Magnetism of strangeness: Silenced histories of landscapes

Abstract

Why do certain parts of landscape become places for waste disposal? This simple question seems to be easy to answer given the existence of sophisticated tools for formal modelling of a range of environmental, economic, social, and political variables which are supposed to minimize risk, cost, and disequity. There are, however, more subtle factors that shape waste disposal and its inscription in landscape. Using examples of two Czech landfills and drawing upon my ethnographic research of wastescapes, I examine how history, economic interests, social practices, events, material indeterminacies, and multispecies encounters took part in the transformation of these places into loci of 'strangeness'. Using a metaphor of magnetism I refocus our attention to a capacity of strange entities such as garbage, rubble, military waste, dead bodies, animal farms, and shooting ranges to attract each other along a spatiotemporal continuum. I argue that strangeness sticks to places and tends to perpetuate itself through a series of 'magnetic' relations over time. This magnetism stems from the human propensity to classify and dispose of entities whose open-endedness is dangerous and must be controlled through placement. While this process of placement is often imagined as a management of absence, I point to a dialectical relationship to the opposite category of presence as a critical source of magnetism. Waste management, then, becomes envisioned as part of a more general social process that keeps the world meaningful.

‘It's Only Us, Hyenas, Who Profit Out of It’: Wrecked Cars, Leaked Humans, and the Death of the Person-car

“…In this paper, I aimed to show the part of the world of waste management that prefers to be hidden (Sosna, 2021) – the world of auto salvage yards. These places deal not only with end-of-life vehicles but also with totaled cars that might bear traces of dead humans.…”

Grey greening: quiet sustainability at auto salvage yards

“…In this paper, I respond to the invitation to acknowledge "practices that are sustainable in outcome, but don't seek or claim to be" (Smith, Jehlička 2013, p. 155), and similarly to Sovová, Jehlička and Daněk (2021), I respond to Gibson-Graham's (2008) call to bring new worlds into being by making visible the range of existing diverse economies. Therefore, I attempt to move attention towards the widespread but not-much-recognized world of auto salvage yards -as part of the waste management world that prefers to be hidden (Sosna 2021) -to reveal that 'greening' can also be done quietly through the 'grey' economy of breaking cars. Inspired by the concept of quiet sustainability, I complement it with recent ideas on the practices of repair, maintenance, and care (Alexander 2012;Isenhour, Reno 2019;Martínez 2017;Martínez, Laviolette 2019).…”

Does waste make language?

“…22For recent approaches to silence and languagelessness in siolinguistics see Rosa (2019) and in discard studies Sosna (2021). …”