Waste and historicity in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT This article argues that historical existence in the Anthropocene is constituted by waste. As both act and product waste increasingly dominate natural, social, and political environments. The Anthropocene as a threshold in natural history then is inseparable from the profusion of waste that has accompanied its rise. Our insatiable wastefulness and our reforming of the planet with trash in turn create distinct consequences for historical consciousness and historical theory. Historical thinking and historical writing must reckon with waste in its physical and metahistorical registers. Key to this challenge is the thought of Georges Bataille, who attempted to reorient political economy by centering waste in place of production. With expenditure at the center of human existence, twenty-first-century historians can undertake an analogous restructuring of historical knowledge. Waste constitutes a central experience of sovereignty. In wasting, the consumer attains momentary sovereignty over self, world, and history. This article also examines Jean Baudrillard’s articulation of the end of history as a moment of refusal in order to sketch how waste has emerged as a historical condition. As a consequence of this connection, it also considers how the historicity of waste might reshape the self-understanding of historians as they take stock of the Anthropocene. (7724 words)