Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain - Part 3, Chapter 3

Luis I. Prádanos
2018 Modern Languages Open  
Waste, disaster, refugees, and nonhuman agency Nonhuman Agency and the Political Ecology of Waste The Anthropocene has reversed the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us. -Amitav Ghosh 1 T he more waste modern societies produce, the less their members want to think about it, and thus dominant cultural narratives are dedicated with increasing vigor to obliterating the link between growth and pollution. As Zygmunt Bauman
more » ... points out, 'we dispose of leftovers in the most radical and effective way: we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking'. 2 Usually, waste is left out of the dominant 'distribution of the sensible' (as Rancière would put it) and its symbolic order, which determines and prearranges what can be visible or thinkable in advance and therefore significantly limits our epistemological, imaginative, and political possibilities. In this chapter I claim that if we are to 'reconfigure the map of the sensible', we need to create a political ecology of waste that persistently disrupts and disturbs the growth imaginary with narratives and practices that redefine what can be thought, said, and seen. Capitalist economic processes are transforming material and energy into 1 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago, IL: University of
doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.248 fatcat:kcv4ratnzve4fnqjw5uhj36jyy