We are pleased to announce the publication of a special issue of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology dedicated to the phenomenology of waste, developed in connection with research conducted within the PAScapes project.
Guest-edited by Mintautas Gutauskas and Nicolas de Warren, the issue brings together contributions by both editors, Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė, Tomas Šinkūnas, Alice Iacobone, and Kristupas Sabolius.
The publication marks an important achievement for the PAScapes project, contributing to international philosophical debates on waste, environmental awareness, and the challenges of the Anthropocene.
Articles by PAScapes Researchers:
Mintautas Gutauskas
Waste in the Anthropocene: Practices of Forgetting and New Environmental Awareness
This article discusses waste practices in terms of social order and challenges of the Anthropocene. The first part analyses the role of waste in our everyday practices. Based on M. Douglas and G. Hawkins, it begins with the spatiality and temporality of waste, showing how waste is a matter out of place, revealing the temporal structure of use-discard-forget, exploring the relationship between symbolic order and purification rituals, and connecting practices of forgetting to practices of the self. It then moves on to the challenges of the Anthropocene, which complicate the inside-outside distinction and practices of forgetting. In revealing the challenges of the Anthropocene, the main focus is on our changing attitude to waste due to awareness of hyper-connectivity and the accumulation of insignificant actions, and on the new environmental awareness emerging with its unique reflexivity, imagination, and responsibility. A new awareness is discussed, one that evaluates everything not according to the functionality of objects, but their potential to transform into waste. Finally, it asks how “old” and “new” awarenesses can coexist, shaping the conditions of everyday life in the Anthropocene.
Kristupas Sabolius
Revisiting the Ontology of Waste: Compossibility and Compost-ability
This article introduces the newly coined term compost-ability in order to propose a reconceptualization of the ontological domain of waste. Structured around two interrelated components—“compost” and “possibility”—compost-ability functions as both an ontological and an epistemological category. As such, it may be theorized in relation to the problem of imagination, understood in connection with cosmotechnics, a concept developed by Yuk Hui. Drawing upon Gilbert Simondon’s notion of milieu, compost-ability is articulated as a technological operation governed by the principle of compossibility. From this perspective, waste can be interpreted as a task of technological reintegration into the human milieu. In this light, waste becomes a site where the terms of coexistence are contested, and the milieu emerges as an active domain in which limits and vital potentials are continuously renegotiated.
Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė
Anthropocene Landscapes: Aesthetics Between Pollution and Inflammation
The article discusses the issue of the Anthropocene and pollution from the perspective of aesthetics. The initial part analyses the tendency of the visual representations of the Anthropocene to aestheticise the crisis rather than serve as a mobilizing factor. It is argued that this tendency has its roots in modernity and has been influenced profoundly by the Western tradition of landscape painting. The second part focuses on the impact the perspective of landscape painting has on our perception of nature and the environment. The third part analyses the concept of landscape as a multidimensional process and reflects on the limitations of this approach, possibly based on a symbolic classification of a territory. The article concludes with a proposal to rethink the concept of a landscape in the context of the Anthropocene, thus moving beyond the inside/outside distinction and considering the coherence between the planet (pollution) and the singular body (inflammation) instead.
