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Trash as History/Memory

Throughout the 20th century, trash has been appropriated as one of the key figures through which to contest traditional, scholarly understandings of history. The term trash, understood in its broadest sense as something deemed of no value, has been located as a telling figure, capable of highlighting all that 19th-century forms of history have too readily dismissed in their faith in objectivity, progress, and development.

Walter Benjamin and Early Theory

Walter Benjamin is one of the early theorists to have adopted this optimistic view of trash for the revision of conventional forms of history. In his treatise, The Arcades Project, Benjamin undertakes a critical evaluation of 19th-century conceptions of modernity and history, drawing upon the seemingly trivial, minuscule items of detritus left to decay in the dilapidated shopping arcades of 19th-century Paris. Writing from the vantage point of the 20th century, these obsolescent commodities held allegorical significance for Benjamin, gesturing to the failure of history and modernity under 19th-century industrialization. Outdated commodities were vital runes of modernity at large. They were telling for the way they undermined the foundational tenets of development and illuminating for the way they highlighted the contradictions inherent in 19th-century conceptions of progress. Benjamin thus imbued the arcades’ junk and refuse as symbolic for the redundancy of modernity's ideals of civilization and social betterment. When framed through trash, the definitive experience of urban modernity was far from an encounter with the new but was rather the experience of repetition—endless sameness. The arcades and their detritus stood as cathedrals of the commodity fetish, offering up the appearance of a long-awaited better world in order to still any real sense of actual historical change.

The ruined arcades, and their outmoded clutter, therefore held the potential to open up a different understanding of history and modernity, prizing open the lines of closure through which traditional narratives of history maintained their cohesion. Derelict objects could offer a radical critique of history's myth of universal progress, illuminating the way history becomes stagnant and derelict when driven by the supposedly innovative power of capitalism and technology. By apprehending the modern as the already-old—the ancient dressed up as the new—Benjamin held that this consciousness was also capable of realizing the actually new. The trivial scraps of urban life therefore offered a fundamentally different way of understanding modernity and history, not only by allowing for different representations to emerge, but also by fundamentally reconfiguring historical methodology. Trash therefore eschews conventional historical methodologies based on transcendence, progression, and linear narrative models in which the past only exists to confirm the dominance of the present. Trash exceeds official scholarly knowledge grounded on the separation between public and private, heritage and the contemporary.

Later Conceptions

Benjamin's reading of the viability of trash in staging a critical and transformative encounter with the past takes on a new urgency in the 21st-century cultural milieu, given that the value of trash has changed in the contemporary commodity culture. The insatiable desire for endlessly new outdated “retro” objects in postindustrial commodity cultures has come to suture the historical consciousness, such that the coveting of trash may no longer hold the rupturing capacity it was once believed to possess. Trash has become tainted with the aura, not of heritage, but of vintage or retro. As a coveted commodity, it may no longer hold the critical potential Benjamin once ascribed to it. Critics like Fredric Jameson and Hal Foster argue that trash epitomizes the limitations of historical thinking in postmodern culture. Trash has been written into the canon of postmodernism's theory of history—history has become trash—such that it no longer resides as a figure through which to rupture traditional models of history, but the very figure that signifies the crisis of history in late capitalism. Trash embodies the perpetual repetition and recycling that purportedly sutures the postmodern present. In Jameson's view, it is the latest symptom of postmodernism's facile interest in micronarratives that do little to displace the presence of the present, so much as confirm the ubiquity of late capitalism. Trash therefore embodies the logic of posthistoire, or as Jameson notes, the disappearance of the weightiness of history—the incapacity of society to “retain its own past,” prompting the perpetual amassing and aestheticization of past fragments that Jameson terms pastiche—a form of history that has become little more than a dusty set of spectacles or a series of perpetual presents.

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