On Rag-picking as Creative Intervention in Knowledge Production

Over recent years, the amount of scholarship on waste and waste recycling has been growing exponentially, and diversifying in terms of disciplines and methodological approaches. Importantly, waste is becoming understood, speculated upon and (re)imagined less exclusively, that is, not only as solid throwaways and by-products of extractivist and industrial production and consumption. Increasingly, the focus shifts to include wasting regimes and relations producing undervalued human and more-than-human beings, along with wasted places and wasted stories, wasted ideas and unrealised potentials – all of which result from practices of “sorting out” and “othering”. The shift in focus is often accompanied by coming back to pre-industrial practices that now provide fitting names for new realms in research. As I will show in this chapter, it is also the case of rag-picking; the practice of collecting discarded materials from waste for resale or reuse once provided a livelihood for many individuals, and has recently been revived in naming new forms of deindustrialised waste management and new approaches to knowledge production. Soon enough, “the Waste” may join Elizabeth Povinelli's diagnostic and symptomatic geontological figures that she introduces in Geontologies ( 2016 ) as tools for understanding the contemporary mode of late liberal governance, more effective than figures and approaches commonly associated with biopower. Povinelli names the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus to make visible the figural tactics of late liberalism in the geological era of the Anthropocene, with its companion concept of climate change, when the previously stable ordering divisions of life and nonlife crumble visibly. In their diversity, those three figures help to reveal the formation of geontological power concealed by the concept of biopower, which operates “through the governance of life and tactics of death” ( Povinelli, 2016 : 17).