15 August

I find this a powerful image. You can tell an awful lot about a society by what they throw away. That idea is actually quite strange - to 'throw away'. Not many cultures in pre-modern times threw things away. This isn't an environmental thing for me, it's not really about waste, it's about how we relate to the physical things in our lives. We're a culture that loves objects (a common theme for me), but at the same time they're meaningless to us. We throw them away. That's telling us a defining thing about our societies, paradoxically the fact objects are the central defining thing about our societies is also the reason we throw them away. Our objects are the 'solid' part of our social relations, so when those social relations change, we throw the old objects away. Our garbage tips are our collective unconscious.