On Garbage

Description

This is the first work to examine the detritus of our culture in its full range; garbage in this sense is not only material waste and ruin, environmental degradation and so on, but also residual or 'broken' knowledge, useless concepts, the remainders of systems of intellectual and cultural thought. In this unique and original work (a kind of intellectual scavenging in its own right) the author shows why garbage is, perversely, the source of all that is valuable.

John Scanlan is lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. As well as exploring the shadowy world of garbage from the safety of academic confines during the last five years, he also worked as a refuse collector for a brief period in the late 1980s.

There is such a fine Montaignesque scope to On Garbage ... a little masterpiece ... Scanlan is an essayist of the first order The Times The story of rubbish, as Scanlan persuasively argues, is the story of culture ... and cheery references to everyone from Heidegger to Blur make this fun reading Guardian Highly different, intellectually intriguing and happily stimulating stuff Glasgow Herald