Talk abstract:

Garbography: Depicting residual matter beyond representation

Olli Pyyhtinen (University of Tampere, Finland)

Critically contesting the privilege assigned by social scientific methods to language, meaning and culture, the talk proposes a methodology what I and my colleagues call garbography for engaging with the dynamic realities of waste matter. The materiality of waste is easily obscured by approaches that treat it as a sign and as a symptom. Instead of examining residual matter as a reflection of society and consumerist culture, the talk explores the possibilities of depicting it beyond representation, as a non-representational trace or asemic, auto-graphic inscription that does not communicate anything else but its – oftentimes disturbing – own material absence-presence. Such an endeavour, the talk suggests, entails a move from a textual or semiotic reading to a ‘textural’ approach. The talk illustrates the practice of garbography mainly by drawing from the work done together with my research group and from a joint video installation titled What Remains? which embodies a multimodal way of engaging with residual matter.

Bio

Olli Pyyhtinen is Professor of Sociology and the founder of the Relational Studies Hub (RS Hub) at Tampere University, Finland. His publications include the books More-than- Human Sociology (Palgrave, 2015), The Simmelian Legacy (Palgrave, 2018), The Gift and its Paradoxes (Routledge, 2014) and Simmel and ’the Social’ (Palgrave, 2010) and a number of articles and chapters in edited volumes. He is currently leading two projects on waste and the circular economy, WasteMatters (ERC CoG, 2022-2027) and DECAY (Research Council of Finland, 2022-2026).