Philosophy of the Dump / Dumpology
Commentary on the 2021 work
by the Canadian philosopher
Michael Marder
Hegel said that philosophy is its own time expressed in concepts. Heidegger held that every epoch coins its own word for Being. Marder notes that our word for being is dump; our own time is expressed in the concept: dump. Marder explores dump responsibility, dump care, dump meaning, meaning in the world of the dump. The new formulation of nihilism is to shit without giving a shit. In this capacity, polluted, we and the world perish together, categorized into nothingness. The Anthropocene becomes the epoch of dumping. Marder says the the 'we' he is talking about is the collective technobody. As it were, this conglomerate remains in the anal stage, creating excrement and still learning control -- emerging out of not giving a shit.
Marder says all this and more to set the stage for his question -- is it too late? -- it may be that the destruction wrought by the technobody -- its carelessness, its nihilism, its excrement -- is past the critical threshold. Societal growth takes time, yet we may not have any. This is urgent.
His ideas for positive steps: call it out, name it, attack it, clean it up. Marcuse: the power of exaggeration. Ramsey: the power of imagination. Intellectually and morally lazy people create and live in a world of shit. Every kind of crap floats up -- everything is coated with this shit in our very messy, foul, stinks-to-heaven world. This is the people who laughed at the crucifixtion. This is the people who salute their dictatators and gobble up their shit and spew it everywhere.
Some escape to minimize the effects of the dump, but the very force of existence has changed. The dump is everywhere, even in the high rise, the superyacht, the tax shelter, the country club.
What we dump in the Earth follows our metaphysics. We sought for eternal being, and now we have created an eternal nightmare. This is the nuclear waste, plastic waste, industrial, fossil fuel, globalized garbage dump -- the culture of porn and fake news and buy-it-now and shit on tomorrow. Ethnic cleansing, washing our hands, whitewashing, washing it away -- it just grows.
Perhaps we can finally reach parity when all of us are entirely and irredeemably coated in shit.
Note the disparity: the line I draw, the ideal line; the ideal of pure water, the water I drink.
The child makes its way past the anal stage by reinterpreting garbage as a gift that loving parents will welcome -- the child gets more control though nurturing encouragement than from being neglected or hectored and demeaned or ignored or smeared with its own excrement.
The dump implies: look what we have done, mommy! But also: God, look what we have done!
Remind, realign, reawaken, renew, recreate the transformation we must bring forth into a gift.
Heidegger imagined building, dwelling, thinking -- Marder observes the garbage dump -- we discover a retroactive self-definition for ourselves by the consequences of our actions. Is this what we have built? Is this where we dwell? Is this what are are forced to think by everything we see in front of us? The idiots assemble in the dump and laugh as everything gets smeared.
It is humanizing, humiliating to really see ourselves inside the mess we have made of the Earth.
It is dehumanizing to just stay here and dump more in and do nothing to clean up this garbage!
We have to exit the dump -- exit the cave -- climb up to see the light -- perhaps to find some insight -- in order to return and help clean up at least some small space in this enormous dark shadowy rank sick polluted and degraded world of the dump.
