Creative Waste

Definition

Creative waste is Christine Frederick's "oxymoronic term" (as Lupton and Miller call it) for the housewife's duty of rhythmic disposal: at the end of the 1920s, the domestic theorist "employed the oxymoronic term 'creative waste' at the end of the 1920s to describe the housewife's moral obligation rhythmically to buy and discard products" (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006, p. 207). The term is the consumer economy's positive self-description of waste: "Her phrase 'creative waste' elevated the garbage of consumer culture into a form of positive production, valuing the destruction and replacement of objects as a pleasurable and socially instrumental act. Frederick and other promoters of consumerism conceived of 'waste' not merely as an incidental by-product, a final residue, of the consumption cycle, but as a generative, necessary force. In the consumer economy, 'production' finds a place inside the process of consumption, a cycle that reiterates the body's own form of 'creative waste,' excrement" (p. 207). Waste is not the system's remainder but its engine — discard as the productive act that keeps the "continual cycle of production and waste, ingestion and excretion" (the planned-obsolescence economy, p. 206) healthy.

The concept has a psychoanalytic twin in Ernest Jones's second adult reaction to anal eroticism: alongside the fastidious "withholding," a second response "acts upon symbols of waste in a productive manner: here, waste becomes the material of art, generosity and a general 'giving out.' Similarly, in the enthusiastic vocabulary of consumerism, phrases like Christine Frederick's 'creative waste' elevated the rhythmic disposal of goods to a form of positive making" (p. 211). The seemingly 'natural' life cycle of objects was propelled forward by streamlining, "whose organic yet industrial forms marked the coexistence of a fetishized cleanliness with an economy that was dependent on waste" (p. 211) — creative waste and fastidious cleanliness are not opposites but the two reactions the same style serves. The concept's gendering is constitutive: the moral obligation of disposal was assigned to the housewife, making the engine of consumerism a disciplined feminine labour (see consumerism's Gordon register — the consumer position gendered at birth).

Key Thinkers

• Christine Frederick — the concept's author (Selling Mrs Consumer, 1929): the oxymoron as household doctrine; the housewife's rhythmic buy-and-discard as moral obligation (not yet paged — see log).
• Ellen Lupton & J Abbott Miller — the concept's theorists and historians: the oxymoron's system-role ("production… inside the process of consumption"), its excremental analogue, and its placement in the process-of-elimination (1992/2006).
• Ernest Jones — the concept's psychoanalytic counterpart ("Anal-Erotic Character Traits," 1918): waste as "the material of art, generosity and a general 'giving out'" (not yet paged — see log).
• Ernest Elmo Calkins — the advertising twin of the doctrine: "an urgent task of marketing is to make people 'use up' products that they formerly 'used'" (1932, via Lupton & Miller, p. 207) (not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• process-of-elimination — the master concept: creative waste is its economic strand theorized from inside the consumer economy.
• consumerism — the system creative waste describes from within: disposal as the consumer's contribution to the "continual cycle."
• obsolescence — the concept's industrial partner: planned obsolescence manufactures the goods that "creative waste" disposes; the economy-as-body whose health depends on excretion.
• novelty — the concept's affective currency: rhythmic replacement presumes the appetite for the new that Hope priced as fashion's "incessant change" (1807) — creative waste is that cycle's moralization.
• streamlining — the style of the coexisting poles: "a fetishized cleanliness with an economy that was dependent on waste" (p. 211).
• fashion — the concept's tempo: Frederick's rhythmical discard is fashion's cycle raised to household duty; Hope's expense-multiplier priced the same cycle as economics in 1807.
• domestic-economy — the concept's household-science frame: the Beechers' thrift economy inverted — waste productive rather than sinful.
• consumerism's gender structure — see gender-and-the-interior, separate-spheres: the disposal-duty assigned to the housewife.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — the founding source: Frederick's term quoted and theorized (p. 207); the Jones "giving out" counterpart (p. 211); the planned-obsolescence economy-as-body (p. 206); Calkins's "use up" doctrine (p. 207).
• Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope 1807/2006) — the concept's pre-history and its priced negation: Hope's fashionable mode "usually broken or discarded, long ere it has had leisure fairly to serve its time" — the discard-cycle existing 120 years before Frederick moralized it; Hope prices it as expense ("the incessant change of fashion which it stimulates and supports… occasions a much greater expense," pp. 154–155) where Frederick revalues it as production. See obsolescence, fashion, patrimonial-interior.

Open Questions

• Frederick's "creative waste" makes disposal a moral obligation; Hope makes the same cycle an expense; the McClures make its building-scale heir obsolescence ("the average Walmart… estimated useful life of seventeen years"). Is creative waste therefore the missing link between 1807's fashion-economics and the wiki's whole obsolescence cluster — the moment the discard-cycle was moralized into doctrine?
• The oxymoron hinges on "production" moving "inside the process of consumption" (p. 207): is this an anticipation of Baudrillard's consumption-as-system (the sign's circulation as the real production) — or does it remain within a productionist frame Baudrillard dissolves? See consumerism, semiocapitalism for the later mutation.
• The gendering: "the housewife's moral obligation rhythmically to buy and discard products" (p. 207) — the consumer economy's engine assigned as feminine discipline, "both empowers and manipulates" (pp. 207–208). Can the woman-as-consumer be a site of agency (de Certeau's tactical consumption) inside a doctrine that conscripts her discard as duty?
• If excrement is the body's "creative waste," the analogy makes the economy's excretion — garbage — the system's work of art (Jones's "giving out"). What would an art history written from this pole look like — readymade (Duchamp), Pop (Warhol), Kienholz's domestic junk (see Spatial seductions) as the "giving out" lineage?