A New Year, A New Project

Within Patricia Yaeger's "The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish Ecology," she poses the question: "Why should the dominant aesthetic response to trash suggest that we need to revalue it, to soak up its numina, its radioactive glow?" (335) To this, she provides four answers. The first is that "detritus is the opposite of the commodified object...Trash has history, about the object as it is individuated and the object as it decays or enters entropy" (335). Secondly, one finds that "trash becomes attractive in rebellion against Englightenment dialectics" (336); furthermore, and seemingly related to point one, "trash has a history of moving in and out of the circle of exchange" (336); and finally, "scenes of waste and detritus dominate texts because our epistemologies are shifting...detritus is both its curse and its alternative" (337-338). With these and several other source materials in mind (Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "haptic" art), I explore the cassette tape in new and different ways; to re-imagine it as it hasn't been before.