Theorizing Discard Studies: Taking Arendt to the Toilet in Tema
How does the production, decomposition and repurposing of discards complicate inherited frameworks of political theory and move us to rethink urban political life? That is, how do discards lay waste to received political models and structures and repurpose them in turn?
These questions are examined from the vantage point of Ghana’s port city of Tema, a paragon of high-modernist planning and a sight of ruin, repair and reinvention. In Tema, material discards, including human waste, engender novel formations of urban plurality. Notably, Tema’s excremental infrastructures, built on, around, and for the discards of the human body via the city’s defunct substrate, alter public norms and expand what is acceptable and desired in the public realm and from public authorities.
Privately operated, Tema’s infrastructural innovations both shape the conventions of public life and extend the scope and potentials of the domestic domain. City dwellers turn discards into vital remains to seed relations of urban dependence and ascendance and negotiation of norms of propriety, solidarity and self-care in the shadow of an under-resourced state. Blurring the boundary between domos and polis, these arrangements unseat the imposed divide between bodily labors, the collective world of work and fabrication, and the realm of free expression and debate famously discussed by political theorist Arendt. With discards seeding not the “death of the social” per Rose and Bauman, but an expansive or deep-domesticity, new modes of collectivity rise to the fore despite the exclusions and material breakdowns that fuel them.