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Article published In: Linguistic Landscape
Vol. 11:1 (2025) ► pp.32–46

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Garbage day as dispositive and semiotic landscape

A visual essay

ORCiD logo with link | University of Bern
Published online: 3 October 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.24020.pel
Abstract
For many, garbage day functions as a mundane performance of civic and even national selfhood; yet garbage days are also practices with complex spatial and semiotic entanglements. To demonstrate this, I present a visual essay which draws on an ethnographically informed study of garbage day in five Swiss cities. At the intersection of semiotic landscape studies and dispositive analysis, these banal practices constitute biopolitical forms of governance and control. In this setting, waste reveals itself as a language-material formation; this interplay of words — both visible and invisible — and things is central to the distinct meanings and practices of wasting. Rather than approaching garbage bags as passive receptacles or neutral technologies, therefore, they are best understood as performative regimes by which waste is displaced, public space is ordered, and particular subjectivities are produced.
Astratto
Per molti cittadini, il giorno di raccolta della spazzatura funge da catalizzatore per esternalizzare il proprio senso civico e di orgoglio nazionale. Tuttavia, questo giorno rappresenta anche un complesso intreccio di azioni e risorse semiotiche. Per dimostrare quanto detto presento un saggio fotografico basato sullo studio etnografico del giorno di raccolta dei rifiuti in cinque città svizzere. Al crocevia fra gli studi semiotici del paesaggio e l’analisi del dispositivo, sostengo che queste pratiche banali costituiscono in realtà forme scalari di controllo biopolitico. In questo contesto, i rifiuti si rivelano come una formazione linguistico-materiale. Questa interazione tra le parole — sia visibili che invisibili — e le cose è centrale nel definire i significati assegnati alle pratiche di smaltimento. Aniziché analizzare i sacchi della spazzatura come contenitori passivi o tecnologie neutre, essi sono meglio compresi come regimi performativi attraverso i quali i rifiuti vengono dislocati, lo spazio pubblico viene ordinato e delle particolari soggettività vengono prodotte.
Article outline
  • Part 1.Garbage day as dispositive and semiotic landscape
  • Part 2.The language materiality of garbage bags
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Endnotes
  • References
References (37)
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