The Disposal of Place: Facing Modernity in the Kitchen-Diner

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to suggest how the material turn in sociology could benefit from a re-theorizing around wider understandings of disposal. The argument is that it is not enough to document how spaces for dwelling are produced and consumed; their building and use also entail a disposal of place that has to account for how the materials that make up a dwelling get arranged and ‘placed’ as moralities. Taking spaces for living and eating as its object of analysis, each section of this paper examines a different aspect of modernity, bringing the kitchen-diner ‘front stage’. Avoiding a ubiquitous conflation of disposal with waste – whereby ‘excess’ is dismissed out of hand as redundant and non-productive to design – the analysis goes on to suggest how modernity advances its orders through our making the ‘belongings’ of collective identity more detachable and by our thinning the ‘stickiness’ of cultural institutions.

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