The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: We contend that “waste” is the political other of capitalist “value”, repeated with difference as part of capital's spatial histories of surplus accumulation. We trace its work on India through a series of historical cuts, and suggest that the travels and perils of waste give us a “minor” history of capitalist surplus—the things, places and lives that are cast outside the pale of “value” at particular moments as superfluity, excess, or detritus; only to return at times in unexpected ways. The neologism “eviscerating urbanism” becomes our diagnostic tool to investigate both urban transformations in metropolitan India and their associated architectures for managing bodies and spaces designated as “wasteful”. In sum, our essay reveals how “waste” begins as civil society's literal and figurative frontier only to become its internal and mobile limit in the contemporary era—a renewing source of jeopardy to urban life and economy, but also, in the banal violence and ironies of fin de millennium urbanism, a fiercely contested frontier of surplus value production.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it