Trashed Future: Waste Objects and Identity Politics in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay analyzes the eco-religious “God’s Gardeners” group as they appear in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood as a possible model of capitalist “non-existence,” exploring the alternative potentials at which they arrive in relation to waste throughout the text. The Gardeners present an affective mode of consumer non-participation as a possible first step toward a reflexive awareness of the role trash plays in our subjective experiences of the world. Through a process of symbolic embodiment, the Gardeners exist in marginalized space and so re-situate waste for themselves as objects and spaces with new potential boundaries. This leads to a confrontation with social reality itself, piercing the reality-building project of capitalist logic in order to uncover the fabricated “antagonism between the Excluded—the ‘animals’ according to global capital—and the Included—the ‘political animals’ proper, those participating in capitalism” that structures characters’ experiences (Žižek 2008: 44). The focus here is not only on re-situating waste but re-inscribing it in the domain of social discourse in a way that subverts consumer expectations and challenges the limits of desire. In these texts, enjoyment is displaced onto waste objects as a point of psychological investment transmitted from subject to subject. In building reality through these kinds of direct relations, Atwood implies, one may challenge the imposition of ideology and expand its apparent limits in order to re-symbolize the spaces and objects marginalized as waste, proceeding in the end to a renewed interconnection between subject, object, and excess.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".