Non-Commodity
& Malleability
Circulating waste as much as possible before it enters landfill has obvious benefits environmentally – less waste, less extraction, less industry, less violence. But benefits of scavenger-crafting from garbage run far deeper. The use life of commodities is linear; extraction -> manufacture -> selling -> owning -> disposing -> decomposing. For their worth to peak, they rely on us perceive them as ‘objects’ exclusively in the centre of this use life [selling -> owning], with little to no thought of what occurs outside of it. Disposal is necessary for commodities, because commodities do not aim to sell a ‘thing’, but rather the feeling of fleeting gratification that ‘thing’ supposedly provides. As the assumed satisfaction is unattainable from what has been purchased, more must be purchased (Zizek, 1989). To maintain this pattern of consumption without falling into ‘hoarding’ taboos (the concept of which falls apart once one considers themselves to be connected to parts of the planet outside their immediate vision (Morton, 2013)), what didn’t give gratification must be thrown away. In this sense, rubbish is a sort of opposite to ‘commodity’, though materially they are the same thing. ‘Dirt’ recontextualises the object within the sanitised consumer mindset who frames worth as contingent on monetary cost, it becomes useless, unsellable, worthless (Soucie, 2023).
Rubbish is not uncommodifiable, as we can acknowledge through practices such as upcycling. Remaining in this uncommodified framework, however, and refusing to sell our scavenging’s back to the public, gives us power to crack, glitch from Capitalist frameworks.
A practice as simple as scavenging, meditating, and crafting is fundamentally free, widely accessible, and malleable to a variety of settings. Craftanooning can be practiced alone, with friends, in communal collaborative projects, for closed community events, events open to the public, organised, disorganised, spontaneous, intimate, anonymous, etc. It is malleable, adaptable, evolving to fill whatever form it needs to!
Rubbish is public, and thus so is the idea of Craftanoon, and so I urge you to adopt this in your life in any small way, just personally, or getting together with friends to play around with materials over a picnic, or getting involved with a community centre running your own public Craftanoon. I urge that this idea is and must remain communal, please take it, reform it, adapt it, it’s yours, it’s ours!
The selling of Craftanoon (i.e. ticketed events or paid entry) fundamentally undermines the ethos and power in an uncommodified practice, and as much as I urge you so adopt it, I urge you not to sell it back to the public. Allow it to be a magical bug in Capitalist infrastructure who invites us into the world of Free: communal ownership, public art, gift appreciation, material meditation, and connection through locality.