My decision to separate space and time in the preceding two chapters has been both artificial and unsustainable. It proved impossible to write about the shifting arrangements and alignments of places, not least the more or less United Kingdom, without encountering their tendency to shift – as relationships, processes, imaginaries and institutions changed. And it has also been impossible to write about different temporalities without recognising that they ‘take place’ – happening in particular places and in the relationships between those places. Nevertheless, I think the separation has been useful, given that neither space nor time is simple to discuss. But then the next challenge emerges – how to think conjuncturally in ways that pay attention to both space and time.

For me, it is useful to think of these multiple relationships and dynamics as being condensed in the making of the present conjuncture. The idea of being condensed is intended to emphasise something of the effects of compression – the squeezing of this multiplicity into the confines of the ‘here and now’ brings tensions, pressures, distortions and antagonisms into being in the process. This view also implies treating the conjuncture as being simultaneously overdetermined and underdetermined. It is always overdetermined (in the Freudian/Althusserian sense) by the constitutive copresence of many heterogeneous forces, tendencies, contradictions and antagonisms: there is no singular cause or motive force that makes history move. A conjuncture is always what Hall (2003, following Marx, 1857/1973) called a ‘unity in difference’, rather than a simple or expressive totality. At the same time, it is necessarily underdetermined in its multiple lines of possibility: there are different potential resolutions of the current troubles that might be assembled into political projects and enacted by a political bloc if it can assemble sufficient support or consent. For me, it is exactly this sense of multiplicity and possibility that insists we refuse reductive or deterministic readings of a crisis or its resolution.

This leaves a further question – if conjunctures are marked by this sort of heterogeneity, how do we recognise them? How can we identify what coheres to form a conjuncture, and how do we know when a new one emerges?

In Chapter 3, I approached the significance of conjunctural analysis by exploring some of the accounts that have been offered for ‘Brexit’. Across the many accounts, I focused on three themes in particular – populism, neoliberalism and the ‘left behind’ – because they exemplify two concerns that have preoccupied me since the Brexit vote. First, they tend to frame events and their causes epochally (in Raymond Williams’ terms), treating the event as part of an era or period dominated by one condition – populism or neoliberalism. Second, they tend towards a singular view of explanation, relegating other dynamics or forces to subordinate or marginal roles. In contrast, I have been developing the view that conjunctural analysis requires ways of thinking contingently and thinking complexly. Conjunctures are formed through contingent – and contested – arrangements of times, places, people, possibilities and powers. There is, as I tried to show in Chapter 2, always more than one dynamic in play – and it is the complexity of their entanglements that both forms the conjuncture and creates its unstable trajectory.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 have been devoted to thinking about the UK as a complex social formation that contains heterogeneous social forces. That idea has its origins in a distinction within Marxism between modes of production (made up of the forces and relations of production) and social formations, understood as the more concrete arrangements in which multiple modes of production are combined with their other elements – such as politics, ideology and (in some versions) processes of social reproduction. These are not just the ‘superstructures’ (in the old base versus superstructure distinction) but form the necessary conditions of existence for production (and the extraction of surplus value) to take place. But it will be clear that I want to make the idea of ‘social formation’ do rather more work than that.

My view of the social as a field of complex and shifting relationships is central to this. Such relationships are structured by divisions, hierarchies, forms of domination and subordination that certainly include class divisions (and sub-divisions) but extend well beyond those.

The Battle for Britain has generated unusual political turbulence. The long decade from 2010 included a coalition government (Conservative– Liberal Democrat, 2010– 15), the rapid rise of an outsider party (the Nigel Farageled UKIP), two referenda (over Scottish Independence and the vote on EU membership), and a Conservative minority government when Theresa May failed to lead the Conservatives to a majority in 2017. May was replaced by Boris Johnson who then led the party to a landslide victory in 2019, campaigning on the promise to ‘get Brexit done’ and in 2022 he resigned and was replaced as leader and Prime Minister by Liz Truss – who resigned after 45 days. The accelerating churn of party politics is a feature of the trajectory of this conjuncture and makes it harder to keep the wider dynamics of the conjuncture in sight.

In this chapter, I build on Stuart Hall's idea of articulation as a politicalcultural practice to think about how social forces are addressed and mobilised conjuncturally. I begin from a critical examination of approaches to politics as structured by social divisions, exemplified in Sobolewska and Ford's (2020a) account of Brexitland as embodying divisions between identity conservatives and identity liberals. In contrast, I suggest that it is important to treat people as plural subjects who inhabit a shifting and contested field of social relations. These give rise to different potential affiliations, identifications and solidarities. My arguments build on the preceding chapter's analysis of the heterogeneous social relations and the multiple social forces that are active in a conjuncture. This provides me with a route into thinking about the processes of building political-cultural blocs, processes that seek to articulate different groups into a temporary unity.

The concept of blocs is borrowed – and adapted – from the work of Antonio Gramsci, for whom it was central to his thoughts about constructing and contesting hegemony. Returning to the moment of Brexit, I explore the political work that went into assembling a ‘Brexit bloc’, involving the mobilisation of different desires and disaffections through the promise to ‘take back control’.

In this chapter, the focus shifts from recognizing that discard is foundational to being human, and thus unavoidable, to seeing how consumer discard, and acts of discarding, are baked in to many economies.

In this regard, I want to go beyond the largely theoretical accounts in the social sciences that see discard as an inevitable aspect of economic organization, particularly under capitalism. To be clear, I am not dismissing the power of these arguments. There is much that is of merit in them. Not least is that they establish key general principles that help explain why waste is an endemic part of capitalist economic activity. I begin the chapter, therefore, by outlining these approaches and how they see waste, before going on to show why these accounts are less helpful to understanding consumer discard.

Marxist and neo-Marxist readings of economy recognize that all primary and manufacturing processes involve transformations of the material world brought about by (human) labour, and that they also entail material transformations. But, just like the firms they analyze, mostly these accounts focus on the end point of the production process: the commodity. This is because here, labour (and the commodity that is the result of production) is seen to be the means to value creation for capitalist firms. Yet, in highlighting the overarching significance of commodities, these accounts also flag the relative insignificance to many capitalist firms of the inevitable material leftovers and residues of production processes – or the stuff that, while integral to production processes, never realizes the commodity form. They also flag that residues have mostly been seen as waste, that is, as stuff of zero value. This helps to explain why the history of how firms have dealt with residues is characterized by ‘dump and disperse’, and never mind the consequences. When stuff is seen to be of zero value, it is but a short step to that stuff being discarded, and discarded as waste. Examples of the residues of economic activity that over time have been dumped in this way include the tailings that come from mining operations and ore preparation; the husks, shells, skins, stones and pips that are stripped from agricultural crops prior to their becoming an agricultural commodity; and an array of remainders from the various chemical and industrial processes that produce basic feedstocks for core areas of manufacturing.

In this chapter, I examine what happens when discard becomes waste. My argument here is that while there is no inevitability that discard will become waste, there are strong pressures that it does. More than this, I argue that there are drivers that work to ensure that the proportion of discard that is captured as waste actually increases. Rather than this being a period characterized by waste reduction, the world is currently in a situation that demands the converse: that more waste is generated.

To make this argument is to go against an industry and regulatory narrative that presents the current situation as one in which business and regulators are increasingly aligned in their pursuit of Zero Waste. That, I maintain, is ‘greenwash’, for – leaving aside the impossibility of that goal – what the Zero Waste narrative does is to mask that the waste management business (or, as it increasingly casts itself, the waste-to-resource business) is very much a waste business. In other words, it makes (very large amounts of) money by attending to materials classified as waste. So, at a fundamental level there is every incentive for the waste business to want more waste. But just what kind of ‘more waste’ does it want?

Of critical importance here is the category of waste that the industry labels as ‘residual’ – or that which is not suitable for recovery for recycling, or reuse. Taking the materials that can be recovered for recycling, sorting and separating them, and then selling them into the commodity markets is one means by which the waste industry makes money from the waste stream. That was the focus of Chapter 5. But the other – and much bigger – source of revenue, at least according to company accounts, comes from the management of the residual waste stream. To understand why residual waste generates the most revenue for waste businesses, we need to understand the technologies that are used to attend to it, but not just as technologies, which is how the waste business presents the management of waste to outsiders. Here, emphasis is placed on the technical processes that enable the safe treatment of material declared to be waste.

This book is a synthesis of 30 years’ research. It's taken a while to write, not just because of the years involved but also because of what's at its core. Perhaps I was being a bit ‘slow’ but it took me a long time to realize that what I was working on was waste. Seemingly, I’m not alone. In 2020, I was interviewed by the editors of a handbook on waste scholarship in the social sciences, to help frame one of their introductory chapters.1 One of their questions was, ‘tell us how you got into researching waste’. Like the others they asked that same question to, my answers turned out to be very much of the type, ‘I never really set out to look at waste’. I find that fascinating and instructive. It points to the elusive qualities of certain types of waste research. It also forewarns that interesting things start to happen to understandings of waste when the starting point isn't waste.

It is, of course, important to recognize that a great deal of academic research starts from waste. There is a huge body of scientific and technical work focusing on what is – or, I would argue, appears to be – self-evidently waste – material, physical stuff that needs to be either managed as waste or manipulated to become something that is not waste. Then there is the social scientific work that starts with waste. Although nothing like the size of the scientific-technical field, this is now a substantial literature. Mostly, it has looked at people in proximity to waste and the effects of that proximity. They are typically injustices and inequalities, be they the health inequalities that come from living and/or working alongside certain wastes or the socioeconomic causes and consequences of working with it. Another strand of social scientific research starts from waste as an environmental concern and addresses the governance and governing of waste. What unites these two strands of social scientific work is their passive positioning of waste.