Garbage day as dispositive and semiotic landscape

Abstract For many, garbage day functions as a mundane performance of civic and even national selfhood; yet garbage days are also practices with complex spatial and semiotic entanglements. To demonstrate this, I present a visual essay which draws on an ethnographically informed study of garbage day in five Swiss cities. At the intersection of semiotic landscape studies and dispositive analysis, these banal practices constitute biopolitical forms of governance and control. In this setting, waste reveals itself as a language-material formation; this interplay of words — both visible and invisible — and things is central to the distinct meanings and practices of wasting. Rather than approaching garbage bags as passive receptacles or neutral technologies, therefore, they are best understood as performative regimes by which waste is displaced, public space is ordered, and particular subjectivities are produced.