ABSTRACT
Chapter 14 reflects on a problematic running through much of the current volume: the way sustainability can often function a floating signifier and thereby underwrite a wider rhetoric of (un)knowing ecological crisis. To make the point, Thurlow turns to discard studies and an empirical case study of stock-photographic depictions of beach waste. His social semiotic analysis of a sampled dataset reveals a particular “regime of truth” which fetishizes plastic bottles through highly stylized, aestheticized visual techniques. As such, these pervasive, everyday framings of waste render it unknowable in ways which are neither accurate nor productive.
