The notion of residue invalidates the dangerous longing for absolute purity and leads straight to a revaluation of contamination. The inspiration for such a shift in perspective may again be derived from Merleau-Ponty, on whose account "nature cannot be adequately conceived as a pure thing in itself over against a pure consciousness for itself [Low, 2000, 38]." Instead, the two constantly permeate or, in my terminology, contaminate one another. This notion is largely incompatible with the traditional American philosophy of wilderness, as envisioned by nineteenth-century transcendentalists. In his analysis of Emerson's Nature, for instance, Tadeusz Rachwał [1997, 76-7] delineates the formation of the self/centre from the position of which "the world is but a contamination of the absolute, 'the sordor and filths of nature' to be dried up by the sun [...]". The dirt of material nature is too much for the purified subject, who imagines a pure, absolute realm behind the "sordor and filth" of the visible. Arguably, the very same posture underlies the enterprise of modern technology, whose ultimate aim - as I have pointed out earlier - is to transform the world into waste, a disposable by product, garbage. Works such as A. R. Ammons's justly renowned poem-book Garbage undertake the difficult task of reconceptualizing the notion of garbage - not as something that needs to be neatly disposed of, i.e. moved to a place where it cannot be seen, but as "the poem of our time [...] believable enough / to get our attention, getting in the way, piling / up, stinking [...]" [1993, 18](fragment of text)
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