This is the first work to examine the detritus of our culture in its full range;garbage in this sense is not only material waste and ruin, environmentaldegradation and so on, but also residual or 'broken' knowledge, useless concepts, the remainders of systems of intellectual and cultural thought. Inthis unique and original work (a kind of intellectual scavenging in its ownright) the author shows why garbage is, perversely, the source of all that isvaluable.