We are the “affluent society” of such opulence that our abundance is not measured by accumulation, but only by discard.

In the tonnage of junk, trash, clutter and glut is the visible fulfilment and climax of our social power.

The proof of our wealth is not in what we hoard, but in what we waste, how much we relegate to the garbage heap.

In the logic and dynamism of our superabundance, if the affluent society is to become ever larger, it must move to a new concept of growth, to a format of planned waste. Social necessity cannot be durable, permanent or precious objects. If the tempo of use must keep pace with the new growth, then use must be accelerated, and this means the creation of instant objects. Hence, the new tempo calls for total replacement of the instant object in the era of planned waste.

The name for this concept of progress is co-ordinated chaos and ruin. This is why we are fascinated with a cinema of holocausts, infernos, sharks, monsters, satanism and cannibalism. This is why we love the fragment in art – why we believe in the found object (objet trouvé), and why we cherish the assemblage and the collage, whose concoctions are random pieces of discard, the expendable metaphors of the cybernetic age.

• Burne Hogarth, Tarzan: A Myth Man in the Age of the Macromachine

His own prescription, in response to this diagnosis, Hogarth’s nostalgia for ‘myth’ and ‘archetype’, is a deflating slip towards rightist kitsch. Is it only admiration for his astounding art, a disinclination to let heroes (even of pen & ink) disappoint, that makes it also unconvincing? That suggests that disavowed or not, the one thing he most wants to render, and that might deserve his vivid libidinal gaze more than the jungle, is the garbage heap he decries? 

The nonexistence of such a work is abominable. Death cannot be an obstacle. Hogarth’s illustrated edition of Benjamin’s Illuminations is the book for which we wait.