1 “To take out the trash.”
The expression is entirely ubiquitous, common to the point of being banal. Its utterance is experienced as part of everyday domestic life, or one at least comes into contact with the saying through film or television as a means by which to evoke an authentic (if not idealized) image of domesticity. An overbearing mother reminding one of her several children, typically a moody teenaged-boy, to take out the trash on his way out for school or an aloof father offering perform the same task in order to skirt a line of questioning that would reveal him as the culprit of a prior, albeit trivial and comedic indiscretion, are both classic tropes of North American sitcom programmes. The other common usage of the phrase is in its metaphorical sense, in which trash is broadly equated with unwanted ideas, objects or people. All that is unwanted, literal trash included, is taken to the place deemed to be outside. What is good, of value to be retained, is allowed to remain inside and that which is bad, defined as such through issues of safety and hygiene, social conventions and individual preferences, are banished to the exterior. Taking out the trash, along with the other processes that constitute “cleaning,” which are, for the most part, different methods by which to move various accumulations of dirt from the inside to the outside and in doing so separating what is qualitatively "good" from that which is "bad." The possibility that this formulation leads to, the possibility upon which the following essay is based, its reversal: rather than trash being taken to the ubiquitous "outside," the outside and the interior are consequences of location to