Palimpsest and heterotopia, metaphors of the Circular Economy
Authors: Birat Jean-Pierre 
Published: February 2020

Words like palimpsest or heterotopia do not belong to the working vocabulary of materials or engineering sciences: they are used in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). A palimpsest is a manuscript written on an older document, the text of which has been erased. Heterotopia is a young word forged by Michel Foucault in 1967 to describe a closed space, the boundaries of which mark a discontinuity in terms of behavior: a jail or a monastery are thus a heterotopia. The Circular Economy (CE) is an essential concept in the framework of the ecological transition, pulled by a series of converging economic, ecological and political drivers. It is usually described as the adoption of a circular model of production to replace the “linear model”, but also as the new buzzword to describe material efficiency, the 3-R rule, the zero-waste ideal, the concepts of lean or frugal design or their reformulation by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, as a societal challenge and an ethical necessity. Materials producers claim that they have been practicing the Circular Economy since long before the expression was ever invented, thus à la Monsieur Jourdain, etc. The point of this paper is to describe the Circular Economy as a palimpsest and as a heterotopia and to use the metaphors, if indeed they are only metaphors, to highlight some of the less obvious features of the CE. A palimpsest is a parchment or a papyrus, which is used several times to support a series of consecutive texts. Secondary raw materials are like a palimpsest, because there are retrieved from a previous life and used again in a second life: a new artefact made from that material is like a new text written on/with this material – a metaphor also used, mutatis mutandis, in expressions like 3-D printing or laser scribing. Some interesting features of the CE pointed out by the metaphor: a the palimpsest can be used several times, like a material can be recycled several times; the concept of the palimpsest posits that the parchment is somehow more important than the text that is written on it, therefore a material is more important than the goods that are made of it; the palimpsest was used before the invention of paper and, similarly, the Circular Economy was the standard model before mass production of cheap consumer goods imposed the so-called “linear model”; a palimpsest keeps a fragmented memory of the past, in the same way as recycled material maintains a link to its past lives, through its composition in tramp elements. Examples of heterotopia are a prison or a cemetery. The Circular Economy defines a space where a particular material/element exists in its various avatars, impersonations and reincarnations and this may tentatively be worked out as a heterotopia. This is a more complex endeavor than discussing the palimpsest metaphor, but a potentially more fruitful one. Foucault has provided criteria defining heterotopia which can help us explore the analogy: particularly the point that such a space is either a space of illusion or a space of perfection. This analysis is original because it hybridizes materials and SSH concepts and thus fits with the exploration of the frontier between materials and society that SAM conferences are concerned about.