Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value - New Edition

By Michael Thompson and Joshua O. Reno

Rubbish is something we ignore. By definition we discard it, from our lives and our minds, and it remains outside the concerns of conventional economics. However, this book explores the dynamics through which rubbish can re-enter circulation as a prized commodity, in many cases far exceeding its original value. Antiques, vintage cars and period homes, after being discarded as valueless, can, even after many years, become priceless.

First published in 1979, Rubbish Theory has become foundational in its field. Today, it is as relevant as ever. This edition includes a new afterword revealing how the consequences of our compulsion to discard are far from inevitable, and going on to explore how we can transform our troublesome wastes into valuable resources.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Jun 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786800978

Michael Thompson

Michael Thompson is a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford. He is the author of Rubbish Theory (Pluto, 2017).

Book preview

illustration

Rubbish Theory

Rubbish Theory

The Creation and Destruction of Value

NEW EDITION

Michael Thompson

Foreword by Joshua O. Reno

illustration

First published 1979; new edition 2017 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Michael Thompson 1979, 2017

The right of Michael Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 9979 9 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 9978 2 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0096 1 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0098 5 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0097 8 EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

Contents

Foreword by Joshua O. Reno

Preface

Introduction to the new edition

  1   The filth in the way

  2   Stevengraphs—yesterday’s kitsch

  3   Rat-infested slum or glorious heritage?

  4   From things to ideas

  5   A dynamic theory of rubbish

  6   Art and the ends of economic activity

  7   Monster conservation

  8   The geometry of credibility

  9   The geometry of confidence

10   The needle’s eye

Afterword (co-authored by M. Bruce Beck)

Notes

Index

Foreword

Joshua O. Reno

Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory is not just a book about waste. For one thing, this is the book about waste, arguably the first and best general theory of waste. As such, it is only appropriate that it was relatively neglected and discarded after its limited initial printing, only to be treasured later by those, like myself, who were shocked that it was not more widely known and available. But Rubbish Theory is also not just a book about waste because in it Thompson shows that any adequate account of waste, its role in our lives and worlds, is about so much more than the seemingly insignificant contents of a bin, toilet, dumpster, or landfill.

For scholars within the growing field of discard studies, this reissued and expanded version of Rubbish Theory is a long-awaited gift. Diligent students of discard have been wrestling with this book’s profound and provocative arguments for the better part of a decade. And this new version largely resembles the original 1979 one, with the notable exceptions of a new Introduction by Thompson and an Afterword co-authored with M. Bruce Beck. These two new chapters add considerable depth to the book and make it even more rewarding reading for those interested in discard studies and beyond. And yet, when any text is recovered, restored and reissued, like this one, it becomes something more than its actual words, old and new. It is only after an undervalued text has all but vanished that it can be reborn as an irreplaceable fixture of the literary canon (the posthumously revered work of Walter Benjamin or Franz Kafka come to mind). You need to read Thompson’s strange and wonderful book to appreciate what makes it worthy of rebirth; but you also need to read it to truly understand what makes such radical value transformations possible in the first place.

If the original Rubbish Theory was deliberately turned into literary rubbish, ironically, Thompson’s argument provides the best way to understand what this means. Early on in the book, he explains that no object is fated to remain relegated to a particular category of value. This is without doubt the primary contribution Rubbish Theory has made to discard studies thus far (see, for example, Crang et al, 2012; Evans, 2014; Gabrys, 2011; Hawkins, 2006; Lepawsky and Billah, 2011; Nagle, 2014; O’Brien, 2008; Reno, 2009). His examples make clear that value is a mutable social relation and not an inherent characteristic of things themselves. Here Thompson is in agreement with many economic anthropologists, but his argument extends their insights in innovative and unexpected ways.

Most value forms are, in Thompson’s words, transient: alienable and temporary. They are not worthless, but they are headed in that direction. They are therefore easier to exchange, dispose of, detach ourselves from. Most things with value have value in this sense, which is in marked contrast with things that are invaluable. When something is treasured for its profound meaning and import, it appears relatively inalienable, durable and permanent. The distinction between transient and durable forms is what makes it absurd to compare the value of a People magazine with Hamlet, an aging Buick Regal with a preserved Model T, a temporary hillside encampment with the city of New Orleans.

As David Graeber (2001) explains, a vast anthropological literature has developed around this tension between distinct levels or spheres of value. According to the more Marxian solution of Munn (1986), Graeber, or Pedersen (2008), the greater the proportion of human labour and imagination, the more durable the value: it takes more collective effort and time to build a city, a monument, a work of art. While persuasive, this approach makes it hard to understand more personal inalienable objects like family heirlooms. Explaining such singular values leads some to adopt a more Durkheimian-Maussian account of values as representations of social histories, memories, and relations. A version of this argument was proposed initially by Annette Weiner (1985) and developed separately by Maurice Godelier (1999) and Roy Rappaport (1999) to link valuable things and sacred values in speculative accounts of the emergence of sociality.

Rubbish Theory has avowedly Durkheimian ambitions. Like the Marxian theorists, however, Thompson recognizes that value forms are not only representations of social relations but help maintain systems of power and hierarchy. As Thompson argues in his new Introduction, rubbish theory is really Cultural Theory, just as the creation and destruction of value is the very stuff of our hopes and dreams, both the forms of life we strive for and those we struggle against. Rather than ask where value comes from in general, Thompson pursues a different problem. If value is mutable and conferred rather than fixed and inherent, then what prevents values from changing? If social conventions disallow certain value transformations, under what circumstances can they occur? It is not just any value change that interests Thompson. The question that he focuses on is the improbable leap from ordinary to extraordinary, from forgettable to eternal. The reason is simple: if it were possible to pass from one stage to the other then that would present the most radical challenge to systems of value and power. Thompson’s elegant solution is that value transformations rely upon the possibility of things with zero value, that is, rubbish. By falling into disuse and disregard, a transient object can be one day revalued as a classic, as retro, as kitsch, as an archaeological artifact or relic, as rare and exceptional. Without being removed from value considerations altogether, this sort of radical transformation would not be possible. Rubbish is necessary, therefore, as a result of the seemingly unbridgeable divide between categorical extremes. As a realm outside of formal value assessments, rubbish also provides a creative reservoir of material and social potential, one that can be harnessed to either effect dramatic change or maintain relative stability.

One radical implication of this account is that rubbish, for Thompson, is not simply what is left after value has been depleted. He insists that the contents of a bin or dumpster are not (yet) rubbish. Rather, they are transient, of little value and even less over time. Discards do not become ‘rubbish’ until social processes and practices conspire to remove them from circulation and consideration. Rubbish is not exactly worthless, for Thompson, it is that which is not even worth assessing in the first place, not consciously labeled as an anti-value, but perhaps semi-consciously ignored as a non-value. This makes rubbish a ‘valueless limbo’ (Hawkins, 2006:78) betwixt and between the overt, acknowledged categories of transient and durable.

While some take issue with this definition of rubbish (Lucas, 2002; Hetherington, 2004), it solves a number of dilemmas that emerge from the social creation of value. If human imagination and labour are so potent, why don’t value transformations happen all the time? When such transformations routinely occur, as happens on dumps and among scavengers the world over, then how are rigid hierarchies of wealth and power maintained? The answer lies in the controls that various elites and sub-groups place on value transfers. In forms of life more dedicated to hierarchy, for instance, it will be more critical to disallow access to rubbish, to police acts of radical value creation by means of authority and violence (Hill, 2001; Millar, 2008). Within forms of life that are more egalitarian, by contrast, forms of rubbish revaluation will proliferate and destabilize the formation of durable values, which has been documented among anarchist and activist collectives (Liboiron, 2012; Giles, 2014). Here Thompson’s debt to his mentor Mary Douglas is particularly evident. Like Douglas, Thompson associates radical possibilities with materials that have exited our purview altogether, which surprisingly or embarrassingly reappear where they do not belong. Douglas saw dirt, the absence or flaw in any pattern, as the very stuff of change and transformation.

For Martin O’Brien (2008:136–9), Thompson’s argument puts Douglas’ more idealist conception of dirt to work to explore concrete moments of value creation and destruction. One could summarize Thompson’s basic insight as this: the more things stay the same, the more things change. That is, for systems of value and hierarchy to remain as they are requires additional activity to police the ever-present possibility of value transfers from rubbishness to durability. Without these controls, those making do on the margins of a social system could marshal their considerable imaginative labour to produce alternative systems of counter-value, ones made up of the forgotten detritus that those in power have left behind. Benjamin famously associated the revaluing of rubbish with the moment of revolution, where the remains of what came before provide the raw material to remake the world anew. It takes a great deal of semiotic and material investment to prevent value transformations on such a scale, to disallow creation from destruction.

And value transformations from rubbish can never be fully and completely banned. This is one insight that can be derived from Thompson and Beck’s new Afterword, that different ‘solidarities’ are present to some degree within any social totality, with various sub-groups, in a Maussian sense, adopting one or the other extreme. The possibility of radical value transformation, and therefore revolution, would always be immanent within any social formation, precisely because of the continuous flux of materials and representations. This is what makes Thompson’s framework productively dynamic, which is evident in the geometrical models he conjures in the latter half of the book. These are produced with the help of catastrophe theory and topology, precursors to the cybernetic systems theory approaches that have been recently elaborated in accordance with various philosophical accounts of being. And this is why those of us in discard studies should welcome the republication of this volume. It aspires to join the canon of general social theory by making the study of discards indispensable for critical social analysis anywhere with anyone.

Ignoring the greater ambitions of this book has arguably led to two related misreadings of Rubbish Theory. One sees it primarily as an argument about shifts in exchange value within capitalist social formations (see Hetherington, 2004:166). A similar interpretation identifies Thompson’s theory of value transformation as an alternative or lesser version of Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) idea of ‘regimes of value’. The latter endeavours to map the category shifts (between gift and commodity phases, for instance) that occur as valuables cross social contexts (see Frow, 2003:36). Thompson does more than explain how particular objects can change over the course of their careers, however. The ontology (that is, the philosophical approach to being) he adopts is more radically Heraclitean than this, one where ‘all is strife, conflict, and no neutrality’ forcing us to ‘abandon a Cartesian sociology that pretends otherwise’ (this volume, p. 111). Where the social life of things is normally reduced to people struggling to acquire and keep things they find desirable, rubbish theory depicts people trying to maintain value itself, to prevent categorical distinctions and power relations from coming completely undone or to aid in their dissolution. Power is not simply about hoarding values, in other words, but about struggling to maintain or resist control in the face of constant uncertainty and flexibility. In Thompson’s framework, achieving valued ends means finding ways to manage perpetual losses and imagine occasional wonders, about life at its most ordinary and extraordinary.

If much of Rubbish Theory concerns what could be called exchange value, this is not because its insights are limited to capitalist systems of exchange. Rather, price fluctuations just happen to provide a useful way of representing rising and falling values, making legible dramatic categorical shifts. The latter half of the book, the new Introduction and Afterword, explore how this is part of larger social projects which involve fluid hierarchies as people struggle with each other as well as distinctions between forms of life, or ‘solidarities’, that cut across societies.

If individual texts can become rubbish, one could argue that portions of texts can also be neglected and forgotten (this is the normal fate of the preface or foreword, in fact). That is to say, each text has its rubbish, aspects of which may be neglected for a time and then later mined for rereading and renewed appreciation. I would argue that there has been an implicit tendency to regard the latter chapters of Rubbish Theory as excessive or unnecessary. This might be related to misreadings of Thompson as concerned merely with fluctuating values, à la Appadurai, rather than concerned with elaborating a broader account of systems of value in practice. The last few chapters take rubbish far beyond questions concerning the agency of things and non-human beings (the province of new materialist and vitalist approaches, respectively). Thompson’s freewheeling exploration leads him to construct dynamic models to depict the relationship between worldview and action, to elaborate partial connections between disciplinary boundary making and Melanesian pig exchanges, all leading to an overarching model of the monsters that threaten steady state systems and keep them going. These are the concerns of the more experimental and generally neglected portions of his book, which cover topics ranging from the philosophy of knowledge, to geometry, ethnology, and topology.

These rubbished sections of Rubbish Theory are difficult to summarize, but all of them cry out for further discussion and dissection. Art and the ends of economic activity (Chapter 6) shows that Thompson’s threefold division (durable, transient, rubbish) is actually a five-fold relation that includes consumption and production—an open-ended general economy with increasingly complicated variations. Monster conservation (Chapter 7) offers nothing less than an alternative theory of practice, one that is founded neither on structuration nor habitus, but on a dynamic representational economy of disuse and reuse, forgetting and reimagining, repression and fantasy. Whatever one makes of the result, it is far beyond anything heretofore attempted by anyone in discard studies and stands as an example of the still unrealized potential of this shared field of inquiry.

There is another important lesson here, which is demonstrated by Thompson and Beck’s new Afterword, dedicated to uniting anthropology and engineering. In general, discard studies has tended to welcome all collaborators and interlocutors, just so long as they are primarily invested in writing, not creating, thinking rather than tinkering. If ruminations about rubbish are to have any salience, if currently fashionable trans-disciplinarity is to have any impact, it has to cope with what Thompson and Beck characterize as a ‘plurality’ of disciplinary terms, models and methods. Focusing on something we all depend on—water—they suggest that discard theorists transcend that seemingly impassable divide between theory and practice, between interpreting the world and changing it.

Arguably, this is just about value transformation in another register. As such, this call for unity across plurality has far-reaching implications in contemporary discard studies, where there is a lingering tendency to divide approaches that deal with the economic from those that deal with the environmental, recovering value from restoring vitality. This could be seen as a reflection of the broader tension of the contemporary Anthropocene, which everywhere counterpoises economic profit and environmental justice. It is not enough to say that value is relative:

It is clear that one man’s rubbish can be another man’s desirable object; that rubbish, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Yet it would be wrong to explain away this distinction ... To say that one man’s meat is another man’s poison is not to explain anything, but simply to pose the next question, which is: what determines which man gets poisoned? (this volume, p. 106)

Thompson was among the first to point out these two sides of rubbish. As a repository of indeterminate potential, rubbish can be a source of profit or pollution, a resource and a toxicant. Thinking with engineers does not mean simply adding a new interpretation of waste, offering yet another set of perspectives for its revaluation. Rather, it means taking seriously the capacity of rubbish relations to transform lives and power relations, including their capacity to drive us out of our familiar disciplinary habits and habitats. Reading and rereading this text is not merely essential to understanding rubbish. As Thompson teaches us, diving into rubbish is essential if we are to understand who we are, how we relate to one another, and what we are really capable of. This is not just a book about waste, because the best books about waste are actually about everything else.

REFERENCES

Appadurai, Arjun (ed.) (1986), The Social Life of Things, Cambridge University Press Cambridge and New York.

Crang, Mike, Gregson, Nicky, Ahamed, Farid, Ferdous, Raihana and Nasreen, Akhter (2012), ‘Death, the Phoenix and Pandora: Transforming Things and Values in Bangladesh’, in C. Alexander and J. Reno (eds) Economies of Recycling, Zed Books, London, pp. 59–75.

Evans, David (2014), Food Waste: Home Consumption, Material Culture and Everyday Life, Bloomsbury, London and New York.

Frow, John (2003), ‘Invidious Distinction: Waste, Difference, and Classy Stuff’, in G. Hawkins and S. Muecke (eds), Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, pp. 25–38.

Gabrys, Jennifer (2011), Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Giles, David (2014), ‘The Anatomy of a Dumpster: Abject Capital and the Looking Glass of Value’, Social Text 32: 93–113.

Godelier, Maurice (1999), The Enigma of the Gift, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Graeber, David (2001), Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our Own Dreams, Palgrave, New York.

Hawkins, Gay (2006), Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD.

Hetherington, Kevin (2004), ‘Secondhandedness: Consumption, Disposal and Absent Presence’, Environment and Planning D, 22: 157–73.

Hill, Sarah (2001), ‘The Environmental Divide: Neoliberal Incommensurability at the U.S.–Mexico Border’, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 30 (2/3): 157–87.

Lepawsky, Josh and Mostaem Billah (2011), ‘Making Chains that (Un)make Things: Waste-Value Relations and the Bangladeshi Rubbish Electronics Industry’, Geografiska Annaler, 93(2): 121–39.

Liboiron, Max (2012), ‘Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement’, Social Movement Studies, 11(3–4): 393–401.

Lucas, Gavin (2002), ‘Disposability and Dispossession in the Twentieth Century’, Journal of Material Culture, 7(1): 5–22.

Millar, Kathleen (2008), ‘Making Trash into Treasure: Struggles for Autonomy on a Brazilian Garbage Dump’, Anthropology of Work Review, 29(2): 25–34.

Munn, Nancy (1986), The Fame of Gawa, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Nagle, Robin (2014), Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York.

O’Brien, Martin (2008), Crisis of Waste?: Understanding the Rubbish Society, Routledge, New York and Abingdon.

Pedersen, David (2008), ‘Brief Event: The Value of Getting to Value in the Era of "Globalization’’ ’, Anthropological Theory, 8(1): 57–77.

Rappaport, Roy (1999), Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York.

Reno, Joshua O. (2009), ‘Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure: The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill’, Journal of Material Culture, 14(1): 29–46.

Weiner, Annette (1985), ‘Inalienable Wealth’, American Ethnologist, 12(2): 210–27.

Preface

It is difficult for the author of a book on rubbish to thank adequately those who have helped him in his endeavour. Rubbish, when all is said and done, remains pretty repulsive stuff and has a tendency to adhere to people who come into contact with it. It is for this reason that not all those whom I wish to thank may thank me for doing so in too public a manner.

But I do owe a great deal to the many colleges of art (particularly Hull, Winchester, Falmouth and The Slade) which over the years have given me encouragement and financial support. The same is true of the School of Architecture at Portsmouth Polytechnic. I should also like to thank the following institutions for their financial support: the Nuffield Foundation (9 months’ research assistantship at University College, London), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (14 months’ post-doctoral fellowship), the International Institute for Environment and Society, Berlin (4 months’ visiting fellowship). The intellectual climate in schools of art and architecture is ideally suited to the germination and growth of tender plants but, sooner or later, they must be transferred from the art hothouse into the cold-frame of the academic—and the wider—world. That both I and my ideas have, I hope, survived this traumatic journey, and that thoughts about rubbish led to wider considerations and to involvement with catastrophe theory, is largely thanks to the stringent yet helpful criticism of my colleagues in the Anthropology Department at UCL and in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick.

It is proper to record that some parts of the argument in the early chapters of the book appeared in a somewhat different form in New Society; and that part of Chapter 8 was first published in Studies in Higher Education, vol. 1, no 1 (1976).

Introduction to the new edition

In the summer of 2000 Britain’s ‘New Labour’ government was thrown into a tizzy by the publication in the Daily Mail of excerpts from a confidential draft, by one of its senior policy advisers, of its future strategy. At first it was feared that there was a ‘mole’ in Number 10 Downing Street: someone on the inside must have faxed or e-mailed the secret document to the not entirely friendly newspaper. Then it was a ‘hacker’ in the Conservative Party’s Central Office, and accusing fingers were rather publicly pointed in that direction. But, either way, the consensus was that there was some sort of damaging conspiracy with the Murdoch-owned press. Eventually, to the delight of those who had been accused, and to the somewhat malicious amusement of all those who were neither among the ranks of the accusers or the accused, it turned out to be none of these suspects. It was Benjamin Pell, now much better known as Benji the Binman.

Benjamin is a refuse collector, in so far as he wears a cloth cap and a luminous yellow anorak and goes around emptying dustbins, but, unlike most refuse collectors, he does not work for a local authority; he is self-employed. Moreover, he is very selective, removing only some of the refuse—written and typed material that he judges may be of value to him—and from outside only certain premises—City law firms, for instance, and the north London homes of celebrities and policy wonks. It was during the course of these nocturnal excursions in his white van that Benji had acquired what was, in fact, a discarded early draft of the secret strategy document. Once he had it, and had realised what it was, he knew where to take it—to the offices of News International—and the rest, as they say, is history.

Had an offence been committed? The law, unsurprisingly, is not entirely clear about whether, and up to what point in the process, people who are set on getting rid of something are entitled not to be deprived of it. It is, in other words, a ‘grey area’ but, because of the seriousness of the consequences of this particular piece of freelance refuse collection, the police decided to raid and search Benji’s house, (or, rather, his mother’s house, since Benji, who was then in his late 30s, was unmarried and still lived at home). In a large wooden shed in the back garden they found more than 200,000 documents, all of which had come from dustbins, and all of which were meticulously organised, indexed, filed and so on.

The most remarkable thing about this awesome Pell archive is that it is composed entirely of documents that have been discarded in order to form archives. The hapless adviser to Number 10 could only work his way towards a satisfactory strategy document by discarding his earlier and not entirely satisfactory drafts and, in the other direction, it would be asking for trouble if the prime minister’s office had on its computers not just the final version (which they would then circulate to all those who were authorised to have sight of it) but all the versions leading up to it as well. So, if you cannot create an archive without discarding, what on earth is this shed full of documents that, while having all the characteristics of an archive, is composed of nothing but discards? It is, of course, an anti-archive: an affront to all the archives it draws upon in this negative way, in that it clearly has both order and value, while the whole justification for the discards from which it is composed is that they are both amorphous and valueless. Indeed, it is only by discarding them that what is left is able to achieve form and value, and thereby become an archive!

Shredders might help, together with ‘stand alone’ computers with programs that routinely wipe documents that have been superseded. And a law that got rid of the ‘grey area’, by making it illegal to take possession of anything that has been discarded by someone else, is another possibility. But most Britons do not want to live as though they are MI5 agents, nor are property rights in rubbish much of a capitalist turn-on. And, even if we did all that, the discards would still have, within and between them, the structure and value that Benji the Binman has now revealed for us all to see; it is just that, without him and his ilk plying their strange and strangely disturbing trade, we would not know about it. Beyond that, perhaps we, and posterity, would all be the poorer. To now go and destroy Benji’s anti-archive—an ordered assemblage that, unlike most archives, actually pays for itself and then goes on to show a handsome profit—would surely be a philistine and culturally erosive act; on a par, almost, with Lady Churchill burning Graham Sutherland’s portrait of her illustrious husband.1

And so it goes! Once Benji’s anti-archive is out of the bag we cannot put it back in. Indeed, less than a year later, and despite having been certified by self-appointed psychologists as suffering from an ‘obsessive-compulsive disorder’ (shades of the old Soviet Union), Benjamin Pell found himself in line for the coveted ‘Scoop of the Year’ award in the so-called Oscars of British Journalism.2

*  *  *

Well, this story—Benji the Binman and his anti-archive—confirms just about every prediction from the rubbish theory that I first propounded in the 1960s3 (though the book itself did not appear until 1979).

•   You cannot create value without at the same time creating non-value.

•   We make sense of our world by whittling it down to manageable proportions.

•   This whittling-down cannot be done in an unbiased way.

•   Nor can we ever reach general agreement on how this whittling-down should be done.

•   Even when the whittling-down has been done, the chances are it will not stay that way.

•   And so on... .

What then, is the theory that gives us these predictions: predictions that, though I never realised it at the time, clearly have some relevance when it comes to what are nowadays called archive processes?4

To answer this question, quickly and simply, I will rely on a 1979 review of Rubbish Theory. What I particularly like about this review (I come from an engineering family) is that it is not by a social scientist. It is by a mathematician, Ian Stewart: an up-and-coming young lad back in 1979 but now probably Britain’s most distinguished mathematician. He begins with the puzzling business of antique-creation, which, he explains, is one of the key concerns in rubbish theory.

•   How does something second-hand become an antique?

•   How, on a rather larger and less moveable scale, does a rat-infested slum become part of Our Glorious Heritage?

•   And, how, I can now add, coming to the sorts of processes Benjamin Pell has played such havoc with, does a draft memo become a crucial component within a national archive?

Those were the sorts of questions I asked when I was starting my PhD, back in the 1960s, and of course I looked at all the literature—economics especially—to find out what sorts of answers were already on offer. To my amazement, I found that no theories answered those questions, and, even more amazingly, according to most existing theories these sorts of dramatic value shifts were actually impossible.

So I had stumbled on a wonderful PhD topic; all I had to do was come up with a theory that (a) accounted for the existence of the two value categories, transient (here today, gone tomorrow) and durable (a joy forever), and (b) explained how transitions from the former to the latter were possible (and why the reverse transitions were not possible) (Fig. 0).

illustration

Figure 0 The Basic Rubbish Theory Hypothesis. (The solid boxes denote overt cultural categories; the broken-line box denotes a covert category, like the documents discarded in the formation of an archive. The solid arrows are the transfers that happen; the broken ones the transfers that do not happen, because they contradict the value and/or time directions that define the various categories.)

Ian Stewart, in his review, explains it like this:

Social economists have long recognised two categories of possessable objects: Transient and Durable... . The value of one decays to zero, the other increases to infinity. Michael Thompson argues that there is a third, covert category: Rubbish. Rubbish has zero value, hence is invisible to socio-economic theory. But this is blinkered self-delusion: Rubbish provides the channel between Transient and Durable.5

If the Rubbish category was not there—if everything in the world was of value, one way or another—no transfers would be possible (you can’t go from minus to plus, or vice versa, without passing zero). And, even when it is there, there is only one smooth path: from Transient to Rubbish to Durable.

This splendidly simple hypothesis does two vital things: it answers my questions (the three ‘bullet points’ above) and it rescues us from the ‘blinkered self-delusion’ of orthodox economic reasoning. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has had a mixed reception. In the art world (which is where it actually started off, thanks to my involvement in the Art and Language Group)6 it has been embraced right from the start. Indeed, at the time of writing (August 2016) an early version of Fig. 0 is on display, as an artwork in the Tate Britain Gallery, in its exhibition ‘Conceptual Art in Britain: 1964–1979’. And one museum of modern art—the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, Germany, which after the Second World War had lost all its contents—was re-founded on explicit rubbish theory principles. As well as the conceptual art, I produced a host of real world examples, perhaps the nicest of which were the nineteenth-century woven silk pictures—called Stevengraphs—that were produced, on Jacquard looms, at the Coventry factory of Thomas Stevens Ltd. In 1902, a complete set of 60 Stevengraphs cost £2.55. Immediately after purchase they were worth nothing, and they stayed that way for the next 50 or so years. But by 1973, they were worth £3,000: about 200 times their original cost (allowing for inflation).

Ian Stewart, being a differential topologist (a breed of mathematician whose nose is finely attuned to qualitative differences: state changes, as when ice melts or smooth flow turns turbulent, for instance) is attracted by simple hypotheses that lead to complex and counter-intuitive behaviour. And having cut his professional teeth on catastrophe theory,7 he is particularly attracted to simple hypotheses that result in the sort of discontinuous behaviour—despising one moment, cherishing the next—that underlies the value transformation of these Stevengraphs (and also of inner-London houses which provided my other main example, thanks to my earning my living so as to pay for my PhD—Britain’s Social Science Research Council having refused to fund it and the head of my university department having tried to have it stopped—in the building trade). Rubbish theory, Ian Stewart goes on to explain, ‘studies this mechanism and its all pervasive influence’.8

•   What sort of people effect the transfer?

•   What sort of people try to prevent it?

•   What sort of people are able to profit from it?

•   What sort of people lose out?

In putting his finger