Table Of ContentRubbish Theory
Rubbish Theory
The Creation and Destruction of Value
new edition
Michael Thompson
Foreword by Joshua O. Reno
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 vi
Preface xiv
Introduction to the new edition 1
1 The filth in the way 19
2 Stevengraphs—yesterday’s kitsch 30
3 Rat-infested slum or glorious heritage? 49
4 From things to ideas 70
5 A dynamic theory of rubbish 88
6 Art and the ends of economic activity 112
7 Monster conservation 138
8 The geometry of credibility 158
9 The geometry of confidence 186
10 The needle’s eye 216
Afterword (co-authored by M. Bruce Beck) 229
Notes 253
Index 273
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
foreword . vii
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
viii . rubbish theory
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 archae-
ological 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
foreword . ix
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 trans-
formation.
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.
