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Rubbish Theory The Creation and Destruction of Value 2nd Edition
Michael Thompson
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The Secrets of AI Value Creation: Practical Guide to Business Value Creation with Artificial Intelligence from Strategy to Execution Michael Proksch & Nisha
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.
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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
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Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Joshua O. Reno
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 transdisciplinarity 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 whittlingdown 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).
TRANSIENT
Value decreases with time
DURABLE
Value increases with time
RUBBISH
No value, no time
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 nineteenthcentury 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 on this four-fold requisite variety9—four different kinds of ‘social beings’, all of whom have to be present if this mechanism, with its all pervasive influence, is to kick-in—Ian Stewart was ahead of the anthropological game, in that he was making explicit a link to the four-fold typology that Mary Douglas (who was my supervisor) set out in her paper ‘Cultural Bias’:10 a link that I only really got around to making many years later.11 And by that time Mary Douglas’ original analytical scheme (she called it ‘grid-group analysis’) had developed into a fully-fledged and extensively applied theory (variously called cultural theory, the theory of plural rationality, neo-Durkheimian institutional theory and a few more) that, it has been claimed, now ‘rivals the rationalchoice, Weberian and postmodern outlooks in terms of influence across the social sciences’.12 So, if that claim is valid (and of course I want to argue that it is), and if Ian Stewart was indeed ahead of the game, then I will have to pause in order to make this implicit link explicit. However, I will do it in a fairly light way here, keeping the heavier argument for the Afterword.
rubbish theory’s link to cultural theory
One thing is obvious enough: social status and the ownership of Durables are closely related (as, in the other direction, are marginality and Rubbish). And we all know that money, by itself, does not confer social status. If it did we would not be able to witness that socially fraught process by which those who have acquired ‘new money’ transform it into ‘old money’ by, among other things, buying, and making themselves comfortable with, objects that are Durable (so nicely captured in the Duke of Devonshire’s remark, after a rather bourgeois guest had departed: ‘Cheek of the man, noticing my chairs!’).
But there is another route to the same destination, and creative and upwardly mobile individuals can sometimes emulate Frank Sinatra and do it their way, by convincing the ‘high priests’ that the rubbish items they have lovingly surrounded themselves with are mis-categorised and are actually sadly-neglected components of Our Glorious Heritage:
Durables. This, for example (and as we will see in Chapter 3), is what happened in the 1960s and ’70s with inner London’s terraced housing. And it is by some combination of these two routes—making your new money old and transforming your Rubbish to Durability—that two crucial adjustments can be achieved: (a) keeping the category system abreast of the whole ever-evolving technological process by which objects are produced, consumed and conserved and (b) ensuring that status (feeling at ease with Durables, for instance) and power (loads of money, for instance) are continually re-aligned.
That, at any rate, is what has to happen if we live, and are to go on living, in a class-based society. But, for that to happen, the controls on the transfers to Durability have to be ‘just right’: permissive enough to keep the class show on the road yet restrictive enough not to inflate the Durable category to the point where Durables are so ubiquitous as to no longer be able to denote the crucial conjunction of status and power: a ‘repeater system’, in other words.13 This then raises the question that was not really addressed in the first edition of Rubbish Theory: how do we trace out all the other possible shifts: shifts that, in one way or another, take the totality away from the ‘repeater system’ state of affairs that prevails for as long as the controls are ‘just right’?
This, I need hardly point out, is a big question: probably as big a question as we are likely to come across in social science. Unfortunately, to answer it fully we need to venture into cybernetics—the science of communication and control—and that is something that many social scientists may see as a step too far. Better, therefore, if I postpone that step until the Afterword, where I can then draw on the expertise of my co-author, Bruce Beck, a journeyman (as he modestly puts it) control engineer.14 For now, I will just point out two things: first, that the overall system (three linked cisterns and two taps) has the potential to generate shifts across two dimensions—status and power—and, second, that to realise that potential there will have to be sufficient variety among the individual actors for all the different dynamic permutations (opening this tap, closing that one, etc., etc.) to be possible. An analogy would be that spooky game where people (and there have to be enough of them) sit around a table, each placing a finger on an upturned glass, and the glass then seems to take on a life of its own, sliding first one way then another across the flat surface.
Such requisite variety, though a crucial concept in cybernetics, is seriously at odds with most of social science, in that it requires that
rationality be plural (rational choice theory, for instance, insists that it is singular: we are all rational utility maximisers). But each ‘social being’, according to cultural theory, will be striving towards a different goal (just one of which is the utility-maximising one); turning the taps this way or that, as it were, in the expectation that, if they are successful and can overcome those who are doing all they can to turn them to different settings, they will bring the totality ever closer to that goal. This plurality, moreover, has to be sufficient; it has to be four-fold. Just two sets of hands (which is the most that social science tends to countenance—markets and hierarchies, for instance) would only generate a back-and-forth oscillation (between ‘light touch’ and ‘heavy hand’ regulation, to give a topical financial example), leaving the other dimension of variation unexploited.
For instance:
• In the ‘repeater system’ situation, where the controls are ‘just right’, there is a lot of stratification and a lot of competition, and the transfers from Transient to Rubbish and from Rubbish to Durable are such that the inevitable changes in power are quickly reflected in matching changes in status: things staying the same, class-wise, despite all the unavoidable flux: increasingly wealthy British brewers in the nineteenth century, for instance, finding themselves ‘raised to the beerage’.
• If the controls become rather more restrictive then status and power will no longer be able to realign themselves and, as they diverge, we will find ourselves being transformed into a caste-based society (as in the classical Indian system, where the meat-eating Rajah sits firmly at the head of the power structure but defers to the vegetarian Brahmin within the hierarchy of caste).15 Perhaps the current and much lamented lack of social mobility in Britain, despite all sorts of efforts to promote it, can be explained in terms of a shift—quite small and easily overlooked—away from class and towards caste.
• If things are too permissive the Durable category will eventually collapse under its own weight. The status ‘currency’ will be debauched, and the totality will move away at right-angles to the class-caste axis. As status differences disappear transactions become more symmetrical and we move onto the increasingly levelled ‘playing-field’ beloved by those who abhor ‘restrictive
practices’, on the one hand, and, on the other, an unwillingness by those who cannot discern any opportunities in their immediate neighbourhood to ‘get on their bikes’. Margaret Thatcher’s ‘enterprise culture’ is the goal here, and some ferociously individualistic societies—those in the New Guinea highlands, for instance, that engage in competitive pig-giving—actually get themselves to this goal (though, as we will see in Chapter 9, they are not then able to stabilise themselves in that position).
• And yet other settings of the taps will trace out the other possible shifts on this two-dimensional ‘table’.16
This requisite variety, however, is nicely captured by the answers to those four questions that Ian Stewart has listed:
• Those who are able to ‘do it their way’—we can dub them the ‘crashers-through’—are the upholders of what in cultural theory is called the individualist solidarity. Their hands are strong enough to hold open the tap that will allow the flow of objects (theirs, of course) from Rubbish to Durable.
• Those whose aim is to over-ride the tap-turnings of the crashersthrough—we can call them the ‘high priests’ (those literary critics, for instance, who strive to define what shall and shall not be admitted to ‘the canon’)—are the upholders of what is called the hierarchical solidarity.
• Those—we can call them the ‘levellers’—who, by flooding the Durable category, are able to diminish both status and power, are the upholders of what is called the egalitarian solidarity.
• And those—we can call them the ‘losers-out’—who, despite all their efforts, keep on finding themselves squeezed out to the margins (unable, as it were, to get their hands on any of the taps, and unsure which way to turn them even when they do) are the upholders of what is called the fatalist solidarity.
This plurality, being four-fold, gets us beyond the inadequate one-fold and two-fold schemes that are so prevalent in social science and thereby provides us with what we need for a decent theory: the requisite variety.17 On top of that, it has a certain plausibility, in that we can all recognize ourselves, and others, within it.18 Or, putting it another way (and as will become clearer, I hope, when we come to the Afterword), cultural
theory is inherent in rubbish theory; they are ‘of a piece’: a single, and rather all-encompassing, theory. But what, some may ask, apart from this conflation within what is often disparagingly referred to as ‘grand theory’,19 is there to justify this republication of Rubbish Theory?
the book itself and why it is still valid
The basic idea, to quickly re-iterate, is that the two cultural categories— the Transient and the Durable—are ‘socially imposed’ on the world of objects. If these two categories exhausted the material world then the transfer of an object from one to the other would not be possible because of the mutual contradiction of the categories’ defining criteria: those in the Transient category have decreasing value and finite expected lifespans; those in the Durable category have increasing value and infinite expected lifespans. But of course they are not exhaustive; they encompass only those objects that have value, leaving a vast and disregarded realm—Rubbish—that, it turns out, provides the one-way route from Transient to Durable. A Transient object, once produced, will decline in value and in expected lifespan, eventually reaching zero on both. In an ideal world—a world uncannily like the one that is assumed in neoclassical economics—it would then, having reached the end of its usefulness, disappear in a cloud of dust. But often this does not happen; it lingers on in a valueless and timeless limbo (rubbish) until perhaps it is discovered by some creative and upwardly-mobile individual and transferred across into the Durable category.
Just who the people are who are able to effect this value-creating transfer, and what sort of people feel at home with transient objects, with durable objects and with rubbish objects, tells us a lot about our dynamic and ever-changing social system. It also makes clear that both the status ladder itself, and the subtle transitions up and down it, depend on there being things ‘out there’ for us to push around (and be pushed around by): materiality; as it is sometimes called. In other words, and this I would say is the crucial and enduring message from this book, stuff matters. We need a theory of people and stuff—particularly now that we are faced with seemingly intractable discard-generated problems such as climate change—and that (as Bruce Beck and I will endeavour to explain in the Afterword) is precisely what rubbish theory gives us.
The book’s early chapters set out this three-components-and-twopossible-transfers framing, and then go on to explore those social
and cultural dynamics that it gives rise to. This is done, first by way of case studies: of objects, such as Stevengraphs (Victorian woven silk pictures), and of contemporary arguments over just which objects are to be permitted to make which transitions (Grange Park—at that time a dilapidated mansion in Hampshire—being a spectacular bone of aesthetic contention). It is then done a second time by way of anthropological fieldwork: participant observation of the building trade in Islington, in north London, that was at that time in the early throes of what is now called gentrification.
However, it is not all plain sailing and things soon become rather complicated. This is because, as one sympathetic reviewer pointed out, rubbish theory opens up, and provides a way of getting to grips with, a question that is (or, rather, should be) at the very heart of social science.
At bottom there are only two possible subjects for social science— stability and change. Since it takes a great deal of change to maintain stability, and change cannot continue without stability, social science is always in danger of swallowing its subject matter. Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory is a heroic effort to stand outside society just long enough for the subject to stop chasing its tail.20
Put another way, this engagement with materiality on the one hand, and with stability and change on the other, takes us into a veritable maelstrom of social and cultural dynamics: a maelstrom in which gradual and smooth changes in some variables can result in sudden and discontinuous changes in others: a set of hitherto neglected phenomena that, as it happened, were just at that time being grappled with by mathematicians: catastrophe theory, as it was called by the great French topologist, Réné Thom (catastrophe, in French, means simply discontinuous change and does not carry any of the negative connotations of the same word in English). Catastrophe theory was the vital precursor of all those theories—chaos, complexity, dynamical systems and so on—that are now much relied-upon (albeit, more often in the physical and biological sciences than the social ones). Catastrophe theory typically relies on ‘folded landscapes’—morphogenetic fields—on which ‘gravity’ can work both ways: the discontinuous changes, depending on where things are in relation to a fold, can be upwards or downwards, and these geometrical insights have some profound consequences for our understanding of what is going on in social life.
Through it all, if one listens carefully, is the language of the rejected who are to rise again. Would not it be wonderful if the despised object, idea, person, or group, the rubbish heaps of society, were to turn out to be its transformers, containing within their collective corpus the seeds of future regeneration? If what goes down can also come up in the world, all of a sudden, like falling up a social cliff.21
While I would hold, nearly 40 years on, that none of this is wrong, I readily concede that the book is everywhere suffused with period charm.22 Indeed, with its origins in early conceptual art, it offers a rich slug of the intellectual ferment that bubbled away in the 1960s and ’70s; I would not do it that way today! So the book’s later chapters follow its essentially optimistic line of argument into some places that, at first sight, may seem somewhat remote from the initial case studies and fieldwork: into economic cycles (intriguingly similar to the recent, and continuing, transformations of the global economy) that are generated by ceremonial pig-giving among the peoples in the highlands of New Guinea, and into the socio-linguistic processes that result in our efforts to achieve stability within our educational systems driving the school curriculum through a whole sequence of changes that bring us back (for a time, at least) to precisely what those efforts are aimed at getting away from. So is it just period charm, or is it still relevant today? The latter, I would claim, in which case I will need to explain (starting here in the Introduction and then developing further in the Afterword) what has been happening with rubbish theory in the 40 or so years since it was first published (50 years, if we count from the article ‘An Anatomy of Rubbish’ that appeared in New Society in 1969).
Perhaps the lasting message from all that period charm is the omnipresence of what Aaron Wildavsky, Richard Ellis and I (when we got together to write the book Cultural Theory)23 dubbed curvilinearity: nothing, as is so evident in the pages of Rubbish Theory, ever goes in a straight line (Kant put it rather more elegantly: ‘From the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’). Rather, as with all those folded landscapes, those pig cycles and those curricular contortions, behaving in a particular way turns out to give us more and more of whatever it is that we are looking for and then, without any detectable indication that things have changed, goes into reverse, requiring us to either accept less and less or drastically change the way of behaving we have come to rely on. Or, as Hyman Minsky—the neglected economist
who predicted the 2007/8 global financial crisis (but did not live to see it)—put it: ‘stability is destabilising’.24
Periodic alternations of boom and bust are normally seen as resulting from advanced industrialization. In consequence, the sorts of economic theorising that tackle these cyclical dynamics (Keynesian, Schumpeterian, etc.) are seen as quite inapplicable to primitive societies. But (as we will see in Chapter 9) ceremonial (and competitive) pig-giving in the highlands of New Guinea gives rise to cycles that, it can be shown, are beyond the grasp of explanations even as sophisticated as the Hansen-Samuelson model of the trade cycle. ‘Big men’, as they are called in pidgin, extend credit during the optimistic upturn (taking care to ignore the ‘rubbish men’) but, in a way that is uncannily similar to the 2007/8 credit crunch/ global financial crisis, that confidence starts to ebb away, eventually triggering a catastrophic collapse: a bleak phase of bankruptcies, leading to wars between newly-distrustful clans. Until, eventually, things start to pick up again. In other words, and as I have recently argued in relation to the 2007/8 crunch-cum-crisis,25 this sort of ‘erratic cycling’, far from being restricted to advanced industrialised societies, will likely be found in any human social system. It is not just developing countries that have development problems; it would have taken only a few more years of its recent negative rate of growth (circa 5 per cent) for Greece to join the ranks of the LDCs (Least Developed Countries).
Stability and change, gradualism and suddenism, category and action, evolution and revolution ... persistence and change: those, looking back, are some of the daunting intellectual challenges that have surfaced, once we’ve started poking our noses into rubbish. A case of ‘fools rushing in’, some may say, and yet rubbish theory, it can be argued, has made a quite reasonable fist of it all. But what, putting it another way, has rubbish theory (the early chapters) got to do with catastrophe theory (the later chapters)? Sir Christopher Zeeman (who did so much to develop, and even more to apply, this new field of mathematics) provided the answer in his Foreword to the original edition of this book.26 ‘The long-term objective’, he explains, ‘is to tackle some of the central paradoxes of the social sciences, such as the relationship between values and behaviour, between world view and action, between culture and society’. He goes on to suggest that one of rubbish theory’s
major insights is to observe that a paradox may in fact be none other than the existence of two different configurations of the same system
under the same social constraints. The analogy with physics is made precise by using the same universal mathematical model for both, namely the cusp catastrophe. This in turn suggests a variety of related phenomena, a synthesis of ideas that would not have been possible without the geometry. Nor is this synthesis expressible without the geometry.27
rubbish theory’s origins and impacts
The theory began life fairly and squarely in anthropology: it is built on the work of my doctoral supervisor, Dame Mary Douglas—on her Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970), in particular—and it conformed to the discipline’s time-honoured requirement of two or more years of participant observation (though the location, in the heart of the capital city of a developed country rather than in some remote and pre-literate community, was a little unconventional at the time). Its impact, however, has been largely in other fields and disciplines, most notably art and architecture. I was much involved (as already mentioned) with the early conceptual art movement Art and Language, Peter Rayner Banham always had me give a lecture to his first-year students at University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture, and I see that in 2016 there is a serial art-work ‘Rubbish Theory fanzine’ that is based in the Lebanon (www.behance.net/gallery/14430349/ARubbish-Fanzine). Archaeology too was impacted (not least because of Colin Renfrew’s interest in catastrophe theory) and these influences soon spread to museology and aesthetics.
I recall an exhilarating ‘Schmutzkongress’ (conference on filth), around 1980 at the Darmstadter Werkbund, that was convened by Lucius Burckhardt, who went on to mastermind another conference—‘Design der Zukunft’ (the Design of the Future) which took place in the legendary Ballhaus in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district.28 Then (as already mentioned) there was the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, whose director, Michael Fehr, re-founded it explicitly on rubbish theory lines: a successful initiative that led, in 2002, to the major centenary exhibition: ‘Museutopia’, to which I contributed on artwork in the form of a one-act farce about economists29 that I was later able to expand into a book chapter about the rubbish-related problems with the concept of scarcity.30 The Museutopia exhibition was preceded by an interdisciplinary conference (under the joint auspices of the Karl
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Rona was grateful, but stood firm. Much as he desired to know more, he felt the fine quality of faith and loyalty in so young a girl. He did wish that he could feel quite certain that there was nothing discreditable in the mystery that surrounded her. People are not usually in hiding without a reason, he reflected. He was beginning to realize that this girl was having a curious, powerful, unprecedented effect upon him. It would be terrible should it turn out that she was really the sister of a youth who led a canal horse along the towpath. Like most persons of mediocre ability, he was much influenced by the dread of ridicule. He feared to make himself ridiculous concerning the unknown maiden. His judgment approved her; but he lacked confidence in his own judgment.
He walked back to Normansgrave, his mind occupied not as to the tragic circumstances of his brother's disappearance, but about the flight of a young servant girl from a harsh mistress with her brother, a bargee!
CHAPTER VIII
A TOUCH OF SYMPATHY
"This son of mine was a self-willed youth, always too ready to utter his unchastised fancies.... He got the spur when he should have had the rein.... He, therefore, helped to fill the markets with that unripe fruit which abounds in the marts of his native country."
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
Felix had been sent by his employers up to Basingstoke Station to bring down some parcels of rivets and special nails arriving by goods train that evening. As he stood on the platform waiting, the boat train from Southampton came rushing in, and stopped to put down a solitary passenger. This was a tall, wiry, hatchet-faced man, of about forty, with black hair, brown skin, and soft, melting dark brown eyes—eyes you would
not have expected to see in that face, unless you were familiar with the Slav type.
This man gave his directions to the porters in very hesitating English. He was so like the type to which Felix had been accustomed in the dynamite brotherhood, that the sight of him was actively unpleasant. And yet the young man could not help being fascinated, too.
The stranger said, in painstaking English, "I wish this trunk put upon the hotel omnibus."
The porter, understanding this, cheerfully shouldered the trunk and disappeared, the traveler meanwhile lighting a cigarette and gazing round the station at the town beyond with a look of interest.
"Now, sir," said the porter, returning, "what are we to do with all this stuff?"
It looked like machinery—curiously shaped, spiky packages sewn up in canvas.
"I wish that put—how do you say?—ah, yes—en consigne, s'il vous plait—pardon, I would mean—en consigne—hein?"
The porter looked blank. "No parly frongsay," he remarked, resentfully.
"Wants you to cloak it, fathead," said Felix, unable to hold his tongue.
"To cloak it—eh? Why in blazes don't 'e say so, then. This way, mounseer."
"Le mettre en consigne pendant quelques jours, monsieur," cried the foreigner, eagerly pouncing on Felix. "Malheureusement je ne puis pas dire —je ne sais pas pour quel temps—combien faut-il payer maintenant?"
Felix turned good-naturedly to him. "You want to cloak it, and you do not know for how long?" he said in French. "That's all right, you take a ticket now, nothing to pay, and when you want it out, you produce the ticket and pay so much for each day."
The man was delighted. "I am indebted to you, sir, I am truly. I was told my English was enough to take me through; but it breaks down at every turn. You speak French admirably—that is not so with all your countrymen —hein?"
"No," said Felix, "we are not great linguists, taken as a nation. But I have lived abroad."
"Ah! By chance now—you speak German also?"
"Assez bien, monsieur."
The stranger literally clutched him. Was he at liberty? Would he come up to the hotel and make terms for him? Could he do some translating—a letter, the sense of which he could not discover, though he had looked out all the words in a dictionary?
Felix explained that he was anything but at leisure, but that he had to await the arrival of a goods train, and while waiting was very glad to translate the letter in question into comprehensible French. After safely consigning the luggage, which, so the stranger said, consisted of models of machinery, they repaired to the bar—since the weird regulations of England forbade one to smoke in the waiting-room—and Felix made all plain to the perplexed inventor, who described himself as a Russian,—an engineer employed in a vast mining enterprise in Siberia. He had perfected an invention for the ventilation of deep-level mines, by which he hoped to make his fortune. He had appointed to meet, at Basingstoke, the manager of one of the largest Welsh mines, who happened to be returning from abroad, and promised to break his journey there, in order to have an interview.
He launched into a description of his invention, and Felix, who had always had a fancy for machinery, grew deeply interested. Finally, the eager inventor extracted a promise from his new friend to come to supper with him at the hotel, though Felix owned with regret that he had no decent clothes; and they parted for a time with a mutual desire to meet again.
Mr. Doggett, in the expansion of his heart, had offered Felix his "grub" free if he would sleep aboard the Sarah Dawkes and mind her while the
owner spent these few nights in the bosom of his family—a thing he could not have done otherwise. Thus obtaining free, though rough, board and lodging, the young fellow had all his wages as clear profit, and he had ventured upon the purchase of such trifles as a comb and a tooth-brush, and even six pocket-handkerchiefs. He was, however, very doubtful as to how he should obtain the suit of decent clothes which he felt to be indispensable if he was to convey Rona by train to the North of England. He was plunged into the consideration of the problem of how to buy a suit out of three weeks' wages at fifteen shillings a week, and leave enough for railway fares, when chance sent him running up against the Russian engineer.
The fee paid by lawyers for the translation of a letter is ten shillings; and after Felix had translated four or five for his new friend he did not refuse this fee when warmly pressed upon him.
As the evening passed the two grew very friendly. Felix said he had known many Russians. He had been a member of a society in London many of whose adherents belonged to that nationality. One had been quite a pal of his.
The engineer—whose name was Vronsky—eagerly begged to know the name of Felix's friend. It was Loris Levien Ivanovitch.
Vronsky was much agitated. "Why, he was imprisoned, in London, for belonging to a dynamite society—unhappy boy, not to be warned!" His mother was Vronsky's own cousin. It had been heartbreak to her. But she had left her home and country and gone to meet her son in Styria, when he came out of prison. There they had made a home together, and the young man had found work. He had a fine tenor voice.
Felix made a gesture, as of one smitten by an overpowering memory. He began to sing, at first with hesitation, but with increasing confidence, a Russian song, full of the essential melancholy of the Slav peoples. A certain thrilling tenderness, mingled with the plaintive despondency of the national outlook, found expression in the strange cadences. The Russian sat with his head bowed, his clenched hand lying on the table. His eyes were heavy with tears, his whole heart was wrung by this song of his native land. When it was done he raised his head and looked intently at the singer.
"You must often have heard Loris sing that song?"
"Often and often. Very often," said Felix, his mind traveling back across old memories. He set his lips firmly, and looked his new friend straight in the eyes. "I was there—in prison—with Loris Ivanovitch," he said, steadily.
Vronsky gazed at him in pure sympathy. His eyes were still soft with tears. "My poor lad," he said, softly. "Poor, misguided child. You have suffered."
It was the first time that any soul had pitied Felix Vanston for his downfall. The whole world had said to him: "You have sinned." Not one human soul had said: "You have suffered."
"I have suffered," he said, slowly, "and through all my future I must suffer. I am branded, I am a marked man. I have disgraced my father's name. And yet I meant no harm. I entered upon the thing not knowing what I did. I was full of compassion and of thoughts about brotherhood. Brotherhood!"—he broke off with a sneer that was half a cry. "Do you know that now the very word brotherhood means to me something that is ruthless, terrible, secret—something that strikes in the dark—something that will reach you and punish you, however distant. That was what it seemed to Loris and to me. We were caught and held in its meshes. We might struggle, we could not get free. His sentence was six months shorter than mine. He went away to Styria the moment his ticket-of-leave expired. The Brotherhood let you alone as long as the ticket-of-leave lasts, for they do not want the police to know anything of their movements; and as long as you are under surveillance they lie low. I shall be free of the police in a week from now. And then—then I have to reckon with the Brotherhood."
"Go abroad," said Vronsky. "You are a good linguist, you should do well abroad."
"Yes," said Felix, "but there is something I must do first; something that counts before my own safety."
The Russian looked sympathetic. "A woman?"
"My sister," said Felix, laying the stump of his cigarette down in his plate, and watching it sedulously. "She got into bad hands during my imprisonment. I have to put her in a place of safety. She is in hospital now —the result of an accident."
"Take her abroad with you—why not?"
"The old unanswerable argument—£ s. d.," said Felix, with a sad smile. "It costs twice as much—more than twice as much—to take a girl about with you."
The conversation had been in French from the beginning.
Now the young man stood up. "I must go," he said. "My job is not over. I have to be on the premises at night and keep watch. Many thanks for your good entertainment. This dinner has bucked me up."
"Yes," said Vronsky, in an interested way. "They told me that in England they never cook at all, and that one eats food raw or goes without. But I have dined here well to-night."
"So have I; and as it is the first time for very many nights, it leaves me most grateful to you for all your kindness."
"Shall I see you again? I hope so. Stroll down after your work tomorrow, and have coffee with me and a smoke."
"It ought to be my turn to-morrow," said Felix. "I don't like sponging. But I literally have not a halfpenny to spend just now. Good-night. I was glad to hear that about Loris Levien. About his being safe with his mother. But chiefly I am grateful to you for not looking on me as an outcast. Here, in my own country, I have done for myself, once and for all. My own brother won't speak to me. It is—but there! how can you tell what it feels like, to be taken by the hand by a man who knows your record and does not despise you for it?"
"My boy, in Russia one has more sympathy for these things. In England, I own, it is hard to see why boys take up such notions. But with us few
families are altogether free of the taint. For myself I was never touched with the desire to make men good and happy by burning and killing. I do not think terror ever begot love. I know that it always begets hate. I am an engineer and a rough fellow. But I believe in God and in Him I put my trust for Russia and her future. Want of faith, my boy, that is what ails Russia. Good-night. God keep you. Come to me to-morrow."
Felix walked home to his couch in the cabin of the Sarah Dawkes with his heart full of gratitude to the new friend so accidentally thrown in his way.
The next morning, on his way to work, he went to the post-office, and, to his joy, was handed a letter addressed to David Smith.
"DEAR DAVID,—Thank you for your letter. I was so very glad to get it, and I am pleased to say that I am getting better very fast now. I am still in bed, but they let me sit up and do knitting, and Mr. Denzil Vanston comes to see me. He is the Squire, Sister Agnes says, and she thinks I am a lucky girl. He has given me a kitten, and he reads to me out loud. Do you know the first day he came in I thought he was you! I can't think what made me so silly, for he is not a bit like you really, but fair, with a little neat light brown mustache. He is very kind.
"They say yes, I may certainly stay three weeks, and by that time I ought to be quite well. I shall look forward to seeing you and starting for Sempleton. Do you think it would be best to write to the Reverend Mother or not? I think not, because it is just possible she might think she ought to tell Uncle Rankin.
"Miss Rawson is making me a new frock; it is brown. I think this is all my news, so I will only add my love, and my thanks too, for all you did for me. When I think how you wanted to die, and went on living to take care of me, I do feel ashamed of myself. I hope you are quite well. Mind and tell me when to expect you, and write again soon. I have not let anybody see your letter, though they are all most inquisitive about our affairs!—With my love, I remain your affectionate sister—RONA SMITH."
This letter lifted David right up to the clouds. Since Rona was carried away from him in Miss Rawson's motor, he had not felt such a lightening of his spirits. She was happy; she was getting well; she wanted to see him again. His heart swelled up in a gush of tenderness, hitherto unknown to him. In his solitary youth, full of queer cults and crazes, and stunted by his lamentable prison experience, he had never thought about girls. This one, so unlike the girls in love stories, appealed to him on a side where he was easily touched. All the protective manhood had awoke in him when first he felt her desperate clutch upon his arm, and looked up to see her enemies in pursuit.
He could not help being disquieted by the idea of his brother's attentions to her. But he decided that there was nothing at all to connect David Smith with Felix Vanston in the mind of the owner of Normansgrave. He had followed the papers with eagerness ever since his flight, and had noted with great interest that the police had had no notification of the disappearance of Rona. On thinking it over, he was not much surprised. He could understand that the two villains would prefer to hold their tongues respecting her incarceration. But doubtless they were putting detectives on the job on their own account; and might they not be watching for the moment when the girl emerged from hospital and was joined by him?
He was very doubtful as to what would be their best way of getting off, and inclined to think that he should advise Rona to slip away at night and meet him at some given spot close to the hospital. He did not want to appear, both because of any possible watchers and because of his brother Denzil.
Miss Rawson had not recognized him, as was natural enough. But no disguise, no counterfeit Cockney talk, could prevent Denzil from knowing him, if they met face to face. And if Denzil knew him the first thing that he would decree would be that Felix was no fit companion for his supposed "sister."
For the first time the delicate nature of the situation occurred to him. It filled him with a queer tumult of indignation and championship. He was to
be trusted to take care of her, this white flower, which a tempest had blown against his heart! He felt himself filled with the spirit of knight-errantry. His courage rose and a new sense of joy filled all his veins. Perhaps the hard work, the country air, and Vronsky's hospitality had something to do with the dawning of his new interest in life. But to him it seemed that it was all Rona.
He did a fine day's work that day, and when it was over he bought his usual halfpenny paper, saw that there was no mention in it of himself or the girl, and went on to the hotel, where he found Vronsky happy over a telegram from the mine manager whom he expected, to say that he was crossing to Southampton the following day.
Meanwhile, he had received letters from two mine owners in England, full of cruelly hard words. His dictionary lay before him, and a transcript of the frantic attempt he had made to decipher their contents. It was very evident that he needed not only a translator but an amanuensis, if he was to reply to his correspondents.
Felix buckled down to the work. He translated with care, wrote out a French version of the letters received, and drafted answers in English from the engineer's French dictation.
Then he turned his attention to a German letter, which proved to be the most interesting of all. The writer of this was extremely anxious to be first in the field, and to make all the new machinery if the market were fairly sure. He was too busy to come to England, but implored Vronsky to come over to Hamburg at his expense, that they might converse together over the matter.
This was a difficult journey for Vronsky, who, though he spoke French fluently, and could also speak Turkish and Arabic, knew hardly a word of either German or English. He said he would go if Felix would come with him as his secretary. He was not a rich man, but he would give him a pound a week, and advance money for clothes. It would take him out of the country, away from the Brotherhood—it would give him a new start.
Felix was terribly tempted. But he stood firm. He should not be here, where he was, were it not for Rona. It was she who had kept him back from the miserable, cowardly end he had planned for himself. As he sat, in the cheerful coffee-room, a good cigar in his mouth, a glass of fine ale at his side, and watched the prosperous life of the quiet town flowing along in the irregular, unpretending street, he felt that the world was a pleasant place, and wondered that he could have thought of quitting it. Here he was, and, such as he was, he was hers.
He looked sadly at the kind, intense face of Vronsky and shook his head. He could not go without his sister.
"Tiens!" replied Vronsky, "let us not be rash. Who knows? My business may detain me here longer than I expect. Then you may go and fetch your sister and bring her too."
Felix's eyes lit up. But almost immediately clouded again. He felt there might be inconveniences in traveling about with a sister who is not your sister. He accepted the fee for his secretarial work, and after much pressing consented to dine again with his friend, as it seemed churlish to decline, thereby condemning him to an evening of solitude and silence. They parted on more friendly terms than ever.
There was no moon that night, the dark face of heaven was powdered with stars, Jupiter hanging like a diamond low in the sky as Felix made his way down to the canal wharf. It was not until he got close up to the barge that he noticed a man standing by her, smoking, his hands in his pockets.
"Know much of the barge owners down these parts—eh?" said the stranger, wistfully.
"Can't say as I do," replied Felix in his natural tones, with no assumed accent. "Want work?"
The man sighed. "P'raps I do."
"Better go to the Company's office," suggested Felix.
"So I did. They told me old man Doggett, of the Sarah Dawkes, was wanting a boy. But there's nobody aboard her."
"No. His boy's ill. I'm sleeping in her to oblige the Old Man."
"Oh!" The stranger could not wholly keep his sudden access of interest out of his voice. "Are you the chap that took on the boy's job?"
Felix laughed his scorn. "No, thank yer, mate. I work up in the town. I only oblige the old man while he's ashore."
"Humph! Suppose you don't know what become of the chap as he brought down from Limehouse with him, do yer?"
Felix was quite sure now. He betrayed no surprise. "Want a character of the old man out of him before you sign on to the job?" he said, playfully.
"That's about the size of it—yes."
"Well, I did hear he was tramping it to Plymouth. Wanted to get out of England," said Felix, slowly.
There was a pause. "Got a light?" said the stranger at last.
Felix produced a match. "So long, mate," said he, moving to the gangplank.
"Say—you couldn't let me sleep aboard, could you?" asked the unemployed.
"Daren't risk it, mate. Hope you won't take it hard, but I can't. Clean against orders, and the night-watchman is a terror. I don't mean losing my job, even if it was to help you to get one."
"Not likely. Hold hard a minute. Tell me—did you see the chap that came up on the Sarah Dawkes?"
"Never. Casual, picked up in the streets, I gather."
"And his sister with him?" said the man, urgently, in a low tone. "See here, there's money in this—what can you tell me about 'em?"
Felix was aboard of the barge, and looked up from the deck with a smile. "Money from a right-to-worker?" he mocked. "Plank it down, and I'll invent sisters for you as fast as you like."
"Thanks," said the man, with a change of tone. "I got out of you what I want without the money. She wasn't here when they got to Basingstoke. That's just what I thought. But where in thunder is she?"
"Oh, go to blazes—you're drunk," said Felix.
He turned on his heel and entered his dark sleeping-hole, trembling in every limb.
CHAPTER IX
THE SQUIRE DEFIES CONVENTIONS
Spring is here, with the wind in her hair And the violets under her feet. All the forests have found her fair, Lovers have found her sweet. Spring's a girl in a lovely gown, Little more than a child.
ALICE
HERBERT.
A fortnight after her arrival at the Cottage Hospital Veronica was wholly convalescent. The air, the first-rate nursing, the sense of peace and wellbeing which she experienced, all helped, and came to the aid of a naturally fine constitution. The color she had lost returned to her pale face, her eyes were clear and luminous.
The doctor was fairly certain that the injury she had received, though it had been violent enough to cause inflammation, was not more than nature would triumph over. He did not anticipate lasting effects. She was now to be found on the sofa in the sitting-room, and the nurse held out hopes of a walk round the garden on Sunday next. She had been the sole comfort of Denzil's misery during this time of strain, when day after day passed by, and no news was forthcoming. Each day he grew more certain that Felix was not dead, but alive—and a further certainty followed.
If his brother were really not dead, then the pretense of suicide must have been deliberate. He must have determined to cast off his own identity, and wipe himself out of the list of the living. With what object? Doubtless that he might return to his anarchical pursuits, under some alias.
For this the master of Normansgrave felt secretly grateful to him. The name of Vanston would at least be protected. He did not believe Felix capable of leading a life of decorous rectitude such as his own. The bad blood inherited from his mother must, he thought, come out, and show itself in a wild, ill-regulated life. The fact that his half-brother had now, by his own carefully planned action, cut himself off from all communication with his family, was, in the secret depths of his heart, a satisfaction to him.
But he knew that a longer time must be allowed to elapse before he could feel certain. He could not agree with the police view of the young man having drugged himself, and then proceeded to drown himself. This theory was, however, very strongly held at first by the police, for the reason that such a case had actually occurred, and had been recorded in the newspapers; experience taught them that criminals have a curious habit of imitating one another's methods, and that a certain form of suicide, in particular, frequently provokes others of a similar character. The nonrecovery of the body was not, in their minds, an insuperable objection; for
so determined a suicide might well have weighted his pockets with bricks— and one cannot drag the Thames.
Not a word had Denzil breathed to his romance-princess of the private grief which tormented him. To her he seemed always cheerful, serene, and bent on pleasing her. To-day he was approaching the door of the hospital with a basket of primroses and violets from the woods, which it would amuse the patient to arrange in a soup-plate full of moss. Spring was beginning to bud and blossom in the beautiful land, and in spite of anxiety his heart was warm in him, and his pulses tingled with a feeling he had never previously experienced.
Dr. Causton's small brougham was at the door as he came up, and almost at once the doctor came out, and stood in the sunny garden talking to Sister Agnes. His face and hers were both full of worry.
"Ah, there is Vanston," said the doctor, "in the nick of time. I was going to drive over to you, but now we can settle things at once, and there is no time to lose. We want you to come to the rescue as usual, Vanston. Three cases of scarlet fever in the National Schools."
"Scarlet fever?" said Denzil, looking scared.
"Yes. And the Albert Hospital can't take them, it has too many critical cases, and can't turn them out. To cut the whole thing short, I want you to let us have the Cottage Hospital for the epidemic. Of course, the County Council will pay all the expenses of disinfecting and so on, and give you a handsome donation. But it would save endless bother and fuss. If these three cases are isolated at once, the whole thing may be restricted to those who have been in immediate contact. It will be the saving of the village, so I venture to hope we may count upon you."
"But what about your present case here?" said Denzil, not at all pleased.
"Quite well enough to go out, if her people are careful of her," said the doctor, who was not blind, and thought the patient had been there long enough. "Write to them, or wire, and say she must be fetched away."
"That is not so easy," said Denzil, in tones of ruffled dignity. "Her brother is at Basingstoke, and has been promised that she shall be kept three weeks."
"Well," said the doctor, "you can't foresee a fever epidemic."
Mr. Vanston looked much disturbed. "The risk of leaving her exposed to infection is, of course, not to be thought of," he said. "And I suppose you want to bring in your cases at once?"
"At once, if you and Miss Rawson would be so kind as to put the girl in your motor and drive her to the station. Wire to the brother to meet her, and you have done all that could possibly be expected."
Denzil stood considering. The idea of losing Rona—of losing her at once, that very day—gave him a curious internal jolt for which he was quite unprepared.
"Thank you," he said at last. "I will bring the motor at half-past two. May I ask that Miss Smith be not informed that she is leaving the Cottage Hospital, but simply told that my aunt is calling to take her for a drive this afternoon? I would rather explain matters myself. Sister Agnes, kindly give Miss Smith this basket, with my kind regards."
They promised him his own way in the matter; and after a short discussion of the outbreak of fever, and the adequate staffing of the Cottage Hospital, he departed, and hurried up through the park to Normansgrave, his brain evolving an idea as he went.
Miss Rawson was in the garden, pottering round to gloat over her bulbs, which were doing admirably that year. She gazed with some amusement upon her nephew's perturbed countenance. "She can't have refused him— yet," was the thought that lurked behind her twinkling eyes.
"Aunt Bee, I want you to do something for me—that is, I wish to desire you to do something——"
"Are you giving me an order, Denzil dear? Because there is no need to beat about the bush. What is it?"
"They have got scarlet fever down at Dunhythe. They want us to lend the Cottage Hospital to the County Council—they want to turn out Miss Smith to-day, within an hour or two—and I want to bring her here for the final week of her promised convalescence."
"My dear Denzil! This is a little too fast. My poor old brain will hardly take it all in. Lead me to a garden seat. That's right—thanks. Yes, now let us hear it all over again."
Denzil sat down and explained in detail. He was very fond of his aunt, and had never yet discovered that she was laughing at him.
"Well, but, Denzil dear," said she, when she thoroughly understood the position, "have you considered that there may be some awkwardness? I don't quite understand what this young girl's position is to be. Is she to have her meals in the servants' hall?"
"Aunt!" said the nephew in horror. "She is a lady, you must see that."
"Yes, I know, Denzil. She is a lady, and you, I am proud to find, have the wit to perceive it. But, for all that, she was extricated from a truss of hay on a canal barge, and all our servants know it. If she comes here, and we treat her as an equal, I fear there may be just a wee scrap of scandal in the village respecting our noble but unconventional conduct. Please understand that I shall not mind. But, as your chaperon, it is my duty to point out to you that people will talk. You are usually just a little bit of a coward about talk, you know."
Denzil sat quite still. His face took on a new, dogged look. It very much resembled the look worn by his brother Felix in his mood of championship.
"Aunt Bee," he said, in a low voice, "tell me your own honest opinion of Rona Smith. Tell me what you think of her."
"I think she may grow up to be a fine woman some day, dear. She is, I believe, thoroughly honest and loyal. She is also religious, and grateful for kindness without any cringing. These are fine qualities, and rare in our days."
"Should you think me a—a regular jackass if I told you that I had the idea of paying for the completing of her education? She has, so she tells me, nobody to take care of her but this one brother, and he must be penniless, or he would not have been found at such rough work. I—I cannot but think that these two have been injured by some unscrupulous relative or guardian. Would not the brother be grateful if we offered to keep his sister and complete her education?"
Miss Rawson looked fixedly at Denzil. Never before had she seen him so confused, so little sure of himself. He stammered; he was, so to speak, at her mercy. Her face was quite grave; her manner calmly sympathetic. She knew that there are some men with whom there must always be the protective instinct to excite love. The notion of playing Providence to that lovely young girl was full of an exquisite seductive charm to young Vanston. He really did not know that he was in love with her. It might take him a couple of years to find out.
"Well, dear boy," said she, kindly, "it is a fine idea, but it sounds a little risky. We do not know who the girl is, nor how she came to the plight in which we found her. She may have relations who have a claim upon her, and it would be uncomfortable for you to be asked what right you had to take her under your wing."
"Yes," he said, thoughtfully, digging tiny holes in the gravel with the tip of his stick, "I have thought of that. It seems to me that, if we make the offer I suggest, we ought to do it on condition that the brother speaks out and tells the truth, so that we may know where we are. What do you think of that? My notion is, bring her here to complete her cure. We promised her three weeks—let her have three weeks. By that time we shall know better what we think of her, and consider the desirability of making further offers of assistance."
"Very well, dear boy, I have nothing against that. It will take off your thoughts from this long, wearing suspense. I conclude that you want me to go and fetch your little protégée at once—eh?"
"I said the motor would be round at half-past two, and they were merely to tell her that you were coming to take her driving. I did not want her to be fussed."
"That was thoughtful of you, Denzil," said his aunt.
The motor duly appeared at the pretty white porch at two-thirty, and Rona, warmly wrapped up, was placed beside Miss Rawson in the comfortable closed tonneau, the Squire acting as chauffeur. The doctor and Sister Agnes, who had been informed of the fact that she was going to Normansgrave to complete her convalescence, looked at each other with a half-frightened smile and arching of the brows.
"Well," said Dr. Causton, "if I had known, or dreamt, that I was not getting her out of his way, but pitching her into his arms, I would not have done it—I declare I would not! However, what will be, will be; and we know his own father chose for his second wife a far more unsuitable person. But Denzil has always seemed such a sanctimonious kind."
"Just so," said Sister Agnes, deprecatingly. "That's the kind that does it."
During the drive Miss Rawson gradually told the girl that she was going to Normansgrave, as the hospital was about to receive infectious cases, and she could not be kept there without risk to herself. Rona was immensely interested, and, as Miss Rawson had previously noted, her interest swallowed up her girlish shyness. They went first for a drive among the lovely woods and moors that surround Normansgrave, and it was tea-time when they at last stopped before the door of the old mellow brick house with its air of comfort and well-being.
Miss Rawson saw with relief, but without much surprise, that Rona had no kind of doubt as to the position she would be asked to occupy. Evidently no such idea as being relegated to the servants' hall crossed her mind. She walked on Denzil's arm with pleasure, but without any embarrassment, to what was known as the little drawing-room, where tea was cosily set forth, and took her seat in an armchair with cushions carefully arranged, and a footstool for her feet, as to the manner born.
The kitten, which had traveled from Aylfleet packed in a basket, was let out upon the floor, and, to the amusement of all, swore and spat at his own sister, from whom he had been but ten days parted. The putting down of a saucer of milk, and the humors of the two graceful little creatures, sent Rona into fits of merriment, in which childish fun Denzil joined, with a readiness which astonished and touched his aunt.
"I hope I shall not behave so to my brother when he comes for me," said Rona. "And that reminds me, I must write to him this very day, must I not, to let him know that I have changed my address?"
"By all means, my dear," said Miss Rawson.
To herself she mused: "If only people do not begin chaffing him, it will take Denzil a long time to find out just what is the matter with him. At present it is all quite harmless, and as long as she is here to his hand, I verily believe that he may continue unconscious until she is grown up. I don't see the end of this matter, unless the brother comes next week and marches her off. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing for Denzil, I wonder?" CHAPTER X THE HUNT IS UP
There then, awhile in chains we lay In wintry dungeons, far from day; But risen at last, with might and main, Our iron fetters burst in twain.
Then all the horns were blown in town; And to the ramparts clanging down, All the giants leaped to horse, And charged behind us, through the gorse ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Every faculty in Felix was sharpened to its highest pitch as he lay down that night upon his comfortless bed aboard the Sarah Dawkes. The man on the wharf was a detective, and he was looking for Veronica. His source of information was doubtless some one of the men aboard the George Barnes. He was in the employment of the two wolves, and he had that invaluable clew which the police lacked. He knew that he had to hunt two runaways. There were sure to be persons who had seen them limping along towards the docks that night of terror, of lurid excitement and breathless escape. So long as you knew what you were looking for, they were not hard to trace.
"But what beats me," said Felix to himself, "is how it is he did not find out that she was put ashore at Dunhythe. If he has followed up our trail, how could he have missed that? The whole village saw her go."
A spasm of fear shook him, lest the shelter of the Cottage Hospital should be inadequate. If her uncle came to fetch her, they would have to hand her over. He raged in his heart, rolling over and over sleepless, wondering whether the detective was "pulling his leg," whether he knew, all the time, where Rona was—whether she was no longer where he left her, but gone, taken away, out of his reach. He yearned to know. But how? The idea crossed his mind that he might steal out, borrow the bicycle of a fellow-workman at the timber-yard, and ride over, before morning, to ascertain that she was safe. But that would be to reveal his secret, were the detective still on the watch.
