Innovation, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2003

Times Square: Deriving Cultural Theory from

Rubbish Theory

1

MICHAEL THOMPSON

ABSTRACT Starting with the hypothesis that duration (the standard idea of time that we associate

with the steady tick-tock of a clock) can only exist if it is framed by something that is not

durationeternity or oblivionit is possible to make sense of the fusing of time and space that is going

on, both in acephalous societies in West Africa and in the more familiar dynamic categorizations of

modern Western societies: secondhand, rubbish and antique, for instance. The same hypothesis also sheds

some helpful light on problems over space and time in comtemporary physics. Forgetting, we now see, is

a prerequisite for remembering, and worthlessness a prerequisite for value: insights that suggest we take

a closer look at what is involved in the deceptively simple three-category dynamical system in which

objects, once produced, have only two possible destinationsthe museum or the rubbish dump. Such a

dynamical system, it turns out, can give rise to shifts within the social totality across two fundamental

dimensionsstatus and powerthereby generating many of the grand types that have been discerned by

social scientists: class and caste, for instance. But, if it is to do this, there must be at least four contending

ways of organizing and justifying within that totality. Cultural Theory (the four ways of organizing and

justifying) is thus revealed to be inherent in the seemingly much simpler rubbish theory the three-category

dynamical system): a surprising outcome that has some intriguing implications.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream, the popular Church of England hymn tells us, Bears

all its sons away. This is a robust and straightforward way of thinking about the lives

of each of us, and about how they relate to all the other lives there are, have been and

will be. The Anglo-Saxons also had a robust and straightforward view of it all, likening

a mans life to a moth that ies into the warmth and light of the feasting hall, utters

about for a while, and then disappears back into the cold, black emptiness. On the face

of it, these two views are pretty much the same: a linear, non-reversible backdrop, with

the life of each of us plotted in on a small section of it. Admittedly, the hymn-writers

stream is dynamic while the Anglo-Saxons feasting hall is static, but, once we know the

rate of ow of the stream (relative to its static banks, that is), there is really no difference.

Each backdrop, we can see, provides us with a scale along which things can move in

only one direction, and that movement is measurable: durationthe standard idea of

time that we associate with the steady tick-tock of a clockand the whole broad picture

can be captured in the sort of history Churchill famously characterized as just one

damned thing after another.

But it is not quite that simple, because a scale is always qualitatively different from that

which it enable us to measure; if it wasnt it wouldnt work. Each life, as it is carried

along, is nite: it has a beginning and an end and covers a precisely plottable distance

that then determines its relations to all the other liveswhich damned things it comes

after, as it were, and which damned things come after it. And the same is true for all

those moths itting through the feasting hall. And, again, the scalein this case, the

ISSN 1351-1610 print/ISSN 1469-8412 online/03/040319-12

2003 Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social SciencesDOI: 10.1080/1351161032000163557

320 Michael Thompson

hallis qualitatively different from that which it enables us to measure: the moths

progress within it. But, while the ever-rolling stream is eternal (owing through time but,

unlike the lives it provides the measures of, having neither a beginning nor an end),

everything beyond the warm and brightly lit hall is oblivion (a owless and timeless

nothingness, in which neither beginnings nor endings are conceivable). Where the stream

involves two qualitatively different issour nite lives within it and its unending (and

unbeginning) ever-rollingnessthe feasting hall involves an is and an isntthe moths

all doing their itting about, and then the cold, dark outside where there simply isnt any

of that, or anything else.

So duration can exist only if it is framed by something that is not duration: either

eternity or oblivion. At any rate, that will be my hypothesis. Of course, there may be

more than these threeduration, oblivion and eternity (nirvana is a possible candidate)

and it may be that oblivion and eternity need one another too. But, for now, let me take

this simple hypothesis and test it against the lives of an anthropologically renowned

people in West Africa: the Tiv, all of whom (there are something like four million of

them) see themselves as the descendants of one person: Tiv, the father of them all. Does

the ever-rolling stream we sang about in school chapel bear all the sons of Tiv away, or

just some of them? The answer, we will see, is Just some of them. It is an answer that

has some far-reaching consequences, and not just for the Tiv.

Compression, rearrangement and the fusing of time and space

The Tiv have what is called a segmentary lineage system.

2

They are organized in terms

of a vast family tree that is traced through the male line, and they are distributed in

spacein Tivland, as it is calledaccording to that genealogical scheme. That is, the

segments that are descended from two brothers, x generations back, will be next to one

another on the ground, and if there is a dispute between two Tiv each will mobilize his

segmentrst generation, then second and so onuntil they reach the point where they

have mobilized the segments of two brothers. So the Tiv have no need of leaders (indeed,

designated or elected leaders would mess up this mobilization process); they are what is

called an acephalous society: a tribe without rulers.

3

But it will be objected that,

especially in a pre-literate society like the Tiv, a genealogical scheme that encompasses

four million people will be hopelessly unwieldy. And, on top of that, the requirement that

it make sense of all the Tiv, not just in time but in space as well, will surely make it

unworkable in just a few generations.

Well, neither of these debilitating consequences has arrived. Though new generations

are being added all the time, the genealogy remains at just 16 or so generations and, for

all the inevitable territorial upheavals and demographic uctuations, the Tiv still manage

to live next to their closest kin, and their segments still remain numerically balanced. So

two things must be going on. First, there must be some compression: some generations,

somewhere, must be being lost from the genealogy as new ones are being added. Second,

some ancestors, somewhere, must be being rearranged, so as to keep the spatial

distribution of the Tiv in line with their temporal distribution. Both these essential

adjustments involve amnesia: some ancestors have to be forgotten completely, and the

relationships of others (two brothers, say) have to become blurred enough for people to

be convinced that they are related in a different way (father and son, for instance).

At the two extremes of the genealogy, however, such compression and rearrangement

simply are not possible. Tiv, and his sons, and their sons, are xed in myth (and in the

major regional divisions of Tivland) and, at the other end, people know who their fathers

and grandfathers and great-grandfathers are or were (indeed, the Tiv themselves say

Times Square 321

Every man has three fathers). So duration reaches back at least three or four

generations from the present, and eternity reaches forward at least three or four

generations from the mythical father of them all. This means that the forgettingthe

black hole of oblivionmust be somewhere in between: somewhere in the eight or so

middle generations. Only in that range are compression and rearrangement possible and,

even then, only with the exercise of impressive political skills. Politics, among the Tiv,

it is said by their ethnographers, is conducted in the idiom of kinship. Some ancestors

are forgotten as they become overshadowed by the enhanced importance that is focused

on others, and some brothers become father and son through a combination of the

persuasive powers of political actors and the enhanced spatial sense that accompanies

such a temporal rearrangement.

Being a Tiv, and staying a Tiv, you could say, simply would not be possible without

this amnesia, and that amnesia, in its turn, requires a three-fold structuring: eternity (to

keep the founding mythical fathers anchored just 16 generations back), duration (to cope

with not being able to pull the wool over peoples eyes about their immediate ancestors),

and oblivion (to achieve the degree of compression and rearrangement sufcient to keep

the whole segmentary lineage show on the road).

In some societies, the curtain of amnesia is brought forward, much closer to the

present. The Sherpas of Nepal, for instance, go to considerable lengths not to mention

the names of the dead, and this means that lineage structures (such as that of the Tiv)

are nipped in the bud, thereby making it pretty well impossible for the Sherpas to anchor

claims to land and property in the weight of history. And in Bali, for instance, the

institution of teknonymy (in which people, once their children are born, are called father

of so-and-so and mother of so-and-so) pulls the curtain of amnesia even closer to the

present. In other instances, and especially with the advent of writing (and the absence of

institutions such as teknonymy), the curtain can be pushed further and further back,

thereby strengthening ancestral claims but making it more difcult to realign temporal

and spatial distributions.

As the curtain of amnesia is pushed back so duration is expanded and both eternity

and oblivion retrenched. As the curtain is pulled forward so duration is truncated and

oblivion expanded, even to the point where (as in the Anglo-Saxons hall) eternity is

overwhelmed. But, whichever arrangement a society is relying on, there will have to be

some structuring. Duration, in other words, has always to be framed by something that

is not itself duration. And, if that is the general rule, then it is most unlikely that we

moderns are exempt.

Transience, rubbish and durability

Though kinship and genealogy are by no means irrelevant in modern societies, it is the

social life of thingspaintings, furniture, houses and, indeed, everything that comes

under the rubrics of material culture and natural resourcesthat is most revealing of

the time/space structures by which we struggle to maintain and transform our lives with

one another.

Thats a nice car you have there someone may say to us, and we reply modestly Yes,

but its second-hand, you know. But we could not give that modest reply if someone said

Thats a nice Rembrandt you have there, nor could we give it if the car in question was

a vintage car: a Bugatti, say. The explanation, of course, is that possessable objects can

fall into one or other of two cultural categories: the Transient (in which items steadily

decline in value and have nite expected life-spans) and the Durable (in which items

steadily increase in value and have innite expected life-spans). But most objectsthe

322 Michael Thompson

Figure 1. Cultural categories of objects and the possible transfers between them (from

Thompson, 1979, p. 10).

Bugatti, for instancestart off in the Transient category and are only later transferred

to Durability.

4

This then raises the question of how this transfer is possible, given the

mutual incompatibility of the criteria that dene the two categories. The answer is that

the direct transfer is not possible, but that there is a third, covert, categoryRubbish

and that this provides the crucial pathway. A Transient object, decreasing in value with

time and use, eventually sinks into Rubbisha timeless and valueless limbo.

5

In an ideal

world it would then disappear in a small cloud of dust but often this does not happen,

and it lingers on, unnoticed and unloved, until perhaps one day it is discovered by some

creative and upwardly mobile individual and successfully transferred to the Durable

category. This is how something second-hand becomes an antique and how, as has

happened with many a run-down inner-city district, a rat-infested slum becomes part of

Our Glorious Heritage (see Fig. 1).

There is, clearly, a structure here that exactly matches the structure that enables the

Tiv and their segmentary lineage system to keep on going. Durability (A thing of beauty

is a joy forever) equates to eternity, Transience (Here today, gone tomorrow) is

measured out in duration, and Rubbish (Out of sight, out of mind) matches oblivion.

But, though these transfers relate to the social life of things, they are also intricately

connected to the social life of people: creativity and upward mobility going with the

transition from Rubbish to Durability and, in the other direction, social marginality and

fatalistic resignation going with the decline from Transience into Rubbish. Those who

ride the downward ow, therefore, are not at all the same as those who ride the upward

one! And it is by these sorts of transfers, together with these sorts of changes of riders,

that our class-based societies are able to continually realign status and power, and

thereby perpetuate themselves.

I will look more closely at what is involved in these complex social dynamicsdynam-

ics that lead to both class formation and class transformationin just a moment, but,

rst, I want to draw a very general conclusion, which is that, if the Tiv are to go on being

the Tiv, and if we are to go on with our modern societies, then they and we are going

to have to structure time (and space) in this three-fold way. So, rather than asking

ourselves the supposedly Big QuestionWhat is time?we should be asking what sort

of structure does there have to be before we can ask that question. Bizarreperverse,

eventhough this may sound, it is, to judge from a recent high-powered gathering of

Times Square 323

physicists, historians and philosophers, quite likely the way forward: the only way

forward.

Physics big puzzle

In June 2001 a four-day meetingthe Seven Pines Symposiumat the aptly named

Stillwater, Minnesota, confronted this last big questionWhat is time?head-on, only

to nd the discussion quickly degenerating to the blind-men-and-the-elephant level.

Worse still, as Robert Wald, a physicist at the University of Chicago, conceded, I dont

see any evidence that theyre talking about different parts of the same elephant.

6

Time

and (to a lesser extent) space, they agreed, may not even be the same actors in unied

theories based primarily on relativity as in those based on quantum mechanics. Time, it

turns out, looks very different depending on whether scientists try to construct a nal

theory by starting with quantum mechanics and adding gravity, or vice versa.

Theories based on quantum mechanics and particle physics, for all their strangeness,

assume that somewhere the regular tick-tock of ordinary time is being measured by

something like a Swiss watch or a planet whirling about a star. But, add in gravity,

and the absence of a reliable background means that there is no Swiss watch, even

in theory. This is duration, in our terms, but with the curtain of amnesia pushed so

far back that there is no longer any structure: no eternity and no oblivion.

Superstring advocates, and relativity theorists, fare no better. Jeffrey Harvey (also of

the University of Chicago) confessed that if you asked a bunch of string theorists to

formulate their theory in a way that doesnt involve any choice at all of a background

space-time they would throw up their hands and say We dont know how to do that.

Relativity theorists face much the same difculties. For them, time and space begin to

mix together in incomprehensible ways and, when quantum effects are added, they

often cannot even nd time as an entity distinguishable from space in the mathemat-

ical mishmash that results. Again, in our terms, we are back to duration, with no

background against which it can acquire structure.

John Earmana philosopher at the University of Pittsburgthen suggested that perhaps

time was a psychological illusion: something that was important only to humans, not to

physics. The physicists, however, found that pretty radical; chilling even. But just

substitute social imperative for psychological illusion and you have a plausible (and not

too radical or chilling) resolution of the physicists problem: essentially that they have

been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking What is time?, they should have been

asking what structure there has to be before we can ask that question. Time and space,

after all, are a fair old mishmash in those middle eight generations of Tiv: the region of

the genealogy where all the compression and rearrangement that is so vital for them and

their segmentary lineage system are going on. Nor would a tidy world, in which there

was no rubbish and no durabilityno oblivion and no eternitybe a world we could

make our modern selves at home in!

So, if we are right about this social imperative then we are going to have to be careful

not to be too tidy minded. If forgetting is a prerequisite for remembering, and if value

(whether Durable or Transient) is impossible without Rubbish, then we will have to

ensure that we do not become oblivious to oblivion, or dismissive of the value of the

worthless. This is what I will try to do in the remainder of this paper.

Economics is the prime example of over-tidiness. Having set out by restricting itself to

the realm of value, it can see the Transient and Durable categories clearly enough, but

not the Rubbish category. The result, to quote the mathematician Ian Stewart (1979,

324 Michael Thompson

p. 605), is blinkered self-delusion because, as he rightly observes, Rubbish provides the

channel between Transient and Durable. Stewarts area of expertise is dynamical

systems, and he is understandably horried to see an entire discipline tidying up the

world to the point where it can no longer see the system of transfers that actually keeps

that world up and running! Economics, in other words, has made itself oblivious to

oblivion, and insisted that all there is is eternity and duration. The remedy, of course,

is to start not with the realm of the valuable but with the whole three-component system,

and then to explore its dynamical possibilities: the full range of transformations that are

inherent in the oblivion/eternity/duration structure.

Our untidy world and its transformational possibilities

The transfers from Transient to Durable do not happen of their own accord. As is

evident from the fact that those who ride the downward ow into Rubbish are different

from those who ride the upward ow into Durability, these transfers require a variety of

social actors. Nor is it safe to assume that these social actors always impinge on one

another in such a way as to maintain the status quo: keeping the category system abreast

of the whole ever-evolving technological process by which objects are produced,

consumed and conserved and, at the same time, ensuring that power (loads of money,

for instance) and social status (feeling at ease with Durables, for instance) are continually

realigned. Of course, those crucial adjustments are happening all the time; if they werent

we wouldnt be able to exclaim Oh, we used to have one of those but we threw it away

every time we see some item of now-obsolete technology in an antique shop window. Nor

would we be able to observe (or actually engage in) that socially fraught process by which

new money is transformed into old money. But each of these adjustment processes can

go too fast or too slow, in the sense that they can easily diverge from the specic rates

that would ensure that the social order exactly reasserted itself through all these changes

in the material markers by which that social order is achieved.

So, if we can pin down the different kinds of social actors, and then tease out all the

different things that can occur when their interactions happen not to be generating these

two status-quo-maintaining rates, we will have done something rather interesting. From

these very minimal dynamical considerations we will have mapped the full range of social

possibilities, together with the full range of structurings in terms of oblivion, eternity and

duration that are the essential supports for those social possibilities. Daunting though this

challenge may appeardoing that much with that little is scarcely the everyday

expectation in social scienceits resolution is surprisingly straightforward. Indeed, it

involves just two steps, both of which are already implicit in our Transient/Rubbish/

Durable diagram:

First, we should note that the overall systemthree linked cisterns (the Transient,

Rubbish and Durable categories) and two taps that together make possible the

unendingly contested controls on the rates of transfer between those cisternshas the

potential to generate shifts across two fundamental dimensions: status and power.

Second, we can see that, to fully realize that potential, there will have to be sufcient

plurality of purpose among the individual actors for all the dynamic permutations

(opening this tap, closing that one, 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 nger on an upturned glass, and the glass then seems to take on a life

of its own, sliding rst one way then another across the at surface.

Times Square 325

What this means is that if people were all the same, or all completely different, it would

not work. If people were all the same (all rational utility-maximizers, for instance) the

glass would slide off in one particular direction and then, when it had gone as far as it

could go, stop: the End of History, as it is sometimes pretentiously called. Conversely, if

people were all completely different (as postmodernists insist they are) then their

individual efforts would cancel one another out, and the glass would not go anywhere:

history as a non-starter, you might say, as, for instance, in the PoMo mantra There are

no meta-narratives (Lyotard, 1979). So the plurality has to be sufcient: one is too little;

innity far too much. Nor is two enough, since just two sets of handsone trying to turn

the taps this way, the other the other, would, at best, generate only a back-and-forth

oscillation, leaving the other dimension of variation unexploited.

So it looks as though three, or four, or ve is the number we are looking for, and

rubbish theory itself suggests it is four, in that, when we consider the three-cistern

diagram together with the awareness that there is always a change of riders as we go

from the downward ow to the upward ow, it prompts us to raise four crucial questions:

What sorts of people effect the transfers through Rubbish?

What sorts of people try to prevent them?

What sorts of people are able to prot from them?

What sorts of people lose out?

Summarizing this requisite variety in just one sentence, we can call these social actors the

crashers-through (those creative and upwardly mobile characters who effect the trans-

fers to Durability), the high priests (those, like those literary critics who strive to dene

what shall be admitted to the canon, who try to prevent them), the levellers (those

who, by ooding the Durable category, are able to diminish both status and power, and

thereby prot in the sense of getting more of what they are after: equality) and the

losers-out (those, like ourselves when we see in an antique shop window something we

recently threw away, who, despite all their efforts, keep nding themselves at the bottom

of the pile).

There is, I should now mention, a quite well-worked-out theory of all this

7

a theory

of socio-cultural viability (though it is usually called Cultural Theorythat puts this

intuitively appealing four-fold variety onto a pretty solid and rigorously argued foun-

dation. That foundation consists of four forms of social solidarity: four different and socially

viable arrangements for the promotion of transactions. Four ways of organizing, in other

words, each of which, at the same time, is a way of disorganizing the other three. Two

of these are the familiar hierarchies and marketsthe rst instituting status differences

(asymmetrical transactions) and setting all sorts of limits on competition (accountability,

as in noblesse oblige, or We dont do that sort of thing in this regiment/family), the second

instituting equality of opportunity (symmetrical transactions) and actively promoting

competition (unaccountability, as in If I dont do it somebody else will)while the other

two are less familiar and are arrived at by completing the typology that is inherent in the

conventional hierarchies and markets distinction: egalitarianism, which institutes equality of

result (symmetrical transactions) and sets all sorts of limits on competition (accountabil-

ity), and fatalism, which institutes status differences (asymmetrical transactions) and lets

competition rip (unaccountability). The crashers-through, clearly, are the social beings

that characterize the market (the individualist solidarity, as it is called), the high priests

t the hierarchical solidarity, the levellers the egalitarian, and the losers-out the fatalist.

I mention all this because the theory goes on from here to what is rather grandly called

its impossibility theorem, which states that there are these four, and only these four,

solidarities.

8

It also has its requisite variety condition, which holds that if one solidarity is there

326 Michael Thompson

they will all be there, and if one solidarity disappears they will all disappear. The idea,

with the requisite variety condition, is that each solidarity is only viable in an environ-

ment that contains all the others. Put another way, it is saying that, despite the rivalry

of the four solidarities (each of which can be seen as all the time trying to extend itself

at the expense of the others), each ultimately needs the others to do something vital that

it cannot do itself. Markets, for instance, need some extra-market authoritythe

hierarchyto enforce the law of contract, egalitarianism needs the inegalitarian excesses

of the market and the hierarchy if it is to mobilize the outrage and moral commitment

that holds it together, and even fatalists would not be able to be fatalistic if there were

no markets, hierarchies and egalitarian groups to exclude them from the decisions that

govern their lives!

In the absence of the impossibility theorem there would be so many ngers on the

glass, each pushing in its desired direction, that it would be unable to move anywhere.

And, in the absence of the requisite variety condition, some of the different sorts of actors

could become extinct and one or more of the crucial sets of tap-turning hands would

then be lost. If that happened then the totality would shift away to one or other of the

extremities of its possible range and then stay there. Historythe ceaseless and never

exactly repeated sequences of shiftswould then come to an end, democracy (which

requires that all four voices are able to make themselves heard, and to enter into

constructive argumentation with one another)

9

would be snuffed out, and humanity

would be nothing more than a bunch of thinking animals. Or, rather, this is what would

happen if what we were dealing with was the exact analogy of the upturned glass with

the ngers on it. In fact, the system we are dealing with is a little bit more complicated

than this. The ngers (or rather, the hands, because they have to twist) are on the two

taps, and they do not move anywhere. What moves is the whole regime (in terms of status

and power) in response to changes in the contents of the three cisterns, those changes

deriving from the struggle to turn the taps this way or that.

So (and this is where things become even more counter-intuitive) it is not a simple

matter of the solidarity with the strongest wrists causing the totality to move towards the

goal it is striving for. The tables edge is not bounded by four pure and extreme states,

each coterminous with the goal of one of the solidarities. All sorts of what are called

curvilinear relationshipsactions carrying you towards your goal to begin with and then,

when, unknown to you, you start eroding one or more of the solidarities on which yours

is ultimately dependent, moving you in the opposite directionprevent a simple

four-to-four mapping from the solidarities to the bounds of the regime space (the tables

edge) that the interactions of those solidarities create. Just like in post-Newtonian physics,

you might say!This means that, if we want to get some sort of a handle on that space,

we are going to have to look at what can happen to the contents of the three cisterns

as the solidarities battle over the taps, and then relate those changes to changes in status

and power.

At the class apexwhere the controls happen to result in the two status-quo-maintain-

ing ratesthere is lots of stratication and lots of competition, and the transfers from

Transient to Rubbish to Durable are such that the inevitable changes in power are

quickly reected in matching changes in status.

If the controls become rather more restrictive then status and power will no longer be

able to fully realign themselves and, as they diverge, we will nd ourselves being

transformed into a caste-based society (as in the classical Indian system, where the

meat-eating Rajah sits rmly at the head of the power structure but defers to the

vegetarian Brahmin within the hierarchy of castesee Dumont, 1970). Whether any

Times Square 327

social system ever makes it all the way to this apex is highly doubtful. McKim Marriott

(1967) has shown that, even when caste appears dominant, there is more than a touch

of class around, and in nineteenth-century Nepal (whose ruler proclaimed it to be the

true Hindustan) it is doubtful whether the caste-based penal codethe Muluki

Ainever functioned as intended. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any of the apices are

stably reachable. But it is certainly possible to move towards and away from each of

them and, in that sense, these apices do dene the regime space.

If things are too permissive the Durable category will collapse under its own weight,

the status currency will be debauched, and the totality will move away at right angles

to the classcaste axis. As status differences disappear transactions become symmetrical

and we move onto the increasingly levelled playing-eld beloved by those who abhor

restrictive practices, on the one hand, and an unwillingness among those who cannot

discern any opportunities in their immediate neighbourhood to get on their bikes, on

the other. Margaret Thatchers enterprise culture would be located here, and some

ferociously individualistic societiesthose in the New Guinea highlands, for instance,

that engage in competitive pig-givingactually get themselves to this apex (though

they are not then able to stabilize themselves in that position).

Back in the 1970s, when I was writing Rubbish Theory I thought that that was it, and

spoke of these three apices as constituting a rubbish triangle. But since then I have

worked among societies that are on the Tibetan fringe of Nepal and realized that there

is a fourth possibility: the one corresponding to the remaining permutationlow on

status differences and low on competitionwhich I had discounted on the grounds

that economies of scale would always move a de-stratifying totality in the competitive

direction. But Sherpa villagers who rely on a mixture of subsistence farming and

trans-Himalayan trading are simply not able to increase their returns by taking one

another over. There are, in their geographical location and with the technology

available to them, no opportunities for economies of scale, and this means that

competition is dampened down to the point where the enterprise culture, like the

class and caste apices, becomes a repeller, not an attractor. The resultand it can

happen in non-Buddhist settings (Wordsworths pure Commonwealthhis beloved

Lake District, as it was in the early nineteenth centuryis one example)

10

is a sort

of easy-going and convivial yet unbeholden self-sufciency that is particularly beguiling

to those who espouse small is beautiful and are so opposed to globalisation. Yet, for

all that, it is not the egalitarian goal. It is not nearly communal enough, and it is far

too tolerant of the major disparities in wealth that can result from activities like

trans-Himalayan trading.

So our tableour regime spaceis square, not triangular, and with none of its four

corners (because of curvilinearity) mapping exactly onto the goal of any one of the

solidarities, even though it is thanks to variations in the relative strengths of those

solidarities that we nd ourselves carried towards and away from those corners. So I have

now done what I set out to do a few pages back: I have derived all the possible

transformations of the overall social system from a consideration of the dynamic

possibilities of this three-cisterns-and-two-taps scheme. Along the way I have been able

to give a new answer to that old question What is time? and also to show that Cultural

Theory, far from being a free-standing set of hypotheses, is inherent in a seemingly much

simpler theory: rubbish theory.

11

But what is the signicance of all this?

Conclusion

That something a little unconventional has been achieved here is, I think, evident in its

328 Michael Thompson

having taken me more than 30 years to realize that Cultural Theory can be derived from

rubbish theory (even, I hasten to add, allowing for my stupidity). I can think of three

reasons for that out-of-the-ordinariness: deceptive simplicity, materiality as the dy-

namizer of seemingly static categorizations, and distinctions that apply at both macro

and micro extremes.

The unied theoryCultural Theory derived from rubbish theoryis remarkably

simple, in that it all comes from one little diagram: the three cisterns and the two taps

by which they are connected. Since simple yet unobvious theories are much appreci-

ated (and much sought after) in the physical and natural sciences, it is gratifying to nd

that they can also be formulated in the social sciences. But perhaps that should be

social science in the singular, since this simple yet unobvious theory undermines the

over-tidy foundations that economics and political science have raised themselves up

on. Value (Durability and Transience), as we have seen, is crucially dependent on the

valueless (Rubbish). And if there were no unpolitical xed ancestors (eternity) and no

unpolitical and unalterable recent forebears (duration) then Tiv politics (the compres-

sions and rearrangements that are enabled by oblivion) would not exist. So bracketing

away the valueless (which is what economics does) is equivalent to a psychologist

cutting off the oxygen supply to the rats he is running through his maze. The same

holds for political science when it draws its dening line between the political and the

non-political.

If the Tiv were not themselves a material owone esh-and-blood generation

succeeding another, on and onthen they would not have to resort to all that

compression and rearrangement. And, if there was no ever-evolving technological

process by which objects are produced, consumed and conserved then we moderns

would not have to bother ourselves with all those anxiety-ridden adjustments: Do I

throw this useless item away or treasure it?, Do I struggle to make my new money

old (like Donald Trump, say) or just lie back and enjoy it the way it is (like Miss Piggy,

say)? In other words, the materialthe objects that are being consigned to the

cultural categories or transferred between themare the way they are because of that

which is not material: the cultural categories. Whether we must understand the world

in order to understand it is really neither here nor there, since we cannot not change

it (whether we understand it or not).

The theory is everywhere dynamic. Yes, there is structureeternity, duration and

oblivion, and Durability, Transcience and Rubbishthat stays in the same place, as

it were. But that structure emerges from our efforts to make sense of an unstoppable

ow. The analogy would be the eddies that stay in the same place in a fast-owing

stream; it is only because of all the movement that they are there!

12

Interestingly, this

is precisely the sort of process that neuroscientists currently grapple with: the human

brain, if it is to do what it does, has somehow to distil universality out of all the

particularities that it registers. Neuroscientists call this process abstraction (Zeki,

2000) and it seems to be doing, within each individuals brain, exactly the same thing

as our fusing of time and space is doing on a social and cultural level that involves

millions of brains.

13

But physical scientists might not be too surprised; those propo-

nents of relativity and of superstring theory who were gathered at the Stillwater

Symposium regularly leap back and forth between the smallest things we know

(sub-atomic particles) and the largest (the universe).

Just what the implications of these rather speculative conclusions are, I readily concede,

are none too clear, but they do suggest one thing: that social scientists should get out

Times Square 329

more. They should cut back a bit on all those disciplinary conferences and start

hobnobbing with dynamical systems theorists, physicists, brain scientists: people like that.

References

Bohannan, L. (1952), A genealogical charter, Africa, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 301315.

Douglas, M. (1966), Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Population and Taboo,

London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Douglas, M. (1978), Cultural Bias, Royal Anthropological Institute, Occasional Paper

No. 35. Reprinted in Douglas, In the Active Voice, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul

(1982), pp. 183254.

Douglas, M., Thompson, M. and Verweij, M. (2003), Is time running out? The case of

global warming, Daedalus, Spring, pp. 98107.

Dumont, L. (1970), Homo Hierarchicius, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Evans-Pritchard, E. (1940), The Nuer: a Description of the Models of Livelihood and Political

Institutions of a Nilotic People, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1979), La condition postmodernerapport sur la savoir, Paris, Les

E

ditions de Minuit.

Marriott, McK. (1967), Hindu transactions: diversity without dualism, in Kapferer, B.

(ed.), Transaction and Meaning, Philadelphia, Institute for the Study of Human Issues.

Ney, S. and Mollenaers, N. (1999), Cultural theory as a theory of democracy, Innovation,

Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 489509.

Schmutzer, M. E. A. (1994), Ingenuium und Individuum: Eine Sozialwissenschaftliche Theorie von

Wissenschaft und Technik, Vienna and New York, Springer.

Stewart, I. (1979), Review of rubbish theory, New Scientist, 23 August, p. 605.

Thompson, M. (1979), Rubbish Theory: the Creation and Destruction of Value, Oxford, Oxford

University Press.

Thompson, M. (1994), Blood, sweat and tears, Waste Management and Research, Vol. 12,

pp. 199205.

Thompson, M. (2002), Dont let it put you off your dinner, Journal of Comparative Policy

Analysis, Vol. 4, pp. 347363.

Thompson, M., Ellis, R. and Wildavsky, A. (1990), Cultural Theory, Boulder, Westview.

Thompson, M., Grenstad, G. and Selle, P. (eds) (1999), Cultural Theory as Political Science,

London, Routledge.

Wordsworth, W. (1810), Guide to the Lakes, 5th edn, which was republished (edited by

Ernest de Selincourt, 1906) in paperback in 1977, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Zeki, S (2000), Abstraction and idealism, Nature, 404 (6Aps), p. 547.

Notes

1. An early version of the rst half of this paper appeared in Lab: The Jahrbuch (2001/02) of the

Kunsthochschule fur Medien Koln (eds Thomas Hensel, Hans Ulrich Reck and Siegfried Zielinski,

Cologne, Walther Konig). I am indebted to Siegfried Zielinski for pointing out to me that

rubbish theory is saying something interesting about time.

2. The Tiv are explained in more detail (and with the supporting references to their ethnogra-

phers, see especially Bohannan, 1952) and related to the more general framework of cultural

categories of objects and their possible transformations, in Thompson (1979).

3. The most famous of which is the Nuer of the Southern Sudan, who were rst described by

Evans-Pritchard (1940). Their lineage system functions in much the same way as the Tivs but

has only 11 or so generations in all.

4. The vast majority, of course, never make the transfer; they are thrown away, scrapped,

recycled or whatever around the time their value has declined to more or less zero.

330 Michael Thompson

5. Properly speaking, a cultural category cannot be covert, and it is when disregarded objects

for some reason or other force their attention upon us (when we step in them, perhaps) that

we rid ourselves of delement by consigning them to the cultural category Rubbish (see

Thompson, 1994).

6. This and subsequent quotes are from James Glanz, Physics big puzzle has big question:

what is time?, The New York Times, 19 June 2001. I do not pretend to understand these

various theories within physics, but it is sufcient for my purposedemonstrating the

problems that arise when attempts are made to de-structure timethat those who attended

the symposium understand those theories.

7. The common point of departure for this theory (see Thompson et al. 1990) and rubbish

theory is Douglas (1966). Her grid:group analysis, based on the four-fold typology of social

solidarities, was rst set out in Douglas (1978).

8. There is, in fact, a fth and socially withdrawn solidarityautonomythat is characterized by

the hermit. However, since hermits are intent on steering well clear of any tap-turning, we

need not consider this solidarity here. For an explanation of the hermits solidarity see

Thompson et al. (1990) and Schmutzer (1994). For a justication for ignoring autonomy in

certain situations see the introductory chapter in Thompson et al. (1999).

9. For a discussion of this idea of democracy as an essentially contested notion, together with

a fairly extensive set of references, see Ney and Molenaers (1999) and Thompson (2002).

10. Towards the head of those Dales, Wordsworth (1810, pp. 6768) tells us, was found a

perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists, amongst whom the plough of each man

was conned to the maintenance of his own family, or to the occasional accommodation of

his neighbour. Two or three cows furnished each family with milk and cheese. The chapel

was the only edice that presided over these dwellings, the supreme head of this pure

Commonwealth.

11. Something I have not done is explain how time is shaped for each set of tap-turners (for the

upholders of each form of solidarity, that is, by the manner of their involvement with this

system of which they are such vital components. This is done in Douglas et al. (2003).

12. So the message, contra postmodernism, is that structure and process, far from being options

we must choose between, are each entailed in the other: no structure, no process, and vice

versa. Postmodernists, of course, opt for process and reject structure (which is like saying Ill

have the stream but not the eddies).

13. There are two closely linked and automatic processesabstraction and the formulation of

idealswhich underlie our ability to acquire all knowledge because they are the characteristic

features of any efcient knowledge-acquiring system. The former is both selective and

eliminative; it allows the brain to determine some property or relation which is common to

many particulars, thus making it independent of the particular. Abstraction is also imposed

on the brain by the limitations of its memory system, since it does away with the need to

recall every detail. Abstraction leads naturally to the formation of ideals. Plato used the

term ideal to mean a universalderived from the intellect aloneas opposed to the

particular, derived from sensory experience. Because memory of the particular fades, the

ideal built by the brain from many particulars becomes the only real thing about which we

can have knowledge (Zeki, 2000, p. 547).