Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2004, volume 22, pages 157 ^ 173

DOI:10.1068/d315t

Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal, and absent

presence

Kevin Hetherington
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, England;
e-mail: k.hetherington@lancaster.ac.uk
Received 10 March 2002; in revised form 11 February 2003

Abstract. In this paper I argue that in the now-extensive work on the sociology of consumption there is
very little that addresses directly the important issue of disposal. Furthermore, I argue that disposal
is not just about questions of waste and rubbish but is implicated more broadly in the ways in which
people manage absence within social relations. I develop this argument through a critical engagement
with the work of Mary Douglas, Rolland Munro, Michael Thompson, and Robert Hertz. I seek to show
that disposal is never final as is implied by the notion of rubbish but involves issues of managing social
relations and their representation around themes of movement, transformation, incompleteness, and
return. I suggest that rather than see the rubbish bin as the archetypal conduit of disposal within
consumer practices the door might be seen as a better example. This has implications for under-
standing questions of representation, ethics, and the management of social relations within the
practices of consuming.

Introduction
The growing academic interest in consumption in recent years has, in large part, been a
product of the cultural turn within social science. That is not to say that consumption as
an issue was not there in the past. Thorstein Veblen's work on the new rich, or leisure
class, in the United States at the end of the 19th century (1991 [1899]), Frankfurt School
critiques of the culture industry (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979 [1944]) and of the false
needs created by capitalism (Marcuse, 1968), as well as writing on spectacle and the
colonisation of everyday life by commodification (Baudrillard, 1996 [1968]; 1998 [1970];
Debord, 1977 [1967]; Lefebvre, 1971), have all made a significant contribution to our
understanding of consumption and consumer culture (for an overview and discussion
see Miller, 1987; Slater, 1997). What has changed is that the more recent analysis of
consumption has sought to valorise it as a creative source of cultural or in some cases
individual expression, lifestyle, and taste rather than see it as a fetishistic expression of
alienation and false needs (such as in Haug, 1986 [1971]; Marx, 1938 [1867]). As in
audience research, the general move in much of this work on consumption has been
towards recognising the skilled and creative person making a social life for themselves
through consumer practices (Douglas and Isherwood, 1980; Featherstone, 1991; Gabriel
and Lang, 1995; Lury, 1996; Miller, 1995; Shields, 1992).
Even so, there have been serious differences of opinion within this field. In partic-
ular, some of this work has come in for criticism for overemphasising the more
spectacular within consumption cultures. The associated focus on consumption as
indicative of a postmodern culture, with much emphasis on style and fashion (high
and street), has been criticised for overlooking more routine forms of consumption (or
provisioning) (see Clark, 1999; Dant, 2000; Gregson, 1993; 1997; Miller, 1998; Warde,
1997). The alternative has been to suggest we concentrate on ordinary consumption,
and on routine provisioning. Spatially it is either the shopping mall (Shields, 1989) or
the boot sale or charity shop (Gregson et al, 2002) that exemplifies the locus of these
two different positions.
158 K Hetherington

One way in which to understand these two recent approaches to consumption,

therefore, is to look at the point in the consumption process that they focus on.
Culturalist approaches tend to concentrate on the beginnings in the process of con-
suminginfluences of image, style, brand, advertising, and buying practices or on
the significance of the `dream-world' spaces of consumption (for an illustration of
this approach see Bowlby, 1985; Lury, 1996; Shields, 1992; Williams, 1982).(1) Such
approaches highlight the importance of acquiring and having things and of creating
lifestyles and identities through consumption. They look at the `front end' of consump-
tion. Those more critical of such an emphasis on the spectacular focus instead not only
on routine consumption but also on issues of utilityon what people do with their
shopping, the services they obtain, the DIY or self-provisioning they engage in after
they have seen the adverts and acquired the goods (Miller, 1998; Pahl, 1984; Warde,
1997). In the first case the consumer is constituted as a bricoleur of style, in the second
more as a bricoleur of everyday practice, kinship, class, or gender relations.
From both positions we now know a good deal about consumer habits, tastes,
lifestyles as well as about how households consume and also about class and gender
patterns of consuming. What we know little about, however, is the role that disposal
plays within the consumer's activity. A detailed library-based, and Internet-based
search on the word `disposal' in social-science indexes and abstracts will reveal that
it tends to come attached to the words `environmental' and `bomb'. A search in
my own university library recently revealed over seventy publications on disposal, the
majority of which were local-authority oversize pamphlets on slurry and sewage.
Indeed, it would seem that in this literature disposal is synonymous with forms of
waste (Hawkins, 2000). Linked to this is work on environmentalism and so-called
ethical or green consumption. Ethical-consumption arguments from groups like
Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace often make the claim that we live in an unethical,
throwaway society, submerging the world and future generations in toxic pollution and
waste and that such consumption is indicative of a utilitarian or selfish form of
pleasure seeking with no real concern for the consequences.
My aim in this paper is not simply to suggest that the disposal part of the
consumption process (as its end point) is something that has been neglected in recent
work on consuming and to then redress that omission (for such an argument see
O'Brien, 1999) but instead to suggest that disposal be seen as a necessary issue integral
to the whole process of viewing consuming as a social activity. In other words, I suggest
that studying consumption makes no sense unless we consider the role of disposing as
an integral part of the totality of what consumer activity is all about. Recognising this
may allow us to address some of these ethical questions too. Whereas the trope of waste
is often taken as indicative of the uncaring individualism of consumption, a focus on
disposal as a recursive process suggests it to be, instead, thoroughly constitutive of
social and indeed ethical activity.
There is, of course, an anthropological literature on `waste' that treats it as
more than a category suitable for the oversize local-authority report: studies of the
gift and potlatch (Mauss, 1991 [1950]; Titmuss, 1970), burial rites (Hertz, 1960 [1907]),
pollution (Douglas, 1984 [1966]), and sacrifice are all noteworthy attempts to locate
how getting rid of things is integral to the performance of social relations, kinship
networks, and ritual knowledge and activity (Girard, 1977; Hubert and Mauss, 1964
[1899]). Indeed, there have been serious attempts to understand consumption by
using some of these categories (Bataille, 1991 [1967]; Douglas and Isherwood, 1980;

(1) This is also related to the development of more historical work on shopping, particularly

concentrating on its cultural significance for women (see Bowlby, 2000; Nava, 1992).
Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal and absent presence 159

Miller, 1998; Sahlins, 1972). All the same, it is `getting rid of things or meanings'
rather than the recursivity of disposal in a fuller sense, I contend, that much of this
work tends to emphasise. Indeed, what is often missing is a sense that disposal is a
continual practice of engaging with making and holding things in a state of absence,
any notion of return (beyond simple equations of return with green recycling), or any
notion of understanding how something can be in a state of abeyance or `at your
disposal' and what the effects of that might be. Work on disposal in this broader
anthropological sense is in very limited supply indeed (see Derrida, 1994; Munro,
1995; 1998; Strathern, 1999; Thompson, 1979).
My criticism of work that either ignores disposal or treats it solely as a category of
waste or wasting is that it does not grasp its dynamic and performative role within
consumption. Waste suggests too final a singular act of closure, one that does not
actually occur in practice. Though there are good histories of how the social and
technical processes of dealing with rubbish have changed over time (for example,
Strasser, 2000), they do not pay any attention to other senses of disposal, nor to how
that which has been turned into rubbish tends to have the ability to return. Disposal, I
contend, is not primarily about waste but about placing. It is as much a spatial as a
temporal category. Terms like `waste disposal' and `waste management' are misnomers.
Rather, disposal is about placing absences and this has consequences for how we think
about `social relations'. If we are to understand what disposal means in relation to
consumption we would do well to analyse it as such and to consider how consumers
manage and are managed by the absent rather than just how they throw things away.
Getting rid of something is never simply an act of waste disposal. Issues of agency and
representation (and nonrepresentation) get drawn in too. When we dispose of some-
thing to handa material form of some kindwe do not necessarily get rid of its
semiotic presence and the effects that are generated around that. Disposal, then, is
concerned with not just semiotic mobility but also mutability and translation as well
(on translation see Brown, 1981; Callon, 1986).
My argument is that when discussing disposal we should begin with a counter-
intuitive move that questions from the start the idea of disposal as a final state of
rubbishing. My purpose is to suggest that in so doing we might understand more about
the processes of consuming than if we just assume disposal to be the last act that leads
inexorably to a closure of a particular sequence of production ^ consumption events.
Such an approach aims to challenge the commonsense idea that production ^ con-
sumption ^ disposal follows in an inevitable, discrete, linear temporal sequence. Such
a view may suit the methodological individualism of much economic writing on
consumption, or the fondness for linear narrative within social science, but it is not
particularly helpful. As a secondary and more abstract theme, this argument also
challenges the idea that we should think only sociologically about issues of presence.
The absent can have just as much of an effect upon relations as recognisable forms of
presence can have. Social relations are performed not only around what is there but
sometimes also around the presence of what is not. Absence, I argue, is not just a
philosophical concept, it is also a distinctly sociological one. Indeed the category of
absence can have a significant presence in social relations and in material culture.
Given the social rather than individual basis of consumption acts (see Douglas and
Isherwood, 1980), this has implications not only for what we do to things but also for
how those things (and their absence) are implicated in how we do social relations
(Callon, 1986; Latour, 1993). Disposal, then, is fundamentally implicated in the making
of modes of representational order it helps to make a society make senseeven
though that is often done in a fluid manner and at a highly local, mundane and
material level.
160 K Hetherington

In order to address these issues we need to consider the spatiality of disposal more
fully, particularly around these issues of presence and absence. Here, after a discussion
of work on disposal by Mary Douglas (1984), Rolland Munro (1995; 1998), and
Michael Thompson (1979), I adapt Robert Hertz's work on what might be called the
anthropology of the gap implied in his discussion of human burial practices (1960) and
apply it to understanding the dynamics of disposing of things (what I will call here
secondhandedness) as a means of addressing the issue of how ordering work gets done
around some of the central forms of disposal: abeyance, return, storage, removal, and
haunting.

The absence of disposal

The recent writing that does exist on disposal is small but useful, though it is as yet
undeveloped and still often takes the limited `problem' of waste as its central theme
(Chappells and Shove, 1999; Hawkins, 2000; Munro, 1995; 1998; O'Brien, 1999;
Strathern, 1999). In addressing the relationship between consumption the associated
acts of acquiring, possessing, valuing, exchanging, and using an object, good, or
service of some kind and disposal, we can find some guidance from earlier work
on the relationship between consumption and production. First discussed by Karl
Marx in the Grundrisse (1973 [1939]) and repeated many times since, we find the
argument that there is never an altogether clear-cut distinction between production
and consumption, nor a simple temporal sequence to these processes (see Lury, 1996;
Pahl, 1984; Warde, 1997). We may buy something from a shop that has been produced
and we can, in acquiring and using it or in attributing some significance to that object,
be said to be consuming it. However, in so doing, productive work may still be required
of us. A flat-pack table still needs work done to it in order for it to be assembled for use;
a ready-cooked meal still needs to be heated up before it is eaten and then there is the
washing up to be done afterwards. Production and consumption are entangled together
in these and other cases. They also entangle time into the process in a nonlinear way
as well as matters of technique (see Latour, 2002). Production does not always come
before consumption; it may also come after in the sequence of events. Likewise, to
produce something itself requires prior acts of consumption before it can be made ready
for consumption. A carpenter has to acquire wood, an artist paint, and so on. We
should consider disposal in the same light as these other entanglements. It is not just the
last act in a sequence that runs from production to consumption to disposal, but is
recursively implicated in the ordering of a whole sequence of events.
Although it is my contention that it is far too simplistic to equate disposal with
waste per se, the issue of how we get rid of what is unwanted still has to be addressed
because this is about as far as discussions of disposal have got. Not least because our
present problem of definition stems from this treatment of the theme of disposal as
`dirt' in the best-known writing in this area (notably Douglas, 1984 [1966]). How
societies get rid of things and the role that this plays in creating social classifications,
boundaries, and orders may have been of minor interest within sociology but it has for
a long time been a theme of major significance within anthropology. Beginning with
Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss's work on sacrifice (1964 [1899]) and Mauss's analysis
of the gift, especially his discussion of potlatch (1991 [1950]), we see that getting rid of
something is profoundly implicated in the maintenance of a recognisable state of social
order. The destructive waste of a life or of precious goods is seen as a conduit for the
ongoing maintenance of social stability. The waste becomes a material expression
of translation in the practices of ordering. In other words, even the most extreme
destructive or violent acts against persons or things can have effects that make sense
within the social order that members of that society understand. In this sense, disposal,
Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal and absent presence 161

expressed through its material forms, is part of the accomplishment of the ordering
work that goes into making a society (see Bataille, 1991; Girard, 1977; 1989). The object
as gift, the scapegoat, or sacrificial victim are all made as conduits of order through
their disposability in a cycle of ongoing events. In engaging in such acts, members of a
society can be seen to get rid of unwanted things and thereby to stabilise social
categories of membership and belonging around their removal. In making something
absent, either through death or destruction, a representation of social order is appar-
ently secured but never for all time. Such acts often need to continue in an endless
processual sequence in order to help reaffirm a sense of social order as a stable thing. It
is noteworthy, too, that sacrifice as a form of disposal cannot be simply reduced to its
final, violent conclusion. It has long been argued that there are a whole series of prior
stages of preparation involved in the sacrificial act that have to be considered too as part
of a sequence of disposal events (Hubert and Mauss, 1964). I would contend the same is
true with disposal in nonsacrificial contexts as well although clearly a linear sequence
would not always be the appropriate way to think about disposal in nonsacrificial
contexts (see also Miller, 1998).
In those few recent anthropological studies of disposal, it is this theme of how
societies get rid of what is unwanted that has been prominent in discussion (Munro,
1992; 1995; Strathern, 1999). As Munro puts it, societies develop `conduits' for the
disposal of unwanted images or meaning and not just for the objects of waste (1995).
A precursor to these concerns is Douglas's analysis of dirt and pollution (1984 [1966]).
Disposal, she argues, is all about questions of boundary and order it is about putting
in place, beyond a certain threshold, all that threatens to pollute because it is seen as out
of place. In her view, this is how classifications are made. Rubbish is made invisible by
putting it beyond a certain threshold. Disposal in her account helps to affirm social
categories, membership, and a sense of belonging for those who might be threatened by
some unwarranted intrusion on their society from the representational `outside'. I say
representational `outside' because it may not in fact be some foreign thing or person
that is disposed of. That thing or person may be insidepart of the communitybut be
seen as outside of the classificatory order of things.
Disposal, for Douglas, involves the issue of something or someone going away so
that classifications can be maintained. Dirt, for Douglas, is above all a spatial category.
For Douglas, what is disposed of is pollution or dirt, famously defined as ``matter out of
place'' (1984, page 35). The anomalous and the incongruous are a source of the figural
`out-of-placeness' of this state of pollution that continues to present itself unless it is
represented out of existence. Dirt appears where boundaries have not been performed
correctly (or in ritual forms of transgression). Things, Douglas suggests, following
Jean-Paul Sartre, can become sticky or viscous (page 38). The viscous defies the rules
of classification. It unsettles because it is anomalous. It is neither a solid nor a liquid.
As such, it has to be disposed of so that orderly classification can be maintained. It is
represented out of existence through the known social rules of interpretation, or though
physical control, avoidance, or by using it in such a way so as to remove its unsettling
qualities through a transference onto something else, something better subject to the
process of control (1984, pages 39 ^ 40).
Dirt is, Douglas argues, approached through the question of order (1984, page 40).
The drawing of boundaries, the creation of taboo, ritual forms of controlling an
invoked anomaly, labeling, scapegoating, these are all examples of the representational
ordering work that is undertaken to dispose of matter out of place (see also Girard,
1979). In her work, a sense of social order is seen to rest on such representational
cleansing acts. Such an approach makes a clear distinction between the present and the
absent, which is entirely intuitive to our understanding of what we can see and know.
162 K Hetherington

However, it is this intuitive sense of presence and absence that is problematic and raises
questions about the character of her (structuralist) argument.
No one would deny that societies become good at such forms of disposal. But
nothing is ever perfect. The viscous has a tendency to remain tacky it does not always
disappear completely in fact, it continues to tack. It has a motility as well as a
mobilityit moves between a status of presence and absence and is transformed by
so doing (Munro, 1997), seemingly disappearing only to return again unexpectedly
and perhaps in a different place or in a different form. It can come and go, appear and
disappear, and in so doing it remains unfinished and not fully disposed of no matter
how much representational work we might do to put it somewhere where it is no longer
perceived as out of place. It has a tendency to stick, even if only as a trace of what has
passed.
It is this movement between the categories of presence and absence that is key to
understanding the role of disposal within consumption and it is precisely that which is
missing when disposal is treated solely as an issue of dirt within the structuralist
machine of classification and order rather than approached through a more fluid
understanding of ordering processes (see Hetherington and Lee, 2000; Law, 1994).
Douglas's approach too readily treats disposal as about making something absent for
all time. But the absent is only ever moved along and is never fully gotten rid of. Its
capacity for translation remains as an absence just as much as when a presence is
encountered. Furthermore, rather than see this moving along as a problem we should
acknowledge that it can also be a socially useful resource.
Matter out of place in Douglas's account draws our attention to the spatiality of
disorder and the subsequent ordering acts that aim to correct disorder. In her account,
making something safe or disposing of it involves putting it there so that it is no longer
here. `Put your rubbish in the bin.' `Take your dirty hands off the food.' `Bury your dead
in the graveyard.' All of these invocations to order matter out of place through disposal
involve a spatial displacement within an already-known regime of representational
possibility. Of course, this binarism of the `here and there', Douglas herself would
acknowledge, is too simple to account for all acts of disposal. She recognises that there
is often a third space involved, the threshold itselfliminal, betwixt and between,
itself uncertain and anomalouswhich is sometimes mobilised within this process
(see also Turner, 1969; Van Gennep, 1960). Providing that this space is knowable and
representable in advance and its location definite, this is not usually seen as a problem.
Indeed, the neutralisation of the anomalous, the classificatory in-between and sticky
state, is often seen as best dealt with through the ritualised transference (rites de
passage) of disorder from the state itself to this in-between space that can be ordered
and controlled through symbolic means (Turner, 1969).
The problem with this analysis is that pollution never fully goes away in the
manner that Douglas or Victor Turner tend to assume. They have a little too much
faith in the powers of representation. As Marilyn Strathern more recently suggests in
contrast, ``Pollution surprises by its untoward nature, an unlooked for return; yet those
involved in the activity of waste disposal know that one cannot dispose of waste, only
convert it into something else within its own life'' (1999, page 61). It is not just that it
can be sticky but also that it can flow.
Although Douglas does acknowledge that `dirt' can be a flexible resource, recur-
sively involved in the making of a sense of order, she tends to focus on this issue
through an understanding of previously established rules and conventions of represen-
tation within society. But dirt has nonrepresentational qualities that are intrinsic to it
too. It is that which is missing in her account. It can be manifest as a figural absence as
well as a discursive (and thereby representational) presence and can help to disorder in
Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal and absent presence 163

ways that provide a necessary flexibility to ordering processes (see Lyotard, 1984;
Serres, 1991). It is largely because Douglas wants to see the category of social order
as a stable and representable thing in advance of her analysis of how it is established
and maintained in specific social orders that she misses the ongoing way in which
order is made as uncertain process. `Dirt' has to do with the making and unmaking of
that process rather than with a thing in itself.

The disposal of absence

Having `disposed' of Douglas in the previous section, the logic of my argument
suggests that she has to remain in some form thereafter. Her contribution to the study
of consumption has been to acknowledge its significance to questions of belonging and
the rules of membership within society and I would not want to do away with that
(Douglas and Isherwood, 1980). Neither would Munro, who, in a series of recent papers,
has begun to open up our understanding of this theme of disposal and its ultimate
impossibility (1992; 1995; 1998). Acknowledging, too, a debt to Douglas, his central
concern is to suggest that consumption be seen as a performance of membership and
communication through goods, rather than as a series of utilitarian, individual
(rational) choices beloved of economists (see Douglas and Isherwood, 1980). Through
this, he suggests, we have to address and find ways of controlling the proliferation of
understandings or `meanings' that consumption generates.
Looking at two different contexts, how disposal is an integral part of the food
consumption process (1995) and how accountants make use of `X-gaps' (or blank
figures) in their accounts (1998), Munro suggests that dirt, what we can call more
abstractly an absent presence, can never be fully disposed of. What we do as food
consumers will not simply depend on the choices we make in deciding what to eat or
not eat but also on an acknowledgement in advance of the ``conduits for disposal''
(1995, page 313) that are available to us, in which we can dispose of the meaning of the
food we consume. We put things in a supposedly stable context dispose of themso
that we do not have to deal with their implications in a direct way. We do not just
produce such implications when we acquire goods, we also dispose of them by keeping
certain things outside.
To that extent, Munro would agree with Douglas and Isherwood (1980). However,
he recognises that the conduits of disposal (he cites the fridge as an example) do not
always work effectively in managing such representations. The lingering smell of
yesterday's fish in the fridge, even after we have eaten it, has the ability to remain
(Munro, 1995, page 318). Such issues of disposal are not just physical though but
also representational; they involve questions of how societies deal with ``the haunting
presence of exclusion'' that is an inevitable part of consumer activities (1998, page 148).
An implication of this analysis is that the disposal outcome is not one of rubbishing
but of placing; this suggests we cannot get rid of the consequences of our actions but
are held accountable as they translate our actions into other forms that are `out of
control'. Disposal is a means, therefore, of managing our accountability and our debt to
such effects.
This is not just a matter of the lingering smell of fish or yesterday's washing up
still `calling us' from the kitchen. It is also, significantly, a matter of epistemology;
in particular, it is a question of how we account for or are held accountable by that
which we have tried to dispose of but have left unfinished. Disposal in this approach
becomes a question of `creative accounting' and of the way in which we use or deal
with gaps the aporial absent presence with the unfinished disposal within our
otherwise seamless representations:
164 K Hetherington

``Gaps in our knowledge, whatever else they are, are also places in which the
unspeakability of the Other can reenter. Where gaps are closed through exclusion,
they are also fissures through which the Other can leak back in'' (Munro, 1998,
page 145).
Munro recognises that representational stability, associated with acts of disposal, is
never ultimately achieved as a form of closure in the way that Douglas wants to
assume. As `accountants' we will always find recurring X-gaps in our daily lives. The
question is how we respond to those gaps. All the same, Munro's analysis, although it
hints at morewhat he calls a positive view of disposal (1992; 1998, page 149)is still
mostly concerned with the idea of disposal as the `problem' of waste. Although that
Other we call waste can indeed become a spectral horror, it can also be a resource. If
we have to speak about rubbish at all in the context of disposal it should be in that
more neutral manner. The idea that societies develop conduits of disposal that are
themselves fluid and uncertain is a useful one. The problem though is that, in thinking
about receptacles like rubbish bins and fridges as fluid conduits, metaphorically speak-
ing they have a tendency to become something more akin to unfluid black holes when
disposal gets reduced to an issue of waste.
Rather than see the rubbish bin as the archetypal conduit of disposal I suggest the
door is a better example. Not only do doors allow traffic in both directions when open,
but also they can be closed to keep things outside/inside, present/absent, at least
temporarily and provisionally. Figuratively, the door better captures the role of dis-
posal within consumption. We can see this when we imagine that rubbish itself can be a
conduit of disposal rather that which is placed in the conduit. This argument can be
developed out of reading Thompson's analysis of the recursivity of rubbish (1979).
Although Thompson does not discuss the issue of disposal directly, much of his
analysis is taken up with addressing the role of rubbish within rather than at the end
of the processes of consumption and with the disposal of value, in particular, that is
attendant upon it.
For Thompson, there are three classes of object that we might consume, each of
which has a different status in relation to the issue of value: durable, transient, and
rubbish objects. A durable object is one that has high status and value and is recog-
nised socially as worthy or important he cites the example of a piece of antique
Queen Anne furniture. A transient object, in contrast, is something that loses its status
and value over timecars are the example cited in this case. Both sets of objects,
Thompson argues, occupy what he calls regions of fixed assumptions (1979, page 8).
In other words, in such a region an object is known, its status and value established,
and we know how to respond to it accordingly. Social agents find ways of controlling
these regions, they do ordering and representational work to establish and maintain
them, especially in maintaining a separation between the categories of durability and
transientness. No one who has a fine piece of 18th-century furniture wants it to be seen
as transient, just as everyone would like their rusting old car to be seen as a `classic'
(except, of course, those who already own what is deemed to be a classic car).
If we relate this to Douglas's argument, the transient category, from the standpoint
of the durable, would be seen as dirt that had to be kept from polluting that high-status
category. Yet, the virtue of Thompson's analysis is that it does not rest on this binarism
of separate and distinct regions of fixed assumption alone. There is in his analysis a
third category, rubbish, which he suggests is more covert in nature and quite different
from the transient, occupying what he calls a region of flexibility (1979, page 8). Here
objects have little or no status or value at all, they become blanks that can address not
only the question of value in the singular instance but also value as a general category.
This is the space where transient objects end up. But they do not always remain there.
Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal and absent presence 165

Although all this talk of regions might appear today in all our concern with
networks and other topologies as a little static and rigid in its structuralist assumptions
(Mol and Law, 1994), Thompson hints at a more fluid analysis. But what is most
interesting about Thompson's approach is the way that he considers the dynamic role
of rubbish in relation to the two other categorieschallenging our intuitive under-
standing of rubbish as an end point in a sequence of the declining value of an object.
He sees rubbish occupying a blank and fluid space between the other two categories,
helping to maintain their separateness while also providing a conduit for objects to
move back and forth into the regions of fixed assumptions. At one and the same time
rubbish affirms the stasis of the order of value while also allowing for movement,
flexibility, and change (see also Hetherington and Lee, 2000). In this sense rubbish is
itself a conduit of disposala conduit of the disposal of value but it acts more like a
door than a rubbish bin.
Thompson illustrates this with two examples: Stevengraphs (late Victorian machine-
woven silk pictures) and Regency housing in Islington, London, during the 1960s
(see Thompson, 1979). Both were at one time popular artefacts that became transient
before being seen as rubbish: uncollectable Victorian kitsch in one case, and run-down
slum housing fit only for demolition in the other. Yet both have ended up subsequently
back in the durable category. Thompson charts how a few collectors in the first
instance and 1960s pioneer gentrifiers, the `knockers-through', in the second, were
willing to accept the blank facility of rubbish and to champion its significance beyond
its then current categorisation as nonrepresentational except as rubbishhereby
making it visible and subsequently popular to others of a similar mind. Both are
now expensive and highly sought after artefacts firmly established as durable objects.
What this also shows, incidentally, is that collectors are just as much animated by the
work they can do in establishing the reputation of a class of objects as they are by
issues of rarity, classification, or possession.
As the many habitues of Sunday morning car-boot sales would attest, there is a
tacit understanding of this dynamic of the blank by the many who are out looking for
an overlooked bargain or a class of object whose day has yet to come (even Queen
Anne furniture was once hopelessly unfashionable and rather cheap to buy). People
know that some things are just tat, and others are design classics waiting to be
discovered, sorted, and made durable in their respectability and value again. Yet today,
more than when Thompson was writing in the late 1970s, even the outright tat often
has its fans. Still, much collecting derives its meaning precisely from this dynamicthe
making of the reputation of an object (and thereby its status and value) by making it
visible, recognisable, and `respectable' (including cult or subcultural respectability with
respect to kitsch). A cheap contemporary utilitarian object can be disposed of by one
generation only to return later and be claimed as a design classic by the next.
Not only are conduits of disposal implicated in changes of value of particular
materials but also the fluidity of such conduits is implicated in the establishment of
social relations like those associated with stability, provenance, and trustworthiness.
And some conduits are better at this than others because they are more readily
implicated in established relations of trust. The car-boot sale is an untrustworthy
conduitit is `dodgy'. A much better conduit of disposal is the familya conduit
through which the Queen Anne table can be `passed down'. But it is a conduit with
fluid or door-like qualities. The table can also be held back if one's offspring prove to
be a disappointment, sold off to pay for necessary renovation work on the chimney
stack, moved on as part of a divorce settlement, be given to a museum in order to be
offset against tax or death duties, or go down another line of the family if there are no
children.
166 K Hetherington

Thompson goes on to discuss the further complexities of the dynamics of this

threefold classification of objects (drawing on the mathematics of catastrophe theory).
However, the point he makes most clearly is to acknowledge the recursive way in which
`rubbish'that which has supposedly been disposed of is implicated in the relations
between objects, in their relative status, and in their value. What his analysis shows is
not only that societies have conduits of disposal for `dirt' (pace Munro) but that `dirt'
is itself a conduit for the disposal of a certain kind of representation (value) and that it
feeds that back into the other categories from whence it has come in a transformed
state. Disposal as a fluid translating practice is implicated in the ordering processes
associated with such representational stability. What it shows, though, is that change
and transformation are a part of that processindeed, that one cannot always predict
in advance what will remain in the category of dirt and what will return highly valued.
Where Thompson's analysis is particularly limited, though, is in the fact that he
only really extends his discussion of rubbish to its role in the establishment of mobility
and flow within the field of exchange value. The whole issue of how a piece of rubbish
might be valued in other ways or how one form of value might be translated into
another is not really developed in his argument. A worthless item may still be practically
useful, it may convey fond memories to its user, may be the conduit for sentiment, or
may connect a person to loved ones or to their own past. Indeed, the whole arena of
sentimental value as opposed to use, exchange, or sign value remains to be investigated
sociologically and its potentially highly significant implications for consumption prac-
tices explored. Certainly it is highly significant for the practices of disposal as a form of
placing. One of the reasons why people often do not get rid of things in a rational way
when they have become practically useless or economically valueless is because they
retain a high level of sentimental value.
If we are, then, to understand fully the significance of disposal in relation to
consumption practices we need to disassociate it from the class of objects we call
rubbish or dirt and to open up our understanding of what is meant by value. Certainly,
disposal can be about binning something, but it can also be about forgetfulness
(sometimes deliberate); it can even be about maintaining something in such a state
of abeyance so that it does not become rubbish, not only in the home but in the
institutions of public culture, too.
The museum is above all a conduit of disposal. Many museums have vast quantities
of objects in store, which have been collected over the years but that never see a display
case. They become part of the reserve army of objects (or perhaps a study collection)
and are usually seen only by curatorial staff or specialists in a particular field, if at all.
They are disposed of in the sense that they are put away out of sight from a viewing
public. That creates its own problemsnotably the need for storage space, which may
often be in short supply. Objects have a tendency to leak out of cupboards. But even
when an object is put out of view and is not readily accessible it can still have effects
through other media: in the card index or catalogue those items may be just as visible
as items on display. The fact that they are in store at all attests to the fact that the
museum does not want to get rid of them, it wants to keep them for posterity because
they are seen as either important in themselves or representative of a class of object.
There are few things that institutions like museums and libraries agonise over more
than disposal in the sense of deaccessioning. Whether socially this is a form of senti-
ment is an open question. In effect, these objects are disposed of into a place that
holds them in abeyance in order to prevent them being lost forever beyond the walls
of the museum.
Similarly in the home it is not just the bin that is the conduit for disposal. The
attic, the basement, the garage, fridge, wardrobe, make-up drawer, or cupboard under
Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal and absent presence 167

the stairs, even the public rooms of the house itself, are all often used in the same
manner as conduits for disposing of things which are forgotten, sometimes until
they are tidied away or thrown out, sometimes for a whole lifetime, until the house-
clearance people come along after a death in the family. But what are not disposed of
are the translating effects of those objects. Old photographs or family heirlooms might
retain a presence in the attic just as powerfully as when they are brought down from
the attic to be reappropriated perhaps by subsequent generations concerned with
family history. Even their memory after they have gone from the house can still have
effects. Disposal and inheritance are not as far apart as might initially be imagined.
These receptacles act more like doorways than trashcans. This is more than a
question of storage though. Storage implies some kind of intention to hold something
provisionally as absent and to avoid any translating effects that it might perform. But
not all disposal is intentional and nor is its return. The semiotic mutability of that
which has been disposed of can return in a manner different from when it was
disposed. Former minor connotations associated with an object might come to take
on a denotative character. The locations of something made absent may change its
character, whether that be in allowing it to attain an attractive antique patina or in just
allowing it to go moldy in a bag at the back of a cupboard. Likewise, things not
intentionally disposed of can get lost. In other words, in the dynamics of consuming
in which disposal is an integral part, the absent can assume agentic powers indepen-
dent from any human intentionalityindeed, whole scientific disciplines such as
archaeology are (tacitly) founded on just such a principle.
Make a visit to any cheap antique centre on a Sunday afternoon and listen to the
comments of other shoppers. People go there not only to buy but also to reminisce
with the objects that they see on display (as well as with accompanying friends and
family): `They've got my tea pot!', `I used to have one of those', `Your dad broke one of
those soon after we got married!' The importance an object may hold for someone can
be conveyed by its absence in one place just as much as by its presence in another.
Sometimes the absence of an object (brought to recollection by a similar one on view)
can be so strong that people still think they have things long after they have got rid of
them.
As consumers, people do membership and identity work not only through what
they acquire, as most of the more sociological literature on consumption now suggests
(following Douglas and Isherwood, 1980; see also Hebdige, 1979; 1988; Lury, 1996), but
also through what they dispose of and how they dispose of consumed objects. An old
wedding dress still in its box in the loft, the pair of candelabras split up after a death
with one going to the son another to the daughter, the chipped vase kept for senti-
mental reasons: disposal sometimes involves making things, or the people associated
with them, not just physically absent but representationally present at the same time.
Likewise, an effect is that sometimes this action of making things representationally
absent can also make them nonrepresentationally present.
Think of the objects on view in a display case either at home or in a museum. Is
their placement there on display, sometimes for years in the same arrangement, not
itself a form of disposal by making something representationally absent? The fact that
it is has been made apparent in recent years in a number of museums in Britain,
including national museums, that have allowed artists to make `interventions' within
those display cases. This has usually taken the form of putting anomalous objects into
ordered displaysplaster casts of discarded pairs of knickers (so-called `knicker
beasts') in fossil cabinets in the Pitt Rivers museum in one recent example or putting
contemporary artworks in alongside old objects, often because they have been a source
of inspiration for a contemporary artist. What these objects attain (and it is their
168 K Hetherington

purpose in the former case, the latter is more subtle in its effects) is to reveal precisely
that permanent display cabinets are spaces of disposal brought to life again by the
shock effect of an incongruous, nonrepresentational blank that unsettles either a class
of objects, a classificatory scheme, or a visual sense of representational order. We are
made to see not only the knicker beasts but also the fossils that have been disposed of
in their display since they were collected perhaps over a hundred years earlier at a time
when the theory of evolution was still novel and shocking and more people were
interested in fossils than they are today.
Consumers of all kinds engage in acts of disposal with things that they have. But the
erasure of an object is never complete. There is always a trace effect that is passed on by
its absence. Whether it be an avid collector who disposes of his or her collection into the
indexing work that he or she does, a tourist who disposes of his or her holiday into
holiday photographs, or someone who buys a set of six cast-iron pans but only regularly
uses two of them, disposing of the others in the back of the cupboard, all of these acts
can be seen as acts of disposal that are far removed from any simple association with
rubbishing. The question is not specifically about how an object gets placed but about
what happens to the ordering effects of that object within that placing. All acts of
arrangement and ordering involve moving representations about in order to stabilise
them but that sense of order and stillness is rarely achieved in practice. Think of the
look of horror on the face of a lifelong collector of Chantilly porcelain when he or she
finds, after reading a piece in the newspaper on recent archaeological research, that
one of his or her major pieces bought some years ago at great expense was actually
made at St Cloud. Above all, then, disposal is about the mobilisation of absence
(blanks) in the making of ordering processes through placing activity that engages
with the categories of presence and absence. Indeed, getting into the terrain of defini-
tions, we might go a little further and say that disposal is about the mobilisation,
ordering, and arrangement of the agency of the absent. Perhaps the most useful
account we have of such management comes not from the study of consumption but
from the disposal of the dead in Hertz's famous account of the practices of first and
second burial within funeral rites (1960).

Disposal and the second

Through a comparative study of funeral rites, Hertz was able to show the two-stage nature
that those rites take in many cultures. Once a person has died his or her family or
community becomes responsible not only for the disposal of his or her bodily remains but
also for his or her soul. The act of disposal often involves an initial and provisional `burial'
which may last anything from a few days to a number of years depending on the particular
culture in question. After that burial the remains are still available to the community.
Subsequently a second and more final burial will take place where the remains of the
person will be finally disposed of and will assume a form of closure once the person's soul
is assumed to have passed on, often into the company of other souls.
It is what happens in the gap between these two burials that is of particular interest
for Hertz and for us in considering the fluid composition of disposal. In part, this gap
is a space for preparing the soul for its final place of rest and, in part, it involves the
living honouring a debt they feel they have to the departed. The ritual is, of course, in
part about ordering and controlling possible sources of pollution and the unmanaged
return of unsettled and malign spirits (pace Douglas) but it is also about the use that is
made of absence within presence. The gap between first and second burial has both a
temporal and a spatial dimension: interval in the first instance and segregation in the
second. Disposal is an act of double take. Disposal of the body allows preparation for
the soul before the final disposal of the body allows the soul to move on. The body is
Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal and absent presence 169

disposed of and then brought back before being finally disposed of. The gapthe
time ^ space between the two funeralsis concerned with the motility of presence
and absence and their enfolded state in a seemingly valueless or valuable set of
material remains. It is a space of abeyance in which living persons (re)construct their
identities through an extension of themselves beyond their own bodies in the realm of
these material bodily remains (on extension see Strathern, 1991). Remains are put at a
distance representationally while remaining close physically in first burial and then
brought back as representationally close but physically distant after second burial.
Through such rites of the double take a debt is honoured, the person and the soul of
the departed reaches a settled state, and the person doing the honouring establishes
a sense of who they are through a closure to the act of disposing. In particular, such a
rite constitutes the practice of disposal as one of membership and identity through
what might be described as an ethics of care (see Harbers et al, 2002).
How one translates these arguments about the double-take into the disposal of
inanimate articles one has shopped for, rather than kin one has been born into the midst
of, remains to be answered. In some cultures the distance between disposing of people
and things is not all that distant at all. In Japan, for instance, holding funeral rites for
inanimate objects is a common practice (see Kretschmer, 2000). Mortuary riteskuyo
are performed for everyday objects when they cease to be useful either because they are
worn out or broken. Different objects have different shrines where they are disposed of.
Needles, for example, when worn out, are often taken by their users to a needle shrine to
be disposed of. First burial, in this context, involves them being inserted into a block of
tofu. A prayer of thanksgiving for their useful life is then said over them. Later the priest
who cares for the shrine will take all the needles away and dispose of them a second time
after a second prayer (see Kretschmer, 2000). And it is not just traditional work tools that
are disposed of in this way. Consumables like spectacles have had shrines for a centuries.
But even new classes of objects have shrines too. For example, there are now shrines
in Japan for worn-out computer motherboards (and probably for mobile phones also).
What is being disposed of is not only the item but also its value. It is the separation of
the value from the item that requires the state of preparation between first and second
burial. Value is the equivalent of a soul for an object.
In the West, this practice is less clearly visible as religious ritual but it is present
nonetheless. Conduits of disposal often have this two-stage `holding' process through
which consumer objects pass before becoming waste. The bookcase, the recycle bin on
a computer, the garage, the potting shed, the fridge, the wardrobe, even the bin, are
often constituted more as sites of first burial rather than of second burial. Items
are held in them for a period of time while their uncertain value state is addressed
(use, exchange, or sentimental value) before being removed into the representational
outside where they undergo their second burial in the incinerator, the landfill, or
unfortunately sometimes just fly-tipped onto the side of the road. The object itself is
disposed of though such second burial because its value and how that is translated and
then moved on has to be addressed first. This is something that first burial alone
cannot do. If the intrinsic worth of a person is assumed to be their soul, the intrinsic
worth of an artefact is its valueuse value and sentimental value as much as exchange
or sign value. Only when all forms of value have been exhausted or translated and
thereby stabilised will the object be permitted to undergo its second burial.
But although we might rely on the principles of first and second burial when
disposing of a consumable we cannot be quite so clear whether second burial has
actually taken place: a broken pot thrown into the ditch in the 3rd century may turn
out to be extremely valuable as dating evidence for archaeologists 1700 years later and
may find its way into a museum or even an antiques shop thereafter. The object,
170 K Hetherington

then, may be reprieved or resurrected, in the manner that Thompson describes (1979),
or it may disappear absolutely.
There are clearly cultural differences between disposing of a person and disposing of
an inanimate thing but abstractly the use of a gap between a first and second action,
where presence and absence are enfolded into the question of value between two acts in
which that thing is put away, remains apparent in both cases. The gap is the space where
things are held in a state denying their wastagewhere they are held at our disposal for
a second time so that we can attain a settlement with their remaining value. Such a
settlement is often about identity. We are not just `what we buy' but also `what we do
not throw out'at least not until a respectable interval has passed for any residual
value to be passed onand also `what we value'. And it is in that space that we find
a concern with matters of care (or their lack) and begin to see how consumption is not
so much a utilitarian and selfish act of pleasuring ones desires as a communitarian
source of social integration, identity making, and membership-confirming activity.

Disposal and settlement: issues of secondhandedness

Most of the time such acts of disposal are a routine and ordinary part of consumption
practice. It is about how we manage absencehow we order it, where we place it,
when we use it as a source of value, and so on. As long as we do not encounter that
absence as unexpected presence, in effect an unresolved question of value, the conduits
of disposal can be said to be working effectively. The utility of absence is as much a
part of the communicative and ordering activity associated with consumption as it is
a part of the acquisition and use of some object or service as a mark of social member-
ship. We see this perhaps a little more obviously in the practices associated with
`important' examples of disposal such as in the disposal of a house onto the market,
the disposal of a kitten or puppy, or the disposal of the effects of a loved one who has
just died. People will often say that they want such `artefacts' to `go to a good home'.
Why? Because they have valued it and expect that valuing to continue. But to appre-
ciate fully the agency of absence we see most clearly the importance, recursivity, and
ongoing nature of disposal when the management of absence does not work effectively,
when it unexpectedly returns or attains a presence and shocks us into a recognition of
its significance. We see this most clearly when the expected processes associated with
disposal are unfinished or are carried out in an ineffective manner and where questions
of value are not properly honoured. The representational figure of unfinished or unman-
aged disposal is the ghost and its agency is expressed in the idea of haunting (see
Gordon, 1997). This is where the act of second burial has failed, been hurried, or has
not been carried out to its full effect.
We encounter the unexpected presence of absence as a ghost. In consumption
practices there are many ghosts. Things we threw out before we should, things we
held onto long after they should have been disposed of, the credit-card statement
at the end of the month, or the absence marked with a little red `o/d' next to a figure in
the bank balance, are some of the most obvious examples that people routinely
encounter as a consequence of their consumer activities. Ghosts do not only moan
and rattle their chains they also speak the language of credit and debt. In a word they
are the figure of value untranslated. Commonly, we understand haunting as an unac-
knowledged debt and feel a sense of guilt in its presence. It is a debt that we, heirs to
past consumption, owe for the failure to dispose of something in the proper manner
(see Derrida, 1994). It is a debt that has to be settled. Future generations expect their
inheritance and themselves reciprocate through the sense of debt and obligation they
owe to their ancestors.
Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal and absent presence 171

Disposal, then, within consumer activity is about managing an ever-present potential

absence such that that absence does not itself make an appearance as a visible agent. For
its agency to be dealt with effectively requires successful doorkeeping. All the while it can
be moved alongdisposed ofit remains unseen as an absence and the conduits of
disposal within the consumption process can be said to be working effectively. This
implies more than trying to avoid spending too much and getting into financial debt.
It also means managing a whole array of social relations through consumption in such
a way that we affirm our membership of society effectively. It is not just the act of
consuming that positions us in this way as Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood have
argued (1980), disposal, too, is an integral part of that process.
In the most mundane way, then, we encounter unfinished disposal through the idea
of an unpaid debt. We encounter it in the credit-card bill that arrives after a spending
spree; after the expensive new outfit has been worn and lost its glamour. We encounter
it also in the detritus that consumption leaves behind waiting to be dealt with, whether
that be crumbs on the floor after a quick snack or vast areas of tropical rainforest
remaindered as tree stumps in our demand for veneered luxury. But as a social
practice, rather than an individual one, debt and the need to honour it in order to
avoid being haunted are part of the way in which consumer membership is performed.
Pots and pans may not literally start flying around the room if this is not done but
representational instability will occur when the conduits for disposal do not operate
effectively. Disposal that is completed in two stages serves to help stabilise, materi-
ally, social relations within the consumption process and the transformation of value
from one form to another that is central to that process. Such activity is part of the
membership work that constitutes the terrain of consumption, the figure of the ghost
arrives where we fail to honour that commitment or when we do it unsuccessfully or
halfheartedly.
Haunting, then, connotes debt but not only in the language of credit cards. It also
suggests the importance of disposal to an ethics of how we `consume' each other
as responsible social agents. By ethics I do not simply mean careful consumption,
recycling old bottles and newspapers and so on, but how, through consumption, people
relate to one another. This ethics is premised on a notion of the care for the absent,
a making of the self through an encounter with its presence, and a concern for its
possible return if the conduits through which it is moved are not managed effectively.
Issues of social membership, recognition, order, acceptance, status, honour, self-worth
are based not just on how one consumes but also on how one disposes.
The social relations of consumption involve consumers not only as shoppers,
gourmands, and car drivers but also as doorkeepers. To attend a door is a tactile or
haptic encounter with the material world. Who has a hand on the door (or the market)
matters. But within such consumer relations we cannot rely on the supposed hidden
hand of the market to guide us, nor always on the visible (first) hand of the gift. Rather
it is often our own second hand, a receiving as well as a giving hand, a hand that moves
value on, that matters most. The handedness of the market, a consumer market in
which disposal is a key part, is one of such translations as are constituted through the
`passing on' of this capacity for secondhandedness. In the arena of consumption,
second burial is perhaps better understood as secondhandedness. Not only do we
dispose of things by passing them on but we manage the fluidity of the conduits
of disposal through such handed activity just as much as we manage the things
that pass through them. We attend on the door as a conduit of disposal in order to
try and effect admittance or nonadmittance and in which direction. Failure to do
this effectively can mean more than feeling spooked, it carries risks with it as the
ongoing cases of unmanaged disposal in consumption associated with global warming,
172 K Hetherington

the unapproved removal of organs from bodies in autopsies in British hospitals, and
BSE all illustrate.
The idea of unsettled spirits is an apposite one. Sociologically, disposal as a con-
sumption practice is all about settlementa settlement that takes place as something or
someone comes in or goes out through the door. Settlement connotes several things.
Most obviously it connotes a legal, contractual agreement as in terms like `divorce
settlement' or `out-of-court settlement'; it also connotes a coming to rest through move-
ment as in `the house settled after it was constructed'. If settlement connotes such things
it also denotes the way in which disposal is integrated within the process of consump-
tion. Consumption is about how we negotiate the settlement of social relations; it
involves our tacit acknowledgment of the ways in which we make things absent in order
to establish that settlement. Settlement may imply the mundane activity of putting the
children's toys away in the attic after they have grown up and left home, but we use
consumption as a means of disposal more generally in order to come to a settlement
with how we manage our relations with others in terms of our memories, a sense of
tradition, and through our relations not only with our contemporaries but also with our
ancestors and future generations. Disposal as a theme is important not just because it is
a stage of consumption which has been left out of most of the sociological writing but
because it is involved in making consumption as a social and ethical activity make sense
as such.
Acknowledgements. I am grateful to Rolland Munro, Sharon Macdonald, and Tony Waters for
their comments and suggestions of reading in connection with this paper.
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