After the publication of my entry on a recent book by Kent Johnson, that poet wrote to thank me, but expressing puzzlement that I never mentioned the word “satire.” For me, I explained, a rubric like that would block thinking rather than spurring it forward. I realized afterward that the word “satire” puts me in mind of certain English professors I’d had, dry as dust, who specialized in the eighteenth century—for me, as a result, it reminds me of someone droning on about Alexander Pope. But even aside from that, satire is not really my thing. Either you agree with the satirist’s view of his or her target, in which case the satire is redundant; or you disagree with it, in which case the satire is annoying; or you don’t care about it one way or another, in which case the satire is boring, its point perhaps lost on you. But satire can be more interesting when it isn’t supposed to be there—when it is half-hidden. That happens sometimes when anthropologists turn their eye to their own society; the neutral and unjudgmental gaze that allows the ethnographer to look with equanimity at any custom or belief, from sun worship to cannibalism, can turn ironical when it means a distance on one’s own culture, which suddenly looks strange, even grotesque. That happens sometimes in Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, which in its best moments, which are rare and perhaps unseen as such by its author, uses “theory” as cover for a barbed dissection of British society in the Wilson-Callaghan era—the book was first published in 1979, just as Margaret Thatcher was taking office—but which still resonated with me as a former Londoner of a later day. But I’d picked the book up out of a misunderstanding. I thought it would be about rubbish in the specific sense of garbage; an analysis of how people decide to discard things or not (or rescue them from the trash after they’ve been discarded) would be interesting in itself and possibly of relevance to aesthetics generally. But Thompson means “rubbish” in a slightly different sense: deprived of value. He presents a simple thesis: that there are three fundamental categories of value, namely durable (value increases over time), transient (valued decreases over time), and rubbish (without value), and that items of transient value can only be promoted to the durable category if they first pass through a stage of being devalued (rubbish). His great example of this is given in his third (and most implicitly satirical) chapter, “Rat-infested slum or glorious heritage?,” which gives an inside view (the author had been a construction worker) of how Islington row houses went from being unsalvageable, unsellable wrecks to restored and valuable exempla of gentrification. All very interesting—but the fact that in this case objects of transient value became rubbish before being transformed into ones of durable value is no demonstration of the contention that it could not have happened otherwise—that a thing considered durable can be demoted to merely transient and eventually even rubbish, or that something can go from transient to durable without passing through a rubbish stage. Oddly, Thompson seems to believe that expressing his proposition in a diagram makes it true, or at least convincing—set it down to the bad influence of structuralism and semiotics on its epigones in the 1970s. On the other hand, diagrams are a relief from the garrulousness and self-importance of the author’s voice (I think this is the first time I haven’t been tempted to quote in A Reader’s Diary from what I’ve been reading). His title is more telling than he realized. What this book has ultimately done for me—inadvertently—has been to make me more conscious of something I rarely dwell on: that to find something unreadable is also a reading. There are texts considered transient, such as news stories, and ones held to be durable in value: Homer, Plato; but also those whose value is determined as insignificant or nil. Have I been wrong to omit any of the latter from this diary? If so, I hereby mend my ways, more conscious that sometimes abandoning a book unfinished is a smart way of reading it and that this occasionally has to be said.
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Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, second edition, Foreword by Joshua O. Reno, is published by Pluto Press, London, 2017.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.