202039 Thompson RubbishTheory

Michael Thompson Rubbish Theory The Creation & Destruction of Value " / - i ONFRONT THE OBJECT", said Capability >_• Brown, "and drawn nigh obliquely...." Just as, to understand poverty, we must study the very rich: so, to understand value, we must study rubbish. The one is the dark side of the other. But the social sciences, paying little heed to the tenets of landscape gardening, have tended to adopt a brutish head-on approach. Anthropologists interest themselves in what is noticed, treasured, and admired in an exotic society rather than with what is disregarded, discarded, and despised.

The sociology of knowledge is well-established, yet the sociology of ignorance scarcely exists. Economics is concerned with scarcity; if something becomes dirt-cheap it disappears from view. There is more than just aesthetic satisfaction to be gained from this devious approach. The fact is that the dark side and the light side feed one on the other—that which was worthless becomes valu- able: what was once admired is now despised. As we draw nigh obliquely this continual flux is revealed to us; from the front it must always remain hidden. So the study of rubbish holds out the possibility, not just of understanding value, but of understanding the process whereby value is con- tinually being created and destroyed.

We are all familiar with the way despised Victorian objects have become sought-after antiques—with bakelite Art-deco ashtrays that have become collectors' items, with old bangers transformed into vintage motor cars. Yet, without a theory of rubbish, we can have no real understand- ing of how and why these transformations occur. The basic idea in Rubbish Theory is that, when we take stock of our world, we are very selective; we only include those items that are of value— anything that has no value is excluded. If we did MICHAEL THOMPSON is a social anthropologist. His book "Rubbish Theory" will be published by Oxford University Press in July.

not do this we could never complete our stock- taking. Those objects that we include fall into two categories: those that increase in value over time (the durable) and those that decrease in value over time (the transient). For some objects, such as Queen Anne walnut tallboys and second-hand Ford Cortinas, membership is self-evident—they lie within a region of fixed assumptions. Other objects may not be so unequivocal and, by making a personal aesthetic commitment, we may be able to tip them one way or the other. Such flexibility is made possible by the existence of a third, unnoticed, category—rubbish.

A transient object, declining in value, can sink into rubbish and then at some later date be discovered by some creative individual and transferred to durability. Just why some objects get transferred and others do not— and just why some people are able to do this and others are not—are the intriguing questions that Rubbish Theory raises and tries to answer. Rubbish Theory, with its bizarre subject matter and engaging paradoxes, is often smiled upon by economists, sociologists and physical scientists as if it were some Wodehousean corner of Academia: an amusing backwater, like the Drones Club or Lord Emsworth's estate, far removed from the mainstream of social life.

There is the assumption that, though it may hold for Victoriana and bakelite ashtrays, it does not, of course, hold for major components of the economy such as housing. There is the assumption that, though the qualities of durability, transience, and rubbishness may be subject to a certain social malleability, this varia- tion takes place within severe natural limits. Both these assumptions are mistaken. BETWEEN 1966 and 1971 I was living in North London and working as a carpenter for a small (and now bankrupt) building firm. Like all my colleagues, I also "did foreigners" (moonlighting— 12 PRODUCED 2005 BY

ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Rubbish Theory 13 taking on other jobs, theoretically in one's spare time), installing a cast-iron grate and marble sur- round here, building a Georgian pipe-box to con- ceal the gas-fired central heating there. Essentially our work consisted of transforming dilapidated early-Victorian artisans' cottages into trendy residences for Observer journalists, and we were all piratically engaged in the early stages of a process that has since been christened "gentrification." "Carpenter" is perhaps too grand a title for my activities as a wood-butcher which, appropriately, were very crudely dovetailed with the desultory pursuit of my

D. at London University. And it was this Swiftian regime of wallowing in the ordure of the blocked drains in the basements of Ripplevale Grove in the morning and contributing to seminars on cognitive economics at University College in the afternoon that led me to the realisa- tion that even so major a component of the economy as housing is subject to exactly the same social dynamics as are bakelite ashtrays. The kinds of societies traditionally studied by anthropologists have little or no recorded history and this means that when, more recently, they have started to look at Western society, anthropologists have found it difficult to take account of the historical record: not surprisingly, since they operate within a set of techniques that has been evolved specially to cope with situations where such an historical record does not exist.

This is something of a sore point with the historian whose traditional territory the anthropologist muscles in on in this way. Let me try to make amends (and bolster my argument) by at least starting off with an historical example: the Packington Street Affair. The controversy raged and eventually reached the Housing Minister, who at that time was Mr Richard Crossman. He decided in favour of demolition. In his speech announcing this decision he said: "These rat-infested slums must be demolished. Old terraced houses may have a certain snob- appeal to members of the middle-class but they are not suitable accommodation for working- class tenants."

From this amazing statement (he was a Cabinet Minister in a Labour Government) we can extract the Crossman definition of a slum, which runs something like this: "An old building which, occupied by members of the middle-class, forms part of our glorious heritage, is, if occupied by members of the working-class, a rat-infested slum." So Mr Crossman would have agreed with my thesis that slums are socially determined and that such physical, physiological, and economic considera- tions as poor living standards, lack of services and amenities, poor health, dampness, inadequate light, inadequate cooking facilities, overcrowding, high fire risk, while real enough are essentially the by- products of a concealed social process.

They are the effects, not the cause. A commonsense view of the nature of housing would be that, when new, a house had a certain expected life-span and a certain, quite high, value. As time went by the expected life-span would decrease and so would its economic value. When it reached its allotted span its value would be virtually zero, it would be demolished, replaced by a new house, and the process would start again. T H E PACKINGTON ESTATE in Islington in North London consisted of one long street of early Victorian terraced houses called Packington Street and a number of smaller streets of similar houses which included one side of a large garden square— Union Square.

The local council decided that this estate should be compulsorily purchased, demolished, and replaced by a complex of modern council flats. As usual, the interval between deci- sion and implementation was lengthy and the houses suffered deterioration through "planners' blight." Even so, their condition was sufficiently good for a (largely middle-class) pressure group to oppose the demolition. They claimed that the houses were structurally sound, needing only modernisation, bathrooms in the rear extensions, and so on, and that they were architecturally and environmentally valuable. A CONCEALED SOCIAL PROCESS operates behind this commonsensical facade. If we say that those houses with a finite expected life-span and decreasing economic value are in the transient category and those with zero expected life-span and zero value (excluding site and scrap value) are in the rubbish category, then we can see that there is a third category, the durable category, the members of which, flying in the face of common sense, have an ideally infinite expected life-span and increase in value over time: what the estate-agent terms "period houses", the buildings that constitute "our glorious heritage."

The euphemistic terminology of the estate agent confirms the cultural nature of these categories. The transient houses are described as "new" or "contemporary" or "post-War" and. if they happen to be terraced, they will be described as "Town Houses" to avoid any polluting confu- PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 14 Michael Thompson sion with the rubbish houses which are optimistically described as "older-type terraced houses." Economists, alas, are also a party to the com- monsensical view of housing: "Houses are one of the most durable forms of capital.... As far as mere physical life is con- cerned, houses may last for generations, given reasonable maintenance.

Admittedly they fall in public esteem, e. become obsolescent, sooner than this but even obsolescence takes place quite "1 The economist's assumption here is that the long expected life-span of a house derives from its intrinsic physical properties: the lastingness of bricks and mortar, tiles and plaster, timber and glass; and that its career (its gradual physical and social decline) is the natural outcome of fair wear and tear, of continual use and the ravages of the weather. This "natural" gradual decline, so the argument runs, is accompanied by, and may be slightly modified by, a parallel fall in public esteem, deriving from the effects of obsolescence and the vagaries of fashion.

THE WHOLE PROCESS and its interpretation appear so obvious, so self-evident, that it may seem rather pedantic to go to such lengths to set it out here. But the whole of this commonsense account is based on the physical properties of houses and these, I wish to argue, are the by- products, not the determinants, of the process. Consequently the explanation must be stood on its head. It is not that the intrinsic properties of con- sumer durables naturally give rise to this familiar pattern of decline, but that those commodities which display this pattern of decline we (or rather, the economists among us) assign to the category "consumer durable."

Further, this lastingness is 1 R. C. O. Matthews, The Trade Cycle (1959). There is, unfortunately, some confusion of terminology here, for which I must carry the blame. In describing housing as "one of the most durable forms of capital" the enonomist does not mean that houses are in the durable category as I have defined it. He means that the value of houses decreases more slowly than that of most other things: that their expected life-spans are longer. But the economist puts all houses into my transient category and in so doing accepts the commonsense view in which there are only two categories, transient and rubbish.

As a house transfers from the transient to the rubbish category so it passes out of the economist's field of vision, becoming valueless and so no longer possessing any sense of scarcity. imposed not by intrinsic physical properties but by the social system. An adequate theory of the economics of housing must be able to account for this social process of imposition; both the mechanisms that make it possible and the dynamic forces that cause it to change. I do not mean to imply that the natural properties of objects have nothing to do with this social process.

Obviously, it is much easier to impose durability on a solid granite-faced Edwardian bank than on a thatched wattle-and-daub cottage, yet we frequently choose the more difficult alternative. Equally obvious is the corollary that any natural explanation for such a manifestly unnatural choice is bound to be inade- quate. First, the natural process of decline becomes a little less natural when we realise that the fact that buildings last for generations is dependent upon their receiving "reasonable maintenance." The amount of maintenance that is deemed reasonable is not a quantity deriving naturally from the intrinsic physical properties of the house and its environment.

The level of maintenance that is deemed reasonable for a building is a function of its expected life-span and its expected life-span is a function of the cultural category to which that building at any moment is assigned; if its category membership changes, so will its expected life-span and its reasonable level of maintenance. For example, it is obvious, in view of the recent Appeal for money and the vigorous public response to it, that most of us believe that £2,000,000 is a reasonable sum to expend on the maintenance of St Paul's Cathedral, this being the amount required to prevent it from collapsing under its own weight.

On the other hand, to expend an equivalent sum on a badly-bulged block of Victorian working-class dwellings in Limehouse would plainly be con- sidered unreasonable. This is because the expected, or ideal, or hoped-for, life-span of St Paul's is immense (at least a further 500 years) and perhaps infinite, while that of the slum tenement is a few years at the most. We might say that the "natural" life-span of St Paul's is being artificially prolonged; that of the slum tenement artificially curtailed. Both in the first instance were built to last. St Paul's Cathedral and the East End Industrial Dwellings are evidently in very different cultural categories, and their expected life-spans and reasonable levels of maintenance vary accordingly.

So the economist's argument remains reasonable as long as the expected life-spans of buildings change only in response to the march of time. If we find that their expected life-spans change in response to other factors, such as the socially induced transfers PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Rubbish Theory 15 between cultural categories, then the economist's argument becomes fundamentally unreasonable. Second, the decline in public esteem which nor- mally is seen as a peripheral social accompaniment to the "natural" process of decline of the house is, in fact, a complex and partially independent process.

And it looks as though the process of physical decline is not really a "natural" process anyway, but is closely tied up with cultural categories and in particular with the expected life- span that we attribute to a building. In other words, the initial separation of natural and social factors is not valid. This decline in public esteem—that is, obsolescence—is commonly held to precede the natural physical decline of houses, but nevertheless is considered to proceed quite slowly. But is the rate of obsolescence a constant for any particular building or is it an independent or partially independent variable?

To answer this we must enquire into just what obsolescence is. Obsolescence derives from the interrelation of the form of the building, which is largely fixed at the time of construction, and two influences which do change through time. One of these is Technology and the other Fashion. For example, in the mid-18th-century, the owner of a new house in the City of London would find that his property gradually became obsolete in two ways. On the one hand his plumbing system discharging into a cesspit in his rear basement room, while perfectly adequate when the house was new, would gradually appear less and less attrac- tive after the invention in 1779 of Alexander Cum- ming's patent water closet and in 1778 of Joseph Bramah's water valve-closet.

And the longer it remained there the less attractive it would become. No matter how long he held on to his property he would never find it becoming more attractive, because it possessed such crude sanitation rather than a low-level bathroom suite with his-and-her bidets. That is, the march of technological evolu- tion is irreversible and linear. By contrast he would find, to begin with, that the style of newer houses was in some ways rather different from that of his house and slowly these differences would become greater and greater. He would find public opinion swinging away from his style of house and rating the newer houses as altogether more fashionable.

But, provided he and his heirs held on to their house (and assuming they staved off all attempts at compulsory purchase), they would eventually find 2 Such a largely unquestioned assumption underlies the refusal, in the 1960s, to grant the course in fashion at the Royal College of Art the degree status which was extended to all other courses. that, rather than becoming less and less desirable, it was becoming more and more desirable—the style of his house had become fashionable once more. Thus the progress of fashion, while irreversible, is clearly not linear but cyclical.

The relative contributions to obsolescence of technological evolution and fashion may vary con- siderably; sometimes one is dominant, sometimes the other. But this balance is not reflected in the weight given to the two influences in scholarly com- mentary. The role of technological innovation features in every textbook on economics, but what of fashion? Well, that is best left to women's magazines. Fashion, being seen as frivolous, ephemeral, transient, and irrational, is not afitsub- ject for scholarly attention where what is prized is the serious, the persistent, the durable, and the 2 SERIOUS THOUGHT has long been biased towards the utilitarian (for instance, the satisfaction of physiological and social needs in response to such universals as inclement weather and the threat of attack) and away from the question of fashion (for instance, the seemingly whim-like particularistic oscillations that elevate first one need then another, as shortlived as they are unpredictable, but essentially trivial in that they are seen as contained within the universal and eternal frame).

Economics is no exception to this general rule; indeed it has produced one of the most explicit and persuasive formulations of it. What an awesome pit opens up in the hitherto firm terrain of understand- ing if we admit that perhaps all these years we have had things the wrong way round and that really, instead of examining the eternal and unchanging, we should have been studying the erratic flutterings of the butterfly of taste! With this possibility in mind, let us take a garden square in an inner suburb of North London. The square is real enough but, to protect my sources, must remain unnamed.

The date is 1965 and the square, though it still exists, is not now as it was then. All things are in flux, and when describing specifics one must always attach a time and place label. The generalities of the process, though, have a timeless and universal quality: there are other Innominate Squares in cities all the world over. When the houses in this square were new, they stood on the outskirts of the City, there were green fields visible from the rear windows and the majestic plane trees, for whose protection residents' associations are now organised, were tiny saplings.

The square was part of a late Georgian and early PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 16 Michael Thompson Victorian suburb built by speculators in modest imitation of the earlier grand estates in central London such as Bedford Square and Belgravia. Sir John Summerson notes a certain decline in taste and competence about this period and that it was most marked in the "remoter regions of Pad dington, Chelsea, and Islington where a less prosperous class of tenant was "3 So these houses when new were moderately desirable, moderately expensive, designed for and occupied by moderately prosperous middle-class families: those in modest middle-management in the City or comfortable bureaucracy in Westminster, or perhaps fairly successful men of commerce, merchants, and large shopkeepers.

OVER THE NEXT HUNDRED OR SO YEARS the houses in this square followed a career so familiar, not only in housing but throughout the entire range of what economists call consumer durables, that we accept it as part of the natural order of things. The houses declined, both in physical terms and with reference to the social standing of their inhabitants, to whom, over the years, ownership had passed. Consequently, it is rather difficult to imagine what a house in this square must have been like, both in physical and social terms, in 1840 when it was brand new and on the market for the first time.

Obviously the structure, the paintwork, and so on would have been in excellent order, as would the communal garden in the centre of the square. In social terms the house would probably have been seen then in much the same way as we now see a new four- or five-bedroomed Wates-built town house in a tasteful little development in Barnet, Chislehurst, or Carshalton Beeches. Over the next 60 years or so the house declined surprisingly rapidly. This was the heyday of the Industrial Revolution and the rate of technological change was extremely high. Yet it could well be argued that fashion played a more important role than technological change in bringing about this rapid decline.

Islington had barely established itself as a desirable bourgeois suburb when the railways, main-line and suburban, totally invalidated the logic underlying its development. Admittedly, Barnsbury, Highbury, and Canonbury were served by the North London Line from Richmond to Broad Street, but the massive radiating network of 'John Summerson, Georgian London (1945; e. 1962). lines that developed between 1838, when Euston was opened, and 1877, when the Holborn Viaduct was completed, meant that for the first time the moderately prosperous couid work in London and live in the country (not that it remained country for).

A spectacular change in fashion gave impetus to this migration: the rapid collapse of the classical tradition and its replacement by the various brands. of Gothic, Elizabethan, and Venetian that characterised the Victorian era. ALMOST OVERNIGHT the Georgian house in Is- lington became unfashionable. The inhabitants fled, not so much because technological change had rendered inadequate the amenities of their houses, but in order to join their equals or betters in the optimistic new Victorian suburbs. Into the vacuum moved those on the next rung down the economic ladder. In these early years of decline Islington, along with Chelsea and St John's Wood, exhibited a tarnished gentility and provided a favourite place for prosperous Victorian gentlemen to install their mistresses in pretty, but small and modestly priced, houses.

But by the end of the 1890s the area had descended past the naughty to the straightforward seedy and, eventually, the downright sordid. AND SO THE DECLINE continued. In the period • between the Wars our Georgian house in a garden square, along with most houses in Islington, had become a multi-occupation tenement, each floor let as a single unit and, with luck, a cold tap and small lead-lined corner sink on each half- landing, and a single C. in the rear extension on the ground floor. Rents seldom exceeded five shill- ings per week per floor and the legislation provided by the various Rent Acts merely exacerbated the existing situation and trend.

Landlords either could not afford, or saw no point in, maintaining their properties and this attitude was reflected and justified by the market value of the houses, which was extraordinarily low. One of the most spectacular examples concerns a four-storey house occupied by a winkle-stall- holder and her husband. Just after the Second World War they were offered their house, free, by the landlord. They refused to accept it. The house still stands and has changed hands several times since (but not for nothing). Evidently the life-span expected of the houses both by landlords and tenants was very short.

Many of these houses did indeed attain their allotted span and were PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 1_ Rubbish Theory 17 demolished and replaced by remarkably well-built blocks of workers' flats in a monolithic Queen Anne style, but the turn of events—the War and its subsequent years of austerity—imposed a long- protracted senility on the remainder, with the result that many, including the houses in our square, are still there today. Externally they show most of the signs of long- term neglect: bulged brickwork due to failure to repoint. peeling or non-existent paintwork, decayed stucco, which in some cases has been removed (and not replaced) in response to a Dangerous Structures Order, cracked front steps, window sashes propped with short lengths of timber after the sash-cords have broken, slates cracked and missing, and, frequently, roofs waterproofed with hessian and bitumen—a cheap alternative to re- slating.

The railings around the basement area are rusty, often the elegant cast-iron pineapples surmounting the corner posts have disappeared, the top-rail has rusted away from the post and is only held in place by a few turns of wire or insulating tape, and some of the uprights, having worked loose, have been appropriated as spears for long-forgotten gang- fights and replaced by odd lengths of redundant gas pipe. The front doors are often unpainted with a clear long triangular gap at the head—the result of distortion of the opening during settlement. But sometimes the tenant has modernised his front door by flushing it with hardboard, in which case it displays a rusty chromium-plated letter-box-cum- knocker made of pressed steel, and a collection of assorted plastic bell pushes.

The front area is usually decorated with a large number of dustbins (one for each occupation unit), and scooters and mopeds under waterproof covers. The door number is often simply crudely painted on in large figures, and an end-of-terrace house will usually have its return elevation decorated with graffiti. BUT, WHAT IS THIS! Here in the middle of all these uniformly dilapidated houses is one, immaculately painted Thames Green, with orange front door complete with six fielded panels, brass dolphin knocker and huge brass letter-plate to match. The leaded fanlight has been painstakingly repaired, and affixed to the brickwork at the side of the door is a blue-and-white enamel number plate: a little touch of provincial France proclaiming that the owner drinks Hirondelle Vin Ordinaire with his Quiche Lorraine for his dinner and not Light Ale with his ham-and-egg pie for his tea.

The cast-iron balconies to the first floor windows are gay with geraniums and painted shiny black. Likewise the front railing, through which is visible, thanks to the enormously enlarged basement window (which has, not closed white net curtains, but a fully-retracted navy blue blind), the basement kitchen. Directly under the window is a two-bowl twin-drainer stainless steel sink with mixer taps and waste disposal unit. On each side it is flanked by formica-topped Wrighton units and the walls are clad with similar cupboards and clear- polyurethane sealed knotty-pine matching. We catch a glimpse of a stuffed pike in a bow- fronted glass case fixed to the chimney breast, and below this the space left by the now obsolete fire- place opening has been cunningly utilised as a mini wine cellar and is filled by a metal and beechwood bottle-rack.

The dividing wall has been knocked through, an RSJ (Rolled Steel Joist, known in the trade as "Irish Jays") inserted and clad in the ubiquitous knotty-pine, and so the heather-brown hexagonal quarry-tile floor extends in one unbroken sweep from the kitchen sink, through the rear dining area to the hardwood sill of the large french windows which open to the patio, paved with Staffordshire blue bricks, and the garden beyond. We cannot help but notice the pine farmhouse table from Heal's, the bright red bentwood chairs from Habitat, some large gilt letters in a bold type salvaged from a Victorian grocer's shop front, and a row of large blue jars with ground glass tops, similarly salvaged from an archaic chemist's and bearing in gold lettering the abbreviated names of assorted poisons.

And so I could go on: every feature, every lick of paint, once one has learned the language, a clear statement proclaiming the presence of a frontier middle class. THIS DECODING OF THE ENVIRONMENT, as well as providing a malicious parlour game, is now the orthodox concern of structural anthropology. When applied to housing it is particularly reward- ing, for people cram an awful lot of carefully encoded information into their houses and its patterning reveals quite clearly that houses, like other communicable things such as motor cars and ash trays, are assigned to one or other of the cultural categories: transient, rubbish, and durable.

No great sociological insights are involved in pointing out that houses in the transient category tend to be inhabited by a sector of our society that is much concerned with respectability. From the PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 18 Michael Thompson viewpoint of those who do not live in them, the inhabitants of transient houses are the dull and plodding members of the lower middle class or upper working class. Houses in the durable category would seem to be the preserve of the more exalted middle class and of the remnants of the upper class: professional men, captains of industry, large landowners and the like.

The rubbish houses tend to be inhabited by what is left: the lower end of the working class, perhaps criminal, shifting, or immigrant. And then those who exist on the margins of society: the non-coping families, the mentally ill and so on. A neat self-perpetuating system we might think: the cultural categorisation of the houses exactly matching the socio-economic divisions within the society. But to propose such a self-perpetuating system, though intellectually seductive, is to ignore the empirical data and to avoid asking the one really interesting question, which is: How can such a seemingly self-perpetuating system ever change itself?

For houses sometimes transfer from one cultural category to another, and people sometimes move up or down the socio-economic ladder. Worse still, cultural categories sometimes cease to exist, and the socio-economic ladder sometimes extends itself or retracts itself as if it belonged to a fire brigade. In the later 1960s the inner suburbs of North London provided a ready-made laboratory for the study of this question, for these transfers virtually filled the social and physical arenas. There was hardly any self-perpetuation left in the system; almost all was change. THE INTERESTING FEATURE of this category system is that membership is not fixed for all time but is to some greater or lesser extent flexible.

A member of the transient category can, and usually does, gradually transfer to the rubbish category and a member of the rubbish category can, under certain conditions, transfer to the durable category. The other transfers that would complete the diagram do not happen. So, dynamically: insn'nt - Rubbish Transfers that hjppcn -™ Transfers thjt do not happen - - This then is the dynamic system of cognitive categories, and the problem now is to enquire how this cultural system can be related to the social order in such a way as to recognise that they are closely tied to one another yet, at the same time, are not in general mutually reinforcing and self- perpetuating.

The arrows on the diagram, indicat- ing those transfers that happen and those that do not, provide an obvious clue to the identity of the third and missing element between cultural and social order: control. NO GREAT OR REVOLUTIONARY INSIGHTS are involved in the realisation that those who own and control durable objects enjoy more power and prestige than those who live entirely in a world of transience or, worse still, a world of rubbish. Similarly, when we look at examples of successful transfers of objects from rubbish to durability we see that, at the same time, their ownership is transferred from the rag-and-bone man to the knowledgeable collector—from the junk-shop window to the Bond Street showroom—from Steptoe & Son to Bevis Hillier et al.

(ownership, of course, is just one kind of control). The degree of control over the transfers between categories can vary widely and rapidly. Not even Mr Crossman could stem the innovative tide of the early 1960s that transformed many square miles of inner London from rat-infested slum into glorious heritage—the phenomenon now known as "gentrification." In many ways "gentrification" is an unfortunate term; for those young couples— actors, graphic designers, architects, art-school teachers, and television executives—who formed the vanguard of the frontier middle class were, we can now see with the benefit of hindsight, forceful and successful social climbers who competed (on very unequal terms) with the indigenous inhabitants of those run-down areas who, alas, had no access to durability.

Something no gentleman would do (or need to). Those much-satirised trendies, crashing through social barriers with the same insensitive arrogance that they knocked through the dividing walls of their terraced Georgian houses, believed themselves to be the harbingers of that egalitarian millennium where we would all end up like David Frost— classless and close-cropped, successful and suited by Cecil Gee. In the grey economic light of the 1970s, we see them consolidating their social gains with Volvo estate cars, the country life, and private schools. PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Rubbish Theory 19 A T THE RISK OF being accused of upper-class English romanticism of the worst kind, of preach- ing cultural separatism, and of advocating a return to Edwardian social distinctions, I will simply state that in the mid-'60s Innominate Square, Islington, was unstably inhabited by two groups so distinct in culture, in attitudes, in behaviour, and in world- view as to constitute two separate tribes.

This is not to say that they would always remain separate: that there would be no inter-marriage, no trade-offs between the groups as they readjusted their values in the light of their inevitable interac- tions. "Interaction"—that optimistically egalitarian catchword of the ideologically committed sociologist—is ill-suited to describe the sort of social intercourse between these tribes who, living in different cognitive worlds, had to share the same cramped physical one. "Head-on collision" would be more appropriate. And trade-offs there indeed have been. One now cannot predict, by decoding the exterior of a house, the social identity of the occupants with anything like the accuracy that was possible only ten years ago.

Distinguished baroque harpsichordists and first-generation Turkish kebab- house owners now live behind identical and adjoin- ing facades. And old terraced houses—carefully restored on the outside and thoroughly rehabilitated inside—are now (pace Mr Crossman) regarded as suitable accommodation for members of both the middle and working classes. THE TWO TRIBES are "the Knockers-Through" and "the Ron-and-Cliffs." The Knockers-Through, immortalised by Alan Bennett, are often considered to be synonymous with the frontier middle class. This is not quite correct. The Knockers-Through constitute only a Art Sales Boom in "Second-Hand Rubbish' PRICES for Victorian and reproduction fur- niture and art works— items once dismissed as representing the "inferior" end of the Fine Art market—have risen re- markably in the last few- years.

Demand for objects which barely qualify as "antiques" has risen enor- mously, largely because good original period pieces are expensive and becoming increasingly difficult to find. One London dealer summed up: "A few years ago many of these highly-priced items were dismissed as second-hand rubbish." THE POTENTIAL that this seemingly insatiable demand offers has not been lost on foreign suppliers. Oriental "English" items—factory-made reproduc- tion pieces from the Far East—are now said to be appearing on the British market. At the same lime, prices have at least trebled for certain items of British produced reproduction furniture, particularly for pieces made in the 1920s, a period noted for its high quality reproduction of "period" works.

A dealer, I am told, can count himself lucky if he can get his hands on an eight-piece set of Queen Anne-style walnut dining chairs. They now fetch around £1,500. Three years ago they would have cost between £400 and £500. A set of good quality Chippendale-style chairs which might have been "knocked down" in a sale-room for about £400, will now fetch about £1,000. STIMULATED BY DEMANDS from American buyers, the whole field has become a profitable growth area. In the last four years or so well-made Chippendale- style mahogany chairs, produced by cheap labour in Korea and India, have been appearing.

Reproduction pieces—those made from about 1900 onwards—carry the term "style" in auction catalogues. Most "country"furniture sales now have their bulky quota of such items as "Chippendale- style" cabinets, "Georgian-style" dining tables or even "19th century-style"chairs. As the reproduced heirs of a distinguished English furniture making tradition, they now take their place in auction rooms alongside authentic period pieces and antiques. (The Government-accepted definition of an antique being items which are 100 years old or over.) The growing business for Victorian, Edwardian, art nouveau and art deco pieces, as well as for reproduction items, is particularly evident in the flourishing auction rooms outside London, though there are sale rooms in the capital now largely devoted to this end of the trade.

ONE OF THF MOST surprising foreign enthusiasms has been for stained glass and ecclesiastical fittings. One dealer is reported to be selling "stained glass by the mile." The Americans, it seems, use it to make room dividers and even doors for kitchen cupboards. Japanese buyers have been purchasing quantities of Gothic-type church fittings—altar screens, brass and wroughl-iron altar rails, lecterns and carved decorations. At an auction at Phillips last week woodworm- riddled panels, which would have landed up in a dustbin but for the dustmen's strike, were bought "for someone in Europe"for £10.500. Keith Nurse Arts Correspondent, DAILY TELEGRAPH PRODUCED 2005 BY

ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 20 Michael Thompson part of the frontier middle class and there are many others, such as those who engage in meticulous but low-key restoration. However, there can be no doubt that the Knockers-Through, in their strident patronising of their indigenous neighbours (if there are any left) and their crushing insensitivity to the cognitive boundary fences of those who still persist in distinguishing between public and private, personal and impersonal, are by far the most prominent members of their class. What is more, they are surprisingly long-lived and even in the mid- '70s the diligent anthropologist could still occasionally experience the thrill of overhearing the classic remarks: "We're knocking-through, you know" and "Yes, we were the first people to come and live here."

But one can be too hard on these courageous and creative pioneers. Only ten or fifteen years after the event, architectural students to whom I teach Urban Sociology will tell me that the Knockers-Through did it for the money. This is not so. They did it for love, and from a Dr Johnson-like commitment to London; and they did it against considerable odds. This tiny band who, with little money and much faith, began restoring rubbish houses in the late '50s and early '60s were ridiculed by the staid and established members of the middle class who regarded Hampstead, Highgate, and Golders Green as the only habitable atolls in the North London Sea of Plebs.

Their attitude was reflected by bank managers, estate agents, mortgage-brokers, building societies and borough architects (not surprisingly, since they are one and the). And so, as anyone who has ever attempted to buy a house will appreciate, a massive economic barricade was erected to keep the rubbish out: out of the durable category, that is. Their indigenous working-class neighbours were equally unsympathetic, but for different reasons. Their response was that, in buying and doing up a rubbish house, the frontiersman was throwing good money after bad. "They're all coming down, them houses" was their endless refrain.

THESE ARE the Ron-and-Cliffs: proud, competitive, working-class, frequently self-employed, villainous, anti-union, racially-prejudiced, Conservative-voting inhabitants of rubbish or near-rubbish houses. The origin of this not very scientific nomenclature is almost lost in the mists of unrecorded time—but not quite. The originators were two printer friends of mine who in the mid- 1960s had a factory near Euston Station. The derivation is rooted in interminable archetypal con- versations in the local pub—between young men with razor-cut hair dressed in Fred Perry shirts, fawn cable-knit cardigans with leather buttons, and large boots—which were always of the following type: "Hey Ron!

What you doing tonight?" "Well Cliff, I thought I'd go down the boozer/ do an oil change on the Consul/ take the bird out down the West End." (aside) "I'm sorry mate, did I spill your beer?" "Sorry Ron. What was you saying?" "Well Cliff...." The Knockers-Through and the staid established members of the middle class are united by a world view that clearly includes, and places a high value upon, the durable category, and are divided only as to what shall be included in that category. The Knocker Through wants to get his rubbish house in: the bank manager wants to keep it out.

The Ron-and-Cliff has no access to durability: he is committed to a world in which there is only transience and rubbish. In consequence he can see no future except demolition for the house he has to live in. This is a profound cultural difference which, once recognised, allows us to make sense both of the divergent behaviour of the Knocker-Through and the Ron-and-Cliff when faced with the same situation, and of the contradictory encodings that they make of their environment. And nowhere is this contradictory encoding more marked than in the Knocker-Through's and the Ron-and-ClirFs treatments of the front door—that secular icon of urban life.

THE KNOCKER-THROUGH makes his early Victorian house older by fitting a six-panelled Georgian front door with exact reproduction brass door furniture from Beardmore's and painting it either a classic dull colour such as Adam Gold or Thames Green or, better still, black or white. His Ron-and-Cliff neighbour makes his house younger by flushing the original four-panelled door with hardboard, fitting pressed steel or brushed aluminium door furniture such as one would find on a modern private estate and in the local hardware shop, and painting it in a contemporary bright colour such as Canary Yellow or Capri Blue.

The Knocker-Through, having access to durability, is trying (successfully as it turns out) to push his house from the rubbish to the durable category. His neighbour, living in a world of transience, is trying (rather unsuccessfully) to pre- PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Rubbish vent his house from sliding further down the slippery slope from the transient to the rubbish category. TH E EGALITARIANISM of a world bereft of durables can be, and in this case is, spectacularly competitive. Along with the flushed front doors go plastic flowers, nylon net curtains, highly polished motors, and the whole well-scrubbed, sharply-dressed, cigar-smoking, fiver-waving, round-buyer bravado of the Saturday night "down the boozer."

The whole business of "putting on the style"—the devotion to sport, often expensive sports like power-boat racing, duck-shooting, or trout- or shark-fishing; the gambling; the leather coats, Silver-Cross prams and elaborate hair-dos of their wives; the conspicuous consumption of drink, tobacco, sea-foods, and mohair suitings beloved by street-traders, crash-repair specialists, offset lithographers, asphalters, and self-employed central-heating engineers, carpenters, and orna- mental plasterers—serves to define an aristocracy of transience, piratically scornful of those who put their trust in durables, and viciously exclusive of social rubbish. Their motto is "easy come, easy go", for in the Land of Transience the man with the highest turnover rules, OK?

The Ron-and-ClifF stands in the same relationship to our society as the Bedouin of the Euphrates Delta does to the rest of Iran. "The Bedouin should gain his living by the sword. All his values are those of a warrior society, in which the two dominant themes are courage and generosity. By displaying courage in war and so obtaining plunder he gains his livelihood. Through generosity he disposes of what he owns. To be mean implies a want of confidence in one's ability to gain more "4 The secondhand-car dealer whose ageing Ford Consuls filled the front garden of a rubbish house 1 once considered buying was pessimistic: "All coming down, you know.

All Darkies and Bubbles in them houses. Diabolical state. Cook chickens with the insides still in them. The way some people live—fucking disgusting...." The Knocker-Through and the Ron-and-Cliff, though their behaviour is widely divergent, are both 4 S. M. Salim, Marsh-dwellers of the Euphrates Delta (1962). Theory 21 perfectly rational in terms of their differing relations to the transient to rubbish to durable transfers. That is, the category system furnishes each of them with a different set of rules. But what about the despised social rubbish—the Darkies and the Bubbles? (Rhyming slang—bubble and squeak: Greek.)

They don't seem to know about the rules at all. The Greek Cypriots, in particular, are much addicted to metal-frame windows and to brick facades painted pink with all the mortar laboriously picked out in pale blue. As the transfers to durability gain momentum so Conservation Areas are designated and legislation is now contemplated forcibly to prevent the Bubble from going to this enormous trouble to knock thousands of pounds off the market value of his house. This would seem to be the thin end of a very nasty wedge. For the thick end of this attack on rubbish is the gas-oven and the elimination of those who have no place within the system.

If there is one thing worse than some- one painting the front of his Regency villa pink and blue, it is stopping him from painting it pink and blue. I WOULD CLAIM that the foregoing treatment of housing in general and of the problem of slums in particular has taken us a long way from the more familiar position set out within the collective con- ventional wisdom of urban planners, educationists, and anti-poverty campaigners. But whither has it taken us? And, in view of the present vexed, intractable, and serious problems that are involved, what are the implications of this shift of position?

Like all journeys, it is easier to tell how far one has travelled than to discover where exactly one has ended up. The distance can be measured in three ways. 1. The conventional approach assumes that objects have the qualities that they have as a result of their inherent physical properties—that these qualities are, as it were, a "given": a part of nature. The present approach avoids this assumption, and, while not denying that there are certain natural limits, replaces it with the notion of the social malleability of objects—the idea that objects have the qualities that they have as the result of a social process of endowment.

It follows that the same forces that confer these qualities may, in changed social circumstances, withdraw them. Society giveth and society taketh away; and, in the act of giving and taking away, society is itself changed. 2. The conventional approach, like most serious thought, does not pay much heed to rubbish. The PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 22 Michael Thompson attitude is that rubbish housing unfortunately exists, that this is a bad thing, that something should be done about it, that it constitutes a problem to be solved. Just as household rubbish presents a problem that is solved by refuse collec- tion and disposal, so the first solution that comes to mind is Slum Clearance—a once-and-for-all round by the housing ash-cart, that becomes instead a permanent and expensive social service.

Having (by treating the symptoms and not the cause) failed to cure the disease, these urban doctors conclude that the disease is incurable and that it can only be arrested by regular and massive injections of cash. The present approach sees rub- bish housing not in the first instance as a public health problem but as a crucial integral part of the system. Slums are social in origin but physical in manifestation. As the social nexus varies so does the physical manifestation: sometimes almost vestigial, sometimes so widespread as to become a "problem." And this is the trouble with the con- ventional wisdom relating to the slum: it suffers from the narrowness of all problem-oriented research.

The great landscape gardener, Lancelot Brown, when confronted with a client's estate, did not say "What is your ", he asked "What are the capabilities of this piece of land?" Optimism, generality, and scope flowed where otherwise all would have been pessimism, specificity, and narrowness. That is what is wrong with the conventional wisdom: not enough Capability Browns and too many Problematical Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. 3. Since the conventional approach ignores the social malleability of objects, it is led away from the sort of investigations that would confirm and illuminate this malleability. The present approach places great emphasis on cognitive frameworks and in particular on discontinuities between cognitive frameworks.

This means that where there are cultural boundaries within a society, their existence is recognised and taken into account. The con- ventional approach tends to ignore cultural boundaries; this approach is focused upon them. FOR EXAMPLE. Gillian Tindall has shown how the way the inhabitants of a street in Kentish Town see that street varies spectacularly with the social con- text of the 5 The indigenous working- class inhabitants see it as on the way down because 5 Gillian Tindall, "A Street in London", New Society (No. 433, 1971). immigrants have moved in and the Knockers- Through sit with their curtains open and wash their dirty dishes at the front window.

The Knockers- Through, on the other hand, committed to their restored frontages and leafy patios, see it as on the up-and-up. Significantly, she does not notice that she fails to describe how the immigrants see the street. Now these different street-views may coexist peacefully enough in the back garden but they are inevitably in conflict in the market place. There is only one market, and either it will confirm the view that the street is on the way down (in which case houses in the street will sell for less and less money as time goes by), or it will confirm the view that the street is on the up-and-up (in which case houses will sell for more and more money as time goes by).

So, in the market place, one street-view will win and the others will lose. Why is it that, in this case, the Knockers-Through win and the Ron-and-Cliffs, the Bubbles, and the Darkies lose? What sort of con- trol mechanism lies behind this real-life Midas touch: the power to make things durable? THE DIFFERENT WORLD VIEWS of the Knockers- Through, the Ron-and-Cliffs, and the Darkies and Bubbles correlate to widely differing patterns of investment and of sociability, which in turn reveal striking differences in control over time and space. These differences are so marked as to define three largely autonomous cultures—(i) a middle-class culture based upon durability which secures an extensive control over time and space; (2) a culture of transience with a proportionally higher invest- ment in social relationships but with much less extensive control over time and space; and (3) a culture of poverty with a pathetic portfolio of investments and very little control over either time or space.

For instance, what very different world-views and what very different, yet equally realistic, expectations of events in time and space are embodied in the Curzon family motto: "Curzon hold what Curzon held", and in the ever-present fear of those struggling to leave the lower orders: "clogs to clogs in three generations." In other words, what I am suggesting is that the power to make things durable is a function of the relative extents of this control over time and space, and that control over time and space is secured by gaining control over knowledge. That is, it is not just physical objects but also ideas, historical facts, and systems of knowledge that are subject to social PRODUCED 2005 BY

ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Rubbish Theory 23 malleability. Cars, ashtrays, and houses are only the physical tip of a huge conceptual iceberg. AN ANECDOTE may help to clarify this point. k. The Ron-and-Cliff, like the Euphrates Bedouin, not only maximises turnover but must be seen to maximise turnover by constantly reaffirming his relationships through generosity. Pay night (we were always paid in the pub) was a veritable potlatch of round-buying (often £5 and in recent years as much as £15 for a single round). What is more, one could not just quietly slip the money to the barmaid and ask her to give everyone a drink.

It had to be the highly ritualised perfor- mance befitting an urban warrior. First empty one's own glass while everyone else's is still half-full, then shout for the ex-boxing-champion landlord and, with him in attendance, address all one's friends and acquaintances one by one, even if they are in the other bar. ("Hey, Alf! What you drinking? Light Ale? Have a scotch!") Another example of turnover maximisation was a "foreigner" which two of us undertook and which involved installing a mid-Victorian cast-iron grate and marble surround in the drawing-room of a Regency house belonging to an executive of a large company.

The grate and surround were, in fact, from my own house (where they had been removed to make room for a kitchen). But we spun an elaborate and convincing tale about having had to buy them out of a Regency house that was being converted and so having to pass on what at the time we thought was an exorbitant price. The fireplace was quickly, but neatly, installed and we retired to the pub with our £30, well pleased with our Ron-and-Cliff piracy and at having exploited the Knocker-Through owner by convincing him that a mid-Victorian fireplace was really a Regency one.

A few weeks later, while we were doing some more work in the same house, the owner proudly showed the drawing-room to a friend who exclaimed: "Oh, isn't that splendid! Whatever you do you must keep that marvellous fireplace!" At that moment I realised that we were the exploited ones. The fact that we knew that the fireplace had just been installed and was of the wrong period was irrelevant, for all that matters is that those who exert the widest overall control over time and space believe it to be original. Already the value of the house had risen by very much more than £30 Credibility, not truth, is the name of this game.

IT IS TEMPTING BUT UNWISE to rush ahead and try to discover what practical implications flow from this acknowledgment of cultural boundaries and of their role in shaping our urban environment. For instance, take the dynamic phenomena of class apartheid and ghetto formation. The interaction of the rules derived from the category system and the fixity of houses (the fact that domestic buildings, Mongolian yurts and some timber-frame houses apart, are indissolubly linked to the ground on which they stand) gives rise to the curious process, running counter to the second law of thermodynamics, whereby a completely random, disordered, mixed-up residential arrangement gradually moves towards a structured, orderly, crystallised arrangement of rich and poor ghettos.

If we accept the present fairly widely-held view that class apartheid is a bad thing and that some- thing should be done about it, then the first thing to do is to stop all local authority projects which are virtually uniclass—for example, many new towns, huge council estates, and high-rise blocks. Further, local authorities could take a positive approach to the problem of class apartheid by using their powers to mix up continually the crystallising process—I suggest moving Pentonville Jail to Belgravia; a fruit and veg, secondhand clothes, and junk street market in Bond Street; a transport cafe and lorry park in place of the proposed new hotels in the Cromwell Road; and the moving of the Bank of England to the Isle of Dogs.

The ludicrous nature of these proposals indicates that these extreme procedures are probably impossible. That is, they would be trying vainly to impose flexibility upon buildings and areas that currently form part of the region of fixed assumptions. The problems of class apartheid would be nothing compared to the social problems of a world with no fixed assumptions. It is rather like suggesting beheading as a cure for migraine. Even so, more modest proposals along the same lines should prove quite feasible and, indeed, are now happening, though more from economic necessity than from free choice.

We would be well advised to make a virtue of necessity and to welcome the British Museum Library in the Somers Town coal depot and the council-renovated house in the owner-occupied Georgian terrace. ANOTHER WARNING AGAINST leaping too eagerly to practical conclusions, as a result of the recogni- tion that slumminess is imposed by the social system, is contained in the extreme and con- tradictory policies that can result. PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 24 Michael Thompson On the one hand, the argument can run like this: that slums are socially determined; that slumminess is in the eye of the beholder; that the social system imposes slumminess on certain areas of the urban and social environment in order to maintain the status quo.

On this argument, the slum is an instru- ment of oppression and the slum-dweller who accepts the judgment of non-slum-dwellers and shares their disgust with his living conditions is possessed of false consciousness and is actively conniving at his own exploitation. Rubbish theory thus provides the starting point for a revolutionary course of consciousness-raising: "you have nothing to lose but your slums." On the other hand, one can argue like this. Rub- bish is an integral and extremely important part of the category system, and in particular the existence of the rubbish category, together with the possibility of the transfer from rubbish to durable, permits the social mobility which relates our social system to changing technology and other macro- forces.

This means that we cannot get rid of slums within the framework of our present social system since our present social system is the cause of the slums. So, if we wish to keep the present social system (more or less) we must accept slums (in one form or another), must realise that they will always be there and that they are a functional component of the system. So this approach supports the argu- ment which claims that every city should have its Skid Row, its East End, its Soho, in so far as it demonstrates that we cannot get rid of this rubbish without a revolutionary change in society.

There is clearly something too simplistic about a 6 Post-mortems on the poverty programmes in the United States during the 1960s chronicle in detail the problems that await any social programme based solely upon the middle-class world view and a complete disregard for the boundaries between sub-cultures. Particularly scathing is Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (1969). The programmes in the '70s that emphasise bi- culturalism and minority rights will probably reveal the different problems that arise from having too much regard for the same boundaries. model that ends up uniting the conservatives and the radicals (who agree on the cultural boundaries and their location within society and disagree only as to whether they are a good or a bad thing) against the liberals (who try to pretend that the boundaries are not

6 This simplistic model depicts nothing other than the invalid self- perpetuating system which represents the three largely autonomous cultures of the Knockers- Through, the Ron-and-Cliffs, and the Darkies and the Bubbles as persisting unchanged in their essentials (their relative control over time and space). Instead of rushing to wild problem-oriented con elusions, it would be more sensible for those who make decisions (supposedly) on our behalf to try to find out why, in general, these cultures do not persist unchanged. They should enquire how these boundaries may shift one way or another, become more pronounced or more blurred.

They should try to understand how the transactions across these boundaries, which are inevitable given that the bearers of the different cultures are members of the same society and inhabit the same physical universe, may sometimes bring about the con- vergence of the world views that they separate, and may sometimes add fuel to their divergence. To enable them to do this we must look at the social control of knowledge: we must generalise the argument from ashtrays and houses to ideas. In doing this we come up against the great philoso- phical divide between idealists and dialectical materialists.

I argue that what holds for objects also holds for ideas. Ideas, I agree, are ideally free and unconstrained but in reality they must always be generated within a social context and so will inevitably be constrained by control mechanisms. To those idealists who criticise materialists for unjustifiably putting economics, that is things, before ideas, I would reply that materialists should not be saying that things are prior to ideas but that ideas are things. » Michael Thompson 1979 PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Kenneth Minogue Can One Teach "Political Literacy"? Illiberal Illusions about "Activism" and Participation (or, Whatever Happened to Civics?)

THE NEWS from the polls is bad. It turns out that people are very misinformed about politics. Some think the Conservatives are the party of nationalisation, others that the IRA is a Protestant organisation. Lots of people never seem to know the name of the prime minister. Some think he was called Harold, but aren't quite sure if his other name was Wilson, or that charming Macmillan they saw on television the other night. The Dorset cottager who thinks we are still ruled by Ethelred the Unready is no doubt an eccentric, but several authenticated cases of confusion between Mrs Shirley Williams and the Virgin Mary have come to light.

Whatever can be done? Fortunately, a Com- mittee has turned up with a timely Report. The teaching profession will once more save the day by developing amongst children the subject of political literacy. The subject of whati Yes, it is an odd expres- sion. A tiny dwarf called "political" is trying to pass itself off as tall by riding around on the shoulders of a giant called "literacy." The inventors of this unlikely circus act are a "Hansard Society Working Party" and what they are working on is called a "Programme for Political Education." The fruits of their labours have just been published by Longman.

Within the covers of this Report' will be found a discussion of the new concept of "political literacy", guidelines (even better, "general" guidelines) and frameworks (better yet, "overall" frameworks) and (as the pages turn) syllabic dreams of classroom adventures. The main recom- 1 Political Education and Political Literacy. Edited by BERNARD CRICK and ALEX PORTER. Longman, £3.95. The Report is by a variety of hands, but expresses a single coherent point of view. Hence there has seemed little point in distinguishing the contributions of different authors. Nor have I distinguished between the Report itself, the project papers and the other material collected in this volume.

mendation is an expansion of political education ("a modest requirement of timetable hours", as the Report cautiously words it) and more investment in the training of teachers who can make us all politically literate; and if that doesn't wipe the smile off your face, you're incorrigibly frivolous. NOW THE VERY FIRST ELEMENT of political literacy—its ABC, so to speak—is to recognise that nothing is quite what it seems. Here in this Report we seem to have a collection of public- spirited teachers who have discovered a dangerous void in our society where political involvement ought to be.

They present us with a plan for solving the problem. The plan turns out to be a bid for money and time. It has significant costs. Teachers have for many generations encouraged debating societies and given a bit of direction to fledgling political societies after hours. The Report is in tune with the times in seeking money and professional status for a long-standing amateur enthusiasm. It is inevitable that this particular use of public money and curricular time will be disadvantageous to other competing interests. Since the main concep- tion of a political problem found in the Report is in terms of conflict of interests, the reader may appropriately perform the function of reflexivity on behalf of the writers of these recommendations.

What seems most appropriate of all is to consider the document as an exercise in persuasion. THE PERSUADER'S trump card is to convince his audience that they don't really have any choice at all: necessity dictates what the persuader seeks. This old friend of an argument turns up as early as page 5: "The question is not really whether it is done at 25 PRODUCED 2005 BY ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED