14: Ferrell: Empire of Scrounge

Once again I find myself writing about the politics of rubbish (see also here). I started reading Jeff Ferrell's Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging (New York University Press: 2006) as a teaching case study to illustrate the variety of ways of doing research and the power of the sociological imagination. I kept reading, however, because it is a genuinely inspiring book - inspiring about the possibilities of sociology and in the way it which it forces the reader to reflect on her/his own habits, priorities and assumptions.

In 2001 Ferrell resigned his post as a Criminology Professor and returned to his home town of Fort Worth in Texas without any work or the prospect of a new academic job for at least eight months:

  " Given my long-standing personal and scholarly interest in the often illicit worlds of scrounging, recycling, and secondhand living, the answer seemed obvious, if risky: I'd try to survive as a Dumpster diver and trash picker. I'd try to adopt a way of life that was at the same time field research and free-form survival." (p1) 

Ferrell has a place to live and a partner with a modest wage. He makes no pretense to be in the same situation as a homeless person scratching a living through other people's rubbish. But Ferrell does spend the eight months touring the city on an adapted bicycle living the life of a scavenger. In doing so he enters a new urban underground. What Ferrell calls 'the Empire of Scrounge' is populated by 'illicit Dumpster divers, homeless trash pickers, independent scrap metal haulers, activist recyclers, alternative home builders, and outsider artists.'

" ... the empire offers all the fun of stealing with none of the jail time, it offers all the benefits of shopping with none of the bills." (p45)

Ferrell's book is firstly interesting methodologically. He conducts an ethnography of lost and found - recording objects he finds, observing what stays and goes from piles of trash. Ferrell's approach 'emerged out of something closer to survival than to traditional social research' and as such is 'autoethnography' grounded in a lived experience of the rhythms of a social activity 'shaped by ambiguity and uncertainty' and that explores 'the pleasure of self-determination'. Ferrell provides a bottom up account of the creative work of scratching a living and the honing of the skills necessary to make such work viable. A Dumpster diver frequently wishes to avoid human contact in contrast to the textbook fieldworker who is always seeking the next interaction. Never-the-less Ferrell is able to build a picture of the varied population of the Empire - encompassing both the homeless and the working poor - and unwritten rules of scrounging and of mutual aid by which that population gets by.

Ferrell's book is also a model of how to write an accessible and engaging account of research and in doing so link mundane experiences to big sociological questions. Getting his hands dirty in other people's rubbish allows Ferell to highlight and make strange a culture and economy of hyperconsumption that runs on waste. Hyperconsumption is driven by the thrill of the purchase but acquisitions must be housed, organised, protected and regularly discarded to make way for new stuff.  Value is not intrinsic to objects but is rapidly gained and lost: yesterday's 'must have' is tomorrow's trash.

"Day after day, I and other scroungers negotiated the porous boundaries between private property and discarded public resource. We read and misread transitory signs that suggested scrounging opportunities, and in doing so wandered back and forth between legality and illegality. As we dug in Dumpsters and accumulated scrap and reinvented what we found, we watched the status of everyday objects drift between wished for possession and forgotten waste, useless castoff and usefully reconstructed tool, trash pile discard and outsider art." (p161)

As this quotation suggests, Empire of Scrounge is also in the criminological traditional that explores the socio-political construction of deviance. Ferrell argues that 'to pick through the city's trash is to engage in all manner of unpleasant questions about cleanliness, propriety, danger, and deviant career.' Dumpster divers work  in the boarder lines between public and private, salvage and theft and as Ferrell shows they risk criminalisation through ordnances that classify kerb side rubbish as city property, restriction of garage sales, and zoning rules that prevent stock-piling of materials ready for recycling.

" ... I began to wonder whether each statute I encountered, each city code, each emerging community standard regarding waste and its reuse wasn't in reality designed to eliminate any form of material acquisition and exchange except, well, shopping at the mall." (p28)

We should instead celebrate and support the heroic work of the scroungers Ferrell characterises as 'everyday environmentalists' and  'the last thin line between consumer waste and the landfill'.

In addition to its academic contribution Empire of Scrounge can lay claim to being an interesting life guide making us think about how we might avoid what Ferrell terms the 'existential vacancy' of consumer culture. During his fieldwork Ferrell rethought the work of an academic scrounging the tools of his trade - paper and pens and also books that he used to make sense of his experience. In doing so he highlights that ways that so many supposed critics of consumerism are preoccupied with the latest 'must have' book, idea, or technology.

" ... if the empire could offer a sort of shambling material self-reliance, could it offer some sort of analytic and aesthetic self-reliance, too?" (p74)

This plea for a serendipitous, patient 'shambling scholarship' fits with a more general conclusion: we need to challenge 'a consumer culture of perpetual panic' with a different attitude to the spending of time.

"As the weeks and months rolled by, needed items were found, little problems solved, to-do lists crossed off, if only I had the patience to let solutions emerge." (p188)

Ferrell's priorities are also evident in the pleasure he gains from sharing his finds with friends and strangers. Exploring trash he also found ample evidence that life is transitory:

"Digging amid the detritus of people's lives, I came away with a disturbing sense of existential rubbish - a sense that we'd best live our lives like they matter, because ultimately, we're all disposable heroes." (p95)

Ferrell is now working again as an academic but still scrounges when he can and blogs about his finds here.

13: Machado and Silva: Forensic DNA in Portugal

Forensic DNA is at the front of my mind at present as I am finishing the revisions to my chapter on the racialisation of Police National DNA database for the book Identity After DNA that I am co-editing with Katharina Schramm and Richard Rottenberg. Readers’ comments on the draft manuscript led me to Helena Machado and Susanna Silva ‘Informed Consent in Forensic DNA Databases: Volunteering, Constructions of Risk and Identity Categorization’ BioSocieties 4 2009: 335-348.

Machado and Silva explore the ethical and legal dimensions of the establishment of a national DNA database in Portugal. The similarities and differences between this process and its equivalents in Britain and elsewhere are fascinating – well fascinating if you are a forensic DNA database geek like me. The Portuguese forensic database is going live this year (that’s 15 years on from the beginnings of Britain’s Police National DNA Database). Prior to this there has been substantial and extended legal and policy-making discussion about the database with an open political discussion around issues of inclusion and consent. This is in contrast to the British case where the governance of the NDNAD has developed post-hoc, the scope and use of the database has never been established through parliamentary legislation and the discussion of whose DNA records should be stored or destroyed has taken place with millions of profiles already is police possession.

Interestingly in 2005 the Portuguese government contemplated creating a universal forensic and identification database arguing that such an approach would provide humanitarian benefits and “avoid discrimination”. Instead Portugal has followed the lead of other countries in establishing a database of the ‘criminal population’. The rules for inclusion are in comparison with the British case very strict.

“Nevertheless , there is a widespread belief among politicians and law and science experts that the Portuguese forensic DNA database will ‘inevitably’ increase in breadth and scope over the next few years.” (336)

The principle of ‘informed consent’ is a recurring feature of discussions and practice around the collection and use of genetic material in medical and scientific research. The issue of informed consent is not normally considered an issue in discussion of forensic DNA. Machado and Silva do us a service by reminding us that there are significant national variations in this respect. The UK is one of a number of European jurisdictions to stipulate that donor permission is not required when taking samples from people convicted or suspected of a crime. Other countries (such as Belgium, Cyprus, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) do claim some form of limited informed consent is needed for samples to be collected but it is open to question how ‘informed’ or ‘voluntary’ consent can be in these circumstances. All European Union countries allow ‘coercive sampling’ but Belgium, Cyprus, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, Portugal, and Spain require a court order before biological samples can be taken from suspects.

Machado and Silva’s analysis of proposed consent processes (and associated provision of information to donors) reveals some of the complexities and contradictions of ‘consent’ in this context. Convicted criminals and suspects sign consent forms but these are different to those supplied to those who volunteer samples to the database. There is no guidance currently as to how to proceed if convicts or suspects refuse to collaborate with the consent process. As Machado and Silva point out, the notion that another group of people – ‘volunteers’ – will also donate DNA is built into the legal framework of the Portuguese database despite a lack of clarity about the circumstances and motivations behind volunteering. They make some suggestive links between that idea that people have a right and a desire to have their genetic profile included in the database to a wider discussion of a morality of ‘good’ biological citizenship, and notions of mutual future benefit and of deserving and undeserving citizens in relation to (bio)security.

Another feature of the Portuguese case is that information about a person’s ethnicity (and their parents’ ethnicity) is stored along with their DNA profile. Machado and Silva are vague about the detail of his process (the why and how) and I am unclear about whether this reflects their own uncertainties or the uncertainties within the system. The paper lists a familiar series of concerns about the racialisation of DNA databases but reflects the general confusion about why precisely we should care about this issue (a topic I am planning to write about in the coming months).

12: Clarke and Innes: Retroactive Social Control

I am currently working a paper with Greg Elmer that uses my previous work on the police National DNA Database (NDNAD) to develop a more theoretical discussion of surveillance and ‘the database state’. Martin Innes and Alan Clarke ‘Policing the past: cold case studies, forensic evidence and retroactive social control’ (British Journal of Sociology 60:3 2009) has provided new insight.

As Greg and I are also trying to do, Innes and Clarke link the growth of databases such as the NDNAD to the issue of pre-emption.

“Predictive, pre-emptive and precautionary logics have wrought fundamental transformations in how social control is both imagined and practised. Instruments of prediction have become increasingly commonplace as part of attempts to anticipate amongst which individuals and population groups criminal and disorderly conduct is likely to arise.” (p543)

They highlight a shift in posture of the criminal justice system and other institutions of control towards the prediction of future behaviour driven by a ‘logic of precaution’.

“ Profound and significant shifts in the conduct of social control have been premised upon future-orientated frameworks, where harms and risks are not just reacted to but anticipated, and counter-measures enacted prior to their actual occurrence.” (p544)

The really original contribution of the paper, however, is to show that alongside projection into the future “the delivery of social control increasingly pivots around redefining the past and placing events that have already happened under new descriptions.”

Innes and Clarke’s analysis is built on interview and observational research with police investigators involved in ‘cold case reviews’ of previously unsolved homicides. The periodic review of unsolved serious cases has become a feature of policing on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USA reviews of cold cases are driven by a belief that the passing of time will open up new investigative possibilities (changing circumstances may make informants willing or able to talk to the police). In contrast, UK cold case review is driven by faith in advances in expertise and technologies related to crime scene investigation. Innes and Clarke argue that this reflects a more general preoccupation with the potential of DNA analysis, ‘scientific policing’, and socio-technical applications to social control in the UK so that:

“ Collecting, processing and interpreting physical evidence now routinely constitutes a significant proportion of the work performed during a major crime investigation.” (549-550)

Innes and Clarke’s research on cold case reviews shows how reviews are not just a reinvestigation of a past situation but rather a rewriting (or ‘fixing’) of the past and a redefinition of the situation. In the UK case physical evidence, in particular the re-examination of crime scenes and new analysis of contact trace materials, are central to the complex and fluid work of deconstruction of original police narrative and construction of a new social reality

Out of this empirical work Innes and Clarke develop the concept of ‘retroactive social control’: placing past events under new descriptions, rewriting official definitions of a situation. Thus social control horizons are both future-orientated and past-orientated. In the closing pages of their paper Innes and Clarke extend their analysis to official rewritings of collective memory about crimes using examples such as the Macpherson Inquiry, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Northern Ireland Police Service.

But my solipsistic interest remains with their discussion of crime and science. New technologies and new kinds of technical experts (forensic, psychological and geographical) are central to cold case review. Cold case review has helped to bolster the crime solving credentials of the police at a time when they have come under increasing scrutiny and critique.

“It is not simply a case of there being a social control problem for which a technological innovation provides a solution. Under certain circumstances social control practice changes when an extant technology finds a new problem to which it can be applied. In effect, sometimes innovative social control logics are generative of new technologies, but at other times it is a new technology that enables social actors to think about new possibilities for the conduct of control.” (p551)

Clarke and Innes suggest that this is about nothing less than a new politics of memory.

“The proliferation of databases encoding and storing materials of different kinds (of which the NDNDAD is one) has massively multiplied our capacity to collectively recall and thus ‘remember’ both major and mundane events and interactions. It is set against this backdrop, that retroactive social control has emerged as a key process in the architecture of governance and social order.”(p561)

11: Mackenzie: Beliefs and Desires in Data

I was lucky to attend some the symposium on ‘New Materialisms and Digital Culture’ held at Anglia Ruskin on 21/6/10 organised jointly by CoDE and Milla Tiainen. The starting point of the event was that “far from being immaterial, digital culture consists of heterogeneous bodies, relations, intensities, movements and modes of emergence”. Papers explored the potential of ‘a new materialism’.


Contributions by Eleni Ikoniadou and Satinder Gill also showed the ways in which experimental art and performance could disrupt and reveal assemblages and hierarchies of the digital and the embodied in ways not open to conventional theoretical critique. It was, however, a paper by Adrian Mackenzie that I found most inspiring. Mackenzie considered the potential of a new materialist analysis of data networks. Taking as his starting point Gabriel Tarde’s formulation that all associations are intersections between different desires and beliefs, Mackenzie asked what could be learnt by considering vectors of belief and desire in data. In emphasizing the ‘in’, Mackenzie wants to go beyond a discussion of trust of data or beliefs about data onto analysis of the ways that beliefs and desires are invested in and in turn vitalise data. These beliefs and desires are not just embodied in users but also systems (e.g. Data Centres that seek to measure and respond to our desires).

Topographical models of distributed networks are, according, Mackenzie inadequate to understand the flux and dynamism of data movements and the resistances to those movements. Metaphors of ‘drag’, ‘lift’ ‘vortex’ seem more appropriate. Mackenzie examines the discourse of ‘data deluge’ that suggests that key contemporary problems relate to the containment and management of too much data – how to ‘mine’ for particular information, how to manage technical capacities, how to find patterns and order in the deluge? Mackenzie considered ‘the next big thing’ in data analysis and data mining the statistical programming language R. He discussed the energy and hope invested/expressed in R (e.g. the use of visualizations to bring data to life) as expressions of the plurality of desires and beliefs in data.

Mackenzie closed his paper by suggesting that we should stop thinking that data ever exists in a pure or raw form – it is given only in belief and desire.

Reflecting on my own work, this approach gave me another way of thinking about the part that data plays in contemporary politics and policy – the intersections of beliefs and desires in forensic DNA databases for example. But I was also left with some questions:

• Is there value in unpacking ‘beliefs and desires’ e.g. exploring ‘fears’ and 'hopes' in data might be useful?

• Perhaps also we should also consider‘beliefs and desires’ in different forms of data organization, management and representation e.g. categorization, abstraction, quantification, aggregation and visualization.

• There is also an interesting contrast (or perhaps I cannot see the join) between Mackenzie’s use of Tarde and Bruno Latour’s use of Tarde to champion possibilities of a non-reductive (and easily assessable) statistics of association which I have discussed previously.

10: Davis: Building the Ark

Following on from my last blog about Campbell Jones, Mike Davis (‘Who Will Build the Ark? New Left Review 61 2010) also takes an original route to challenge the paralysis/apathy often prompted by the issue of climate change. While Jones focused on the mundane realities of individual consumption choices, Davis considers nothing less that the fate of the world. He chooses to do this in an original format; he structures his paper as “ a debate with myself, a mental tournament between analytic despair and utopian possibility that is personally, and probably objectively, irresolvable.”

Anyone who has read Davis’ previous work will know that few do ‘pessimism of the intellect’ better than him. Davis argues that given the failure of current efforts to limit carbon emissions it may already be too late.

The real scientific controversy is not whether climate change is happening or whether it has human causes but rather whether the targets for cutting emissions need to be much tougher. Davis acknowledges that he is not best placed to judge the scientific evidence but, as a leading urban geographer, he can confidently argue that current policy (international agreements to limit emissions, carbon trading, ‘green’ capitalism) is wildly optimistic and rests on dubious assumptions about how economic and social processes will play out locally and globally.

“Our old world, the one that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper has yet printed its scientific obituary.”

Davis estimates that demographic pressures will increase the size of cities by 3 billion in the next 40 years. At the same time climate change will mean that the capacity to produce food in many parts of the world will decline. We will be faced by “… the synergistic possibilities of peak population growth, agricultural collapse, abrupt climate change, peak oil and, in some regions, peak water, and the accumulated penalties of urban neglect.” While supporters of action to prevent or manage climate change present it as a ‘War of the Worlds’ type challenge to the planet as a whole, in practice the impacts are unlikely to promote global unity:

“In a warmer world … socio-economic inequality will have a meteorological mandate, and there will be little incentive for the rich northern hemisphere countries, whose carbon emissions have destroyed the climate equilibrium of the Helocene, to share resources for adaptation with those poor subtropical countries most vulnerable to droughts and floods.”

OK so that is the pessimism nailed; what of the ‘optimism of the imagination’? Here Davis turns to what he knows best – urbanization. He argues that while the growth of the modern city might have been a driver of climate change, cities have the best potential as sites of socially and environmentally sustainable life in the future (the city ‘as its own solution’). Davis finds hope in the plans for utopian cities that inspired socialists in the early twentieth century. These show the potential for a highly planned and efficient city whose population benefit from public rather than private luxury.

“Since most of history’s giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten science.”

This might sound utopian but, as Davis shows, the alternatives do not bear thinking about too long.

9: Jones: The Subject Supposed to Recycle

Having scheduled a discussion of ‘how to put society into climate change’ for the closing weeks of my new module Nature and Society, I found myself struggling for enthusiasm and ideas. This begs the question: how can one be uninspired by the prospect of global catastrophe?

Campbell Jones ‘The subject supposed to recycle’ (Philosophy Today Spring 2010) offers, at least, some explanation of my inertia. Jones provides a different way into discussions of climate change by problematising the figure of the ethical/apathetic/greedy consumer usually placed at the centre of narratives about the issue. In the contemporary setting it is recycling (and we might add other forms of ‘ethical’ consumption) that are driven by moral imperatives. Jones suggests that while some early capitalists (as Max Weber described) pursued salvation through ‘good work’ the recycler is responding to the ‘generalized risk’ of apocalypse.

“ But we have it in our own hands to forestall this apocalypse, and in this sense we are today invited into a care for the planet, that is accompanied by an almost paranoiac ‘care of the self’.” (p30)

Recycling depends on the intersection of recyclable objects and active free subjects rests on fantastic claims made for the potential contribution of individuals and for the recyclability of objects. Jones suggests that we should locate this within a discussion of commodity fetishism by considering “the mystifications on the other sides of the product, with respect to the ghostly afterlife of products in the social relations of their disposal.” (p32)

Jones writes of ‘the ideology of recycling’ and, in particular, “the subjective categories supposed or presupposed by ideology”. These categories include ‘the catastrophic subject’ responding to real and present danger and her evil twin, the complacent subject unwilling to change her behaviour. These subjectivities and their notions of responsibility have two key aspects – guilt and freedom – which, Jones suggests, are neither realistic or helpful.

I found Jones’ discussion of guilt and consumption particularly thought provoking. The interiorisation guilt and responsibility may have deep roots in Judeo-Christian culture but seems integral to consumer behaviour: Jones quotes Walter Benjamin who wrote that “capitalism is presumably the first case of a religion that does not atone but produces guilt.” Much consumerism is driven by cycles of over indulgence and regret (think of the current preoccupation with food and body management). This point was make previously in Colin Campbell’s book The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism.

The implication of Jones’ arguemnt is that making people guilty about consumption choices and giving them personal responsibility for global climate melt-down is counter-productive.

“Perhaps then the properly moral subject is the one who refuses to allow their subjectivity to enter into the process, who refuses to take responsibility for the catastrophe. The subject who refuses to accept the invitation to permanent guilt and paranoiac self-concern that one hasn’t done enough.”

Jones argues that our response to climate change should not be passivity but a rejection of individualized, localized guilt. Our current tokenistic attempts at behaviour change mirror those of corporations and governments who have ‘outsourced’ their responsibilities to us. We need to shift responsibility to those who really have the power to bring about a low carbon world.

8: Lawler: Middle Class Disgust

In recent years students have gained a renewed appetite for discussion of social class. Stephanie Lawler’s ‘Disgusted subjects: the making of middle class identities’ (Sociological Review 2005) certainly sparked a lively response this semester.

I find it hard to warm to Pierre Bourdieu’s work. But Lawler and others (notably Beverly Skeggs) have taken his analysis of the cultural violence of capitalist class relations, translated it to a British context, added a much-needed feminist dimension and produced work that brings the contemporary realities of inequality and identity to life. A key feature of this approach is an acknowledgement of the ways in which class relations are affective as well as material and invested with high levels of emotional energy.

Lawler’s paper considers how the middle-class defines and distinguishes itself via expressions of disgust towards the working-class (or rather towards an imagined working class). This process has a long history. Lawler begins her paper:

“George Orwell, writing in the 1930s, famously declared ‘the real secrets of class distinctions in the West’ to be summed up in ‘four frightful words’: ‘The lower classes smell.” (p429)

Lawler points out that, eighty years on:

“ If people are embarrassed and evasive when discussing class as a system there seems little embarrassment in characterizing white working-class people in the most horrific and disgusting terms.” (p431)

Focusing on expressions of disgust at working class existence in the British media and other public fora, Lawler examines the particular forms that the ‘othering’ of the working class now takes. She highlights how class is racialised (disgust is aimed at ‘the white working class’) and how an older hyper- masculine view of the working class has been largely superceded by feminine folk devils (the harridan ‘pram face’ single mum with ‘bingo wings’ or the drunken ‘Essex girl’ spoiling the metropolitan cool of the town centre on a Friday night).

As my examples above suggest, bodies, their adornment and their need for control are central to the representation of the white working class. These folk devils defy neo-liberal discourses of self-improvement and body management. The working class are typically discussed, according to Lawler, in terms of ‘lack’: lack of taste, lack of parenting skills, lack of control of reproduction, lack of self-control, lack of appreciation of multiculturalism, lack of aspiration etc, etc.

“This constitution of working-class existence in terms of ‘lack’ is now so widespread as to be almost ubiquitous. It informs social policy (‘social exclusion’ presumes a deficit model, as do discussions of ‘widening participation’) and is present even in some (though by no means all) analyses which are sympathetic to working-class people.” (p434)

Narratives of lack are frequently combined with a narrative of the decline of a once progressive and productive working class. Thus the poor are no longer working class but an ‘underclass’ discursively separated from both conservative notions of respectability and radical notions of a proletariat.

“For about 150 years, ethical and intellectual justifications for middle-class disgust at working-class existence have sat side by side, forming a neat boundary which precludes any middle-class questioning of their own position.

“What as changed in recent years is less the sentiments than the explicit naming of class as such. ‘Class’ is rarely explicitly invoked in contemporary expressions of disgust: instead, the ‘disgusting’ traits are presented as the outcome of individual or family pathology.” (p437)

Within this dynamic the working class “become little more than personae in a bourgeois drama”. Their subjectivities are assumed to be knowable through their appearance (and failings in appearance deemed are taken as signs of moral failure). What is really happening here is, of course, the normalization of middle class lifestyles and worldviews and the claiming by the middle classes of a monopoly on ‘true humanity’.

Perhaps best to finish with another of Lawler’s quotations from Orwell:

‘The fact has got to be faced that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself.’