The End of Second Hand. Part IV

September 14th, 2007 Posted in Analysis, Concepts, Second Hand

Material goods are easy. The user queue describes the experience of a large array of them, from the ephemeral to the durable. They all fit the same abstract model.

The distinctions: producers from consumers, sale from gift, public from private, useful from useless. Advisers and re-makers in support, the users in a line taking turns in exhausting the use value within the good.

But other work generates values that defy exhaustion. They do not fit the model. We have identified three: services, icons, and recordings.

Services produce no transferable material—a word, a motion, a sound, hands-on or hocus-pocus. It leaves a mark, a scar, a concept and sometimes not even that. The value that is used is the work life of the producer and is given directly to the client. The queue formed is a schedule of visits to the server rather than a linked line of users.

Icons are signs. The value is in the being rather than the doing. They are statements, meanings made manifest. In summary, part of an ideology for the group and society that contains them.

Some scholars think of fetishes as the superstructure that helps maintain a stable civilization. In experiments in shifts of political power like the French Revolution or the Spanish colonial invasion of the Americas a concerted effort is made to suppress the entire old field of objects (along with the associated ideas) and replace it with another set representing the new order.

Some argue that placing emotion and energy in an empty object is a distraction and a defense against the difficult and painful grasp on one’s actual situation. It is a comfort while we are weak and defenseless, but as we become surer of ourselves and our ability to cope, we can give it up. The conversion outward is as much the issue as the idols. The place free of icon and fetish is, in the post-modern world, probabilistic and unanchored–like the shadowy and mysterious and dangerous world from within which the child and man himself starts.

Recordings are a special case. Physical goods that extend what once were limited ephemeral services into hard copy and social memory. The story teller with a small group of listeners around a campfire, then the bound book and photograph, then the electronic voice and moving image, and now the vast holdings we participate in here. A massing of fragile electrical bits seemingly durable beyond physical wear but dependent upon the continued human control of the strange energetic.

We reach the idea of using up of the purely conceptual. Where the value is in the meaning the erosion is in the separation of the sign from its interpretation, a process that can continue toward social amnesia. A recording that persists may in the long run (or sometimes not so long) transform in meaning and then even become meaningless.

A sociologist will of course suspect the involvement of a social process. Perhaps a consensus of negation–we agree to forget. Perhaps a drifting in the understanding of the sign-meaning connect based on small transforming increments. Perhaps a revolution–an active critique and rejection–like a knocking down of the statue, there is a trashing of the idea.

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The paradox of the physical exhaustion of use value is that at the mechanical level at least all the worn parts can be replaced and the object kept in action well beyond its anticipated demise. The typical example is the hammer–replace the metal head and the wooden shaft and the wedges to secure its unity and it continues on driving nails. But is it the same hammer?

Occasionally a good is transformed into something else, either by an alteration or by an act of definition. For example hitch a mule to drag a still operating automobile. Or make gin in a bathtub. Use a cooking pot as a planter. A complicated equation: the initial use value is trashed but the new use value is added.

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Ultimately the active material goods descend into a final stage of junk, garbage, trash, detritus, shit. The original use value gone and only a hulk remaining, if even that. This is the moment of last chance of salvage. Organic remnants can be recycled as mulch and compost, still functional parts can be removed and reconditioned and recycled as used parts. Chemicals, metals and woods and cardboard and paper can be extracted and recycled as primary materials available for the making of the new.

Individuals and small groups engage in this recycling and salvage as part of their ordinary routine. Clericals recycle paper clips, carpenters nails and lumber, cooks leftovers. Doctors harvesting the organs of the just dead for replanting into the needful living. In large cities people scour the street side trash set out for collecting. It is a general process, each craft and person alerted by his own experience and knowledge. But it is not universal, some discard prodigally and casually like a fiddling Nero.

Example of scavengers from the New York Times, Saturday, April 18, 1981. Alan Riding reporting from Mexico City in an article titled “Outcry Over Fire Imperils Mexico City’s Scavengers” Turns out that a stratified grouping of scavengers worked over the city’s garbage dump, searching tons of new urban waste daily. To gain permission to search preferred spots the line workers paid ‘cubos’ or corporals fees that were passed on upward through to overlords who served in the Congress. Average earnings for line workers was 150 to 300 pesos which translated to $6 to $12 per day. Bonus were the discovery of a watch or a gold chain or ring and the like. These returns were earned even though the trash had been picked over by the truckers who made the initial pick-up and carried the material to the dump.

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The using up is imperfect–the familiar pollutions and the eyesores. Residuals pass through to final resting places: the midden or garbage dump and the effluvia ponds and streams. The leftover in the landscape. The uncollected, the careless mark. The polluted air.

The using up of value implicates the non-using up which is generally called waste. Faulty goods that are not up to the highest standards available have a measure of value lost. Goods trashed with significant value unused or stored and forgotten are wasted. Goods and services that actively contradict and negate the larger consensus are arguably a waste. Failure to work in the first place is another. Unanticipated or ignored consequences that according to the larger consensus degrade the environment and place people at unnecessary risk are wastes.

The making and the using up processes both generate, sometimes deliberately, sometime accidentally, a by-produce of poisonous materials–chemicals, biologicals that are grievously dangerous to human and animal and plant health and life. Weapons of mass destruction and weapons of conventional destruction, diseases, cancer causing chemicals and foods, changes in climate, destruction of habitat and species–all interference in natural ecological processes.

People argue the detail, sometimes to confuse and intervene in the direction of self-interest. But altogether there is a production, from all sources, of a negative use value. It is another kind of waste. The ultimate users are the usual victims. A seeming paradox, work to produce value that kills. But that is the way of the intentional murderer with his macabre value added.

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On the question of metric: Experts are always with us. Maven with special knowledge and experience for every category of act. Pedigree dogs have their judges and so can everyone and everything else. If you cannot find a referee, define and draft or conjure one up. The job: to take the objective and repeatable measure of each and every use value. We need a metric that is independent of market price but will still allow us to make comparisons between and among use values. Say that each new automobile should have 100,000 miles of travel in it before it collapses. That would give us an expected 100% value potential. Now we find a car that is being trashed and our expert tells us that it still has 10,000 miles in it. So we can say that it is scraped with 10% waste of use. Same treatment for an office building, say 500 years of expected use and it is pulled down with the expert telling us that it still has a good 400 years left. The waste is 80%. Already we have a comparison, and it escapes the money measure. Summary comparisons, if the scheme is applied, can be made among different uses by time and place. Remember, the quality defining full exhaustion of use will vary greatly , but whatever it may be or how far ranging, the possibility of measuring waste comparatively in a non-monetary way is established.

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The price system based on money and the accounting and the decisions that it promotes tend to underestimate the actual cost of products. Discarded rubber tires, for example, have been an historical problem because even though the items are too worn to function, their residual material deteriorates very slowly under ordinary weathering and destruction by burning releases toxic products. So very large, actually massive, dump sites have developed that offer no hope for recycling. As reported by John McPhee in a New Yorker article called “Duty of Care” in the June 28, 1993 issue a major social and economic effort was underway to discover how to turn elements of this waste back into productive use. The first step is to identify tires with use still available and to get them back to users. Others are remade into retreads. For those that can not be saved there is chemical pyrolysis–a thermal degradation–out of which oil can be reclaimed but under the price regime this can only be done at a loss. And burning to generate energy directly is also usually not profitable. Chipping the tires to provide a paving material for roads and playgrounds is useful but eventually leads back to the problem of waste when these new products wear out in turn. This is also true of making old rubber tires into flip-flops. Under the market exchange regime based on price, waste and poison are not unusual outcomes. The costs of the undigested residue is never included within the accounting equations of producers and consumers of the new and is instead debited from the state and the people as a public service–the connection of the two costs is usually denied and hidden. Assigning the true cost in terms of irritation, poisoning, conversion and so on to the initial maker and insisting on equalizing action and payment would be a prime step in resolving many ecological issues.

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It is not far from conventional usage to describe our own lives as an active continuum of use value that each of us in our fully conscious adult state, or to the limit of our understanding of the reality within which we reside, consumes for himself. This is usually a non-transferable possession. The original user carries through to the end and cannot slough off the remaining waining value for another chance. There are jokes about this.

A large part of the game of our lives turns on the replenishment and maintenance. We have professional careerists such as medical doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, agriculturalists, mechanics and carpenters, builders. In fact much if not all of the panoply of our modern economic system is oriented toward our own care and feeding. We are still locked into our ancestral way though in a more complex and convoluted manifestation.

Some portion of us attempt to give responsibility for our own use value to a higher authority–a dictatorial figure, a moral authority, a religious belief. Even a giving up of the self to a local leader, even to a headstrong domineering spouse. But in a real sense we all pay the necessary price of coordination of our togetherness, the order of our mutual lives, which is the reality of our culture. Our range of choice is large but not unlimited.

Then we can think of our consuming of the natural environment as a society or even humanity wide sharing. Over generations, there is a pass-along. We are all second hand users together, the current stewards of our habitat.

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The new and the expensive are the desired life in the USA. We can only drum the used and the cheap as an off, and mostly ignored, beat. The Madhi movement in the Sudan that did in old Chinese Gordon, the British Pasha, started among the poor, and patched clothing was their uniform. When they were temporarily successful the patches continued but now at the designer level and as symbols of style and elegance. It is clear though that the regime of the new and money dominated has a hidden cost, and to move away from it requires another cost. But since so many indulge the fat side I think I will succumb a little and buy a few new clothes and a fine pair of shoes and maybe go swank with an upscale vacation.

The life and death theme is persistent. Freud called it instinctual but an easier way, I believe, is in the energy of life itself. A sociology grows from following the primitive, and not to be denied though they can be dented, biological necessities: sexual expression, aggression and violence, elimination and waste. Not to be used ex post facto. But we don’t have to go there in minute detail, simply stay within the gross and obvious. Eros and Thanatos. Entrance and exit. The biological order of mortality. Things look very complex but, I think, remain startling simple. In this order of making and using, of living and dying, the second hand experience has its place.

(This is the last of four associated posts on the second hand experience.)

May the pleasures pile up for you.