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

Sarah' has been visually impaired since a wartime injury to her eyes at the age of seven. (1) A keen artist with some skill in pencil drawings of the human form, she has also been an avid visitor to museums and art galleries since the 1980s. A friend first took her on a visit to a museum. She was doubtful that there would be anything of interest for a visually impaired person like herself, but that first visit turned out to be something of a pleasant surprise to her. Her excitement developed as she became aware of the possibilities and the potential that museums might hold for a person like herself. She has since spent many years trying to convince a conservation-minded museum sector of the importance of access to objects in collections other than through vision and has now become well-known as an activist campaigning for greater access to museums for people with disabilities:`A nd ... after that [visit] it became a passion. I took lessons with a long cane. Because up to then I'd just pottered around tapping but I took proper lessons so I could travel up to London on my own. Well, touch was not allowed then [1980s]. And of course I would go round the galleries and museums and say could I touch just one thing, it doesn't have to be precious, just an old stone ... . And so I just wasn't going away without touchingöso I would touch the floors if they were old flag-stones, columns, doors, which are usually of great interestöand the galleries got used to me going round with an old tape recorder, magnifying glass and a white cane. And the education department became very kind öthey would give me pamphlets and posters. When they started the actual touch tours, they would get professional advice but what they wanted was the grass roots. And they thought, well what better than to call in the queer old duck who has been driving us mad. So overnight from a nuisance I became an expert'' (Sarah, interview, 5 May 1998).

Our aim in this paper is to introduce the figure of the underdetermined ‘blank’ into issues of social and spatial order. We argue that forms of social order habitually make tacit use of blank figures. Beginning with examples of blank figures as they appear in games of cards and dominos, we show how the ‘joker’ and the ‘double-blank’ domino, respectively, allow for conditions of both stasis and change to develop within an order. Such blanks are underdetermined or ambiguous figures that are constitutionally indifferent to heterogeneity. Blanks have the capacity to figurally represent the presence of absence in a known social order. Through the indifference that absence has to order, blank figures are able to form links and coordinations within heterogeneity to produce what pass for homogeneous social orders. They are figures of topological complexity that allow for connections and spacings to be made that unsettle Euclidean geometric assumptions about order through its representation in terms of regions, scale, and boundedness. Furthermore, this same indifference ensures that any such coordination remains open to change. We describe blank figures' ability to provide the conditions of possibility of both stasis and change in terms of their motility. The blank figure allows us to build an account of social order as a switching between stasis and change which treats both as emergent effects of the same ordering practices.

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This paper reports some findings frotn a study of households in the region of Greater Manchester. As part of a wider study of divisions of labour within households, information was collected about food preparation, the place of food in domestic routines and aspects of food preferences. The results are compared with Charles and Kerr's (1988) account of British domestic food practices. Introduction: the sociology of foodThe relevance of food for sociological analysis is much underestimated. Thus, a recent, authoritative literature survey (Mennell et al., 1992) was obliged to draw mostly on anthropological and historical sources in trying to establish the basis for a sociology of food. Much of what is known about contemporary British food habits derives from market research, which provides evidence about how often and what products people eat, from health specialists and official surveys, concerned almost exclusively with nutrition, or from food industry statistics. There are relatively few sociological studies of the role of food in British households. As a result, despite extensive discussion of change in social aspects of food practice -for instance, about men's participation in food preparation, 'grazing', the distribution of tastes for new foods, the impact of dining out -conclusions remain almost entirely speculative.Food provision constitutes a discriminating case for at least two sets of contemporary sociological debates. First, it provides an excellent locus for investigating consumption. It has a particu-