first time in human history over half the world’s inhabitants live in urban environments and exposure to dirt is the corollary of overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and the industrial shaping of metropolitan life’. All of the recent hand wringing and anxiety about the growth of slums in the world seems to stem from a certain memory of European urban planning, in which European slums were destroyed, as part of a grandiose top-down urban planning movement. When we think of slums as a problem, and implicitly or explicitly think about how to get rid of them, we are repeating the thoughts of the nineteenth century. What will become increasingly clear, I suspect, as the twenty-first century runs on, is that the contemporary slum, like dirt, is here to stay, whatever our fantasies. The rest of the exhibition wanders without direction.The visitor will encounter New York’s Fresh Kills , an enormous landfill site that grew exponentially, like a distorted mirror image of our consumerist dreams. It is now being turned into a park. Just before that, one is presented with the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, which, during the Third Reich, linked the scientific discourse of hygiene to racial purity. Just as in modern life, the way dirt is dealt with in the exhibition moves uneasily between treating it as a moral disorder and as an object of medical and technological intervention. Just as in the American suburban home, the moral economy behind our treatment of dirt is never addressed. 4 Dirt is not a particular object. Anything can be dirt. The category of dirt is instead a stage in the life of every object (and person): as things decay and die, they become dirt, impure and contaminated. Dirt is a moment in the life of an object.And what is the end of dirt’s life? In Purity and Danger Mary Douglas writes:‘Dirt was created by the differentiating activity of the mind, it was a by-product of the creation of order. So it started from a state of non-differentiation; all through the process of differentiation its role was to threaten the distinctions made; finally it returns to its true indiscriminable character’. At the end, for Douglas, it is ashes to ashes, and dirt to dirt.
If only it were so. While if one takes a cosmic view, perhaps, dirt is truly dirt – the undistinguished mass of everything that is not categorized; dirt also endures. Perhaps this is why it is considered so powerful; as dirt passes from one domain to another, it carries with it the mark of its past life; a transgression that can make it holy. Before the Hindi festival of Durga Puja, the statues of the Goddess Durga are made from dirt and straw from the banks of the Ganges. The most important addition to the statues, however, is a small amount of dirt from just outside a brothel: the holy and the unclean, joined together, barred from the everyday world. Dirt endures. We need it. One of the joyful things about watching Tarun Paul’s film Durga Goddess , on display in the exhibition, was that one is reminded of a world in which dirt is not ignored, and the interplay of the categories of dirty and clean, and the transgressions between them, are celebrated. Perhaps the worst thing to do with dirt is pretend we can get rid of it. Think of the two categories that have stalked this review: morality, and the type of thought that claims that practices of hygiene and cleanliness are based on absolutely objective facts. Upon the latter view no mark of morality can appear, the better not to taint its appeal to the absolute authority of science. And yet, as is made explicit in our endless commercials for detergent, the modern obsession with hygiene is a view as moralistic and normative as the most devoted Calvinist manual of oeconomia. Except that, for us moderns, unlike the Calvinists, in the modern view, morality plays no part in cleanliness; it is kept hidden, like a bad stain that cannot be scrubbed out. As I left the grand building of the Wellcome Collection, I thought about the exhibition I had wanted to see. I wanted to see American bathrooms and clean kitchen tops. I wanted to see the triumph of a demoralised regime of hygiene.That, I realised, is exactly what I got: except that wasn’t what was on display in the exhibition, rather, it was displayed in the structure of the exhibition itself. Science’s stain. n
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Durga Puja: a procession carrying an idol of Durga to honour her victory over evil. India, 19th century gouache on mica.
Wellcome Library, London V0046155
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