Remain deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to have an answer to your dirt, or who claims that your home maintenance chores can be magically done away with. In his pre-digital discussion of technology through the complex lens of processes of mechanisation, Sigfried Giedion, an architectural historian and critic writing in the 1930s, maintained an orientation toward cleanliness that went so far as to claim to secure the liberation of domestic labour. For Giedion, gender and technology, when applied to what he calls the “feminist question”, facilitates the emancipation of women from domestic toil through the imagination of a “servantless household” (Giedion 2013, 514). Giedion’s analysis goes beyond gadgetry to acknowledge the organisation of the spaces and practices of work, including the postures of the house-working woman. While he does not say it as such, what becomes evident are the contagious relations between architectural spaces, technological systems, labouring bodies and the incursions of dirt.
Lewis Mumford, an American philosopher of technology and contemporary of the Swiss Giedion, dramatises another vision of household rubbish by mobilising the mythical figures of Mars and Venus and the “ritual of conspicuous waste” that they perform in the interstices of war and peace (2010, 96). For Mumford, waste is the by-product of the cyclical dynamic between war and leisure time activities, between battle and rest and recreation: “When Mars comes home, Venus waits in bed for him” (97). An unfortunate, rather bipolar, vision. Supine, she awaits the spoils of war and demands her luxuries, Mumford explains. And with the toil of war, the reward is one that is increasingly augmented through advancing technologies, hence what is frequently referred to as the military-industrial complex. Simply, war supports the technological development demanded by advancing industries.
Ursula le Guin throws quite another spin on the ancient Roman figure of Mars in her novel Lavinia (2008), where she explains that this cyclical rhythm is rather one between warfare and agriculture. When Mars is not at war, his mortal representatives tend to the fields; when Mars and his men are away, staging battles and border skirmishes (keeping things territorially clean), then the women get to work managing the farmlands. Le Guin’s novel explores a feminist reorientation of Virgil’s Aeneid (29-19 BC), offering an account of events on the ground from the point of view of Lavinia, daughter of Laurentum, King of the Latins, and the Trojan migrant Aeneas’s third wife. As more than mere supplement to epic poem, the reproductive toils and rhythms of housekeeping are celebrated here as fundamental to the sustenance of social and reproductive relations. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément take this further where they call forth the newly born woman: “She handles filth, manipulates wastes, buries placentas, and burns the cauls of newborn babies for luck” (cited in Bloomer, 1993, 105). Sometimes we need to take hold of the story, entirely reorient it, and tell it again from an entirely other point of view; take it from a point of view otherwise obscured, purposively shoved down in the dirt. Recover it, restore its value. This is something that Ursula le Guin does well.
Returning to dirt and technologies, in Mumford we encounter an ambivalent view of machines, instruments and systems, which, like dirt, and regardless of their scale or level of complexity, can be good and bad for you. “It [technics] is both an instrument of liberation and one of repression” (Mumford 1934, 283, cited in Genosko 2015, 8). Félix Guattari, influenced by Mumford’s concepts, likewise asserts: “The machinic production of subjectivity can work for the better and for the worse” (1995a, 5). Technology is understood here as something integrated into the everyday activities of human (and non-human) bodies, and not as that which is outside or independent. Dirt is the grease and the grit that contaminates the boundaries of bodies-technologies. The leftovers, the becoming redundant of old technologies leaves waste in its wake: “Beside the few ingots of precious metal we have refined, the mountains of slag are enormous” (2010, 106), Mumford comments, though his hope is that from the slag heaps we may yet discover some value. These are some of the troubles of our vast and energetic industrial toil. The so-called, and oft alluded to, geological era of the Anthropocene is one attended by waste, rubbish, pollutants and dirt. We are in the dirt, and the dirt, from micro-plastics to insecticides, is in us, as we are increasingly discovering.
From the digging of foundations and laying of groundworks, via the collection of cobwebs and dust in the crevices, nooks and crannies of architecture, and all the way to instances of demolition or the gradual progression of decrepitude, dirt is a glue, a sticky substance that holds architecture together and causes it to fall apart. Dirt includes gossip: Who has the dirt on whom? What will paperwork trails, archives and histories reveal? And what of the anecdotal stories we tell ourselves of our discipline and practice? When we get ‘the dirt’ on someone, we contribute to the circulation of gossip, and as Keller Easterling argues, gossip, rumour and hoax can be used to destablise power (Easterling 2014, 215). Such critical tools can be used by the politically oppressed, but tools, including concept-tools, can be taken up by anyone, “the powerful as well as the weak” (216), and applied to both creative and destructive ends.
To trouble architecture, to undo its categories, its exclusions and inclusions, I seek advice from feminist philosophers Judith Butler and Donna Haraway. Where Haraway calls on us to stay with the trouble of our dirty worldly relations, Butler troubles gender, alerting us to how messy identities really are and how trouble is always bound up in prevalent power relations (1990). Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) exploded out of the late 1980s, challenging any assumptions about achieving a biologically essentialist fix on sex or a universal and stable identity for gender. Gender is wilful, performative, apt to pervert the course of conventional categories: it makes trouble. There is nothing universal about ascriptions of gender identity imposed on unwilling subjectivities by way of societal norms. The convenient definitions of sex, understood as biological, and gender, understood as culturally constructed, are likewise muddied by Butler. Not even the body can be taken as a given, because it admits its own genealogical trajectory. In fact, Butler makes reference to Mary Douglas to challenge the notion that the body is a hermetically sealed unit, understanding instead how the body is apt to be contaminated. Where the impermeable virginal body is raised up as an ideal, we should watch out for the violence to follow (Douglas 1966, 159). The boundaries of the body, of all bodies, must be re-drawn, but with a line that acknowledges leakage points and the playfulness of drag performance, poking fun, telling dirty ditties at the expense of those who would wish us to be clean, ordered and decorous.
The introduction to Architecture and Feminism (1996) opens with a quote from Butler on the strategy of exclusion: “What is ‘outside’ is not simply the Other – the ‘not me’ – but a notion of futurity – the ‘not yet’ …. Will what appears as radically Other, as pure exteriority, be that which we refuse and abject as that which is unspeakably ‘Other,’ or will it constitute the limit that actively contests what we already comprehend and already are?” (Butler cited in Coleman 1996, ix). The simple moral of Butler’s pronouncement is as follows: What we expel, the dirty, the abject, is exactly what composes us, what we already are. Coleman cites other feminist philosophers too, such as Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigaray. If the ‘absence’ (of women, the Other, any ‘other’) at the centre of the discipline demarcates a place cleaned of clutter and mess, then this noise and dirt, which is part and parcel of “the lived difficulty of everyday life” (Butler cited in Coleman 1996, xv), must be restored. Like housecleaning, the work of restoring minor voices in architecture, design and art, as elsewhere, is unending. Elbow grease is required. Troubling expectations, the result of our taking the trouble to work from the midst of our murky environment-worlds, can benefit our modes of creative practice.
As Butler’s work tracks its trajectory through later essays and books, the focus on gender, the performances of subjectivities in process and the emphasis on cultural constructivism eventually lead to a politics writ large at the scale of infrastructures and their spatial support systems. Acts of troubling here locate subjectivities in performative collective formation and spaces in the midst of being made and unmade in intimate embedded relations. A performing subjectivity is a collective subjectivity that is demanding a public space in which to enunciate its concerns. Closing down or restricting spaces of public gathering is an act of cleansing that obviates creative possibilities for new forms of life and living together
