Frichot Dirty Theory

Troubling Architecture
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-3-88778-910-7
Verlag: AADR – Art Architecture Design Research
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 186 Seiten

Reihe: Practice of Theory and the Theory of Practice

Dirty theory follows the dirt of material and conceptual relations from the midst of complex milieus. It messes with mixed disciplines, showing up in ethnography, in geography, in philosophy, and discovering a suitable habitat in architecture, design and the creative arts. Dirty theory disrupts a comfortable status quo, including our everyday modes of inhabitation and our habits of thinking. This small book argues that we must work with the dirt to develop an ethics of care and mainte- nance for our precarious environment-worlds.

Hélène Frichot (PhD) is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia as well as Guest Professor at KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Her research traverses the dirty interdisciplinary domain between architecture and philosophy where she places an emphasis on feminist theories and practices and how to maintain a creative ecology of practices.

Zielgruppe

Architekturstudenten, Architekten, Doktoranten, Hochschullehrer, Forscher

Autoren/Hrsg.

Frichot, Hélène

Leseproben

Chapter 1

A Dirty, Smudged
Background

The primary reader on dirt, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, which was first published in 1966, was bequeathed to us by the ethnographer Mary Douglas. That this is the work of an ethnographer should be a reminder that in pursuit of an adequate approach, we must remain close to the ground, listening, not being quick to make assumptions, not judging pre-emptively. Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox, who dedicated their edited collection Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (2007) to Douglas, subsequently address this material-concept, dirt, from the point of view of geography, thereby expanding social considerations of dirt in order to address its spatial qualities. Dirt, they explain, “slips easily between concept, matter, experience and metaphor” (1). It gets into the gaps, troubling the distinctions by which we attempt to order and control a world. Campkin and Cox’s project aims to update theories of dirt with an emphasis on their spatial implications, and as a means of analysing societies and spaces in their complex relations to dirt.

Plotting a theory of dirt inevitably means passing through the work of Douglas, and paying respects to other dirty theorists on the way. It is, for instance, in the shade of STS (Science Technology Studies), feminist new materialism, and the feminist posthumanities together with the emergence of the environmental humanities, that the importance of dirt becomes even more pressing, reminding us as it does of the material stuff and relations of our environmental milieus. In this way, dirt alerts us to our situated positions and what Peg Rawes calls “relational architectural ecologies” (2013). Architecture, design and art, the creative disciplines generally, those disciplines embroiled in ethico-aesthetic concerns, inherently establish an attitude to dirt. All those processual practices in which we think stuff though drawing and modelling it, where we think through doing, making a mess in order to understand the implications of the role we play in world-making, need to engage a thinking-doing with dirt.

From her perspective as ethnographer, Douglas argues that by tracking dirt we can gain an understanding of the interconnections and patterning of a world (1966, vii). In her structuralist framework, as she explains it, a desire to purify inevitably alludes to a larger whole, a system, and the dirt you discover must be located, situated and understood from amidst myriad emergent connections and disconnections. Douglas observes that if “uncleanliness is matter out of place, we must approach it through order” (1966, 41), and if we are to understand contexts other than our own, she advocates that we should also be able to critique our own habits, rituals, assumptions and norms. Removing the dirt reveals the pattern, presumably produced by the norm, that orders subjects, spaces and societies. Without dirt, though, how could patterns and creative processes of ordering be activated in the first place? This is not to say that dirt comes first, but it certainly draws attention to the interdependency of dirt and acts of cleaning – what Haraway, Barad and their companion thinkers would call “entanglements”. Acts of cleansing and acts of cleaning. Surely a distinction must be made, for such acts can lead to violent erasures or creative possibilities in the forging of new relations.

On returning to Douglas’s seminal work, Campkin argues that we must take her oft-cited formula “dirt is matter out of place” not as something fixed, but rather as something ambiguous. He warns of universalisation and of the tendency for readers to get stuck on Douglas’s formula, understanding it as a binary, when in fact it opens up the deeply ambivalent qualities of dirt. Not all matter out of place is dirt, and dirt certainly has a place, as he remarks, in terms of our systems of organisation of societies and worlds. Dirt, filth, abject stuff can all be both a dangerous pollutant and something valuable, even incorporated into sacred rituals, as Douglas demonstrates. Dirt is contradictory, complicated and restless. We must attend to dirt on a case-by-case basis, accepting its situated contingencies. When we locate what we would define as dirt or dirty, it can be discovered in places where it would appear to belong: in the rubbish bin, the waste dump, the sewage plant, spaces of ablution. (As a friend recently pointed out to me, when my baby shits in its diaper, for sure the shit is dirty, but it belongs there; it is only when the diaper leaks that the shit becomes dirt, matter out of place.) There is the emergence of dirt, the event of dirt taking place at the moment of failure – the temporal aspect of dirt. Ablutions must be continually cleaned away; the waste dump will reach maximum capacity, and so on. As quick as the will to catalogue and classify dirt may be, the emergence of new forms of dirt is quicker. The long list of dirty things, by which an attempt is made to order dirt, is unending, its composition demanding a conceptual labour that would be perpetual.

Dirt confronts us with the radical contingencies of experience, and yet this is not to say that such a confrontation should be abysmal. When we dig deeper into Douglas’s Purity and Danger, in fact we find that the formula is derived from the work of the pragmatist philosopher William James. Douglas explains this, quoting James at length in a passage that concludes as follows: “Here we have the interesting notion… of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view of any system which those elements make up, can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident – so much ‘dirt’ as it were, and matter out of place” (William James cited in Douglas 1966, 165). That which disrupts systems and threatens the infrastructures that support everyday life, which undoes social relations and causes political unrest, which lacks sense or threatens a milieu (social or otherwise) with nonsense, irrelevance and accident, belongs in the category that James defines as “dirt”, held in the containment of his inverted commas.

James is a thinker that Deleuze and Guattari have drawn upon in establishing their ethics of difference, specifically borrowing James’ concept of a radical empiricism. What is a radical empiricism? It is an onto-epistemological position that situates all life as unfurling in a state of continuous flux from which identities and states of affairs emerge, and into which they dissipate. In the midst of this field of immanence that is life, the subject-environment assemblage persists as “a habitus, a habit, nothing but a habit in a field of immanence the habit of saying I” (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 48). Sheltered here is a message concerning the profound imbrication of subjectivities in formation and dissolution amidst environment-worlds, one bound up with the other in reciprocal relay. As will become evident in the small chapter below dedicated to dirt and differentiation, Douglas and Deleuze can be placed in dialogue around the question of dirt and an ethics of difference, that is, the complex conjunctive and disjunctive entanglements of subjectivities, environment-worlds and things. Importantly, when we frame this discussion around the subject matter dirt, we find that the contingencies of a radical empiricism, less than creating out-and-out chaos rather diversify situations and points of view in a pluralistic way, so that from the seething flux of existence, creative forms of life may yet emerge. It is out of the chaos, furthermore, that novel concepts clamour for existence. To demonstrate such complex concepts and harried relations, a sited example may be of use, and Peg Rawes can poetically lead the way.

In her edited collection Relational Architectural Ecologies (2013), Rawes opens her own chapter by inviting us to bear witness to a landscape vista. Across a field of wheat gently swaying in the breeze a woman walks. She makes her way with quiet purpose. The artist Agnes Denes and her team undertake the labour of care of planting a wheat field on the site of a former waste dump, Battery Park, in New York, and the project in question is called Wheat Field: Confrontation (1982). The iconic image that is disseminated of the work depicts Denes walking calmly with a stick through the wheat field, and in sharp contrast rising up in the background are the skyscrapers of New York. The confrontation alluded to in the title operates in a number of ways: wheat field juxtaposed with dense, energy-hungry and waste-producing urban context; former trash heap remediated as wheat field; food crises contrasted with greed and wealth, the financial capital of Wall Street just a block away. As Rawes argues, at work in this demonstrative performance and its contribution to a women’s environmental movement in art are social, material and technological systems intertwined in durational flux across what could be called a field of immanence (2013, 44). From the dirt of the massive waste dump of Battery Park, the remedial promise of a wheat field blooms, and with the dirty smudged background of advanced capitalism looming in the background such ecological relations exude a dirty resilience, though they continue to be threatened. The confrontations themselves yield transformations, both constructive and destructive. At work are the complex relational ecologies of human and non-human subjectivities and environment-worlds. The wheat field sprouts as a...

Über Autor(innen)

Frichot, Hélène
Hélène Frichot (PhD) is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia as well as Guest Professor at KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Her research traverses the dirty interdisciplinary domain between architecture and philosophy where she places an emphasis on feminist theories and practices and how to maintain a creative ecology of practices.