Dirty Theory. Hélène Frichot
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This architecture is a simple, unified, disciplined and essential affair, much in need of dirtying. In Bois and Krauss’s work, the unholy relation between form and the formless dominates, though there is still something rather masculinist and heroic about the celebration of the formless as a will to break down the ordered compositions and surfaces of a world. To break things apart. The formless still tends to organise the mess of materials as something of a side effect necessary to the expression of the formless over form. While there is evidence of the inclusion of dirt, vomit, shit, blood and other satisfyingly repulsive materials in the media of art and architecture, in Bois and Krauss’s account these tend to fall under the remit of the powers of the formless. While it troubles their neat distinction, the formless here does not equate to an overthrow of the form/ matter dichotomy. Questions of the formless are still too caught up in the predominance of form, which accords form a privileged position relative to matter. It could well be simply a matter of emphasis, and in any case it could also be that both Bloomer and Bois and Krauss’s textual self-enjoyments merely return us to a somewhat nostalgic recollection of the theoretical fascinations of the 1990s, when the pastel pop of pomo (postmodernism) was beginning to become rather jaded. Only, dirty theory is not afraid of such apparent anachronisms. What the dirty theorist insists is that when we dismiss something – a work, a text – as ‘anachronistic’, we might as well be describing it as dirty and should instead go for a closer feel.
Dirty theory seeks support in the emergence of the environmental humanities, and intersects with what has come to be called feminist new materialism (though the ‘new’ here ought to be held in suspension, and even placed under interrogation). Dirty theory is distinctly posthumanist in its tendencies toward more entangled human and more-than-human worldly relations and practices of worlding and even an acceptance of everyday contaminations. The philosopher of science and dog lover Donna Haraway is clearly a champion here, though she has her own reservations about the category ‘posthumanist’, averring instead that we have never been human (Haraway 2007, 3-108).
Genealogical acknowledgements are necessary, and the dirty precedents that are dealt with above presage a distinct turn to material concerns that emerged in the first decade of the 21st century, through edited collections including Katie Lloyd Thomas’s Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice (2006), Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s Material Feminisms (2008) and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010). To these, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things could be added, and especially the early scene depicting her encounter with “Glove, pollen, rat [dead], cap, stick” mashed into a plug of refuse in a storm water drain on Cold Spring Lane, Baltimore (2010, 4). Note here, an architectural thinker-practitioner, Katie Lloyd Thomas, leads the brigade toward what matters when it comes to material relations. Plunging further into the murk of a recent theoretical past, I will continue to champion the enduring legacy of Bloomer’s work, especially for those brave enough to track a feminist and queer course through the pristine halls of architecture. Trailing blood and guts in their wake. I proffer here that the subsequent impact and uptake of new materialism allows us to undertake a reengagement in Bloomer.
New materialists, especially those with a feminist project, explain that through the 1980s and ‘90s we had gotten so caught up in textual play and discursive tangles that we failed to remember the materiality of the text and the text’s entanglement in specific environment-worlds. As architectural feminist thinker-doer Katie Lloyd Thomas points out, this writing here and now, this book you hold in your hands, assumes a complex array of material supports and infrastructures; it is the “result of a vast network of practices” from the conventions of the English language to “a complex history of development, extraction, technique, transportation and exchange” (2006, 2). That the dirty mess of material matters matter draws our attention to the background, the complex environmental background that is composed of vast networks of material flows. Consider rare minerals such as cobalt and the outsourced non-Western labour that comes together in this laptop into which I type (Rossiter 2009). In time, this not-so-clean piece of equipment (smudged screen, keyboard messed with strands of hair, skin, dust, even crumbs), will be passed through electronic trash heaps, picked apart again by the small fingers of child labourers who are obscenely relegated to the off-scenes of the Global North. It is worth considering all the livelihoods that are dependent on dirt.
Fig. 1 Hélène Frichot, Dig and Dump. Drawing, 2019.
Thinking with dirt means thinking with local and global environment-worlds. No locale rests outside the infiltrations of dirt, and if you don’t see the dirt in front of you, it is because it is being collected, held and managed elsewhere. In my dirty drawing Dig and Dump (2019) I illustrate a simplistic relation between the resources we dig up, and the trash we dump when we have exhausted the perceived use-value of the things that resources have been ingeniously moulded into. This is an ancient cycle, dig and dump, dig and dump, that has accelerated dangerously following the industrial revolution. I invite you to multiply this thought-image ad infinitum in order to understand the concatenating impact of our collective dirty habits. An urban context that is described as dirty is often one in which layers of infrastructure are dysfunctional and spatial support systems are insufficient for the job.
Dirt troubles architecture and its associated disciplines. Hence the subtitle of this dirty book. If, as Bois and Krauss argue, “The dream of architecture, among other things, is to escape entropy” (Bois and Krauss 1997, 187), dirt can be understood as one of the primary material outcomes of such entropy. Dirt creates resistance to the deceptively smooth surfaces of urban inhabitation, compounding local miseries with global flows.
The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of worldwide organization, but also of a counterattack combining the smooth and the holey and turning back against the town: sprawling, temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even relevant. An explosive misery secreted by the city… (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 481)
Failure to clean, to wash, to purify, to organise and to tidy results in the world reclaimed as dirt. And yet, we must hesitate here, for failure to maintain houses, neighbourhoods and cities that are falling into disrepair is quickly countered with the demand for ‘clean-up’ jobs – revitalisations that are supported by the perceived economic benefits of gentrification. The problem is that even to undertake a friendly, local clean-up job is to risk the collateral damage of social cleansing. Revitalisation and gentrification can bring with them the homogenisation of the social ecologies of neighbourhoods. Things get more complicated, as Ben Campkin has demonstrated, in that dirt, the grittiness of “edgy” neighbourhoods can develop their own aesthetic value (Campkin 2007, 74). Gentrification works with dirt, revaluing it. The complexity and ambiguity, the instability of dirt categories, produce unbalanced and precarious relations between the pure and the impure, the smooth and the striated.
Dirt, it might be assumed, is anathema to technology, but the lifecycle of technological products depends on the extraction of resources, the environmental mess of industrial effluents and the designed obsolescence of technological things that anticipate a future incarnation as trash. Nevertheless, dirt is what we are frequently promised will be removed, should we only apply adequately advanced technologies. The techno-fix is supposed to clean our living environments of dirt. 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,