Dirty Theory. Hélène Frichot

Jennifer Bloomer who best represents dirt for the architects. She represents it in such a way as to steal it from the grasp of the would-be phenomenologists, and those who would wax lyrical about dirt as an elevated outcome of weathering (Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow 1993), or celebrate the aesthetic effects of dust or seek a metaphysics of the imperfect and impure. Much like violence when violence exudes a curious fascination in its beholder, dirt is ever at risk of aestheticisation. Despite this risk, cannot a dirty theory enable creative possibilities beyond mere aestheticisation – creative possibilities that can make a critical difference where it matters? Bloomer, I believe, can help show the way.

      With architecture, we are ever at risk of rendering dirt bucolic and rustic, of laying it out for our phenomenological enjoyment. Bloomer, who will play an important part in what follows, has darker tales to tell concerning dirt. She mixes water and blood, mixes words and matter, putting things purposively where they do not properly belong. An example: On introducing the beloved architectural motif of the poché, the secret that is supposed to properly reveal the deepest phenomenological desires of the architect, she shows instead the hole at the back of the wardrobe through which a young girl escapes from sexual abuse; the poché becomes the after-effect of a cigarette burn, the dirt that comes from the violence that is hidden behind the stern façades of what are supposed to be proper family men (1993, 178-179). Sobering scenes for a dirty theorist. In this sleight of hand Bloomer deploys feminist resistance in response to the accepted definition of poché, which instead gives way to matter in the wrong place. Trailing behind Bloomer, suddenly a standard definition breaks into narrative and is off and away. This is no Bachelardian reverie in her discourse, no, it is nothing so saccharine as that. The phenomenological sacred is instead rendered profane and filthy. This is critique, what I would call material semiotic critique, an elegant slippage. The clean sheet turns out to be smudged.

      Why get dirty? Why dirty theory now? Dirt is what gives relief to the mark drawn on the dusty ground with a stick to say: inside/outside, included/ excluded. To mark, as Michel Serres explains, means to leave a footstep in the soil, and thus to claim, and reclaim, a territory (2011, 2). Dirty theory is a reminder that theories are good for nothing unless they are bound up with the muck of mundane relations on the ground, with the kind of environmental things that are increasingly at stake today, that were at stake yesterday, too, and that certainly will be at stake tomorrow. Make a mud map, find your way through the dirt. The temporalities of dirt take us all the way from property rights to a call for the commons and a return to practices of communing, getting dirty together. These are what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa calls “soil times” (2017). Dirt is in the body, the home, the environment (Cox et al. 2011) and in all that we share and divide. At its best, dirty theory could participate in the imagining of new modes of getting messy together, accepting what Donna Haraway calls our messmates: our more-than-human relations. Dirt demands that we listen to the environment-worlds in the midst of which we lose and find ourselves, becoming and unbecoming. Dirty theory is concerned with discovering new ways of getting along with each other that challenge fixed categories, that track a diagonal and even a zig-zag course across taxonomic charts to invent new kinds of territories. La terre is what dirt might aspire to become, as long as the Earth is something that can be adequately, equitably shared.

      There are thinkers of dirt, and they are diverse. I will attempt in the short chapters that follow to think-with them. There are practitioners of dirt, who understand the nutrient bases of the dirty work required, who can remind us of how some contact with the dirt can build up our immunological systems and open ameliorative relations beyond the habits of human exceptionalism. Think dirt. Do dirt. But because this is dirty theory, the thinking and the doing are messed up, and a theorist one day is a practitioner the next, and a practitioner one moment is a theorist the next. Dirt relations are transversal relations. Make a mess, clean it up, accept that the task must start over again the very next day. I have no doubt that Sisyphus was caked in muck and dirt.

      Dirt has already settled into some of the crevices of architectural research, whether through a fascination with dust, or weathering, or with what David Gissen calls architecture’s “other environments”, to which he offers a name: “subnature” (2009). This is a name presumably meant to designate that which comes from below or which operates from beneath the domain of proper disciplinary conventions, and this begs the question: Do subnatures subconsciously structure our disciplinary habits, and our behaviours, too, in relation to our habitats? Gissen makes no recourse to Sigmund Freud, more politely presenting a series of architectural projects that admit a fascination in the dirt of the subnatural, from the work of enfants terribles François Roche and Stéphanie Laveux of R&Sie(n) with their speculative Bangkok tower, B_Mu, which was designed to attract rather than repel the polluted air (Gissen 2009, 79), to Jorge Otero-Pailos’s iterative experiments in the reappropriation of dust, which test the radical preservation of architectural surfaces (Gissen 2009, 95-99).

      While Gissen does not venture to mention Freud’s tales of what may lie beneath conscious consideration when it comes to dirt and architecture, Bloomer certainly does, and Haraway likewise points out that Freud can act as a guide to understanding the traumas associated with the conceit of human exceptionalism (Haraway 2007, 11). No doubt dirt of various kinds has been at work in architecture from its dark beginnings, registered in the first moment that some dirt was cleared to create the ground on which human life could commence its performances. Some ground is cleared, a circle is demarcated, what is considered foreign is removed and as a result a rarefied space is secured. In his own meditations on pollutants and dirt, Malfeance: Appropriation Through Pollution?, Serres argues that dirt and its distributions play a fundamental role in relation to the basic questions: “How do the living inhabit a place? How do they establish it, recognise it?” (2011, 2). He answers: “appropriation takes place through dirt” (3; italics in the original). Through the scent-signs of our personal stains, body odour, urine, “perfume and excrement” (2), we demarcate territories, venturing to make them our own. We spit into the tasty soup so that no one else will eat it. Dirt admits a spatiality in the simple observation that other people’s houses do not smell quite right, because they do not smell like home.

      When addressing dirt in relation to architecture and art, a detour through the formless becomes inevitable. Here, the proper name of Georges Bataille necessarily enters the frame of reference, followed by mention of Yve Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss’s exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris (1996) and the subsequent book Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), which was supported by their thinking with Bataille. It is worth noting, though, that Bloomer’s experimental work Architecture and the Text: The (S) crypts of Joyce and Piranesi also draws on Bataille and was published some four years earlier (1993). Acknowledging the long relationship between dirt and artistic expression, Bloomer quotes Mark Taylor on Bataille. In reference to a meditation on the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux,Taylor reports: “From the beginning (if indeed there is a beginning), there is something grotto-esque and dirty about art. Bataille is convinced that the dirt of art’s grotesque, subterranean ‘origin’ can never be wiped away” (cited in Bloomer 1993, 50). Note especially the grotty textual invention of grotto-esque. Despite its title, with its apparent emphasis on textuality, Bloomer’s artfully composed (s)crypts, and her other essays, reveal a distinctly dirty underground, including dirty ditties and lewd allusions to the dirty stuff that the passageways between architecture and text inevitably reveals. A perhaps unknowing companion thinker to Douglas, Bloomer meditates on the intimate relations cohering between the sacred and the profane, concluding that architecture “actually represents the ‘filth of the sacred’” (1993, 50; italics in the original).

      The essays that are collaboratively and individually signed by Bois and Krauss in Formless: A User’s Guide are instructive in terms of dirty precedents. They cut a cross-section through representative samples of the performances of the formless in art and architecture. Included, for instance, is Gordon Matta-Clark’s infamous intervention Threshole (1973) (Bois and Krauss 1997, 190). Folded into Matta-Clark’s title is the temptation to allow for a slip of the tongue, turning it into a dirty word: arsehole. No doubt such controversial quasi-architectural examples, which appear to take things apart rather than construct anything, would not be accepted by those who take a more conservative view on disciplinary taxonomies. The core of the discipline of architecture, as Bloomer explains,