The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures: on Traveling, Toilets, and Belonging

CULTURA 2012_262905_VOL_9_No2_GR_A5Br.indd 1 CULTURA mote theexplorationofdifferentvalues andculturalphenomenain ted tophilosophyofcultureandthestudyvalue. Itaimstopro- www.peterlang.de are ding thevalues andculturalphenomenainthecontempo that research original on based judged tomake anovelandimportantcontributiontounderstan- manuscripts of submission the contexts. international and regional and ulture C F ounded in2004, SN 978-3-631-62905-5 ISBN xiology A hilosophy of hilosophy P of ournal J International ultura. C isasemiannualpeer-reviewed journaldevo- T he editorial board encourages encourages board editorial he rary world. 2012

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Advisory Board Prof. dr. Mario Perniola, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy Prof. dr. Paul Cruysberghs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Prof. dr. Michael Jennings, Princeton University, USA Prof. Emeritus dr. Horst Baier, University of Konstanz, Germany Prof. dr. José María Paz Gago, University of Coruña, Spain Prof. dr. Maximiliano E. Korstanje, John F. Kennedy University, Buenos Aires, Argentina Prof. dr. Nic Gianan, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines Prof. dr. Alexandru Boboc, Correspondent member of the Romanian Academy, Romania Prof. dr. Teresa Castelao-Lawless, Grand Valley State University, USA Prof. dr. Richard L. Lanigan, Southern Illinois University, USA Prof. dr. Fernando Cipriani, G.d’Annunzio University Chieti-Pescara, Italy Prof. dr. Elif Cirakman, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey Prof. dr. David Cornberg, University Ming Chuan, Taiwan Prof. dr. Carmen Cozma, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania Prof. dr. Nancy Billias, Department of Philosophy, Saint Joseph College, Hartford, USA Prof. dr. Christian Möckel, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany Prof. dr. Leszek S. Pyra, Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland Prof. dr. A. L. Samian, National University of Malaysia Prof. dr. Dimitar Sashev, University of Sofia, Bulgaria Prof. dr. Kiymet Selvi, Anadolu University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. dr. Traian D. Stănciulescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania Prof. dr. Gloria Vergara, University of Colima, Mexico Prof. dr. Devendra Nath Tiwari, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India Prof. dr. Massimo Leone, University of Torino, Italy Prof. dr. Christian Lazzeri, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France Prof. dr. Asunción López-Varela Azcárate, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief: Co-Editors: Prof. dr. Nicolae Râmbu Prof. dr. Aldo Marroni Faculty of Philosophy and Social- Facoltà di Scienze Sociali Political Sciences Università degli Studi G. d’Annunzio Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Via dei Vestini, 31, 66100 Chieti B-dul Carol I, nr. 11, 700506 Iasi, Romania Scalo, Italy [email protected] [email protected] Executive Editor: PD Dr. Till Kinzel Dr. Simona Mitroiu Englisches Seminar Human Sciences Research Department Technische Universität Braunschweig, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Bienroder Weg 80, Lascar Catargi, nr. 54, 700107 Iasi, Romania 38106 Braunschweig, Germany [email protected] [email protected]

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CONTENTS

SEMIOTICS OF WORLD CULTURES

Asunción LÓPEZ-VARELA 7 Introduction to Semiotics of World Cultures

Wenceslao CASTAÑARES 13 Lines of Development in Greek Semiotics

Oana COGEANU 33 In the Beginning Was the Triangle: A Semiological Essay

Qingben LI & Jinghua GUO 45 Rethinking the Relationship between China and the West: A Multi- Dimensional Model of Cross-Cultural Research focusing on Literary Adaptations

Ömer Naci SOYKAN 61 On the Relationships between Syntax and Semantics with regard to the Turkish Language

Dan LUNGU 77 Translation and Dissemination in PostCommunist Romanian Literature

Yi CHEN 87 Semiosis of Translation in Wang Wei’s and Paul Celan’s Hermetic Poetry

Lars ELLESTRÖM 103 The Paradoxes of Mail Art: How to Build an Artistic Media Type

Benson O. IGBOIN 123 The Semiotic of Greetings in Yoruba Culture

Ulani YUNUS & Dominiq TULASI 143 Batik Semiotics as a Media of Communication in Java

Nadezhda NIKOLENKO 151 Semiosis and Nomadic Art in Eurasia

Susi FERRARELLO 163 Husserl’s Theory of Intersubjectivity

Dennis IOFFE 175 The Cultural ‘Text of Behaviour’: The Moscow-Tartu School and the Religious Philosophy of Language

Nicolito A. GIANAN 195 Philosophy and Dealienation of Culture: Instantiating the Filipino Experience

Diego BUSIOL 207 The Many Names of Hong Kong: Mapping Language, Silence and Culture in China

I-Chun WANG 227 The Semiosis of Imperialism: Boadicea or the 17th-Century Iconography of a Barbarous Queen

Massimo LEONE 237 The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures: On Traveling, Toilets, and Belonging

10.5840/cultura20129217

Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)/2012: 237-258

The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures: On Traveling, Toilets, and Belonging

Massimo LEONE Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università di Torino Via Sant’Ottavio 20 10124 Torino Italy [email protected]

Abstract. Tourism industry is increasingly stripping traveling of one of its most fundamental anthropological and existential values: its being a laboratory in which travelers can temporarily experience the disruption of their regime of sedentary belonging, protected by a plan of return. According to this perspective, non-touristy traveling is one of the best ways to test the limits of one’s tolerance to cultural diversity and acknowledge, as a consequence, the identity of one’s cultural and existential ‘home.’ Yet, modern and contemporary travelogues mostly extol the traveler’s hero- ic capacity to overcome the limits of tolerance. Claiming that such emphasis stems from the colonial desire to domesticate and assimilate the world and its diversity, the article proposes to subvert this logic and to replace panoramic travelogues, dominated by the will power of subjects, with prosopopoeic travelogues, that tell the stories of how the things of the world, relics of centuries of civilization, reject travelers and their desire of domestication and conquest. As an example of this sub- version, the article proposes a semiotic exploration of toilets, their variety, and their ‘cultural resistance.’ Keywords: travel, tourism, travel literature, cultural colonialism, toilets, semiotics

INTRODUCTION

The present article claims that in most post-modern societies the experience of traveling is constructed in such a way as to prevent travelers from achieving the most important existential awareness traveling can offer: not the feeling of how beautiful traveling is – a feeling that is unceasingly sold and bought in the contemporary market of tourism – but the opposite feeling of how ugly traveling is. Indeed, as the present article seeks to make it clear, it is only by coming to terms with the intensity of transition entailed by a journey that travelers understand the meaning of frontiers, of crossing them, of nostalgia for a lost regime of sedentary belonging (Leone, forthcoming), and of despair in the situation of those who, like migrants, travel without the certainty of return. On the contrary, the present-day tourist industry downplays the intensity of transition

237 Massimo Leone / The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures implied by traveling while exalting its extension of distance, with the consequence that flocks of tourists currently travel from the economically most advanced societies of the world to the most disenfranchised ones without ever losing, and therefore without ever understanding, the feeling of ‘being at home.’ In order to re-appropriate the formative experience of traveling, which is essentially an experience of temporary aliena- tion, travel discourse should switch from the triumphing tale of a domineering traveler – relic and perhaps prosecution of the war imperialistic tale – to the humbling tale of nostalgia. There is only one way to per- form such switch: passing from a travelogue of acting protagonists to one of passive subjects, voicing the tale of how they are rejected by the things of an alien land. The article proposes both a case-study and a tale of this sort, exploring the ways in which ‘Western’ travelers can become aware of the rigid limits of their area of belonging by clashing against a very quotidian traveling experience: the intolerability of other cultures’ modalities of bodily waste disposal.1

ON HOW DISCOMFORTING TRAVELING IS

As it was announced in the summary, the present article is meant to be an inchoate reflection on the traveling body. Most narrative and academic literature on traveling has a predilection for the tale and/or the study of a more or less conscious traveling mind.2 When the traveler’s body enters the scene of writing, it remains behind the veil of the traveler’s mind. For instance, in The Road to Oxiana – a sort of archetype of late modern travel literature – Robert Byron describes his dysentery in epic terms, but offers an account of his bowels that is sifted, nonetheless, through the traveler’s desire: dysentery becomes a mere obstacle to the attainment of the destination, and not an extraordinary occasion to talk about what befalls the traveling body, independently from the more or less conscious mental agency of the traveler (Byron; on Byron’s narrative style, Knox). The ‘Cartesian’ conception of travel professes that I am a more or less alert mind moving a more or less subjugated body. A eulogy of decision and planning stems from this conception: the day on which I decided to leave, the destination that I planned to reach, the path that I meant to take. Also the mystics of hazard – so common in the contemporary imaginaire of travel that it has turned into the most trivial cliché – would be

238 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)/2012: 237-258 meaningless without its contrast with this logic of programming: I met the Imponderable only because chance, whatever it is, upset my traveling plans. To what extent this dialectics between planning and unforeseen events owes its characteristics to the culture of war, and in what measure modern travel looks like a small-scale military campaign, are issues that would deserve further reflection. The present section, however, is meant to take a different path (as it is evident, also the rhetoric of academic discourse does not escape the metaphors of military and travel planning). For each journey there is a secret story – secret because rarely told. It is a story that remains hidden in the interstices of the official one. In the official story, travelers’ minds receive through their senses the spectacle of a different world, which un- folds before them thanks to the endeavor of a journey. That is essentially a panoramic narrative: the narrative of a subject’s mind that gathers in itself the impressions of traveling and re-elaborates them into a subjective tale. In a journey’s secret story, instead, the protagonist is not a subject’s mind that receives the diversity of an explored world, but the world’s resistance to be received. It is essentially a prosopopoeic narrative: the tale of a traveling body knocking against a reality that rejects it. The reason why this story has been rarely told should be already quite clear: whereas the panoramic narrative extols the triumph of a subject’s mind that penetrates into an Otherness – most travel literature consists in nothing but this encomium of penetration and adaptation –, the secret story of a journey is essentially a depressive tale: despite all efforts, the Otherness of the world rejects the subject’s body; if the body could au- tonomously express its own judgment, it would immediately declare that traveling is insane, and that there is no better decision than that of going back home. Hence, the story of the traveling body is a secret one, little told, because it is not the triumphing tale of a mind that imagines reality and acts upon it; it is, on the contrary, the nostalgic tale of a body that does not imagine reality but is, in a certain sense, imagined by it, a body that does not act upon reality but is acted upon by it. It is, to say it in the terms of generative semiotics, a tale of passion more than a tale of action. Hence, how is it possible to voice this secret story? And, above all, why is it necessary to voice it? Certainly, it is not a story that could be told through the genre of lamentation. For instance, Lévi-Strauss’s sores in Tristes tropiques are legendary insofar as they signal his body’s incapacity

239 Massimo Leone / The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures to adapt to pre-modern transportation means. Yet, the description of these sores is nonetheless instrumental to the epic of the traveler’s mind: despite suffering, Lévi-Strauss stoically moves toward the Unknown. The story of the traveling body should focus, instead, not on the tale of the sores but on the alternative tale of the saddle that provokes them; it should express the hardness of the saddle, its pride, its impenetrability, and its hostility. The saddle should be represented as the anti-subject of Lévi-Strauss and his sores as the passion caused by this anti-subject’s action. The sores should turn into the expression of a pre-modernity that withstands being explored by a modern subject. This is the point of view that should be adopted by a tale of the traveling body: not that of the traveler’s mind adapting to the Otherness of things, moved by the subject’s unstoppable desire to conquer, but the point of view of things, of their refusing this adaptation, of their declar- ing the defeat of travelers, or at least the inanity of their efforts. “Sunt lac- rimae rerum” should be the motto of those who undertake narrating the tale of the traveling body. The general aim of such an inversion of perspective is evident. Most narrative and academic literature on traveling pursues, more or less con- sciously, the objective of ‘domesticating’ the world. Travelers moves across space, comes across worlds that are very different from their own, string their tale together around the surprise of this encounter, exalt the human diversity, but eventually unceasingly re-propose a eulogy of ad- justment: if one really wishes so, and if one has the intelligence to do it, one can turn the world into one’s own home. The ultimate testimony to this domestication (in the etymological sense of the term) is writing: it is through writing that travelers attest not only their survival to the world and its adversities but also the embracing of all such adversities in a single subjectivity. This version of the travelogue is fascinating and in line with the epis- teme of post-modernity – the thriving of this genre of literature confirms it – but also deeply hypocrite as well as guilty. The hypocrisy of travelogue consists in neglecting an essential element of every traveler’s experience: the idea that one travels in order to savor the taste of different cultures is a banality that even Lonely Planet marketing experts no longer promote. On the contrary, the Homeric conception of travel is anthropologically more meaningful and sincere: one travels in order to be nauseated by traveling, to accumulate nostalgia, and

240 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)/2012: 237-258 to confirm the conviction that the world is an alien land and that one cannot be at ease if not ‘at home.’ One travels because it is only through traveling that one understands what this ‘home’ is. ‘Home’ is not the place from which one leaves, but that to which one returns. And what is, after all, this place to which one returns if not the mirror-like image of all that which in traveling has been a cause of suffering? Of that which in alien lands has rejected us and that, on the contrary, will welcome us ‘home’ (or, at least, such is our illusion)? The greatest existential contribution of traveling does not consist in the taste but in the distaste of Otherness. We travel in order to test the limits of our capacity of adaptation because it is exactly these limits that outline our ‘home’: I do not tolerate, therefore I am. And the measure of this intolerance, which defines us in a fundamental way, manifests itself – for those who are not blindfolded by the hypocritical commerce of travel – precisely through the body. It is, indeed, in the traveling body and the reactions that the conscious mental agency of travelers can control the least, that the limits of their capacity of adaptation are inscribed. Over- coming these limits is possible through an effort of will. We can bend our body to the needs of travel. In contemporary travel literature, there is no text that does not include the exaltation of this stoic and agonistic attitude. However, extolling such effort of adaptation, such tension toward stretching the limits of one’s tolerance, without admitting the existence of these limits, would be not only hypocritical but also meaningless. Why, indeed, should I take pleasure – a subtly masochistic pleasure, like that of fakirs – from increasing my tolerance to distaste if not in order to exactly understand what I cannot tolerate and what, in other terms, the conditions are in which I could not live? I am what I do not tolerate because I am that to which I could not renounce. Traveling is, after all, nothing but an existential laboratory where to understand, protected by a plan of return, what is indispensable in my culture. The indispensable something, which we discover through the distaste of traveling, is our ‘home.’ A politically correct conception of travel, which disregards its fundamental aspect of identity construction – besides the very well known and commercially fruitful aspect of the exploration of Otherness –, would be, as it was pointed out earlier, not only hypocritical but also guilty. The panoramic logic, indeed, according to which there are no limits to the

241 Massimo Leone / The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures traveling subject’s capacity to absorb and distill the diversity of the world, is essentially a domineering logic, which, as it was pointed out earlier, is probably inextricable from that of the imperialistic war tale. Claiming one’s infinite adaptability to Otherness – an adaptability without distaste – and more or less explicitly considering it as an essential feature of the human anthropology could appear, at first glance, as standings of extraordinary ecumenism: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me al- ienum puto.” But the other side of the coin is that if I am able to adapt to whatever Otherness, it is also because whatever Otherness, including mine, is adaptable; it can befit my existential and narrative project of travel. There is nothing incommensurable in the world, nothing deeply intolerable and distasteful; as it was said earlier, that could seem like an expression of extraordinary tolerance. However, denying the incommensurability of one’s own identity, affirming one’s own capacity of tolerating everything, implicitly also means denying the incommensurability of the others’ identity, and somehow obliging them to tolerate everything. When I say: “you, Other whom I come across while traveling, are, after all, like me,” I am implicitly expropriating Others of their identity; I am domesticating them. On the contrary, if travelers really consider that nothing in humanity is extraneous to them, they should include in this humanity also the attachment to one’s form of life as well as the distaste for the Others’ forms of life and the consequent incapacity to adapt. The fairy-tale of the cosmopolitan traveler is guilty because it neglects an element that is essential for understanding contemporary societies: the masochistic pleasure that travelers experience in testing the limits of their intolerance becomes an unbearable torture when it is deprived of the protective net of its temporariness, which essentially is an expression of the traveler’s mental and subjective agency. I travel; I revel in my capacity of adaptation, but while being well assured that if I wish so I could turn on my heel and go back ‘home’. Traveling should teach young people – those who can afford it – not “how beautiful traveling is” – according to an ideology that is not only tautological but also fed by the logic of tourism marketing –, but exactly the opposite: “how ugly traveling is”; how uncomfortable is; how unbearable. How much one is better ‘at home.’ Or, better, how traveling would be unbearable had one not the certainty of return. “Tu proverai sì come sa di sale/ lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle/ lo scendere e ‘l salir per l’altrui scale,”3 as Dante said.

242 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)/2012: 237-258

When in April 2010 a cloud of volcanic ashes prevented interconti- nental travelers from landing in London, turning several airports of the planet into bivouacs, journalists reporting from these airports declared their common impression: “it looks like a refugee camp.” Indeed, if there is something traveling should teach is exactly that: the intolerability of the human condition of those who travel with the awareness that they will not be able to return, of those for whom adapting is not an option but an obligation, of those who discover, in an alien land, the exact boundaries of both their distaste for the Others and the Others’ distaste for them but cannot escape either. Traveling should have this purpose (and such was essentially the purpose of traveling in several ancient cultures before the rise of tourism, that is, a version of traveling where the dimension of cyclical routine and, therefore, the certainty of return are emphasized): learning the intolerability of uprooting and sharpening one’s solidarity with those who suffer from it. A recent advertising campaign for a famous cruise company showed a couple at home bursting into tears at the memory of a past vacation. In fact, exactly the opposite should occur: nostalgia should take over the traveler during the journey’s most difficult moments, those in which the body says “enough” and longs for returning; it is at the thought of ‘home’ that the traveler should burst into tears. This advertisement is nothing but a symptom of the way in which the industry of tourism has turned traveling into a stupefying substance through which the contemporary ‘escapism’ is fed (Roche, and Sie(n)), into a vicious circle where traveling does not result in rediscovering one’s home but in clouding the feeling of not having one. In order to recuperate the existential value of traveling, the contemporary imaginaire should be nourished with different narratives, which instead of featuring the domesticating subject of the imperialistic war travel or the domesticated subject of the consumeristic tourism travel, high- lights the resistance of the world to the traveler’s body: the unavailability of ‘things’ to become the traveling subject’s ‘objects’ and their turning, instead, into an obstacle to the tourist’s will of penetration, adaptation, and control. Things that make a journey intolerable: that should be the theme of a new travel literature. The panoramic narrative should be par- alleled by a prosopopoeic narrative, where things become protagonists in their incommensurable Otherness.

243 Massimo Leone / The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures

As it was said before, these narratives will have to be about the body, especially about its refusal to accomplish even the most essential biological functions in an alien land: “When my body, although hungry, refused to eat or drink”; “when my body, although tired, refused to fall asleep”; “when my body started to suffer from vertigos”; “about unbearable cold and warmth”; “on being uncomfortable”; “on the disappearance of sex- ual drive”; etc. These are indeed the occasions – when the body is supposed to almost spontaneously act in the world but refuses to do so, or ‘is jammed,’ or paralyzed by hesitation –, that reveal the existential nature of travel, its capacity of making us discover how the shadow of our ‘home’ conditions us in our apparently most elementary behaviors and perhaps especially in those. These new narratives must be about the body but not from the point of view of the body. Narratives from the point of view of the body inevitably adopt the perspective of a subject, and one would therefore go back to the epic of Robert Byron’s dysentery. On the contrary, narratives about the traveling body should be from the point of view of things, of alien things that prevail over the body and refuse to be domesticated, absorbed, and controlled. These new narratives must be tales of disgusting food, uncomfortable couches, windows without curtains, cities without squares, apartments without heating, streets without sidewalks, alcoves without privacy, etc. They must be tales of absences, or else of fastidious presences, but they must be, nevertheless, prosopopoeias, narratives that reveal, through the denial of things, the failure of the traveler’s grappling with Otherness. What matters, nevertheless, is not the sad anecdote of food we cannot eat, of beds where we cannot sleep, of streets that give us vertigos, etc, but the way in which this food, these beds, and these streets are, in reality, signs of something much more general and abstract. In order for the failure of our body, in its contact with an alien reality, to be intelligible to us, it is necessary that we develop an interpretation of this reality, that we compare it with that of our ‘home,’ that we single out, for instance, the fulcrum of the difference between ‘our’ food and the food that disgusts us. This operation is indispensable not only for understanding the limits of our tolerance but also, according to the typical mirror-like logic of structuralism, for seizing the features of ‘our’ identity. What has to be programmatically pursued is the construction of a dif- ferential taxonomy in which a relation between subjects and things is not

244 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)/2012: 237-258 reduced to universal principles, but it is interpreted, instead, as a possibility within a matrix of patterns. So as to exemplify the theoretical contents expressed in the first part of this section, the second part will propose a travel prosopopoeia from a semiotic viewpoint: a tour of the world from toilet to toilet. Here the term ‘toilet’ will generically desig- nate, unless specifically indicated, the place devoted to the elimination of corporal waste.

THE STATE OF THE ART

The semiotic reflection on the places and practices of ‘travel scatology’ must not develop from scratch, but must carve out a niche for itself with reference to the abundant literature on the topic. Historical studies on the subject are numerous, although not always of high academic stand- ard.One of the first attempts to write a history of toilets is Wright; Do- bell, Horan, and Monestier propose a social history of toilets, although with a narrative more than academic style; one of the best scientific works on the subject is Inglis; Furrer carries on a cultural history of ‘excrementitious’ places; Silguya scatological history from the Middle Ages until nowadays; Cagliano focuses on the Italian context in particular; an excellent archaeological and historical study of places for defecation in ancient Rome is Hobson, which focuses mostly on Pompeii (where, as it is known, some specimens of Roman latrinae and foricae are still visible); Juuti and Wallenius concentrate on the Finnish contest; Prignano on Lat- in America, again with narrative more than academic style; for a history of the technology of toilets, to be consulted is Lehr, Keeley, and Lehr (vol. 1, chap. 4: “Waste Water Treatement”). From the point of view described above, these historical studies are important mostly because they point out that the resistance things put up to the traveler’s body can be related to complex historical processes, which have shaped throughout centuries – sometimes throughout mil- lennia – the ways in which a group of individuals handles the issue of corporal waste. This is true not only for ‘excrementitious’ places and practices but for the experience of traveling in general: when an alien land repels the traveler with its disgusting food, uncomfortable couches, ‘poisonous’ drugs, etc., in reality what repulses the traveler are not only these things as such but the centuries of cultural history that they embody: in the dimensions

245 Massimo Leone / The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures of a toilet, in the shape of a WC, in the disposition of water sources, etc. the traveler comes across the quintessential output of centuries of history. No discipline more than cultural anthropology has undertaken the task of understanding the variety of ‘scatological cultures’, although the studies devoted to the subject by this discipline are thus far relatively few considering the centrality it holds in the experience of every human being. At least in the twentieth century, one of the main steps toward the establishment of an ‘anthropology of toilets’ is represented by the activity of Geoffrey Gorer, Ruth Benedict, John Embree, and other anthropologists in the ‘Foreign Morale Analysis Division’ [FMAD], established during the Second World War as part of the ‘United States Office of War Information.’ In 1942, the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (1905−85) wrote for the FMAD an essay entitled Japanese Character Struc- ture, where he argued that the ‘toilet training’ of Japanese children was determinant in shaping their adult character. This thesis, proposed by someone who had never visited Japan, was subsequently harshly criti- cized (for a survey, Janssens) but was nevertheless instrumental in intro- ducing the subject of toilets in the international anthropological debate. Even nowadays, Japan produces the highest number of academic essays on this topic, also in relation to a flourishing industry of sanitary fixtures (cfr the cultural activities sponsored by TOTO). Sabbath and Hall propose an anthropological exploration of the taboo of defecation; Cum- mings carries on a comparative anthropology of toilet cultures; Weinberg and Williams frame the ‘eliminative behaviors’ – an expression used by much English literature on the subject http://seccentral.dyndns- home.com/ in the anthropology of deviance; Praeger dwells on US fae- cal culture; Shannonon the issues related to the gender dimension of public toilets, especially as regards transgender users; the most recent study, and perhaps also the best one, on the ‘gender’ of ‘excrementitious’ places and practices is Gershenson and Pensen; one of the most recent contributions on a general anthropology of public toilets is the excellent collective volume Molotch and Noren. Several coffee-table books on the argument also exist, but have very little academic relevance. Some of them, though, offer a rich photographic documentation, like Lambton (which focuses mostly on the UK), Eveleigh, and Gregory and James (with more an international viewpoint). More relevantly, post-colonial studies on toilets include Mbembe, Anderson (1995) and (2010), and

246 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)/2012: 237-258

Esty; to be consulted is also the special issue 3, 2 of the International Jour- nal of Postcolonial Studies. One must learn from these studies, compare them with one’s anecdot- ic experience of the world, and seek to increase their explanatory potential by inserting them in a new theoretical, methodological, and analytical framework. Semiotics too, has already produced several studies on the subject of toilets (for a recent survey, cfr Gramigna Forthcoming). One of the first structural studies on the design of toilets is Kira, still interesting; the essay of Francesco Marsciani on the ethno-semiotics of public toilets is already a classic; so are Kim Sung-do’s analysis on ‘toilet manuals’ in Ko- rean Buddhism and Manar Hammad’s insights on the spatial path pre- disposed by the Japanese bath (but centered mostly on the ritual bath and not on ‘excrementitious’ practices). More or less semiotic observa- tions on latrinalia, that is, what people write and draw in public toilets, are numerous too.Also the many anthropological studies on this theme often adopt a more or less explicitly semiotic perspective, like Butler, which conducts a study of the latrinalia of the University of Melbourne; Hands and Hands is a less academic survey on the same topic. There is no lack either of more specific essays, mostly confined in blogs or other extemporary publications with scarce academic tenor: on the semiotics of urination postures (Boles) – to be compared with the cultural analysis of ‘street urinating’ proposed by the fine Italian intellectual Claudio Magris –;on that of the signs that indicate the gender of toilets (Sensemaya), etc. However, the most famous attempt to elaborate a ‘cultural semiotics’ of toilets is the one by philosopher Slavoj Žižek. In his review (for the London Review of Books) of a book by Timothy Garton Ash (Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time), Žižek recalls a famous sequence of Buñuel’s movie The Phantom of Liberty (1974), a sequence in which alimentary and ‘excrementitious’ practices are inverted:4 people defecate around a table, conversing amiably, whereas when they want to eat something they slip away into a private closet. Drawing inspiration from this sequence, Žižek elaborates a triangle of ‘excrementitious’ cultures, a triangle that is meant to parallel and complement the one elaborated by Lévi-Strauss about food cultures (‘the cooked, the raw, and the rotten’). According to Žižek’s cultural taxonomy, in a traditional German WC, the hole in which excrements – after flushing – disappear is situated in

247 Massimo Leone / The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures the front, so that excrements do not fall in it immediately but lie first on the ceramic layer above, exposed to smelling, inspecting, and possible detecting of traces of any disease.5 In a traditional French WC, instead, the hole is situated in the back, where excrements are supposed to disappear as soon as possible. Finally, the US or Anglo WC looks like a syn- thesis of the first two, like a mediation between these two opposites: the toilet bowl is full of water, so that excrements float in it, visible but without being completely open to inspection. Žižek then quotes a famous passage of Erica Jong’s book Fear of Flying (1973), a passage where the author declares that German toilets are the key to the horrors of the Third Reich, and that individuals able to build toilets like the German ones are capable of anything. Žižek’s analysis concludes by an attempt to link the semiotics of WCs to that of cultures: starting from Hegel, the geographical triad Germany-France-England has been related to three different existential expressions: reflexive precision (Germany), revolutionary urgency (France), and utilitarian pragmatism (England). German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism, and British liberalism represent the same triad at the level of political systems, whereas the prominence of metaphysics and poetry (Germany), politics (France), and economics (England) represent it at the level of the public sphere. According to Žižek, the comparative analysis of toilets allows the scholar not only to observe the effects of this trichotomy in the intimate dimension, but also to identify its effects in the various attitudes that such trichotomy produces in relation to the idea of ‘excrementitious’ ex- cess: ambiguous contemplative fascination (Germany); desire to get rid of it as soon as possible (France); and pragmatic decision to treat it like an ordinary matter and to dispose of it in the most appropriate manner (UK). According to Žižek, an inspection of WCs would allow the scholar of contemporary cultures to understand that it is not true that we live in a post-ideological world. Žižek’s pseudo-semiotic analysis is marred by thoughtless reference to its philosophical-psychoanalytical background, conspicuous propensity for stereotypes, and a taste for boutades. However, if the analysis is rough, the idea underlying it is worthy of consideration: ‘excrementitious’ places and practices are elements that a semiotics of culture can put into a series, analyze through the elaboration of a more or less articulated dif- ferential taxonomy, and most importantly, seek to couple with other tax-

248 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)2)/2012: 237-258 onoomies in the attempt to turn these humble places and scabrous practices into a key for the intelligibility of the world and its cultures.

TAXONOMIC ATTEMPTS

Here follows a map of ‘world toiletry patterns’ (Fig. 1). This map of world toilet practices was produced by the Toto Toilet Company; it is partially reproduced here for scientific purposes only. As a piece of commercial research, generated in Japan, it would require a specific analysis. Francesca Bray includes the map on her website, but iit is, in fact, a ‘quote’ from another article, by Allen Chun. Chun subsequently published his analysis of the map in a special issue of Postcolonial Studies on toilet cultures.

Fig. 1. World toiletry patterns according to Francisca Bray

The taxonomy divides the ‘excrementitious syntagm’ into three fundamental elements: “style,” which identifies the body poositions at the moment of defecation; “how to wipe,” which indicates techniques for the subsequent cleaning of the body; and “treatment of waste,” which regards the processes of bodily waste’s disposal. To each ellement of this syntagm corresponds, according to a logic that is quite close to that of structuralism, a paradigm. Hence, for instance, “style” inclludes two op-

249 Massimo Leone / The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures posite possibilities: “sitting down” and “squatting down”; “how to wipe” includes five possibilities: “paper,” “water,” “pebble,” “rope,” “leaf,” and “spraying”; finally, “treatment of waste” includes six possibilities: “bait of animals,” “bait of fish,” “burying,” “compost,” “sewerage,” and “ex- posure.”6 It is immediately clear that these paradigmatic options are not struc- tured in a perfectly exclusive matrix as they can co-occur in certain common ‘excrementitious’ practices of the planet.7 Francesca Bray’s map also visualizes the way in which various countries tend to construct their own ‘excrementitious syntagms.’ In Turkey, for instance, the map shows a co-presence of “sitting down” and “squatting down”, combined with “water” and “sewerage.” The map signals also, through suitable graphic patterns, the religious demography of the planet, perhaps so as to sug- gest that there is a connection – to be explored yet by anthropologists and other scholars – between ‘excrementitious syntagms’ and religious ideologies. From the point of view of semiotics, this taxonomy and the diagram that visualizes it are interesting but too simplistic. A much more articulated map is needed to fully understand the meaning of ‘excrementitious’ places and practices and relate it to that of other dimensions characterizing the various cultures. One should start from the assumptions that, on the one hand, the human body cannot avoid producing waste – which from a certain point of view is nothing but an expression of the biological entropy generated by life –; on the other hand, that this production is never purely biological; or rather, that there is nothing in the biological mechanism of the human body that is not inextricably intertwined with its functioning as semiotic interface with the world, permanently im- mersed in a continuously changing web of meaning and textuality. Nothing in the alimentary-digestive process is perfectly ‘natural,’ but many anthropologists, and perhaps also several semioticians, have often assumed that only those sections of such process directly exposed to the external reality (the preparation of food, its consumption, the elimination of bodily waste, etc) are under the influence of cultures. However, the human body features porous thresholds, and its nature of semiotic interface with the world manifests itself also in its internal functioning, invisible to the observation of anthropologists and semioticians. Let us consider, for instance, to what extent the meaning we come across in the world thanks to our unceasing – although often unconscious – semiotic

250 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)/2012: 237-258 activity influences the speed with which we chew, the production of sali- va, the ease with which we swallow, the production of gastric juice, the efficacy of digestive movements, etc. Let us consider also how ‘semiotic’ the very beginning of the ‘excrementitious syntagm’ is (if it can ever be isolated from the whole alimentary-digestive process), that is, the stimu- lus, the initial impulse;and to what extent the quotidian interpretation of our Umwelt, – according to Von Uexküll’s acceptation of this term –, can either accelerate or slow down the elimination of the waste we produce. For instance, when we are extremely afraid we empty our bowels immediately without even the possibility of a conscious control. One could ar- gue: this is an instinctive and therefore very little semiotic mechanism, selected by the evolution of the species as extreme mechanism of defense; if I can neither flee nor fight, at least I make myself extremely un- desirable for my predator, covering myself with my own excrements.Yet, this apparently instinctual mechanism too can turn into a cultural pattern, for instance, when human beings cover themselves with excrements or other nauseating substances in order to repel the enemy. The incipit of Naipaul’s A Bend in the Rivercontains a narrative evocation of this strategy. However, if this defense mechanism is highly instinctive and effective from the evolutionary point of view exactly insofar as it is instinctive, the elaboration of the meaning of fear is not instinctive at all. Again, it is through functioning as semiotic interfaces with the world, producing the thread of meaning and the web of textuality, and using this web to link ourselves with our Umwelt that we are able to feel afraid and therefore trigger the instinctive mechanisms of panic. Also in conditions of extreme danger, some people can block these mechanisms; in a certain sense, they can choose not be afraid or at least not to let fear handle their body as it pleases. At the opposite extreme, let us consider also what Freud wrote on the pre-genital pleasure of retaining one’s own excrements not only for the nervous stimulation that it provokes but also for the unconscious sense of production and therefore fullness linked with this retention. What is ‘natural’ in this sense of accumulation, possession, and retention? Semi- otically speaking, nothing. What is mechanically biological in the behavior of those who cannot get rid of their bodily waste, even while suffering from it? Of course, a chemical compound can force the body to empty itself in a few minutes, but this chemical necessity proves exactly the non-chemical but semiotic nature of the human body’s functioning: I

251 Massimo Leone / The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures need a drug because the meaning that I produce through my interaction with the world has such a grip over my body that it even manages to block its apparently more ‘mechanical’ functions. If the impact of meaning, and therefore, culture on my body, or rather, on the functioning of my body as the interface made meaningful by culture, is evident even in the development of peristalsis, let us imagine what its influence can be on ‘excrementitious’ places and practices: when and where I eliminate my bodily waste, in what conditions of solitude, in what spaces, in what places, at what times, with what movements of the body, according to what more or less gender logics, with what sanitation techniques and disposal of waste, etc.. Each of the elements of this ‘enlarged “excrementitious” syntagm’ implies a choice within a paradigm of possibilities, and therefore involves a dynamic that is similar to that of the construction of a text starting from the virtual possibilities of a language. Moreover, each of these ‘linguistic’ choices is directly or indirectly shaped by a culture, according to dynamics that have analogous – and homologous – impact on other dimensions of life. It is in this sense that Žižek’s (pre-) semiotic analysis must be interpreted: who can deny that the same cultural mechanism simultaneously shapes the hermeneutic style of a culture and its relation with bodily waste? However, the ‘excrementitious’ style to which, influenced by a certain culture, we adhere is mostly unintelligible to us. Since early childhood, we have absorbed its elements and often we are not even aware of the existence of alternatives. The obstinacy with which, normally with no reflection whatsoever, we follow this routine day by day would deserve an in-depth analysis. In almost every society, only small children, ‘fools’, ‘perverse’ people, or artists dare modify, sometimes in a radical way, the ‘excrementitious’ style they have inherited from a family, a society, a culture, and a historical époque. As if the management of bodily waste needed an iron cultural control with very little space for idiosyncrasies. Whereas cultures generally attribute a taste for variety, novelty, and indi- vidual creativity to the elaboration of food and to the modalities of its ingestion – and increasingly so especially in late- or post-modern societies –, at the other end of the digestive process human beings adopt a rigidly codified habit, learned in early childhood and kept throughout life. Perhaps, reflection on the routines that preside over the elimination of bodily waste must involve a meditation on the ways in which this waste represents the most tangible and quotidian expression of the prin-

252 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)/2012: 237-258 ciple of death that we harbor in our bodies, of the principle that sooner or later will transform our entire body into waste.8 At the risk of perpetuating a cliché, it is necessary to underline that it is only through contact with different cultures, and therefore in particular through traveling, that we become aware of the existence of these routines, that the ‘excrementitious’ style to which we adhere is deeply different from those we come across in other societies. It is through traveling – and here we return to the initial point of our reflection – that we realize how a certain culture writes its laws even in the depths of our body, even in our apparently most ‘private’ behaviors. It is through traveling that we become aware of the ‘inalienability’ of our routines, of the identity limits with which a culture – from the micro-culture of a family to the macro-culture of a whole society – circumscribes our tolerance, making all the other routines, and the cultures that have generated them, insufferable to us and our traveling bodies.

WASTE AND BELONGING

This article represents only an initial and quite subjective and impres- sionistic step toward the elaboration of a semiotics of ‘excrementitious’ cultures. The next step, a huge step, must consist in linking this simple taxonomy of ‘excrementitious’ syntagms and paradigms with a causal ex- planation: why does a traveler with my cultural identity finds it so unbearable to renounce his own sense of place, solitude, invisibility, privacy, posture, coproscopy, cleaning, and disposal? What cultural and historical forces are behind this intolerance of mine? What is, instead, behind the ‘excrementitious’ costumes that I cannot accept? In the next decades, it will be difficult to underestimate the relevance of the way in which cultures influence the management of bodily waste. The more and more frequent crises of advanced economies manifest themselves also as crises of the modalities with which the role of human beings as producers of waste is removed and ignored. The experience of traveling allows one to re-appropriate a conception of waste as something that, despite the cosmetics of modern toilets, inexorably accompanies human existence.9 Furthermore, it allows one to understand that the economic disparities characterizing the planet express themselves also as disparities concerning the sense of waste: only the economically most advanced societies can afford the illusion of living in a world where the excrements that

253 Massimo Leone / The Semiotics of Waste World Cultures we produce while we live – this little quotidian memento mori – are immediately cast away from the senses in a mysterious elsewhere. The planet’s intensifying cultural globalization and demographic growth will push us to wonder how sustainable and, most importantly, how democratic our ‘excrementitious’ styles are. How many can afford cultivating the aseptic sense of waste characterizing, in various ways, most advanced economies? Reflection on the ecological bettering of these ‘excrementitious’ styles (from the double flushing system on) and to their potential expansion (see the initiatives of the World Toilet Organi- zations) is already current. Also semioticians, as social scientists, can and must give their contribution, helping us to understand the deep meaning of apparently meaningless everyday gestures, and replacing the traditional tales of triumphing travelers who dominate the world with newsemioti- cally-oriented stories of nostalgic travelers that humble things, like foreign toilets, urge toward a more modest feeling of their humanity.

THEORETICAL CONCLUSIONS

The everyday practice of getting rid of one’s bodily waste is made apparently meaningless by the ‘excrementitious’ routines that we learn and in- teriorize since early childhood and that make us forgetful about their cultural character. In reality, nothing is naturally spontaneous in the way in which we eliminate the waste we produce while living, although being oblivious to it can be a way to escape coming to terms with the troubling awareness of how our existence not only brings about waste but also is ul- timately destined to turn into waste. Yet, there is a deep lesson about belonging to be learned from the cultural semiotics of bodily waste practices. On the one hand, a general lesson: the frontiers of our body are de- signed day after day also through the ways in which we expel and reject everything we consider as waste. From this point of view, the positive profile of our identity is a mirror-like image of the negative waste that the construction of such identity brings about. Economically advanced societies have elaborated sophisticated methods to get rid not only of the presence but also of the very awareness of this negative production of death, which is inextricably related to the positive production of life. El- egant toilets and effective sewage systems cast faraway from our areas of belonging not only our bodily waste but also what it represents: the waste that we essentially are, once the sparkle of life has abandoned us.

254 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)/2012: 237-258

On the other hand, a specific lesson: it is only by re-interpreting traveling as an experience that tests the limits of our area of belonging, ex- posing us to the crossings of frontiers whose intensity is intolerable, that we can understand how our ‘home’ is mostly made by the quotidian routines that shape our identity without us being aware of it. A non-touristy experience of travel, for instance, does not reproduce in an alien land our own ‘excrementitious’ syntagms, but gives us the opportunity to realize that also in the apparently insignificant elimination of our bodily waste we are shaped by invisible routines, and that these routines outline our identity with a force whose intensity can be revealed also by the shock and the intolerability of traveling.

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1 This article is part of an essay on the semiotics of belonging that the author will hopefully publish in 2013. A first version of this essay, in Italian, was published as Leone 2012. 2The literary and academic bibliography on travel is immense, to the extent that it constitutes an autonomous branch both in literature (‘travel literature,’ also said ‘odeporics’) and in scholarship (‘travel studies’); a useful, although somewhat dated, tool of navigation through bibliography on travel is Coz 1935−49; a more updated survey is Hulme and Youngs as well as Speake; for a gender perspective, Netzley; on odeporics, Monga; an interesting journal on the subject is Studies in Travel Literature www.studiesintravelwriting. com; it gathers many of the research results of the Cen- tre for Travel Writing Studies of the University of Nottingham (www.ntu.ac.uk/ hum/centres/english/travel_writing.html); a reference in this field is also the series of symposia ‘Borders and Crossings’, which have been organized for more than a decade (the last one to date took place in Melbourne: www.languages.unimelb.edu.au/ research/conferences/borderscrossings/ index.html); the publications of the Hakluyt So- ciety are also indispensable (www.hakluyt.com); for a cultural history of travel, Elsner and Rubiés; for an interesting introduction to the semiotics of travel literature (focusing mainly on a Francophone corpus), Scott; on the semiotics of tourism, Brucculeri and Giannitrapani, and especially all the works by Jean-Didier Urbain; the bibliography on imaginary traveling is even vaster than that on ‘real’ traveling! 3 “You shall learn how salty is the taste/ of another man’s bread and how hard is the way,/going down and then up another man’s stairs.” Engl. translation by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (Princeton Dante project). 4For an in-depth study of the many movies in which toilets, and especially public toilets, become a fundamental place of narration, cfr Tschirbs. 5Incidentally, the first cross-fertilization between semiotics and coprology probably took place in semeiotics, and in particular in the study of excrements as possible reservoir of diagnostic signs; Gaultier is one of the first systematic surveys of this branch of semeiotics; for a historical reconstruction, Lewin. 6Slapstick comedy often draws inspiration from a ‘politically incorrect’ viewpoint on these differences; see, for instance, the adventures of Sasha Baron Cohen’s fictional character Borat Sagdiyev as he seeks to learn the US ‘excrementitious syntagm.’ 7In Italy, for instance, there is no clear opposition between “paper” and “water” as regards cleaning techniques, given the diffusion of one of the ‘national jewels,’ the bidet. 8Cfr Bataille (on the informe) and Kristeva (on abjection). 9 There are countless literary representation of such estrangement toward “the toilets of the Other”; cfr, for instance, Paul Bowles’ Sheltering Sky (1949) and Edmund White’s The Married Man (2000), the last chapter of which describes a traveller cov- ered in excrement in the Sahara.

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