Cleaning and Value

This is an electronic reprint of the original article. This reprint may differ from the original in pagination and typographic detail. How is Dirt Possible? Lagerspetz, Olli Published in: Cleaning and Value Published: 01/01/2020 Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Document License Publisher rights policy Link to publication Please cite the original version: Lagerspetz, O. (2020). How is Dirt Possible? On the philosophy of dirt, cleanliness and refuse. In B. Isabel, H. Christina, & K. Felix (Eds.), Cleaning and Value: Interdisciplinary Investigations (pp. 55-65). Sidestone Press. https://www.sidestone.com/books/cleaning-and-value General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. This document is downloaded from the Research Information Portal of ÅAU: 27. Sep. 2021 CLEANING AND VALUE This is a free offprint – as with all our publications the entire book is freely accessible on our website, and is available in print or as PDF e-book. www.sidestone.com CLEANING AND VALUE INTERDISCIPLINARY INVESTIGATIONS edited by Isabel Bredenbröker, Christina Hanzen & Felix Kotzur © 2020 Individual authors Published by Sidestone Press, Leiden www.sidestone.com Lay-out & cover design: Sidestone Press Photograph cover: Robert Schittko ISBN 978-90-8890-921-4 (softcover) ISBN 978-90-8890-922-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-90-8890-923-8 (PDF e-book) Contents Contributors 9 Editor’s note 15 Preface 17 Hans P. Hahn Paper Abstracts 19 SECTION 1: EDITORIAL 21 We have never been Clean – Towards an Interdisciplinary 23 Discourse about Cleaning and Value Isabel Bredenbröker, Christina Hanzen, Felix Kotzur SECTION 2: DISCIPLINARY REFLECTIONS 39 Archaeology and Cleaning: Some Reflections on the 41 Archaeological Process Ulrich Veit How is Dirt possible? On the Philosophy of Dirt, Cleanliness 55 and Refuse Olli Lagerspetz SECTION 3: CONTEXTS AND PLACES 67 The Last Bath: Cleaning Practices and the Production of 69 ‘Good Death’ in an Ewe Town Isabel Bredenbröker The Cultural Aspect of Cleaning in Archaeology – a Case Study 89 from the late Neolithic Site of Fıstıklı Höyük Georg Cyrus CARPE Dirt, Disease, and Detritus: Roman Sanitation and its 105 Value System Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow SECTION 4: BODIES, OBJECTS AND PERSONAL HYGIENE 127 A Matter of Representation – Personal Hygiene in Eastern 129 Zhou-dynasty China (771-256 BCE) Catrin Kost Why is Death defiling? Considering death-related Pollution 155 and Cleaning in Central Asia Jeanine Dağyeli Your Clothes Should Be Clean! Your Head Should Be Washed! 167 Body Cleaning and Social Inclusion in the Epic of Gilgamesh Ainsley Hawthorn SECTION 5: SOCIAL PRACTICES AND POLITICS 181 Shaking out the Tablecloth – Uzbek Hospitality and the 183 Construction of Boundaries of Belonging Sebile Yapici The Cleansing of a Political System: Obliterations, Burials 195 and ‘Reuse’ of Palaces and Seats of Power in Central Italy (Seventh-Fifth centuries BCE) Robinson Peter Krämer Cleaning up the Past 213 Mareike Späth SECTION 6: ARTISTIC PERSPECTIVES 229 Growths: Contemporary Art between Cleaning and Value 231 Isabel Bredenbröker Mother Tongue (2013) Interview 235 I: Isabel Bredenbröker, C: Chrischa Oswald Mehl, Salz und Wasser zu einem Teig verarbeitet und auf die 240 Spiegeloberfläche aufgetragen (2017) Flour, salt and water, prepared as a dough and applied to the 240 mirror surface, size varies (2017) Kerstin Gottschalk Duschvorhang (2005/2015) 246 Andreas Koch Cleaning and Value 249 Robert Schittko, Nikolaus Kockel In between contemporary stones (2016) 251 Wagehe Raufi Contemporary Art and the Gaze of an Archaeologist: 255 An Interpretative Attempt of Decay and Lost Evidence Anna Langgartner Bruise 13 (2017) 257 Mia Bencun How is Dirt possible? On the Philosophy of Dirt, Cleanliness and Refuse Olli Lagerspetz To ask how is dirt possible is to ask: what are the conditions of human thought and life that make it meaningful to use the concept of dirt at all? When attempting to answer this question, related concepts like those of refuse, pollution, soiling and cleaning will also have to be addressed. What is involved in applying these and similar descriptors to material objects, and what does the fact of their application imply about our ordinary relations with our physical surroundings? As Hans Peter Hahn points out1, the role of dirt- related concepts has to do with what it means to assign value to objects, or perhaps, as I would prefer to put it, with what it means to recognise the values that objects already have. The question ‘how is dirt possible?’ is of course an allusion to Immanuel Kant who framed some of his central enquiries in this form. He asked, among other things, how synthetic a priori truths were possible, how mathematics and pure (i.e. theoretical) natural science were possible, and how the categorical imperative was possible. These questions assume that a certain phenomenon or practice, such as pure natural science, clearly exists. There is, however, something about our other philosophical or intellectual commitments that implies that it somehow ought not to be possible. Kant, for instance, argued that a workable conception of laws of nature, and thus of pure natural science, could not be upheld if philosophy remained committed to the then received idea of the relation between a priori and a posteriori. Given that pure natural science – which so to speak should not exist – in fact is a meaningful undertaking, how should we revise our intellectual commitments? It seems to me that dirt is in a similar kind of predicament. Given some of the intellectual commitments typical of academic culture at present, it may seem that dirt does not fit in. Existing debates on dirt, soiling and impurity are, to a great extent, attempts to come to grips with a perceived incoherence between the phenomenon of dirt and our commitments. The most important of these commitments is a certain view on the relation between physical reality and culturally determined ideas about reality. Natural science is expected to be the ultimate arbiter of the real and the unreal. Whatever falls outside 1 In his opening remarks for the conference for which this essay was written. in: Bredenbröker, I., Hanzen, C. & Kotzur, F (eds) 2020: Cleaning and Value. Interdisciplinary Investigations, Sidestone Press (Leiden), pp. 55-66. 55 its reach belongs to the domain of mere subjectivity. Clearly, our descriptions of things as dirty, soiled, clean and the like imply a dimension of meaning or value which seems incompatible with science as we today understand it. The crucial idea was expressed concisely by Justus von Liebig more than a hundred years ago: ‘Für die Chemie gibt es keinen Dreck’ (for chemistry, no turd exists). Scientific Realism, Culturalism and Aristotle: a first Approximation The structure of my argument is as follows. In theoretical analyses of soiling we find two main approaches, labelled here for short as scientific realism and culturalism. Less prominent today, there is the possibility of a third approach, connected with Aristotle. These perspectives represent different ways of making intellectual sense of the phenomenon of dirt or, as the case may be, of claiming that the phenomenon itself is illusory. The bulk of this essay is devoted to developing the last of these three approaches. The two others must, however, be outlined in order to get an idea of the current state of the debate. Scientific realism as a philosophical position comes in many varieties, but now it is sufficient simply to indicate its general outlook. Its main theses are, firstly, that reality is independent of the mind and, secondly, that the entities and qualities that really populate the world are the ones that would be picked up by the predicate terms of a ‘mature’ or fully developed (natural) science (see Agazzi, 2017:pp.209f.). Historically, scientific realism emerged when natural science was enthroned as the preferred framework for rational inquiry of reality. The aim of science, according to scientific realism, is to present descriptions of reality independent from any subjective point of view. To quote Thomas Nagel, it is to present ‘a view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986). For realism, objective reality exists, but adherents of scientific realism argue that everyday experience alone cannot give us an undistorted view of reality (Agazzi, 2017:p.210). Some key aspects of reality are inaccessible to the untrained mind and liable to be misconstrued by it. Therefore, in scientific realism, theoretical natural science is presented as the best approximation to a true and completely subject-less account of reality. In such a perspective, dirt tends to disintegrate, sucked up into the general category of physical substance. ‘Culturalism’ is, for the most part, not a term used by the thinkers who are subsumed in that category. Nevertheless, it may be a good term to describe a tendency that is widely accepted in anthropological approaches to pollution.2 Dirt is understood as a subjective, symbolic and culturally conditioned product of the mind. In a sense, the approach which is here labelled culturalism can be regarded as the opposite of scientific realism, because it focuses precisely on the experiences of human subjects. On the other hand, culturalism and scientific realism spring from a common root and they can be made mutually compatible. If scientific realism is accepted as the best approach to reality as such, we are left with a ‘remainder’ of human experience that seems to require treatment of some other kind. Material reality as such is handed over to science while its subjective aspects are represented as the business of psychology and cultural anthropology.

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