ABSOLUTE DIRT
When a farmer or farm-labourer plods his weary way home, some of the Good Earth he has plowed sticks to his boots. This Good Earth is the source of almost all that is necessary for survival.
The Horn of Plenty, the Matrix, the Mother of All.
As he crosses the threshold of his house, the farmer or farm-labourer again shakes his boots against the step or post. and often removes the heavy boots as he walks further into the house.
If he forgets, and leaves his boots on, tracking the Good Earth on to the floor of hearth or kitchen, his wife will say:
“Don’t bring that Dirt on to my clean floor!”
And so what was Good Earth becomes Polluting Dirt. The earth of the field becomes dirt in the house.
The earth is the very ground we walk on. Earth in its meaning of soil, that stuff, that matter in which plants grow, and in which animals of all sorts live, is our Mother — or Matter in its primordial sense of Mother or Womb.
In the soily earth, the ‘waste’ from animals (shit) and from plants (various) becomes the food or tools of other animals and plants. The dead bodies of animals and plants also become food and tools for others.
Dirt meant originally dung or shit. So the earth of the fields, typically called ‘soil’, becomes ‘dirt’ or ‘shit’ on the floor of the house, Thus, to soil one’s trousers or bed is to shit in one’s trousers or bed — an act now of great shamefulness.
A farmer who owns so little land that he can work all himself, is called a ‘dirt-farmer’ in the USA.
This magical transformation of a valued substance, good earth (by definition, full of the shit and rotting corpses of dead plants and animals) into filth’ as it is tracked into the house is said by some (M Douglas; M Thompson) to be a universal trait of humans. We do It because it is our nature as cultural animals to do so — we have to create categories of good and bad, clean and dirty to think of the world, categories that describe matter out of place, or, in the case of modern, civilised people, matter that should have no place at all.
One way of defining dirt (pollutant) and waste (useless stuff) is to call them ‘matter out of place’. Soil or earth on the field is useful and clean (non-polluting); soil on the kitchen floor is useless and dirty/ (aesthetically and ideologically polluting). On the floor it is waste; on the field it is full of worth and value.
Even human shit itself is seen by traditional agricultural societies as valuable. Maxine Hong Kingston describes how one of her peasant ancestors visited a neighbour and, “He tarried so long that he had to use the outhouse, but he carefully weighed his shit on the outhouse scales so that these neighbours could return a like amount to his fields.” (p. 22 China Man, 1990, Picador)
Mary Douglas elaborates on this idea of matter out of place in Purity and Danger. In this book, for instance, she describes how an animal called the pangolin, which is sacred to a tribe (the Lele) in Africa cannot be eaten – its flesh was taboo, and to eat it is dangerous, makes one impure, unclean. But on certain times of the year, it is called upon certain tribal elders to eat of the pangolin, evading the dangers of breaking the taboo through their skill and status as elders of a cult, and in doing so, ensure fertility and virility for their community.
If dirt or waste is something or some action or some idea that is in the wrong place at the wrong time, this logically entails that this thing/action/idea has a ‘right’ place to be in, and can be transformed by this change of place and time. Even more, dirt can be transformed by being acted upon, as in a bug’s eating and digesting another animal’s waste, eg flies on human shit.
Michael Thompson has pointed out that some dirt has no right place to be in — but he claims we can solve this sometimes by putting it out of ‘sight’ or ‘mind’ (p.92-93 Rubbish Theory, 1979): “That which is discarded but not visible, because it does not intrude is simply residual to the category system” He does not realise that this is pseudo-annihilation.
But even that which is physically perceptible, e.g. household rubbish in rubbish bins can be ok because, Thompson says, the ‘right place’ for rubbish is a rubbish bin. But this ignores the fact that the rubbish in rubbish bins is transferred to landfills, which are then ignored, because landfills are full of waste that has not been transformed by location.
Even that which is seen to be rubbish and has no right place to be in (e.g. Gypsies) can be ignored because, by being categorised as rubbish, and the ‘right’ place for them to be in is ‘nowhere’. (Thompson, ibid) So we push them outside of our social universe. A solution not seen as adequate by Nazis.
In fact rubbish bins are also pushed out of our social universe even though we see them as we pass by them: they are irrelevant to the ‘being’ of the homes and houses they stand outside, just as the dirt and grit on the pavement and streets is irrelevant, to be ignored if possible, to be ‘disappeared’ when possible to a landfill. (Yes, yes, recycling. So what? It creates more waste, and is far from being exhaustive).
Thompson is wrong in that he assumes that this category of absolute waste/dirt is universal, and that it has a right place to be, eg in rubbish bins. By definition, absolute waste has no right to be in. It must be annihilated. Disappeared forever.
On the contrary, until civilisations, one being’s discarded waste (useless stuff) is another being’s food, utensil, etc. Dirt (pollutant) could always be transformed back to cleanliness by moving it from one place to another, one time to another. Dirt and waste are relative in the world of these people. An ‘enemy’ can join a new nation (“for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”)
Even the most ‘taboo’ of things or actions can be made useful in pre-civilised cultures.
It is only with modern civilisation that we have ‘absolute’ waste: discarded things, people, actions that can never be useful or clean anywhere, any time. This is a gradual development, from the rubbish tips of ancient cities (middens) to the nuclear waste and the creation of categories of people and other living things (vermin; pests; weeds), that need complete extermination.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing are directly related to our creation of absolute waste: toxic wastes, destructive land fill etc. Because we already see much of our waste as absolute, and apparently annihilated by being put into a landfill, some people have no problem with seeing certain groups of other people as absolute waste who can be dumped into a landfill.
Douglas and Thompson ignore the indigenous ways of life at a deep level, ignore the modern development of the concept of absolute waste. To claim that a ‘rubbish bin’ is the ‘right’ place for rubbish (i.e. is seen as the right place by some people) is to ignore this absoluteness of a state of being dirty: it will always be dirty.
If we follow this post-structuralist analysis of the inevitability of the absolute categories of dirt and waste. we end up exactly where we are in our modern terrible economic and ecological relation to Nature. In other words, post-structuralism echoes, mirrors in theory the pollutant practices of our current global economy.
In our dumbed—down, mealy-mouthed modern manner, we invent terms like ‘recycling’ to describe what should be an activity of profound power and transformation, and yet also usual, complete and everyday. But modern industrial recycling is a joke: it is wasteful, waste-making, uses non-renewable technologies and material, etc. A bad joke on the woke, and a disaster for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
‘Sewage’ is both an idea and a fact. If we did not agree with the idea of sewage, we would not create the fact of it. The idea of it is this idea of absolute waste.
The Way of Nature is the way of relative waste, relative worth. The great Evil of Modern Times is the idea and fact of the attempt to ignore this, to create absolute waste. absolute worth.
And now we reap the whirlwind because of our attempts to push things. people, actions into a black hole of ‘nowhere’ .