Time and date: January 2022, 13.00~

　Venue: Faculty of Humanities, Kobe University

　Attendants: Mayumi Fukunaga, Sae Nakamura, Taro Okuda, Tomoko Sakai, Oscar Wrenn

Aims and objectives

This workshop will attempt to dig down into and explore sensations and experiences of ‘dirtiness’ for each of the research group members. While doing this we will try to think through what sort of things we are unable to ‘reveal’, express, and share with others, and why this is so. In contrast to our first workshop in which ‘dirtiness’ was examined from an academic perspective and through research experience, in this workshop we will consider it in the context of the bodies and daily life of each research group member.

Specifically, this workshop aims to bring together both a variety of materials (images, video, text etc.) which express participant feelings of ‘dirtiness’, as well as examination of the difficulties in ‘bringing out’ into the open and sharing one’s own ‘dirtiness’ with others. After presentations from each member, comments and opinions on the content brought up will be exchanged as part of a general discussion.

For this seminar we have also invited graphic recording (graphic facilitation) artist Demura Sayo (Company Director, Tagayasu) to produce illustrations of the content of both member presentations and the general discussion. Through this we are aiming to shed light on things which tend to be lost in the flow and organisation of verbal or written discussion.

Through the above activities this workshop aims to bring to the fore the limits and difficulties inherent in the research project, in addition to opening up possible directions for future inquiry.

This research seminar was financially supported by the Suntory Foundation 2021 Grant for Collaborative Research in Humanities and Social Sciences.

Tomoko Sakai

Translated from Japanese by Oscar Wrenn

For this report on our workshop aiming to ‘dig down into dirtiness’, I would like to collect together a number of points which occurred to me during the process of preparing for the workshop, as well as during the discussions on the day itself. As this workshop was designed to be a space in which particular experiences could be explored freely as part of the flow of the discussion, impressions and experiences were likely different for each participant. The following notes outline some of my personal ruminations on the contents of the workshop.

Dirtiness and the ‘inability to say no’

What struck me first when thinking over my own personal daily activities was the fact that my experience of ‘dirtiness' was inseparable from that which I was able to sense, whether through smells, material textures, humidity, colours, or shapes. These sense-experiences were closely connected to physical reactions in my body, such as in goosebumps, averting my eyes, or scrunching up my face.

I also noticed a tendency to experience strong feelings of disgust at times when I sensed danger related to intrusion into my personal body and space. For example, the fact that I feel a strong sense of dirtiness whenever cleaning the sludge of tangled hair that collects in plugholes in the bathroom is disgust directed towards the idea of that sludge sliding under my fingernails. Similarly, the fear experienced when noticing small spiders creeping into undergarments is in the image of those spiders continuing their journey and ending up inside of you.

In extreme reactions of disgust there is also an aspect of unavoidability once noticed, a sense that there is ‘nothing to be done about it’: the way vomit rushes up from stomach to throat in a sort of unavoidable outpouring. Mennighaus’ observation on disgust is pertinent here: ‘disgust implies, not just an ability to say no, but even more a compulsion to say no, an inability not to say no.’ (Winfried Mennighaus, Digust, p.2). (How does this relate to sensations of moral or ethical dirtiness, however?)

The socialisation of dirtiness

The workshop also gave me an opportunity to reconfirm an important point regarding dirtiness. There is an aspect of dirtiness that involves learning what is regarded as 'dirty' in society in general, on the basis of which individuals make judgements about what is 'clean' and what is 'dirty'. This is a point that bears continual emphasis.

Did our own grime and body odour (and that of others in our vicinity) not become, at some point in the past, something which we came to sense as ‘dirty’? Similarly, do we not at points warn ourselves, ‘this is dirty’? The emotions and bodily reactions related to ‘dirtiness’ feel as though they are beyond our individual will: how, then, can we write about this particular aspect of dirtiness without naturalising (making invisible) the political aspect of social exclusion enacted through the label of dirtiness?

People are socialised to feel that certain things are ‘dirty’, and within this process they are shaped as subjects who physiologically sense things in particular ways – as icky, skin-crawling, nausea-inducing etc. - becoming subject to (subjects of) governance (for example, the instillment of hygienic practices as part of the project of the modern nation state, and the associated exclusion and criminalisation of that taken to be dirty).

Whilst remaining aware of the relations to such broader mechanisms, it is perhaps important when thinking about dirt avoidance to engage with depictions at the detailed, micro-level: shedding light on what happens within individuals (and between them) as part of particular events or situations that encompass the socialisation, communality and shared sense/understanding of our feelings surrounding and reactions to dirt, as well as the distance taken from and omission of dirtiness (though this still remains a vague description).

‘Working out’ boundaries of disgust

What would happen if, for example, a number of people were to gather together and discuss topics at the very limit of acceptability, things that might cause people to feel disgust? The contours of what, and under what circumstances, was felt to be ‘dirty’, ‘unbroachable’, ‘permissible’, and ‘provocative’ (in the broadest sense of the term) would no doubt be negotiated, ‘worked out’, amongst the members present. This would perhaps entail forms of comparison and adjustment for points of empathy and difference, as well as the work of secretly recognising those peculiar and unsightly parts of oneself not held by others.

However, there would also be cases in which people would be unconcerned with the various sensations of others present, where a sense of communality (complicity) might be constructed through the pre-established fact that all were present to engage with the same taboo or ‘dirty’ object/activity, within the same space or at the same time. Coming together as a group and watching pornographic media strongly involves this sense of ‘complicity’, and it is for this reason that it is used as a test of loyalty in the drawing of boundaries for gendered groups. This then links to the severe acts of exclusion directed at those who do not acquiesce to the demand to become an ‘accomplice’ in such activities.

The varied vectors and multi-layered violence of dirt

The power enacted in exclusion and attacks surrounding issues of ‘dirtiness’ can work in various directions. The most direct example of this would be to call someone dirty, a verbal act which both entails violence and works to produce relations of power. Such an act is an attack that causes hurt by targeting vulnerable parts of the subject, and is connected to sensations of shame. Furthermore, it is likely that, depending on context, things which should not be seen as dirty are unilaterally labelled as such.

In a different way, we can also think of the act of bringing out ‘dirty’ things ‘into the open’, and through this causing people in such spaces to feel discomfort or shame, as a form of violence or assault – such violence is perhaps evident when one talks about another ‘airing their dirty laundry’. Truthfully, during the preparation for this workshop I was concerned about this very issue, a certain hesitation about showing dirtiness to others. However, I was also keenly aware that the act of bringing out ‘dirty’ things ‘into the open’ has been used as a means of critical action toward dominant regimes of social and political value (and associated hierarchies).

‘Boring’ dirt

As mentioned above, the process of presenting ‘dirty’ images and materials and using them as objects of consideration through which to think through broader themes forced me to confront a number of issues. One of these was the fact that my own sensations, as everyday ‘givens’, are fundamentally uninteresting.

Faeces, eye mucus, snot, vomit, plaque, rotten food – these are all essentially banal objects, which are not, or do not need to be, the subject of conversation. In fact, doing so is thought to be a waste of time. Though I had certainly experienced dirty objects as uninteresting in this way, I was struck by one thought in particular whilst delving into these ‘banal’ sensations.

Perhaps dirtiness includes within it concepts of staleness and obsolescence, a sense of being ‘worn-out’ and of banality. To come across something completely spotless, something perfectly undefiled is, within our day-to-day life, a rare occurrence. A musician giving a performance of The Transcendental Études by Franz Liszt without even the slightest mistake would no doubt be referred to as a ‘rare talent’, and safe drinking water without any cloudiness was previously not something available to everyone everywhere. When we say that a residential space has a ‘lived-in feel’, is that referring to an atmosphere produced, whether we like it or not, by dirt and disorder (messiness) seeping in as part of day-to-day life?

Conversely, perhaps the moment that a ‘dirty’ experience, or expression of such experience, becomes something notable, shocking, and out of the ordinary, is the moment it ceases to be something that is just simply ‘dirty’. Maybe ‘indecent art’, as long as it is still considered art, transcends ‘dirtiness’ in some way?

Objects of awe or disdain, remark or familiarity?

Proving a counterpoint to this examination of the banal, the sensation of awe (in the original sense of the term, an overwhelming feeling of wonder but also of dread and fear) was also an important point of discussion in the workshop. Awe can be seen as perhaps the polar opposite sensation to banality and boredom – it would certainly seem to be so. The interest in and importance of dirtiness lies in its intermingling and integration with the sacred. If this is the case, it would appear to be a mistake to think of dirty objects as ‘boring and insignificant’.

Do our day-to-day experiences of dirtiness all entail some sense of awe, then? After grappling with this idea for a while, my current thinking is that it would be worth once again examining dirtiness as straddling both the domains of the aberrant and remarkable, and the common and familiar.

Our everyday, as well as our selves as part of this everyday domain, always contains slight degree of uncleanliness, a faint amount of ugliness. The degree of this ‘faint’ dirtiness maybe also be a point worth considering.

The danger of dissecting dirtiness and related concepts

Lastly, I would like to touch upon the pitfalls involved in comparative examination of, and differentiation between, dirtiness and other related or neighbouring concepts. When thinking about dirtiness there is a tendency to direct attention to what the core or essential elements of a given concept might be, or what elements can be seen to be shared between multiple, varied cases.

There are certainly findings to be made from such an approach. For example, in contrast to cleanliness, which is closely connected to ideas of logic and consistency, dirtiness is connected to the absence of consistency, and the impossibility of measurement. Similarly, ‘ugliness’ does not necessarily imply the danger of pervasion or infection, but there is such an aspect to dirtiness – and so on.

However, from the outset this approach has its limits, something that requires either discarding it entirely or limiting it to partial level of analysis. Dirtiness only appears within the context of particular individuals, social situations, and events (for example, someone who experiences a fallen-out tooth to be dirty in one situation might in a separate situation not feel dirtiness at all) – I believe this needs to be placed at the heart of this research group’s approach towards dirtiness.