From the very first day, my roommates and I realised we were going up against something bigger than ourselves. We had just moved into a studentenhuis ahead of the fall semester, and much to our collective dismay, the shared kitchen we had inherited exemplified the tragedy of the commons. Thick layers of grime discoloured the floor, months of grease clung to the backsplash, and the fridge/freezer had not been emptied, allowing exotic life forms to develop inside over the summer. Was this where we were to prepare our meals for the next year? The five of us immediately came to the unanimous conclusion that the state of the kitchen was unacceptable and got together in short order to give it a deep clean.
While we worked, I noticed a sense of discomfort buzzing within me. In that kitchen, with its strange odours hanging in musty endsummer air, sorting through the squalor felt like we were folding ourselves into it, marinating ourselves in it. The act of cleaning had made me dirty. When we finally decided to call it a day, I was consumed by an overwhelming need to then clean myself.
Close the Door
For all the time that we spend living in our heads, tussling with lofty ideas, there is no getting around the fact that we are physical beings existing in a physical world: we see colours when light refracts into our retinas, hear sound when sound waves vibrate our eardrums, smell odours when molecules bind with receptors in our noses; we traverse the world in our suits of meat and bones. The brain steers the wheel, but the mind is enclosed inside the vehicle that is its body, with the skin acting as the border that demarcates where the individual becomes separate from the world at large.
Maintaining this border is an active task, one which we take seriously. Every evening, after returning to the sanctums of our homes, we dutifully wash off the debris of the day. Even among non-believers, cleanliness is apparently still godliness. When we were young, perhaps we had to be taught, but now the importance of scrubbing dirt off of our skins goes unquestioned. Slacking off on this ritual would mean allowing our bodies to be polluted — allowing the boundaries of our beings to blur — risking our becoming lost in the unruliness of the world. So we wash our hair, our faces, our bodies, our clothes, before we can finally rest, clean.
If cleanliness preserves order, then dirt is ‘disorder’, as famously articulated by sociologist Mary Douglas. Pollutants are ‘matter out of place’: juice in a glass is inoffensive, where it is supposed to be, but juice spilled on the body stains clothing, makes skin sticky. When the relative positions of objects disturb the social fabric, the object itself is seen as undesirable, ‘dirty’. The statuses of objects as clean or dirty are not due to their inherent qualities; rather, these are sociocultural judgments that we bestow, where cleanliness is equated with goodness, and dirt with badness.
Keeping clean takes work, but it is work that we relegate to the private realm, that we hide. Behind closed doors, away from the watchful or inattentive eyes of others, we reveal our aberrations — the dirt and sweat that cling to our skins and pollute us. When we are all alone, in the safety of our bathrooms, we confront the ways we taint and have been tainted, without fearing we may contaminate others. There is a sense of relief in this un-hiding: finally, we can answer nature’s call to be our honest, natural selves. Finally, we are allowed a break from the need to appear ‘clean’. This reprieve is granted only temporarily. Before we leave that special space where being dirty is allowed, we must reorder ourselves so that we are fit to be seen by others again.
A body’s cleanliness is a symbol of its owner’s ability to slot into the strata of civil society. This notion is embedded in the very definition of the word: we are clean when we are free of germs, pollutants, stains, offensive odours, or anything else that may be undesirable. Being clean is less about the production of a trait of ‘cleanness’, and more about the elimination of what is ‘dirty’. Beyond concerns about personal and public hygiene, our daily cleaning practices reveal a desire to conform to the dictums of cultural consensus. This is a natural aspiration: when society agrees that the body should be clean, keeping clean becomes a prerequisite for participating in social life, and failure to do so becomes grounds for exclusion.
In a city as multiplicitous as Amsterdam, whose residents take pride in their diversity and acceptance of the transgressive, the lines between clean and dirty may be crossed more than in other places. Few can deny the charm or the ‘gezelligheid’ of a quintessential brown bar, whose floor is carpeted in layers of spilled beer, whose wallpaper has been discoloured by decades of cigarette smoke and whose furniture is painted dark expressly to conceal stains. The hygiene levels of the canals that run through the city are often disparaged, but come summertime, the young and the young at heart don’t shy from taking a dip to cool off. After using the toilet, some may not even wash their hands. But even here, in a city that seems to welcome everyone, not cleaning one’s body is a sign of deviance, a fact that sidelines one group more than others: the homeless. After all, how is a person without regular access to a bathroom supposed to wash themselves? Cleanliness as status quo serves as a mechanism of social organisation, delineating who belongs and who doesn't.
Meet Me at the Fence
While the skin separates the self from the world, it also connects. In classic Western traditions, the notion of the separate self is so dominant that the relevance of boundaries seems ‘natural and essential’. As this paradigm has been disturbed and disrupted, turns in thought now consider how we live in a reality of relationality, of social connectedness. To paraphrase Julia Kristeva, the body is the boundary, the envelope that shelters the internal world and enables the dialogue between the inside and the outside. Through nerve endings on every square inch of our skins, through every sensory faculty our bodies afford us, we take in information about and experience the world outside. Like the edges of each piece in nature’s impossibly immense and continuous jigsaw puzzle, the skin acts as a conduit for connection, shattering any notion of a self that exists in isolation.
In contrast to student houses and their infamously filthy kitchens, the second home of students — the university — is a sparkling manifestation of order. When it comes to the UvA, whether we are talking about the Roeterseiland campus, the Science Park, or a suite of other buildings designated for the use of the university and its students, the floors are free of litter, tables are wiped clean of sticky substances, and there is often the smell of disinfectant in the air. What do we make of this stark difference? Are students more conscientious in their use of spaces in schools? Of course, I ask this question facetiously; students may be more careful in public where others are always watching, but they are not the ones doing the dirty work of cleaning the campuses. In the evenings, waste generated throughout the day overflows from trash bins, but this is a matter that students don’t concern themselves with as they leave. After all, by the next day, the bins are emptied, without the students ever dirtying their hands.
What makes the cleanliness of universities possible, the cleanliness that we take for granted in those hallowed halls of learning, is a team of sanitation workers whose labour makes it so. Although their work is necessary for the functioning of campus life, these workers are otherwise excluded from the social fabric of the university and are, in truth, rarely seen. Their invisibility is no accident, but instead a result of the nature of their work set within the context of our culture. Although these workers are in the business of making clean, ‘cleanness’ is not a quality that is produced; rather, it is the absence of dirt, of ‘matter out of place’ that deviates from a societally ordained order. Consequently, when sanitation work is done well, such that the state of things is as it should be, it goes unnoticed. As opposed to in the studentenhuis, the work of cleaning the second home of the students has been outsourced, allowing students to remain ignorant of the work required to maintain the campus. To their eyes, this work has been rendered invisible.
This ignorance, whether blissful or wilful, affords a kind of privileged irresponsibility on the part of students towards the cleaners who support their lives. The cleanliness of the university seems to occur without effort, exactly as if it were the natural order of things, rather than a cultural construct perpetuated by society. When we are oblivious to the labour of others that we depend on to meet our needs, we are able to maintain an illusion of self-sufficiency.
Our ignorance acts as a layer of insulation, separating and distancing us, allowing us to keep up the facade, so that we may be spared from confronting our more complicated relationships and the questions they raise, such as this one: the cleaners are responsible for maintaining a clean environment for the students, but what are the responsibilities of the latter toward the former? The labour of others has freed us from engaging in the work ourselves, while the invisibility of this labour has freed us from our relationality.
Cross the Line
Beyond acting as an interface, as an area of contact points through which we perceive the world, our skins also function as a semipermeable membrane, allowing for a constant exchange between our inner and outer worlds. In truth, we know that our skins are porous. When we exert ourselves, our bodies leak sweat and oils, the specific chemical compositions of which reveal the state of our physical being — whether we are diabetic, inebriated, or otherwise unwell. This is a two-way street: traffic goes in the other direction as well, such as when we use topical medications like nicotine patches or ketoprofen, where the active ingredients penetrate our skins to enter our bloodstreams directly. Our skins are membrane-like: they act sometimes as a boundary, sometimes as a contact point, and other times as a site of exchange, where our bodies have conversations with our surroundings. This semipermeable quality hints at the nature of our place in the world; it challenges the notion that we are separate selves, existing alone, and instead invites us to reconsider the ways we relate to the outside world and to each other.
There is a certain hubris to all this cleaning that we humans do, in imposing our definitions of order and disorder on the world around us. In recent decades, this arrogance is no longer unfounded. We have long left the epoch of the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene, where the effects of human activity on the planet are undeniable. Just as we are at the mercy of the forces of nature as it shapes our conditions, we give back what we get, doing our best to reshape the world in our image. In this story, if we grant the world personhood, in the footsteps of New Zealand with the Whanganui River or the United States of America with the corporation, then we are all unambiguously fluid characters, influencing each other with every interaction, every choice, every breath, every touch.
We have never been apart from the world; we were always mere parts within it, a larger ensemble that is complex and ever-changing. Despite our efforts to distance ourselves from disorder, we remain porous, malleable beings, susceptible to the will of the world and inextricably interdependent. We can scrub our skins, do our best to wash off every visible sign of dirt, but we cannot vacuum away the invisible cobwebs that we are enmeshed in. Any condition of cleanliness we achieve is but a fleeting comfort. Before long, we find ourselves marked once more by our interactions with others, stained, changed. Our hands got dirty again.
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