_Dialogue

A philosopher, P, and a Japanologist, J, walk together down the riverbank of the Aura, in Turku, Finland. It’s an early spring afternoon, cold but clear. Old snow and pebbles punctuate the cobblestones by the still naked trees.

P: Finland is so clean; there’s hardly any trash on the streets. And we have the cleanest air in the world, did you know? [1] We have all the health benefits of clean air and clean cities, like better sleep and a better mood. The place in the world with the cleanest air is actually in Finland, in Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park. [2] Here, we pay a lot of attention to cleanliness. Clean air, water, and food. You can even pick berries and mushrooms in the forests and eat them; [3] that’s how clean Finland is.

J: It really sounds almost utopian when you look at all the information from national and local websites! And yet, it is interesting to consider when we think of something as dirt. Look at this gravel scattered all through the streets. In winter it makes paths safer and cleaner. But in spring, when the snow melts, it becomes dirt and dust.

P: A lot of Finnish street cleaning discourse is devoted to when and how the stones should be cleaned in the spring. [4] You could say this is an example of dirt as “matter out of place.” [5] This is a concept popularized by Mary Douglas in the 1960s, but she didn’t originate it. It was a pre-existing Victorian phrase, employed in a speech by British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), talking about urban planning ideals. [6] At this time, England was dealing with an ‘urban blight’ where rapid industrialization and inequality caused destitute urban dwellers to live in close quarters in unsanitary living conditions. Waste management was insufficient for such large groups of people in such small areas, and Lord Palmerston’s position was that natural byproducts were essentially good. The problem was not waste itself (as human and food waste make perfectly good fertilizer if managed properly), but waste management. [7]

J: From how you are talking, I thought you were going to tell me the bodies living in close quarters were the matter out of place and not the waste they produced! Because both waste and bodies are like this gravel we were talking about. They could fulfil particular social functions when organized appropriately but were instead disorganized and unmanageable. For Palmerston, when bodies are ‘in the right place’ they become valuable through their placing; for example, farmers on agricultural land. And so, impoverished bodies must have been to the prime minister also like dirt or waste.  

P: I guess there is a thinner line than one would like between waste and bodies as ‘matter out of place.’ We were talking about spotless streets, with no trash and clean air, where gravel is an efficient tool, but if the environment changes, gravel turns to dirt. And suddenly the same element that was part of the discourse about the street as an almost ideal example of appropriateness becomes waste whose management is a discursive and material complication.

J: Unwanted bodies can get in the way of discourse, when the misplacement of matter pushes the limits of ideological structure. That Victorian ‘urban blight’ transforming perfectly good waste into dirt, reminds me of urban issues in Heian-kyō, the old capital in Japan established in the late 8th century. It was to be the seat of government, and a center of ritual power, so, killing, burying the dead, and even warriors would not be allowed in its premises, because of ritual pollution associated with death. [8]

P: Ritual pollution is similar to ‘matter out of place.’ Certain things, acts, or people might be regarded as not inherently wrong somewhere else, but not ‘clean’ when in an inappropriate space. And so ideal separation creates this kind of utopian notion of a city in which ‘dirt’ is absent, or removed as quickly as possible, to a more fitting location.

J: This utopian notion is the impression modern readers often get when they read courtly literature from the time. TheTale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973–c. 1014) [9] is probably the best known of the Heian narratives; the story of the son of an emperor and his romantic liaisons and relationships. But the tale was written in almost post-apocalyptical circumstances; after several decades of bubonic plague and smallpox epidemics that clogged the streets of the capital with bodies, left there to rot and be devoured by dogs. This played a part in the cultural shift from burial to cremation that took place at this time. [10] Several of the author’s family members and her husband died of disease in the years before we believe she started writing the tale.

If a casual reader is asked what comes to mind when thinking about Genji, or even about Heian literature as a whole, they will likely say poetry, romance, secret rendezvous, trailing robes, and natural imagery. More dedicated students may dutifully remember Genji as the prototypical example of the classical theme of mono no aware, or ‘the pathos of [the impermanence of] things,’ though that is a concept developed later by nativist scholars in the 18th century. [11] I think people are sometimes misled by this notion of ‘impermanence.’ Heian aristocrats often brought up the fragility of human life in diaries and tales, but their lived experience of the impermanence of death was not one of “dissolving like smoke into the air,” or “vanishing like the dew” like some deathbed poems of the time describe. The living had to contend with the very physical and spiritual aspects of death and decay, including the actual corpses.

P: That is interesting. Despite this strong idea of impermanence, does this mean that the actual achievement of this grieved physical impermanence required dealing correctly with the dead, bodily and spiritually, when they remained on?

J: Exactly! Death requires a lot of logistical, material, and spiritual management, and in the Heian period this management was hitting a level of crisis, not unlike how we talk about trash. I don’t mean ‘spiritual management’ as an abstract notion of emotional and religious response to transcendental truth. Remember the Heian cosmological conception of the world was one where humans, gods, animals, and objects worked together as active agents in making meaning. [12] The corpses needed to be managed physically but also negotiated with to be neutralized as sources of disgust, pollution, and danger.

P: So, Genji and all these Heian tales are written during quite a terrible time to be in the city, full of dead bodies and disease, but this is largely absent from the text? Are the texts kind of a utopian escape where death sits correctly?

J: Well, there is a death anxiety throughout the text, but the physicality of death and death management are only hinted at. The text is marked by death and grieving—Genji’s mother dies when he is a baby; one of his lovers and his principal wife die, perhaps haunted by the spirit of a jealous rival, Miyasudokoro. The bodies in the text are manicured or hidden, obscuring the more troublingly bodily aspects of death.

When Genji’s lover Yūgao dies in his arms, her body as he carries it is “very tiny and very pretty, and not at all repellent.” Her hair “streamed forth” from the wrapping where he had put it. [13] Likewise, the hair on the corpse of Genji’s consort, Murasaki, “was smooth and lustrous and not a strand was out of place. […] the skin was a purer, more radiant white than the living lady, seated at her mirror, could have made it. Her beauty, as if in untroubled sleep.” [14] These women are untroubling corpses. The main marker of Heian female beauty, their hair, still shown as prim and socially appropriate.

The narrative defends the dead bodies’ ties to social class, as well as gender. Both Yūgao and Murasaki are middle-ranking and with no social support, and we are invited to gaze upon their bodies freely. When Genji’s principal wife—the high-ranking daughter of a minister—dies in childbirth, her body does not appear at all. One second the lady is alive, and then we are informed she has been taken to be cremated. The same thing happens to Miyasudokoro, who had been the consort of a prince, and to Genji’s imperial stepmother. Their bodies are veiled by the narrative; the juxtaposition between their social position and the debasement of dead flesh too horrifying to be made clear.

P: This again brings to mind this idea of where and how matter ‘ought’ to be. The dead body has to correctly perform gender. To not be ‘out of place,’ it must visibly subscribe to the rules of humanity. To not become ‘dirt,’ it must remain aesthetically pleasing to gaze at and appropriate in death; it must remain to a point consumable. Depending on class, even showing the beautiful undiseased corpse would not do, for the dead body of high rank must not be seen; it ought to “vanish like the dew.” The unveiling or disclosure of the body itself is a violence upon the status of the dead and acknowledges its transformation into something troubling; into potentially destabilizing matter.

J: Yes. The inability of the corpse to defend itself from being made visible is already out of place for a high-ranking body. For it to be made into an object to be gazed at; to generate an emotional response without control of its unveiling or without the subjecthood to be the one who gazes is a distressing subversion of the appropriate placing of ranked bodies. The only way to manage both ritual purity and hierarchy is to look away.

P: In that sense, what is out of place is not the dead body, but the one who makes it visible by looking at it. Sara Ahmed in the Cultural Politics of Emotion discusses the feeling of disgust and how disgust functions “as a speech act.” [15] She talks about the exclamation of disgust as a speech act that distances the speaker from the thing that is disgusting, but that requires a witness to see the distancing. She uses as an example the disgust expressed by American media after the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001. This disgust, expressed towards something specific, like terrorist action, is “sticky,” [16] meaning it becomes attached to things that exist in relation to it. For Ahmed, disgust exists in a power relation. Those who express it, remove themselves from, but also become placed above what is disgusting. Through that speech act, ‘disgusting’ becomes then not only an action, but a property of the offending body. [17] In this case, then, depicting signs of disease, or decay, or loss of personhood, or—depending on the station of the dead—the dead body itself, would render the body disgusting. Would disgust stick to the viewer of the body? Would the act of gazing on the dead body render the viewer or the reader disgusting?

J: The viewer risks generating disgust by seeing! Seeing the body makes us complicit in the body’s disgustingness, much like one can experience shame by seeing someone do something embarrassing. The disgustingness of the body sticks to the viewer dialogically and requires distancing through the disgust speech act. Allowing the body to remain veiled and invisible creates the illusion of an un-relatable body. When the body does not have to be related to, the viewer does not have the power or need to distance themselves from it. To remain invisible as personhood is being lost is a mark of respect; the bodies of the higher-ranking ladies are protected from the reader’s gaze. There is an attempt to destroy the de-structuring power of death through looking away and through verbal omission. [18] The possibility of opening the high-ranking body to provoking disgust through description is too much to bear for the tale.

At the same time, refusing to engage the materiality of the body renders the force of the dead undefined and hard to control. We were talking of courtly narratives like Genji, because I am interested in this idea of what is unaddressed, and unmentioned, but there are some Heian texts where you can see death through different eyes. For instance, a contemporaneous compilation of Buddhist anecdotes and tales of India, China, and Japan, the Collection of Tales from Times Past and Present [19] shows us an un-aristocratic view on dead femininity. In one of its stories, we learn of a thief in the capital who sees an old woman at the Rasho Gate, plucking hair out of the head of a dead girl. The woman tells the thief “as there was no one to bury [my mistress], I brought her here. See what nice long hair she has. I’m plucking it out to make a wig.” [20] The thief then steals not only the corpse’s hair, but also its clothes and the clothes of the old woman. Here, the dead body retains the same social markers of gendered acceptability clothes and hair, but they’re no longer an expression of inherent superiority; they can be removed for someone else’s gain, with the flesh left behind and abandoned.

P: In Precarious Life, Judith Butler talks about some lives being grievable while others are not. That is, that a life we cannot see as valuable also cannot be grieved. Butler references Emanuel Levinas’ idea that ethics do not come from inside the self but rather from the face of the other. The other looks at you, and they ask you to see them as human. Except, Butler says, sometimes the face of the other is meaningless to us, because we cannot perceive it as a face that matters; certain faces must first be established as having value. And so, the ability to mourn a death is a sort of barometer and if we cannot mourn someone’s death, we cannot value their life. [21] In that sense, the story about stealing the hair and the clothes from the corpse of the woman at the gate serves to discharge the social markers on the corpse of meaning. Instead of being grievable, they become depersonalized, literally de-faced.

J: I wonder if the recognition of the face of the other in our grief is also part of our own need to interpret someone or something as legible to us. It is true that part of the process of mourning is upholding the humanity of a body that has stopped being able to maintain that expression of humanity by itself, but it is also our own response to the material and social effect the corpse has on us. The dead body is effective beyond our intention to see it as the social person it used to be. Rajyashree Pandey talks about the understanding of agency in pre-modern Japan as something that does not presuppose the existence of an a priori humanist, transcendental subject. Heian actors thus had no such concept of the self. Subjectful agency exists as an expression of identity, but agency emerges also in the interactions of human actors with the other, the object, the natural, and the supernatural. [22] Mournable lives in Butler’s conception demand an identity to be mourned. They are an attempt to hold together the humanity of a subject, and the subjecthood of a body. This is one of the limits of theories of agency based on a notion of resistance. Can we talk about mourning without a face? Trash has all the elements to play the role of the uneasy corpse; as a reminder—a remainder—it haunts us and requires reconstitution, else it drowns us and brings us disease. Looking at trash with disgust reveals it as having escaped our control to render it manageable and productive.

P: Mourning without a face? What you say about corpses escaping our attempts to frame them in the shape of the person we try to see reminds me of Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida. There he talks about the concept of hauntology. As you may know, ontology examines notions of being and often uses a process of categorization to come to some sort of truth. In this process, something is always left out, for categories cannot grasp the full nuance of a singular thing. The remainder of the thing that does not fit within the ontological framework haunts ontology, making it hauntology. [23]

Derrida says also that the work of hauntology is the work of mourning. When Levinas died in 1995, Derrida’s eulogy included this notion of “faithful infidelity,” which he defines as the work of mourning. [24] This means that when someone dies you take them with you into the future, while knowing you are never capturing them fully. The work of mourning is an attempt to maintain the presence of the other knowing that you can only fail; the fullness of the other haunts you by escaping your grasp. This ‘ghost’ moves you to try and recreate it, to bring them back into the world, despite this being impossible. You can only take with you your own image of the dead person; you are being faithful to them by doing so, but this faithfulness is always unfaithful because it is destined to fail. Like an adaptation, it cannot capture the fullness of the original, and it becomes something different, faithful in action and unfaithful in effect.

Hauntology argues against the idea that something is ever fully absent. Within the absence of something there is the work of mourning. Like how, for Derrida, the absence of Levinas is present and the absence of something is in itself an absent presence. Derrida will never be Levinas, and his philosophy will never be his, but the absent presence of Levinas remains in Derrida’s work.

J: This reminds me of the Heian pacification of angry spirits: those resentful dead thought to bring natural disasters and epidemics. Spirit-pacifying ceremonies first took place in 863 to appease the ghosts of six disgraced aristocrats who were thought to have brought pestilence—but they also appeased the living, who felt the lack of proper rites to the dead caused an explosion in famine and disease. [25] The angry dead became something to be negotiated with to protect the city from further disgrace; they could both cause and protect from disease. Successful mourning pacifies, reframing death and social upheaval into a neutral or useful tool against those very things. This process is not just a ritual or psychological; it requires a physical and material process of reconstitution.

So, if trash and filth are noticeable through their absence in Finland, are they haunting us? What would the work of mourning trash even look like?

P: Trash is what Butler would call ungrievable. We don’t mourn its absence, or endeavor to be faithful to it. Trash doesn’t have a face. But I am intrigued by your idea of grieving something without transcendental subjecthood. Maybe the fact that trash haunts us implies inherently the possibility of grieving and mourning. Could we say we are doing an improper job of mourning trash, rather than not mourning it? It is interesting to think of trash as a specter, both hauntologically, but also like the bodies and specters in Heian Japan occupying a place of material anxiety. We do attempt to take trash into the future. Here, in Finland, we have a strong sense of it being pacified and neutralized through our faithful efforts of recycling and proper handling. However, in terms of the agency of matter, trash’s absence in the streets of Finland means something. It means cleanliness, health, and harmonious social relations. However, the material specter of the absent trash looms over us—a threat and a reminder of global environmental collapse. After all, though it intends to become a zero-waste circular economy by 2050, [26] the European Union waste exports rose 75% between 2004 and 2020, now standing at 32.7 million tons. [27] Fins produce much less waste per capita than most other Europeans, but they are still above the quantities produced in some countries like the Netherlands or Spain. [28] These facts haunt us.

J: So, a Finnish specter emerges through the Finnish failure to adequately pacify trash? Instead of mourning and acknowledging the production of trash, Finland makes the waste invisible. However, we are collectively unable to deal appropriately with trash—it remains elsewhere and unpacified—and with its agency. To stop trash from haunting us we may need to learn how to engage it materially in terms of effective grieving.

P: Our ‘mourning’ of trash fails to pacify this specter, as we are not accounting for the fullness of it, but rather through what we would want it to be. We ‘look away’ to respect the illusion of appropriate structural—and ritual—management; to allow it to remain a beautiful corpse. But pacification is not successful when it only addresses the discursive aspects brought forward by the mourner or the haunted. Pacification needs to respond to the material agency of the one who haunts.

_How to Cite: