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Introduction

Dirty Theory:

Troubling Architecture

There is nothing very respectable about dirty theory. It seeks out approaches and plots trajectories from a position close to the ground. We must move past our disgust, to work with the dirt: This is an imperative for coping with our dusty, dirty, defiled world. To think with it, not against it. Dirt never emerges from nowhere, ex nihilo, but from beneath your feet, from under your fingernails, from encounters and relations and from the accumulated odds and sods that compose any mode of life. A life, where it is not stultified as nature morte, is inevitably dirty, messy, buffeted by contingencies. Theories, ways of actively thinking-with, can be derived from all kinds of sources and situations. The dirty theorist is usually something of an avid collector, accumulating not just the regular set readers – written by the usual theoretical suspects – but pamphlets, brochures, maps and postcards, snatches of conversation and grabs of social media feed, accepting all the while that distinctions between low and high culture are easily undone. (An old lesson we keep forgetting, caught up as we are in a will to purification.) What was once sacred and revered in the next moment may well be expelled as abject, judged to be without sense, useless. The dirty theorist follows the materials, tracks the soiled effluent, observing from where it came and the direction that it appears to be taking. She is unafraid of selecting at will from the sedimented archive of thinking.

Dirty theory messes with mixed disciplines. Showing up in ethnography, in geography, in philosophy, it can just as well find a home in architecture, design and the creative arts. Dirt and art have an existing long-term relationship, whether rendered as negative sculptures extracted from the earth, or maintenance manifestos or soil re-valued as currency. Dirt and architecture – beyond the uptight habits of the archetypal heroic architect’s will to purification and hygiene – admits sly allegiances here and there. David Adjaye’s Dirty House dabbles in dirt, but better still, Katherine Shonfield’s transient installations dig deeper and Jennifer Bloomer’s dirty ditties and dirty drawings conspire to imagine architecture otherwise. Dirty theory helps architecture think about the ordinary gestures of care, repair and maintenance that can form part of its mandate. Most powerfully, following the dirt can be a creative movement, a profound relationship with our local environment-worlds.

Dirty theory is wary of the strictures of disciplination, preferring instead indisciplination, a wayward approach to problems. It’s scattergun, if not scatological. Dirty theory appropriates and critically, knowingly, misappropriates, because ideas do not belong to singular authors, the dirty theorist avers. Dirty theory, the dirty theorist and the theory slut herself are not very respectable, rational or reasonable figures. The preferred approach here is one of a “groping experimentation” (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 41), to quote that still disreputable pair, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Groping the world, prehending it, trying not to grasp it too hard. To be respectable means to have accepted and internalised the status quo, where everything and everyone is agreeable and none are prepared to rock the boat. To rock the boat would be to place oneself at risk of being thrown overboard, only to discover that the mythical island of reason has disappeared into the mists. To be rational assumes that reason has been determined in advance, and that everything can be organised in good measure. To be reasonable, well, it means you are prepared to get along and are certainly not a woman who makes a fuss. The reason that supports the reasonable (“be reasonable now!”) assumes that each thing has its proper, measured and assigned, place. Once a title on the lands belonging to reason has been secured, and “a solid foundation to build upon” (Kant 1979, 180) has been established, why should we not be contented? Why venture further? Beyond the island of truth, as Immanuel Kant has famously expounded, we only risk venturing further into the fogs of illusion. Yet islands, in this age of concatenating global climatic crises, rising sea levels, micro-plastics and pollutants, turn out to be not so secure after all. Island, land, dirt, all proffering opportunities for the cultivation of reason:There is more than a whiff of the colonial impulse in this territorialisation of dirt. Pure reason must be muddied. Dirty theory thus has additional labour in the political project of decolonisation, and even in the decolonisation of the otherwise too clean imaginary. Dirty theory demands that other voices be heard.

The dirt, the earth, is the required ground in which concepts can be planted and eventually bloom as flowers or weeds (either way). Dirty theory, you see, is neither good nor bad per se; like flowers or weeds it depends on the situation, the relations at hand, on what comes together to form a greater or a meaner composition. The dirt may not be sufficient for anything at all to grow. To territorialise, to deterritorialise, to reterritorialise – all such movements depend on the dirt rendered as the earth, la terre, beneath your feet, between your fingers, in your mouth as you utter a furious expletive. Without these movements-utterances, not much would be achieved, for good or for bad, and you are bound to get dirty either way.

It is the anthropologist Mary Douglas who famously offers the neatest definition of dirt: Dirt is matter out of place (Douglas 1966, 36). Matter located where it is judged not to belong. Judged as such by someone, or rather, judged by some societal context organised around societal norms and structures. Douglas explains that this simple formula directs us toward order and then the contravention of ordered relations. Dirt is that which crosses boundaries, challenges decorum, contravenes norms. The low, the reduced, the underfoot, the despised, the rejected, the expelled are at the same moment the accumulated ground upon which the powerful steady themselves in order to reach rarefied heights. Dirt carries material and conceptual weight, it is part of the stuff of all manner of corporeal relation, and it is also symbolic. Dirt registers the conjunction of the material semiotic. It invokes unholy mixtures of concepts and materials, of words and what matters. Jennifer Bloomer puts it plainly: “The world and the language are all tangled around each other” (1993, 87). The tangle should be read as a growing vine, a process of entanglement, as of that emerging from the mouth of the young woman in Botticelli’s painting Primavera [Spring] (1478); either she is choking on, or else she is vomiting up, growing life.

If it is Douglas who represents dirt for the ethnographers, then it is the architectural thinker-doer Jennifer Bloomer who best represents dirt for the architects. She represents it in such a way as to steal it from the grasp of the would-be phenomenologists, and those who would wax lyrical about dirt as an elevated outcome of weathering (Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow 1993), or celebrate the aesthetic effects of dust or seek a metaphysics of the imperfect and impure. Much like violence when violence exudes a curious fascination in its beholder, dirt is ever at risk of aestheticisation. Despite this risk, cannot a dirty theory enable creative possibilities beyond mere aestheticisation – creative possibilities that can make a critical difference where it matters? Bloomer, I believe, can help show the way.

With architecture, we are ever at risk of rendering dirt bucolic and rustic, of laying it out for our phenomenological enjoyment. Bloomer, who will play an important part in what follows, has darker tales to tell concerning dirt. She mixes water and blood, mixes words and matter, putting things purposively where they do not properly belong. An example: On introducing the beloved architectural motif of the poché, the secret that is supposed to properly reveal the deepest phenomenological desires of the architect, she shows instead the hole at the back of the wardrobe through which a young girl escapes from sexual abuse; the poché becomes the after-effect of a cigarette burn, the dirt that comes from the violence that is hidden behind the stern façades of what are supposed to be proper family men (1993, 178-179). Sobering scenes for a dirty theorist. In this sleight of hand Bloomer deploys feminist resistance in response to the accepted definition of poché, which instead gives way to matter in the wrong place. Trailing behind Bloomer, suddenly a standard definition breaks into narrative and is off and away. This is no Bachelardian reverie in her discourse, no, it is nothing so saccharine as that. The phenomenological sacred is instead rendered profane and filthy. This is critique, what I would call material semiotic critique, an elegant slippage. The clean sheet turns out to be smudged.

Why get dirty? Why dirty theory now? Dirt is what gives relief to the mark drawn on the dusty ground with a stick to say: inside/outside, included/ excluded. To mark, as Michel Serres explains, means to leave a footstep in the soil, and thus to claim, and reclaim, a territory (2011, 2). Dirty theory is a reminder that theories are good for nothing unless they are bound up with the muck of mundane relations on the ground, with the kind of environmental things that are increasingly at stake today, that were at stake yesterday, too, and that certainly will be at stake tomorrow. Make a mud map, find your way through the dirt. The temporalities of dirt take us all the way from property rights to a call for the commons and a return to practices of communing, getting dirty together. These are what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa calls “soil times” (2017). Dirt is in the body, the home, the environment (Cox et al. 2011) and in all that we share and divide. At its best, dirty theory could participate in the imagining of new modes of getting messy together, accepting what Donna Haraway calls our messmates: our more-than-human relations. Dirt demands that we listen to the environment-worlds in the midst of which we lose and find ourselves, becoming and unbecoming. Dirty theory is concerned with discovering new ways of getting along with each other that challenge fixed categories, that track a diagonal and even a zig-zag course across taxonomic charts to invent new kinds of territories. La terre is what dirt might aspire to become, as long as the Earth is something that can be adequately, equitably shared.

There are thinkers of dirt, and they are diverse. I will attempt in the short chapters that follow to think-with them. There are practitioners of dirt, who understand the nutrient bases of the dirty work required, who can remind us of how some contact with the dirt can build up our immunological systems and open ameliorative relations beyond the habits of human exceptionalism. Think dirt. Do dirt. But because this is dirty theory, the thinking and the doing are messed up, and a theorist one day is a practitioner the next, and a practitioner one moment is a theorist the next. Dirt relations are transversal relations. Make a mess, clean it up, accept that the task must start over again the very next day. I have no doubt that Sisyphus was caked in muck and dirt.

Dirt has already settled into some of the crevices of architectural research, whether through a fascination with dust, or weathering, or with what David Gissen calls architecture’s “other environments”, to which he offers a name: “subnature” (2009). This is a name presumably meant to designate that which comes from below or which operates from beneath the domain of proper disciplinary conventions, and this begs the question: Do subnatures subconsciously structure our disciplinary habits, and our behaviours, too, in relation to our habitats? Gissen makes no recourse to Sigmund Freud, more politely presenting a series of architectural projects that admit a fascination in the dirt of the subnatural, from the work of enfants terribles François Roche and Stéphanie Laveux of R&Sie(n) with their speculative Bangkok tower, B_Mu, which was designed to attract rather than repel the polluted air (Gissen 2009, 79), to Jorge Otero-Pailos’s iterative experiments in the reappropriation of dust, which test the radical preservation of architectural surfaces (Gissen 2009, 95-99).

While Gissen does not venture to mention Freud’s tales of what may lie beneath conscious consideration when it comes to dirt and architecture, Bloomer certainly does, and Haraway likewise points out that Freud can act as a guide to understanding the traumas associated with the conceit of human exceptionalism (Haraway 2007, 11). No doubt dirt of various kinds has been at work in architecture from its dark beginnings, registered in the first moment that some dirt was cleared to create the ground on which human life could commence its performances. Some ground is cleared, a circle is demarcated, what is considered foreign is removed and as a result a rarefied space is secured. In his own meditations on pollutants and dirt, Malfeance: Appropriation Through Pollution?, Serres argues that dirt and its distributions play a fundamental role in relation to the basic questions: “How do the living inhabit a place? How do they establish it, recognise it?” (2011, 2). He answers: “appropriation takes place through dirt” (3; italics in the original). Through the scent-signs of our personal stains, body odour, urine, “perfume and excrement” (2), we demarcate territories, venturing to make them our own. We spit into the tasty soup so that no one else will eat it. Dirt admits a spatiality in the simple observation that other people’s houses do not smell quite right, because they do not smell like home.

When addressing dirt in relation to architecture and art, a detour through the formless becomes inevitable. Here, the proper name of Georges Bataille necessarily enters the frame of reference, followed by mention of Yve Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss’s exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris (1996) and the subsequent book Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), which was supported by their thinking with Bataille. It is worth noting, though, that Bloomer’s experimental work Architecture and the Text: The (S) crypts of Joyce and Piranesi also draws on Bataille and was published some four years earlier (1993). Acknowledging the long relationship between dirt and artistic expression, Bloomer quotes Mark Taylor on Bataille. In reference to a meditation on the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux,Taylor reports: “From the beginning (if indeed there is a beginning), there is something grotto-esque and dirty about art. Bataille is convinced that the dirt of art’s grotesque, subterranean ‘origin’ can never be wiped away” (cited in Bloomer 1993, 50). Note especially the grotty textual invention of grotto-esque. Despite its title, with its apparent emphasis on textuality, Bloomer’s artfully composed (s)crypts, and her other essays, reveal a distinctly dirty underground, including dirty ditties and lewd allusions to the dirty stuff that the passageways between architecture and text inevitably reveals. A perhaps unknowing companion thinker to Douglas, Bloomer meditates on the intimate relations cohering between the sacred and the profane, concluding that architecture “actually represents the ‘filth of the sacred’” (1993, 50; italics in the original).

The essays that are collaboratively and individually signed by Bois and Krauss in Formless: A User’s Guide are instructive in terms of dirty precedents. They cut a cross-section through representative samples of the performances of the formless in art and architecture. Included, for instance, is Gordon Matta-Clark’s infamous intervention Threshole (1973) (Bois and Krauss 1997, 190). Folded into Matta-Clark’s title is the temptation to allow for a slip of the tongue, turning it into a dirty word: arsehole. No doubt such controversial quasi-architectural examples, which appear to take things apart rather than construct anything, would not be accepted by those who take a more conservative view on disciplinary taxonomies. The core of the discipline of architecture, as Bloomer explains, concerns building habitable buildings in which to dwell (Bloomer 1993, 33). This architecture is a simple, unified, disciplined and essential affair, much in need of dirtying. In Bois and Krauss’s work, the unholy relation between form and the formless dominates, though there is still something rather masculinist and heroic about the celebration of the formless as a will to break down the ordered compositions and surfaces of a world. To break things apart. The formless still tends to organise the mess of materials as something of a side effect necessary to the expression of the formless over form. While there is evidence of the inclusion of dirt, vomit, shit, blood and other satisfyingly repulsive materials in the media of art and architecture, in Bois and Krauss’s account these tend to fall under the remit of the powers of the formless. While it troubles their neat distinction, the formless here does not equate to an overthrow of the form/ matter dichotomy. Questions of the formless are still too caught up in the predominance of form, which accords form a privileged position relative to matter. It could well be simply a matter of emphasis, and in any case it could also be that both Bloomer and Bois and Krauss’s textual self-enjoyments merely return us to a somewhat nostalgic recollection of the theoretical fascinations of the 1990s, when the pastel pop of pomo (postmodernism) was beginning to become rather jaded. Only, dirty theory is not afraid of such apparent anachronisms. What the dirty theorist insists is that when we dismiss something – a work, a text – as ‘anachronistic’, we might as well be describing it as dirty and should instead go for a closer feel.

Dirty theory seeks support in the emergence of the environmental humanities, and intersects with what has come to be called feminist new materialism (though the ‘new’ here ought to be held in suspension, and even placed under interrogation). Dirty theory is distinctly posthumanist in its tendencies toward more entangled human and more-than-human worldly relations and practices of worlding and even an acceptance of everyday contaminations. The philosopher of science and dog lover Donna Haraway is clearly a champion here, though she has her own reservations about the category ‘posthumanist’, averring instead that we have never been human (Haraway 2007, 3-108).

Genealogical acknowledgements are necessary, and the dirty precedents that are dealt with above presage a distinct turn to material concerns that emerged in the first decade of the 21^st century, through edited collections including Katie Lloyd Thomas’s Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice (2006), Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s Material Feminisms (2008) and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010). To these, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things could be added, and especially the early scene depicting her encounter with “Glove, pollen, rat [dead], cap, stick” mashed into a plug of refuse in a storm water drain on Cold Spring Lane, Baltimore (2010, 4). Note here, an architectural thinker-practitioner, Katie Lloyd Thomas, leads the brigade toward what matters when it comes to material relations. Plunging further into the murk of a recent theoretical past, I will continue to champion the enduring legacy of Bloomer’s work, especially for those brave enough to track a feminist and queer course through the pristine halls of architecture. Trailing blood and guts in their wake. I proffer here that the subsequent impact and uptake of new materialism allows us to undertake a reengagement in Bloomer.

New materialists, especially those with a feminist project, explain that through the 1980s and ‘90s we had gotten so caught up in textual play and discursive tangles that we failed to remember the materiality of the text and the text’s entanglement in specific environment-worlds. As architectural feminist thinker-doer Katie Lloyd Thomas points out, this writing here and now, this book you hold in your hands, assumes a complex array of material supports and infrastructures; it is the “result of a vast network of practices” from the conventions of the English language to “a complex history of development, extraction, technique, transportation and exchange” (2006, 2). That the dirty mess of material matters matter draws our attention to the background, the complex environmental background that is composed of vast networks of material flows. Consider rare minerals such as cobalt and the outsourced non-Western labour that comes together in this laptop into which I type (Rossiter 2009). In time, this not-so-clean piece of equipment (smudged screen, keyboard messed with strands of hair, skin, dust, even crumbs), will be passed through electronic trash heaps, picked apart again by the small fingers of child labourers who are obscenely relegated to the off-scenes of the Global North. It is worth considering all the livelihoods that are dependent on dirt.

Fig. 1 Hélène Frichot, Dig and Dump. Drawing, 2019.

Thinking with dirt means thinking with local and global environment-worlds. No locale rests outside the infiltrations of dirt, and if you don’t see the dirt in front of you, it is because it is being collected, held and managed elsewhere. In my dirty drawing Dig and Dump (2019) I illustrate a simplistic relation between the resources we dig up, and the trash we dump when we have exhausted the perceived use-value of the things that resources have been ingeniously moulded into. This is an ancient cycle, dig and dump, dig and dump, that has accelerated dangerously following the industrial revolution. I invite you to multiply this thought-image ad infinitum in order to understand the concatenating impact of our collective dirty habits. An urban context that is described as dirty is often one in which layers of infrastructure are dysfunctional and spatial support systems are insufficient for the job.

Dirt troubles architecture and its associated disciplines. Hence the subtitle of this dirty book. If, as Bois and Krauss argue, “The dream of architecture, among other things, is to escape entropy” (Bois and Krauss 1997, 187), dirt can be understood as one of the primary material outcomes of such entropy. Dirt creates resistance to the deceptively smooth surfaces of urban inhabitation, compounding local miseries with global flows.

The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of worldwide organization, but also of a counterattack combining the smooth and the holey and turning back against the town: sprawling, temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even relevant. An explosive misery secreted by the city… (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 481)

Failure to clean, to wash, to purify, to organise and to tidy results in the world reclaimed as dirt. And yet, we must hesitate here, for failure to maintain houses, neighbourhoods and cities that are falling into disrepair is quickly countered with the demand for ‘clean-up’ jobs – revitalisations that are supported by the perceived economic benefits of gentrification. The problem is that even to undertake a friendly, local clean-up job is to risk the collateral damage of social cleansing. Revitalisation and gentrification can bring with them the homogenisation of the social ecologies of neighbourhoods. Things get more complicated, as Ben Campkin has demonstrated, in that dirt, the grittiness of “edgy” neighbourhoods can develop their own aesthetic value (Campkin 2007, 74). Gentrification works with dirt, revaluing it. The complexity and ambiguity, the instability of dirt categories, produce unbalanced and precarious relations between the pure and the impure, the smooth and the striated.

Dirt, it might be assumed, is anathema to technology, but the lifecycle of technological products depends on the extraction of resources, the environmental mess of industrial effluents and the designed obsolescence of technological things that anticipate a future incarnation as trash. Nevertheless, dirt is what we are frequently promised will be removed, should we only apply adequately advanced technologies. The techno-fix is supposed to clean our living environments of dirt. Remain deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to have an answer to your dirt, or who claims that your home maintenance chores can be magically done away with. In his pre-digital discussion of technology through the complex lens of processes of mechanisation, Sigfried Giedion, an architectural historian and critic writing in the 1930s, maintained an orientation toward cleanliness that went so far as to claim to secure the liberation of domestic labour. For Giedion, gender and technology, when applied to what he calls the “feminist question”, facilitates the emancipation of women from domestic toil through the imagination of a “servantless household” (Giedion 2013, 514). Giedion’s analysis goes beyond gadgetry to acknowledge the organisation of the spaces and practices of work, including the postures of the house-working woman. While he does not say it as such, what becomes evident are the contagious relations between architectural spaces, technological systems, labouring bodies and the incursions of dirt.

Lewis Mumford, an American philosopher of technology and contemporary of the Swiss Giedion, dramatises another vision of household rubbish by mobilising the mythical figures of Mars and Venus and the “ritual of conspicuous waste” that they perform in the interstices of war and peace (2010, 96). For Mumford, waste is the by-product of the cyclical dynamic between war and leisure time activities, between battle and rest and recreation: “When Mars comes home, Venus waits in bed for him” (97). An unfortunate, rather bipolar, vision. Supine, she awaits the spoils of war and demands her luxuries, Mumford explains. And with the toil of war, the reward is one that is increasingly augmented through advancing technologies, hence what is frequently referred to as the military-industrial complex. Simply, war supports the technological development demanded by advancing industries.

Ursula le Guin throws quite another spin on the ancient Roman figure of Mars in her novel Lavinia (2008), where she explains that this cyclical rhythm is rather one between warfare and agriculture. When Mars is not at war, his mortal representatives tend to the fields; when Mars and his men are away, staging battles and border skirmishes (keeping things territorially clean), then the women get to work managing the farmlands. Le Guin’s novel explores a feminist reorientation of Virgil’s Aeneid (29-19 BC), offering an account of events on the ground from the point of view of Lavinia, daughter of Laurentum, King of the Latins, and the Trojan migrant Aeneas’s third wife. As more than mere supplement to epic poem, the reproductive toils and rhythms of housekeeping are celebrated here as fundamental to the sustenance of social and reproductive relations. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément take this further where they call forth the newly born woman: “She handles filth, manipulates wastes, buries placentas, and burns the cauls of newborn babies for luck” (cited in Bloomer, 1993, 105). Sometimes we need to take hold of the story, entirely reorient it, and tell it again from an entirely other point of view; take it from a point of view otherwise obscured, purposively shoved down in the dirt. Recover it, restore its value. This is something that Ursula le Guin does well.

Returning to dirt and technologies, in Mumford we encounter an ambivalent view of machines, instruments and systems, which, like dirt, and regardless of their scale or level of complexity, can be good and bad for you. “It [technics] is both an instrument of liberation and one of repression” (Mumford 1934, 283, cited in Genosko 2015, 8). Félix Guattari, influenced by Mumford’s concepts, likewise asserts: “The machinic production of subjectivity can work for the better and for the worse” (1995a, 5). Technology is understood here as something integrated into the everyday activities of human (and non-human) bodies, and not as that which is outside or independent. Dirt is the grease and the grit that contaminates the boundaries of bodies-technologies. The leftovers, the becoming redundant of old technologies leaves waste in its wake: “Beside the few ingots of precious metal we have refined, the mountains of slag are enormous” (2010, 106), Mumford comments, though his hope is that from the slag heaps we may yet discover some value. These are some of the troubles of our vast and energetic industrial toil. The so-called, and oft alluded to, geological era of the Anthropocene is one attended by waste, rubbish, pollutants and dirt. We are in the dirt, and the dirt, from micro-plastics to insecticides, is in us, as we are increasingly discovering.

From the digging of foundations and laying of groundworks, via the collection of cobwebs and dust in the crevices, nooks and crannies of architecture, and all the way to instances of demolition or the gradual progression of decrepitude, dirt is a glue, a sticky substance that holds architecture together and causes it to fall apart. Dirt includes gossip: Who has the dirt on whom? What will paperwork trails, archives and histories reveal? And what of the anecdotal stories we tell ourselves of our discipline and practice? When we get ‘the dirt’ on someone, we contribute to the circulation of gossip, and as Keller Easterling argues, gossip, rumour and hoax can be used to destablise power (Easterling 2014, 215). Such critical tools can be used by the politically oppressed, but tools, including concept-tools, can be taken up by anyone, “the powerful as well as the weak” (216), and applied to both creative and destructive ends.

To trouble architecture, to undo its categories, its exclusions and inclusions, I seek advice from feminist philosophers Judith Butler and Donna Haraway. Where Haraway calls on us to stay with the trouble of our dirty worldly relations, Butler troubles gender, alerting us to how messy identities really are and how trouble is always bound up in prevalent power relations (1990). Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) exploded out of the late 1980s, challenging any assumptions about achieving a biologically essentialist fix on sex or a universal and stable identity for gender. Gender is wilful, performative, apt to pervert the course of conventional categories: it makes trouble. There is nothing universal about ascriptions of gender identity imposed on unwilling subjectivities by way of societal norms. The convenient definitions of sex, understood as biological, and gender, understood as culturally constructed, are likewise muddied by Butler. Not even the body can be taken as a given, because it admits its own genealogical trajectory. In fact, Butler makes reference to Mary Douglas to challenge the notion that the body is a hermetically sealed unit, understanding instead how the body is apt to be contaminated. Where the impermeable virginal body is raised up as an ideal, we should watch out for the violence to follow (Douglas 1966, 159). The boundaries of the body, of all bodies, must be re-drawn, but with a line that acknowledges leakage points and the playfulness of drag performance, poking fun, telling dirty ditties at the expense of those who would wish us to be clean, ordered and decorous.

The introduction to Architecture and Feminism (1996) opens with a quote from Butler on the strategy of exclusion: “What is ‘outside’ is not simply the Other – the ‘not me’ – but a notion of futurity – the ‘not yet’ …. Will what appears as radically Other, as pure exteriority, be that which we refuse and abject as that which is unspeakably ‘Other,’ or will it constitute the limit that actively contests what we already comprehend and already are?” (Butler cited in Coleman 1996, ix). The simple moral of Butler’s pronouncement is as follows: What we expel, the dirty, the abject, is exactly what composes us, what we already are. Coleman cites other feminist philosophers too, such as Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigaray. If the ‘absence’ (of women, the Other, any ‘other’) at the centre of the discipline demarcates a place cleaned of clutter and mess, then this noise and dirt, which is part and parcel of “the lived difficulty of everyday life” (Butler cited in Coleman 1996, xv), must be restored. Like housecleaning, the work of restoring minor voices in architecture, design and art, as elsewhere, is unending. Elbow grease is required. Troubling expectations, the result of our taking the trouble to work from the midst of our murky environment-worlds, can benefit our modes of creative practice.

As Butler’s work tracks its trajectory through later essays and books, the focus on gender, the performances of subjectivities in process and the emphasis on cultural constructivism eventually lead to a politics writ large at the scale of infrastructures and their spatial support systems. Acts of troubling here locate subjectivities in performative collective formation and spaces in the midst of being made and unmade in intimate embedded relations. A performing subjectivity is a collective subjectivity that is demanding a public space in which to enunciate its concerns. Closing down or restricting spaces of public gathering is an act of cleansing that obviates creative possibilities for new forms of life and living together (Butler 2014; 2016). Infrastructures emerge as a theme in Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox’s edited collection, Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination, according to hierarchies of the low and the high, specifically drawing attention to how the subterranean depths hold and channel the filthy effluents of a city (2007). These are the infrastructural systems upon which we depend for our wellbeing, and they must be understood as socio-technologies, which bind technology and technics with subjectivities. Supporting some, letting others fall and fail.

It is toward thoughts of our environmental ‘entanglements’ that Donna Haraway likewise leads the reader in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). Here, trouble leads directly to the central importance of dirt; to soil and compost and how to work and think with multi-species critters out of which we humble humans are also composed. Haraway looks for “humus-friendly technological innovation” wilfully combined with “creative rituals” (2016, 160), a gesture toward dirtying the presumed purities of scientific objectivity, and what she has in her earlier work called the ‘God trick’. We are always in the shit, we cannot presume to be looking at it from a privileged position high above or from a position that is omniscient and thus nowhere. Dirty theory places us in it, where we already are, groping darkly about.

Haraway speaks of tentacular thinking and storytelling, and of projecting an alternative vision of our current epoch under the title “Chthulucene”. Offended that, yet again, the figure of man, as designated by the Anthropos, is used as primary marker of the Anthropocene, Haraway counters this conceit with her denomination of the Chthulucene (2016). Dirt participates in the hybrid, the monstrous and the improper, and Haraway’s alternative figure resembles nothing Vitruvian. No such perfect human figure, the Chthulucene is more terrifyingly Medusa-esque, with tentacles and slippery, multiplying limbs. It is a counter-figure that is supported by a counter-narrative, able to collapse temporal matrices and to tell other stories. It disrupts hierarchies and plunges us into the dirt, the slithering of worms, the haptic grasping of tentacles, the mucky celebration of multi-species, non-human relations. The Chthulucene is both monstrous figure and geological epoch, both/and. Haraway’s counter-concept for a geological epoch figured otherwise is drawn from a story by the African American sci-fi writer Octavia Butler (Haraway 2016, 119) about how we find ways out of destroyed environments, and reduced relations. The heat of the humus pile is where Haraway argues we get dirty, because “we need a hardy, soiled kind of wisdom” if we hope for worldly, human and non-human recuperation (Haraway 2016, 117). Less abject than joyous, it is a dirty melée that we find ourselves within. Haraway calls the world ‘Terra’, earth, dirt. She borrows this act of naming from another science fiction writer, Ursula Le Guin. Haraway’s mobilised acronym SF (Science Fiction; Speculative Fabulation; String Figures) encourages a hands-on approach to staying with the trouble of local and global worlds. We have to be able to tell a good and dirty story, even mutter a few dirty words, to infect the habits of thought of those who have become too complacent, unbelieving or disengaged. Contamination is not all bad, as Anna Tsing has argued in her journeys with mushrooms to the ends of the world (Tsing 2015). “We are contaminated by our encounters, they change who we are as we make way for others” (27), a proposal that looks to the value of passing knowledge along and making way for future generations, as well as acknowledging the eventual decay of the body once it has seen its life through. Relations of contamination are both material and semiotic.

There are theories of dirt that have been propounded from Douglas to Campkin and Cox, and explored via alternative narratives and practices from Bloomer to Haraway, but what happens where we warily mobilise dirt as its own kind of theory? Dirty theory? Again, this is nothing new. Katherine Shonfield has done it with goose feathers, writing and wit (2001). Dirty theory is a hand-me-down, worn-in, a little grubby. By intersecting with dirty thinkers and dirty doers, I’ll attempt to muck out a few concept-tools that might belong to this thing called dirty theory. Following Douglas, and listening to Campkin, where possible I will attempt to maintain a mundanity of metaphors (Campkin 2012). Simply, I should keep my figurative language a little grubby.

What can theory do, anyway? It comes before and after the subject matter under consideration, operating as a speculative gesture in anticipation, or else a means of critical reflection after the fact. When theory gets dirty then it begins to work with, from the midst of what you are doing, from the midst of the situation that is being analysed, designed, discussed.

What does dirty theory do? Dirty theory contravenes disciplinary boundaries. Dirty theory is impure. Dirty theory moves in ways that are not very decorous. Dirty theory mixes meanings and matterings (always has). Dirty theory disrupts norms. Dirty theory, like any theory, is apt to be abused and done badly, and is peopled as much by the disreputable as by the earnest. It is important to see where dirty theory has become toxic, and it will continue to be important to explore how dirty theory can be creative. Moving from theories of dirt to dirty theory has been a way for me to test a mode of thinking and practicing from the mess of our Anthropocene epoch, of inventing dirty theoretical operations from knee-deep in the dirt. Again, Douglas opens up a glimmer of hope, reminding us that from our multifarious situated engagements with dirt, as subject matter and approach, something creative may yet be fostered. She asks: How does dirt, normally condemned as destructive, become creative? (Douglas 1966, 160).