On Monday, I tried and failed to write what I’d determined would be my first annotated bibliography. Instead, I reviewed George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. When I sat down to begin writing, I looked at the group of books I wanted to draw from for my first “postcard from the route of my research,” and was daunted. Going through hundreds of pages of text that I’d underlined and annotated didn’t feel possible, nor was it in the spirit of what I’d imagined. (The pile included two books about the hegemony of English and globalization that I highly recommend and will write about at a later date: The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura and The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language by Rosemary Salomone.)
I told myself that it’s fine to just abandon the concept of the annotated bibliography since I knew that Othertongue would evolve. But, today as I continued my research into the concept of “clean,” I realized that it was my attempt to retroactively recreate my thinking as I read those books that blocked me. It is much easier to write as my research unfolds.
Below, I’ll share the first iteration of the annotated bibliography, including a bit about where my thinking is going, what I’m looking forward to reading, and some quotes and notes. It’s messy, cluttered thinking for now, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing—a clean line of inquiry is never an interesting one.
Thinking about the word “clean”
Last week, I wrote about the distress I felt when moving into an apartment in London that was—to my eyes—filthy. Where I saw a panic-inducing level of grime, what had they seen? Perhaps they lived with a level of cognitive dissonance, feeling distress at the caked-on scum on ever surface in the bathroom but not doing anything about it, but my guess is that we just have differing standards of cleanliness.
This lead me to wonder about how this subjective standard can feel so intensely objective. As Thomas Leddy, a professor at San Jose State University notes in his 1995 paper “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities: "Neat," "Messy," "Clean," "Dirty",“ it is easy to attribute these differences in standard to taste:
In any cooperative household, there is a housemate who is messier than others. That person may nonetheless insist that he or she is neat. The others may say that this person lacks a certain perceptiveness, that he or she is insensitive to mess or clutter. Someone could also lack sensitivity to dirt, filth, and grime. Such a person would be cleanness-blind. Moreover, neatness and cleanness, or cleanliness (the disposition to clean up), are often used as gauges of taste. Persons who care about neatness and cleanness often see persons who do not as tasteless.1
Most of Leddy’s paper is about making the case for what he calls “everyday surface aesthetic qualities” as legitimate in the realm of aesthetic philosophy. In art, for instance, clean can act as metaphor and as a description of the state of a painting:
In the visual arts, for example, we speak of clean lines, clean edges, muddy color, neat construction, and cluttered space. Of course, the lines in a visual work are not literally clean…a painting is literally clean if it is free of dirt, dust, food particles, and such. Having clean lines, it seems, is metaphorical. Thus something can be literally clean and fail to have clean lines, or have clean lines and fail to be literally clean.2
Leddy includes a letter from Stan Godlovich about the appeal of the aesthetically dirty and how it can lend authenticity to musicians like old-school flamenco players, jazz musicians, and even Jimi Hendrix. What is “clean,” in this sense, is the establishment. Godlovich says: “that clean execution represents a value of an anti-folk pro-aristocratic and pro-technocratic conception of performance, which by its very studied quality, robs the execution of of genuine spontaneity.”3
What else?
I’ve also been thinking about how the words “clean” or “dirty” (and other dichotomies like pure/impure and neat/messy) are used to talk about societal values and morality. Often, “dirty” is used to describe what is other.
What I’m most excited to delve into next is a 2022 paper in The Sociological Review by Emma Casey and Jo Littler that examines how “cleanfluencers” like Mrs. Hinch are recasting unpaid domestic labor in what they call “a neoliberal therapeutic promise to ‘clean away’ the instabilities, anxieties and threats of contemporary culture.”
Questions I’m thinking about as I continue down this research route:
How does time relate to “clean?” Whether you’re cleaning by choice or for work or paying someone to do it affects what clean means.
How does cleanfluencing intersect with race? I only briefly went down the internet rabbithole of cleanfluencers today and not only did I exclusively see white content creators, there is a certain filter-bleached aesthetic that I associate with a certain type of white influencer. I want to examine if and how tradlife relates to cleanfluencing, too.
How does Big Clean influence our moral perceptions of clean/dirty? Spherical Insights predicts that the “Global Household Cleaning Products Market Size” will grow from USD 100.50 billion in 2021 to USD 177.13 billion by 2030. My hunch is that selling products is dependent on consumers’ investment in the concepts of clean and dirty.
You can now find my book recommendations over on Bookshop.org!
Finally, a small update: I’m using Bookshop.org to curate lists of recommended reading as well as all the books I reference on Othertongue. It is an affiliate model so if you click through and purchase through one of the links, I will receive a small commission. The first list (books about language) is there now, and I’ll be continuously adding books and little plugs for them on the lists. Sales made through Bookshop.org support independent bookstores. Read about how it works here.
Leddy, Thomas. “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities: “Neat,” “Messy,” “Clean,” “Dirty.”” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 53, no. 3, 1995, p. 263, https://doi.org/10.2307/431351. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.
Ibid, p. 259.
Ibid, p. 263.
Then there's the expression "clean living" which I interpret to mean as without stain - or sin free ;). Someone is rewarded as a result of clean living...
Also - bookshop.org is great and I use it as well as libro.fm for audiobooks, which also supports independent bookstores!