by Ivan Illich
The complaint that cities are dirty places goes back to antiquity. Even Rome with its nine hundred fountains was a dangerous place to walk. A special kind of petty magistrate sat under umbrellas on one corner of the forum: they heard and adjudicated complaints from people hurt by excrements thrown from windows. Medieval cities were cleaned by pigs. Dozens of ordinances survive which regulate the right of burghers to own pigs and feed them on public waste. The smell of tanneries was a cypher for hell. However, the perception of the city as a place that must be constantly deodorized by washing has a clearly defined origin in history: it appears at the time of the early Enlightenment. The new concern with scrubbing and cleaning is primarily directed toward the removal of features which are not so much visually ugly as objectionable in an olfactory sense. The whole city is now for the first time perceived as an evil-smelling place. The utopia of an odorless city is here first proposed. And, as far as I can judge, the new concern with the cities’ odors reflects primarily a transformation of sense perception and not an increase of the air’s saturation with gases having a characteristic smell.
The history of sense perception is not entirely new, but only recently have some historians begun to pay attention to the evolution in the sense of smell. It was Robert Mandrou who in 1961 first called attention to the primacy of touch, smell and hearing in pre-modern European cultures. This complex dark texture of sense-perception only slowly gave way to the ‘enlightened’ predominance of the eye that we take for granted. When a Ronsard or a Rabelais touches the lips of his love, he claims to derive his pleasure from taste and from smell. To write about the past perceptions of odors would be the supreme historical achievement: since odors leave no ‘objective’ trace whatsoever, the historian can know only how things were perceived. Last year, Alain Corbin made a first monographic attempt at describing the transformation of odor perception at the end of the Ancien Régime.
From my own experience I still know the traditional smell of cities. During two decades I have spent much of my time in city slums between Rio and Lima, Karachi and Benares. It took me a long time to overcome my inbred revulsion against the odor of human shit and stale urine that, with slight national variations, makes all unsewered industrial shanty towns smell alike. What I have gotten used to was, however, but a whiff from the dense atmosphere of Paris under Louis XIV and Louis XV. Only during the last year of his reign was an ordinance passed which made the removal of fecal matter from the corridors of the palace of Versailles a weekly procedure. Below the windows of the Ministry of Finance pigs were slaughtered for decades and the wall of the palace was impregnated with layers of blood. Even tanneries still worked in the city — albeit on the shores of the Seine. People relieved themselves as a matter of course against the wall of any dwelling or church. The odor of shallow graves was part of the deads’ presence within the walls. So much was this atmosphere taken for granted that the surviving sources barely call attention to it.
This olfactory nonchalance came to an end when a small number of citizens lost their tolerance towards the stench from burial places within churches. Without any indication that the physical procedures by which corpses were entombed near the altar had changed since the Middle Ages, in 1737 the Parliament of Paris appointed a commission to study the danger they represented to public health. The miasma emanating from graves was declared dangerous to the living. Within the decade a treatise by the Abbé Charles-Gabriel Porée, Fenelon’s librarian, was edited several times. In this book, the theologian argued that philosophical and juridical considerations demanded that the dead be laid to rest outside the city. According to Philippe Ariès, the new olfactory sensitivity to the presence of corpses was due to a new kind of fear of death. During the third quarter of the century, reports that people had died from mere stench became commonplace. From Scotland to Poland people do not just resent but fear the stench of decomposing bodies. Mass deaths among the members of church congregations occurring within the hour after exposure to the miasma escaping from a grave opened for a funeral, are described by supposed witnesses. While in the 1760s the Cimetière des Innocents is much used for parties in the afternoon and for illicit intercourse during the night, it was closed by general request of the people by 1780, because of the intolerable smell of decomposing bodies.
Intolerance against the smell of feces took much longer to develop, although the first complaints about its intensity can be heard in the 1740s. Attention was drawn to the issue at first only by public-spirited scientists who studied ‘the airs’ — today we would say gases. The instruments for the study of volatile substances were still rudimentary at the time; the existence of oxygen and its place in combustion had not yet been understood. Researchers had to rely on their noses for the analysis they made. But this did not stop them from publishing treatises on the subject of the cities’ ‘exhalations.’ A dozen and a half such essays and books published between mid-century and Napoleon are known. These treatises deal with the seven smelly points of the human body that lie between the top of the head and the interstices between the toes; they classify the seven odors of decomposition that can be observed in succession in a rotting animal body; they distinguish disagreeable odors into those which are healthy, like dung and shit, and those which are putrid and damaging; they teach how to bottle smells for later comparison and the study of their evolution; they estimate the weight per capita exudations of city dwellers and the effect of their deposit — by air — in the city’s vicinity. Most of the new concern with malodorous miasma is given expression by a small group of physicians, philosophers, and publicists. In almost every instance the authors complain about the insensitivity of the public at large toward the need to remove these ‘bad airs’ from the city.
By the end of the century this avant-garde of deodorizers begins to count on the support of a small but important minority within the city. On several accounts, social attitudes towards bodily waste began to change. The king’s audience on the stool (en selle) had been abandoned two generations ago. By mid-century we have the first report that at a large ball, separate closets for women were provided. Finally, Marie Antoinette had a door installed to privatize her defecation, making it into an intimate function.
First the procedure, then also the outcome were pushed beyond the reach of eye and nose. Underwear that could be frequently washed, as well as the bidet, came into fashion. To sleep between sheets and in one’s separate bed was now charged with moral and medical significance. Soon heavy blankets came to be proscribed, because they accumulate body-aura and lead to wet dreams. Medical men discovered that a sick man’s odor could infect the healthy, and the single hospital bed became a hygienic exigency if not a praxis. Then on November 15th, 1793, the Revolutionary Convention solemnly declared each man’s right to his own bed as part of the rights of man. A private buffer of space surrounding each one in bed, on the stool, and in the grave became an exigency of the citizen’s dignity. Charities were formed to spare the poor at least one of the new horrors: burial in a mass grave.
Hand in hand with the new toilet training of the bourgeoisie, the social toilet of the city itself became the predominant urban problem. Since the early eighteenth century the particularly unhealthy conditions of prisons and bedlams had attracted international attention. The wide attention given to their knee-deep filth had even helped to make the rest of the city look clean by comparison. Now the high mortality rates in the prison were related to the intensity of their smell perceptible over a distance. The ventilator was invented and the first ones installed to give a whiff of fresh air, at least to those spaces where the innocent prisoners were kept. The ‘airing’ of prisoners seemed to be necessary, but difficult to organize. So several cities from Switzerland to Belgium adopted the idea of the city of Berne to combine removal of excrements with the ventilation of prisoners by using a new machine. This was a cart drawn by chained men, to which women were attached on thinner chains, that allowed them to move with relative freedom over the pavement to collect waste, d
ead animals and nightsoil. The city came to be compared with the organism, it too having its smelly points. Smell began to become class specific. The poor are those who smell, and often do not know it. Osmology — the study of smells — tried to establish itself as a separate science. Supposed experiments proved that savages smell differently from Europeans. Samojeds, Negroes and Hottentots can be each recognized by their racial smell, which is independent from the diet they eat or from how much they wash.
To be well-bred came to mean to be clean: not to smell and have no odor attached to one’s aura and home. By the beginning of the nineteenth century women were bred to cultivate their own, individual fragrance. This ideal had appeared during the end of the Ancien Régime, at the time when the strong and traditional animal perfumes like ambergris, musk and civet were abandoned in favor of toilet waters and plant oils. Napoleon’s upstart preference for the old tradition led to a short-lived return to the use of precious animal fat from rodents’ genitals; but by the time of Napoleon III their use had become a sign of debauchery. The well-to-do lady now enhanced her personal flair with vegetal fragrances which are much more volatile, must be reapplied frequently, stay lingering in the domestic sphere and become signs of conspicuous consumption. Rousseau’s Emile now learns that ‘fragrance does not give as much as it makes you hope for.’ The separate, mirror-walled cabinets, one for the faucet and one for the sink, which an opera-singer, Mlle Deschamps, had brought from England to the embarrassment of Frenchmen in 1750, were part of exalted propriety two generations later. As the rich are lightly scented with vegetable oils, and the not-so-rich are increasingly well-scrubbed and taught to leave their shoes outside the door, the deodorizing of the poor majority became a major goal of the medical police.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the English have already set out to wash their cities and to pollute the Thames. In France and in general on the Continent, public opinion is not yet ready for such profligacy. L’Institut, in a report of 1835, rejects the proposal to channel the excrements of Paris into the Seine. It is not concern for the river, nor mere anti-English prejudice, which motivated this decision, but the calculation of the enormous economic value that would thus be lost. Another twenty years later the editors of the Journal of Medical Chemistry invoke Malthus and arguments from social physiology to demonstrate that canalizing excrements is a public misdeed. During the years preceding their study the proposal had been heard to tie the distribution of old age pensions to the old citizen’s daily delivery of select fertilizers that they had collected. Now that the railroad had come to the city, it ought to be used to allow the city to fertilize the countryside, possibly turning it into a garden.
By the 1860s two national ideologies on the value of sewers faced each other across the channel. Victor Hugo gave the supreme literary expression to the French position. ‘La merde,’ since Cambronne’s exclamation, must be considered as something very French and of great commercial potential. In Les Misérables it feeds ‘l’intestin du Léviathan.’ No doubt, he says, the sewer of Paris for the last ten centuries has been the city’s disease but ‘L’égout est le vice que la ville a dans le sang.’ Any attempt to stuff more night soil down the drain could not but increase the already unimaginable horrors of the city’s cloaca. To live in the city calls for us to accept its smell.
The opposite view on the value of sewers and the disvalue of shit was taken in 1871 by the Prince of Wales, before he became King Edward VII. If he were not the prince, he said, his next preference would be that of becoming a plumber. In the Royal Society of the Arts, Hellinger about that time exhorted his fellows: ‘Lying there in these strong arms of yours, slumbering peacefully in their hardened muscles, resting in the well-trained fingers and educated hands is the health of this Leviathan city’! Jules Verne in a novel gives the French literary expression to this English view: ‘to clean, forever to clean, destroying the miasma as soon as it rises from human agglomeration, that is the principal and foremost task of central governments.’ The sweat of the laboring classes was dangerous as long as it smelled.
To deodorize the city the English architects proposed to use water. As early as 1596 Sir John Harrington, the godson of Queen Elizabeth I, had invented the water closet and published a treatise on ‘Ajax,’ but the contraption remained for most people a curiosity. Then, in 1851 George Jennings installed public W.C.’s in the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition and 827,280 persons, 14% of the visitors, tried them and paid for their use. The ‘convenience suited to the advanced age of civilization’ was perfected by a Mr Crapper, a foundry owner. The ‘anus mirabilis’ water flush reserve valve was patented in England, and the English word ‘W.C.’ became an integral part of every civilized language. According to a U.S. Government report, Baltimore was the last Eastern city to produce its fertilizer ‘in a natural way’ before it switched to mandatory flush in 1912.
By the end of the nineteenth century fecal-borne infections began to seep into tap water. Engineers were faced with the choice to apply limited economic and institutional resources either to the treatment of sewage before its disposal or the treatment of the water supply. For the first half of this century, the accent was placed on the sterilization of the supply. Only recently had bacteriology replaced the old filth theory that explained illness as the result of corruption within the body, by the new germ-theory of disease which constantly threatens the body with microbe-invasions. Citizens demanded above all to be supplied with ‘germless drinking water’ from their taps. Then, towards mid-century, what came from the tap had ceased to be odorless and had become a liquid many people no longer dared to drink. The transformation of H2O into a cleaning fluid was complete. Public emphasis could shift toward the ‘purification’ of sewage and the salvaging of lakes. In the United States the cost of sewage treatment and collection by 1980 has become the greatest expense of local government. Only schools cost more.
For the archaic Greeks, I guess, ritual lustrations exorcized miasma more often than not. The attempt to wash the city of its evil smells has obviously failed. At the plush club in Dallas, where I slept, little bottles with cotton tongues spread a powerful anesthetic that paralyzes the nasal mucus to mask the failure of the most costly plumbing that you can buy. The deodorant cripples perception with pink noise for the nose. Our cities have become places of historically unprecedented industrial stench. And we have become as insensitive to this pollution as the citizens of the early eighteenth century of Paris were toward their corpses and their excrements.
We have now followed the waters of history from archaic Greece to the ecological tap. We have looked at the fountains of Rome that flushed titanic Mnemosyne from the mind of the literate city and peopled it with classical nymphs. And we have looked at the waterworks that remove H2O out of sight. We have listened to the improvisations of gurgling springs, to the planned symphony of the fountain of Trevi, and then to the hiss of faucets, the dripping of sinks and the sound of flush. We have understood that city water, in Western culture, has a beginning and, therefore, might have an end. It is born when the artist domesticated each of the waters of Rome at an appropriate fountain where it was used to tell its own unique story to the citizens’ dreams, and it is threatened when the suction rotors of waterworks make it into a cleaner and coolant of which some may be diverted into a lake. We have come to wonder about the possibility of coexistence between wealth and dreams.
Looking back at the waters that have flowed through the cities, we can now recognize their importance for dreams. Only where dreams have been reflected on the waters of the commons, cities could be spun out of their stuff. Only waters alive with nymphs and with memories can fuse the archetypal and the historical side of dreams. H2O is not water in this sense. H2O is a liquid that has been stripped of both its cosmic meaning and of its genius loci. It is opaque to dreams. City water has debauched the commons of dreams.
A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy
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Special Guest Lectu
re at the American Education Research Association General Assembly San Francisco, August 1986
By lay literacy I mean a symbolic fallout from the use of the alphabet in Western cultures — something quite different from clerical literacy, which consists in the ability to read and write. By lay literacy I mean a distinct mode of perception in which the book becomes the decisive metaphor through which we conceive of the Self and its place. By lay literacy I do not mean the spread of written contents beyond the pale of the clerics to others who, previously, could only listen to what is being read to them. I use the term lay literacy to speak of a mind-frame which is defined by a set of certainties which spread within the realm of the alphabet since late medieval times. The lay-literate is certain that speech can be frozen, that memories can be stored and retrieved, that secrets can be engraved in conscience and therefore examined, that experience can be described. By lay literacy I mean therefore a weaving together of categories that — since the twelfth century — has shaped the mental space of the ‘illiterate’ laity just as much as that of the ‘literate’ clergy. It constitutes a new type of space inside which social reality is reconstructed: a new kind of network of fundamental assumptions about all that can be seen or known. I have tried to follow the evolution of this mind-set since the Middle Ages, along with the transformation of a number of certainties that can exist only within it. I will illustrate how such a transformation happens by telling the story of ‘the text.’
