In academia, in my particular corner of the world as in many others, writing is first and foremost done in English. In the Netherlands, where I was born and raised and where I have been living for most of my 61 years, my colleagues and I are supposed to publish in so-called international journals – international being a euphemism for English language. But English is not our first language. We therefore live in translation, even those of us who never migrated.
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Writing in English comes with rewards: it allows our texts to travel. In the 1980s, when I started out as an academic, I wrote texts in Dutch. It was frustrating that the authors on whose insights I gratefully built, or whose arguments I proudly refuted, never took any notice.
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And I couldn’t blame them for it. I could read their English, French and German as Dutch schools insisted on the multilingual training of their students. But where and why should they have learned my Dutch? Once I started to go to international conferences, it became even more painful. I could tell people that I had written something that spoke to their concerns, but my texts remained opaque to them. So writing in English is wonderful in that it allows for intellectual exchanges beyond the relatively small circle of readers of Dutch. Exchanges, that is, with at least all academics who have had the chance and taken the trouble to acquire some proficiency in this particular imperialist tongue.
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But this comes at a cost: within the Netherlands and Flanders what we write in English is, for all practical purposes, less accessible than what we write in Dutch.
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And there are a few further complexities, too.
Of course it takes extra effort. A lot of it. With many years of training this improves a bit, but it doesn’t go away. However, I am not out to seek your sympathy. Instead, I would like to take this occasion to address a matter of content. There are a lot of resonances to negotiate when one writes across different linguistic repertoires. For words do not just refer to entities that different languages cluster in different ways; with, say, the English word ‘stone’ representing a boulder, a pebble, a seed as well as a pit – entities not necessarily gathered together in other tongues. They do not just do things when used in practices; where, say, if one builder yells ‘stone’ to the other, this order, or request, may have the effect that a stone changes hands.
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Words also evoke, there are absent/present realities that resonate within them; with the English word ‘stone’ calling up such things as stepping stones, including those that help people moving up socially, and rolling stones, including those that became legendary in the music scene. Such resonances are not simply characteristics of ‘a language’ – an allegedly well-rounded system of signs that may be caught within the confines of a dictionary. Instead, they have to do with all kinds of particularities of the practices in which words participate.
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Some of these particularities I will touch upon in this text.
Touch upon? That is English alright, but does it qualify as academic English? Maybe it sounds too light-hearted, superficial even, so that in one editorial round or another, someone with linguistic authority will change it into present. Should I maybe go for exemplify so as to underline that I am not after abstractions and generalities, but care about telling stories and specificities? Analyse is a possibility as well – that would also make things sound more serious, maybe, analyse, and stress that what I am up to is not just chatter but theory. Would it? And can I get away – in an academic text in English – with opening up questions and then never answering them?
The materials that I draw upon as I explore words-in-practices and their more or less elusive resonances all have to do with the positive qualification clean. But they are Dutch materials so what they turn around is not quite clean.
Cultural resonances
Anthropologists freely use the category of Euro-American when they make comparative contrasts with other large culture-clusters such as Amerindian or Melanesian. But as I move between different European languages I keep falling into gaps. These hinder smooth transitions from one tongue to another. They make life difficult for a Dutch scholar reading French and German and seeking to write in English. But they are also cracks through which the light gets in.
‘There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in’, Leonard Cohen sang. It is a beautiful line. And as it is widely known, in an English language text I might want to use it without even naming the source. That is what ‘we’ do. We use hidden references to constitute ourselves as a ‘we’, a collective in the know. The undertones resonating in such sentences pleasantly perform cultural connections between ‘us’. But then again. Not every reader of the present text will get this reference. You may be too young to have absorbed Leonard Cohen songs; you may not like his music; or his lyrics; your head may be filled with Spanish, French or Bangla songs. Now that I have made my source explicit, though, you might want to look it up on Spotify or YouTube. The song where ‘the light cracks in’ is called Anthem.
Some resonances can be spelled out and explicated. With others this is far more difficult. Given that you are reading this text, it is likely that you have the technical facilities and the skills necessary to now trace Cohen’s Anthem – even if you didn’t know it before. But my guess is that (unless you happen to have been raised in Dutch) you will have more trouble with Floddertje and her dog, Smeerkees. While to me they loudly resonate in schoon, a Dutch word central to the research project that I just embarked upon.
The name Floddertje does not exist outside the stories about her written by Annie M. G. Schmidt in the early 1970s. It resonates with sloddervos – sloven – and flodderig – baggy – in a light, affectionate way, made manifest by the tje, a diminutive. Smeerkees is also a creative composition, this time of a smeerpoets – someone dirty, and keeshond – where hond is the Dutch word for what in English is called a dog and kees-hond a particular breed of dog. When I go online to find out if once again there are resources that I can point you to, I find a collection of Floddertje stories translated into English. But it is out of print. The blurb: ‘Once there was a little girl called Scrumple who was always grimy and covered in dirt. Except when she’d just had a bath. But she could never stay clean for more than half an hour. Scrumple constantly needed another bath, together with her dog, Splotch, who was always filthy too . . .’ However hard the translator tried, these English names do not have as much splash as their Dutch not-quite-equivalents. They miss a particular poetry – rhythm, music – that enlivens the original.
‘How do you know?’ one of the readers of an earlier version asked. As if it were a scandal that I claim knowledge about how things sound in the English language even though it is not mine.
Annie M. G.’s humour does not easily transport either. She ingeniously plays with stereotypes to do with Dutch ‘housewives’ that stem from a historical moment when most women in the Netherlands were doomed to stay at home and overinvest in cleanliness. Annie M. G.’s way of surviving her sneakily sexist home country was to lighten it up with mockery.
An example. Floddertje’s mother goes out to shop. Floddertje is eating but even so allows Smeerkees to climb onto her lap. He wags his tail which sends a slice of bread with jam into the air. As it falls, everything gets dirty – the tablecloth, Floddertje, her dress, Smeerkees. To solve this problem, Floddertje puts all these things in the bathtub along with the household’s supplies of soaps and cleaning powders. Given that she is such a dirty child, supplies are ample. Floddertje opens the tap and as water pours into the bath, all too soon she cannot control the foam. To avoid drowning, she escapes into the street. The foam follows. People in the street get scared and call the fire brigade. The firemen disperse the foam with water. A lot of it. Until a brave fireman manages to enter the house, climb the stairs and close the tap. Now everyone is happy: the streets have never been this clean! Floddertje’s mother comes back from the shop and reproves her for being naughty, but then again, look how clean you are! And so, too, are Smeerkees, the dress and the tablecloth.
I study the topic of clean with a heavy theoretical agenda and driven by serious societal and ecological concerns. At the same time, I cannot forget about Floddertje. I might, of course, use her as material; as an instance of a former Dutchness that by now has faded; a self-reflective figure lightly ironizing my field. But I wonder. That Floddertje resonates in the Dutch word schoon makes her absent/present when I study clean. But how exactly? Not just as a topic. I have been formed by Annie M. G. Schmidt’s vicious humour and by the way she pointed out, time and again, the bizarre within the ordinary. This means that beyond being a part of my field Floddertje is a part of me. She has helped to shape my research abilities. She informs the sensitivities that inspire and direct my enquiries.
Floddertje is not the only Dutch figure to have shaped me. There are countless others. This being an academic text I might have foregrounded academic sources of inspiration. For instance, Lolle Nauta’s argument that even theories that pretend to be abstract are best understood by foregrounding the ‘exemplary situation’ that, often by stealth, they reflect upon.
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That is a relevant point of reference indeed. But when I study clean in everyday practices, my work is not just informed by theoretical repertoires, but also by the cultural resonances of the words relevant to those practices. Schoon resonates with Floddertje, not in ‘the Dutch language’, but in a gradually fading cultural repertoire articulated within that language.
Material resonances
In the Netherlands, waste water is pumped through the sewage system to what is called a waterzuiveringsinstallatie. Water = water; zuivering = purification; installatie = installation. When we were planning a field visit to one of these sites, I wrote to my colleagues, without having consulted a dictionary, that we were welcome at the Hilversum ‘waste water cleaning plant’.
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But in English, this plant doesn’t clean waste water, it only treats it. Fair enough. Actually, in this instance, ‘waste water treatment plant’ is the better term, for while a lot of pollutants are retrieved in the plant, the effluent is far from pure. It has been purified only to the extent that it meets the legal standards of clean – which have to do with low enough nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations, on average, over the course of a year. But effluent still contains micropollutants – such as remnants of medicines and drugs and microplastics – and, added to that, it still contains microbes, too. You are not supposed to happily swim in water that a waste water treatment plant has just treated: it is not necessarily swimmable. And it is certainly not drinkable.
The plant in Hilversum that with six scholars based in Amsterdam we visit is remarkably clean. It is even its own kind of beautiful. The concrete of the buildings does not stand out as industrial white (like the waste water treatment plant two of us recently saw in Tilburg) and neither is it boringly grey (like the small one in De Meern where I went a few years ago on an open day). Different shades of warm red and light brown have been added irregularly, fluidly, to the sand-cement mixture and the result evokes nature rather than technology. The plant is adjacent to a small nature reserve and the hope was, we are told, that with its uneven, earthy colours it would blend in.
In the UK, Andrew Balmer and Susan Molyneux-Hodgson have explored the differences between waste water treatment plants and laboratories. ‘Much like the laboratory, the sewage works is full of peculiar shapes, sounds and smells. But by contrast to our laboratory-experiences of bacteria as manipulable and yet vulnerable, and of the body as a danger to the bacteria, when one approaches the waste water sewage facility it is the body that is at risk in this immediately daunting and threatening landscape.’
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Before reading the text from which I quote here, I didn’t know the words ‘sewage works’ and ‘sewage facility’. Apparently ‘waste water treatment plant’ is not the only name for this place in English. It is rather, or so I learn when asking someone in the know about it, a recent invention, crafted to avoid the harshness of ‘sewage’. I am yet more surprised by the insistence on grime. In their field, or so Balmer and Molyneux-Hodgson tell, bacteria are lurking everywhere, not just in the sewage: ‘in the water treatment facility . . . everything is a murky brown that has to be scrubbed and blasted off the body and other surfaces’ (p. 68).
The library of the University of Amsterdam does not provide me with access to the journal Engineering Studies. Hence, I have only been able to read the article just quoted because Andrew Balmer was kind enough to send it to me after (even though we never met) I asked for it in an email. Grateful for his collegial kindness, I respond after reading. I quote from my email: ‘what struck me, too, was that by contrast to the muddiness you describe, the waste water treatment plants in NL that we visited are meticulously kept clean – we didn’t even have dirty shoes when we left. There are the tanks of course; and handling those, or otherwise doing maintenance work, will be messy and dirty (our field work did not yet include any of that, we just “visited”) but my impression was that cleanliness was part of local pride.’ Andrew, in an email back, presumed that we visited a place for purifying drinking water: ‘we have a strict separation in the UK between the clean water facility and the waste water facility. This is reflected in the amount of time engineers put into maintaining the space surrounding the water. So it really is a muddy nightmare outside, and then very clean indoors.’ But in our Dutch field, the separation between treating sewage and purifying drinking water goes a lot further. It is not an outdoors/indoors affair, drinking water is ‘produced’ in another site altogether. It is really the waste water treatment plant that is clean. When in a further email I underline this, Andrew jokes back: ‘That is so impressive. Another reason to move to the Netherlands!’
Here is my puzzle. It is not that waste water treatment plants are different between the Netherlands and the UK. It is that getting to know about such differences seems to be necessary before I am able to write in English. And how do I get to know about the practices that English words incorporate, from the grime (mentioned in the original article) to the location of drinking water in relation to waste water cleaning (that I only learn about from Andrew’s email)? There must be lots of further differences about which I have no inkling, even though they have serious consequences for what resonates in the English words that I may use when writing about this or that Dutch case. Learning that in English I should say ‘waste water treatment’ rather than ‘waste water cleaning’ is just the easy bit. The dictionary bit. It is a lot more difficult to find out about the realities that resonate within such words. The problems of writing in English stretch way beyond English.
The three waste water treatment plants that I so far visited in the Netherlands all have different colours: white washed; desolate grey; beautiful red-brownish. From that contrast I may conclude that the colour of the structures that make up waste water treatment facilities is not self-evident. But all three plants were clean. How, then, am I supposed to know that this is not the case elsewhere? And no, I do not insist on this cleanliness to suggest to my UK colleagues that the Netherlands is a better place to live. I say it to point at a particular difficulty of writing in a foreign tongue. Even if I use ‘proper’ English words, words that even a severe editor is unlikely to interfere with, they may not transport what I hope to say. For while for me they speak of my Dutch field, they may resonate with quite different realities for those who get to read my texts.
If stories are about so-called ‘far away’ countries, we expect as much. Of course the treatment of sewage in Senegal or Bangladesh deserves to be explained to the readers of ‘international’ texts written in English. They – we? – are unlikely to have been there. But there also are differences between adjacent places in regions termed Euro-American. And how can I know what exactly these differences are without doubling my research and doing it in English as well as in Dutch? Added to that, in which English should I do added fieldwork – that of Durham UK, Durban SA, Dunedin NZ, or elsewhere yet again? And if I were to double, triple, quadruple my fieldwork, then what to attend to and what to leave be? Between different sites, there is no end to the specificities an author might try to explicate.
Words mean different things, not just between different languages, but also between different sites and situations. Different realities resonate within them.
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In some cases and to some extent it is possible to spell this out. This is what fieldwork is about, after all. As a field worker you try to describe a site so that others, who haven’t been there, get some sense of it. But here is my point. When it comes to it, ethnography is premised on the exemplary situation of the traveller who comes home to tell her tales. It presumes that someone who is one of us goes to a faraway place and then comes back to explain to us how they are different. We are the implied audience and since the author is a part of us she knows what about them to write down and make explicit. She knows what we take for granted and what we are bound to consider surprising.
But how can I know what you consider surprising? From language courses, novels and films I may learn English. But there is a lot that I do not know about ‘readers of English’ and their everyday realities. And if kind colleagues from the UK help me to attune my texts to the realities of ‘sewage facilities’ in that country, that still only goes so far. English is not euphemised as ‘international’ for nothing. You may be reading my words in Rio de Janeiro, Saint Petersburg, Osaka. How to guess what you hold to be self-evident, possible, or unimaginable? How to fine tune what needs to be said in so many words and what may be lightly skipped over? It is possible to tell fine stories, attentive to their details. But it is impossible to articulate all the resonances that echo in all their words. Hence, when texts travel, they are bound to transform along the way.
This is my point: Not only translations are betrayals. A lot also transforms between authors and readers of English who work in different sites and situations. Even a banal description of a waste water treatment plant cannot be properly tamed, but stubbornly defies transportation. So much, then, for the dream of stable analytic categories, firm concepts, universally salient theory.
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Semantic resonances
The most likely antonym of schoon – a Dutch word translating the English clean – is vies. If Floddertje and Smeerkees are not ‘schoon’, they are ‘vies’. But that does not turn vies into an equivalent of dirty. If only translation were that simple! It isn’t. Even in cases where two words map on to one another relatively neatly, their antonyms may go off in different directions. And here is what makes vies so interesting: it is not just an antonym of schoon, but also of lekker.
Lekker translates into English as tasty or delicious. While it used to pertain only to food, more recently it has widened out to other sensuous pleasures.
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Yes, sex may be lekker, even if 50 years ago, when sex was more seriously sanctified, that sounded vulgar. Agreeable weather is lekker; pleasantly fitting clothes are lekker; and even work may be lekker: it is on days when things flow. Vies is a relevant antonym in some of these cases. Food is vies when it is unpalatable. Sex used to be vies, before it was lekker, as unless it was holy, it was shameful – but now it no longer is. The weather is vies when it is too wet to cycle. Clothing is lekker when it fits nicely, but when it is vies it needs a wash. Some work is vies, as it involves handling dirt or excrement, but working when one has no flow, while unpleasant, is not vies.
I greatly enjoy all these details, but I fear that for you they might be too much. So instead of further expanding this complex, criss-crossing semiotic network, I will zoom in on a point. Which is that the gap between vies and dirty may well be one of these cracks through which the light gets in.
In the social sciences Mary Douglas’s assertion that dirt is matter out of place is repeated again and again. In its original incarnation – presented in the book Purity and Danger – it was an original idea.
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But it has become a mantra and I wonder if it deserves to be endlessly reiterated. Douglas’s concern was with categories. As she wrote that dirt is matter out of place, she was at the same time talking about situations in which categories need to be kept apart; circumstances in which it is ill advised to mix them up. Her clean, then, beyond its material incarnations, is about symbolic distinctiveness.
In English, it is possible to distinguish between ‘cleaning up’ and ‘clearing up’. But if Douglas defines uncleanliness as ‘matter out of place’, she blurs that distinction and makes cleaning and clearing flow over into each other. What is matter in place? When I try to imagine that, I dream up the higher middle class English households that figured in the children’s books that I read – translated into Dutch – around the time Douglas presented impurity as a categorical danger. There, children were tasked to tidy the room where they had been playing. Puzzles, dolls and Dinky toys: they all had their own particular spot on a shelf in a designated cupboard. This seems to be the exemplary situation that best illuminates what it means to have a proper place. This situation may not be English so much as Douglas. But it is definitely not Dutch.
The English expression ‘clean and tidy’ suggests that these are different things, but it also makes it easy for clean and tidy to flow over into each other. This is far more difficult in Dutch. For when things have been put in their proper place, a Dutch playroom (living room, bedroom, office) is opgeruimd. Opgeruimd bespeaks a spatial concern – the noun ruimte translates into space; the verb ruimen evokes displacing, and opruimen (which has opgeruimd as it past perfect) is putting things in their designated place. But schoon has nothing to do with places. As vies is its most prominent antonym, schoon sides with lekker in that something that is not schoon is disgusting. Schoon and vies bespeak concerns that, rather than spatial, are visceral.
Schoon calls up a floor that is no longer sticky, a dress without stains, a body that smells of soap, not sweat. The schoon/vies pair could never have illuminated a theoretical argument about the need to separate out categories. Instead, it suggests the need to spare sensitivities.
Do I have the right to claim this? When two so-called native speakers of English commented on an earlier version of this text, the first insisted that I am mistaken about English. In daily life, he noted, clean and tidy are actually markedly different and clean is about sensitivities, too. After all, next to dirty its antonyms also include filthy and disgusting. That was disappointing. Maybe I had to bow to his authority – English, after all, is not my language – but what, then, about Douglas and her ‘matter out of place’? As I was wondering, the comments of the second reader came in. He wrote in the margins of my text that clean and tidy are actually hardly distinct at all. Or maybe, he added, this is just me, as in my daily life they amount to the same thing: housework that calls out to be done. The disjunction between my friends made me laugh.
Here is what I dare to write, then. I do not claim that infringing on the good of cleanliness is never sensitive. Instead, I claim that schoon is never spatial.
Words are not just spoken in practices, they also bespeak practices. This means that specific exemplary situations may hide, absent/present, within those words.
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If you listen out for them, it is possible to hear them resonating. This helps in getting a better grasp on the strength and limits of the theories articulated in those words. The particular pollution that Douglas was concerned with in Purity and Danger could be remedied with tidying. It was dirt that, by putting it to one side, on a shelf, or in a bin, could be cleaned away. But the dangers that follow on from things being vies cannot be remedied in the same way. Cleaning something that is vies involves gut feelings. It is not a matter of transport but of transformation. Hence, theories articulated with the help of the schoon/vies pair are bound to go in different directions than theories informed by Douglas’s dirt is matter out of place.
Mind you, I am not out to advocate ‘Dutch theory’. I rather suggest that taking a detour through any language that is not English may help to shake up theoretical short-cuts that are not just specific to this or that theorist, but also depend on (a particular version of) English.
Douglas could never have written Purity and Danger in Dutch, for it would not have made sense to define vies in a spatial way. But what about English: do, after all these years, the dangers of uncleanliness still deserve to be theorised in a spatial way? Maybe that epoch is over. Who still dreams up nurseries to be tidied? And who, for that matter, still equates pollution with dirt? These days, the more striking exemplar of dangerous uncleanliness is rather the emptied plastic bottle.
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Where is this not out of place?
Multilingual resonances
The dictionary suggests that the English word clean happily translates into the Dutch word schoon. But schoon is not quite clean. It has a more pronounced visceral twist. In addition, schoon also suggests an aesthetic pleasure that differs from the modernist ideals that have come to infuse clean. Clean calls up well-ordered categorisations, signals without noise, and buildings without frills – in a way that schoon does not.
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In Limburg, the southern region of the Netherlands where I grew up, schoon is pronounced as sjoûn and translates into English as beautiful. Despite almost two centuries of trying, language boundaries in this corner of the world do not coincide with those of nation states. The sjoûn of Limburg is quite like the schön of the German spoken only a few kilometres away, across the border. A dress that is sjoûn has not just been washed and ironed, but its colours are pleasant and its fit is flattering. A sjoûn house has fine windows and rooms of an appealing size, not too small, not too big. And then it is possible to compliment someone by saying that they have accomplished a task in a sjoûn way. In this usage, the word widens out from ‘beautiful’ to express a more general positive apprehension.
In the northwest of the Netherlands schoon no longer translates as beautiful. But schoonheid – the noun made out of the adjective – still translates as beauty. Small wonder, then, that for those who listen out for historical traces, dialects and adjacent languages, the aesthetic resonance of schoon is acute. When English words have such half-hidden resonances, I risk missing them. Hence, I make mistakes. I write sentences which, by stealth, say things that I do not particularly want to say. If I am lucky, an avid English colleague or editor remarks on this and – caringly, brutally – corrects me. I am truly grateful for this; even if sometimes I struggle to defend my points. However, while those of us who cannot claim authority over English are bound to err, we also have something to offer. We may add in a few resonances that echo within our own words and think with them. In the case in point: as I do fieldwork into clean – or rather schoon – I wonder about the aesthetics relevant to local practices.
For an evening, I trail a group of men and their machines as they energetically clean streets and squares after one of Amsterdam’s day markets. Every morning the market stalls are laid out, every evening they are packed up again. Stall holders are supposed to put their debris in the large yellow plastic bags that they receive for this purpose from the organization that runs the market. But not all of them do. Customers, in their turn, are supposed to throw their waste in one of the bins that adorn the sides of the road. But not all of them do. Hence, by five in the afternoon, when the cleaners arrive, everything is messy and smelly. By nine, when they leave again, they have made an impressive, positive difference. That is part of what turns cleaning up after the market into a gratifying job. ‘You arrive and the entire stretch is messy and smerig [filthy, like Smeerkees]. And then, when you leave, well – things look mooi schoon again.’
Here, the mooi is added to schoon. Mooi is a modest kind of beauty; or it may, as it does here, strengthen a word that already has a positive ring to it. In this little sentence fragment, the mooi stresses the schoon’s aesthetic undertones. When the street and squares are mooi schoon as all the debris has been trucked out (off to the incinerator), they are not simply well-ordered, but, more positive than that, look nice. All the cleaning efforts lead to them being pretty.
Harry, the foreman of the group, takes me on a walk through the neighbourhood in which the market is situated. In this part of Amsterdam, inhabitants are supposed to put their garbage in underground containers. If they have stuff that is too large, they are supposed to call a special phone number and set an appointment for the truck for grof vuil – large, bulky, heavy waste – to come and fetch it. But this isn’t always done. People often put their bulky stuff out on the street, preferably near the underground containers. While this location shows their good will, it is counterproductive. For if there is stuff on the platforms attached to the underground containers, the designated machines are unable to lift up the containers and cannot empty their contents into the truck meant to carry it away. First, the garbage men have to get out and shift the stuff away. This is unpractical and when a single man is alone on his truck, it is often difficult, it takes time, it may be heavy. Pointing to a set of cardboard boxes, just next to a container, one that isn’t full at all, Harry turns to me and asks: ‘Do you understand that? Why do people do that?’
When Harry asks me why people ‘do that’, improperly putting boxes next to a container, he does not expect me to give an answer. I might have invented one. I could have replied that some people don’t understand this business with the phone number; that the cardboard boxes are not easy to fold, especially for people who are not as strong as he is; or that it is interesting that people at least take the trouble to carry their boxes from their house to the container. But all of this would have been beside the point. Then and there, Harry is not inquisitive but exasperated. He himself is fully committed to making this neighbourhood mooi schoon. Then why are the locals so negligent, so insensitive, so painfully improper?
Schoon is not the only Dutch word that translates into English as clean. Another one is proper. Yes, this is a Dutch word. It is written in the same way as the English proper, but it is pronounced with a long o – proo-per. This term has moral undertones. This might come as no surprise for speakers of English, as the English proper is all about morality – the cleanliness having seeped out of it – despite its prominence in the French word propre.
When we walk back to the truck that brought us to the market, I come across a single spot where beneath my boots the stones feel slippery and sticky. The lingering smell is disagreeable as well. Carefully, I suggest this, but Harry immediately, defensively, replies that if only I had been here earlier, I wouldn’t say this. The difference is truly impressive. This spot was very oily and very smelly only two hours ago. Here, the fishmonger has been selling fish, both fresh and deep fried. Fat leaks from his car. Added to that, people have discarded remnants of their fried fish on the pavement. So, too, have the herons, that also freely spread their excrement. ‘A few years ago, there was a strike’, Harry says, ‘all cleaners were on strike. But I would still come here and work this part. For things need to be clean here. Hygienic. People come and eat here.’
If streets and squares are aesthetically schoon such prettiness is pleasing: it adds to Harry’s job satisfaction. His dissatisfaction takes a moral turn: why do people do this? And then there appears to be yet another way of valuing that is highly relevant to cleaning up after the market, one in which the good to be served is that of hygiene. People who eat food from market stalls should not catch infectious diseases. Bugs are to be scrubbed away. They are to be killed with strong cleaning fluids. By men who are truly dedicated and who, beyond disputes about their salary, want eaters to be safe.
Schoon is a composite value, it calls up different kinds of good. In trailing Harry and his men, I come across aesthetic, moral and hygienic repertoires of valuing.
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I wonder if all three goods at stake – beautiful, proper, safe – resonate as loudly in clean. But how might I find out? I can ask my helpful English friends, but they have not done fieldwork with cleaners of a day market. They may know a lot about the word clean in other sites and situations, but not about the way it figures in my (or an equivalent, but what would be an equivalent?) field.
In the Dutch semantic network that includes schoon and proper and puur there are yet more related terms, notably zuiver and rein. If you speak German, you might recognise sauber and rein. A clean conscience is zuiver; and waste water, as we saw above, is submitted to zuivering. Rein is somewhat old fashioned, but the verb reinigen is still in use for particular kinds of cleaning, such as dry-cleaning, carpet cleaning and skin cleaning. What is more, these words are pertinent in practices beyond households, sewage systems, markets, hospitals and the beauty industry. In practices, that is, to do with theory.
As I assemble resonances and slippages between the few closely related European languages that I have access to, I cannot help thinking of the different translations of the clean reasoning that stood out as an icon of the Enlightenment. In German, Kant wrote a Kritik der
reinen
Vernuft; in French this became the Critique de la raison
pure
; in English it was translated into the Critique of
pure
reason; and while both rein and puur would have made sense in Dutch, the Dutch version contains a third term, it is called Kritiek van de
zuivere
rede. Should we indeed wash our words until they are clean and shining? I wonder whether calling for theory that is schoon might be an improvement here. My hope is not particularly with its hygienic or its moral overtones, but rather with its third layer, its promising aesthetics.
To conclude
Academic authors tend to put a lot of effort into closing down the gaps between the different variants of the terms they use. Hoping to build transportable theories, they celebrate ‘the concept’ – an honourable title given to a word defined in such a solid way that it is able to travel throughout a research project, between research fields, or even across disciplines, without transforming. However, if words are entangled with their semiotic as well as their practical contexts, it is impossible to make them immutable while they move between settings.
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The dream of ‘the concept’ is faltering.
That words adapt is true within any so-called ‘language’, but the impossibility of semantic stability is all the more striking once you move between ‘languages’. Elsewhere, this has been laid out and exemplified in work on the limits of translation.
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In the present article, building on those insights, I have discussed it in the slightly different circumstances of the author who cannot claim full authority over English, but still knows enough English – but what is enough? – to write in it.
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But if words cannot be fully stabilised, the idea that this might be possible is consequential. It means that some words gain prominence while others are sidelined; and that dominant meanings are strengthened while lesser ones are marginalised or lost. In as far as academic work is done in English, this affects not just English, but also academic work.
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It leads to an undue linguistic impoverishment of English language linguistic repertoires and, added to that, foregoes the enrichment on offer in other tongues. In the present text, I have attended to a particular kind of richness, that of the resonances that echo within words. I have provided examples of cultural, material, semantic and multilingual resonances by visiting a few situations where the words schoon or clean are spoken and to situations that these words bespeak.
Can I use the word bespeak, is that okay? My first English reader edited it away. The second wrote in the margin that he liked the fact that I revitalised this old fashioned term. I had no idea it was old fashioned. Can I use it?
Recognising the fluidity, adaptability, multiplicity, relationality – the context dependency – of words has consequences for theory. For, as it is, the social sciences harbour theories about such phenomena as taste, values, morality, materiality, inequality, work – what have you. These theories are made to travel: from the UK to the Netherlands; from France to Brazil; from Chicago to South Africa and back again.
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The suggestion is that ‘taste’, ‘values’, ‘morality’ and so on are the same thing from one site to the next. But they are not.
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That even between English and Dutch, closely related languages, there are impressive gaps, might serve to underscore this.
While the word schoon may resonate with Floddertje, the word clean does not. While in the Netherlands a ‘waste water treatment plant’ is a clean place, in the UK it is not. While Douglas used a spatial version of ‘clean’ to argue for washed out, distinct categories, in terms of ‘schoon’ this would never have made any sense. The word schoon moves between aesthetic, moral and hygienic repertoires of valuing – and to know whether the word clean does as well, I would have to do added fieldwork (but where?). In the semantic networks that afford words with their meaning, schoon is related to the Dutch proper, rein, puur and zuiver – but also to the German schön, rein and sauber and the French propre – in ways that clean is not. Such a small linguistic distance; so many gaps!
What to conclude? One possibility is to acknowledge slippages but still aim for a theory that is ‘as coherent as possible’. The other is to attend upfront to things that do not fit. To control, or, better still, to care for equivocations.
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To juxtapose stories without seeking to fuse them. To craft patchworks in which the threads that connect the pieces together are clearly visible. Or, to shift back from visuals to sounds again: to sing tunes that are polyphonous; or to keep diverse resonances audible, even if they are dissonant.
The format of this text resonates with this way of understanding theory. I have not presented you with a firm, overall proposition supported by subservient facts that are staged as if I am out to win an argument. Instead, I have assembled examples of what resonance may be and what, in these cases, its implications are. And no, this is not a Dutch format. Instead, it is informed by the pains and pleasures of moving and moving again between different linguistic repertoires.
