Page 31 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 25

living room, a dining-room and a kitchen, each spraying air freshener in front of
them as they talk about visiting their ‘favourite country’. This slogan indicates the
name of the product and the country fresh air it produces when sprayed inside the
home. Another advertisement for a floorcleaner is set in the middle of the night.
It consists of a solitary mop secretly dancing a gleaming, shining trail across the
kitchen linoleum to the tune of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In these two
representative advertisements, like many others for household cleaning products,
assertions that the product cleans and sanitizes are coupled with claims that it
freshens the home or leaves it smelling ‘like the great outdoors’. Such
advertisements stress that the effects of housework are effects of erasure, yet of
an erasure that leaves traces in its wake—a gleam, a shine, the scents of lemon or
pine. Cleaning products not only promise to evacuate dirt, grime and germs,
aspects of the ‘natural’ that are dirty and dangerous, but also to import the scent
and freshness of the outdoors, leaving behind olfactory traces of vegetal or floral
growth. Because the effects of cleaning are a lack or absence of dirt and germs,
the scents, the shine, as tangible presences, verify (for the housewife, for her family
or guests, or for the maid’s employer) that cleaning has taken place. 4 The fact
that the residue of cleaning in our commodity culture, its proof, its product is
often an olfactory trace resonates tellingly with Sigmund Freud’s work linking
organic repression, civilization and the sense of smell. While I will discuss his
thesis in detail below, here it is sufficient to note that these ‘fresh scents’ are
given moral valence in the advertisements where they occur. They are subtly
marketed both as instruments of surveillance (cleaning has occurred) and as
signs (available for purchase) of the moral virtue our culture assigns to
cleanliness and the clean (and to organic repression—‘cleanliness is next to
godliness’).
What is frequently erased without a trace from these advertisements is the
sense that cleaning involves work, sweat, labour. The mop n’ glow is a
‘sorcerer’s apprentice’, its unattended, dancing mop producing a gleaming floor
in the middle of the night. The floral, pine or lemon scents left by Lysol or
Pledge signify a natural source of cleanliness, not that of human labour. What
these advertisements promote are products that, in the absence of human labour,
effect a contradictory construction and valuation of the concepts of natural and
cultural, inside and outside, clean and dirty. In them, nature or the natural, often
coded as the source of the dirty and taboo, is also commodified and chemically
reproduced as a signifier of cleanliness that opens up and refreshes stuffy indoor
domestic space. An intricate process of material exchange and human labour
(moving dirt, germs, effluvia from inside to outside the home) is wedded to a
commodity transaction (purchase of product which is then brought into the home)
that employs symbolic values both in its promotion and its use (the significations
within the advertisement; the scents or shine that the product leaves as its trace).
These same advertisements repress the labour involved in cleaning, any sense of
the housewife as labourer, and usually any but the most isolated, antiseptic image
of dirt or filth. The matrix of social, economic and symbolic transactions