Page 37 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 31

By this same reasoning, cleaning, the management and disposal of filth and
excreta, marks, along with man’s assumption of an erect posture, the beginnings
of civilization. As an implied part of the transformative matrix of odour, sight,
sexuality, posture and repression, it too acquires a moral, normative valence.
Freud’s account highlights the assumption of a position (erect posture) and does
not pursue the other implications of ‘organic repression’: the performance of
cleaning practices necessary to implement its dictates.
In Freud’s much more extensive work on sexuality and subjectivity, cleaning
and hygiene also play a significant role in the advent of the individuated, sexed
being. Writing on his discovery of infantile, polymorphous, perverse sexuality,
Freud is eventually led to identify the mother as the figure who inaugurates the
infant’s sexual excitation:

And now we find the phantasy of seduction once more in the pre-Oedipus…
but the seducer is regularly the mother. Here, however, phantasy touches
the ground of reality, for it was really the mother who by her activities
over the child’s bodily hygiene inevitably stimulated, and perhaps even
roused for the first time, pleasurable sensations in her genitals.
(1930/1953–74: SE 22:120)

One of the ways in which the social, historical context inflects the psychic
formation of the subject within the family romance consists precisely in
bourgeois norms of cleanliness. These norms institute disciplinary procedures
that profoundly influence subject formation. Yet cleaning practices also literally
impress on the infantile body the marks of a social order characterized by
multiple types of diversity. Variations in social position, gender, status, material
wealth, occupation and domestic environment significantly inflect and alter such
subject formation within the only apparently homogeneous (bourgeois) family.
We can see the social order’s simultaneous incursion into and marginalization
from the bourgeois family romance in cleaning scenes that occur in Freud’s
analytic work.
The intimate links among cleaning practices, sexuality and sexual difference,
although not noted as such by Freud, emerge in the form of small narratives or
anecdotes embedded in several of his case histories. One example particularly
suited to my interests bears upon the ideas later expressed in Civilization and its
Discontentsit. I refer to the Wolfman’s repressed image of Grusha, the
housemaid, scrubbing the floor. As Freud interprets it, her image served the
Wolfman as a cover for the more frightening memory of the primal scene he had
witnessed as a child. ‘When he saw the girl upon the floor engaged in scrubbing
it, and kneeling down, with her buttocks projecting and her back horizontal, he was
faced once again with the attitude which his mother had assumed in the coitus
scene. She became his mother to him’ (1909/1960:285).
For the Wolfman and for Freud, an image of a woman on her hands and knees
could only be a sexual image, her physical posture and not her activity the