[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.78 A recentcraze for black toilet paper produced by a Portuguese paper company,called Renova Black, signals  avant-garde creative work. Luxury or arturinals in the shape of orchids or Jack-in-the-pulpits, created in the spiritof Marcel Duchamp s  Fountain, are increasingly seen as a  must fordesigner homes, in part because of their touted environmental benefitsin that they use less water than ordinary toilets.79 While these fecal toys LOOKI NG BEHI ND 137could be a doorway to embracing or normalizing feces and the processof excretion, they simultaneously allow us to displace our anxieties onthe artifacts associated with excretion, rather than deal with the filthymatter itself.80Why do we find the  excremental body so threatening? Lennard J.Davis s pioneering work in disability studies can be applied to ourpostmodern understanding of the medieval body.In Davis s Lacanianreading, Western culture typically has read the disabled body as a disrup-tion that  must be regulated, rationalized, contained for the modernbinary normal/abnormal to function.81 Our presumed coherent identity,situated in the body and willingly believed in, is exposed as a sham by the abnormal body.The  whole is a  hallucination or  fiction. 82 Thedisabled body, Davis argues, represents the  repressed fragmented body,or  the true self of the fragmented body. 83 The fragmented nature ofall bodies is repressed.84 The excremental body, like the disabled body,reminds us of our fragmented self.Cultures split (Freud s Spaltung) bodiesinto whole and fragmentary, as well as, I would argue, clean and filthy,as a way of addressing fears of fragmentation.85 The  clean body, likethe  whole body, is a fiction.Our rejection of excrement parallelsthe medieval mystics rejection of food, which stopped or minimizedexcretions.86 In our attempt to control our filth, we displace excrementonto the Middle Ages.The Middle Ages is remembered as waste.As JohnScanlan writes, the  imaginary graveyard of progress.buries the past asif it was simply useless rubbish. 87 The past, the Middle Ages, is not  asif it were garbage; it is made into literal filth.The more excrement is made invisible, the more it becomes titillating,obscene, and taboo.88 The increase in privatization in the early modernperiod accompanies a diminution in the valences, especially the positiveones, that excrement could possess.The body is not discrete or bounded;it has openings through which filth can be expelled.But some find thisthreatening.89 It is only in the post-Rabelaisian world, certainly in apostmedieval world, that we are presented with  an entirely finished,completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside assomething individual.All orifices of the body are closed. 90 The moreexcremental medieval bodies are, the less excremental are our modernbodies.The convention of the excremental medieval body in popularculture works to normalize our own bodies; that is, the medieval bodyexcremental, fragmentary, unnatural is a fantasy conjured up by us tofunction in opposition to our modern whole, clean, natural bodies.By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we have cometo view the Middle Ages as a repository of filth and waste, a time whenwaste was domesticated and even embraced; this view of the Middle Ages 138 EXCREMENT IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGESallows us to construct ourselves as clean and modern, unlike those filthy,childlike medievals.Thomas Aquinas famously wrote about prostitutionas a necessary evil:  Remove the sewer and you will fill the palace withordure; similarly with bilge from a ship; remove whores from the worldand you will fill it with sodomy. 91 Similarly, the medieval functions asour necessary evil.Without it, we would be filthy, barbaric, and perverse.Ironically, the demonization and privatization of excrement also means,as Lewis Mumford regretfully points out,  the degradation of the innerlife [which] is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred fromintrusion is the private toilet [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • funlifepok.htw.pl

    •