Week 5: The semiotics of leftovers: frugality and the boundaries of disgust

Module 2 — Micropolitics.

Douglas’s formulation is the most useful sentence in the course: dirt is matter out of place. Dirt is not a property of a substance. It is a judgement about whether something is where the system of classification says it belongs, and it tells you far more about the system than about the substance.

Apply it to a refrigerator and the results are immediate. The same rice, cooked at the same time, is meal prep in a labelled glass container on the middle shelf and dangerous leftovers in a knotted plastic bag at the back. The food is identical. The container, the label, the position and the intention have changed — and those are what determine whether it gets eaten or binned.

This produces the course’s central mechanism in miniature. The refrigerator does not resolve a food’s status; it defers it. Putting something in the fridge is a way of not deciding about it, and the deferred decision, when it finally arrives, is very often the bin. Frugality and disgust turn out to be the same boundary viewed from either side: eating the leftovers is virtue, and the exact same act one day later is contamination.

Inherits from week 4: shelf position determines what is seen. This week is about what being unseen does to a thing’s category.

Outline#

• Douglas on dirt, anomaly, and classification as system-maintenance
• container, label and position as classificatory instruments
• meal prep versus leftovers: the same food, different verdicts
• deferral — the fridge as the place you put a decision you are avoiding
• frugality and disgust as one boundary from two sides

Reading#

• Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966) — the chapters on dirt as matter out of place and as the enemy of order

Tutorial preparation#

The tutorial is a structured ethical debate about a share-house dispute. Read the scenario on the session page before Wednesday and decide which side you find harder to argue.