Human Waste

‘Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system’ Mary Douglas wrote; similarly, Zygmunt Bauman conceived of the 'stranger' as a form of 'human waste' created by societies attempts to cognitively order physical and social space – ‘...the typical modern strangers were the waste of the State's ordering zeal’.(Bauman) This dynamic brings to mind an artwork by Barbara Kruger which contains the slogan: “We construct a chorus of missing persons.” The artist Michael Landy’s installation: ‘Scrapheap Services’ provides us with an image of such a dynamic, along with a sales-pitch. ‘Make a clean sweep with Scrapheap Services. We make people black-spots a thing of the past...’ as the chilling anti-serenade of the promotional video that accompanies his artwork tells us, in a creepily upbeat tone. To be a stranger in the Modern State is, in Bauman’s words, to live in a state of suspended extinction. (He distinguishes between the modern and the post-modern state, for simplicity's sake, I won’t). “Sanitation officers” was the job description given to some of those who killed Jewish people, and others, during the Holocaust – people were construed as human waste.* They were treated like shit in other words, and if you are treated like shit then you feel like shit: things like childhood emotional abuse and emotional neglect are (according to diagnostic manual entries) associated with several disorders. When someone drinks rat poison and, after his recovery, says that the incident just goes to show you how he felt about himself: he felt like a rat, and when you know that that person had been abused (beaten and raped) then a simple (simplistic and crude) conclusion to arrive at would be that he had been treated like shit and so he felt like shit.

Is the stranger really a stranger? We would not want a Boy in Striped Pyjamas-like mishap and so questions should be asked. Are you able? Are you well? Do you have merit? In a meritocracy this is how we sort the wheat from the chaff. Merit by whose standards? By standards set by the boy I rolled matchbox cars down a hill with when I was six? It could be argued that our culture views and treats many as the manure scattered on fields on which a few decent crops grow and that it is these people – the 'crops' – who are then admired for their ruthlessness. When someone works as a prostitute because it is the only way that he can access the worlds of the lawyers and doctors who are his customers and when he takes heroin to cope with his job and other pressures (heroin is one way to cope and things like dp/dr and ptsd are, unsuccessful, automatic strategies – central to both is finding it unbearable to present in your life) and when his naked corpse is found sprawled on the pavement outside of the hostel that he stayed at – naked because it has been stripped by vultures living at the hostel – then what is efficiently and quickly removed is – has been built as – human waste.

*Direct killing was emotionally grueling and so one set of people poured the pesticide Zyklon B through the roofs of gas chambers and another (inmates who formed the sonderkommando) dealt with the aftermath. These methods - the limiting of vision and the division of labour, made the process comfortable or enjoyable, even. (For more detail see the chapter: ‘The Nazi’s Pursuit for a “Humane” Method of Killing’ in Nestar Russell’s: ‘Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2’). It’s difficult to discover the corpses beside us and to feel horror at existing by assassination given the many complicated and carefully arranged layers of social and psychological mediation that serve to obscure causality. In the lecture “La Crise de l’homme” Camus says: ‘With so much paper, so many offices and functionaries, we are creating a world in which human warmth has disappeared. Where no one can come into contact with anyone else except across a maze of what we call “formalities”. The German officer who spoke with care of the shredded ears of my comrade thought this was fine, since tearing them was part of his official business, and there could not, therefore, be anything wrong with it. In sum, one no longer dies, one no longer loves, and one no longer kills, except by proxy. This, I suppose, is what is called good organization.’