Filth

Dust, grit, and grime provide foundations for two very different examinations of progress.  Beginning with the mundane and unpleasant, Joseph Amato uses dust as a symbol for our understanding of scale and the limits of perception, while Ruth Schwartz Cowan finds a somewhat vicious paradox in efforts to keep crud out of our domestic sanctuaries. 

Amato’s Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible begins in the Middle Ages when motes of dust represented the common denominator of life, filth and decay, and the minuscule boundary of human knowledge.  As technology advanced dust lost these symbolic roles, which were assumed by the new microscopic world.  Each step forward in genetics, chemistry, and physics brought a deeper understanding of life and the world, while insights into disease gave dust and dirt a new aura of menace.  This new scale plays an essential role in the modern world, but in many ways is too abstract–too removed from the world of daily life–to capture the imagination in the same visceral way dust once did.  

In More Work for Mother, Cowan surveys the evolution of household technology and finds that, despite dramatic changes, the ideal of the middle-class home has trapped families in a cycle of labor.  Each advance saved time and energy for the women responsible for cleaning and other tasks, and each new device effectively nudged the standard of living upward.  In order to maintain the new higher standard of living, however, families spent more time working in the home.  Vacuums and chemical cleaners made it easier to tidy up while they also dramatically increased the standards of home cleanliness; refrigeration and new cooking technology made food easier to prepare, but also sparked the elaboration of meals themselves.  Progress has improved life while creating unforeseen demands. 

Amato and Cowan creatively use the mundane to trace out unintended consequences and ambiguities in the notion of progress and in the relationships that emerge between people and technology.