[…]
Žižek talks about the connection between objects and
ideology using, as examples, the different types of toilets he encountered
while traveling through Europe. He reflects on three types: the French, the
German and the British toilet. For the uninitiated, I shall briefly describe
each. In France, the toilet is designed with the hole at the back of the bowl
so the waste falls immediately into water and can disappear unseen and unacknowledged
by its maker. The German model is the exact opposite. The Germans place the
hole in the front of the bowl with a raised shelf behind. When you use the
toilet, the waste collects on the dry shelf below you, affording the
opportunity to inspect it for disease before you flush it off the shelf and
into the hole in the front. The English design is a compromise that places the
hole in the center of the bowl with a larger amount of water. This lets the
user decide whether they wish to confront their waste or not.
Noticing these things, Žižek wanted to know how these
different designs had come about. Architect friends supplied him with technical
books on the subject and he describes how each designer tries to prove their
design is the best in a purely functional sense. Since they are all ultimately
variations on a theme, Žižek says this argumentation merely reflects the
cultural ideology behind the features of each design. While there may be
technical arguments for one design feature or another, the best combination is
ultimately a matter of cultural taste. To those who would argue we live in a
post-ideological world, Žižek says you only need to go to the toilet to find
you are literally sitting on ideology, so to speak.
While it may seem ridiculous (and perhaps a bit gross) to
spend too much time pondering toilet design, I find his argument compelling on
a number of levels. Every man-made object is, in varying proportions, both
utilitarian and symbolic. We have items that are almost entirely symbolic which,
like a king’s scepter, have almost no utilitarian purpose whatsoever. At the
other extreme are things like the humble toilet, which are so banal and
commonplace that we can forget they carry any symbolic baggage at all. The
toilet is an especially extreme example since the act of using the toilet is
considered by most cultures to be a vulgar necessity, to be done in private and
not to be discussed, further negating any potential symbolic value. A designer
wanting to make their mark on the world is not likely to choose the toilet as
their medium. But there it is: holes in different places, shelves, different
water flows, and we haven’t even left Europe.
These small differences can have lasting social impacts. To
this day, most German men urinate sitting down, precisely because any attempt
to pee directly on the German shelf from a height results in urine being
splashed all over the room. Although the German-style toilet is disappearing
(perhaps understandably) from German homes and public places, the culture of
seated urination for men is alive and well. Foreign men living in the country
for any length of time are likely to encounter signs urging them to sit down
and it is not uncommon for a German host to ask for this directly, even if they
have an English-style bowl. It makes me wonder how many habits I carry around
from objects now gone or completely different from their antecedent
[…]
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