1 - 7 March 2001
Issue No.523
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 1 - 7 March 2001 Issue No.523 |
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More than black and white
With new stain removing pearls: so announced the box of washing powder sitting, otherwise innocently, on top of the washing machine in my bathroom. For how long the stain removing pearls had been new -- this adjective being highlighted in a yellow box, the other words in a red stripe -- was anyone's guess. Nor is the connection between pearls and the removal of stains at all obvious. Still, there it was. At least some of the five kilogrammes of powder contained in this box could be accounted for by the presence of these marvelous pearls that are able, presumably, to perform their magic even at the lower temperatures recommended for the newer, easy to care for fabrics that seem to be stretched across every fashion conscious back.
I do not make a habit of studying cartons, of reading labels, and certainly not of examining the list of contents appended to so many pre-packaged foods. They mean nothing to me: indeed, I strongly suspect that they may mean nothing to anyone, except, perhaps, to a chemist undertaking a particularly obscure bit of post doctoral research, or possibly a nuclear physicist. They at least might be in a position to understand why so many hydroflourocarbonoxides happen to be in this particular bar of chocolate, while the bar with the coconut filling seems to consist of little other than magnesium sulphate and potassium compounds, or whatever.
But the washing powder had excited my curiosity. Everyday it gets tossed into washing machines all over the world, and mills around for an hour or so with millions of people's clothes, and then they are worn, all stains removed courtesy of the new stain removing pearls.
More alarming than this mystery ingredient, though, was the message emblazoned across the bottom of the box. It must be clean on the inside to be clean on the outside.
It was all too much. Not only did the box boast that it was full of pearls, it was seemingly intent to impose on its exterior its own pearls of wisdom -- gratuitous, tritely moralistic, but no less offensive for that.
That it should come to this: a box of washing powder spouting moral platitudes. I am sure I am not alone in resenting being offered moral guidance from a detergent product, whatever the brand, whatever its stain removing qualities.
And there we go again: the removal of stains. Stains, smears, filth, pollution: do metaphors come any more loaded than those that revolve around dirt.
Advertising, we are constantly told, is a sophisticated industry, employing subtle techniques to beguile any would-be consumer to become the real thing, ie an actual customer. Yet when it comes to detergents the crudest associations remain virtually in tact: cleanliness remains next to godliness, and if you read the small print on your packets of detergents, you are unlikely to be allowed to forget this fact.
Still, it was less than pleasing that on top of my washing machine I should daily encounter this nauseating piece of didacticism. Nor can it be ignored. One of the most annoying aspects of noticing things is that once noticed they cannot be pushed into the background. The box stands there, day in, day out, with its prissy, accusing little message. I resolved to change my brand.
Quite whether this will make any difference, though, is an open question. For while I am a firm believer in the fact that the automatic washing machine is one of the few consumer durables -- perhaps the only consumer durable -- to effect any significant improvement in the quality of life, I am aware, too, that the possession of such a machine, certainly in a country where more than 30 per cent of the population survives on less than $1 a day, remains the prerogative only of those with the economic wherewithal.
Automatic washing machines, and the powders that go with them, target the middle classes, and it will take decades of actually achieving the announced target of eight per cent economic growth annually before the middle classes can be safely assumed to constitute a numerically significant minority. Yet we might as well forget about class as an economic or political issue -- everyone else has, after all.
As the advertising industry has been quick to understand, class can be effectively repackaged -- is indeed, exclusively defined by the industry -- in terms of lifestyle. It is just that this repackaging process requires the identification of stereotypes, and to be successful, such stereotypes must, necessarily, convince.
Cleanliness, then, is next to godliness -- or held to be, by the middle classes at least. And as proof of what might otherwise seem a contentious statement, one need only look at the message emblazoned across the automatic washing powder market leader's box. All of which is a little disheartening for those who might like to believe that clean clothes do not automatically indicate an unblemished conscience, and that dirt beneath the fingernails might indicate -- and this, once upon a time, was the reverse side of the same, petit bourgeois, and oddly puritan, prejudice -- an honest days toil.
The fact is, though, that the great majority of those whose honest day's toil involves the dirtying of hands is unlikely to be possessed of sufficient means to interest the advertising industry, certainly not that section of the industry involved in the marketing of consumer durables. And such is the pervasiveness of our consumer-led morality that this simple economic fact has been allowed to reify into something far more disturbing than a set of demographic and economic statistics. It has acquired peculiarly moral overtones. Dirty equals poor equals undeserving. Clean equals middle class equals righteous.
It is not a set of equations that fits particularly comfortably with the realities of a third world economy. But then children who smear themselves in grease from used car batteries because they think it protects them rather than causing endless skin and respiratory problems during their (technically illegal) unpleasant, dirty jobs, have somehow become invisible, though they can be met in back streets all over the city.
Such, it seems, are the virtues of the dazzling whites produced by those stain-removing pearls. They dazzle so much that we can no longer really see.
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