Modern hygiene and sanitation are civilization’s most characteristic and mystique-destroying inventions

Evidence

It is precisely this sense of mystery or the marvelous, whether conveyed by Surrealism, by Flemish still life, or by the glorious encasement of a Renaissance Madonna, which is negated by modern civilization, whose “most unquestionably original achievement” Bloch sees in the “modern bathroom and water closet, just as surely as furniture, in the Rococo, and cathedrals, in Gothic art, furnished the architectonic dominants around which the rest of the style of the periods in question organized itself. Now washability dominates, somehow water flows down all the walls, and the magic of modern sanitary installations imperceptibly intervenes as an a priori of completed machine production even in the most precious achievements of the industrial technique of our time.” — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 286

Categorization

• XREF: Bloch’s diagnosis of washability as the architectonic dominant of modernity echoes Benjamin’s account of the modern reordering of perception and domestic space; also converses with Adorno’s treatment of functionalism.
• CANDY: The claim that the modern toilet, not the cathedral, defines our era’s dominant style is a striking, sharable paradox.