Within modern society, there are two things that cannot be acknowledged. Dirt and death. These represent the abject, that which we refuse to see, except when it slips into view, and then we experience revulsion and disgust.

As Anne McClintock says in Imperial Leather, “nothing is inherently dirty… dirt is what’s left over after exchange value has been extracted.” In other words, dirt is the visual evidence of manual labor- slave labor, domestic labor, sweatshop labor, etc.-and because modern economies were founded on the myth that non-manual labor- like banking- is worth the big bucks, dirt must be erased. Death represents a different sort of disruption. As Mary Shelly made so beautifully clear in Frankenstein, death brings the progress narrative of modern science to a monstrous halt.

So Burlington, Vermont, where I live, may be the place where the Occupy movement ends as death …

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