The house can be divided into designated spaces that serve our fundamental needs. A kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom cater to our basic biological requirements. Embracing the idea that rooms fulfill specific needs, we can view ancillary rooms as central to our identities today. The office reflects our intellectual commitment to work, while the living room serves as a space to consume media, both essential to being an active member of mainstream society. Although the shower typically shares a room with the toilet, I propose it be allocated its own space, an 'aesthetic room,' to meet one of our fundamental needs—to be aesthetic objects.
Leaving a trail of clothes from my bedroom to the bathroom, I find myself standing naked in front of the shower. I can’t explain how weird a naked body is. Perhaps it’s the head that’s attached to a body that creates a sense of dissonance. As we walk around through the world, we are mostly floating heads with covered bodies. Maybe the face, as a representation of the self, becomes troubled when it is attached to the naked body. Perhaps there is a sense of our animal self and our civil self. Or our human and post-human self. The shower, as an object, brings our attention to this feeling of our two selves. It shatters our sense of self, momentarily elevating the body from a secondary to a primary component of who we are. In order to maintain our primary sense of self, represented by the face, we must come into contact with ourselves as an alien form.
I stick my hand behind the curtain and feel for the smooth handle. Cranking it up, I encounter a resistance that is so familiar to showering. The shower, like all objects, has a sense to it. I feel a slight reverberation through the pipes while touching the handle. A slight whistling precedes the sound of water spraying out of the shower head. The instantaneity of the water reminds me of what Heidegger said about the standing reserve. Water, always ready for our consumption, reveals the world as a resource to be used. No longer required to bathe in a river or under a waterfall, the shower robs us of an encounter with nature in all its power. The shower becomes possible only when nature is reduced to a mere resource.
Opening the curtain, I find myself staring at the tiled wall as water sprays against the tub. Entering the shower, I feel the water spray across my body, dripping onto the tub and surrounding my feet, with my wet hair covering my face. In two ways, the shower is an aesthetic experience. First, it restores a particular form of our appearance. Second, it exposes our skin to a stream of water. Like an angel with eyes across its body, our skin’s sensory capacity envelops our being, making touch the only sense that spreads itself across our body. The shower is not only involved in producing an aesthetic object but is itself a highly aesthetic experience.
Grabbing soap to wash myself, I think about the parallels between sewage treatment plants and our bodies. Our two to four million sweat glands secrete waste onto the surface of our bodies as we walk through the city, standing above millions of pipes that carry thousands of tons of waste to water treatment facilities. As I walk, a jogger runs towards me, covered in sweat. The sweat paints lines across their body that, like a canvas, hold an expression of who they are. Soap washes away a version of ourselves that we don’t want others to experience. By creating a distance from our natural scent, body soap contributes to the aestheticization of the self.
Staring at the shampoo bottle, I think about how my hair isn’t actually dirty, and although it hardly ever is, I wash it nonetheless. Perhaps if I worked a job that put my body into contact with chemicals, germs, or irritants, shampoo could serve to clean my hair. But sitting at a desk, writing code, and attending meetings makes shampoo appear unnecessary. It seems that shampoo is an example of what we might call cultural drift. I mean that perhaps in its infancy as a mass-produced commodity, shampoo was primarily used to clean dirty hair. However, a hundred years after Hans Schwarzkopf produced the first mass-produced shampoo, the world has changed but our views on shampoo have stayed the same. No longer just about cleaning our hair, shampoo now serves functions congruent with our times: styling our hair in a particular fashion by adding volume or keeping it healthy.
Despite my reluctance about the necessity to use shampoo, I do so out of habit. Reaching next for the conditioner, I realize the shower is definitely about creating an aesthetic experience of the self. In two ways, conditioner not only gives us a feeling of our self but also affects our hair so that it takes on a particular appearance. Thinking about the sense of self that we produce, I realize that all objects have a sense to them. After a long day, we might smell or feel the dried sweat on our legs—these sensations create a sense of self that makes us not feel right, motivating us to shower and restore our sense of self.
Overheating and feeling guilty for how long I’ve been in the shower, I turn the water off. The instant disappearance of the sensuous experience gives way to an unnameable feeling, consisting of standing naked in silence and stillness. Reaching for a towel to dry myself, I step out of the shower and dry off with what smells like an old towel. Standing there wrapped in cloth, I wipe the steamy mirror to see my familiar face, as if I were checking to see the finished product.
