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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
The modern bathroom is an ingenious compilation of locked doors, smooth porcelain, 4-ply tissue and antibacterial hand soap, but despite this miracle of indoor plumbing, we still can’t bear the thought that anyone else should know that our bodies produce waste. Why must we live by the rules of this intense scatological embarrassment?
In Spectacles of Waste, leading historian of medicine Warwick Anderson reveals how human excrement has always complicated humanity’s attempts to become modern. From wastewater epidemiology and sewage snooping to fecal transplants and excremental art, he argues that our insistence on separating ourselves from our bodily waste has fundamentally shaped our philosophies, social theories, literature and art—even the emergence of high-tech science as we understand it today.
Written with verve and aplomb, Anderson’s expert analysis reveals how in recent years, humanity has doubled down on abstracting and datafying our most abject waste, and unconsciously underlined its biopolitical signature across our lives.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: Modern Excrementalities and Postcolonic Biopolitics
Notes
1 The Sewage Panopticon
COVID Down the Toilet
Sentinel Feces?
Sewage Information Mining
Interoperable Effluent
Notes
2 The Waste That Therefore I Am?
Shit Histories
Anal Characters
Orificial Orders and Their Contents
The Uncanny Stool
Notes
3 The Colon-ized World
Excremental Colonialism
An Archipelagic Laboratory?
The Latrinoscene
Abstracted Fecal Labor
Notes
4 Powers of Ordure
Excremental Literary Visions
On Not De-colon-izing
Anthropological Excremental Romances?
Shit Envy
Dirty Protests
Notes
5 Gut Feelings and Dark Continents
Toxic Hauntings in Constipated Modernity
From Toxic Dialectic to Ecologic Harmony, or Not?
Rewilding the Colon?
From Bare Life to Bioavailable Shit?
Notes
Conclusion: A Topsy-Turvy Creature
Notes
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: Modern Excrementalities and Postcolonic Biopolitics
Begin Reading
Conclusion: A Topsy-Turvy Creature
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
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Spectacles of Waste
WARWICK ANDERSON
polity
Copyright © Warwick Anderson 2024
The right of Warwick Anderson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN–13: 978–1–5095–5742–4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023944563
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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IntroductionModern Excrementalities and Postcolonic Biopolitics
My subject is shit, unavoidably. For most of us, it is a subject that elicits disgust and unease, fears of contamination and transgression, feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Shit is something we humans want to eliminate, remove from our vicinity, avoid touching or smelling – especially when it is others’ shit. But the same intense disavowal and fervent distancing, the same desperate repression and displacement, also seem to compel us to analyze, calculate, survey, and write up the very thing that causes so much discomfort and distress. And so, that which ought to go unnamed in fact generates unceasing discussion in the humanities, the sciences, and popular culture. Our perpetual denial and rejection of shit force us to think again, and to think differently, about what it means to be human and modern; our reactions to shit make us speculate on how we might become more hygienic, secure, and civilized citizens. Surely, efforts to control shit, the seductive stool, are among the infant’s first opportunities to theorize the world. Do we ever stop pondering shit in this way? In other words, it may be shit and its disavowal that make us “modern humans” – in as much as we aspire to that status or are permitted that status. The response to shit serves as the means to figure out who we are and who we want to be – and what we are not. Shit, then, can be good to think with and against and beside.
In this book, human shit proves to be a remarkably capacious subject, one that allows us to mess with wastewater surveillance or sewage snooping, the gut microbiome, the politics of colon-izing others and ourselves, perceptions of pollution and danger, feelings of revulsion and repugnance, along with an array of fecal fascinations and repressions. A dirty subject that touches on excremental colonialism, the fecal body politic, the latrinoscene, anal characters and anal pleasures, stool fetishes, intestinal intoxication, turd romancing, gut buddies, the helminth underground, kitsch tropical laboratories, and the rise of the biomedical sciences in the twentieth century. A subject, as we shall see, that ranges from environmental epidemiology and contemporary genomics to literary figuring of the grotesque or carnivalesque, to the reveries of psychoanalysis and social theory, and to the proliferation of shit art. Among this cornucopia of modern excrementality, my principal goal has been to reveal the scato-logics of the life sciences and population health during the past century and more; that is, to perform a procto-ontology of those sciences that help to make us “developed” and civilized.
Shit is a subject that has long preoccupied me – like everyone else, I expect. In the 1990s, I began writing articles with titles such as “Excremental Colonialism” and “Crap on the Map,” observing pervasive and durable fixations on the intimate relations of bodily wastes and states of health or disease – offering critical historical studies tracking the cloacal captivations of modern public health. I was especially interested in how toilet practices became technologies of “whiteness,” and how other races became “wasted” and pathologized under the sign of shit. By 2020, however, scarcely a whiff of this earlier research lingered, my thoughts about the history of shit having been, so it seemed, thoroughly evacuated. Then came COVID-19 and a renewed sense of excretory urgency – or at least, a renewed apprehension of the need for further critical inquiry into the paradox of how shit, repellent yet also alluring, can both devalue and acquire value.
Soon after the pandemic began, I found myself engrossed in discussion of the merits of sewage surveillance, as one does. I was in Hobart, Tasmania, talking with the state director of public health, whom I have known since we were medical students, about the growing political and popular obsession with wastewater testing for the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. At the time, we faced the conundrum that any fecal findings would be inconsequential without additional public health intelligence. In communities with adequate individual testing and contact tracing, like Australia, the results of wastewater epidemiology did not matter much; certainly they were rarely sufficient in themselves to determine health policy. Yet everyone then was clamoring for more sewage studies, fetishizing excrement, demanding their sentinel wastes be registered and archived. They were stuck on the promissory value – and potential risk – of shit. The virus was reschooling us in stools. As Emma Garnett and colleagues note in Critical Public Health, “waste has come to matter in distinct ways during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing opportunities to re-think waste as a problem.”1 And in compelling us thus to rethink waste as a problem, the pandemic inevitably insists on us interrogating our sense of self, prompting us to reassess our body’s relations with itself and the world. Feminist theorist Judith Butler observes:
The definitive boundaries of the body pressured by most forms of individualism have been called into question as the invariable porosity of the body – its openings, its mucosal linings, its windpipes – all become salient matters of life and death … How, then, do we rethink bodily relations of interdependency, intertwinement, and porosity during these times?2
Or, just as urgently, how do we recognize continuing scatological resistances to, and denials of, any new-found entanglement and porosity? In this sense, every scatology is fundamentally an eschatology too, a theory of the destiny of humanity.
Meanwhile, the planetary excremental burden continues to surge. Along with our domesticated animals, we produce more than four trillion kilograms of fecal “biomass” each year. Not surprisingly, China and India together contribute a quarter of the world’s human shit, with Brazil and the United States following close behind.3 Much as we want to deny it, we are wallowing in the stuff. A lot of the non-human animal manure ends up as fertilizer in agriculture; some human waste in developed urban centers is removed, flushed away through sewage systems, then treated and destroyed; some in poorer spots is dissolved in septic tanks; and most turds in the remainder of the world just get deposited in the surrounding environment. Careless disposal of shit and failures of sanitation undoubtedly promote the spread of enteric pathogens, which can cause cholera, typhoid fever, poliomyelitis, and a range of diarrheal diseases.4 There is no gainsaying the risks of indiscriminate contact with feces, of inept and discriminatory fecal management, especially affecting the poor, marginalized, and dispossessed. And yet, most epidemiological studies and molecular research concerning human stool in the past thirty years have concentrated on middle-class communities and sewersheds, on the wealthy sewered 30 percent, where such diseases are rare. Predominantly, the biomedical commitment has been to make this “developed” excreta data rich and informationally loaded. The vast enterprise of datafying and digitizing stool, of abstracting and securitizing feces, occurs disproportionately where the threat is least. In sewered parts of the world, where most wastewater epidemiology and gut microbiome research take place, shit is rarely infectious and noxious. Accordingly, the datasets and other symbolic equivalents derived from it, so far, have demonstrated little utility in public health and clinical practice. There must be some other explanation, then, for these relentless and extravagant efforts to abstract and to objectify and to securitize our beguiling yet still fearsome shit.
Why shit? Why now? These are questions we ask ourselves almost every day, sometimes insistently, with deep-seated feelings of necessity. Despite such universal physiological needs, the metaphysical expression of these irrepressible urges has not commonly been subject to critical scrutiny. What I want to do here, however, is look closely at how defecation and intestinal stasis – a kind of anal dialectic of flow and blockage, perhaps the most visceral dialectic of all – have prompted and shaped knowledge practices in epidemiology, microbiomics, public health, psychoanalysis, social theory, literature, and art. I am interested in what shit comes to symbolize in these domains. As we shall see, each study of defecatory possibilities and excremental imaginings inevitably leads to another, then another. Time and time again, shit conjures a sense of danger and disorder, a perception of open orifices and permeable boundaries, an incessant threat to corporeal integrity and safety. The disciplines of the humanities and biomedical sciences generate and regenerate possible solutions to this most proximate problem of disorder.5 Thus, in opposition to shit’s defacements and defilements, the arts and sciences together serve to provide alternative models of the secure citizen, the private civilized person, as well as to constitute ideal hygienic polities – modern collectives of mutually untouchable, or immunitary, individuals. The disciplines come to anathematize and mobilize shit, using it to police spatial and political boundaries and to ensure, as historian Dominique Laporte put it, the “sphincteral training of the social body.”6 But then, implacably, shit returns to stain such carefully laundered whites – a seemingly indelible brown presence.
I want to explore in these pages – through a veritable “history from below”7 – what it is that drives us to know our shit. As matter out of place, excrement disturbs our sense of order and identity, breaching boundaries, disrupting classificatory grids, declassing and defiling that which we want kept pure and secured. It shows, ironically, just how hard it is for modern humans to live with our bodily functions. We respond to excremental danger either through expulsion and elimination, flushing shit away, wiping it off, banishing it to the sewer, or through sublimating whatever bits hang around, through abstracting this base matter, objectifying it in ways that might render it just another dataset or collection of images. Thus, wastewater epidemiology and molecular analysis of the human gut microbiome – along with much social theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, literature, and art – may be regarded as apotropaic genres, modes of warding off the perceived excremental threat, incantations against the supposed troublemaking powers of excrement. We are driven to inscribe, calculate, and digitize our shit, to classify and organize our poo, to reimagine the colon as sanitary, even Elysian. In the form of symbolic equivalents, as an array of data substitutions, shit looks neat and tidy, serially ordered, even informative; certainly, it no longer smells. In classifying shit, we re-class it, trying to exclude whatever makes it nasty shit.
The parts of this compelling redemptive process, this rarefication, that interest me most occur within what may be called the “ritual frame” of the modern laboratory, a sanitary place, delibidinized, where shit can be conjured as just another specimen or sample, transmuted into a surrogate object, reduced to a controllable assemblage of cells and molecules, an aggregation that can be cautiously manipulated. Accordingly, we try to recuperate stool as a kind of fetish, an autonomous power-object that represents and disguises the social and political work that its abstraction and refinement may be doing. Nonetheless, this alienation of excretions – what Friedrich Nietzsche called “the pathos of distance”8 – proves unsustainable. Despite desperate attempts at sublimation, despite our multiple voidances, shit keeps coming back to bite us in the bum. While we try to transform it into a safe object – displacing it, inscribing it – shit remains “abject,” something we thrust aside or alienate but from which we never really part.
It is telling that disquisitions on shit so often get simplified into structural binaries, into simplistic contrary ontologies: hygienic or filthy, pure or dangerous, civilized or natural, modern or primitive, white or brown – with the first term of each juxtaposition privileged. We seem to lack the ability to reason ecologically or even simply to think symmetrically, to think with balance, when it comes to shit. In this dialectic of the sphincter, the negative or inferior polarity is violently projected onto other races, characterizing them as inherently excremental and polluting – dangerous, even terrorizing, types. I have called this the colon-izing process, meaning the inscription and stereotyping of shit in order to stigmatize or subjugate others, especially other races – indeed, it is an essential part of the constituting of “other races.” It involves relentless disparagement and degradation, signifying specific types of people as corrupted and defiling, as promiscuous defecators, dangerous shit spreaders. My goals here are to mark this production of difference, to show its undecidability or instability, and to explore critically the slippery dialectical interplay. The attribution of excrementality, or excretory difference, is perhaps the most intimate and powerful impression that colonial projects can make on subject bodies. Of course, by “colonial projects” I mean not only formal imperial regimes, but any rationalized power imbalance or political asymmetry. Empire offers models for such colon-ization, but it scarcely exhausts the practice. This process explains my recourse to the queer appellation, “postcolonic biopolitics,” where the “post” in postcolonic indicates anti-colon-ial critique, a stepping aside from durable colon-ic thought styles, rather than their easy and uncomplicated elimination or succession.
And yet, as I hope will become clear, even ostensibly civilized scientists and epidemiologists, even the most white and hygienic of them, cannot hide forever their dirty secrets. Inevitably, they come to realize their own internal colon-ization, a reluctant yet undeniable creeping self-incrimination. Their absolute fecal discriminations and typologies thus fall apart and decompose. Hence the perceived need for recurrent datafying and elevating of their own stools, a sort of eternal reiteration of the civilizing process, purification rituals that sometimes provide additional benefits of producing intelligence to police excremental boundaries and ensure defecatory compliance. Philosopher Bruno Latour pointed out we have never been modern9 – implying we can never be completely unencumbered by shit; it will always be around for us to try desperately to purify and sublimate.
What I want to do is scrutinize critically the infrastructures that make it possible for us to imagine ourselves as modern humans – to make ourselves up, or be made up, as modern persons. By “infrastructure” I mean the range of discourses and installations that structure society’s waste disposal systems. Such scrutiny involves reckoning with the development of multiple classification systems and modes of standardization that work in various social worlds, retaining significance as they cross over boundaries.10 It requires us to look at how this networked interoperability of our systems of thought can construct realities and constitute identities and polities – how it can “set parameters within which social action takes place,” validating one set of social practices above others, placing ontological guideposts.11 I am referring also, of course, to what Michel Foucault described as the dispositif or biopolitical apparatus, the heterogeneous and patchy ensemble of institutional, administrative, and discursive mechanisms that enhance and maintain the exercise of power relations.12 Thus, the excremental dispositif includes sewage systems, flush toilets, public latrines, scientific laboratories, epidemiology, microbiomics, public health regulations, datasets, and digital files; it incorporates psychology and social theory, literature and art, language itself. As Giorgio Agamben put it, such biopolitical apparatuses have “in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”13 Such a dispositif or infrastructure, according to Foucault, is a “formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need.”14 That is, generating a dispositif is a bit like the act of defecation.
It is worth pointing out what this history of our excremental present does not do. It hardly touches on other human excretions and seepages, whether urine, semen, menstrual blood, mucus (or phlegm and snot), sweat, tears, and so on – though inquiries into these additional challenges to personal identity and bodily sovereignty would surely be illuminating. Nor do I consider non-human animal wastes, the piles of shit produced by livestock and domestic pets, since their shit seems to display distanced relations, if any, to our own human bodies, with therefore less impact on our sense of ourselves. Additionally, I have rejected here our many discards, such as ordinary garbage, leftover food, plastics, toxic chemicals, spent nuclear fuel rods, personal protective equipment (PPE), other medical waste, and so on, and on – since such detritus appears to me to imply connections with individual bodies and bodies politic quite distinct from intimate and privy responses to human feces. The closeness of bodily attachment to common physical trash is comparatively negligible; the antithetic corporeal symbolism is absent or paltry; and the ease of alienation is considerably greater. At the same time, my analysis does draw on several pioneering studies of trash or garbage or rubbish and on the recent profusion of “discard studies.”15 In particular, my exploration of postcolonic biopolitics seems to confirm general arguments in discard studies for the importance of the analytic defamiliarizing of waste; observing the vacillations in value of waste; recognizing the classification of waste as an operation of power; and accepting the need to specify and situate any delving into heterogeneous “waste.” It behooves us to remember that things and people can be wasted in diverse ways and to different ends.16 In writing what is, at least implicitly, an ecological critique of costive excremental humanism, I am not trying to assert any universal theory of waste – but nor would I hastily deny the pertinence of my findings to other environmental domains.
I hope to show here that shit has become one of the great spectacles of modern life, perhaps the most pervasive and compelling spectacle of all. Though we continue to insist it is nowhere, we realize deep down that it is everywhere. Through this exercise in postcolonic biopolitics I seek to make visible again the shit we fervently deny, to render it tangible as an actor in our lives, to reveal its political doings, to suggest how we might think it otherwise, ecologically. That is, I hope to squeeze out its vast and transgressive and complex messiness into a small book.17
Notes
1.
Emma Garnett, Angeliki Balayannis, Steve Hinchliffe, Thom Davies et al., “The work of waste during COVID-19: Logics of public, environmental, and occupational health,”
Critical Public Health
(2022):
https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2048632
.
2.
Judith Butler,
What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), pp. 33, 45.
3.
David M. Berendes, Patricia J. Yang, Amanda Lai, David Hu, and Joe Brown, “Estimation of global recoverable human and animal faecal biomass,”
Nature Sustainability
1 (2018): 679–85.
4.
James L.A. Webb, Jr.,
The Guts of the Matter: A Global History of Human Waste and Infectious Intestinal Disease
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
5.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer,
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
6.
Dominique Laporte,
A History of Shit
[1978], trans. Rodolphe El-Khoury (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 65.
7.
Roy Porter, “The patient’s view: Doing medical history from below,”
Theory and Society
14 (1985): 175–85.
8.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Genealogy of Morals: An Attack
[1887], trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City NY: Doubleday and Co., 1956), p. 160.
9.
Bruno Latour,
We Have Never Been Modern
, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
10.
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star,
Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000). See also Ian Hacking, “Making up people” [1986], in
Historical Ontology
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 99–114.
11.
Susan Leigh Star and Martha Lampland, “Reckoning with standards,” in
Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practice Shape Everyday Life
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 3–14, p. 14. See Brian Larkin, “The politics and poetics of infrastructure,”
Annual Review of Anthropology
42 (2013): 327–43; and Peter Redfield and Steven Robins, “An index of waste: humanitarian design, ‘dignified living’ and the politics of infrastructure in Cape Town,”
Anthropology Southern Africa
39, 2 (2016): 145–62.
12.
Michel Foucault, “The confession of the flesh” [1977], in
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 194–228.
13.
Giorgio Agamben,
“What is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays
, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 14.
14.
Foucault, “The confession of the flesh,” p. 195, original emphasis.
15.
On rubbish and waste generally, see Michael Thompson,
Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Gay Hawkins,
The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish
(Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke, eds.,
Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value
(Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Sarah Hodges, “Medical garbage and the making of neo-liberalism in India,”
Economic and Political Weekly
48, 48 (2013): 112–19; and Marco Armiero,
Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). On discard theory, see Kate O’Neill,
Waste
(Cambridge: Polity, 2019); Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky,
Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2022); Patrick O’Hare,
Rubbish Belongs to the Poor: Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons
(London: Pluto Press, 2022).
16.
Sarah A. Moore, “Garbage matters: Concepts in new geographies of waste,”
Progress in Human Geography
36, 6 (2012): 780–99; and Max Liboiron,
Pollution is Colonialism
(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
17.
According to Christian Enzensberger, “even written matter can also be conceived of as excretion” (
Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt
, trans. Sandra Morris [London: Calder and Boyars, 1972], p. 34).
1The Sewage Panopticon
“Waste is a religious thing,” muses Don DeLillo in Underworld. “We entomb contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread. It is necessary to respect what we discard.”1 In the novel, DeLillo has his principal character, Nick Shay, an Arizona garbage management executive, attend a conference in the Mojave Desert in 1978 on the future of waste. During a run through the desert between sessions, Big Sims, an African American delegate, reflects on his experiences of waste, telling Nick, “The thing about raw sewage … you treat it with loving care. You route it through bar screens way underground. And pump it up to settling tanks and aeration tanks. And you separate it and skim it and nurse it with bacteria.” All waste, Big Sims assures his colleague, defers to shit and its caregiving. This careful wasting process has broader implications. As Jesse Detwiler, a UCLA waste theorist, tells them at the meeting, civilization arose out of the perceived need to discard waste, to set it aside and reprocess it, always with a sense of awe and trepidation. Disposal of shit, the waste theorist asserts, “forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, and mathematics.”2
Detwiler might have added epidemiology to his list. The development of interest in the microbiology of feces paralleled the rollout of sewage systems in urban centers during the late nineteenth century. Sewers offered enticing new vistas for bacteriologists and epidemiologists studying patterns of infectious disease. In freshly sewered cities like London and Boston, a generation of microbe hunters flocked to the expanding repositories of wastewater, hoping to cultivate novel germs, to find species native to feces, and so make a name for themselves. These public health experts would spend a lot of time on their knees collecting sewage samples from local manholes, then analyze the bacterial composition of the waste back in their laboratories. Of all the materials that might reveal microbial secrets, feces appeared to be among the more hazardous, yet also the more compelling, possessing a special epistemic allure if not authority. Even so, most of these pioneering excrement sleuths eventually gave up in disappointment, sometimes ruing their initial enthusiasm as a passing folly. The promise of large-scale wastewater surveillance, the value of fecal intelligence, would not be fully realized until a century later. And then, later still, with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater epidemiology suddenly went viral.3
The exuberant discovery during the COVID-19 pandemic of the full informatic potential of human waste coincided with growing concerns about the reliability and safety of aging urban sewer systems. Since World War II, the expanding cities of Western Europe and North America had put greater stress on their decrepit infrastructures, leading to fears of sewage seepage and spillover. Abatement of water pollution became prominent on the agenda of emerging environmental movements. In the past few years, this sense of a sewage infrastructure crisis has heightened, in part because of the likely overload from storms or “large rain events” and flooding, consequences of human-induced global heating.4 “Fecal matter represents a clear and present danger to that most precious right of access to clean water, contaminating natural sources like streams and bubbling up into bathtubs and sinks due to faulty septic infrastructures,” a journalist told Guardian readers in 2022.5 Reports of possible cyber sabotage of American sewage systems also float around the internet.6 Even wealthy white sewered communities have started to worry about the prospects of contamination with human waste, the return of the expelled, the spillage of discards, the imminent deluge of sludge, the breakdown of barriers between hygienic bodies and their excremental products. Such anxieties about the permeability of boundaries that once seemed so robust – fears of what has been called the “fecal peril”7 – reinforce the need to comprehend and contain our supposedly dangerous wastes, and thus to engage in wastewater epidemiology. When you cannot safely eliminate shit, you can try to subjugate it by objectifying it – you make it calculable and abstract, neutralized in biostatistics.
It is tempting, however, to reduce this story to a homily about technical advances and improved medical utility. Perhaps biomedical scientists simply got better at revealing the microbial mysteries of ordure. They learned how to factor shit into the epidemiological calculus. There is no denying the appeal of ever more information about the prevalence of potentially pathogenic microorganisms in human populations, even if data are often redundant or belated and the health implications obscure. The medical rationale cannot be dismissed. What I find more interesting is how fascination with human excrement so often is out of proportion to its likely utility, surpassing any use value. Even when feces fail to disclose much of practical benefit, we seem driven to delve ever deeper, searching for the microbial secrets that must surely be concealed in them. This is no relaxed quest for knowledge, no naïve following of the science – something more heartfelt is at stake. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, philosopher William James warned against facile recourse to “medical materialism,” the supposition that scientific explanation and clinical functionality will always exhaust or substitute for symbolic import and spiritual meaning.8 In this chapter I want instead to explore the ways in which language, culture, and social practice have shaped our apprehensions of the epidemiological value of human waste, thus resisting any easy, or at least conventional, philosophical refusal or sociological denial. That is, I seek to understand some epidemiologists’ “obsessive preoccupation with the visceral and excrementitious subject,” as Aldous Huxley once called it.9
