Talking shit: discussing the centrality of excrement to the modern world

What links Karl Marx, William S. Burroughs, Dalit struggles in India and the Yetties' famous Muckspreader Song? Ed Emery writes on the centrality of excrement, both metaphorical and literal, to the modern world.

The French do it figuratively. During the recent general strikes against President Macron’s pensions policy, towns all over France were plastered with posters proclaiming “Nous Sommes dans la Merde” [We are in the shit]. The English do it literally. Underground stations in London are currently plastered with blue posters featuring a ghoulish looking turd (menacing with two eyes...) designed to foster shit-fear in the population. The menace is the “poonami”, and the posters advertise Pampers shit-proof nappies.

The last time shit consciousness was so much to the fore was under the Thatcher regime. The Left then was so thoroughly disempowered that the conversation at dinner tables turned insistently on the scandal of dog turds in the streets – the only thing, on our doorsteps, on which the Left could exercise power.

I must declare a personal interest in the matter. At Easter I picked up a dose of E-coli from eating raw oysters out of the River Teign in Devon. The body does a remarkable job of evacuating undesirable matter out of the back end. Three days that merited closer scientific, not to mention philosophical, study. However, the salient fact was that I had eaten stuff that had come out of somebody’s arsehole. As the former Oxbridge rower discovered as he was sculling around the upper reaches of that river, it’s easy enough to do; there were, he reported, human turds floating in the water. South West Water has a policy, during heavy rain, of dumping raw, untreated human sewage into the Teign.

During the recent general strikes against President Macron’s pensions policy, towns all over France were plastered with posters proclaiming “Nous Sommes dans la Merde” [We are in the shit]

As a result, the river’s shellfish beds have been declared (based on logged incidents) the most polluted shell fishery in the country, with South West Water named as the culprit. Ask Barry Sessions, the last remaining oysterman on the Teign, what he thinks of all this. The Environment Agency has just shut down his oyster farm (“winter precautionary measure”) and he is in danger of losing his livelihood. As he points out, the problem is not the oysters but the people who allow shit to be dumped in the river. 

Shit is Useful

Karl Marx also had a view on such matters. In later life he was interested in what John Bellamy Foster calls the “metabolic rift” – the realisation that soil fertility is not a natural given, but is determined by over-exploitation, particularly under capitalism.

Exhausted soils need replenishing. Marx was interested in the writings of the chemist and agronomist Justus von Liebig (known as the “father of fertiliser”). Perhaps all the shit that was pumped into London’s rivers could have been better used as natural fertiliser for the land. As Liebig said: “If it were practicable to collect, with the least loss, all the solid and fluid excrements of the inhabitants of the town, and return to each farmer the portion arising from produce originally supplied by him to the town, the productiveness of the land might be maintained almost unimpaired for ages to come.” In other words, shit in a bucket and return it to the farmer to fertilise the land.

Is the idea so outrageous? As is very thoroughly attested, Chinese farmers have been doing this for millennia. And for a while, when London’s market gardeners turned to humanure to feed their vegetable plots in the seventeenth century, the city’s citizenry would address each other jocularly: “A turd in your teeth, sir!” In the US, one lucky researcher has managed to persuade his university authorities to turn over a patch of campus to be fertilised entirely by human shit – which of course can be collected from the students.

In the US, one lucky researcher has managed to persuade his university authorities to turn over a patch of campus to be fertilised entirely by human shit – which of course can be collected from the students.

Not as outlandish as you might think: in South Korea, Professor Cho Jae-weon developed a toilet that could turn shit into heating energy. At the Ulsan Institute, students who used the BeeVi toilet were paid for their efforts, in digital currency – Feces Standard Money (FSM).

Security Concerns 

Sanjeeta Pokharel, an Indian research biologist, spends her time collecting elephant shit and found that urbanisation in India has reduced elephant habitats. Marked territorial conflicts between human and animals. Elephants go on crop-raiding forays. They may get angry and kill people. It is crucial to understand the stress factors. Studying the DNA in faeces to understand who are the rogue elephants Males in musth? Females in heat? Habitual offenders? And how can this be managed.

An interesting ethical problem confronted a colleague doing similar work in Kerala. When the police arrive demanding to see your research records to enable them to identify elephants that have killed people. What do you say? 

You might think that intense forensic examination of shit is not something that we do over here. You would be wrong. Mass testing during the Covid pandemic was expensive, and global lockdowns were a pain. But, testing sewage at local sewage farms made it possible to identify Covid hotspots and apply selective curfew lockdowns where necessary. In East London a presence of the polio virus was identified from sewage samples.

There are obvious civil liberties issues here. Logically the trail could be followed further up the sewer pipes. Identifying households of drug users perhaps.  And indeed this faeces monitoring is now established practice in the campus toilets of the University of California-San Diego. The long arms of the state reaching up through your toilet bowl. 

Public Toilets

When you sit down and start to map shitphobia in our society, all kinds of stories begin to emerge. The colleague who will only shit in her own toilet, or in the toilet of a very close friend. The other, whose bottom has not touched a toilet seat for the past 3-years. And the friend from our revolutionary commune in the 1970s, who took her 5-year-old for her first day at school. The child told the teacher she wanted to do a shit. The mother was called in after school and was told that this word was emphatically not to be used, and that the child had to say “poo” or “Number Two”

Once again in India, the lack of provision of public toilets means that the poor have to relieve themselves in the street. A recent spoof video shows a huge water tanker, with a mounted water cannon and masked operators, driving through the streets of the big city. As soon as they see someone pissing against a wall, they blast them with the cannon. The intention is humorous, but it poses a real question: if people piss in the streets, who is to blame, the poor, or the public authorities who make no provision?

The intention is humorous, but it poses a real question: if people piss in the streets, who is to blame, the poor, or the public authorities who make no provision?

It is not funny. It is a matter of serious social concern. The old, the poor and the homeless of our cities are driven into regimes of urine retention which is bad for the human body. And – as has been documented in Africa by UCL’s project OVERDUE: Tackling the sanitation taboo across urban Africa – sanitation and toilet taboos are deeply gendered. They affect women disproportionately to men. To take one tiny example: in 2020 at the Women’s Centre in the Dunkerque migrant “jungle” in Northern France, volunteers noticed that free disposable nappies were being requested even by women who did not have children. It turned out that they wanted the nappies for themselves to use, because they were too scared to go out to the toilet in the night for fear of attack or rape.

Postscript

During 2022-23, the French and the British had a shit war-of-words about persistent sewage discharges into the English Channel. French shellfisheries were rightly concerned by the threat of disease. Now, it may surprise you to learn that the River Teign is owned by the “Duchy of Cornwall”, in other words by the present king of England (and also middle England’s favourite brand in Waitrose, with its self-proclaimed environmental concerns). As his nibs helicopters down the Teign to view his royal estates, he might like to ponder the words of that master of shitology and most prolific of scatologists, William Burroughs:

"God save the Queen and a fascist regime ... a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire."

And meanwhile we swim on among the floating turds…

The full version of 'Talking shit' is published on Verso.  

On 21-22 October, SOAS is hosting Merde Alors! An interdisciplinary conference on excrement, past, present and future, the first ever international Shit Conference. Hosted by the Food Studies Centre, there will be 20 speakers coming from around the world with the intention of setting up an international network to discuss poop and pee in all their aspects.