Theses on Faeces ENCOUNTERS with the ABJECT

Theses on Faeces ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ABJECT

Journal of Extreme Anthropology ISSN: 2535-3241 1 Theses on Faeces: Encounters with the Abject Vol.1, No. 1, August 2017 Cover image: Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016. Cover design: Tereza Kuldova

Journal of Extreme Anthropology Vol.1, No. 1, August 2017, ISSN: 2535-3241 FRITT journal, University of Oslo

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2 EDITORIAL

Tereza Kuldova & Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty Editor-in-Chief & Art Director

Theses on Faeces: Encounters with the Abject emerged out of Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty’s art photography project and in particular the responses to it - typically those of enormous disgust, revulsion and hathos, a paradoxical attraction towards something one cannot stand. These reactions came as a surprise to us, especially given that art has had a long history of engaging with shit and other bodily ﬂuids, with the disgusting, and the abject. It appeared that irrespective of the established use of shit in the art world, none of its power to disgust, offend, and arouse passions has been lost. Even photography of shit, the very representation which does not smell, still contained its original power. Hence, we decided to explore this power of excrements and its limits. This special issue offers a series of different perspectives on excrement, from the possibilities and limitations of its very materiality, to its more metaphorical critical capacities. The philosopher and cultural theorist, Robert Pfaller, explores the ability of the excrement to function as a kind of universal equivalent for understanding; a kind of perfectly convertible currency or primordial gift. The social anthropologist, Jojada Verrips, argues that we cannot understand the remarkable blossoming of shit in the arts without placing it within the context of neoliberalism. Rina Arya revisits Kristeva’s theory of the abject in order to think through the distinction between abjection and disgust in relation to fear. Florian Werner explores the role of shit in popular culture, art, history and society at large, as well as the limits of its power to challenge established social structures. Slavoj Žižek contributes his famous piece on toilets and ideology, and Fred Luks takes another look at the proliferation of ‘bullshit’ in contemporary discourses on sustainability. And ﬁnally, Laura Korčulanin discusses her activist and academic work on western sanitation in a dialogue with Tereza Kuldova. We hope you enjoy these theses on faeces!

3 Image by Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016.

4 CONTENTS

Articles In Shit We Stand United Solidarity and Separation on the Lower Grounds Robert Pfaller (6-17)

Excremental Art Small Wonder in a World Full of Shit Jojada Verrips (19-46)

Abjection Interrogated Uncovering The Relation Between Abjection and Disgust Rina Arya (48-61)

Translation Dark Matter: The History of Shit Florian Werner (63-80)

Shortcuts Knee-Deep in Ideology Slavoj Žižek (82-83)

The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good Bullshit as Discourse, Accursed Share, and Lubricant Fred Luks (85-90)

Interview Give a Shit! An Interview with Laura Korčulanin by Tereza Kuldova (93-99)

Book Review Between Abjection and the Abject Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature , ’by Rina Arya, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. Jefferson Virgílio (101-105)

Shortcut/Republished Andouillette AAA!!! A digest of the doctrine of the anal – And an account of the relationship between art and shit Georg Gröller

5 Article In Shit We Stand United Solidarity and Separation on the Lower Grounds

Robert Pfaller University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz

Abstract In his Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud quotes a poem by Heinrich Heine: ‘Selten habt Ihr mich verstanden/selten auch verstand ich Euch./Nur wenn wir im Kot uns fanden,/so verstanden wir uns gleich’. (‘Rarely did you understand me, and rarely did I understand you; Only when we found ourselves in the muck did we understand each other at once.’). In my contribution, I want to examine this ability of the excrement to function as a kind of universal equivalent for understanding; a kind of perfectly convertible currency or primordial gift (according to Freud's account). What is it that makes this border-element between culture and nature so specifically useful when nothing else seems to help in human communication? This question shall be raised specifically with regard to the "scatological rituals" examined and analyzed by Stephen Greenblatt as well as with to the issue that D. A. F. de Sade makes of the excrement in his "120 days of Sodom", where it plays an astoundingly predominant role when it comes to finding unequivocal proofs of human autonomy.

Key words: solidarity, universalism, solidarity, sadism, masochism, ﬁlthy rituals

1. The Lowest of the Lowest: A Medium of Understanding? In one of his poems from his Buch der Lieder, German poet Heinrich Heine somewhat surprisingly points out the possible role of the abject as a medium of coming together. He writes:

Selten habt ihr mich verstanden, Selten auch verstand ich euch, Nur wenn wir im Kot uns fanden, So verstanden wir uns gleich (Heine 1946, 121).

Rarely did you understand me, and rarely did I understand you; Only when we found ourselves in the muck did we understand each other at once (transl. Hill 1993, 70).

Even if Heines German notion of Kot or else ‘muck’ does not necessarily and only designate shit, but all kinds of lowest respected matters (such as dirt, waste, sex, obscenity, vulgarity, stupidity, ebriety, kitsch, bullshit etc.), one can draw here a philosophical conclusion that certainly also concerns the excrement and related practices. Just as Thomas Hobbes remarked that mathematics unites people while politics splits them, one can say here: culture's lowest matters unite people, while higher matters cause misunderstandings and disagreements. In shit we stand united. But beware the moment we get out of it! More highly respected matters such as art or elegant fashion necessarily work as distinctive cultural capital; and maybe because of

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jea.4827 Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1: 6-17, ISSN: 2535-3241 6 that they always cause uncertainties and controversial judgments. The lower we go, into popular culture, and even lower, into what it despises, the more certain we may then be to ﬁnd unanimity. Contrary to the assumption that what unites people is an idea, we have to acknowledge here that the unifying force comes from something that appears to be a pure matter; something that, at least according to the young Socrates, does not participate in any idea; something for which there seems to be no idea whatsoever. In Plato's dialogue Parmenides, after Socrates having asserted that there are abstract ideas of the just, the beautiful, the good, and all such conceptions, Parmenides asks:

‘And is there an abstract idea of man, apart from us and all others such as we are, or of ﬁre or water?’ ‘I have often,’ he [Socrates] replied, ‘been very much troubled, Parmenides, to decide whether there are ideas of such things, or not.’ ‘And are you undecided about certain other things, which you might think rather ridiculous, such as hair, mud, dirt, or anything else particularly vile and worthless? Would you say that there is an idea of each of these distinct and different from the things with which we have to do, or not?’ ‘By no means,’ said Socrates. ‘No, I think these things are such as they appear to us, and it would be quite absurd to believe that there is an idea of them; and yet I am sometimes disturbed by the thought that perhaps what is true of one thing is true of all.’ (Plato 1953, Parmenides 130c-e)

This may remind us of the point recently made by Jean-Claude Milner and Slavoj Žižek about the distinction between human rights and civil rights (Milner 2017, Žižek 2017). Far below the ‘higher’ civil freedoms of opinion, reunion etc., there lurk the ‘lower’ human freedoms of access to water, hygiene, toilets, food and some personal space. ‘Higher’ and ‘lower’ people may divide precisely along this line of distinction; i.e. the recognition or the disavowal of the identity of both forms of rights. Bertolt Brecht nicely formulated this essential ‘materialism’ of human existence in his Einheitsfrontlied (United Front Song):

Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist, drum braucht er was zum Essen, bitte sehr! Es macht ihn ein Geschwätz nicht satt, das schafft kein Essen her.

And while a man is ﬂesh and blood He will ask, if you please, for bread and meat And windy words won’t be enough For words aren't good to eat.1

The same as for eating, goes of course also for sleeping, clothing, drinking, washing and shitting etc. It is, after all, not only death that lately makes all humans equals, but rather

1 https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/music/lyrics/de/die-einheitsfront.htm; http://marxist-theory-of- art.blogspot.co.at/2010/10/united-front-song-einheitsfrontlied.html ; accessed: 2017-06-01)

7 and long before, it is the common needs of human life – goods which, by that very reason, have themselves to be kept common, and not privatized.

Just as shit, also eating is a matter which, by the higher classes is regarded as low – as Brecht remarks:

Bei den Hochgestellten Gilt das Reden vom Essen als niedrig. Das kommt: sie haben Schon gegessen (Brecht 1984, 633).

Amongst the highly placed It is considered low to talk about food. The fact is: they have Already eaten.2

Moreover, Brecht emphasizes as a necessity for any emancipatory struggle the rememberance of the basic human needs for good life:

In Erwägung daß ihr uns dann eben Mit Gewehren und Kanonen droht Haben wir beschlossen, nunmehr schlechtes Leben Mehr zu fürchten als den Tod (Brecht 1984, 653).

Considering that, then, you Menace us with guns and cannons, We decided that henceforth we fear Bad life more than death.3

Precisely the materialist insistence on the necessities of good life is what enables the communards to even risk their lives. Adhesion to bodily needs is not, as Hegel in his Phenomenology had assumed, a hindrance for becoming a free master; but instead it is the starting point for a materialist struggle for good life in freedom (Pfaller 2011). The lowest matters are the common basis for acceding to the higher things. For, as Brecht puts it drastically,

Wenn die Niedrigen nicht An das Niedrige denken Kommen sie nicht hoch (Brecht 1984, 633).

2 https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/bertolt-brecht/from-a-german-war-primer/; (accessed: 2017-06-10)

3 http://321ignition.free.fr/pag/en/art/pag_002/brech_02.htm ; (accessed: 2017-06-10)

8 If the lowly do not Think about what's low They will never rise.4

2. Plurivocity in the Lowest: Demarcation Lines between the Coprophages If we now, following Brecht, keep in mind the lowest things and practices, such as eating, and if we look then for the lowest object for them, what may come to our mind may be eating shit. So is eating of shit, that occurs in many cultures and practices, an instance of what Heinrich Heine has given us as a hope for universal understanding? Can we come together and be sure that a meal of shit will unite us, the ‘little pigs of Epicurus’ (as Horaz described himself and his materialist comrades). Is there a univocity in the eating of shit? Unfortunately, from a psychoanalytical point of view, we cannot conﬁrm this. There seem to exist at least three practices that have been object to psychoanalytic study where the eating of shit occurs, but takes on entirely different meanings. These practices are: (1) masochism, (2) sadism and (3) scatologic rituals.

(1) Masochism

The eating of shit may for example occur in a masochist practice - when, say, the masochist, as a sign of his utmost humiliation and devotion to his lady, eats (or is forced to eat) her excrements. In an astoundingly charming and lovely way such – for many people repelling – practices have been depicted by the Japanese cartoon artist Namio Harukawa.

Even for experienced masochists this practice may still be a challenge, or an achievement that can only be reached after a long time of ‘training’. Yet, signiﬁcant here is still the fact that even in this extreme case, masochism appears to be a parody of traditional ‘normal’ heterosexual relationships with their culture of ‘courtoisie’, veneration and worship of the lady. Wise husbands for example sometimes explain the secret of their happy marital relationship by the fact that they have Image by Namio Harukawa learnt to say yes whenever tempted to say no. This may also be one of the

4 https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/bertolt-brecht/from-a-german-war-primer/ (accessed: 2017-06-10)

9 early lessons in a masochist training. To restrict one's own will, to even happily suffer for the pleasure of the lady, and to celebrate or ‘sublimate’ her quirks and whimsies so that they do not anymore appear as proofs of feminine folly but, on the contrary, as examples of mysterious superiority and divinity that merit unconditional obedience, are structural practices and features that can hardly be taken away from any heterosexuality without endangering the heterosexual

pattern as such.‑5 In this sense, the radical excremental practice seems at least not to radically separate the advanced masochist from the ordinary heteronormative worshipper. Anyway, in masochism, the eating of shit is the signiﬁcant mark of the slave.

(2) Sadism Yet the same practice can also take on the exactly opposed meaning. Instead of being what designates the utmost

An engraving from the Dutch 1797 edition of Justine, or slave, it can also become what The Misfortunes of Virtue by De Sade. designates the utmost master. This is the reason why this issue occupies such an important place in Marquis de Sade's novel 120 Days of Sodom. We have to keep in mind here Gilles Deleuze's perspicuous remark that sadism is not at all the complement, the other side of masochism (Deleuze 1991: 37ff.). Instead, masochism is always composed of two masochists, one subordinated, the other dominant; i. e. for example, one that eats shit, and one that lets the other eat shit. Sadism, on the other hand, is, as Deleuze has pointed out, not related to either side. This can be very clearly seen when it comes to the issue of shit. For it is in the ﬁrst place the sadist himself (herself) who eats shit - a fact that would appear most paradoxical and could hardly be explained starting from the assumption of a complementarity between sadism and masochism.

But shit is not only a kind of shibboleth for the speciﬁcity of sadism compared to masochism. It is also one of the key issues that characterize the libertine passion, and accordingly the sadist programme, as such. Roughly 60% of Sade's book's pages are

5 In a Lacanian perspective, all these practices seem to amount to the man's identiﬁcation with the objet petit a, or the feminine phallus. Not only masochists, but also a good part of heterosexual men are after the phantasmatic ﬁgure of the phallic women - a fact that allows us to understand Lacan's witty remark that true heterosexuality may be less widespread than it appears.

10 dedicated to the issue of shit. In order to explain this at least at first sight astonishing fact, one has to keep in mind that Sade's work, as Jacques Lacan has pointed out (Lacan 1989: 55), is not a panorama or an encyclopedia of sexual perversions, but in the first place a philosophical work on an issue that it shares with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant: autonomy. What Sade's heroes aim at is not in the first place the satisfaction of their manifold desires, but the shaping of these very desires. They want to achieve a point where their desires do not anymore stem from the object, but where the libertine subject himself is the very origin of this desire - as it were the causa sui of his desire. This is why Sade's heroes are so eager to emphasize

‘...that it is not the object of libertine intentions which ﬁre us, but the idea of evil, and that consequently it is thanks only to evil and only in the name of evil one stiffens, not thanks to the object…’ (Sade [1785] 2002, 139-140).

The Sadean libertines do not only strive for sexual arousal; instead, they seek an arousal that has its cause nowhere else but in their own, self-chosen philosophical principles. Therefore almost every object appears suspect to them; for there is no certainty that it is not some of the object's advantages which cause the desire; that - speaking in Kant's terms - there are not any ‘pathological’ inclinations mingled into this arousal.6 The ideal object for an autonomous arousal, or for an arousal of autonomy, would therefore be an object that in itself could prove ‘that it is not the object ... which ﬁre us’. And which object could provide such a proof better than an object most devoid of any advantages or Platonic perfections whatsoever – namely, shit? This is the reason why the excrement causes such excessive joy amongst the Sadean libertines:

‘Président, your prick is in the air again,’ said the Duc; ‘your fucking remarks always betray you.’ ‘My prick in the air? No,’ the Président said, ‘but I am on the verge of getting some shit from our dear little Sophie, and I have high hopes her delicious turd will precipitate something. Oh, upon my soul, more than I'd expected,’ said Curval, after he'd gobbled up the hash; ‘by the good God I'd like to fuck, I believe that my prick is taking on some consistency’ (Sade [1785] 2002, 306).

The logic of this excitement can probably most properly be described by a comparison not with Kant's practical philosophy, but with his aesthetics – along the lines of Kant's aesthetics of the sublime. The aesthetic pleasure that romantic souls are able to derive from such unlikely objects as stormy seas or terrifying mountains does deﬁnitely not stem from the perfection of these objects. ‘For what is sublime’, Kant emphasizes,

‘in the proper meaning of the term, cannot be contained in any sensible form but concerns only ideas of reason, which, though they cannot be exhibited adequately, are aroused and called to mind by this very

6 Cf. for example p. 128: "'Ah, by God!' said Curval, 'will you now say that youth and pretty looks are indispensable to an elicitation of fuck? Why, once again 'tis the ﬁlthy act that causes the greatest pleasure: and the ﬁlthier it be, the more voluptuously fuck is shed.'"

11 inadequacy, which can be exhibited in sensibility. Thus the vast ocean cannot be called sublime. The sight of it is horrible; and one must already have filled one's mind with all sorts of ideas if such an intuition is to attune it to a feeling that is itself sublime, inasmuch as the mind is induced to abandon sensibility and occupy itself with ideas containing a higher purposiveness’ (Kant [1790] 1987, § 23, 99).

The only ‘perfection’ of an object that appears sublime is, as it were, a perfection of second degree: it lies in the fact that the object itself makes it perfectly clear that it does not have any perfection. It perfectly and most adequately displays its own inadequacy (for a sublime experience). The sublime experience occurs precisely when the object's utter inadequacy to represent an idea of reason is reversed – in the Romantic observer's mind – into a representation of this very inadequacy.

The specific quality of objects such as the stormy sea or the dangerous cliff – or, as instructed by Sade's libertines we may add: shit – is that these objects appear most likely to prove that it is not them but the beholder's mind, filled with ideas, that caused the pleasure. If any object whatsoever can be contemplated in a favorable light by a creative mind, it is still only some objects which definitely prove that it was the mind, and not the object, from which this favorable light has been shed. Only horrible and disgusting objects can ‘objectively’ prove the subjective nature of the sublime experience.

Yet even such an ‘objective’ proof does not unite the subjects. Even if the libertines agree upon this aptitude of shit to induce a sublime experience of autonomy, this does not imply that shit would unite human beings, their aesthetic preferences or their understandings. Rather, the sublime attitude causes most astonishment amongst other people; normal, rational people observe with wide open eyes and with no understanding whatsoever how the libertines eat their excrements - just as ‘the good and otherwise sensible Savoyard peasant’ in Kant's account who ‘did not hesitate to call anyone a fool who fancies glaciered mountains’ (Kant [1790] 1987 § 29, 124). For the libertines, their sublime passion serves as a mark of distinction that separates them from the crowd; from all the people who happily indulge in heteronomous pleasures, dictated to them by their pleasant objects, and do not strive for autonomy. In this sense, it may be argued, the libertines are most autonomous with regard to the object of their sublime experiences. But they are not independent from the judgment of other subjects. They need these ‘good and otherwise sensible’ people in order to distinguish themselves - not only from them, but also from some ‘bad and not at all sensible’ people who might enjoy disgusting things just by pure lack of any taste whatsoever. The experience of the sublime, as can be well seen with regard to Susan Sontag's study of the kitschy Camp culture (Sontag 1964), always seems to require three different classes of observers: ﬁrst, an entirely naive and tasteless group of unconditional kitsch (and shit) lovers; secondly, a reasonable group of people who estimate the good and tasteful things but despise the tasteless ones (like Kant's good peasant); and thirdly, a most sophisticated elite group with a sublime taste that is able to ﬁnd the tasteless objects ‘so bad that they become good again’ - or to state, as Sontag puts it, ‘it's good because it's awful’ (Sontag 1964).

Both lower groups are required for the romantics and the libertines to accede to their sublime experiences. The principle at work is the idea ‘one could have believed’, or ‘it is as

12 if’ (1) [that] disgusting matters were nice, and (2) [that] they were just disgusting. Only as long as believers for these two opposed assumptions can be imagined, the sublime experience is possible. Without superiority to such other groups, the libertines and romantics are in danger to fall back, without any distinction, into the ﬁrst, uneducated, barbaric group. This danger can nicely be illustrated with the anecdote from Casanova's memoirs that Octave Mannoni has perspicuously commented upon (Mannoni 2003, 84-7): When Casanova tries to fool a few peasants with a kind of magic ceremony and when all of a sudden due to an upcoming storm the peasants leave the place, eventually Casanova himself is taken by unsurmountable anxiety. When the believer, the gull, or the fool, start lacking, the naive belief seems to fall back on the impostor, the knave; or, in other words, the knave himself falls back into the role of the naive fool. The pleasure with superstition, as well as the sublime experience require the bodily presence of some naive other that functions as a protection against the naive belief in the ‘as if...’. The Sadean experience of shit thus does not only function as a separator from that of the masochist, but it is inherently based on the separation from naive others. In shit only libertines (and maybe some deviant Kantian romantics) can stand united – but against all others.

(3) Scatologic Rituals Another instance of a comparably programmatic way of eating excrements, but with an entirely different philosophical or political aim, occurs within what Stephen Greenblatt has called ‘ﬁlthy rituals’ (Greenblatt 1982). The essay starts with the report of US cavalry Captain Bourke, Indian ﬁghter and amateur ethnographer, about a strange encounter in 1881 with a group of Zunis in New Mexico. The indians who had promised to show their esteemed guest a secret dance not only surprisingly appeared to mimick a (Mexican Catholic) Christian ceremony, but also started to drink several gallons of urine, not without regretting that the narrow space of their guest's house did not allow them for more, in particular eating the excrement of men and dogs – a practice that this group actually used to perform at other occasions (Greenblatt 1982: 1-2). The observer, Captain Bourke, may, as Greenblatt states,

‘indignantly deny the implicit suggestion that communion is the eating of excrement in both kinds, and may write, with relief and snobbery, that 'Hebrews and Christians will discover a common ground of congratulation in the fact that believers in their systems are now absolutely free from any suggestion of this ﬁlth taint,' but he does so in the preface to a work directly inspired by this disquieting experience, a 500-page study - the result of ten years' obsessive research – the Scatologic Rites of All Nations’ (Greenblatt 1982, 2).

While believing that it was the exclusion of shit that united allegedly ‘higher’ religions such as Hebrews and Christians, the poor Captain himself gave proof to the contrary: that it was shit (and its ritual consumption) that united all nations. His manifest disgust or ‘phobia’ may, Greenblatt argues, hide some desire or ‘philia’, ‘a kind of nostalgie de merde’ (Greenblatt 1982, 4). Greenblatt subsequently points out that scatologic behavior can be regarded as a recurrent situation in cultural history: whenever a social group feels to be deemed inferior by another group, it may start to deliberately humiliate itself in

13 Art and Revolution, 7th June 1968, University of Vienna. the face of the others by eating excrements or by displaying similarily shameful carnevalesque performances. The notorious art performance Kunst und Revolution (also known as Hörsaal 1 Aktion) by the Vienna actionists Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Peter Weibel and Oswald Wiener on June 7th, 1968 at Vienna University may testify to this. Mike Kelley's photograph Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood

(1990)‑7 may be seen as a late ironic echo, or even a nostalgic memory of that heroic period of Viennese avantgardism. As Greenblatt argues, this behavior has to be seen as a gesture loaded with ambivalence: on the one hand, it is a protest against the inferiority that the other, superior group appears to impose upon the acting group; but at the same time, it is an acknowlegment of this very inferiority:

‘The gesture of insult is at the same time an acknowledgment of defeat, for the satiric humor of the oppressed, no matter how telling it may be, always assumes the condition of oppression, perhaps even reinforces that condition, both by releasing aggression nonviolently through laughter and by conﬁrming in the minds of the conquerers the impotence of the conquered’ (Greenblatt 1982, 4-5).

Psychoanalytially, this recurrent behavior of inferior groups can be understood as a form of acting under counter-transference. The inferior group starts displaying precisely what it feels that the superior group sees in them. They start acting, as it were, in the others' imaginary ﬁlm. This can today often be observed in so-called reality-TV. When, for

7 http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/citi/images/standard/WebMedium/ WebImg_000292/223313_3479624.jpg (accessed: 2017-06-16)

14 example, an urban TV-team visits a provincial bar to report about the local customs, the provincial people immediately understand their interpellation as exemplary cases of barbarism and start displaying more barbaric manners than even they can possibly ever have. To the disdainful expectation of the others they react aggressively, by giving them what they ask for. And, usually, this satisﬁes the surprised gaze of their observers who are happy to ﬁnd such proofs of the ‘reality’ that they had been looking for.

Of course, this interpretation by the superior group completely overlooks the dimension of protest contained in this action. The transgression of social norms performed by the inferior group indicated – especially through the use of items pertaining to the superior group – that not the inferior, but the superior group was the transgressor; the shit-eater, as it were. This is the ‘black truth’ implicated in the ‘impossible’ behaviour and standpoint that the inferior group takes on in such a performance (Pfaller 2017a, 2017b): the transgression of the norm by the inferior group is to be seen as a desperate claim for the fulﬁlling of the norm by the superior group. To put this into Lacanian terminology, one can say: on the level of the enunciated content, the inferior group acknowledges its inferiority; yet on the level of enunciation, they protest and make a claim against the superior group's transgression. While what they do may appear low, the fact that they do it may reveal a subject position beyond this lowness – just as, to take a different example, an utterance like ‘you are safe here’ is, by what it says, assuring, but by the fact that it is uttered may actually appear disquieting.

Obviously, this form of communication can easily be misunderstood. Moreover, it can even lose its double meaning due to cultural change. The liberating force of blunt talk and ﬁlthy action, nicely described and analyzed by Thomas Mießgang (Mießgang 2013), can vanish once a culture starts to ‘liberalize’ itself and to abandon previous standards. To quote one of Mießgang's examples, for instance when the former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer as a young MP in the 1980s appeared in parliament with his sneakers on, this could still be read as a gesture of protest – and as a demonstration indicating that not he, Fischer, but his opponents were hurting a certain standard. A few years later though, this gesture lost most of its critical power due to the fact that customs in clothing became liberated. Fischer's performance then could be understood as the mere expression of a time when one did not have to care so much anymore about one's dressing manners; or even as an afﬁrmation of the neoliberal devaluation of democratic institutions.

Thus one can say that filthy rites seem on the one hand to unite their performers with their observers by the fact that, containing two contradictory messages at the same time, they allow for full affirmation without the restrictions that every non-contradictory message necessarily includes. The hilarious, joyful, ‘decathectic’, ‘cathartic’ quality of such actions may stem precisely from this fact. Whatever contains a meaningful, definite, unequivocal message, can only be confirmed by partial affect. Only the contradictory message of the ironic filthy rite provides the pleasure of full affirmation and complete decathexis of affect. In this sense, one can say that in the shit of the filthy ritual we can stand united.

On the other hand, it has become clear that this unity is of utterly deceptive nature. Not only it separates the understanding of the performers from that of their observers; it

15 separates it also from the understanding of other, more ‘liberal’ epochs; not to speak of the utterly different understandings that advanced masochists or libertines may have of the matter.

3. Moments of Filthy Clarity Yet there seem to be cases where our materialist assumption about the uniting power of the lowest matter still seems to apply. In Don Siegel's movie Escape From Alcatraz, the imprisoned hero, played by Clint Eastwood, meets another, life-long black prisoner. The atmosphere between them is initially one of mutual mistrust; yet, still they manage to exchange a few remarks which allow them to regard each other as pretty smart, and not just as a racial enemy. In a later scene, in the prison's court, the black prisoner sits on top of the stairs and Eastwood approaches him, stopping shortly in front of him. The black prisoner then asks Eastwood why he did not sit down beside him, and if it was because he is a coward, or because he is a nigger-hater. Eastwood answers calmly, it was because he is a nigger-hater – and at the same moment sits down beside him. This clever move is the only way out of the philosophical dilemma that the tricky question of the black prisoner has playfully presented to him – either to humiliate himself or to insult the other; or, even worse, by saying something nice, to appear as a pretender. For every nice word, or every assurance that one was not a ‘nigger-hater’, would have sounded in this context as mere hypocrisy. In this atmosphere of mistrust, the only way to show that one has sincere respect for the other is to insult him by what one says, yet show that one respects him and does not regard him as an idiot by the fact that one says it (and by acting accordingly). When the atmosphere is poisoned and loaded with mistrust, one cannot unite on the level of the enunciated content where even every true word would sound false – just like on a theater stage where even a true baroque chair looks like a cheap imitation. Only when we give each other shit by what we say, can we break this illusion and stand united on the level of the fact that we say it.

Brecht, Bertolt. 1984. Die Gedichte von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band. Fft./ M.: Suhrkamp. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, In: Masochism. New York: Zone books, pp. 9-142. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1982. ‘Filthy Rites’, Daedalus, 111 (3): 1-16. Heine, Heinrich. 1946. Buch der Lieder. Wien: Ullstein. Hill, Carl. 1993. The Soul of Wit: Joke Theory from Grimm to Freud. London, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. Kant, Immanuel. [1790] 1987. Critique of Judgment, transl. W. Pluhar. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett. Lacan, Jacques. 1989. ‘Kant with Sade’, October, 51: 55-75. Mannoni, Octave. 2003. ‘I Know well, But All the Same…’, In: Perversion and the Social Relation, ed. by M. A. Rothenberg and D. Foster, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 68-92. Mießgang, Thomas. 2013. Die Kultur der Unhöﬂichkeit. Berlin: Rogner & Bernhard. Milner, Jean-Claude. 2017. L'enjeu de la République : le rapport droits de l'homme / droits du citoyen, http://www.mezetulle.fr/lenjeu-de-republique-rapport-droits-homme- droits-citoyen/ (accessed: 2017-06-10)

16 Pfaller, Robert. 2011. Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt. Elemente materialistischer Philosophie. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Pfaller, Robert. 2017a. ‘White Lies, Black Truths: Elements of Adult Communication’, In: Jela Krecic (ed.): The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left; Ljubljana: Irwin; Vienna: Wiener Festwochen, pp. 49-66. Pfaller, Robert. 2017b (forthcoming). Erwachsenensprache: Über ihr Verschwinden aus Politik und Kultur. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Plato. 1953. ‘Parmenides’, In: Plato. With an English Translation, VI: Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, by H. N. Fowler, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, London: W. Heinemann, pp. 193-332. Sade, Donatien Alphonse Francois de (Marquis de Sade). [1785] 2002. The 120 Days of Sodom, transl. R. Seaver, A. Wainhouse, https://www.odaha.com/sites/ default/ﬁles/120_days_of_sodom.pdf (accessed: 2017-06-18). Sontag, Susan. 1964. Notes On ‘Camp’, http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/ Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html (accessed: 2017-06-11) Žižek, Slavoj. 2017. The Courage of Hopelessness, Public lecture at Wiener Festwochen, Arbeiterkammer Wien, May 20th, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=GbSLqgniSXw (accessed: 2017-06-10).

Robert Pfaller is professor of cultural theory at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria. Founding member of the Viennese psychoanalytic research group “stuzzicadenti”. In 2007 he was awarded “The Missing Link” price for connecting psychoanalysis with other scientiﬁc disciplines, by Psychoanalytisches Seminar Zurich and in 2015 the prestigious prize of the American Association of Psychoanalysis for his book The Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions without Owners (Verso, 2014). Among his other popular books are Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Wofür es sich zu Leben Lohnt (Fischer, 2008) and Zweite Welten und andere Lebenselixiere (Fischer, 2012). Contacting author: [email protected]

17 Image by Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016.

18 Article

Excremental Art Small Wonder in a World Full of Shit8

Jojada Verrips University of Amsterdam

Abstract The representation of defecating and urinating people by artists is a rather old phenomenon, for it pops up in the work of, for instance, Rembrandt. In the 20th century the same can be observed, however with a remarkable difference to past ages. Namely, that the number of artists (painters, performance artists and playwrights to mention only a few) working with shit (as well as with bodily ﬂuids) increased enormously. Especially since the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, it has become popular to use shit in paintings, performances and plays. This essay deals with the question whether the artworks of so-called shit artists working in the West are just a kind of wild manifestations of decadence and the abject, as so many people claim, or whether they are meant to bring across a particular message with regard to the society and culture in which they are produced. On the basis of the work of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and others, the hypothesis will be launched that one cannot understand this remarkable blossoming of shit in the arts without taking into consideration the fact that we live in an era of neo-capitalism, which implies a horriﬁc transformation of consumption goods bought with money (this eternal companion of shit) into all kinds of waste.

Key words: shit art, art, neo-capitalism, consumption and waste

Faeces (as well as farts) are fascinating things. As long as they are still inside a body, no one seems to bother very much about them. However, the moment they leave it, they generally enter the realm of dirt or disgusting matter one has to get rid of as soon as possible, so that they will not pollute us, others or the environment. By using flush toilets, we ban the shit we produce linea recta to the murky underworld of sewage systems, these intestines of our modern world. But not only do we abhor their substance and smell; they very often also keep attracting our attention. In other words, we have an ambivalent attitude towards excrement. Just like the numinous, it forms both a kind of mysterium tremendum which we want to keep at a distance, and a mysterium fascinans of the sorts which keeps us busy. Or perhaps it is better to compare it with the sacred that bears in it both the (idea of the) polluted and the holy. Excrement therefore represents the abject as Kristeva (1982), for instance, has argued in optima forma. Through the ages shit and how to deal or not to deal with it in a literal as well as figurative sense have occupied people’s minds and formed a bone of contention in one way or another. Especially when it cropped up in contexts, places and frames where it shouldn’t, this could generate hot debates and bitter conflicts (for a revealing history of shit, see Laporte 2000).

8 I want to sincerely thank the peer reviewers for critically reading this essay, Birgit Meyer for her constructive comments and Tereza Kuldova for her patience and efforts to get it published in this journal.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jea.4335 Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1: 19-46, ISSN: 2535-3241 19 Recently such conﬂicts have occurred rather regularly with regard to the work of certain (post)modern artists. A famous case in point is the work of Chris Oﬁli, a black British artist who uses elephant dung as an ingredient. When his painting The Holy Virgin Mary, i n w h i c h , a l o n g w i t h pornographic clippings, he used the chemically treated faeces of these animals, was shown in the Brooklyn Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1999 as part of the exhibition of British art, Sensation, Mayor Giuliani threatened to withdraw a seven million dollar subsidy if this obscene and blasphemous work was not removed. Although a host of groups and institutions in and outside the US supported him, he was not successful.

It was not the first time that the use of Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996. faeces in works of art or the (re)presentation of shit as art provoked campaigns by offended persons and outraged people and I expect that it will not be the last. If one goes back in time, there have been similar kinds of vehement protest against ‘arresting images’ and performances by artists using not only excrement, but also other bodily matter and fluids, such as blood, pubic hair, smegma, sperm, tears and urine, to name a few (Dubin 1999). But if one delves deeper into this matter, one is struck by the fact that the twentieth century, and especially the second half as well as the early 21st century, seems to show an intriguing increase in both the number of artists who make use of faeces in one way or another, and the number of scandals and campaigns triggered by them. This use of excrement by artists rapidly spread throughout the world, so that by now one can speak of a global phenomenon. However, its best-known representatives still live and work in Europe and the US, as becomes clear when one looks at the background of the artists taking part in the exhibition Scatalogue 30 Years of Crap in Contemporary Art, which was held in Ottawa in 2003 and, as was to be expected, ignited a scandal.9 One gets a strong impression that the goals and meanings of their (re)presentations and uses of excrement differ rather radically from the goals and meanings of earlier artists who painted and portrayed shitting (and urinating) people.

The big question, of course, is the direction in which we have to think about this blossoming of what by now is called ‘shit art.’ The main goal of this paper is to shed more light on this striking development in the world of the arts. The upsurge of scatological elements in artistic work is by no means restricted to speciﬁc genres, such as

9 See http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/this-art-is-crap/article1162532 (accessed May 4, 2017)

20 painting and performances. They crop up in a broad gamut of genres from literature (which has a longstanding scatological tradition) to plays (with Roi Ubu of Alfred Jarry as one the most notorious and famous examples) and operas, from caricature and comic strips to cartoons and ﬁlms.10 Though it would be interesting to take into consideration all these genres as well, I will concentrate here on the excremental facets of the work of painters, sculptors and performance artists since the second half of the 20th century and try to interpret their occurrence. But a few general issues have to be dealt with ﬁrst.

…The big question, of course, is the direction in which we have to think about this blossoming of what by now is called ‘shit art.’ anthropological ‘subject/object.’ But it is an important phenomenon that deserves more attention than it received so far.

Since Mary Douglas published her seminal work Purity and Danger (Douglas 1966), the study of what is considered to From the moment artists used shit, there have been not only curators and collectors buying and exhibiting their works, as well as gallery owners and museum directors offering them opportunities to show their performances, but also a broad range of scholars who studied their work and published books and articles on it. This contributed to a gradual acceptance of this remarkable art form in certain circles. In a sense, the Ottawa exhibition I mentioned before can be seen as a kind of landmark, for it seems to have been the first that showed only work by artists using crap. Before Scatalogue, this kind of work was merely included in exhibitions devoted to recent developments in modern art, such as Post Human (1992), Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art (1993) and the already mentioned Sensation (1999). Shit art (as well as its companion ‘piss art’), though still controversial, appears to be well on its way to become a fully accepted specialization. And this is exactly what the organizers of Scatalogue were after, for in their view excrement was already a common anthropological subject/object in historical museums. A recent example of an exhibition in which shit played an impressive (olfactory) role is Manifesta 11 in 2016 in Zürich.11 Though the number of museums, for instance in the Netherlands, organizing exhibitions in which faeces and manure figure prominently has been rising, I would not dare to say that this is a general trend and that excrement figures now as a common be dirt and to cause disgust received a firm impetus, but only recently have a small number of anthropologists and sociologists developed a focused interest in faeces. However, they deal almost exclusively with such issues as how people perceive and treat this kind of bodily waste (see, e.g., the special issues of Medische Antropologie 1999 and PostcoLoniaL Studies 2002). So far there have been no anthropologists or sociologists who have systematically studied the

10 For other interesting French scatological plays at the end of the 19th century, see Menon (1993). A famous Austrian playwright who wrote a series of faecal dramas is Werner Schwab (1958-1994). A funny scatological play is The Turd of Da Vinci by Roland Topor. Finally, I want to mention Romeo Castellucis play On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God, (dis)qualiﬁed by John O’Mahony (Guardian April 20, 2011) as ‘a wrenching piece about the metaphysics of excrement.’

11 Interesting in this connection is the fact that recently at several places in Europe shit museums were opened, for example, in 2015 in Cadelbosco near Piacenza (Italy) and in 2016 on the Isle of Wight (GB). On the internet one can visit such a museum too, see www.scheisse-museum.de (accessed May 4, 2017).

21 recent upsurge of shit art and how this phenomenon might be interpreted. The sociologist Dubin refers to it in his trailblazing work Arresting Images (Dubin 1992) only in passing, and, in a fascinating essay, the anthropologist Hadolt (1999) concentrates on a particular conﬂict concerning the excremental work of the Austrian artist Cornelius Kolig.12 In my view, it does not seem far-fetched to argue that this budding interest in excrement and faeces amongst anthropologists and other social scientists can be related to the interest of artists in the same matter and that, at least partly, it rests on similar grounds.

It goes without saying that art historians have followed the scatological development in the arts from the beginning. However, their publications tend to be rather specific, for they either contain short overviews of the work of particular artists or concentrate on the oeuvre of one. I only traced one special issue of a journal dealing with shit in the arts, and it was published more than two decades ago (Art Journal 1993), which I find rather remarkable.13 The number of publications that deal with the scatological development from a more general viewpoint , while placing it in a socio-cultural frame is scant. The tendency seems to be to emphasize the uniqueness of the work of individual artists, which appears to be fully in line with what they themselves want, and/or to philosophize about its meaning in abstract terms. For instance, the reviewer of Julius’ book on the transgressions or offences of art, in which the author classifies the work of shit artists as of the taboo-breaking sort, severely criticized him for lumping together ‘disparate artists who really bear very little historical or aesthetic relationship to one another’ (F.G. 2002, 164). A striking illustration of abstract philosophizing is the conversation published in October on the Informe and the Abject, in which Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois (all connoisseurs of the latest developments in modern art) and others took part (Round Table 1994). In what follows, I will try to venture onto a different path and to explicitly relate shit art to what goes on in the world in which it is produced, exhibited and eventually sold. But first I will present an overview of the most important artists who incorporated (or excorporated) excrement in their artistic work, as well as a more elaborate sketch of the work of some of them.

Artists and Shit: A Brief Empirical Parade Before 1850

In their announcement of Scatalogue, the organizers wrote: …shit has been a persistent metaphor and medium since the beginnings of Modernism, inspiring the imagination of many

12 In 1979, Kolig started building a personal Paradise in Vorderberg (Austria) in which faeces played a crucial role. The artist was very much inspired by Augustinus’ adagium: Inter faeces et urinam nascimur (between shit and piss we are born) expanded by him with morimurque (and we will die). At an exhibition of his faecal art in Klosterneuburg (Austria) in 2009 the public was warned that its moral feelings might be hurt by it (see www.proﬁl.at/gesellschaft/chaos-kot-katzen-besuch-kuenstler-cornelius-kolig-368706 Accessed May 4, 2017).

13 The pieces published in the journal were based on papers presented in a workshop on scatology and art at the Annual Conference of the College Art Association held in 1990 in New York. For the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference that took place in Cleveland ten years later, Jeff Persels organized a workshop on late medieval and early modern scatology (Persels and Ganim 2004).

22 James Ensor, Alimentation doctrinaire, 1889.

inﬂuential thinkers and artists. This subject has been an important, tenacious counter-voice to the institutionalization of art, beguiling artists such as Duchamp, the Viennese Actionists, Manzoni and Hammons.14

Though they are probably right that shit has been a great source of inspiration since the beginnings of Modernism, it cannot be denied that it was also long before. One only has to think of the work of the classical authors Aristophanes and Juvenal and later Rabelais and Swift (Esty, 1999), who excelled in excremental writing. Several famous pre-modern artists, such as Hans Baldung Grien, Breughel Sr., Paul Veronese and Rembrandt, have painted, drawn or etched defecating and urinating people. A scatological topic that ‘appeared with considerable frequency in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting and caricature’ was clyster syringes, used to administer enemas (Dixon 1993, 28). Here I do not want to delve into such questions as to why artists in the pre-modern era produced this kind of work, what it meant and how it could be related to the societal and cultural context in which it was made and consumed, for that would require another paper, although we could say that some of these works undoubtedly fascinated because of their pornographic character. I only want to make clear that using scatological themes in works of art has a very long history and was not invented in the second half of the nineteenth century when modern art entered the stage.

14 Almost two decades before Oﬁli caused a scandal by using elephant dung in his controversial painting of the Virgin Mary, David Hammons made sculptures with the same shitty material (Fusco 2001, 41).

23 Faeces and Art Between 1850 and 1950 In the 1880s, the Belgian artist James Ensor made several works explicitly showing defecation and faeces. Well-known is his Alimentation Doctrinaire (1889), representing a series of authorities, such as a king, a general and a bishop, who sit on a wall and shit on the masses below them, while the sun above is vomiting. According to Canning, this piece was Ensor’s ‘most political statement and his most direct use of scatological imagery’ (1993, 53). In the ﬁrst half of the 20th century, several artists made use of excrement in their work. The Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, for instance, incorporated faeces, urine and other kinds of waste material in his sculpture The Merzbau, which he created in his own house. According to the curator of the exhibit, this sculpture is ‘a kind of fecal smearing – a sick and sickening relapse into the social irresponsibility of the infant who plays with thrash and ﬁlth.’15‑ It is clear that we are confronted here with a (rather vulgar) Freudian characterization, not unusual with regard to pieces of art made in this period in which shit crops up. Two famous Surrealists, Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró, shocked their colleagues and audiences with the paintings The Lugubrious Game (1929) and Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement (1935) (Julius 2002, 110/11). Dalí’s canvas shows a man who evidently has shit in his pants and has soiled one of his legs, and Miró’s shows exactly what the title says. Dalí’s work was passionately discussed by the doyen of Surrealism, Breton, and his opponent, the ‘excremental philosopher’ Bataille (Bataille 1994, 24-31). Both tried to appropriate the piece of art for their own goals.

Joan Miró, Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement, 1935.

15 See www.poopreport.com/intellectual/Content/Scheisse/scheisse.html (accessed May 4, 2017).

24 Whereas Breton mentions only in passing the excremental motif in Le Jeu Lugubre, and hovers on the edge of interpretation in his wish to preserve the enigmatic quality of the painting, Bataille focuses on images of sexual perversions, and makes of ‘the ignoble stain’ a central element of his detailed psychoanalytical interpretation of the painting, read in terms of the Oedipal scenario of punishment, castration and ignominy, supporting his argument via explicit reference to Freud’s theory of dreams (Adamowicz 2003, 6).

Though Dalí tried to keep the middle road in this debate, there are strong indications that he tended towards Bataille’s position, for he later scorned what he called ‘toilet paper revolutionaries’ for their fear of Salvador Dalí, The Lugubrious Game, 1929. shit and the anus, these pre- eminently human phenomena that therefore needed transcendence (Adamowicz 2003, 9). Dalí’s fascination with faeces and the anus became manifest in several other works too, for instance, the painting of his sister with soiled buttocks (Hennig 2000, 180). Along with these artists, there have been a few others (Picasso, for instance) in the first half of the 20th century who also produced scatological pieces, but their number is, as I already remarked, relatively small in comparison with that of the second half.16 Moreover, their nature and meaning underwent a transformation. Whereas the products of at least the Surrealist painters mentioned here were rather classical in form and technique and clearly demonstrated (an intended) return of the repressed (on canvas) in the Freudian sense, the excremental paintings, sculptures and performances (as well as the films and videos made of them) that became popular from the sixties onwards deviated from this. From a source of inspiration to depict, represent and perform certain scatological scenes, Freud’s ideas about the popping up of the repressed (Fusco 2001, 41) became an intellectual tool to decode and interpret these artistic products. Though I find Freud’s view on the return of the repressed fascinating, I nevertheless consider it to

16 For some humorous remarks from famous modern artists about art and shit, see Silk (1993).

25 Odd Nerdrum, Shit Rock, 2001. be of limited value to better understand shit art, because it overlooks the signiﬁcance of the socio-cultural contexts in which it pops up or, to say it in other words - it perceives it too much as an individual idiosyncrasy.

Shit Art After World War II until Now Let me try to sketch the developments on the scatological front after the World War II. This is no easy task, for one is not only confronted with an impressive increase in the number of artists engaging in shit art, but also with a seemingly endless series of apparently unique works and performances that defy any simplifying categorization or classification. However, on closer inspection one soon discovers that there appears to be a kind of order in the chaos or that it is possible to discern a limited number of closely related, though different subgenres in this field. On the one hand, one can observe a continuity in the production of traditional works of art, for people kept on making paintings and sculptures. On the other hand, there has been a radical change, since several artists from the sixties onwards started to use their own and/or other people’s bodies in creating artistic events (as well as objects) and even to present these bodies as art works proper (Schneider, 1997, L’Art, 1999, Alfano Miglietti, 2003). The extremely volatile performance art came into existence. Even though volatile, this new art form was almost always preserved through pictures and (video) films. As Weibel has observed: ‘The human body was no longer represented in an anthropomorphic sculpture (or even abstracted like in a Moore sculpture), but utilized for sitting, walking, sleeping, eating, pissing, using objects in various ways’ (2002, 663), and for shitting, as I would like to add. In a sense, the representation was replaced with reality or by real activities and the

26 Richard Hamilton, The Citizen, 1981-3. image was de-framed, though photography often reframed it again (Weibel 2002, 664, 669).

Since the list of artists who produced paintings, sculptures (and photographs) representing shit or shitting people since the second half of the 20th century is too long to be given in full here, I will limit myself to just mentioning a few eye-catching examples. Odd Nerdrum made the painting Shit Rock (2001), which shows three squatting naked women (reminding one of the three Graces) who sit with their backs toward the viewer and shit in a kind of canal reﬂecting their voluptuous buttocks. The art historian Kuspit, who dealt with this work in an article on perversion in art, made the following, rather cryptic comment on it: ‘Odd Nerdrum shows them defecating in what looks like homage to the sun. But the long stool looks like a penis, suggesting that Nerdrum also worships the

27 phallic woman.’17 In the early eighties, the British artist Richard Hamilton painted The Citizen, representing one of the Northern Irish prisoners who participated in the so- called Dirty Protest against prison authorities and the British government for not treating them as political prisoners, which lasted from 1978 to 1981. It shows a Christ-like man wrapped only in a blanket, portrayed against the background of a wall smeared with faeces.18 Later on I will come back to this painting, for in my view there is an interesting family resemblance between the self-created faecal squalor it shows and particular scatological performances as they were staged by, for instance, the Wiener Aktionisten Günter Brus and Otto Mühl in Austria in the early sixties of the last century.19 In these performances, shit and blood played a dominant role. In the seventies, Mühl, certainly one of the most outspoken shit artists in the world, started a socio-sexual utopian commune, ﬁrst in Vienna and then in the countryside in Friedriechshof, in which collective property and free sex was the rule. In 1991, he was convicted to seven years in prison because he was found guilty of criminal offences against public morals and drug laws. During his imprisonment, Mühl made a whole series of paintings in which, along with sperm and blood, shit and shitting emphatically occurred; they included White Chocolate (1994), Homage to Beuys (1994), Sexual Molestation (1995)20, Eternal Spirit (1996) and Shit Picker (1997) (Noever 1998). After he was released, these and other paintings were exhibited in Vienna and, as was to be expected, caused a scandal of a familiar type. In an interview with Peter Noever, he gave the following answer when asked how he would describe his painting:

As actionist concept painting. My background is actionism. I describe myself as polymorphously perverse. As an actor of polymorphous perversities. I do this quite deliberately and employ it as an assault. My vocabulary is shit, urine, sperm, sexuality, sodomy. I use all of this deliberately and employ it as an assault, as a way to attack moral taboos. I am interested in doing away with everything that constricts sexuality (Noever 1998,19).

In the early 1980s, the famous British couple Gilbert & George produced such pieces as Shit (1982) and Shit Faith (1982), images of turds coming out of four buttocks facing each other and of a man receiving shit in his mouth. In the 1990s, their exhibition The Naked Shit Pictures showing their latest framed photo pictures, some of which were full of faeces, arranged in speciﬁc compositions and with such titles as Naked Shit, Shitty World and Spit

17 See www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit6-10-02.asp (accessed May 4, 2017). Already in 1981 Nerdrum painted a similar kind of work showing just one defecating woman. In the same year the controversial German artist Blalla W. Hallmann painted six people shitting on each other (Funken 1998, 350-51).

18 Stuart Brisley created a similar painting (Mairead Farrell, Dirty Protest) in 1995. This sort of painting reminds one of David Nebrada, who made self-portraits with the face covered with shit (Ardenne 2001, 242). For short biographies of these Austrian artists, see L’Art (1999, 448/49, 461).

19 This painting shows a remarkable family resemblance to the print Kärnten bläht auf (2001) by the Austrian artist Cornelius Kolig, who, like Mühl, produced many faecal artworks.

20 For a short biography of these British artists, see L’Art (1999, 452).

28 on Shit, toured through Europe. In an interview with the Dutch journalist Jhim Lamoree, Gilbert once said: ‘We show something to the public that it has learned to perceive as totally unacceptable. We make a history of two thousand years of civilization and morals look like shit, because it tried to inculcate into us that nakedness and faeces are bad’ (Parool November 3, 1997 – Translation JV). In another interview they remarked: ‘We are naked, full of shit – and that is what we want to show.’

In the beginning of the new century the number of artists making paintings, sculptures and photographs of or with shit signiﬁcantly increased. Two hilarious cases are the Shit Fountain (2004) by the American Jerzy S. Kenar and the Complex Pile (2007) by shit artist par excellence Paul McCarthy. Kenar put his faecal sculpture in front of his gallery in Chicago as a kind of protest against dog shit in the streets of this city, whereas Gilbert & George, Shit Faith, 1982. McCarthy constructed a huge inﬂatable dog turd evidently with a similar idea in the back of his mind: a protest against the pollution of the environment.21 In 2008, the photographer Andres Serrano, the man who in the late 1980s shocked the world with his picture Piss Christ, once again produced a provocative work, this time a series of photographs of all kinds of animal shit, including a self-portrait of his own poop that disgusted many people.22 More impressive and serious, however, I deem the artistic creations or sculptures made by Anish Kapoor and Mike Bouchet. The sculptural installation Between Shit and Architecture (2011) of Kapoor consists of twelve monumental concrete mounds formed by densely textured layers of poured concrete looking like shit that triggers a lot of questions with regard to contemporary architecture. According to the Croatian artist Stefan Haus Kapoor’s work stimulates the beholders to think about such crucial issues as ‘…whose shit are we living in? Who is the “producer”? The state?

21 See http://calumet412.com/post/131750063731/shit-fountain-2004-jerzy-s-kenar-chicago-based and http://www.observatoire-art-contemporain.com/revue_decryptage/tendance_a_suivre.php?id=20120822. (accessed May 4, 2017).

22 Including the art historian Donald Kuspit, for he wrote a devastating critique of the faecal art of McCarthy and Serrano. In his eyes ‘their shit symbolizes the comic tragedy that art has become and the tragic comedy that America has become.’ See www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit9-11-08.asp?print=1 (accessed May 4, 2017).

29 Is it…Capital?’23 Bouchet ’s sculptural creation The Zürich Load (2016) shows a certain family resemblance with Kapoor’s creation, for it also consists of a collection of blocs, only a bigger one. As a matter of fact, he transformed 80 tons of shit produced by the inhabitants of Zürich on one day by mixing this mass with concrete, chalk and pigments into almost 300 dried, but nevertheless smelly blocs and showed them, orderly arranged in a rectangle at the exhibition Manifesta 11 in 2016 in this city. Just Like Kapoor’s work Bouchet’s triggers serious questions with regard to our production of waste and what to do or not to do with it.24

Anish Kapoor, Between Shit and Architecture, 2011.

Along with people who produced imagery of shit and shitting and who put this imagery within classical frameworks, there were and still are also artists who started to use excrement as if it were a kind of paint. The most famous example is the already mentioned Chris Oﬁli, who began to work with elephant dung in his otherwise pretty paintings. In an interview he once said about this curious combination: The paintings themselves are very delicate abstractions, and I want to bring their beauty and decorativeness together with the ugliness of the shit and make them exist in a twilight zone – you know they’re there together, but you can’t ever really feel comfortable with it.

23 See http://stefanhauswords.blogspot.nl/2012/06/between-shit-and-architecture.html (accessed May 4, 2017).

24 See www.srf.ch/kultur/kunst/faekalkunst-an-der-manifesta-sorgt-fuer-dicke-luft (accessed May 4, 2017).

30 A remarkable subgenre of shit art is produced by artists who use their body – as one of them, Jacques Lizene, once aptly remarked – as a ‘tube de peinture’ (Ardenne 2001, 242). In a satirical message on the Internet, Wolfgang Lettl wrote on this new development: ‘“Eat and Shit Art” (…) implies that the artists eat the paint; the work of art is then the piece of paper with which they clean their buttocks. Retouches with a finger afterwards seldom take place’.25 A good example is Keith Boadwee whose ‘…videos, which are installed in the gallery along with the finished products of his painterly efforts, show the artist, completely “unveiled,” crouching indecorously over canvases spread along the floor and ejecting streams of paint out of his anus’ (Jones 1998, 100).26 There is a salient family resemblance here with the famous sculpture Tale (1992) by Kiki Smith representing ‘a naked woman on all fours, faeces trailing from her anus, as if she were in the midst of some evolutionary metamorphosis from animal to human. Helpless, vulnerable, exposed – the sculpture epitomizes abjection’ (Kauffman 1998, 42).27

Some decades before artists used their own body as a tube that they emptied on canvas to exhibit (and even sell) their art products later, the Wiener Aktionisten had already staged performances in which they defecated (and urinated) in public (places such as university buildings). However, their actions were only conserved (or framed if one wishes) in pictures, films or videos. Famous and notorious, for instance, is Günter Brus’ performance Der helle Wahnsinn (the absolute craziness) in Aachen (1968) (for pictures of Brus shitting, peeing and doing other shocking things with or to his body, see Weibel 1970). Along with Brus, the aforementioned Otto Mühl played a dominant role in this taboo breaking and strongly antifascist avant-garde movement that caused a lot of fuss in Austrian society and abroad because of its obscene, often outspoken scatological activities. Mühl organized, for example, so-called Materialaktionen, a kind of happenings ‘…with naked actors engaging in real rude acts of sexual violence and rape’ (Vogel 1997, 250). These happenings formed the basis for a few deeply provocative films such as Sodoma (1970), in which a gamut of sadomasochistic activities is shown and which is dedicated to shit-eaters; another provocative film by Mühl is Mama und Papa (1963-1969, see Vogel 1997, 250-55). Sodoma contains the so-called Scheisskerl-Episode (shit-man episode) in which coprophilia in all its variations is staged. Vogel warns not to quickly disqualify Mühl’s work as pure pornography, arguing that it intends to lay bare the dark side of the society in which he was born, a society that was involved in two world wars and participated in Nazi terror.

25 Original German text: ‘“Eat and Shit Art”…besteht darin, dass die Künstler die Farbe essen; das Kunstprodukt ist dann das Blatt, mit dem sie sich den Hintern abwischen. Nachträgliche Retuschen mit dem Finger werden nur ganz sparsam angebracht.’ See http://www.lettl.de/texte/eat.html (accessed May 4, 2017).

26 There is a striking parallel here with so-called piss artists, who urinate on canvasses or other materials. For instance, the pop artist Andy Warhol and the photographer Andres Serrano used urine in their work. There are many artists who have done this as well. See the text piss art: images of urination in 20th century art by Christopher Chapman (1998) on the Internet at http://ensemble.va.com.au/array/chap_00.html (accessed May 4, 2017).

27 In 1992, Smith had already made a wax sculpture Pee Body, representing a crouching female ﬁgure with long strings of glittering beads coming from between her legs. See also the still of the video production Heidi (1992) by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, which shows Heidi and her grandfather looking at someone shitting a sausage into a dirty pan (Monk et al. 2000, 62-63).

31 Later other artists used shit or material that looked like shit (such as chocolate) to smear on their own or others’ bodies or on material objects. Well-known are, for instance, the black-and-white pictures made by performance artist Mike Kelley of his colleague Bob Flanagan and his partner Sheree Rose, while she was ‘eerily humping a stuffed toy rabbit (appropriately, since she is dominant, she is on top), while Bob, a “bottom,” is smeared with excrement, wiping his bottom’ (Kauffman 1998, 22/23, L’Art, 1999, 26/27). This was a study for the diptych Manipulating Mass-Produced Idealized Objects/ Nostalgic Depiction of Innocence of Childhood (1990), which is just like other works by Kelley of an outspoken infantile, anal and scatological nature. However, if one takes into consideration the title, the soiling of stuffed animals with excrement seems to point to more than just a wish to stage/show an infantile interest in shit. In other words, a more multi-layered meaning of this intriguing study might be involved, a point to which I will return later.

…shit is used to convey particular messages about the thin and superﬁcial nature of our civilization or that of others and how lurking beneath the veneer is a deep, excremental darkness fond of making it to the surface.

Another performance artist who is interesting in this context is Karen Finley. ‘In the late 1980s, performance artist and NEA grant recipient Karen Finley took off her clothes and smeared herself with chocolate to symbolize the shit women put up with.’ The idea for this performance, entitled We Keep Our Victims Ready, Finley got from a 16-year-old girl who, according to the newspapers, was found alive in a Hefty bag covered with faeces. In an interview the feminist performer remarked: ‘I use chocolate because it’s a visual symbol that involves eating as well as basically being treated like shit (…) I could use real shit, but we know that happens already – just read the news…’28

The smearing of shit on bodies and things, as it crops up in the works, actions and happenings of such artists as Brus, Mühl, Kelley and Finley, strongly reminds one of the Dirty Protest as it was held in 1978 in the Armagh and Long Kesh prisons in Northern Ireland, on the one hand, and the dehumanizing practices of American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (2003/04), on the other. Whereas the prisoners in the ﬁrst case decided, for instance, to shit in the corners of their cells and smear their faeces on the walls, as is so vividly shown in Hamilton’s painting The Citizen, the Iraqi prisoners’ guards ordered them to take their excreta out of the toilet pots and smear them on their bodies. The family resemblance is striking and I think not without reason, for it seems that in all these cases shit is used to convey particular messages about the thin and

28 See http://old.cinema.ucla.edu/women/carter/carter4.html (accessed May 4, 2017). Finley’s work is highly visceral and scatological at times. In her performance The Constant State of Desire (1987), in which she used stuffed animals to smear egg muck on her naked body, she tells her audience ‘tales of sticking Cuisinarts and racquetballs and cordless phones up the asses of entrepreneurs…who then “lick the piss and shit off me on Avenue B” – “cause they like it”’ (Schneider 1997, 102). Schneider says this is how she shows how the consumption of commodities and identity or selfhood are related, how ‘objects as insignias of enviability do not ﬂoat in a dreamscape of insatiable desire but are dragged screaming into visceral and ﬁnite social bodies” (Schneider 1997, 102/03, see also Dubin 1994, 149ff.). This is clearly a fascinating critique of consumer capitalism (of a type also occurring in certain works by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy)

32 superﬁcial nature of our civilization or that of others and how lurking beneath the veneer is a deep, excremental darkness fond of making it to the surface.

Very interesting are the artists who processed faeces in one way or another to transform them into works of art, some of which found their way to prestigious exhibitions and important collections. A famous case is Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista.29 Gerald Silk’s brilliant article on this fantastic piece of art begins with the following apt description:

In May 1961, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni packed and sealed ninety cylindrical cans, each containing thirty grams of his own excrement. Atop each tin are the words PRODUCED BY, followed by the signature Piero Manzoni, and a stencilled number designating its place in the run. A label afﬁxed to the body of each consists of rows of the artist’s ﬁrst and last names strung together and repeated over and over. This

Piero Manzoni, Artist’s Shit, 1961.

PIEROMANZONIPIEROMANZONI functions as a background on which is printed the words: Artist’s Shit contents 30 grams net freshly preserved produced and tinned in may 1961

On every can, these words appear in four languages – English, Italian, French, and German. Merda d’artista, to be sold by weight based on the current price of gold, was ﬁrst exhibited in August of that year at the Galeria Pescetto in Albisola, Italy (Silk 1993, 65).30

A few years ago the Tate Gallery paid ₤22,300 for can 004 with Manzoni’s faeces. Ironically, The Daily Telegraph of 21 October 2003 wrote: ‘The price paid by the Tate for

29 For a short biography of this Italian artist, see L’Art (1999, 459).

30 An artist who also turned his own excrements into works of art, in this case so-called Tourtes, is Gérard Gasiorowski (Ardenne 2001, 241). The controversial American performance artist Ann Liv Young sells her (sealed) faeces via the Internet and Andres Serrano made photographs of his excrement.

33 its merda – ₤745 per gram – exceeds…the ₤550 that the contents of the tin would cost if they were made of 24-carat gold.’ The newspaper also mentioned that already 45 of the original 95 (more accurately: 90) cans had exploded and that this exactly was what Manzoni intended.31 Silk, however, emphasizes that they were designed to remain closed and therefore are ultimately conceptual (Silk 1993, 68). More relevant in this context is his argument that Manzoni’s tins remind one, on the one hand, of the association of gold and shit in mythology and alchemy first and Freudian psychoanalysis later and, on the other, of products of industrial manufacture or commodities. According to Silk, in creating Merda d’Artista, Manzoni must have had in mind the production of a piece of art that looked like a real commodity produced on a conveyor belt and clearly referred to the cycle of ingestion, digestion and excretion or – somewhat more abstractly – to consumption-waste cycles. Part of his inspiration for this came from the artists Yves Klein and Arman, who, just like Manzoni, though slightly earlier than he, were also involved in what Silk calls ‘the commodification of art.’ Arman organized in 1960 the exhibition Le Plein in a gallery in Paris, which he filled up with garbage or ‘what the artist called “accumulations,” which involved “the pseudo-biological cycle of production, consumption, and destruction”’ that anguished him because ‘one of its most conspicuous material results is the flooding of our world with junk and recycled odd objects’ (Silk 1993, 69).

Though Silk mentions all these interesting aspects of the art made by such avant-garde artists as Arman and Manzoni, he does not connect them in a detailed manner with the kind of world they lived in or – more speciﬁcally – with the neo-capitalist mode of production, distribution and consumption in which fertilizer and faeces, commodities and capital, goods and garbage are closely united. In the end, Manzoni more or less ﬁgures as an artist who enriched the world with a series of unique artistic products, and not so much with a very particular, though revealing kind of comment or critique on our neo-capitalist society and culture through these products. I would say that precisely the latter is more important than the former. But I am an anthropologist and no art historian.

An artist who clearly works in the same vein as Arman and Manzoni is the British performer Stuart Brisley. He is very interested in excrement, in particular, and all kinds of waste and garbage, which he sees as metaphorical shit, in general. At the end of the 20th century, so he suggests in one of his publications (Brisley 2003), his double R.Y. Sirb or the Curator of Ordure got the suggestion from the Collector of Ordure (another double of Brisley) to establish a Museum of Shit. To found it, he even paid a visit to the Hygiene Museum in Dresden in 2000. In his report on this visit, Sirb alias Brisley wrote that he ﬁrst introduced the subject The Collection of Ordure by dealing with the following topics: ‘The question of shit, its collection, and preservation. Art, shit, and money. The methodologies of collecting and preserving shit. The subject of the redemption of the

31 The rumour goes round that one of the cans ‘decided to self-destruct’ in the Randers Museum of Art in Denmark. In 1989, the artist Bernard Bazile made Boîte de merde ouverte de Manzoni (L’Art 1999, 414). The creation of variations of famous works of art is not unusual. Since Duchamp created a ready-made urinal signed ‘R. Mutt’ as a piece of art in 1917 there have been several artists who came up with similar types of urinals, for instance Sherry Levine with his bronze Fountain (1991).

34 Ian Haig, Excelsior 3000, 2001. subcategory shit in the Collection of Ordure and elevation into art.’32 The visit in Dresden ended with a telling performance – at least that is what the artist wants us to believe – in which Sirb alias Brisley climbed a pile of wood on a chair with a handful of shit in order to raise its status ‘at odds with the compulsion for it to be directed downwards to the ground and further below, consigned to the lower levels, and to be accorded the lowest condition of base production in human affairs.’ Brisley’s Museum of Shit is now called the UK Museum of Ordure (UKMO). Sirb is its curator, and he even took the initiative to set up the Ordure Organization that advises the UKMO and lends out its objects to exhibit. It is clear that Brisley, who has been interested in garbage and shit for many years, is working out a fascinating fantasy about a worrying reality: a world ﬁlled up with waste material. He uses a broad spectrum of means, from works of art to performances and texts; his foremost goal is to let the public realize that next to a pristine side of life there always exists a disgusting one. By elevating ordure to a work of art and exhibiting it in galleries and museums, he forces people to acknowledge that we are the ones who produce it and therefore should not avoid or taboo it, for that would mean a denial of the wholeness of the human experience.

Ordure is an ever-present shadow signifying to all that is deemed unworthy. Unwanted discarded debris induces choking urbanisations, smearing land and urban scapes alike. It thrives in

32 This quote and the next come from Talking Hygiene. Dresden December 2000 by R.Y. Sirb as found on the disappeared site http://dump.ordure.org./www.ordure.org/291/talking-hygiene.html. In a slightly revised form this text can be read in Brisley (2003, 44/45). However, in a new version on the Internet Talking Hygiene, Performance, Dresden the quoted lines do not occur.

35 the sway of the brutalising exploitation of natural materials and processes usually dealt with elsewhere, (where labour markets are cheap). The interface is filled with abrasions, natural disasters, and human sacrifices. The world is a rubbish dump. Aesthetics profits from such profligacy.33

Whereas Brisley, like Manzoni and so many others, still uses real faeces in his works and performances, the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye produces excrement in an artificial way with the help of an ingeniously constructed machine properly called Cloaca, which he exhibits in galleries and museums.34 The first time one could see the machine working in a museum was in Antwerp in the Fall of 2000, where it was fed twice a day as if it were a human being.35 The shit produced there was first conserved and then put in glass bottles that one could buy together with a menu of the food fed to Cloaca for $ 1,000 apiece. In the art magazine Flash Art of July-September 2002 (vol. XXXIV, nr 225), Delvoye had a three-page advertisement in which, in a Manzonian way36, he sought attention for ‘Cloaca Faeces’ in a manner not easy to distinguish from advertisements for ordinary consumption goods: ‘Each of these Cybershits are unique pieces of art. “Cloaca Shit” is now specially freeze-dried, sterilized, vacuum-packed, dated and signed

33 This quote comes from a text on another disappeared site, that is, http://www.ordure.org/main.html. Though I have tried to trace this text via Brisley’s CV on the Internet, I was not successful. See for an overview of Brisley’s work Newman (2015). A similar kind of message as in the quote is succinctly contained in the lines on the cover of Brisley’s book (2003): ‘Dirt is universal, a-historical even. Homogeneity at ground level, mediated by the universal glue of sputum and excreta. Differentiated at the surface by the droppings of local and global consumption, the deposits of fast food, broken furniture, news media debris, plastic bags, condoms, sanitary towels, cigarette butts, betting slips, syringes etc.’ Not only the use of the word ‘homogeneity’ but the whole content of Brisley’s lines recalls the work of Bataille, who stated that the excessive presence of energy on the surface of the globe destines man ‘to that glorious operation, to useless consumption’ (Bataille 1991, 23).

34 Delvoye became widely known for his work Mosaic, consisting of glazed tiles with images of his own faeces arranged geometrically and shown at the art exhibition Documenta IX in Kassel (Germany) in 1992 (Lange 2002). The artist Heinrich Anton Müller constructed remarkable machines ‘en faisant tenir certaines de leur pièces mécaniques au moyen d’excrément’ (Ardenne 2001, 242), whereas Cornelius Kolig designed machines for defecation (Hadolt 1999, 180).

35 The idea to construct such a machine already came up in the early nineties. Since 2000 Delvoye continued to build new shit producing machines. Next to the ﬁrst, Cloaca Original, there exist: Cloaca New & Improved, Cloaca Turbo, Cloaca Quattro, Cloaca Nr. 5, Personal Cloaca, Mini Cloaca, Super Cloaca, Cloaca Professional and Cloaca Travel Kit. They differ qua amount of shit they produce, their size and the number of meals they get per day (Marcadé 2012, 65, Duquenne 2012, 25).

36 Bexte has pointed out that Delvoye’s Cloaca differs from Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista, because the former’s machine shows what remains hidden in the latter’s tin cans (Bexte 2002, 12). With a gesture in the direction of Benjamin, Bexte also observes: ‘In the age of its technological reproducibility, Merda d’artista emancipates itself from the artista. And so Cloaca draws a line under decades of debate’ (Bexte 2002, 13). Whereas Delvoye made the digestive process visible by means of a machine, the artist Mona Hatoum used an endoscopic camera in her ﬁlm Corps Étranger (1996) to show what went on in her intestines (Marks 2000, 189).

36 by the artist.’ The price had increased, for the product now cost $ 1,500.37 What also makes the advertisement look like an ordinary ad is that the Cloaca logo seems to be a clever combination of the logo of Coca Cola and that of Ford (Sterckx 2002, 30).38 In the meantime Delvoye’s shit machine has become the topic of many a study by art historians (Lange 2002), and is widely referred to on the Internet. It clearly evokes many interpretations, ranging from being a device that cleverly puts our stance toward intimacy and privacy into question, to representing a beautifully constructed apparatus that forces us to reﬂect upon the rapidly increasing ability to create machines capable of duplicating human activities as well as the ongoing cyborgization of the human body.39 If one realizes that another of Delvoye’s artistic projects involves tattooing pigs as if they were a kind of human beings, then one cannot but conclude that he seems to be very interested in the erosion of the discontinuity between man and machine, on the one hand, and of that between man and animal, on the other. Apart from this, I think that one of the main attractions of Delvoye’s sophisticated shit machine consists in the fact that it strongly reminds us of the ways in which, in our highly industrialized society, the fabrication of mass products and their consumption hang together both with the pollution of our globe and the prosperity of at least a large part of the population living on it. It not only seems to concern a mechanical reproduction of ‘the most necessary and ordinary act in the world, because [the artist] knows that waste can be turned into gold,’ as Martin (2002, 10) has suggested, but also – and maybe even more – a piece of art that points to a fascinating cycle in which food and manure, gold and shit, or capital and waste belong together as the two sides of a coin.

Another artist who also builds machines that have to do with faeces is the Australian Ian Haig. He developed the Excelsior 3000, a kind of super-toilet equipped with a computer and other technological gadgets that enable one to download videos and sounds from the Internet while one is using it to empty his bowels. The toilet was shown in 2001 at the Experimenta Media Arts ‘Waste’ Exhibition in Australia. In an interview with Elisa Berg, Haig explained that his primary interest is not to shock with his work, but to bring an end to our removed and distanced experience of such natural phenomena as shitting, eating and farting. He wants to see toilets as extensions of and mere interfaces with the body or – more precisely – our digestive system and our bowels. Upon her question

37 This selling of shit not only reminds one of Manzoni, but also of the Indonesian artist Heri Dono, who ingeniously collected the farts of six farteurs in jars during an installation performance called Semar Kentut (Semar Farts) or PHARTY Semar in Auckland in 1999. The jars with the international sign for radiation on the lid, oval brand-type labels on the front and a list of ingredients of the food eaten by the farteurs on the back were later taken to a local ﬂea market to be sold. Some of them ended up as art objects in Archill Gallery in Grey Lynn, New Zealand (Behrend 1999).

38 The signature of Delvoye seems to be inspired by Walt Disney’s. Interesting in the ad is also a smiling man in a white T-shirt whose underbelly consists of nothing but entrails. Delvoye has also shown the inside of a human being elsewhere, for example in X-rays of people having sex that he incorporated in stained glass reminiscent of the stained glass windows in churches; but here holy ﬁgures are joined by couples engaged in fellatio and other sexual activities. In a sense he is making another, darker and tabooed side of life transparent with these remarkable pieces of art.

39 Delvoye is also very explicit where it concerns the use of Freudian interpretations of his Cloaca project. According to him it will not be helpful at all for a correct understanding of his work, but one is, of course, free to try to make sense of it from a psychoanalytical perspective. For him, however, it has everything to do with economics. Defecation is what Bataille called the ‘damned part’ of an economy organized around loss and waste (Marcadé 2012, 56, 61/62, 68).

37 whether he was interested in the ‘notion of technological obsolescence in the way computers quickly become a kind of waste product,’ he answered:

Absolutely, I think we’re not really going to be doing anything interesting with the technology of 2001 until we actually see it in a trash-and-treasure context… (…) …certainly that idea of obsolescence is an interesting one, the idea that what we’re doing with computers is constantly obsolete, it’s like there’s always something on the drawing board that’s going to be released that’s going to make anything we’re using today completely useless and nothing turns to waste faster than computers (emphasis mine).

Upon Berg’s salient observation that Excelsior 3000 could be seen as simply a metaphor for the by products of our consumer culture, for why else was it shown at an exhibition called ‘Waste,’ and that Haig belonged to a (growing) category of artists and writers worrying about the increasing amount of waste produced by this culture and capitalism, the media artist responded by stating that technology actually no longer stood for progress but instead for devolution and regression.40

But along with Haig, there have been more artists who presented toilets as art pieces, for example, Cody Choi, who created Cody’s Legend, Freud’s Shit Box (L’Art 1999, 25), and Mike Kelley, who exhibited his Address System (a toilet for children) and Primaling Cabinet (a transportable lavatory) at Documenta IX in Kassel 1992 (Hoet 1992, 322-23). At the same exhibition, the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov was also present with a toilet (Steevensz 1995:25). It was a small building that from the inside looked like a living room because of all the furniture it contained, for example, a set table with plates suggesting that people were drinking and eating there, too. In his comment upon this installation, Hoet says that The Toilet of Kabakov is ‘a Lebensraum’ and that everything in it ‘points to an outside, to our society’ but a society that remains ‘in front of the door’ (Hoet 1992, 348). The presence of three toilets together with Wim Delvoye’s scatological work Mosaic or his turd tiles in Kassel can be called remarkable; faeces and shitting were for the ﬁrst time emphatically present at an important art exhibition. Hoet apparently had a good nose for the growing popularity of excrement among artists. But I think that I have to disagree here with Documenta’s curator; Kabakov’s artwork not only refers to our consumer society, it also represents and reﬂects it in a symbolic or metaphorical way. In this sense one might compare it to Brisley’s Museum of Ordure.

In sum, one can discern the following development. There is an age-old tradition in painting, drawing, etching and sculpting of depicting shitting (and pissing) people that has not yet come to an end and probably will never end. In the 19th and 20th centuries, such artists as Ensor, Miró, Dalí, Mühl and Nerdrum worked in this tradition. However, after the Second World War a new trend set in, for then the radical and volatile genre of performance art appeared on the stage in which the body, its (gendered) nature and its

40 The source of the information on Ian Haig’s Excelsior 3000 and Elisa Berg’s interview was the site: http:// www.abc.net.au/arts/digital/stories/s443349.htm that does not exist any more. See instead http:// www.ianhaig.net/index.php?section=project&name=install&num=21 (accessed May 4, 2017).

38 functioning played a dominant and crucial role. Shit and toilets became important ingredients along with other bodily ﬂuids, such as blood, sperm and urine, in the happenings, installations and expositions of performance artists. Manzoni and the Wiener Aktionisten played a trailblazing role in this respect. After them, a whole series of artists got involved in what can be called the scatological movement of the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Some went on in a Manzonian direction (such as Brisley and Delvoye) by elevating faeces produced by themselves, others and even machines as artistic products per se that one could buy and eventually exhibit. Others processed the excrement of animals and humans in their artworks. I will now try to present some interpretations of this remarkable development in the art scene that caused so many scandals and negative reactions, especially in the Western world where it originated.

Making Sense of Shit Art Almost all the scholars paying attention to the scatological movement come from other disciplines than sociology and anthropology. Of course, this is a direct outcome of the division of labour within the academic world. However, as an anthropologist interested in the ‘wild (in the) West,’ in cultural and social phenomena occurring in the occidental world that lead us away from the ‘orderly’ and ‘neat’ towards what is considered to be ‘chaotic,’ ‘disgusting,’ ‘decadent,’ and ‘abject,’ I not only think that I can contribute to a better understanding of the often unsettling work of scatological artists, but also that we can learn from their approach to the world we live in (Verrips 2001b). I want to start with Julius’ idea that faecal art can be classiﬁed as transgressive art of the taboo- breaking type (Julius 2002, 107). The two other transgressive types he distinguishes are an art that breaks art’s own rules and a politically resistant art (Julius 2002, 102). Faecal artists intentionally ‘put under threat certain under-articulated or unspoken sentiments and beliefs to which audiences may be taken to adhere’ (Julius 2002, 111). I think that Julius is perfectly right in stating that artists producing scatological works often have the intention to shock or even de-shock their audiences by showing or using excrement where it is out of place. However, this certainly is not all there is to say about these works. Such an interpretation is limited in that it fails to appreciate that many shit artists also have the purpose to transgress existing stylistic rules in the art scene (this surely holds true for the performance artists) and/or to present a kind of political-aesthetic statement about the (glocal) society they live in. As long as people perceive human faeces as abject matter that one has to get rid of in private and to keep out of the public realm, there will be cases in which exactly the opposite will happen, because as Bataille rightfully observed: taboos are there to be broken. By surrendering themselves to (mimetically) trespassing taboos or just watching the products of this trespassing, people can come into contact with aspects or dimensions of themselves from which these taboos have alienated them. In this sense, taboo breaking (actively as actor or passively as spectator) can be understood as an expedition towards repressed aspects of the self, an expedition that might have a correcting effect on the self-image. Temporary surrender to or ‘possession’ by the ‘wild’ enables one to get to know the other (the other who is also oneself) within oneself (Kramer 1987). But interpreting shit art as merely a case of taboo breaking does not tell us much about possible alternative meanings of this particular genre as it developed in the last decades of the 20th century.

39 …The big question then is what kind of economic, social and cultural extremes that one should dare to face and/or refrain from could be implied in the scatological genre.

To trace these meanings, I want to brieﬂy put two anthropologists on the stage: Mary Douglas and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Since the body plays such a prominent role in shit art, I think that it is relevant in this context to refer to the following insight of Douglas: ‘The physical experience of the body, always modiﬁed by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society. There is a continual exchange of meanings between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other’ (Douglas 1982, 65). Douglas, as no one else before, made clear how the parallel between the physical and the social body plays a dominant role in the perception of what is considered pure and impure, good and bad, safe and dangerous, and – as I would like to add – civilized and uncivilized, as well as food/consumption- good/commodity and shit/waste/garbage. In other words, people, including artists, use the body and its functions to think about and convey messages about collections of bodies, i.e., categories, groups, communities and societies, and vice versa.

Lévi-Straus pointed out that the myths of so-called primitive peoples contain speculations about inherent and latent social and cultural possibilities. Extreme positions are ‘imagined in order to show that they are untenable’ (Lévi-Straus 1968, 85). I once launched the idea that this insight holds also true for horror films, which often excel in staging an almost unbridled violence towards the human body and in which blood is all over the place. In these films, so I argued, ‘the abject,’ that abhors and fascinates at the same time, is explicitly shown with the (implicit) purpose of stimulating audiences to refrain from it and stay on what is deemed to be the right economic, social and cultural track (Verrips 2001a). Though one should be careful with a comparison, I think that the family resemblance between myths and horror movies, on the one hand, and shit art (especially scatological performances), on the other, is great enough to also apply Lévi- Strauss’ observation to the kind of art I am dealing with here. The big question then is what kind of economic, social and cultural extremes that one should dare to face and/or refrain from could be implied in the scatological genre. I think that there are – along with the one already mentioned, i.e., the breaking of a taboo – at least two that should be kept in mind when trying to make sense of shit art. The first extreme seems to lie in the realm of civilization and the second in that of production and consumption. Let me concentrate now on the first extreme that in my view shit art touches upon, the one related to civilization.

As I have shown, there are a number of artists who use faeces in their work, especially in performances. Along with shitting (and urinating) in public places, they sometimes smear faeces (or substitutes such as chocolate) on their own bodies and/or on those of others participating in their happenings. Some of the Wiener Aktionists garnered fame as well as contempt with doing this. Several authors (see, for example, Vogel 1997, 250) have pointed out that the message conveyed by these scatological performances– as Frazer observed a long time ago – is that people should not forget ‘the permanent existence of…a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society’ and our moving

40 ‘on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by subterranean forces slumbering below’ (Frazer 1922, 236). What is at issue in the scatological performance art since the second half of the 20th century up till now is what Frazer not only deemed possible but also feared, namely that Westerners could get trapped in an alarming de-civilization process, as they were, for instance, during the Second World War and similar large-scale disasters. Smearing shit, this smelly bodily waste that each and every one of us carries inside and has learned to hide and even fear, on the skin symbolically shows the ever- present human ability to indulge in all kinds of humiliation of and uninhibited aggression, violence and cruelty toward fellow human beings (as well as other living creatures), in short to waste lives. The artists tell their audiences so to speak in a metaphorical way not to forget that we all have a dark, uncivilized side, that we all carry ‘shit’ in us and always are able to lose our civilized masks, to break rules and laws and in doing so to create havoc in a more or less serious manner. By painting (with) shit(ting bodies) and/or smearing what is inside their bodies on their outside, artists express a speciﬁc view of the very fragile nature of our capacity to always remain the civilized creatures we think we are. They hold up a mirror and invite their audiences to look into it and to eventually remember what they saw in it: ‘shit’ that one should try to stay away from. This turning things upside down, or better: inside out, reminds one of what also happens during carnival and rituals of rebellion, as described and analysed by the anthropologist Max Gluckman (1954), which in the last instance serve, both humorously and seriously, the continuity of what is valued: an orderly and civilized society in which no body is seen as waste and is therefore wasted.

…By painting (with) shit(ting bodies) and/or smearing what is inside their bodies on their outside, artists express a speciﬁc view of the very fragile nature of our capacity to always remain the civilized creatures we think we are.

Now I want to come back to the family resemblance I touched upon earlier between the artistic scatological performances and what happened in prisons in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s, on the one hand, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in the beginning of the 20 ﬁrst century, on the other. During the Dirty Protest the prisoners did the same thing as the artists, they soiled themselves with faeces, whereas in Iraq the prisoners were ordered by their guards to do this. In these two cases the issue of being civilized or not also played a role. The Irish prisoners conveyed this double message: look, we are now what you think we are: no more than pure shit, but if you think about it carefully, it is you guards and all the ones you represent that are in fact uncivilized barbarians because of the shitty way you treat us (Aretxaga 1995). In Iraq, the guards wanted the prisoners to look exactly like what they stood for in the guards’ eyes: ‘stinking matter one has to get rid of,’ ‘pieces of uncivilized shit.’ Against the background that the use of faeces as a means to express in words and deeds what one thinks about others whom one deems less civilized than oneself or not civilized at all is age old and widespread; the incorporation of excrement in artistic works took place rather late in time. And this had everything to do with ‘the introduction of the body into the art system’ after World War II (Weibel 2002, 669). That audiences were so often shocked by the appearance of shit in such an unexpected context as the art scene tells us more about their blindness for its frequent use as a metaphor for being corrupt and/or uncivilized in other contexts and discourses

41 than it does about the assumed decadent habitus or lack of decency of the artists who brought it as a work of art into galleries and museums. How powerful shit as a metaphor can be, comes to the fore when these artists are compared to nothing less than this bodily waste.41

Let me now turn to the other extreme that is touched upon in scatological artistic work that either consists of just shit, waste, and/or garbage, as in the case of Arman, Brisley and Kabakov, or of faeces in the shape of a commodity or industrially produced consumption good, as in the case of Delvoye and Manzoni. In the foregoing I already noted that, via their works, several scatological artists convey particular messages about consumer capitalism as it developed and blossomed in the second half of the 20th century and thereafter, and that one can see their art as a revealing comment on our neo-capitalist society and culture. If one takes into consideration what they themselves every now and then say about their works in interviews and texts, one can only conclude that they have great worries about the ways human beings are busy transforming the globe at high speed into one big rubbish dump as a consequence of our overheated system of production, distribution and consumption and that they wanted to express these concerns. Their work shows symbolically and metaphorically the extreme of neo- capitalistic greed and gluttony in all its negative facets. This also happens in other genres with a strong scatological character, for example in popular entertainments like the South Park cartoon show (Gardiner 2000, Larsen, 2001). These artists deal with the seemingly eternal cycle of transforming raw materials, as if they were inexhaustible, into ever more shining and highly desirable mass goods ﬁrst and, later, after they have been consumed, into shit, rubbish and waste that spoils the environment. They use faeces, the shitting body and by extension the toilet as metaphors for the reality of the enormous waste production in the world, especially the Western world. That is the extreme their work deals with in the hope that it will touch and shock us. Once again, the correctness of Mary Douglas’ insight that people think with the natural body about the social body and vice versa is splendidly conﬁrmed. An installation like Cloaca by Wim Delvoye confronts us with the anus of the consumer society or the anus mundi and the shit that comes out of it. The work of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk might provide (part of) the answer to the question why artists like him began to draw attention to this dark side of our existence on the globe in the last decades of the 20th century. In his famous Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (1983), Sloterdijk states that the way we have learned to relate to our own faeces, that is, as something to negate, has functioned until recently as the model for our relation to garbage and waste. Only after the rise of modern ecological thinking has garbage returned to our consciousness and with it the critique of man as ‘a hyper- productive, shit-accumulating, industrial animal.’ Those who do not want to admit that they produce waste and that, as a matter of fact, they have no choice to become

41 See Hadolt (1999) for a fascinating description and analysis of the late-1990s debate in Austria about the commission given to the Austrian artist Cornelius Kolig, who uses shit in his works and designed machines for defecation, to restore a fresco painted by his grandfather Anton Kolig in a hall of the Carinthian Provincial Parliament and that was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 as ‘Entartete Kunst.’ During the Kulturkrieg, as Hadolt calls the debate, Kolig was scorned by his opponents, who considered themselves civilized and ‘clean,’ for being one of these Austrian Fäkalkünstler (shit artists) who soiled his own nest. They even accused him of being a piece of shit himself. Thus, when attacking the artist for using shit in his work, his opponents frequently used ‘ribald faecal speech.’ In connection with this, see Kleeblatt (1993), who studied excremental caricature attacks on Emile Zola for producing excremental literature

42 something else, says Sloterdijk, take the risk of choking in their own shit. Thanks to the growing ecological consciousness, waste has become a ‘higher’ issue, a topic on the agenda. The brilliant philosopher then continues with a penetrating call to radically change our approach to shit and waste. We should start again to seriously think about the usability of the unusable, the productivity of the unproductive or – in more abstract terms – the positive sides of the negative. A cynical man is not disgusted by anything, but is just like a child that does not know yet how negative shit is deemed to be.42 It seems that at least Delvoye, who every now and then has referred to passages in Sloterdijk’s work on the pariah status of the anus, implemented the writer’s call by creating Cloaca. Other artists did not read the German philosopher, but made pieces of art in the same vein as the Belgian artist. Fascinating is how their work plays with the classic association of money with shit (Borneman 1973) and how they, for example Manzoni, symbolically elevate faeces to the same level as capital and vice versa as also happens in fairy tales and folklore.43 Originally, the equation was more positive because it was grounded in the fact that excrement was used as manure, but with the advent of industrial capitalism it became more negative because the signiﬁcance of faeces as fertilizer rapidly decreased and the problem of garbage and waste production correspondingly increased. I will resist the temptation to say more about this topic. Instead I wish to conclude with the following. If one is inclined to interpret shit art as nothing more than a decadent effort to shock audiences by breaking the taboo on bringing shit out of the toilet into public places like museums, then one overlooks at least two things: that this art directly relates to and comments upon a) the fact that, time and again (for example, during the Second World War), the degree of human civilization in the Western world turned out to be not as high as pretended and b) the fact that humans are busily transforming the globe into a waste dump, where consumption counts more than conservation and money more than all the shit and waste this consumption generates. In a certain way, this art thus represents a particular, but nevertheless very sensitizing (re)presentation and critical diagnosis of important phenomena in the Western world. Precisely for this reason, one could argue that, at least in several respects, the artists I have dealt with in this essay look much like anthropologists critically investigating their own culture and society.44

42 For a similar perspective, see Bataille’s essays The Use Value of D.A.F de Sade and The Psychological Structure of Fascism, written before World War II, in which he deals with the sacred character of things that are rejected by the homogeneous society (in which the elementary form of appropriation is oral consumption) as disgusting ‘waste,’ for example, the waste products of the human body, and about how precisely these things are highly valued in a heterogeneous world (in which excretion excels) (Bataille 1994, 91-105, 137-161). In this connection the fascinating ideas of Marcel Duchamp about a great transformer that could utilize wasted energies, such as the fall of urine and excrement, are to the point (see Girst 2014,178).

43 One such famous fairy tale is the one about the money-shitting donkey. In this connection, the very popular German term Dukatenscheisser, a man that shits money, is also interesting (Dundes 1987, 73, 95), not the least because he shows a fascinating family resemblance to people who nowadays want to become rich by transporting drugs in their bowels. Salient fact: the dealers in Amsterdam who sell the drugs later carry them in their mouths and spit in the hands of the addicts after the stuff is paid for!

44 Linda Kauffman came to a similar conclusion when she wrote with reference to Kiki Smith’s Tale: ‘I said earlier that many of the artists, ﬁlmmakers, and novelists in my study are like anthropologists, investigating an alien culture’ (Kauffman1998, 44).

43 Adamowicz, Elza. 2003. Exquisite excrement: the Bataille-Breton polemic. Aurifex 2. Alfano Miglietti, F. 2003. Extreme Bodies. The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art. Milano: Skira. Ardenne, Paul. 2001. L’Image corps. Figures de l’humain dans l’art du XXe siècle. Paris: Éditions du regard. Aretxaga, Begoña. 1995. ‘Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern Ireland Ethnic Violence.’ Ethos 23(2):123-48. Bataille, Georges. 1991. The Accursed Share. Vol. I. Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books. Bataille, Georges. 1994. Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Edited and with an Introduction by Allan Stoekl. Translated by Allan Stoekl et al. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 14. Sixth Printing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Behrend, Tim. 1999. ‘The Millennial Esc(h)atology of Heri Dono: “Semar Farts” First in Auckland, New Zealand.’ Indonesia and the Malay World 27(79):208-24. Bexte, Peter. 2002. ‘Angels with Shitty Wings.’ In Wim Delvoye Scatologue. edited by Regina Lange, 11-21. Gent: MERZ/Luc Derycke & Co. Borneman, Ernest. 1973. Psychoanalyse des Geldes. Eine kritische Untersuchung psychoanalytischer Geldtheorien. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Brisley, Stuart. 2003. Beyond Reason: Ordure. London: Book Works. Canning, Susan M. 1993. ‘The Ordure of Anarchy. Scatological Signs of Self and Society in the Art of James Ensor.’ Art Journal 52(3):47-53. Collective. 1999. L’Art au corps. Le corps exposé de Man Ray à nos jours. Marseille: Musées de Marseille-Réunion des musées nationaux. Dixon, Laurinda S. 1993. ‘Some Penetrating Insights. The Imagery of Enemas in Art.’ Art Journal 52(3):28-35. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. An analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary. 1968. Natural Symbols. Explorations in Cosmology. With a new introduction by the author. New York: Pantheon Books. Dubin, Steven C. 1999. Arresting Images. Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions. London and New York: Routledge. Dundes, Alan. 1987. Sie mich auch! Hinter-Gründige in der deutschen Psyche. Aus dem Amerikanischen von Aurel Ende. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Duquenne, Olivier. 2012. ‘In de huid van Wim Delvoye.’ In Wim Delvoye Introspective, 15-31. Brussel: Mercatorfonds. Esty, Joshua D. 1999. “Excremental Postcolonialism.” Contemporary Literature 40(1): 22-59. F. G . 2002. ‘Review of Transgressions: The Offences of Art, by Anthony Julius.’ Modern Painters 15(4):164-65. Frazer, James George. 1922. The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion. Part I The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings. Vol. 1. Third Edition. London: Macmillan and Co. Funken, Peter. 1998. Blalla W. Hallmann. Eine Retrospektive. Kunstforum 140:350-51. Fusco, Coco. 2001. The Bodies That Were Not Our Own: And Other Writings. London and New York: Routledge.

44 Gardiner, Judith Kegan. 2000. ‘South Park, Blue Men, Anality, and Market Masculinity.’ Men and Masculinities 2(3):251-72. Girst, Thomas. 2014. The Duchamp Dictionary. London: Thames & Hudson. Gluckman, Max. 1954. Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hadolt, Bernhard. 1999. ‘Shit and politics: The case of the Kolig-debate in Austria.’ Medische Antropologie 11(1):179-99. Hennig, Jean-Luc. 1998. Der Hintern. Geschichte eines markanten Körperteil. Aus dem Französchen von Sabine Lorenz und Felix Seewöster. München: Piper Verlag. Hoet, Jan. 1992. ‘’documenta als Motor’ Ein Rundgang durch die DOCUMENTA IX.’ Kunstforum 119:220-503. Jones, Amalia. (1998) Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Julius, Anthony. 2002. Transgressions. The Offenses of Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Kauffman, Linda S. 1998. Bad Girls and Sick Boys. Fantasies in contemporary art and culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kleeblatt, Norman L. 1993. ‘MERDE! The Caricatural Attack against Emile Zola.’ Art Journal 52(3):54-59. Kramer, Fritz. 1987. Der rote Fez. Über Besessenheit und Kunst in Afrika. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum. Kristeva, Julia. 1988. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lange, Regina, ed. 2002. Wim Delvoye Scatologue. Gent: MERZ/Luc Derycke & Co. Laporte, Dominique. 2000. History of Shit. Translated by Nadia Bernabid and Rudolpe el-Khoury. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Larsen, David. 2001. ‘South Park’s Solar Anus, or, Rabelais Returns. Cultures of Consumption and the Contemporary Aesthetic of Obscenity.’ Theory, Culture & Society 18(4):65-82. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1967. ‘The Story of Asdiwal.’ In The Structural Study of Myth and Tote m ism . , edited by Edmund Leach, 1-49. London: Tavistock. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Marcadé, Bernard. 2012. ‘Het argot van Wim Delvoye.’ In Wim Delvoye Introspective, 31-80. Brussel: Mercatorfonds. Martin, Jean-Hubert. 2002. ‘From the Body Lab.’ In Wim Delvoye Scatologue, edited by Regina Lange, 7-11. Gent: MERZ/Luc Derycke & Co. Menon, Elisabeth K. 1993. ‘Potty-Talk in Parisian Plays. Henry Somm’s La Berline de l’émigré and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi.’ Art Journal 52(3) :59-64. Monk, Philip, et al. 2000. Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy : Collaborative Works. Toronto: The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Newman, Michael. 2015. Stuart Brisley – Performing the Political Body and Eating Shit. Belfast: the MAC. Noever, Peter, ed. 1998. Otto Mühl 7. Ostﬁldern: Cantz Verlag. Persels, Jeff and Russell J. Ganim, ed. 2004. Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art. Studies in Scatology. Studies in European Cultural Transition, Volume Twenty One. Aldershot Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

45 Roundtable. 1994. ‘The Politics of the Signiﬁer II: A Conversation on the Informe and the Abject.’ October 67:3-23. Schneider, Rebecca. 1997. The Explicit Body in Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Silk, Gerald. 1993. ‘Myths and Meanings in Manzoni’s Merda d’artista.’ Art Journal 52(3):65-75. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1983. Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Stallabrass, Julian. 1999. High Art Lite. British Art in the 1990s. London: Verso. Steevensz, Bert. 1995 ‘De gespleten wereld van Ilya Kabakov.’ Metropolis M 5:24-30. Sterckx, Pierre. 2002. ‘Wim Delvoye.’ In Wim Delvoye Scatologue, edited by Regina Lange, 21-34. Gent: MERZ/Luc Derycke & Co. Verrips, Jojada. 2001a. ‘The State and the Empire of Evil.’ In Powers of Good and Evil. Social Transformation and Popular Belief, edited by Paul Clough and Jon P. Mitchell, 185-210. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books. Verrips, Jojada. 2001b: ‘The Golden Bough and Apocalypse Now: an-other fantasy.’ Postcolonial Studies 4(3):335-51. Vogel, Amos. 1997. Film als subversive Kunst. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Felix Bucher et al. St. Andrä-Wördern: Hannibal Verlag. Weibel, Peter. 1970 Wiener Bildkompendium Wiener Aktionismus und Film. Frankfurt/M.: Kohlkunstverlag. Weibel, Peter. 2002. ‘An End to the ‘End of Art’? On the Iconocasm of Modern Art.’ In Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 570-671. Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media.

Jojada Verrips (*1942) is a Dutch cultural anthropologist, who was from 1997-2007 professor at the University of Amsterdam. He has conducted research on a variety of diverse topics, from Dutch boatmen to ﬁshermen in Ghana, and has also been a careful anthropological commentator and critical thinker of the mysteries of the Western popular culture, and in particular of its more sinister aspects. Corresponding Author: [email protected]

46 Image by Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016.

47 Article

Abjection Interrogated Uncovering The Relation Between Abjection and Disgust

Rina Arya University of Wolverhampton

Abstract Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, as propounded in Powers of Horror, emphasises the centrality of the repulsion caused by bodily experience in human life, and explains behaviours in and attitudes to our environment. The phenomenology of abjection bears similarities to the phenomenology of disgust. Both involve physical feelings of repulsion caused by a source, and the concomitant need to reject the source in various ways. Abjection is conceptualized within a psychoanalytic framework where it refers to the repudiation of the maternal prior to the production of an autonomous subject, and the subsequent rejection of disgusting substances in later life. But apart from its role in such a psychoanalytic account, are there any other signiﬁcant differences that exist between abjection and disgust, or are we looking at a distinction without a difference?

Keywords: disgust, abjection, Julia Kristeva, repulsion, horror

Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection was propounded in Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, originally published in 1980. The translation, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, which appeared two years later, profoundly shaped the Anglophone reception of her work. Since then, a number of studies about the significance of abjection in cultural life emerged, from within the visual arts (Ben-Levi et al. 1993; Foster et al. 1994; 1996a, 1996b; Ross 2003), which include art criticism, exhibitions, and film (Chanter 2008; Thomas 2008) and from within sociology (Butler 1993; Tyler 2009, 2013), which conveys its wide application to different cultural fields. However, Kristeva’s theory has been criticized on a number of different grounds, especially with regards to the repudiation of the maternal, her claims to universalism and the reification of abjection. This article concerns itself with another aspect of her theory, which has not been probed, namely the relationship between the characteristics of abjection and that of disgust. One of main lines of enquiry here is whether abjection is fundamentally the same phenomenon as disgust or whether there are differences in their phenomenology. Their conceptual frameworks, histories and contexts differ; Kristeva’s theory of abjection is located within a psychoanalytic framework, whereas disgust is evaluated by its aversive effects, firstly in relation to food, and then in broader remits.

Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection In Powers of Horror, Kristeva gives an account of the psychic origins of revulsion where abjection is a process that negotiates the limits in the formation of the subject through the rejection of unwanted things. Abjection preﬁgures the mirror-stage in the psychic development of an infant and occurs in the pre-Oedipal relationship between the infant and the (ﬁgure of the) mother, where the former experiences the latter’s body as abject.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jea.4337 Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1: 48-61, ISSN: 2535-3241 48 Image © Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016.

Kristeva reworks Lacan and positions the maternal in the process of the development of subjectivity. Abjection comprises the period when the child begins to separate from the ﬁgure of the Mother. Prior to the child’s misrecognition of itself in the mirror, it must ﬁrst become estranged from this Mother. Kristeva writes: ‘Even before being like, “I” am

49 not but do separate, reject, ab-ject’ (Kristeva 1982, 13). Abjection therefore occurs before the subject’s positioning in language, anterior to the emergence of the ‘I’: ‘[t]he abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine … The abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to I. (Kristeva 1982, 1). Winfried Menninghaus asks ‘[w]hat sort of strange non-object and non-subject is this – one that precedes the distinction between conscious and unconscious, and always already must be “cast out” in order that some ‘speaking subject’ can speak of itself as “I”? (Menninghaus 2003, 369).

Abjection is a provisional, transitory sense of differentiation from the maternal: a fragile, unbecoming and unknowing sense of self. The process of feeding is simultaneously a process of moving towards the breast and suckling, and rejecting and withdrawing when satiated. This movement of identiﬁcation and separation symbolizes a switch between being one with the mother and then asserting difference, and marks the process by which the borders between the infant and mother are established. The feelings of revulsion and horror, and the action of expelling the mother, shatter the narcissism and result in feelings of insurmountable horror. The ‘child must abject the maternal body so that the child itself does not become abject by identifying with the maternal body’ and its pollutants (Oliver 2003, 47). The process enables the child to create an autonomous identity through the various rituals involving cleanliness such as toilet training and this enables the production of a clean and proper body (the corps propre).

The experience of abjection both endangers and protects the individual: endangers in that it threatens the boundaries of the self and also reminds us of our animal origins, and protects us because we are able to expel the abject through various means.

While abjection originates as a psychic process it affects all aspects of social and cultural life; it ‘is not a stage “passed through” but a perpetual process that plays a central role within the project of subjectivity’ (Tyler 2009, 80). Since the abject is ‘what disturbs identity, system, order’ (Kristeva 1982, 4) of the corps propre, because it ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’ (Kristeva 1982, 4), taboos are in place to safeguard societies and communities. ‘[A]bjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it – on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger’ (Kristeva 1982, 9). Experiences of abjection can be traced back to this elemental scene of maternal abjection – this founding moment of being – where ‘[t]he abject is the violence of mourning for an “object” that has always already been lost’ and is thus the object of primal repression (Kristeva 1982, 15).

Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 193) describes three broad categories of abjection in Powers of Horror, which bring about revulsion. Firstly, we have abjection towards food; secondly, towards bodily waste; and, ﬁnally, towards sexual difference. In their proximity to the oriﬁce, objects in these categories draw attention to the body’s inherent vulnerability of being turned inside out. The physical symptoms of nausea when confronted with an

50 Image © Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016. abject thing is dramatized in Kristeva’s gut-wrenching encounter with ﬁlmy milk, which is one of the opening examples used in Powers of Horror:

When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk – harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring – I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. ‘I’ want none of that element, sign of their desire; ‘I’ do not want to listen, ‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. But since the food is not an ‘other’ for ‘me,’ who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself (Kristeva 1982, 2-3).

The disgust experienced because of this film, which is neither solid nor liquid, inner nor outer, consists in not only physical sensations but also psychological turbulence. Realising that it is not sufficient to ward off the substance because she has already been contaminated, she has to work through purification rituals of spitting before she is able to recover a sense of self. There are numerous other examples of phenomena that bring about abjection in Kristeva’s account but they all follow this pattern of threatening the boundaries of the self, which have to be remade. The experience of abjection both

51 endangers and protects the individual: endangers in that it threatens the boundaries of the self and also reminds us of our animal origins, and protects us because we are able to expel the abject through various means. It is manifested in its two modalities: the action of expulsion (to abject) and the condition of being abject.

Theorising Disgust In the above account of abjection, it is clear that disgust is an integral feature of Kristeva’s theory, where it refers to the sense of aversion experienced when confronted with the abject. Disgust is a powerful instinctual emotion that is central to human life and is associated with aversive feelings leading to recoil and rejection. In 1927, Aurel Kolnai wrote the ﬁrst full-length treatment of the phenomenology of disgust in ‘Disgust’ (Der Ekel). Another noteworthy study was Andras Angyal’s article on ‘Disgust and Related Aversion’, which was published in 1941. More recently, Paul Rozin’s studies on disgust, some of which are carried out collaboratively, are leading in the ﬁeld and identify how the ‘elicitors of disgust come from [different] domains’, which in the case of North Americans are as follows: ‘food, body products, animals, sexual behaviours, contact with death or corpses, violations of the exterior envelope of the body (including gore and deformity), poor hygiene, interpersonal contamination (contact with unsavoury human beings), and certain moral offenses’ (see Rozin et al. 2008, 757).

Earlier expressions of disgust focus on the rejection response to certain foods. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) Darwin discusses disgust (which is deﬁned in opposition to pleasure) primarily as a gustatory response of revulsion that we have to certain foods, which is what has come to be regarded as ‘core disgust’ (Rozin et al. 2008, 757). Disgust, which Darwin takes to be a universal expression (and affect), has evolved for regulatory purposes to ensure well-being; the disgust we have for unpalatable food acts as a protective mechanism which ensures ‘the safety of the organism by inhibiting contact with what is foul, toxic, and thereby dangerous’ (Korsmeyer and Smith 2004, 1). Sometimes the food itself is not ‘bad’ in the sense of harmful but it may be perceived to be so by virtue of its proximity to a carrier of contamination. Consider the following example by Darwin, which Miller takes from The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals:

In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his ﬁnger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty (Miller 1997, 1).

Sara Ahmed uses this example to show ‘that being disgusted is not simply about “gut feelings”’ in the sense of a visceral reaction to food that has gone off, for instance, but is instead ‘mediated by ideas that are already implicated in the very impressions we make of others and the way those impressions surface as bodies’ (Ahmed 2004, 83). The admission that the native’s hands did not appear dirty reveals that the fear of contamination is not about actual dirt but about the perception of being contaminated by someone who is associated with dirt, something that is in this case cast in imperialist terms. This contamination by association is identiﬁed as the contamination response or as psychological contamination (Rozin et al. 2008, 760; Rozin et al. 2009, 266). This also

52 Image © Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016. conveys that disgust does not necessitate the actual ingestion of the disgusting substance as contact alone is enough to cause disgust. Miller takes this further to say that ‘[t]he mere sensation of it also involves an admission that we did not escape contamination’ (Miller 1997, 204).

…sliminess is repugnant because it distorts the relationship between the observer and the object.

Since Darwin’s studies, disgust is regarded as a universal expression and there are common elicitors that cause disgust, especially those connected to the body. But beyond this we cannot generalize cross-culturally or trans-temporally about objects of disgust, although these often centre on the bodily. In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution (1966) Mary Douglas discusses the cultural reasons for judging certain objects or people to be dirty (which she discusses in terms of pollution; she does not use the term ‘disgust’); her findings have been instrumental in research on disgust. She emphasizes the view held by many, including Kristeva, which is that disgust is not caused by a ‘lack of cleanliness’ (Kristeva 1982, 4). Douglas discusses the instrumental role that categories play, including hierarchies, in society which work to enforce boundaries between entities. Boundary crossings bring about pollution, which Douglas discusses at length in relation to specific cases such as the Jewish food laws in Leviticus. Here the in-between anomalous nature of animals that are not ‘proper to [their] class’ (Douglas 2002, 69, xiv) renders them abominable and unfit for consumption. Douglas draws on Jean-Paul Sartre’s

53 ontological account of slime in Being and Nothingness (1943), and its threat to being. He ﬁnds sliminess (or the cognate phenomenon of stickiness) repugnant because it distorts the relationship between the observer and the object. ‘An infant, plunging its hands into a jar of honey, is instantly involved in contemplating the formal properties of solids and liquids and the essential relation between the subjective experiencing self and the experienced world’ (Sartre, quoted in Douglas 2002, 47). In its viscosity slime confuses because it does not behave either like a liquid or a solid but is halfway between these states. The ontological state of being in-between categories, which creates the anomaly, as Douglas puts it, gives rise to a sense of disgust, as it problematizes the boundary. Many examples of disgusting objects fall in between such category states, whether solid/ liquid, living/dead, male/female.

In spite of Douglas’s influence on cultural and anthropological attitudes to dirt, however, there are various criticisms of her structuralist analysis that need to be taken into consideration, including William I. Miller’s concern about the problem of fit (see Miller 1997, 45). One way of refining the definition of dirt as matter-out-of-place argument, which incidentally predates Douglas with Kolnai’s study of 1927, is to consider the significance of the organic when thinking about the issue of matter being out of place. The smear of soup on a man’s beard, to use an example by Darwin, is more disgusting than if the smear was on his collar or tie. And, to give another example, marks made on the door of a public lavatory in ink are far less disturbing than stains of excrement. In these cases, it is the presence of the organic and its location, as identified by Aurel Kolnai, that contributes to the disgust. It needs to be emphasized that Kolnai is concerned here with core disgust, and not moral disgust, which involves a different set of factors, such as agency.

We experience revulsion at bodily ﬂuids because they are reminders of the borders of the body thereby invoking the insides of bodies, and at the loss of control that the body can be subject to.

The presence of the organic in matter-out-of-place increases the contamination potential. In asking ‘What exactly is dirt?’, Kolnai regards the definition of ‘dirt’ as something that is located in an improper place as inaccurate and unpersuasive. ‘For should I find precious stones scattered in a peat bog, I would not say that the peat [was] “filthy with diamonds”, but much rather that I had found diamonds in a heap of dirt’ (Kolnai 2004, 55). Equally, it is too simplistic to adduce that dirt signals danger or is disease-laden because ‘[we] would not, after all, shrink away from a hand that has been dipped into, say, cholera germs as from one which were merely dirty’ (55). Kolnai proposes that dirt has an integral relationship with the organic; ‘[d]irt is, to an extent, simply the presence, the nonobliteration, of traces of life’. It is present in the ‘[h]ands [that] become dirty through manual activity, underclothes through being worn. And there is often sweat that plays an agglutinating role in the formation of dirt.’ Elsewhere he states that ‘[t]here exists here a substantial connection with feces . . . and also with grease and sweat’ (Kolnai 2004, 55–56). Dirt reveals ‘an unmistakable intentional relation to life, and to life’s ebbs and flows’ (Kolnai 2004, 56). This revision and qualification of what constitutes dirt is important when thinking about what we find abject or disgusting. The presence of the organic increases the disgust quotient.

54 What studies about disgust and abjection show is the inherent ambivalence we feel about our animal nature; we tend to find things disgusting that are a reminder of our animal origins. Freud dealt with disgust indirectly through his studies of sexuality, where it is configured within reaction formations (see Freud 1905). The process of ‘civilization’ in certain parts of the world involves the regulation of bodily order and raised awareness of disgust, which becomes integral to moral, social and political order. We experience revulsion at bodily fluids because they are reminders of the borders of the body thereby invoking the insides of bodies, and at the loss of control that the body can be subject to. This revulsion can also be overcome in erotic desire. The animal at the core of humanity is a core idea in the work of several commentators on disgust including Georges Bataille, Andras Angyal (1941), Becker (1973) and one of the central theses of Rozin’s work (see Rozin and Fallon, 1987). The animal roots of disgust are also responsible for the ambivalent feelings that we have towards objects of disgust. We feel a simultaneous sense of attraction and repulsion but the overriding response is to turn away; something which Freud, Becker and others would explain in terms of the denial of death.

The Role of Fear The phenomenology of abjection bears similarities to the phenomenology of disgust in that both involve aversion to and rejection of a source that gives rise to feelings of repulsion. Throughout Powers of Horror Kristeva theorizes abjection in phenomenological terms associating it with bodily experience (ﬂuids, processes, and affects). Her archetypal example of abjection of the rejection of skin on milk can be used to show how the stages of behaviour mirror those experienced in disgust. A reminder of the passage in question conveys the extent of sensory turmoil:

The above passage can be charted in stages that we will later see are key to the phenomenology of disgust, whether core or moral. The ﬁrst stage involves the confrontation with the object of disgust, which monopolizes our senses. Usually something causing disgust comes into contact with us; rarer is the occasion of moving towards the source itself. The threat may come from within (like bodily ﬂuids) or from without. In some cases, the disgust remains on an abstract level – it is the mere thought, which could be a recollection, of the object that evokes disgust. All cases of disgust involve discontent; we are ill at ease with being in the presence of something disgusting, and may shudder in anticipation. The second stage is the physical symptoms that convey the disgust response – this could be the gape face, the ‘disgust face’ (Rozin et al. 2008, 759), and which more precisely involves the lowering of the jaw, the nose wrinkle and (less often) the upper lip rise. The facial expression may be accompanied by nausea,

55 prompting the gag reflex (through retching) and other behavioural changes including the urge to move away from the source of disgust (recoil). The third stage involves undergoing purification rituals, which may involve spitting the milk out if it has been ingested, and if not, ensuring that all physical traces are removed thereby restoring physiological equilibrium and avoiding defilement.

In their introductory essay to Kolnai’s ‘Disgust’, Carolyn Korsmeyer and Barry Smith make a brief but critical comparison between Kristeva’s notion of abjection and Kolnai’s notion of disgust. They argue that the two are ‘different’ and that what distinguishes them is that while abjection entails disgust, it also involves fear, but the reverse is not true (Korsmeyer and Smith 2004, 18). Although in ‘actual experience’ disgust and fear are often ‘blended together’, Kolnai emphasises the point in his work on disgust that they are structurally different, a fact that is derived from phenomenological analysis; disgust is oriented towards the particular features or characteristics of an object (the Sosein) while fear is deeper and is a reaction to the being (the Dasein) of the object (Korsmeyer and Smith 2004, 18–19). The fear and threat posed to one’s self-integrity is at stake in abjection, which causes one to ﬂee (following recoil). Kolnai’s differentiation between the Sosein and the Dasein of an object is interesting. ‘Sosein’ refers to the characteristics of an object, while the prototypical Heideggerean term ‘Dasein’ refers to the sense of being-in-the-world. Dasein is a being whose being is an issue for itself; it is an entity that is conscious of the meaning of its own existence. Kolnai claims that while disgust is caused by the sensory aspects of the object, in its appearance, smell etc., abjection is more minacious because of the inextricable relationship that it has with subjectivity. As it encroaches on the boundaries of the self, it operates as a threat, calling being into question. As Hal Foster puts it, ‘the abject is what I must get rid of in order to be an I … It is a fantasmatic substance not only alien to the subject but intimate with it – too much so in fact, and this overproximity produces panic in the subject. In this way the abject touches on the fragility of our boundaries…’ (Foster 1996a, 153).

Miller also makes a distinction between disgust and fear: he aligns disgust with removal of the offending item and fear with flight. ‘It is usually supposed that fear leads to flight and disgust more to a desire to have the offending item removed’ (Miller 1997, 25). If we are disgusted by something then we wish to have it removed from our presence, and its proximity is a contributing factor. We may even flee the room to escape the object but this is a different type of flight from what would occur if we were fleeing to escape something that we actually feared. There is usually a greater sense of urgency present in fear-impelled flight; we cannot bear to be in the same room as the offending item and need to leave as quickly as possible. Unlike Kolnai who does not think that disgust involves fear, Miller recognises that there are more extreme cases of disgust, cases which he describes as ‘intense disgust’ which involve fear ‘for contamination is a frightful thing’ (Miller 1997, 26).

Excretions, for example, travel from inside to outside the body, thereby troubling any sense of it having secure borders. … The threat to the boundary or oriﬁce remains an indispensable part of the modality of being.

56 I agree with Miller that not all disgust is the same in intensity but believe that if we are going to take the view that contamination is integral to disgust then disgust is necessarily accompanied by fear, however low level. In the face of disgust, we turn away in repugnance and try to avoid its touch. And the closer the disgusting object moves towards us, the greater the fear. Winfried Menninghaus suggests that disgust does in fact bring about fear because it involves the loss of self, which is something that invariably involves fear. He states that ‘Everything seems at risk in the experience of disgust. It is a state of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis of self-preservation in the face of an unassimilable otherness, a convulsive struggle, in which what is in question is, quite literally, whether “to be or not to be”’(Menninghaus 2003, 1). Abjection involves greater levels of disgust, and therefore fear, and fear encroaches on the boundaries of the self. The following two examples illustrate the differences in response between disgust and abjection, where neither precludes our fear of contamination. If we were to find a mouldy peach in a cellar we may feel disgusted and would feel inclined to remove it from our presence or to avoid it in other ways. If we were to find instead a rotting corpse instead of a mouldy peach, our reactions would be very different. That would promote flight of a different kind and urgency. The reason for our different stances is that the peach, vile as it may be, does not encroach on the boundaries of the self. Both the peach and the corpse evoke strong feelings of visceral disgust that affect us emotionally but the corpse represents a threat and harm of a different kind. It is, to use Foster’s phrase, ‘not only alien to the subject but intimate with it’ (Foster 1996a, 153) and this means that we cannot separate ourselves from it. The corpse, Kristeva argues, ‘seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object’ (Kristeva 1982, 4). The same rationale can be applied to bodily fluids and their processes. Once separated from their natural location and on the other side of the boundary, these once benign substances – of blood, mucus, saliva etc. – become foreign and dangerous to us, being reminders of death. They are capable of defilation and must be gotten rid of discreetly. They are what Gordon Allport calls ‘not-me’ – the ego-alien – and cause revulsion (Allport 1955, 43). They are of the body and cannot be completely eradicated. Excretions, for example, travel from inside to outside the body, thereby troubling any sense of it having secure borders. The acquaintance such materials provide us with regarding the lack of assurance of our physical borders is supplemented by recognition of the precariousness of our psychic borders, our sense of self. The threat to the boundary or orifice remains an indispensable part of the modality of being.

…even in the case of objects that we know would not contaminate us, we still feel both disgust and fear. … people reject acceptable foods e.g. chocolate fudge that had been fashioned in the form of dog faeces … because of their fear of contamination.

Disgust thus exists on a spectrum of fear, where mild cases, such as the mouldy peach do not generate much fear but nevertheless inﬂuence our behaviour to move away from the

57 object. Our instinctual desire for self-protection and avoidance of contamination means that we tend to avoid disgusting objects. Paul Rozin’s studies about non-disgusting objects becoming associated through resemblance with disgusting objects reveal the fear of contamination. Rozin and his collaborators drew on the law of similarity (from Frazer and Mauss’ laws of sympathetic magic) to show how even in the case of objects that we know would not contaminate us, we still feel both disgust and fear. They showed how people reject acceptable foods e.g. chocolate fudge that had been fashioned in the form of dog faeces or a bowl of favourite soup that has been stirred by a brand-new comb because of their fear of contamination (Rozin, Millman et al. 1986, 705-6).

Abjection: An Aesthetics of Horror In his study of disgust Miller discusses how the combination of disgust and a high degree of fear – so ‘fear-imbued disgust’ – results in horror (Miller 1997, 26). What is interesting is that Miller suggests that whereas fear generates the desire to flee, horror that has been generated from disgust results in an inability to move, a passivity, that means that the only option is to face it. We are unable to flee because we are frozen in our tracks. We are not able to fight it because ‘the threatening thing is disgusting, one does not want to strike it, touch it, or grapple with it’ (Miller 1997, 26). It becomes like Sartrean slime, and we don’t want to be in contact with it lest we get caught up in it. This fits with Kristeva’s aspirations for her narrative of abjection, which is a story about horror.

In the latter section of Powers of Horror Kristeva talks about the compulsion that certain avant-garde writers like Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, Artaud and Louis-Ferdinand Céline have had to examine the horror of life. As Kristeva says, ‘[t]he writer, fascinated by the abject, imagines its logic, projects himself into it, introjects it, and as a consequence perverts language – style and content’ (Kristeva 1982, 16). Kristeva focuses on the role of the abject in the writing of Céline ‘whose writing “speaks” horror and whose political vision, includes a violent anti-semitism, is to be understood as a symptom, which both enacts and exposes the horror and fascination of psychic violence’ (Marcus 1995, 258). While human ‘civilization’ has been a process of taming and controlling the nature of the human body, this is countered by a continued fascination with the baser side of humanity, with the abject. This shift in motivation is relevant. Everyday life involves a need to maintain the boundaries of the self, which necessitates the disavowing or regulating aspects of instinctual life in order for the subject to enter into the symbolic order. Through abjection Kristeva reverses this. Within the realm of culture artists and writers beckon the abject in order to express the fragile limit of meaning, to experience how ‘objects at the boundaries of palatability and thinkability enter symbolic representation’ (Cazeaux 2011, 718). One of the effects of abject art is to provoke horror ‘and thus regenerate an affective relation to art’ (Lechte 2003, 11) which Kristeva argues can be ‘cathartic’ (Morgan and Morris 1995, 23). This fascination with horror conveys the ambivalence of the abject. Kristeva comments on how we are constantly beguiled by the abject in ‘a vortex of summons and repulsion’ (1982, 1); ‘the jettisoned object, [that] is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (1982, 2).

58 A development of the connection between disgust, fear and horror is articulated in Nöel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990) where he looks at the phenomenology of horror, with the nature of the experience of horror, what it feels like to be horriﬁed. Using examples of ﬁlms to convey the horror of the monster and the monstrous, he makes a distinction between art-horror as opposed to real-life horror to show the continued fascination that we have with the genre.

Conclusion Since the 1990s, reﬂecting the ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, there has been a number of book-length treatments on disgust most of which do not mention abjection. Winfried Menninghaus’ study Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation (2003) is an exception to the literature as it is one of the only studies that consider abjection. Devoting an entire chapter to abjection, Menninghaus describes it as ‘the newest mutation in the theory of disgust’ (Menninghaus 2003, 365) and asks whether it should be added ‘to the Freudian catalogue of defense mechanisms (repression, repudiation, denial, transference’ (367). The omission of abjection in studies about disgust can be explained by the different guiding concerns and methods used, in particular the psychoanalytical framework of abjection vis-à-vis Kristeva is not of interest to evolutionary psychologists or analytic philosophers.

Abjection features as a region on the spectrum of disgust where it is associated with a high degree of fear. … it is something that we do our utmost to reject, but which also captivates our interest. Abjection is the darkness that reigns at the heart of the human condition.

Abjection and disgust share certain phenomenological traits but the degree of fear (and therefore horror) varies. Abjection features as a region on the spectrum of disgust where it is associated with a high degree of fear. And so to draw on two objects used earlier, while the mouldy peach is an example of disgust it does not cause abjection, whereas the corpse does. The degree of fear means that not all cases of disgust are abject. The terms express different applications, where Kristeva’s is folded into a theory about the processes of subjectivity. Kristeva’s theory of abjection highlights the ambivalent nature of disgust, which for the main part is something that we do our utmost to reject, but which also captivates our interest. Her theory then is not only about the unconscious process of signiﬁcation but a theory about a cultural need to seek out horror. Abjection is the darkness that reigns at the heart of the human condition.

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Rina Arya is a cultural anthropologist who specialises in the art of Francis Bacon. She has written a number of articles on different aspects of his work including representations of sexuality, time and death. She is the author of Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World (2012) and Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature (2014). She is currently working on a project about the cultural appropriation of Hindu symbols. Corresponding author: [email protected]

61 Image by Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016.

62 Translation

Translated from the German original by Tereza Kuldova & photography by Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty Werner, Florian (2011) Dunkle Materie: Die Geschichte der Scheisse, © Nagel & Kimche im Carl Hanser Verlag München 2011 (translated with permission of the copyright owner), pp. 7-15, 169-188.

Excerpts from Dark Matter: The History of Shit

Florian Werner

From the Depth Human culture is built on shit. Not only because our cities, the paradigmatic example of our modern civilization, are built above gigantic sewage systems. Not only because our metabolism and with it our life itself would be impossible without the excretion of shit. But also because it is only when we draw a line of separation from shit, we come to know what culture is. Without shadows, there is no light, without dirt, no cleanliness. We need an uncultured opposite in order to be able to think of ourselves as civilized beings. We need shit in order to do away with it and in order to afﬁrm our sophistication. Shit is indispensable to our self-understanding as modern people. This accompanies us throughout our whole life. Already the saint Augustin knew that ‘we are born between shit and piss’, and that it is precisely in this moment that our confrontation with the dark matter begins. It is through excretion that we acquire the social grammar of disgust, of hygiene and a sense for what is pleasant and what not in the realm of smells. We learn that the word ‘shit’ is a taboo, and we learn immediately to use it as a weapon, as a provocation or as a punch line of our dirty jokes. During the anal stage of our development, we learn to control, keep or let go of our bowel movement; this is how we explore the boundaries, openings and muscles of our bodies. And when we turn old, we chat with our excrements – as Alfred Lambert does, the father from Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, who suffers of dementia. From the cradle to the stretcher, shit shapes our understanding of culture, society, health, decency, humour and identity.

And yet, as a rule we do not like to admit to this fundamental meaning of excrements to our life: there is hardly any other matter that is so consistently repressed as the one that emerges on a daily basis within our insides. While only two thirds of the world population have an access to the toilet, and some 2,6 billions of people lack any access to sanitary facilities whatsoever, in the vast majority of our industrialized western world shit has almost completely disappeared from the public eye. If we consider that the inhabitants of a city of the size of Berlin daily produce around 800 tons of shit, then it is indeed pretty astonishing that we only occasionally stumble upon a piece of dog shit (ﬁg. 1). The majority of excrements disappears, invisibly and odourlessly, in the bowels of the city, as if they have never existed.

Naturally, this elimination of excrements from the everyday life is not a new development – since thousands of years, shit has been considered a strange matter that one tried to keep away from and segregated from the sites of eating, sleeping or praying. Even the Old Testament provides exact guidelines on how to keep the war camp clear

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jea.4520 Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1: 63-80, ISSN: 2535-3241 63 from faecal matter, it advises us to have a place outside of the camp to visit upon the call of nature, as the Fifth Book of Moses suggests. ‘And thou shalt have a paddle among thy weapons, and when thou wouldest sit down without, thou shalt dig therewith, and returning thou shalt cover thy excrements’ (Dtn 23, 13-14). Old Norse proverbs scold the birds who dirty their own nests with skíta, and along with them, also the people who would act in a similar manner. At the end of the 11th century, the first English record of the ‘Great Survey’ of England and Wales, the so called Domesday Book, turned defecation in the cathedral of Chester illegal under punishment. And the Jewish philosopher and doctor, Moses Maimonides, called upon Fig. 1. ‘7-eleven’ © Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016. people to remove themselves when shitting as far as possible from their fellow humans: either into the innermost chamber of the dwelling, or outdoors at least as far away, so that other people cannot hear the bowel sounds. However, it was first in the beginning of the early modern era that human excretion became a real taboo connected to feelings of shame and embarrassment; that is when people began living in ever closer and ever more complex social systems and the compulsion towards self-control grew as a result. Modern regulations of decency pertaining to excrements have over the time moved from the paper to the psyche: rules that were still in the 16th century codified in moral guide books, were progressively internalized by the majority of adults and thus integrated into their sense of shame and modesty.

Gradually, along the path of this psychosocial development, the techniques of both hygienic and symbolic cleansing became increasingly sophisticated. In 1857, toilet paper was invented by the American Joseph Gayetty. In 1928, the German businessman Hans

64 ‘Hakle’ Klenk introduced the ﬁrst toilet roll with a guaranteed amount of sheets to the market. These days, even the excrements of toddlers are taken care of by disposable diapers stored in diaper pails that completely eliminate the smell of those little turds. The adults ﬂush their shit into the toilet deep hole that has in the past centuries replaced the traditional central European toilet with the ‘inspection shelf ’. Toilet deodorants and sprays help cover up the smell. Even the sounds of defecation are being silenced these days, and made inaudible for those standing nearby. Japanese toilets equipped with a machine called Otohime, or else ‘Sound Princess’, are enjoying increasing popularity: the machine imitates the sound of running water.

Our western understanding of civilization is thus intertwined with the disappearance of shit; the degree of its (in)visibility signiﬁes the position of a country on a scale of civilizational development. Functional underground canalizations and individual toilets with a lock – those are the harbingers of a modern industrial nation. If they are missing, it is immediately considered a sign of a lower civilizational standard. Is it not rather emblematic that the Latin word for excretion, excrementum, has the same root as the word for a secret, secretum? Shit is a hidden and mysterious substance. Similar to the dark matter, a construct of theoretical physics that aims to explain the economy of mass in the universe, it is omnipresent and yet invisible. Shit is the reverse of culture; the misshapen child of civilization that one hides from one’s neighbour in the cellar. First, it is hidden deep inside of our bodies; and then we discharge it in a silent, often windowless room only to ﬂush it into the depths of canalization.

Shit experiences these days an astonishing renaissance…

But: what goes down must come up, as one could say, modifying the English proverb. Precisely that which is repressed has the tendency to force itself to the surface. Precisely that which is hidden, calls to be freed from the dark sewer grave, in order to be discovered and brought to daylight. The ostracized matter returns like an undead from the depths of the earth and from the unconscious; it knocks audibly against the canal and toilet cover that keep it imprisoned.

Shit experiences these days an astonishing renaissance, and that too precisely in those areas of our culture that traditionally probed the boundaries of the respectable and the permissible. Excrements can no longer be thought apart from the artistic: artworks like Mark Quinns Shit Head – a portrait bust created from the artist’s own faeces – or Wim Delvoyes’ Cloaca, the ‘poop machine’, whose only purpose is to create a substance similar to human excrement, are sure to grab the attention of the fascinated, amused, and outraged public. Movies like Borat, Jackass, or Slumdog Millionaire, engage playfully and even funnily, if one is susceptible to these forms of faecal humour, with shit. Play with faeces and anal eroticism is experiencing a boom in pornography. And even in literature we can ﬁnd an increasing pleasure taken in excremental transgressions, like the bestseller Wetlands by Charlotte Roche, dedicated to the anus and to excretion. The picture book, The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit has become a bestseller, too, even against its disreputable topic. And in the literature of fact, books like Bullshit are also celebrating surprising successes. Shit, as it seems, is en vogue (ﬁg. 2).

But what has turned in this particular moment this most ordinary of all human substances into the currently favoured material in art, cinema and literature? Maybe the reason for the current renaissance of the faecal is the fact that shit can be prosaic, but for that matter no less capable of challenging our late capitalistic society. In an overregulated world, where little is still left to be explored, a w o r l d o r i e n t e d t o w a r d s maximum efﬁciency and smooth functioning, shit becomes the last frontier: a seemingly meaningless and valueless substance that resists its own incorporation into the world of market economy. Every day, every human spends a considerable amount of time Fig. 2. ‘Floater’ © Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016. and energy only in order to create a matter that is immediately eliminated following its production. The bottom line is: one spends almost a year of one’s lifetime with an activity that has no presentable or saleable result. Shit is the absurd and the redundant per se; a lumpy substance in the gears of our economic machine. Its presence questions the ideal image of the rational and proﬁt oriented homo oeconomicus.

Moreover, shit represents a kind of authentic matter that has become increasingly rare in our virtual, postmodern and mediated society. A cowpat on the village square, dog shit on the pathway or skid marks on the public toilet cannot simply be erased, clicked away or ‘cut and paste’ on another place. It may disgust us, but it is nonetheless real. The fascination that one experiences when exposed to Quinn’s Shit Head, or any other excremental artwork stems from the aura of the real that a deceptive imitation from a man-made material never can achieve. The famous scene from the movie Pink Flamingos, where the actor Divine eats hot dog shit, leaves us with a more profound impression than any computer-animated scene from the high-tech DreamWorks Studios. Maybe even the more we are surrounded by simulacra and copies in cinema, art and communication the more we appreciate the presence of shit. From the depths of the mediated bullshit that daily surrounds us, rises the steaming shit – a proud bastion of authenticity.

66 …Maybe we are missing that innocent childhood when we were not yet subject to the anal-retentive imperative, but could poop when and where the hell we wanted. Maybe we are sometimes dreaming about that lost paradise of shit…

However, in this contemporary nostalgia for shit we can also discern a romantic desire to escape the western world’s civilizing mechanisms of repression, or to oppose them through a holistic design for living that does not disavow the stinky shady sides of existence. When Borat brings a plastic bag full of shit to a sophisticated American dinner party, do we then really laugh about that country bumpkin, a supposed Kazakhstani reporter? Or do we laugh more about the consternated reactions of the hosts – those hygiene and control obsessed Americans, who, as the writer William Burroughs once formulated it, would be at their happiest if they could ‘jump down their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out’? Maybe, amidst of all those wash- down WCs, toilet deodorants and sensitive wet wipes, we are longing for more ﬁlth in our lives. Maybe we are missing that innocent childhood when we were not yet subject to the anal-retentive imperative, but could poop when and where the hell we wanted. Maybe we are sometimes dreaming about that lost paradise of shit.

Our increased interest in shit can also possibly be explained by the fact that we are, in a metaphorical sense, constantly surrounded by shit. After all, our contemporary consumer world is full of products that were carelessly produced, that possess only minimal spiritual and physiological nutritional value and that are disposed of very soon after being manufactured, just like shit. Simultaneously, relentless bullshit keeps oozing from our televisions, radios, computers and billboards in order to convince us to purchase these excrements of late capitalism. While real shit has mostly disappeared from our lives, it appears that it has been replaced by industrially produced and mediated bullshit. When the artist Wim Delvoye constructs with great effort a machine for the industrial production of shit, when he advertises the product with a mascot imitating (of all things) Mister Proper accompanied by banal slogans like ‘Buy Cloaca Shit now!’, and when he then actually really sells the excrements of his machine to interested buyers – then he merely drives the emblematic principle of our epoch of market economy to its extremes. Maybe we are also fascinated by shit because it represents the model, the archetype of the fetish objects of our commodity world, because it is the key to the understanding of our consumer society. (Fig. 3).

But maybe this is not the way it really is. Because, in the last instance, shit is distinguished by the following quality: it is a glittering, colourful, matter (ﬁg. 4). The more we think about it, the more difﬁcult it becomes to grasp. Shit is one of the basic conditions of life, and yet, it is considered a dirty, even deadly substance. It is the epitome of worthlessness, and yet it can be, according to the old alchemy’s beliefs, transformed into gold. It exists deep inside of our bodies, and is in a way part of our selves, but the moment we expel it, it is perceived as foreign and offensive. Shit is the most ordinary thing in the world, and yet, together with the word that describes it, it is loaded with taboos. A principal question arises in face of these ambivalences and contradictions: what is, in fact, shit?

67 Fig. 3. ‘Just full of it’ © Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016.

The Dark Side of Power ‘Of soft consistence / and strangely nonviolent’ as Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes in his poem ‘Shit’, ‘she is - of all works of man / presumably the most peaceful. Just what has she done to us?’ Naturally, nothing: most of the time shit is strikingly calm; well, as long as there are no tapeworms, flukes, or threadworms crawling in it. But the human would be no human if he did not find ways to use even such a pacifistic matter as a weapon and as an instrument of power.

… the shit thrower degrades the dirtied victim also symbolically, turning him into … the lowest abject of his body. The shit thrower’s victim then dissolves in the faeces of the other, becoming an extrapolated part of the perpetrator’s body. Within one and the same paradoxical gesture, the shit thrower both incorporates the other and expels him.

68 Fig. 4. ‘Glittering Turd’ © Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016.

When shit is used as a weapon, it is often considered as a subversive matter: a ‘means of non-violent resistance’ (Marielouise Jurreit), used preferably by those oppressed, excluded and unarmed in order to defend themselves against a presumed or real superior power. In antique literature and art, excrements were used as missiles against supernatural heroes who were considered invincible. In the fragmentarily preserved satirical play by Aeschylus, Ostologoi (or Bone-gatherers), a ﬁlled chamber pot lands on Odysseus’ head; also diverse antique vases are decorated with illustrations of similar vessels being emptied on the face of Herakles. In the middle ages, throwing shit was an indispensable part of the Fool’s day and of Charivari rituals, that is whenever time and the world order were dismissed and when spiritual and worldly authorities could, exceptionally, be caricatured and dragged into the dirt. Even in the children’s book The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit, the title hero does not rest until he repays the stupid butcher’s dog Hans-Heinerich with the same, placing a ‘sausage’ on his head. Revenge is a shit sausage.

The humiliating meaning of such gestures is evident and of universal validity. The affected person is in fact dirtied and thus, at least temporarily, socially excluded: almost nobody likes to be in the vicinity of someone who smells like shit. At the same time, the shit thrower degrades the dirtied victim also symbolically, turning him into to a part of his digestive system, turning him into his shit – into the lowest abject of his body. The shit thrower’s victim then dissolves in the faeces of the other, becoming an extrapolated part of the perpetrator’s body. Within one and the same paradoxical gesture, the shit thrower both incorporates the other and expels him. The dirtied victim thus ﬁnds himself in a symbolic middle position of double negativity: he is no longer himself – but

69 he is also not someone else. He is that, which the other has eliminated, a foreign body in his shit.

…Those who fall back on such an archaic and symbolic form of ridicule, reveal that they have no other means of power at hand or that their other weapons have failed them…

‘Wiping one’s ass’ with something (unedifying writing, disadvantageous contract, an image of an unloved person) is a protestation that points in the same direction as shit throwing. The hated opponent (the contract partner, the bailiff, the ex-partner) is not really attacked with shit, but is still dirtied in efﬁgy: the paper on which his thoughts, words or image are prominently displayed is only just good enough to wipe one’s ass with it. The toilet paper with the image of Osama bin Laden represents merely an institutionalized and industrialized version of this form of insult, a depreciative ass wiping in the ages of technological reproducibility. In order to make the purpose of this Osama bin Laden toilet paper clear even to the most slow-witted buyer and to pep up the humoristic humiliating gesture, the images on the toilet paper were accompanied with hardly original and racist word plays, like Wipe out terrorism or Get rid of your Shiite.

At the same time, however, the sales of this toilet roll testify not only to rage and greed for proﬁt, but also to a great sense of helplessness. After all, when the Americans successfully, at least temporarily, ‘eliminated’ Islamic terrorism by bombing Osama bin Laden’s cave complex Tora Bora in December 2001, they did not have to throw shit on the image of the terrorist leader. Those who fall back on such an archaic and symbolic form of ridicule, reveal that they have no other means of power at hand or that their other weapons have failed them. When it comes to this degrading gesture, we are, even against all its humorous nonchalance and cultural-chauvinistic arrogance, in principle dealing with an expression of total powerlessness.

… linguistic signs always fall short of the superior power of reality, and always bounce back when they hit the wall of reality – especially when the reality is as harsh as that of a hydrogen bomb.

Even the simple use of the word ‘shit’ is often an expression of helplessness. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist and father of the atomic bomb, called his intellectual child shit. Looking back, he told his colleague Leo Szilard: ‘the atomic bomb is shit. (…) Well, this is a weapon which has no military signiﬁcance’. (Similarly, the former chancellor Helmut Schmidt called in interviews the second world war a ‘big shit’ or ‘all the shit of the war’). We can, of course, on one hand interpret this statement as questioning the dubious strategic use of a weapon of mass destruction. But on the other hand, it also speaks to the bitter realization that linguistic signs always fall short of the superior power of reality, and always bounce back when they hit the wall of reality – especially when the reality is as harsh as that of a hydrogen bomb. ‘He meant something that eludes naming is automatically relegated, he is saying, to the status of shit’, writes

70 Fig. 5. ‘Høstutstillingen’ © Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016. (A visual response to the National Art Exhibition in Norway, the biggest state exhibition of contemporary art taking place each year in autumn in Oslo, and to the notorious elitism of the selection process). the American novelist Don DeLillo in his Underworld: ‘You can’t name it. It’s too big or evil or outside your experience’. If we stand vis-à-vis someone a bit helplessly, be it an enemy that cannot be touched by military action, or a matter eluding the language’s grasp, we often reach to shit.

If the excremental attack is permanently impossible, if we are the only ones left at whom aggression can be directed, then the form of resistance takes an even more powerless form, namely, the form of dirtying one’s own house, one’s own nest, with faeces. When in 1978 around three hundred IRA and INLA prisoners in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland protested against their prison conditions, they resorted in their distress to a strategy that went down in history books as the ‘dirty protest’: they stopped washing themselves, they refused to use the toilet and refused to leave their cells

71 for cleaning by the prison staff, they spread their faeces on the walls of the prison cell. The archbishop from Armagh, Tomas O’Fiaich said, following the visit to the prison: ‘One would hardly allow an animal to remain in such conditions, let alone a human being. The stench and ﬁlth in some of the cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta scattered around the wall, was almost unbearable. In two of them I was unable to speak for fear of vomiting’.

When the prisoners denied themselves the most fundamental standard of civilization, they did not only make the stay in their vicinity unbearable for the visitors and prison wards, but they also demonstrated in a visible and sniffable way that they ﬁnd their prison conditions inhumane. Akin to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, who withdraws from his surroundings, transformed into a dung beetle, the prisoners are manifestly transformed into the role that the society assigned to them: they transformed themselves to a certain degree into animals.

As we can also see on the example of the work of the actionist artist Günter Brus, conscious violations of the rules of decency, shame and hygiene belong to classical antiauthoritarian gestures. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s love of faecal words can be also understood along similar lines (‘now I wish you a good night, but first shit in your bed and make it burst’, as he wrote to one of his cousins); namely, as an expression of a bourgeois rebellion against the pretentiously noble language of the Austrian court. Julianne Vogel writes in her commentary on Mozart’s notoriously explicit Bäsle letters that ‘the fluency of their usage testifies to the fact that in the rendering of the faecal by language, a social transformation directed against the feudal forms could take place (…) the informality of Mozart’s letters, conscious of their form, rebels (…) against the reign of the feudal language’ (fig. 5).

However, even after the feudal structures were torn down, the faecal language did no lose its potential to provoke: it merely turned into the preferred weapon of the Bohemians against the pretentious values and sense of shame of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois-phobic writer Gustave Flaubert advised his friend Ernest Chevalier in a letter from 1842 to: ‘let diarrhea drip into your boots, piss out of the window, shout out “shit”, defecate in full view, fart hard, blow your cigar smoke into people’s faces (…) belch in people’s faces’. Almost a century later, in his novel 36 Hours, the novelist Ödön von Horváth lets the guests of a Schwabinger art pub sing in protest that they, at least when drunk, are happy to leave all the boundaries of the bourgeois propriety behind them:

We want to intoxicate ourselves with cognac We want to exchange our women We want to besmear ourselves with shit We want to lead a free live!

Were we to add the consumption of psychoactive drugs on top of that, the scene could play out in the year 1969 instead of 1929.

In fact, an image of a shitting man became an icon of the counterculture even in the notorious anti-authoritarian 1960s: it shows the musician Frank Zappa sitting naked

72 with his pants down on a toilet, staring at the observer with a challenging gaze. The fact that the motif is wrapped in a stale-bourgeois art deco frame makes it all the more ironic: this is namely not your typical photo of your son or son-in-law that one would proudly displays above the ﬁreplace – but rather a photo that the wayward children display in their student rooms, house-share kitchens or on their toilet walls. Frank Zappa is the cool anti-father, who leaves the door open when he goes on the toilet – out of political reasons.

In a certain way, however, through his public display of shitting Zappa also provides us, consciously or not, with a parody of the shameless behaviour of absolute monarchs (according to our contemporary standards). ‘In stratified societies of the old type, every distinction, including the hygienic one, pertained to the system of status differences’, writes the literature scientist Albrecht Koschorke. ‘This made it possible that in the absolutist court the most intimate daily bodily needs of the sovereign were a matter of a public ceremony’. It is known that Louis XIV of France used to cleanse his colon every month in full view in front of his court. And about his oldest son, the Dauphin, we know from Louis’ sister-in-law Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, that he liked to be paid honours to while sitting on the shitting throne. After all, a Venetian envoy at the French court should, when on official visit, specifically due to this reason, sit on the shitting throne. Such a behaviour was the privilege of the powerful – those below in rank had to keep their bodies under perfect control in the presence of those above. Frank Zappa, taking on the same posture as the absolutist rulers, reverses the asymmetry of intimacy: he rebels against the ruling bourgeois morality with the weapons of the pre-bourgeois age.

…Why is it that human faeces are used time and again as an actual or symbolic weapon against authoritative ﬁgures?

Because of Zappa’s faecal provocations, the rumours for some time had it that the musician shits on the stage during a concert and then eats his own excrements; it was also claimed that he ran a contest in shit eating against the Heavy-Metal musician and horror-clown Alice Cooper. However, according to Zappa, these rumours have no bearing on reality: ‘For the record, folks; I never took a shit on stage and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973’.

But why is shit and shitting always afforded such a subversive role? Why is it that human faeces are used time and again as an actual or symbolic weapon against authoritative ﬁgures, preferably those of the parents’ generation? Maybe it is because our struggle with shit, from the beginning of our lives, is a ﬁght over power.

At least once, in our earliest childhood, it is a personal battle against an ‘inner enemy’: an opponent that hides himself for a long time, invisible, inside the body and causes inexplicable pains and can embarrass us through its sudden appearance. Once the child learns to control the muscles of the rectum and anus, it ﬁnally gains power over its body and the bodily boundaries. ‘This is where the child gains the ﬁrst experience of sovereignty over its body’, writes the philosopher Hermann Schmitz. ‘Once it learns to

73 playfully control the bowel movements, it acquires the possibility to elevate its self above its body’. Once the child succeeds at pushing the will of his head against the need of his butt, it becomes the chief of his little social body. Moreover, the process of consumption and digestion represents a sort of symbolic power struggle, during the course of which the eater demonstrates his authority over that which is being eaten. ‘One tends to see only the thousand tricks of power which are enacted above ground’, writes Elias Canetti, ‘but these are the least part of it. Underneath day in, day out, is digestion a n d a g a i n d i g e s t i o n . Something alien is seized, cut up into small bits, incorporated into oneself and assimilated (…). The excrement, which is what remains of all this (…) is Fig. 6. ‘Sticky Poo’ © Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016. the age-old seal of that power- process of digestion, which is enacted in darkness and which, without this, would remain hidden forever’.

And not least, the early anal phase of child development is also, on top of handling excrements, marked by significant negotiations of power relations between parents and the child: when the parents attempt to bring their child up to be bodily and linguistically clean, they demonstrate the boundaries of its surroundings and of their parental authority. When the child recognizes or transgresses these boundaries, it also realizes its own power and self-understanding as an autonomous being: ‘the first manner in which the child influences its surroundings (…) is through the regulation of its bowel movements’, writes the psychoanalyst Ernest Borneman. ‘The child discovers: when I do my business quickly, after my mother puts me on the potty, I will make her happy (…) but if I defy her and I poop in the bed or refuse to do my business (…) I can provoke her into anger. Hence, I can do what I like with this big being on which I have been until now dependent’. The anal phase thus represents an important step in the development of the child towards an autonomous being. The free will of people expresses itself in the power of disposition over one’s shit – vis-à-vis their own bodies, as well as their surroundings (fig. 6).

74 However, this free will, as we know, can be broken or prevented in its development. Illnesses like dysentery and typhus make people lose control over their excretion processes; soldiers, prison wards or the accomplices of totalitarian regimes can violently dirty them, and take away from their possibility for self-determined, humane defecation, and in extreme cases even feed them theirs or someone else’s shit.

In his war manual Bellifortis, the inventor Conrad Kyeser of the Late Middle Ages, even proposed that one should, during the besiegement of the enemy fortresses, use wooden barrels filled ‘with stinking manure’ as missiles, in order to make the adversary resign, both physically and morally: ‘you will throw them, wherever you want, this will make the enemies weak / and the locality will be smeared, trade and traffic will be destroyed’. In Simplicius Simplicissimus, we can read how people during the Thirty Years’ War were made to drink the ‘Swedish drink’, a bucket full of manure water in order to force them into submission. 300 years later, the Italian movie director Pier Paolo Pasolini showed in his Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, in the section Girone della Merda, how the representatives of the fascist republic of Salò forced during the last days of the World War II their slaves of pleasure to eat their excrements. Other food had to be eaten very quickly in order to result in a sufficiently hard stool for consumption: the whole metabolism of the slave boys and girls in this modern day inferno was subjected to the dictate of coprophagy. It was through the control of the digestive systems and of the thresholds of disgust of their prisoners that the absolute domination and arbitrariness of the fascist libertines was expressed.

These few examples already reveal to us that shit is not only a weapon of the weak and powerless – but also rulers know how to put it to use in order to dehumanize, humiliate and subject those in a socially lower position, or those militarily inferior. Shit is maybe even predestined for the use and abuse by the powerful. To put it in a graphic language: while the powerless and those on the bottom of society take shit in their hands and throw it up above, making their hands dirty, the powerful, in order to deﬁle the people, just pull down their trousers and shit on them. Gravity is on their side. ‘Every bearer of dirt is powerful’, writes Christian Enzenberger in his Größeren Versuch über den Schmutz (…), ‘and every owner of power uses dirt to establish his rule (…) the one who can deﬁle the other (…) is the boss’.

…shit is not only a weapon of the weak and powerless – but also rulers know how to put it to use in order to dehumanize, humiliate and subject…

The leaders and guardians of the concentration camps knew, in a particularly ghoulish and cruel way, how to use such strategies of faecal deﬁlement. The inmates in death camp, as Terrence Des Pres reports in his book The Survivor, were exposed to repetitive excremental attacks. This began already in the trains in which the prisoners were transported into the concentration camps: in the cattle wagons there were no toilets, the transport could take many days. While there were mass latrines in the concentration camps, their size was too small for the amount of prisoners, and the times when they

75 could be visited were strictly regulated: ‘there was one latrine for thirty to thirty-two thousand women’, reports one female survivor of Bergen-Belsen, ‘and we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get into this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentery, we could rarely wait until our turn came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell which surrounded us like a cloud’.

Since there was no toilet paper, the prisoners had to use parts of their own clothing in order to wipe their buttocks. Many used their soup tureens as chamber pots for fear of being shot by the SS on the way to the latrine. In Birkenau, the guards used to throw the crockery of the prisoners into the latrines, only to let them ﬁsh for it before the food was served. Even during the so called death marches, the survivors of the concentration camps were forced to take part in, the excremental humiliations continued – those who stopped in order to relieve themselves risked being shot. ‘Urine and excreta poured down the prisoner’s legs’, reports one survivor, ‘and by nightfall the excrement, which had frozen to our limbs, gave off its stench. We were really no longer human beings in the accepted sense. Not even animals, but putrefying corpses moving on two legs’.

These degradations were not merely grounded in some sadistic inclinations of the guards, but were consciously perpetrated. It was precisely the intent to arouse a sense of self-disgust and self-revulsion in the prisoners: they wished to break their self-respect, and with it to also dissolve any solidarity between the captives amidst the germs and the shit. ‘How much self-esteem can one maintain, how readily can one respond with respect to the needs of another if both stink, if both are caked with mud and faeces?’, asks Terrence Des Pres. Moreover, the systematic defilement of the prisoners was intended to lower the hindrance to kill on the side of the guards: ‘And here is a final, vastly significant reason why in the camps the prisoners were so degraded. This made it easier for the SS to do their job. It made mass murder less terrible to the murderers, because the victims appeared less human.’ When the prisoners were robbed of the control over their bodily hygiene and bowel movement, they lost, at least in the eyes of the SS guards and at least for the period of their defilement, their human dignity.

… the euphemism for Auschwitz-Birkenau, anus mundi…

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration camp of the Nazi regime, where more than million people were killed, used to be called by the SS-Obersturmführer (senior assault leader) and the concentration camp doctor Heinz Thilo the anus mundi, or else the ‘asshole of the world’. (The survivor Wiesław Kielar used this formulation in 1972 as the title for his memoirs about his ﬁve-year imprisonment in Auschwitz-Birkenau). Firstly, this Latin euphemism degrades the terror of the camp into a bad joke: to say something supposedly drastic, while hiding it like a smart ass behind a coat of classical language, formulating it in an inappropriately high style, belongs to basic strategies of schoolboy humour. Secondly, this Latin expression casts the perpetrators of the atrocities that began in the Nazi camps in a particularly terrible light: those were not only butcher boys at work here, but also academics with doctoral degrees, people educated in humanities.

76 Actually, the Nazis, as Victor Klemperer showed in his notes on the ‘Language of the Third Reich’ (Sprache des Dritten Reiches), displayed a particular ‘preference for grand- sounding foreign words’, for a pretentious linguistic register. In the midst of all the killing, dying and inhuman living conditions in the concentration camps, they even took the great pains to ﬁnd a Latin sophisticated euphemism for an asshole.

Last but not least, the euphemism for Auschwitz-Birkenau, anus mundi, also, in a literal sense, captures the damning judgement about those detained there. The one who resides in the asshole of the world has hit the rock bottom of human society: he is at the very bottom, at the end, there, where one is eliminated from the body, or crushed under its weight. In this context, it is rather revealing that the Nazis captured the social form that they wanted to put into effect time and again through concepts of bodily health and integrity: the ‘racial body’ (Volkskörper) was infested with ‘vermins’ or sucked out by ‘parasites’; one and the same ‘blood’ ran through its ‘organs’; it should be ‘free of Jews’ and only a ‘racial hygiene’ could help it heal itself. All these metaphors have one underlying idea in common. Namely, an idea of the Nazi state as a closed, homogenous community, governed by one singular will that, like any other individual being, marches in unity and in the same direction. The language of the Third Reich, writes Victor Klemperer, was ‘bent to rob individual of his or her individuality’. Instead, it should make him or her part of a bigger and more powerful organism.

However, while this concept was particularly popular during the Nazi era, it was in no way its invention and thus not limited to it. As the social anthropologist Mary Douglas has shown, the perception of our physical body invariably inﬂuences our perception of the social body – and in reverse, our social imaginaries inﬂuence our understanding of a body as a small society, as a social microcosm. ‘The scope of the body as a medium of expression is limited by controls exerted from the social system’, writes Mary Douglas in her Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, ‘the relation of head to feet, of brain and sexual organs, of mouth and anus are commonly treated so that they express the relevant patterns of hierarchy’. In other words, every social body carries on its top a head: countries have a president, corporations a CEO and construction workers their foreman. Similarly, most social bodies also have their anus: this is where the socially excluded and eliminated members of society are accumulated. And it is precisely this part of the social body, with its diverse gates between the inside and outside, that often enjoys most attention: ‘Interest in its apertures depends on the preoccupation with social exits and entrances, escape routes and invasions’.

This superimposition of the political and the physical body is captured in a particularly evocative way in the hallucinatory work of the American, Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs. The junkies, law-breakers, and freaks who populate his novels, and preferably dwell in political bodies marked by badly controlled entrances and escape routes: like for instance the North African city of Tangier that was until 1956 an international zone popular with smugglers, dropouts and outsiders, or in the ﬁctitious, historical Tangier with its ‘Interzone’. On the other hand, the bodies of these anarchic ﬁgures also often possess a grotesque number of entrance and exit devices, which resist any hierarchical bodily logic or control.

77 ‘That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between the bureaus, because there is always a space between’ preaches the psychopathic Dr. Benway about the inhabitants of the Interzone in the monster of a novel Naked Lunch: ‘some would be entirely made of penis-like erectile tissue, others viscera barely covered over with skin, clusters of 3 and 4 eyes together, criss-cross of mouth and assholes, human parts shaken around and poured out any way they fell’. Moreover, there are people with protein bodies, whose boundaries are relentlessly changing and thus refuse to be controlled, ‘rectums open, defecate and close…the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments’. And ﬁnally, there is also the Spare-Ass Annie, a woman, who has, there where the yogis have the third eye, an extra rectum, a spare-ass in the middle of her forehead. Where there is no state control anymore, where social organs can be pushed around like the organs on the operation table of a crazy professor – there, as Burroughs’ modern mythological creatures suggest, the order of the bodies is turned on its head. Where there is anarchy, even anatomy plays crazy – an equally borderless and unrestrained ‘anarchtomy’.

In a more realistic manner, the pensioner Alfred Lambert in Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, suffering of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer, undergoes the same experience. Alfred is in fact the incarnation of the anal-retentive character: pedantic, order ﬁxated, tyrannical, thrifty – the classical pater familias from a small town in the Midwest of the USA. With the age and because of his illness, he increasingly loses control over himself and his surroundings. The dirt that he has been so arduously trying to keep under the lock, pushes itself suddenly on the surface: the shit strikes back.

It all begins with an insult. Alfred is travelling with his wife on a Scandinavian cruise ship, as he, in the middle of the night and in the darkness of his cabin, hears a whisper: ‘Asshole! Asshole!’, reducing him to the bodily part that has been troubling him for a while (out of precaution he wears adult diapers). Firstly, the sleepy patriarch believes that the voice belongs to a mouse. Then, ‘with dismay Alfred recognized the visitor. First he saw the dropping’s slumped outline and then he caught a whiff of bacterial decay. This was not a mouse. This was the turd’.

This speaking turd is, as becomes quickly clear, not only an evil product of Alfred’s mind in crisis, but rather an almost mystical being: the turd is Alfred’s nemesis, his private goddess of revenge, a brown Erinys that confronts the old man with all his repressed power and control fantasies that he had so far largely managed to contain within him. As the slippery pile refuses to conform to his directions and just runs down the leg, spoiling his pyjamas, Alfred becomes convinced that this stinky being can be nothing else than a convict, a piece of human waste that belongs in prison. In Alfred’s hallucinatory faecal phantasies, the social body and the physical body overlap – where the control of the body is demanded, the anal-retentive man obsessed with cleanliness calls for social punitive sanctions. And as Alfred expresses this opinion of his and tells the turd that it belongs behind the lock, the turd answers – and through it also Alfred’s unconscious – with a litany of social and ethnic groups that Alfred would also like to eliminate from the social body: children, teenagers, African Americans, Polynesians, Jamaicans, Chinese, South Europeans, French, Jews, homosexuals, women, proletariat … The turd points out that it looks like all those anally ﬁxated types would like to have

78 everything behind a lock: ‘Hey, funny thing, Fred, the only people that don’t belong in your jail are upper-middle-class northern European men.’

This racist, chauvinistic, and homophobic freak show turns the turd into an exemplary alternative worth imitating, as its own unleashed existence stands precisely in opposition to this freak show: that is, a principle of the anal desire and anarchy of early childhood, that resides in every human and every intestine. The turd makes fun of the American Declaration of Independence, calling it a piece of toilet paper besmeared with shit. It ridicules Alfred and his prudish brothers as ‘fascist schoolteachers and Nazi cops’. It assembles other shit rebels around it to attack all cultural forces of constraint. ‘Civilization? Overrated. I ask you what’s it ever done for me? Flushed me down the toilet! Treated me like shit!’ – ‘But that’s what you are’, Alfred pleaded, hoping the turd might see the logic’. The only thing that he could do, in order to deal with this faecal superior power, was to subject himself to it – to succumb to this turd and its dirty lessons. When he asks the turd what he has to do in order for it to leave the room, the turd just tells the old man to release the muscle, let it out. Alfred does what it wants and the hallucinated turd disappears. The next day, the bed, the bathroom and the ﬂoor of the cabin are covered with his lively excrements (ﬁg. 7).

Irrespective of all the good arguments and attempts to civilize, the turd has in the end the upper hand. It always wins, time being on its side. The human, may it be the biggest patriarch or dictator, can ﬁght it with utmost dedication and power their whole life, but at the latest, in the old age, it ﬁghts him with his own weapons – that is, with himself. Shit has the last dirty word.

79 Augustinus, A. (1998) De Magistro/Über den Lehrer. Ditzingen: Reclam. Borneman, E. (1973) Psychoanalyse des Geldes: Eine kritische Untersuchung psychoanalytischer Geldtheorien. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Burroughs, W. (2013) Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press. Canetti, E. (1962) Crowds and Power. New York: Viking Press. DeLillo, D. (1997) Underworld. New York: Scribner. Des Pres, T. (1980) The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in Death Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Douglas, M. (2003) Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. London: Routledge. Enzenberger, Ch. (1980) Größerer Versuch über den Schmutz. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin und Wien: Ullstein. Enzenberger, H. M. (2006) ‘Die Scheiße’, Gedichte 1950-2005. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Franzen, J. (2001) Corrections. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Holzwarth, W. (1994) The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit. London: Chrysalis Children's Books. Jurreit, M. (1969) ‘Alles über Scheiße’, Twen 12 (December). Klemperer, V. (2007) LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen. Stuttgart: Reclam. Koschorke, A. (1999) Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts. München: Wilhelm Fink. Kyeser aus Eichstätt, C. (1967) Bellifortis. Düsseldorf: Verlag des Vereins Deutscher Ingenieure. Schmitz, H. (1965) Der Leib: System der Philosophie. Bonn: H. Bouvier & Co. Von Horváth, Ö. (1987) 36 Stunden: Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Florian Werner studied English literature, and American and German studies in Tübingen, Berlin and Aberdeen, and received his doctorate with a work about hip hop and the apocalypse. He is the author of numerous literature of fact books and novels, and teaches as a guest professor at several universities. His books have been translated into English, Japanese and Spanish. Corresponding author: post@ﬂorianwerner.net

80 Image by Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016.

81 Shortcut

Knee-Deep in Ideology

Slavoj Žižek

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s semiotic triangle of preparing food (raw, baked, boiled) demonstrated how food also serves as ‘food for thought’. We probably all remember the scene from Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (1974) in which relations between eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at their toilets around the table, pleasantly talking, and when they want to eat, they silently ask the housekeeper - ‘Where is that place, you know?’ and sneak away to a small room in the back. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matière à penser: do the three basic types of toilets not form a kind of excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking? In a traditional German toilet, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush the water, is way in front, so that the shit is first laid out for us to sniff at and inspect it for traces of some illness; in the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is in the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as soon as possible; finally, the American toilet presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles - the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected... No wonder that, in the famous discussion of different European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything’. It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to the unpleasant excrement which comes from within our body, is clearly discernible in it - again, ‘the truth is out there’.

Hegel was among the ﬁrst to interpret the geographic triad of Germany-France- England as expressing three different existential attitudes: German reﬂective thoroughness, French revolutionary hastiness, English moderate utilitarian pragmatism; in terms of political stance, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English moderate liberalism; in terms of the predominance of one of the spheres of social life, it is German metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economy.

…We have such a multitude of the toilet types because there is a traumatic excess which each of them tries to accommodate - according to Lacan, one of the features which distinguishes man from animals is precisely that, with humans, the disposal of shit becomes a problem.

The reference to toilets enables us not only to discern the same triad in the most intimate domain of performing the excremental function, but also to generate the underlying mechanism of this triad in the three different attitudes towards excremental

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jea.4475 Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1: 82-83, ISSN: 2535-3241 82 e x c e s s : a m b i g u o u s contemplative fascination; the hasty attempt to get rid of the unpleasant excess as fast as possible; the pragmatic approach to treat the excess as an ordinary object to be disposed of in an appropriate way. So, it is easy for an academic to claim at a round table that we live in a post-ideological universe - the moment he visits the restroom after the heated discussion, he is again deep-knee in ideology. The ideological investment of such references to utility is attested by their dialogical character: the American ‘Poo in Loo’ © Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016. toilet acquires its meaning only through its differential relation to French and German toilets. We have such a multitude of the toilet types because there is a traumatic excess which each of them tries to accommodate - according to Lacan, one of the features which distinguishes man from animals is precisely that, with humans, the disposal of shit becomes a problem. And, to reach in an even more intimate domain, do we not encounter the same semiotic triangle in the three main hair-styles of the feminine sex organ's pubic hair? The wildly grown, unkept pubic hair indexes the hippy attitude of natural spontaneity; yuppies prefer the disciplinatory procedure of a French garden (one shaves the hair on both sides close to the legs, so that all that remains is a narrow band in the middle with a clear-cut shave line); in the punk attitude, the vagina is wholly shaved and furnished with rings (usually attached to a perforated clitoris) - is this not yet another version of the Levi-Straussian semiotic triangle of ‘raw’ wild hair, well- kept ‘baked’ hair and shaved ‘boiled’ hair? One can see how even the most intimate attitude towards one’s body is used to make an ideological statement.

This text originally appeared in Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies (1997), London: Verso (reproduced with permission of the author).

Jong, E. (1973) Fear of Flying. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Claude Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969) Mythologiques, vol. I: The Raw and the Cooked, (tr. John and Doreen Weightman). London: J. Cape. Buñuel, L. (1974) The Phantom of Liberty. Producers: Serge Silberman & Ulrich Picard, France/Italy: 104 min.

83 Image by Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016.

84 Shortcut

The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good Bullshit as Discourse, Accursed Share, and Lubricant45

Fred Luks

Ugly Bullshit: Discursive Faeces

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. (Harry G. Frankfurt)

Public discourse on issues such as economy, policy, or sustainability is full of bullshit. Indeed, it seems to be infected by it and everybody knows it. It’s like rain, albeit of a less liquid consistency: one does not need to deﬁne rain in order to be able to tell when it’s raining. The same goes for bullshit: one instantly knows when somebody is bullshitting. Even if some prefer the phrase ‘buzzword bingo’ to what it really is – namely, bullshit bingo, they all deep down recognize its true name. For example, the term ‘innovation’, although a term of some theoretical dignity, it is frequently used by people who bullshit their way through intricate sustainability-problems that demand far more actual effort that the cheap resort to this bullshit term.

But why do we then need any more contemplation on bullshit? Well, when we talk about shit in the early 21st century, it is not only impossible but also inappropriate to leave bullshit aside. The present text attempts to make sense of the omnipresence of bullshit and suggests a new approach to the topic – one that does not only describe and bemoan the phenomenon, but also one that does not shy away from the potentially productive purpose of bullshit.

Bad Bullshit: the Classical Case

The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves (…) a certain inner strain. (Harry G. Frankfurt)

Bullshit is widely produced and circulated in all kinds of discourses. Words are thrown around, quotes cited, concepts explained – very often without a clear meaning or reference to real world problems. Serving as it does as a rhetorical weapon of mass

45 I would like to thank Nastassja Cernko, Robert Pfaller and especially Tereza Kuldova for inspiring discussions and (very) critical remarks on an earlier version of the text. Of course, I am solely responsible for any errors, oddities, omissions, and opinions stated. Small parts of this essay have appeared (in German) in Luks 2014.

DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jea.5378 Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1: 85-90, ISSN: 2535-3241 85 destruction, bullshit certainly does not have a good reputation. The opposite is the case: bullshit is seen as the bad stuff. It is considered to be beyond reason, imprecise, irrational. Bullshit often consists of what Uwe Pörksen (1988) calls ‘plastic words’ – crucial devices for the production of bullshit. One can do anything with such words, they are ﬂexible and they can mean all kinds of things – one simply cannot get it wrong when using them. If one desires to acquire a diverse vocabulary of ‘plastic words’, regular visits to congresses on innovation and ‘education for sustainable development’, award ceremonies for corporate social responsibility or political events dealing with environmental protection, diversity issues or development co-operation, will do the trick. One could even conceive of these as ritualistic bullshit bingo championships. When one thinks of it, this may indicate that many gatherings of highly educated people – such as scientiﬁc conferences – are often not (only) events of public debate, but rituals where the formal act of gathering itself is the key, rather than necessarily the content.

Below you can ﬁnd a sample playing card you can use at any of the aforementioned events and once advanced, can proceed to creating your own, depending on your disciplinary and the particular manifestations of bullshit (I hear that for anthropologists for instance: ‘entanglements’, ‘negotiation’, ‘assemblage’ might be the starters). It is not only really easy to play, but may also relieve you from taking the bullshit accidentally all too seriously: as soon you hear one of the words on the card, you tick it off. As soon as a row, a column or a diagonal is completed, you stand up and shout ‘bingo’ or, even better: ‘bullshit’. Enjoy!

Harry G. Frankfurt famously dedicated a whole book to bullshit. For Frankfurt, it is a ‘lack of connection to a concern with truth – t h i s indifference to how things really are’ that he regards as the ‘essence of bullshit’ (Frankfurt 2005, 33–34, emphasis mine). For Frankfurt, however, the problem lies primarily in certain forms of social constructivism, which he d e e m s ﬂ a w e d a n d destructive. But even if Frankfurt’s understanding of bullshit is somewhat at odds with bullshit à la bullshit bingo: his emphasis on the indifference concerning the relation to the truthfulness of statements is also relevant for us, who are not naïve realists. When one looks at discourses on sustainability, globalization, or other societal issues, it is not so much conscious lying but the utter confusion and imprecision of many terms, sentences

86 and statements that transforms language into (bull)shit. The problem with bullshitting is hence not that it is outright lying – it is rather a complete indifference to the quality of verbal utterances. Often, the impact and effect of these statements is more important to those who utter them than their relation to reality, and yet, it is precisely such bullshit- infested discourses that seem very powerful at transforming our societies and having real (and often detrimental) effects. Grandiose phrasings, plastic words, misplaced metaphors – all these have become indispensable to any discussion of sustainability or globalization. For instance, consider the term ‘delinking’ or ‘decoupling’, which refers to the relationship between economic performance and environmental pressure (Luks 2005). In debates about the limits and potentials for growth in a ﬁnite world, ‘delinking’ is frequently used as a substitute for critical thinking about the nature of the problem. (It may be noteworthy that for Frankfurt, highfaluting utterances are not characteristic for bullshit, but are their motive. Bullshit is made, then, because one wants to come across as highfaluting.)

This begs the question of why is bullshitting so widely accepted. What kind of society accepts bullshit in public discourses, even in scientiﬁc discussions? Does the omnipresence of bullshit point to processes of denial in society? Could it be that bullshitting serves the disavowal of unpleasant realities? In her analysis of ‘neoliberal subjectivity’, Lynne Layton writes:

The capacity to hallucinate a way out of painful tension and inevitable environmental disappointments (…) can be a source of creativity, to be sure. But when that capacity becomes a regularly practiced disavowal of the truth of dependence, interdependence and vulnerability, we have the makings of a perverse situation. And this is precisely the situation created by the triumph of neoliberalism, and, more recently, in the United States, the triumph of neoconservatism (Layton 2010, 306).

While I am not very fond of the term ‘neoliberalism’, for it is an example par excellence for bullshitting in (pseudo)economic discourses – ‘market fundamentalism’ being a term much more appropriate, Layton’s point is obviously relevant for an analysis of bullshit’s role in society and the ‘perversion of truth’ that can be a consequence of bullshitting.

This brings us to the aforementioned aspect of quality. Shit can have very different colors, consistencies and odors – and this is also true for bullshit. The whole business of sustainability, responsibility, and so on has suffered from – economically speaking – an oversupply of bullshit. The rough, approximate, nonbinding, sometimes incorrect, have substantially reduced the quality of public and scientiﬁc discourses on these topics: precisely because bullshit is regularly detached from any concern with reality. A bullshitter can even use a wider range of statements than liars can. Frankfurt writes:

The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular (Frankfurt 2005, 51–2).

87 Full of Shit by the art photographer Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2017.

So it is. The bullshitter is not sincere, but s/he is not a liar either; s/he is, well – bullshitting:

When an honest man speaks he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the truth nor on the side of the false. (…) He does not care whether things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose (Frankfurt 2005, 56).

Moreover, bullshit inhibits an appropriate understanding of societal problems and solutions. This is what makes it so popular among populists on all sides (Luks 2014). When anything means everything, in the end everything means nothing – and can thus be used for any purpose: such as disavowal of unpleasant facts. Bullshit, it could be said without much exaggeration, is part of the business model of many activists in ﬁelds such as sustainability, responsibility, and so forth – the very part that on one hand undermines their efforts, but on the other keeps them effectively in business, as it reproduces the very problem it pretends to aim to ameliorate.

88 Good Bullshit: the Accursed Share as Lubricant

Perhaps it is for making death to intimate that we ﬁnd excrement to repulsive. (Harry G. Frankfurt)

Bullshit is not only omnipresent, it may also be, surprisingly, a sine quo non for all kinds of discourse. Since bullshit is always present, we may consider the possibility that it does in fact have some vital function. We do not speak here about the digestive products of male cattle. Bullshit is, of course, a metaphor. At the same time, the activity of bullshitting is itself shaped by its use of metaphors.

As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have shown in their book Metaphors We Live by, our lives are structured by metaphors often in unsuspecting ways, in particular by spatial metaphors. Metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson argue, are very closely linked to our physical experiences (regarding the content of this volume of JEA, one is lead to think of defecating as an example). Our everyday lives, our interactions with the world, especially with fellow human beings, critically depend on the metaphors we use. The same, as Deidre (formerly Donald) McCloskey (1985, 1994) has shown in several brilliant contributions, is even true for economics, a discipline with a distinctive positivist self-image. Economics, of course, is a discourse that uses metaphors such as the invisible hand, equilibrium, green GDP or human capital (see also Luks 1998).

Apropos economics: like money, bullshit as language is a very ﬂuid medium of symbolic communication. But very unlike money, bullshit as shit is worthless. In terms of value, (bull)shit as a physical substance can be viewed as the ultimate opposite of money. While money is a symbol, measure, and storage of wealth, shit is nothing like that. Indeed, shit is the ultimate part maudite – the accursed share (exceptions like artist’s shit sold in cans just prove the rule). This is of course a central term of Bataille’s (1991) theory of the ‘general economy’. His theory is the opposite of what economists would call economics – for Bataille is concerned with what is, at ﬁrst sight, without value, utility, productivity: it is accursed. That’s why Bataille appropriately speaks of ‘anti-economy’.

Hence it is not surprising that shit is indeed one of the materials Bataille deals with in his writings. Semen is another. Well, not semen as such. Semen used for making a child is obviously of the highest ‘value’ one could think of – and not of interest to Bataille whatsoever. Not so with sperm used only for fun. From another, say, some religious viewpoint, every cumshot is a waste by deﬁnition, because it is not used for its god-given purpose: instead of contributing to the reproduction of the human race, it is merely shown to a camera – and then wiped away: it in an accursed share par excellence.

Is all that also true for the shitty subcategory of lingual bull-shit? Yes and no. Yes, because shit is, as described above, the ultimate use-less matter, made for nothing and valueless by deﬁnition. No, because bullshit serves a certain function. One does not stretch the bullshit metaphor too far when one says that the physical attributes of shit (in this case: bull-shit), namely its high viscosity, make it a candidate for lubricating discourse: being not itself very meaningful, it serves to make discourse on meaning and interpretations of terms such as success, reform and sustainability ﬂuid and functioning. It turns out that we need bullshit. It adds the slack and the redundancy that are vital for

89 any creative process. Bullshit is highly inefficient, and that makes it serve the efficacy of debates. When discussions slow down or even stall, bullshitting their way through can enable the discussants to continue. At most social science departments, for example, uttering works like ‘discourse’, ‘deconstruction’ or ‘diversity’ will do the job nicely. (Note that even shit, although considered highly unproductive, can, put on a garden or field, increase the productivity of the soil.)

On a closer inspection, then, bullshit might as well be a sine qua non for a discourse that produces not only bullshit but also meaning, value and transformational power: without bullshit, there may be no discourse at all. Bullshit serves as an instrument, a tool, a device that enables communication.

Conclusion: the Need for a New Theory of Bullshit

However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. (Harry G. Frankfurt)

The frequency of – implicitly or explicitly – playing ‘bullshit bingo’ in meetings and at conferences can serve as an empirical hint for the aforementioned theoretical considerations. Without this shitty device, debates about important contemporary economic and political topics may lead to the loo. Bullshitting turns out to be – albeit crabwise – a productive activity that utilizes totally un-economic, ﬁlthy matter to produce innovative and sometimes even elegant meaning.

But then, to do one more turn – maybe this is too much of an optimistic view. Considering, for example, the ‘bubbles’ many bullshit-ridden discourses appear to produce (e.g. the ‘sustainability bubble’), bullshit may be used to create a certain mood, a sense of belonging, a discursive community – is this the very ideological function of this kind of shit? Moreover, does bullshitting contribute to the disavowal of unpleasant realities? Is, then, bullshit really a part maudite which, in Bataille’s theory, contributes to something good – or is it merely unpleasant stuff that should be eliminated? Many questions arise that are beyond the scope of this paper. Hence, further research on the matter is urgently needed. You have to decide for yourself whether this idea is good, bad, or ugly – or just bullshit.

Bataille, Georges. 1991. The Accursed Share: an Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption. New York: Zone Books. Frankfurt, Harry G. 2005. On Bullshit. Princeton / Oxford: Princeton University Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago / London: University Chicago Press. Luks, Fred. 1998. “The Rhetorics of Ecological Economics.” Ecological Economics 26: 139–149. Luks, Fred. 2005. “Innovationen, Wachstum und Nachhaltigkeit. Eine ökologisch- ökonomische Betrachtung.“ In Innovation und Nachhaltigkeit. Jahrbuch Ökologische Ökonomik 4, edited by Frank Beckenbach et al. 41–62. Marburg: Metropolis.

90 Luks, Fred. 2014. Öko-Populismus. Warum einfache „Lösungen“, Unwissen und Meinungsterror unsere Zukunft bedrohen. Marburg: Metropolis. Layton, Lynn. 2010. “Irrational exuberance: Neoliberal subjectivity and the perversion of truth.” Subjectivity 3: 303–322. McCloskey, Donald N. 1985. The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison: University Wisconsin Press. McCloskey, Donald N. 1994. Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics. Cambridge / New York / Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Pörksen., Uwe. 1998. Plastikwörter. Die Sprache einer internationalen Diktatur. Stuttgart: Klett-Kotta.

Fred Luks has been involved in sustainability-related research, teaching and management for many years. Previously, he has been principal investigator of an interdisciplinary research project, a guest professor at the University of Hamburg, and Sustainability Manager of a large corporation. He is currently the Head of the Competence Center for Sustainability at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He is the author of numerous publications on sustainability-related topics, including eight books. His blog: www.fredluks.com

91 Image by Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016.

92 Interview Give a Shit! An Interview with Laura Korčulanin by Tereza Kuldova

Tereza Kuldova: Laura, you are the mind behind the activist, artistic and academic project Give a Shit, which aims at raising awareness and breaking persistent taboos related to toilets and excrements, while also proposing a reorganization of the existing western system of flushing. Two things strike me about this project: firstly, its focus on the urban areas in the developed world – for we all know that when we talk of problems with shit, we tend to displace it onto the so called ‘Third World', onto the Other, comfortably ignoring our own excremental challenges and secondly, its focus on flushing and water use. Could you tell us what is the biggest problem we choose to ignore is and why?

Laura Korčulanin: First of all, thanks Tereza for creating the space for this kind of dialogue. Yes, we are speaking of a very delicate topic, mostly overlooked and beyond our comfort zone. Most projects on sanitation and water issues focus primarily on developing countries. What we aim at in our project, Give a Shit, is exactly the opposite, we are focusing on raising awareness about toilet issues in the developed world. In the developed world, we are part of the problem every time we visit our fancy toilets. With every single flush, we waste between 3-7 liters of drinkable water, which is more than people who lack access to it have for their daily survival (5 liters in average) – for cooking, cleaning and hygiene altogether (UN, 2010). Old toilet tanks in some buildings still waste 10-13liters of drinkable water per flush. Today’s western system of flushing accounts for nearly thirty percent of an average household consumption of water, being one of the largest amounts of potable water used in our homes (EC DG EV, 2009). Moreover, simultaneously we flush down the drain and waste our precious ‘gold’ - human excrements. Excrements could be potential renewable sources of energy or fertilizers. And believe it or not, as researchers from the Arizona State University confirmed, we flush down the drain various fine metals, such as gold, silver, and platinum.

Mostly, it seems that we believe the problem to disappear once it goes down the drain. But the reality is quite different and a lot more shocking we can imagine. Not only is drinkable and purified water used to flush our excreta away, but 80% of wastewater globally is never going to be reused again (report from UN-Water and Sanitation, 2017). Sanitation and drinking water were declared human rights in 2010 by the UN, being one of the 2015 Millennium goals (UN, 2010). Of fundamental importance here is to understand how human and natural changes impact available resources so that we can develop sustainable attitudes and ensure adequate access to fresh water. The project Give a Shit focuses particularly on issues related to the human factor, to behavioral issues and mindset change to assure adequate water management, improving efficiency in water use and bringing alternative water resources to use. But there is more to the concern about toilets – as Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) claims, approximately 27,000

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jea.5393 93 Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1: 93-99, ISSN: 2535-3241 Laura Korčulanin during intervention in public toilet facility in Lx Factory, November 2016, Lisbon. Photo: Fernando Mendes. trees are wasted every day on our softly bleached toilet paper. Moreover, the latest scientiﬁc and medical discussions on our toilet system are also concerned with our position once we are doing ‘it,’ something that goes beyond technological and environmental issues.

All in all, a lot of precious blue, brown and green ‘gold’ is being (un)consciously wasted every time we visit our toilets. Something being flushed away means something rejected, perceived as useless and undesirable, something that becomes forgotten once it disappears in front of our vision. As Dominique Laporte argued, this had happened with the introduction of water systems in the city and invention of a toilet flushing system in the 18th century when flushing transformed the human sensory experience of ‘elimination.’

The fact that most of us normally prefer not to see or smell our own products seems to conﬁrm that the rejection of and prejudice against excreta is not just a technological coincidence. As discussed by Mary Douglas and others, today’s prejudice against our own shit is regulated by psychological games of shame and disgust and societal parameters of cleanliness and dirt, and purity and danger. During our childhood, we are socialized into treating our bodily ﬂuids as something private, to be dealt with in an intimate space and into perceiving it as a ‘shitty’ thing to deal with or speak about. Though the expression ‘shit’ is used in most languages, helping us either to ‘purify our

94 Public intervention in Rossio Square of Lisbon for World Toilet Day, 19th of November 2015. Photo: Pedro Carvalho Fernandes souls’ when we need to release our frustrations or to say aloud that we do Give a Shit about something.

TK: You speak of design solutions, also given your involvement with design anthropology. Could you tell us what concrete design solutions you have in mind and what would a sustainable ﬂushing system look like in terms of design?

LK: Yes, I work with design solutions based on anthropological research. Firstly, I believe that it is important to clarify and emphasize that speaking of design solutions does not necessarily mean being only focused solely on product design. Design today is increasingly about service and system design and about informing policies with creation of guidelines and different models to set up the possible solutions. In my Ph.D. at Universidade Europeia, Laureate Univeristies, I use anthropology as a basic methodology to approach the problem and understand it from different perspectives. This gives me an opportunity to approach the problem differently than common design practice would do. One of the most important discoveries in my research is that we are not dealing just with an issue of toilet design but that we are facing a technological lock simultaneously with a social lock one. Speaking about toilet issues means understanding this multi-layered complexity; we are dealing with a ‘wicked problem,’ difﬁcult to address only from one angle or through one stakeholder. The fact that our western system of toilet design has remained, apart from aesthetic and comfort innovation, almost untouched from the end of the 18th century, tells us something about the need for

95 Give a Shit project taking action for World Water Day, 22nd of March 2017. Photo: Caroline Masseli. systemic intervention in toilet design. To address this problem adequately, I am working with a living lab methodology where I approach the problem with the help of different stakeholders to co-create proper sustainable solutions for our future generations. My goal is to formulate guidelines that could serve as operational knowledge for those involved in the process of implementation and diffusion of innovative sustainable toilet design, be it waterless toilets or zero freshwater speciﬁcation toilets. There is much happening lately related to sustainable innovation of toilet design, particularly in Re- invent the Toilet of Bill & Melinda Gates and under the World Toilet Organization platform, though much less is being done in respect to social re-organization and holistic approach to technological implementation and diffusion of its sustainable practices in developed countries.

TK: You have also mentioned the different taboos related to excrements that we still stubbornly maintain in the West, what would be your favorite examples from the ﬁeld and what lessons can we take away from them?

LK: A moment when living in Barcelona changed my life course; it was one of those ‘aha’ moments that showed me the degree to which toilets are underlined by a taboo. When living in the city centre, I have constantly been, daily, noticing an unbearable smell of urine on the street in front of my building, and its surroundings. Curious, I began to dig deeper and talk out the issue with my friends, ask around bars, restaurants and so on. I wanted to know, why, when there are public toilets, does everyone piss in the street? Nobody talked about the problem nor showed any interest in the topic. People felt awkward at hearing the question; others would make fun of it. The strange thing was that there was no public or private pressure to change the situation and there were no public toilets in the city. However, once posters with fees to pay for public urination emerged in the public space of Barcelona while no additional public toilets were

96 provided and tourism was increasing, I understood something was wrong, and no one wanted to talk about it. People would say there is nothing to do about it or they felt impotent in the situation. They preferred to hold their pee than to demand new facilities. I would see the people crossing particular streets covering their noses but refusing to speak about it. This was when the Give a Shit project began to take action.

TK: In his book, History of Shit, Dominique Laporte shows how the process of ‘civilization’ and development of capitalism was parallel to the progressive privatization of shit, and thus also individualization, and hence crucial to the development of the modern individual, while also showing that we are full of shit and often deep in shit, Give a Shit project taking action for World Water Day, 22nd of March 2017. Photo: Caroline Masseli precisely when we appear at our cleanest and most hygienic. H a v e y o u t h o u g h t a b o u t privatization of shit also along these lines, and if so, how do you see this relate to the current development of capitalism and neoliberalization of society at large?

LK: We live in times of convergent crisis, where environmental, social or political crises cannot be seen as independent issues. Since these issues are interdependent, they are becoming difficult to address. If we look at the issue of privatization and its consequences, we would be addressing the issue from a comprehensive perspective of ‘common’ wealth – water. Privatization of such resources can abdicate control over a vital public resource while creating conflict in its usage and distribution since it’s using a different set of criteria, often one that emphasizes profitability. On the other hand, seeing toilets as representative symbols of ‘civilized’ nations throughout history until today, we can see them as important parameters of what’s happening in our society. The fact that our mobile devices, clothes, and cars have experienced bigger and quicker innovations than toilets over the last 140 years could pose a trivial question in regards to the basic needs overlooked by the capitalist consumerist system we live in. More people have access to mobile phones (6 billion) than to toilets (2.4 billion of people still lacking

97 access to it – UN 2015). This is a point of concern in today’s society, but understandable as a socio- cultural tendency where visual and comfort experience is more appreciated. Most public toilets are becoming privatized or semi-private or are non-existent in bigger cities of developed countries and cities, New York being a case in point. The important question to ask is whose responsibility should it be to provide public toilet facilities in public spaces? Is it us, the users, or the government? Should we not be able to ‘do it’ without having to eat or drink in the closest Starbucks?

On the other hand, we pay for the water to be purified and to travel kilometres far, to clean our excrements away. We pay for excrements to be flushed away and disappear from our perception. There are countless problems being ‘flushed’ away from our perception Public intervention in Rossio Square of Lisbon for th every day. Manifold crises can be World Toilet Day, 19 of November 2015. Photo: solved only by a conscious and Pedro Carvalho Fernandes liberated society speaking out without shame, fear or disgust.

TK: Shit has been increasingly popular in the art world, especially in the last couple of decades, as some of the essays in this special issue show, precisely because of its ability to shock, and offend, a sign of resistance and rebellion. On the other hand, as such, shit has also been commodiﬁed and its power to offend weakened, could it be that using shit as a form of showing the ﬁnger to the powerful has become merely a sign of our own weakness vis-à-vis the forces we can no longer control? Does shit still have any revolutionary potential in your view? On the other hand, we could say that in shit we stand united as humanity.

LK: Yes, shit is being increasingly popular in the art world, and even in my artistic work, it is a signiﬁcant symbol of power or empowerment to speak out loud about shit. Shit still has a subversive and powerful meaning and thus also a potential to interact with society. As Barthes once said, ‘when written, the word shit doesn’t smell’ – or for that matter, once it acquires an additional meaning or is taken out of its regular smelly environment. If I reﬂect on the socioeconomic doctrine on secretion and nutrition as

98 discussed by Pierre Leroux and Laporte, we are all part of a natural circle (Laporte 1993, 129), where we can satisfy our own needs by ourselves as producers and consumers. I would say we are all producers and consumers of our own shit. So, we better take charge of our shit and start a revolution. Begin with peaceful revolutionary actions as the one we create in our Give a Shit project. For the starters, we created golden poops together with different kind of volunteers who do give a shit about existing toilet issue to raise the awareness and mobilize the society towards change. Poop and other ‘forbidden’ topics are powerful revolutionary objects to work with and inﬂuence the societal change.

TK: Where can we see you next and ‘give a shit’ together with you?

LK: For the next month, I am based in New York where I am conducting my artistic residency funded by Ministry of Culture in Slovenia. But if not in New York, you can always join us and follow the Give a Shit project on Facebook https://goo.gl/xDVhXN there you can also ﬁnd out about our past and future projects. We are also already planning a diverse program of activities for November when we shall together with UN and World Toilet Organization celebrate the World Toilet Day.

99 Image by Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, 2016. - Text: ‘death is an enormous problem, God100 has the perfect solution’ (random ﬁnd). Book Review Between Abjection and the Abject Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature , ’by Rina Arya, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014.

Jeﬀerson Virgílio Universidade de Lisboa

According to the author, Rina Arya, the book emerged as a response to and an attempt to address the low critical capacity among some of her art students working on topics relating to disgust, or abjection (p. viii-x, see also 189). In particular, their difficulties in following the discussion or relating theory and practice. One of the reasons for this, the author believes, was their lack of sufficient knowledge of psychoanalysis and this is precisely why she set out to write this book, having a clear audience in mind. Although Julia Kristeva is one of the most prominent names in the study of the abject and abjection (specifically in Powers of Horror), which has often been recommended to students, her strong Lacanian base may make it difficult to adequately understand Kristeva’s proposal. Thus, the first chapter devotes itself to writing a script of ‘how to read Powers of Horror, considering Lacanian psychoanalysis as the main influence.’

The introduction offers several corrections to the common misinterpretations about the term abject. The most important and most repeated refers to the reduction of the abject to abjection, where a false synonymy is often constructed to the term disgust. The author shows that the English term abjection does not carry the same weight as the French homonym, and that this must be taken into account in any analysis, especially granted the dominant influence of Georges Bataille in the thought of Julia Kristeva. Even in the first paragraph of the introduction, Rina Arya calls to the fore the works of artists who have explored the abject (Pee Body, by Kiki Smith); this feature is repeated throughout the remainder of the book. However, there is no commentary offered on the art works and sadly, the more than 200 pages of the book lack any image, or even a list of art works. This means that the book can become frustrating for readers with a greater interest in theorizing about abject/ion and less prior knowledge within the field of arts,

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jea.5380 Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1: 101-105, ISSN: 2535-3241 101 as they may constantly need to search for additional information and images of the artworks during their reading. This is also visible in the lack of further comments (or, even notes) about the artworks mentioned as opposed to the effort made to explain theorists of other areas, e.g. Marcel Mauss, Emile Durkheim, Victor Turner, and Arnold Van Gennep. Since the author invests a reasonable effort to introduce theorists outside the arts to art students, it would have been plausible to include similar presentations of works of art for students outside the ﬁeld of the arts.

In the introduction, the author argues that there is a strong indication for the relations of similarity between the abject and the Other – a similarity of particular interest for the students of anthropology. For these students, the attempted recovering of Georges Bataille, in contrast to the dominant role afforded to Kristeva, may be especially valuable. Consequently, the author’s objective in chapter one is to summarize, and provide the know-how for reading Julia Kristeva. Aware of the art students’ limitations in psychoanalysis (p. vii), it also offers a brief review of Lacan and Freud, especially in the replacement of the father for the mother as the main constituent in the image of the formation of identity. But the author goes beyond and even recovers the critiques of Kristeva, thus offering a basis for critical thinking. The second chapter then develops a perspective on the relations between the constructions of the abject and borders. If in the ﬁrst chapter the abject is neither subject nor object, in the second, the abject transgresses any frontier limitation that one may try to establish. While in the ﬁrst chapter priority is given to the space and construction of the individual by the abject, in the second, one moves towards the presence of the abject on a more collective, social scale. Rina Arya attempts here to synthesize the work of Mary Douglas on ‘the matter out of place’ with the work of Kristeva. Roughly, there is a leap from the ‘physical body’ of the individual, presented in chapter one, to the ‘social body’ of culture, and to the way in which the social, as well as the biological, shapes our perceptions and actions. The focus that Douglas brings to the discussion points to the question of cleanliness and purity as constitutive to the formation of these boundaries. The third chapter goes on to recover the perceptions about social bodies, through the work of Georges Bataille, and his writings on abject/ion, published post-mortem. The author has a rather conservative view of social organization in Hinduism, referring to the perceptions that have been consecrated by such names as Louis Dumont. These notions are closely bound up with rather rigid and hierarchical structures that refer mainly to values of purity and impurity. These perceptions have already been reviewed by others, such as Steven Vertovec’s works in presenting the reconstructions of the ‘caste system’ in contexts of Indian diasporas, and is also visible in the analyses included in works organized by Ravindra S. Khare (as seen in Caste, Hierarchy, and Individualism: Indian Critiques of Louis Dumont’s Contributions). This chapter, together with the previous one, are those that enable the most dialogue with some anthropological approaches.

The ‘representation,’ promised in the title of the book, enters only in chapter four, where Rina Arya reviews – even though she tries to reject the term of ‘representation’ (pp. 84-85) – artistic objects concerning the abject, within the visual arts. It is from this chapter onwards that the absence of images becomes critical, as in the events described on page 91 and beyond, when the author seeks to describe the construction of a series of real size dolls made by Hans Bellmer. These points would be better developed if some of the photographs were available and included in the book.

102 The multitude of notes included in this chapter mitigates the situation. It is possible that the images have not been inserted to avoid possible triggers in the reaction of readers (see note 4 of chapter 4, the beginning of page 114, see also 195) or some issue involving copyright. It is in this chapter that the ﬁrst male artist, Hans Bellmer, is mentioned. Replacing the high praise for the ‘transgression capabilities’ of the female artists who had been cited so far, there is the inclusion of the ﬁrst moral-psychological judgement of an artist. This seems like a double standard. About Bellmer (pp. 91-92):

All these scenes are deeply disturbing and convey the sinister, paedophilic and violent quality of his images that are suggestive of rape scenes. [...] His work can be explained by a lifelong motivation to liberate himself from the dictates of ‘adult’ behaviour and from certain constraining powers in his life, such as his overpowering father and prevailing fascist ideals [note omitted] as well as an overwhelming need to release his instincts and explore his perverted misogyny [note omitted]. [...] However, through the eyes of a grown man, his images instead conjure up psychosexual disturbance and the nightmarish. His erotomania for his pubescent dolls may be regarded by many as distasteful, as was his need to articulate polymorphous perversity [note omitted].

And about Kiki Smith (pp. 87-88):

One artist who is preoccupied with embodiment is Kiki Smith. She creates sculptures that portray human corporeality (often through the excretory function), the loss of self, decay and the abject state of the body that is drawn into a cycle of replenishment and decay. They ‘are not the kind of bodies and objects we are accustomed to, not the finished, polished desiring machines produced by modern technology or reproduced on glossy paper or celluloid’ [...] Christine Ross offers the descriptor ‘skinned’ with reference to the Virgin Mary (1993), but the term is more widely applicable for describing the general appearance of Smith’s works. [...] Another phrase that comes to mind when thinking about Smith’s work, as articulated by Catherine Lampert, is the ‘strongly visceral and unnerving presence’ [...]. What makes Smith’s work one of the most apt examples of abjection is that she exposes the vulnerability of the subject that is in a state of corporeal turmoil. This manifests itself in the overflow of substances, such as bodily fluids. [...] Smith features bodies in the process of excretion of some kind. And so, not only are we forced to confront excreta but also the bodily function. [...] The placement and position of the figures that are crouching down and lying down add weight to this reading. [...] The emphasis on the bodily and the questions about identity that abjection gives rise to mean that abjection is still a pervasive theme in contemporary art today.

103 Chapter four is flooded with reflections on the potential (and observed) reactions of the viewing public to some works that utilize the abject/ion. Given the centrality of the discussion in the second half of the chapter on viewers (from a rather paternalistic perspective, as when the author exclaims (p. 101): ‘For many of the artworks discussed in this chapter it is difficult for us to speak about their affective qualities. [...] They may cause feelings in the viewer of fear, horror and disgust, all of which make critical detachment impossible’. Combined with the aforementioned lack of images of any of the works cited, this might indicate an effort to try to impair the reader from effectively becoming a viewer and instead suggesting what he or she is to observe in the first place.

As in the third chapter, Bataille is the author who receives most attention in the fifth chapter. His perceptions about the formless are thoroughly presented to the reader, while a dialogue is developed with other contemporary authors. According to Rina Arya (p. 120): ‘Form is maintained when figure can be discerned from ground, and subject from object, and so the formless implies the collapse of the two states.’ The final parts (125 and passim), seeks to demonstrate the relations to and possible problems of these comparisons between Bataille’s formless and Kristeva’s abject. The proposal is: by establishing what is not abject, the reader understands what the abject may be. Similar situations had already occurred in other chapters (Kant’s sublime, p. 6, disgust, p. 33, etc.). The chapter concludes by an attempt to respond to the criticisms made of the limitations of Kristeva’s proposal for the term abject, by injecting ‘too much meaning’ into its composition. The critics suggest, in short, that in presenting the concept of formless, Bataille did not make such a slip. To Kristeva’s critics, Bataille’s concept of ‘formless’ is a more versatile concept than Kristeva’s ‘abject’. Rina Arya returns to the analysis of impacts and effects on the viewers in chapter six (p. 133). Only this time, she dedicates the chapter to cinematographic productions, focusing in particular on reviews of films with monsters, promising to recover the discussion of the social abject (p. 143 and passim). But then, she sacrifices the proposal in favour of prioritizing (again) the discussion about the viewers at the expense of the producer or even the work (action that will be repeated in the next chapter also, starting on page 164). The author also promises to revise Barbara Creed’s critique (p. 143 and passim) on the feminization of monstrosity, but the final argument (pp. 152-155) is not persuasive. If chapter six is not able to maintain the level of the previous chapters, chapter seven, in dealing with the relations between abject/ion and literature, recovers the announced incestuosity between the symbolic and the semiotic (see also pp. 20-21), allowing the book to finish on a good note. While chapter six can be described as a well-organized series of movie reviews, in chapter seven, we can see considerations drawn upon writers of literature. And it allows for the carrying out of analyses on the influences, desires, and even personal histories of the authors. Comparable deeper analyses were not the case in the previous chapter.

Finishing Abjection and Representation, we are left with the feeling that the ‘abject’ for the author refers to the non-belonging from any side, and the full capacity of transposition from one side to the other of the borders. The abject leaps from the condition of non- object and non-subject (p. 4) to a condition of non-belonging while maintaining a dual belonging (p. 133, 190). The abject is presented as the climax of transgression. That is why it so often simultaneously incites excitement and repulsion in the viewer (p. 5). Paradoxically, the author has succeeded in making the analysis of the abject even more

104 abject (as in marginalized) than the abject itself. There is a continuing effort to break out of the analysis of the abject and focus entirely on the analysis of the art consumer’s perspective (art which is marked by abject discourse). We could even say that the author capitalized on and sold the abject by barricading it on the banks. An abject no longer abject. And hence, it becomes even more abject if compared to the original abject. This can be a natural consequence of this type of comparative approach.

Contacting the reviewer: [email protected]

I thank the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, represented by Dr Tereza Kuldova, for offering the book for review.

105 Shortcut/Republished

Andouillette AAA!!!46 A digest of the doctrine of the anal – And an account of the relationship between art and shit

Georg Gröller

A tramp knocks at a monastery door to beg for something to eat. In the time he waits – the nuns must ﬁnish their prayer, before they turn to worldly things – the poor man is overcome by an inner need and he relieves himself beside the convent door. At this very moment a nun opens the door and sees the man crouching his offering and shouts angrily “That is a bit thick!” To which the tramp replies “and what about the length?”

Whenever psychoanalysis deals with a subject, it directs a gaze inevitably and with all the faithfulness of the metier to the ‘pre-Olympian world of the gods’ in which giants and titans, born as monsters, unmanned their father and ate their own children; in which a goddess grew from a penis adrift on the sea and where goddesses could still be changed into trees by a curse - in other words it turns to the fantastic imaginary world of the child at that time when it begins to constitute itself as a subject amid the heftiest psychic thrusts and agitation, until it ﬁnally submits to the symbolic order in the Oedipus complex adopting the laws of mathematics as the matrix of its being in this world.47

So even by broaching the subject of the relationship between art and shit the psychoanalyst under these premises does so, automatically and as a kind of preliminary spadework task, by examining the question of the position the sphere of the anal takes in the universe of the child. When we consider the disgust and contempt society has poured out on excrement and all those processes that have to do with it, (the simple appearance, but still more the smell and touch - with the exception albeit of a fascinated preoccupation with one’s own excrement, but this in closeted secret of course), we gain a ﬁrst hint of those forces that are at work here – since none of this aversion is yet to be found in the small child. Quite the contrary: proceeding from the initial pleasurable or

46 Andouillette, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia. Andouillette is a French sausage, a specialty of Lyon, Troyes and Cambrai. Traditional andouillette is made from the colon and the stomach of pig. …It … is an acquired taste and can be an interesting challenge even for adventurous eaters. Many French eateries serve andouillette as a hot dish, and foreigners have been disgusted by the aroma, to the point where they ﬁnd it inedible .While some ﬁnd that hot andouillette smells of faeces, food safety requires that all such matter is removed from the meat before cooking. Faeces-like aroma can be attributed to the common use of the pig's colon in this sausage, and stems from the same compounds that give faeces some of its odours.

47 This glimpse back to the “age before Oedipus” never reveals the true relationships as they are at this time, of course, since we perceive childhood only from the perspective of now, subsequently and as a portion of our present that we have created and lost through the ruling order. To this extent it regularly appears to us as either a lost paradise or as chaotic horror and death in the most vivid and lively terms.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jea.5572 Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol 1, No 1:106-110, ISSN: 2535-3241 106 painful devotion of the baby to his digestive processes to a general emergence of the capability to control the sphincter musculature, excrement advances the very ﬁrst object that the child itself produces. The two to three year old invests it as both a part and a product of its own body with the greatest curiosity, with all its pride and tenderness, with feelings representing the notion it has of its own brilliance at this age – a warm and smelling pile with its deliciously pasty, mouldable consistency makes the act of shitting a ﬁrst triumph of human creativity.

Play with the excitation of the mucous membranes, which the child itself can either delay or accelerate and intensify, gives the process of defecation an additional erotic dimension that is not only in morphological terms a neighbour of the genital allure: In their ﬁrst concepts of the sexual act children often imagine this as anal penetration (see Freud’s ‘wolf man’), and in this process the excrement becomes both penis and also the child that is pressed out of the mother’s belly – comparable to the primitive cloaca, where the anus and the reproductive organs have not yet been separated. In the mind of a child the lust zones have not yet been clearly differentiated one from the other, nor can they in any way be placed in categories of their own yet, whether morally or aesthetically. Hand in hand with the still marginal inducement to differentiate more clearly between the sexes or indeed to establish a primacy of heterosexual relationships, the entire ensemble of the polymorphic perversity results from this, a situation characterising the sexuality of the child in its totality. The almost exclusive and seemingly self-evident representation of genital lust by the anal is shown later not only in the anal pleasures of the compulsive neurotic, but also makes a return appearance in the regressive processes of old age, when with the laming of the power of the loins lust often rather turns again ever more to eating, drinking – and by inference, to shitting.

All of this would possibly not have such a great and sustained significance, when the gradual development of the child’s ability to control the anal processes at will was not also predestined to be the first systematic point of approach to satisfying the demands of the Other. Auto-erotic lust is directed into the field of the inter-subjective by this means and it undergoes a conversion to a decisive medium of social regulation of the child.

107 The demands of adults – whether these begin to be made at an earlier or later stage, in a rigid or tolerant form –, their praise for the correct and rebuke for wrong giving and retaining in potty training, constantly turn the anal processes, as we all know from the nursery, into a battleground of power, subjugation and resistance, turn excrement into the first tender gift of love offered by the child, or equally into a weapon with which it literally seeks to throw shit at another person. It is through this process that the child first learns what it means to relinquish its own lust as a means of gaining the devotion of the Other. As a result of the regulation in this exchange procedure of faeces for love, excrement assumes a natural position as the first universal currency of mankind, the little pile becoming the first heap of gold, the first possession and it is no surprise at all when money and all the economic procedures that are linked with it can be understood with entire freedom in terms of the logic of anal processes. Producing to sell, earning to save, to buy, to possess and be powerful, all of these lusts and coercions of business show us that any talk of shit capitalism bears more than a quantum of truth albeit unintentionally and quite apart from any indignation the phrase may provoke.

That the ﬁeld of the anal becomes a true precedence case for the effect of the forbidden explains the powerful barriers of disgust, which the child begins to erect against the anal starting from this early age – showing us what drastic measures the child must resort to, in order to enforce on its own this prohibition imposed from without in its own inner life and consciousness. And once again compulsive neurosis can show us impressively in this context to what point of life-stupor the ambivalences of love and of hate that derive from these conﬂicts can bring us.

Space is not available here to describe the extraordinary richness of significance contained in the anal and all its many variations. But the experience that the Oedipus complex retrospectively structures the field of the anal, and the way it does that, should not go unmentioned. The irrevocable fixation on the difference between the sexes in the Oedipus complex and the incisively radical experience of castration now permit excrement to appear as something that really separates itself from the body and thus becomes a true bodily model of a loss, stamping the soul with the seal of lack. In the dread of this existential experience we are unwilling to relinquish anything more – or put literally we shit ourselves, while triumphing over this experience it is exactly the thing that is lost that becomes the object of desire and the motor of that which we describe as “giving a form to existence”.

Confronted with this fantastic wealth, which, covered over as it may be by public contempt, links human experience with excrement, it will be no surprise that the anal is not only quite plainly a secret driving force behind all social life, but also that it is encountered in art in every possible form of disguise or undress.

Only a few of these should be considered here in order to provide ourselves with a notion of what varied mechanisms art employs in fulﬁlling its real task, that of bringing into articulation that portion of living reality that is socially frowned upon – in our case the anal.

What characterises the material aspect in the traditional work of the ﬁne arts more than the kneading of clay, pasting and plastering, the pressing of pigment sausages out of the

108 tube and the pleasure of applying this to surfaces and bodies? These are no more than the classic sublimatory satisfactions that are already offered to the child as a comfort and a substitute for its relinquishment of the anal. And in times like ours, when the aesthetic is allowed to drift away under pressure of circumstance and the emphasis on an increasingly urgent and direct approach to the point at issue, the painting of a Jackson Pollock or a Jean Fautrier shows how this act of sublimation of the anal is transformed into an explicit joy to create – owing much of its effect on the observer also to this experience of joy.

At the opposite pole of the possibilities of human expression, beyond any sublimated translation, we find exemplarily in Artaud’s Abject a delirious state of collapse by means of which the organs of the body and their functions emerge in a state beyond any representation in the real, bringing about a catastrophic transfiguration of the world, in which perhaps Artaud himself with Christ is finally transformed into that heap of shit that the Virgin Mary squeezes out, in Artaud’s Anus sitting, as the childish imagination may have conceived the process of birth.

The assumption of this outrageous radicalisation of expression in public discourse is also quite possibly to be thanked that a very direct and unveiled preoccupation with excrement, partially under the collective term abject art, assumed an important position in the art of the second half of the last century. This appears as a revolt against the demand of society for cleanliness and order, under the cloak of disguise, or indeed as its essential despised supplement (Žižek) as we can understand the wars, such as the battleﬁelds of the Second World War or the practices of the industrial revolution from the mid 19th century up to this day: one gigantic anal scenario. Public outcry and the demand for order are also to be understood in terms of this kind when artists such as the Viennese actionists reveal the aggressiveness of these processes that derives from the ﬁxation of its anal origins in the subconscious – whreas precisely by giving a gestalt to these processes, they alloy them once again with its original libidinous portions.

But the scene has changed. Not that preoccupation with the sphere of the anal has disappeared from art today. But it would appear to have changed in character. This is shown generally neither as a delirious scream nor as revolt, and even the process of sublimation frequently loses at least one of its most signiﬁcant characteristics: the adaptation by means of which the desired object is hidden as though by a veil. When we observe an installation such as Franz West’s Fragile Cloaca we ﬁnd ourselves almost in a garden in which two out-sized lengths of excrement (in metal) invite us to linger in an almost friendly and inviting manner. It is a fact that scarcely any city would wish to display these sculptures in public, but in the context of cultural activities it no longer appears to have the effect of a provocation – and even more important, it does not appear to be aiming at this objective. Far more it conveys us to a fairy tale or dream world in which like Gulliver in the country of the giants, and thus very like a child, we pause in astonishment before these enormous lumps of excrement and try to imagine how huge and how powerful the beings must be who have produced them. It would be entirely senseless, of course, to make use of real excrement in this concept with all its odorous and tactile qualities as a means of artistic expression , although seen from the

109 perspective of imagination it now seems that we can dare to do anything, in a world without prohibitions. Better perhaps in a world either before or after the prohibitions.

Since art is always a messenger of our hidden present, one in which we do indeed live, but which we still perceive and comprehend in terms of the past, art clearly shows us all that we owe to an ideology of globalised liberalism: - a world in which once again everything is possible as it was before the oedipal disillusionment with our omnipotence: one in which we joyfully shit enormous heaps of excrement, available to us simultaneously in the form of penises and children, love tokens and weapons, and of the currency of our wealth and by means of which the world lies at our feet once more. And moreover in which we forget how we ourselves, like King Ubu in this gigantic manner, can also abruptly become powerless weaklings.

How fortunate that in art this is all only a matter of the imagination. Its function in this respect is like that of an andouillette sausage - the delight of the taste of this speciality deriving exactly from the taste being so strikingly like that of faeces, although we know well enough that these are not among the real ingredients. The hope here is that the delight we obtain from the playful in this process will save us from ending in the maelstrom of a much less sublime libidinous scenario – and thus truly landing in the shit.

English translation by Joseph Lancaster / Y plus

Originally published in: 2007, Hamsterwheel, eds. U. Fischer, F. West. For the whole publication, see: http://www.schlebruegge.com/de/content/hamsterwheel

Dr Georg Gröller is a psychoanalyst based in Vienna. Member of the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse (WAP/IPA), of the Neuer Wiener Gruppe/Lacan Schule and of the research group stuzzicadenti. www.lacan.at

110 Journal of Extreme Anthropology ISSN: 2535-3241 111 Theses on Faeces: Encounters with the Abject Vol. 1, No. 1 - August 2017