Spectacles of Waste

Today, our excremental captivation defines what it means to be a modern person. Pressing concerns about fecal matters challenge our sense of ourselves, making us question whether we can ever be truly uncontaminated. Strained efforts to disavow our shit have forced out the sciences of wastewater epidemiology and the molecular refinements of the human gut microbiome. Attempts to repudiate our shit additionally have produced psychoanalysis, philosophy, social theory, literature and contemporary art. But why do we live by these scato-logics? And why are we compelled to try to deny and repress these shitty truths?

In Spectacles of Waste, leading historian of medicine Warwick Anderson reveals how human shit stimulates and challenges modern reason, bioscience and aesthetics. He expertly guides us on a passage through sewage snooping, deep into the gut microbiome, past excremental colonialism and across the contemporary politics of colon-izing others (as well as ourselves). A cornucopia of modern excrementality confronts us, a filthy array of fecal fascinations ranging from anal characters and anal pleasures, uncanny stools, turd romancing, intestinal intoxication, gut buddies, the hookworm underground, shit art, kitsch tropical laboratories, and the latrinoscene-all the way to the emergence of the modern life sciences.

Written with verve and aplomb, Anderson's expert analysis reveals how in recent years (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic) we doubled down on abstracting and datafying our shit, underlining our unconscious complicity in smearing its dirty biopolitical signature across our lives.