Introduction
Modern Excrementalities and Postcolonic Biopolitics

My subject is shit, unavoidably. For most of us, it is a subject that elicits disgust and unease, fears of contamination and transgression, feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Shit is something we humans want to eliminate, remove from our vicinity, avoid touching or smelling - especially when it is others' shit. But the same intense disavowal and fervent distancing, the same desperate repression and displacement, also seem to compel us to analyze, calculate, survey, and write up the very thing that causes so much discomfort and distress. And so, that which ought to go unnamed in fact generates unceasing discussion in the humanities, the sciences, and popular culture. Our perpetual denial and rejection of shit force us to think again, and to think differently, about what it means to be human and modern; our reactions to shit make us speculate on how we might become more hygienic, secure, and civilized citizens. Surely, efforts to control shit, the seductive stool, are among the infant's first opportunities to theorize the world. Do we ever stop pondering shit in this way? In other words, it may be shit and its disavowal that make us "modern humans" - in as much as we aspire to that status or are permitted that status. The response to shit serves as the means to figure out who we are and who we want to be - and what we are not. Shit, then, can be good to think with and against and beside.

In this book, human shit proves to be a remarkably capacious subject, one that allows us to mess with wastewater surveillance or sewage snooping, the gut microbiome, the politics of colon-izing others and ourselves, perceptions of pollution and danger, feelings of revulsion and repugnance, along with an array of fecal fascinations and repressions. A dirty subject that touches on excremental colonialism, the fecal body politic, the latrinoscene, anal characters and anal pleasures, stool fetishes, intestinal intoxication, turd romancing, gut buddies, the helminth underground, kitsch tropical laboratories, and the rise of the biomedical sciences in the twentieth century. A subject, as we shall see, that ranges from environmental epidemiology and contemporary genomics to literary figuring of the grotesque or carnivalesque, to the reveries of psychoanalysis and social theory, and to the proliferation of shit art. Among this cornucopia of modern excrementality, my principal goal has been to reveal the scato-logics of the life sciences and population health during the past century and more; that is, to perform a procto-ontology of those sciences that help to make us "developed" and civilized.

Shit is a subject that has long preoccupied me - like everyone else, I expect. In the 1990s, I began writing articles with titles such as "Excremental Colonialism" and "Crap on the Map," observing pervasive and durable fixations on the intimate relations of bodily wastes and states of health or disease - offering critical historical studies tracking the cloacal captivations of modern public health. I was especially interested in how toilet practices became technologies of "whiteness," and how other races became "wasted" and pathologized under the sign of shit. By 2020, however, scarcely a whiff of this earlier research lingered, my thoughts about the history of shit having been, so it seemed, thoroughly evacuated. Then came COVID-19 and a renewed sense of excretory urgency - or at least, a renewed apprehension of the need for further critical inquiry into the paradox of how shit, repellent yet also alluring, can both devalue and acquire value.

Soon after the pandemic began, I found myself engrossed in discussion of the merits of sewage surveillance, as one does. I was in Hobart, Tasmania, talking with the state director of public health, whom I have known since we were medical students, about the growing political and popular obsession with wastewater testing for the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. At the time, we faced the conundrum that any fecal findings would be inconsequential without additional public health intelligence. In communities with adequate individual testing and contact tracing, like Australia, the results of wastewater epidemiology did not matter much; certainly they were rarely sufficient in themselves to determine health policy. Yet everyone then was clamoring for more sewage studies, fetishizing excrement, demanding their sentinel wastes be registered and archived. They were stuck on the promissory value - and potential risk - of shit. The virus was reschooling us in stools. As Emma Garnett and colleagues note in Critical Public Health, "waste has come to matter in distinct ways during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing opportunities to re-think waste as a problem."1 And in compelling us thus to rethink waste as a problem, the pandemic inevitably insists on us interrogating our sense of self, prompting us to reassess our body's relations with itself and the world. Feminist theorist Judith Butler observes:

The definitive boundaries of the body pressured by most forms of individualism have been called into question as the invariable porosity of the body - its openings, its mucosal linings, its windpipes - all become salient matters of life and death . How, then, do we rethink bodily relations of interdependency, intertwinement, and porosity during these times?2

Or, just as urgently, how do we recognize continuing scatological resistances to, and denials of, any new-found entanglement and porosity? In this sense, every scatology is fundamentally an eschatology too, a theory of the destiny of humanity.

Meanwhile, the planetary excremental burden continues to surge. Along with our domesticated animals, we produce more than four trillion kilograms of fecal "biomass" each year. Not surprisingly, China and India together contribute a quarter of the world's human shit, with Brazil and the United States following close behind.3 Much as we want to deny it, we are wallowing in the stuff. A lot of the non-human animal manure ends up as fertilizer in agriculture; some human waste in developed urban centers is removed, flushed away through sewage systems, then treated and destroyed; some in poorer spots is dissolved in septic tanks; and most turds in the remainder of the world just get deposited in the surrounding environment. Careless disposal of shit and failures of sanitation undoubtedly promote the spread of enteric pathogens, which can cause cholera, typhoid fever, poliomyelitis, and a range of diarrheal diseases.4 There is no gainsaying the risks of indiscriminate contact with feces, of inept and discriminatory fecal management, especially affecting the poor, marginalized, and dispossessed. And yet, most epidemiological studies and molecular research concerning human stool in the past thirty years have concentrated on middle-class communities and sewersheds, on the wealthy sewered 30 percent, where such diseases are rare. Predominantly, the biomedical commitment has been to make this "developed" excreta data rich and informationally loaded. The vast enterprise of datafying and digitizing stool, of abstracting and securitizing feces, occurs disproportionately where the threat is least. In sewered parts of the world, where most wastewater epidemiology and gut microbiome research take place, shit is rarely infectious and noxious. Accordingly, the datasets and other symbolic equivalents derived from it, so far, have demonstrated little utility in public health and clinical practice. There must be some other explanation, then, for these relentless and extravagant efforts to abstract and to objectify and to securitize our beguiling yet still fearsome shit.

Why shit? Why now? These are questions we ask ourselves almost every day, sometimes insistently, with deep-seated feelings of necessity. Despite such universal physiological needs, the metaphysical expression of these irrepressible urges has not commonly been subject to critical scrutiny. What I want to do here, however, is look closely at how defecation and intestinal stasis - a kind of anal dialectic of flow and blockage, perhaps the most visceral dialectic of all - have prompted and shaped knowledge practices in epidemiology, microbiomics, public health, psychoanalysis, social theory, literature, and art. I am interested in what shit comes to symbolize in these domains. As we shall see, each study of defecatory possibilities and excremental imaginings inevitably leads to another, then another. Time and time again, shit conjures a sense of danger and disorder, a perception of open orifices and permeable boundaries, an incessant threat to corporeal integrity and safety. The disciplines of the humanities and biomedical sciences generate and regenerate possible solutions to this most proximate problem of disorder.5 Thus, in opposition to shit's defacements and defilements, the arts and sciences together serve to provide alternative models of the secure citizen, the private civilized person, as well as to constitute ideal hygienic polities - modern collectives of mutually untouchable, or immunitary, individuals. The disciplines come to anathematize and mobilize shit, using it to police spatial and political boundaries and to ensure, as historian Dominique Laporte put it, the "sphincteral training of the social body."6 But then, implacably, shit returns to stain such carefully laundered whites - a seemingly indelible brown...