As I was writing Spectacles of waste (Polity 2024), I got the feeling that a spectre is haunting the modern world. Not the spectre of communism, alas, but phantom human excrement, the uncanny stool. In keeping with the book’s title, I suppose I should say it is an increasingly spectacular, if disagreeable, spectre.
I’m referring to the apparition always shadowing us as we go about our modern hygienic lives—an eerie presence that we virtuously insist must be absent, either flushed away into oblivion or magically refigured and replaced by secure data sets and models. The dirty abject stuff that we seek constantly either to remove and deny or inscribe and sublimate. We civilised moderns develop all kinds of techniques and incantations to render shit invisible — yet it keeps returning, so it seems, to bite us in the bum. Thus, relentless expulsion and rejection of our intimate excretions — what Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘the pathos of distance’ — ultimately proves unsustainable. Or as Bruno Latour told us, we have never truly become modern. But how we keep trying.
The ‘colon’-isation of defecation
Late last century, inspired by the fashion for histories of the body, I expatiated on what I called ‘excremental colonialism’ in Critical Inquiry — in an article now cited some 400 times thanks to scatology’s enduring appeal. I described the obsessions of early twentieth-century white American health officers with Filipino defaecation. These white men presented themselves as purely expressive, retentive, controlled — whereas the Filipinos they had colonised, or rather colon-ised, appeared as ‘promiscuous defecators’, primitive voiceless polluting figures requiring ceaseless surveillance and reformation. I wanted to show how U.S. colonialism was intimately embodied, how it came to constitute a racialised orificial order, marking a somatised hierarchy of closure and control.
My inquiries into colonial wastes caused me to delve deep into social theory and cultural anthropology. I was immersed in the symbolic dimensions of medicine and public health. Heeding William James’s warnings against ‘medical materialism’, I realised, despite my own medical training, that scientific explanation will not completely substitute for symbolic import or spiritual significance. Indeed, most efforts to render shit epidemiologically legible have exerted a symbolic or irrational compulsion out of proportion to any actual utility.
For a few decades after speculating on excremental colonialism I managed to resist the faecofugal spin. Then came COVID-19 and the surge in interest in wastewater epidemiology. In societies where individual testing and contact tracing are possible this seems to me largely a redundant technology. Yet we were transfixed. It was a vivid example of the implacable return of shit to the biosecurity calculus.
So, I wondered, how do we understand this incapacity to leave behind the defecatory scene? What is happening when we imagine otherwise worthless, even dangerous, human waste as informative and valuable viral sentinels? What biomedical rituals make this transformation happen?
The scientific datafication of stool
I decided, perhaps rashly, to write Spectacles of waste. As I did so, I greatly expanded my excretory range, encompassing not only wastewater epidemiology but also the faecal obsessions of psychoanalysis, social theory, modernist literature, recuperative anthropology, and ‘shit art’. The middle passages of the book channel us back to the racial colon-ising of the body, including self-colonisation, and the encroaching latrinoscene of the twentieth century. I considered faecal fetishes, defecation as a labour process, and the disruptive proliferation of uncanny or phantasmatic stools. I returned to the scientific datafication and sublimation of excrement, manifested in the proliferation of investigations of the human gut microbiome, where waste is transmuted into millions of molecularised ‘gut buddies’. I think of the book’s contents as a scatological ensemble, a rich faecal palette, a feast of ordure. According to Anna Tsing’s kind endorsement, I put ‘the “anal” back in analysis, and the “colon” back into colonisation.’ (At least I think she meant it kindly.)
We are assured that as wealthy moderns we might safely evacuate our wastes, keeping them at a distance, purifying them. But these days, as our sanitary infrastructure decomposes, simply flushing rarely feels sufficient. Residual anxieties about excrementitious stuff haunt us, threatening us with abjection, driving us to double down on securitising our waste through rendering it safely molecular and data rich, even when practical benefits are few. Enduringly fascinated by defilement, we keep finding ways to represent safely the unspeakable, to make the abject a securely distant, yet spectacularised, object—hence codifying wastewater epidemiology and the gut microbiome. As Roland Barthes pithily put it: ‘Shit has no odour when written.’
In a sense, then, colon-isation, whether of self or other, has become the decolonial limit experience, the rule we cannot imagine breaking. To think with, rather than against, the colon would be to deny our modern identities. Can we imagine modern life outside the dialectic of the sphincter—which is the embodied form of the dialectic of Enlightenment? (Both Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were fixated on anal character, after all.) We feel the need to reassert conventional structural binaries: hygienic or dirty, civilised or natural, modern or primitive—with the first term of each juxtaposition privileged. We seek to expel or sublimate whatever might trouble these boundaries. We prefer scatologics to ecologics.
Understanding our excremental anxieties
Since I finished Spectacles of waste, our excremental anxieties have only grown in intensity. As Steve Bannon recommends, we’ve flooded the zone with shit. The Seine is supposedly full of poo. Sewage systems are breaking down and overflowing across the developed world. Turds are catching waves in England; Eton College closed when its toilets blocked. In a 2023 debate between governors Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom, DeSantis proudly displayed the San Francisco ‘poop map’, plotting some 250,000 reports of human faeces deposited on the city’s streets. It was a means of colon-ising the homeless in California, degrading the progressive state, and signalling its lack of manly Republican virtue. At a dinner in 2024, former president Donald Trump told supporters he will never again use the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office because Joe Biden had ‘soiled’ it. I could go on: the profusion of poo museums around the world, the incredibly popular YouTube series ‘Skibidi toilets’ (viewed more than 65 billion times), celebrity American proctologists or ‘bottom whisperers’, Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days set in high-modernist Tokyo toilet blocks—the list is endless. A burgeoning sense of widening permeabilities and porosities, the prospect of immunological failure, the looming spectre of faecal peril—these anxieties, these hauntings, have made the spectacle of shit, and its containment or sublimation, more compelling than ever.
We even have a new word for the faecoscene, our modern condition: enshittification. Coined a few years ago to describe the decay of internet platforms, the term was soon expanded to include the multiple ways in which contemporary capitalism destroys human dignity. ‘The obscene little word did big numbers’, its creator Cory Doctorow said, ‘it really hit the zeitgeist.’ You see, that’s just what I mean: a spectre is haunting the modern world…
About the book
In Spectacles of waste, leading historian of medicine Warwick Anderson reveals how human excrement has always complicated humanity’s attempts to become modern. From wastewater epidemiology and sewage snooping to fecal transplants and excremental art, he argues that our insistence on separating ourselves from our bodily waste has fundamentally shaped our philosophies, social theories, literature and art—even the emergence of high-tech science as we understand it today.
