THE PHILOSOPHY OF EXCREMENT

ABSTRACT

I took a shit in the woods for the first time last weekend while tripping on four hits of acid. As the steaming pile of excrement eased out of my yawning butt cheeks, thoughts of God, mankind, and the universe crackled through the synapses of my electrified neurons. It struck me that while everyone is guilty of contemplating their navels, especially on psychedelics, the field of Shit Studies needs some good probing. Phenomenologically speaking, is there an ontological différance between excreta and feces? What are the linguistic ramifications of the protean spellings of the word "diarrhea"? The more I dwelled on the scatological subject—which was now quickly coiling into an Other with the vraisemblance of Being—the more I became aware of the need to cast off antediluvian prejudice and fully embrace the powers of ordure. Here is a prolegomenic elucidation of the metaphorics of excrement.

I. SHIT AS SATIRE

From

South Park

to Samuel Beckett, scatology is smeared all over parodic humor. Since the aim of satire is not only to ridicule, but also to expose the follies of society-at-large, shit's ability to degrade, pollute, and disgust is a useful weapon. As a mechanism of social critique, nothing is more effective than the turd as trope—it serves as a reminder that humanity's lofty aspirations are often full of shit. Swift obviously picked up on the conditions of possibility for extreme desublimation which are manifest in excrement when he wrote the poem "The Lady's Dressing Room," which is about some poor chap who gets heartbroken when he sees his love take a massive dump.

Her Allum Flower to stop the Steams/ Exha'd from sour unsavory Stream/Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!

Evidently, butt fudge in these verses is used as an attack on the pretentions of idealized beauty. But dudes who can't handle a lady's noxious compositions don't deserve to get laid anyway, so moving on.

II. SHIT AS ANTI-NATURE

If all the famous philosophers worth their shit threw a BDSM party, we all know Freud would be the coprophagiac inviting everyone to take Cleveland Steamers on his chest. In his theory of "organic repression," the dude postulated that the repression of the olfactory in favor of the visual is what paved the way to civilization. As the human grew erect (by which I mean developed from a beastly to an upright posture, you pervs) distance from soil translated into disgust at the soiled. Strong odors became a source of embarrassment, as they were linked to animality and primitivism. While children are happy to fondle their dingleberries, adults sublimate these primal instincts, believing them contrary to conceptions of rational enlightenment.

III. SHIT AS CAPITALISM

Usually when some commie asshole starts raving about how capitalism is full of shit, I tell them that I hear tour packages to North Korea are going for cheap. But maybe those Marxist muffs are on to something—the workings of a market economy share many commonalities to defecation. In a world where things and people are thought of as "goods and services," reality is compressed into conceptions of "use value" or "utility." Jean Baudrillard posited that this logic of exchange value—a fundamental tenet of economics—has rendered us into pathetic creatures incapable of differentiation. Everything in a consumer society "is finally digested and reduced to the same homogenous fecal matter… a controlled, lubricated, and consumer excretion (fecalite) is henceforth transferred into things, everywhere diffused in the indistinguishability of things and of social relations." Disneyland, the apogee of capitalism's excesses, consumes childhood fairytales and fantasies only to shit them out in a gluttonous frenzy. Baudrillard called it "the first great toxic excrement of hyperreal civilization." It's no coincidence, either, that the economic term for a loss in utilitarian value is "waste." Or, that oil—which already looks and smells like the most putrid anal butter ever—is frequently dubbed as "the devil's excrement." Freud believed that the bourgeoisie love for money-hoarding stemmed from the infant's libidinal urge towards anal retention. And finally, according to

a recent New York Post report

, the most desired items for consumers in North Korea are skinny jeans, pornos—and human excrement.

CONCLUSION

A hermeneutical inquiry into the philological dialectics of the Stercoraceous Subject reveals a vast plenitude of critical opinions perhaps best summarized by Rebalais when he declared, "O belle matière fécale!" Treatment of the body's secretions as abject matter is, at best, as fatuous as flatulence, or at worst, propagated by narrow-minded ideologies on propriety. After all,

inter urinas et faeces nascimur

. MICHELLE ONG