History of Shit (review)

The Frenchman, wrote Charles Baudelaire in "My Heart Laid Bare," "does not mind filth in his home, and in literature he is scatophagous. He is mad about excrement." ¹ Dominique Laporte carries this tradition into the late twentieth century in History of Shit, published in France in 1978. This essay on the discourse of excretion and recuperation opens with an examination of the royal decree of 1539 regulating the disposal of human waste in Paris, and concludes with Pierre Leroux's socialist (today we would say ecologist) theory of the circulus, written more than three centuries later: citizens' excretions, far from being dangerous waste to be banished, must be collected by the state to assure the production of what is necessary to sustain citizens. Laporte pursues two interrelated strands of argument, Foucauldian and Marxist, rooted in the French intellectual environment of the late 1970s. The 1539 decree was an exemplar of the new disciplines, responsibilities, and boundaries that created the modern state and the individual: "Totalitarianism simply involves (indeed, is predicated on) the relegation of shit to the private realm" (p. 66). There is no public shit—it becomes sewage—and this loss of the communal to the dialectic of the individual and the state is at the core of Laporte's argument. His gloss on the privatization of bodily functions in ensuing centuries resonates with Michel Foucault's contemporaneous explorations of the play of repression and liberation in the discourse of sexuality: "We dare not speak about shit. But, since the beginning of time no other subject—not even sex—has caused us to speak so much" (p. 112).

But Laporte was writing in the shadow of the May 1968 critique of capitalist culture as well. Using the trope of citizens' production of feces in state-mandated privies in the cities, the state's role in their banishment ("the State is the Sewer" [p. 56]), and their return in fertilized crops, Laporte examines the role of the state in the naturalization and legitimization of capitalism. As moral checks on economic activity were abandoned in a nascent capitalist culture, the state's role in purifying the products of citizens' mucking about in the market became paramount. State coinage has no smell, mephitic or otherwise. With wealth, not birth, being the key to the new bourgeois order, the steady flow of currency can cleanse unspeakable origins. History of Shit resonates with the intellectual climate a decade after 1968, both in the concern with why the market and the republic cannot admit their mutual dependence—"the State initiates a contradictory discourse . . . that urges proprietors to become ever richer, while casting a withering eye on the foul odor of their accumulations" (p. 46)—and in ambivalent references to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, site of the last French utopian socialist romance. Leroux's long dialogue presented at the end of the book as "proletarian science" speaking to "bourgeois science," captures the aesthetic and ideological thrill of the logic outside the logic in which we continue to live.

History of Shit is a meditation, not an academic work. Too little attention is given to the cultural worlds in which the cited texts were created to assess what they tell us about these worlds. Laporte's effort to incorporate imperialism into his argument with reference to Europeans' concern that they were unable to purify the black body is not well substantiated with textual evidence, and is an exemplar of the dangers that haunt an essay like this: were people thinking as I am revealing them to think, they would think like this. To use a characterization that might please Laporte, engaged as he is in a conversation with Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents,History of Shit lacks the anal qualities that scholars...