Shit happens: The fears that constitute waste

Faeces, from the Latin faex – residue or dregs – is a material with a rich history of social, spiritual and material consequences (Laporte, 2000) that has nevertheless received scant attention in the social sciences. A notable exception is the work of Norbert Elias (2000 [1939]) who shows that practices of eating have been subject to increasingly stringent codes of social and personal conduct, particularly in respect of bodily functions and fluids. In particular, during the fifteenth century, eating, spitting, urination and defecation appear to have been practices that prompted censure: ‘Before you sit down, make sure your seat has not been fouled’, warns one text (Elias, 2000: 110). That such advice was required indicates an important detail: that it was conceivable for practices of eating and excretion to intersect during the meal! To be sure, the medieval table was a place of mixings: Elias notes that people might chomp on a bone before returning it to the communal bowl (precursor to double-dipping one’s crudité in the tzatziki). Alternatively they might relieve themselves on their hosts’ curtains, a feature common enough at the Brunswick Court to have warranted this advice during the advent of modernity: ‘Let no one, whoever he may be, before, at, or after meals, early or late, foul the staircases, corridors or closets with urine or other filth, but go to suitable, prescribed places for such relief ’ (Elias, 2000: 112). Elias explains that over the course of centuries, these performances of manners are internalised and embodied as a ‘superego’ or ‘habitus’ that layers increasing levels of restraint and foresight over practices of ingestion, digestion and egestion. Importantly, as these connected processes became regulated in this way, they also became temporally and spatially ordered and separated. For example, through the passage of modernity the meal comes to be served in increasing numbers of courses, which become more homogeneous – a fish course, a meat course – and separated into planned sequences (see Flandrin, 2007). Moreover, unlike the mid-meal relief that medieval subjects might have enjoyed, modern digestion is temporally separated from the meal. In highmodernity this may have first entailed time in the smoking room, where the quacks and pongs of gentlemanly farts are disguised by guffaws and cigarsmoke. Finally, expulsion is carried out alone in tiled cubicles where the object of disgust plonks beneath water, lest its stench might linger. Changing temporal and spatial orderings of meals, and the progressive separation of what occurs afterwards are of sociological consequence. Elias (2000) explains how these separations arise from a need to exhibit taste and etiquette as a means of social advancement in court societies in which previous methods of advancement – notably direct physical violence – had been centralised under state authority (cf. Foucault, 1991). Moreover, Elias explains that imperatives to exhibit distinctions in matters of eating and subsequent bodily ejections became more cramping as modernity wore on, since emerging middle-classes aped manners that ordered these higher social circles. This upward pressure justified a kind of etiquette arms race – a race from the bottom – in which distinction was maintained through increasingly elaborate manners and fears surrounding excrement and associated emissions (Elias, 2000). Contravention of these orders resulted in experiences of shame and embarrassment, further limiting contact with excremental matters (Bradshaw & Canniford, 2010; LaCom, 2007; Elias, 2000).