Before the 20th century, European culture did not value shit. There are some exceptions. A few jokes in low comedies, the odd piece of pornography that was privately printed, and some eccentricities. There was Rabelais, or de Sade in France, or two Rembrandt etchings of a peasant couple in Amsterdam, and some other anonymous comedy etchings in England, but that were about it. There was not a consistent, ethical and theological construction around the language of expulsion, of the unruly body once controlled, and there was not even attempts made to make sacred the substance from the body of Christ. Though there were theological efforts to not only make Christ’s sweat, tears and blood holy, but his mother’s milk, blood, sweat, and tears, in addition to a corpus of work depicting the infant Christ pissing, and saint’s stories are filled with blood, tears, milk and sweat.
To discuss shit then as an abstract, as a cultural artifact, is to realize that it can be controlled, that we are sufficiently far away from the substance that art can be made about it in a meta-contextual way, not as a subject of jokes, but as a humanizing influence. The French urbanists Dominique Laporte, Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe El-Khoury in their History Of Shit make the argument that this control was the central civilizing act that marked the beginning of modernity, originating this movement in a royal proclamation about sewage, declared in Paris in 1539, here they quote the translator: “Hold on to your shit. Dispose of it only in the dark of night. Remove your pigs from the sight beyond the city walls, or I will seize your person and your goods, engulf your home in my capricious purse, and lock your body in my jail”
To control shit, was to control the body. The absence of a discourse around, and about this substance was an extension of the desire for those in power to control bodies and discourses. The rivers of sewage that flowed under and were the physical foundations of cities were hidden, and were lost from public discussion by taboos around politness and desire for cleanliness.
The modernist instinct towards the hygienic desire to hide what it did, the body taboos of shame, the raw comedy that came from these, because only comedy was only allowed to be disruptive, were attached to a Christianity that worked from the body to a Christianity that worked from the head. The hiding of shit was analogous to the hiding of the body, a point that Barthes makes in his triple biography of Sade, Fourier, and Loyola. Sade, where the scientific method of the early physicist Fourier, the methodical debauchery of the Marquis de Sade, and the logocentric patterning of the foundational Jesuit Ignatius De Loyola were all about controlling language in the same capacity as the kings controlled bodies, but also, that the transgressions of Sade were systematic.
The upending of the morality and social control as found in De Sade, and the revolution in France, did not seek a chaos, or a complete upending of any status of behaviour. Shit was still being controlled, it was being abstracted, extended, and placed in a new context, but the slop was still being carried by the night, and was pushed under the streets, just as those streets were being ripped apart. Barthes makes the arguments that the upending of Sade, and the construction of norms found in Loyala had the same instincts about the linguistic usurping the corporeal. “What are here being overturned are obliviously, in a very classical way, the social fetishes, kings, ministers, eccleastics, etc, but so too the language, the traditional classes of writing: criminal contamination touches every style of the discourse: narrative, lyrical, moral, maxim, mythological topos. We begin to recognize that the transgressions of language posses an offensive power at least as strong as that of moral transgressions, and that the poetry which is itself the language of the language of the transgressions of language…”
The problem we have then, with De Sade, is not the actual physical acts of pornography that he claims to discuss, but that he has internalized and done violence to the liturgical building up of linguistic power, he has used the control of tongue to radically decentralize the control of asshole—this power: the control of tongue, of asshole, of body, of language, then becomes the end of the early modernist instincts of the king and the beginning of enlightenment era instincts surrounding at the very least, some kind of rhetorical autonomy of person.
To put it another way, the Sade returns the body back to the self, and recognizes that how we are spoken to, not only the words that are chosen, but the order, the construction, the ontological subtextual underpinnings of tradition that allow others to create the self for us, is problematic, but one of the ways to solve that problem, to untie the bondage straps of liturgical or at least theological discourses, is to speak back using the controlled texts.
This control, or the freeing of control, was an inside joke, only allowed to those who could read Sade, who was untranslated until the 20th century, at least in popular editions, and at least in English. Ironically, then the people who were most likely to have read him in the original, were those academics who were taught at least partially in the French system, a system whose paedagogical systems were inherited from Loyala’s methods. In this capacity, the extreme pornographer, and the extreme theologian shared the same psychic space, the same shelf in the bathroom, so to speak.
The translation of , and scholarly work around his religious practices, were then a 20th century phenomena, and he became not a debauched noble of the renaissance, but the originating philosopher for a new kind of libertinism, and also, a new kind of horror. If up to the 20th century, shit was controlled, and was not part of the cultural context, past the 20th century, it became a thematic constant, an important element of our thinking about the body, about God, and about desire. Often these texts feature a loosening of language, and sometimes an explicit talking back, and sometimes they are adaptations or translations of the history that I have laid out, but they are also commentaries on not only language, but morality, politics, art history, war, violence, camp, pleasure, the distancing of the body, and the bring the body closer.
There is not enough space to talk about the dozens of examples across film, theatre, poetry, pornography, photography, sculpture, installation, painting, novels, performance, and short stories that are created by all genders, most sexualities, across the political spectrum, by the Irish, Nigerians, Americans, the English, the French, the Dutch, and Italians, among others. But there are a few works that seem typical, that can tell us about how shit has been used as a theological context throughout the 20th century, as an extension of the interaction between linguistic control, and the radical freeing of desire—a tension that centers our humanity. In her introduction to Andres Serrano’s first major retrospective, Wendy Steiner talks a bit about this undergirding: “The tension between literalism and symbolism intensified when Serrano began to photograph vital fluids. Blood, milk and urine are strongly coded as human symbols--in particular, as fluids requiring containment. Prohibitions against their spillage are proverbial...When Serrano claimed...that he started using urine because it introduced yellow into his photographic palette, he recalled the laughable inadequacy of formalism to control meaning and the body...”
These prohibitions against spilling and this requirement towards containment function as a moral call towards conteince and temprance. Traditionally this call is the tissue that connects the language of religion to the religious body. The violation of these traditions, the refusal to take part in discourses that were never really useful, and often profoundly damaging, was one of the central themes of Yeats, and his poem Crazy Jane talks to the Bishop can provide a useful introduction to other work throughout the century that cut through this tissue. The poem contains a stanza that allows for a new kind of thinking, about shit, a way to sanctify what was previously unsanctfiable, and allows for the incarnation to be found everywhere. “But Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement;/For nothing can be sole or whole/That has not been rent.'”
This prophetic work tells of the problems of the 20th century—the speaking of power, the controlling language that can no longer be controlled, the refusal of the once powerful split between high art and low comedy, and the idea that all is a creation of the divine. Crazy Jane talks to the bishop, she refuses to make the connections between language and power, between ecclestical desire for controlling language and for the freeing of the body, which is central to the European project.
Yeat’s integrative desire to connect the body and the soul, outside traditional Christianity, and his usage of the filth to do so, is also found in the French pornographer and critic, Bataille, whose obscene refusal of the body of Christ, has some of the same prophetic instincts as Yeats, but because of his role in the French academy, is much closer to the rhetorical traditions of Sade, and provides an interesting liminal intersection between the critical instincts of the Loyala inspired academie francaise, and the Loyola refusing post structural thinkers like Foucualt and Barthes. Like the alchemy transmogrifying of filth into fair that Crazy Jane constructs, Batialle uses the language and inbound violence of Christianity as a tool against itself, as a way of refusing it’s power.
This bait and switch can be found most clearly in The Story of the Eye, and it’s passages surrounding how Sir Edmund treats the host. Sir Edmund, debauched, English, and pious is the kind of obscenity laden body obsessive that Batialle views as iconic of Christianity, and by his presence refuses all that is holy about humanities interactions: “After barricading the door, Sir Edmund rummaged through the closets until he finally lit upon a large chalice… ‘Look’, he explained to Simone, ‘the eucharistic hosts in the ciborium, and here the chalice where they put white wine.’ ‘They smell like come’, said Simone, sniffing the unleavened wafers. ‘Precisely’, continued Sir Edmund. ‘The hosts, as you see, are nothing other than Christ’s sperm in the form of small white biscuits. And as for the wine they put in the chalice, the ecclesiastics say it is the blood of Christ, but they are obviously mistaken. If they really thought that it was the blood, they would use red wine, but since they employ only white wine, they are showing that at the bottom of their hearts they are quite aware that this is urine.”
Though it is the generative semen and urine, which has already had a presence in Christianity, and not shit, but there is something to the locking away, to the masking, to the obsessive, connoisseurship of tastes and smells, and the use of latin vocabulary, of explicit claiming of one substance for another, that marks the linguistic power of Christianity. In her essay on the spiritual power of Batialle, and the influence of this text, Leslie Anne Boldt makes the connections explicitly: “In this passage, Bataille invites the reader to imagine a rite in which Christ’s sperm and urine are ceremoniously swallowed; the images of sperm and urine are used to violate the received notions of the host and Christ’s blood respectively; one sign violates another without, however, permitting either one to dominate the other. The value (or energy) of the received notions, once released, continue to reverberate in a loss that is not entirely subverted to the profit of the image inflicting sacrifice.”
One sign violating the other is central here, it is what Sade did to the work of Loyala, it is what Loyala did to the gospels, and it is what Crazy Jane did to the Bishop. It is also, in his filmic adaptation/updating of 120 Days of Sodom, what Passolini does to Sade. The film has the same liturgical, calendar based logocentric structure as the book, but it expands that which is done, by using filmic grammar, it shatters even more of the taboos. The film has four men, a hundred youths, and four women. The men, each representing a kind of power in Fascist Italy (The church, the army, the government, and the traditional aristocracy) force the youth to commit acts of unprecedented debauchery, including incest, corpophagia, sado-masochism, blood play, and in the end torture.
For Passolini, the intermingling of state power, and religious power, of the erotic use of language, and the ecclestical use of language having the same base, is foundationally the structures that will lead to the death of sex. That those in power are libertines who have no limits, and so can make baroque (literally, the film is shot in the same palace that Mussolini commandeered, and was built in the 16th century) the ordinary erotic games that people play, the ones of pleasure, of a kind of arcadian openness that is a hall mark of his films, and which is closed and hardned in this one (though not literally hardened, for all of the wide laughs and rictus grins that are supposed to signify pleasure among the four men, and even among the myriad examples of nudity, there is not one erection.
In the linear notes for the Criterion edition of this film, the film critic Naomi Greene marks the dangerous territory that Salo works through: “…Passolini attempted to remove every cloak, every view, conferred upon sado-masochism by a tradition of romance or pornography…sexuality is not titillating or exciting; it is graphic and brutal, calculated and cold. His libertines are neither Sade’s aristocrats nor Byron’s satanic heroes who defy society but meticulous, grotesque breurocrats who are driven by frustration and impotence rather then desire”
Impotence is the key here. It is a potent question, to ask, where our language about god comes from, how our language about god intersects with our language about power, and how all of those things revolve around the body, this difficult and unruly body, who pisses and shits, who makes messes, whose fluids are both functional and metyonomical. There are a number of ways of controlling shit, of processing shit, literal ways and symbolic ways, to sanctify it, to liberate it, to eroticise it, to medicalise it, and to theologize it. Our bodies are difficult things, which leave more answers then they recall. There is danger, though, in the degrading or politicizing, or treating taboos for their own sake. What I have tried to do here, is to construct a narrative, that allows for the possibility or potential of an unfettered desire, and by extension, allow for a cautionary tale about spending too much time on what language means, and too little time on what those who create language are saying.
