For something so common, shit has an oddly powerful hold on our lives. Not just physically, but socially and politically. In Dominique Laporte’s History of Shit, he makes a bold claim: the State is the sewer. Seems strange to call the state a sewer at first, but when you break it down, it makes perfect sense. Just like how sewers manage waste to maintain the city’s cleanliness, the State manages bodies, language, and behavior to create the illusion of order and purity.
No matter how hard we try, waste never really disappears. It’s relocated, hidden, and suppressed, just like the thing society considers “dirty”. Historically, bodily waste was a public affair but as cities grew, the desire to remove filth from sight grew tremendously. The 1539 edict in France required people to store their waste inside before proper disposal. This marked the beginning of waste privatization – both literally and symbolically.
Also, it wasn’t just physical shit that was being cleansed. Language itself was becoming sanitized, with “dirty” words like “shit” replaced by euphemisms like “waste” or “excrement”. Laporte argues that this linguistic cleansing mirrors the State’s obsession with hiding anything considered impure – be it bodily functions, or marginalized communities. Fast forward to today, and we still see this pattern. Gentrification pushes poverty out of wealthy areas, prisons and refugee camps serve as modern sewers for humans seen as “waste”.
So what is the point? The point is, we cannot fully understand power without understanding how it deals with filth. Whether it’s waste, language, or even people, the State decides what can stay and what must be flushed away. The more we clean and censor, the more we should ask ourselves – what exactly are we hiding?