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Title: The Anti-Chamber
Author: baedan
Date: 2014
Language: en
Topics: domestication, digestion, infrastructure, anality
Source: authors’ manuscript, baedan — a queer journal of heresy — issue two

baedan

The Anti-Chamber

Of where one shits, one shall not speak—to this oath is the whole of

civilization held. From chamber pots to those euphemistically-named

rooms whose real function has little to do with washing or bathing but

is instead to flush away those shameful signs of human animality, there

has ever been in the civilized management of feces a palpable sense of

fear. The terror manifest in the porcelain pots and thrones betrays a

concern far deeper than sanitation and public health, properly

understood. After all, it is no accident that with the pressing of

humanity into the city arises the threat of mass disease. If the

management of food and consumption makes a civilization, the (as yet)

unmanageability of feces and defecation can bring an empire to its

knees, and not only as catastrophe. A way of life premised on delusions

of immortality can have no greater enemy than the daily, material

evidence of eternal decay.

Few have approached the question of revolution from the nether end.

Marxists especially have shown themselves to stick to any discussion of

production and consumption, or even the rather more uncomfortable

subject of reproduction, over the slightest whiff of that stickier

matter of digestion—or, worse still, excretion.

One who was able to coax the anus into speaking was Hocquenghem. That

fag who, riding on waves of sixty-eight subversion, pondered the shame

which moved his comrades to fuck in the bathroom stalls after a meeting

of the Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action. “As if homosexual

desire could only be inscribed where repression has inscribed it.” Here

was a sign that these bathrooms held a power awesome and strange—and all

but invisible—within that hated complex of institutions named

capitalism, patriarchy, civilization, etc. He was able to discern that

the public prohibitions against certain sexual secretions and anal

pleasures were the lurking shadow of the taboos surrounding bodily

excretions.

In The Screwball Asses, Guy wrote of his comrades:

They can desire almost any body with a dick and an ass… on the condition

that it all happens in the shadows, that they fuck without knowing each

other, that only machinic organs be involved.

He might have said the same about the desire to shit and the experience

of excremental intimacy.

Certainly many an academic of queer theory after him has written a

treatise or tract on the architectural construction and psychological

planning of the public excretion chambers, noting some of the finer

points of their referential queerness. Ever attentive to the security of

her or his own post, however, the academic is cautious not to go too far

down the hole, preferring to observe and take note from atop the seat,

so to speak, as to the hidden meanings of the cocks scrawled upon the

partitions and the studious construction of these partitions to erect,

by the omission of their bottoms, a bastion of generalized surveillance

against the improprietous possibilities a stall’s public privacy might

otherwise invite. An innovative proposition, to be sure—one might even

say bold, though only by comparison to the marked timidity of the

academic profession at large—but this analysis remains, for our

purposes, rather too tight-assed.

The aforementioned hang-up of revolutionaries with regards to anality

should not be understood to extend to those revolutionaries’ subject. It

has long gone remarked upon by those proletarians who retain a sense of

humor that the bourgeoisie, their authority figures and officials, in

short, everyone of high social standing, have the remarkable quality of

going about acting as if they were utterly incapable of relaxing their

anal musculature. All theories of the effects of bourgeois diet and

stress upon sphincter tension aside (and this is not to discount their

validity but rather because they are irrelevant to our purposes), a few

facts remain to be submitted.

First, that the development of civilization, for all its lauded hygienic

facilities, has drastically increased the portion of a person’s life

during which he goes about with his sphincters contracted, either

searching for the nearest portal to the municipal sewerage or else

postponing until such time as he is obliged to seek it out with urgency.

Add to this the documented inability of many persons to release their

bowels in public restrooms (whether due to childhood trauma, the nagging

shame of social taboo, or instincts that will not allow a creature to

relax in such close proximity to potential enemies), as well as the high

rates of kidney stones and sexually-transmitted diseases which make

urination painful instead of pleasurable, and the partial or total

avoidance of public restrooms by persons who have learned to fear them

as places where their genders may be scrutinized and their belonging

called into question, not to mention the terror and shame (instilled

during the so-called potty training and bed wetting years) that

refuse—even in sleep!—to allow the modern human’s lower musculature to

fully relax, and finally the widespread incidence of indigestion and

constipation, and one is faced with a public health issue of

unfathomable breadth and depth.

Not that these could ever be deemed an issue in the eyes of those

responsible for identifying epidemics and mobilizing the populace to

rectify them. Quite to the contrary, it is entirely in the interests of

power to have a populace that keeps its sphincters well under control,

thank you very much, however damaging this may be to its health. Anyone

familiar with canine discipline knows well that once an animal is

trained to control the time and place of its evacuatory functions, half

the battle has been won; in no time it will be rolling over and playing

dead on command. Whereas a pet that has not yet learned not to piss the

carpet is so hopeless that it is probably best put out of your—pardon,

its—misery.

Second, that the protracted and chronic retention of a person’s annular

muscles coincides with certain behavioral characteristics which may

include, without being limited to: extreme tension of voice and bearing

often manifest as nasality of speech and stiffness of posture,

prudishness, all-around indisposition to fun, edginess, soreness of

temper, lack of grace in absorbing either criticism or complement,

propensity to take offense to well-humored insult, deficiency of the

sense of humor, uncertainty of bearing, passive aggressiveness,

authoritarianism, stinginess, neediness, moralism, religiosity, and

general unsavoriness of character.

[]

On an instinctual level if no other, we can see that this behavioral

coincidence is indeed no coincidence at all, given that a mere common

sense would lead one to anticipate, indeed to expect, a retention of

one’s excrement to dovetail with a proclivity to retain much else

besides—status, possessions, emotions, and self-importance, to name but

a handful—that this is nothing more than a natural correspondence

between the various bodily and behavioral dispositions.

Third, that civilized society has come to value mostly highly and indeed

pride itself on the very same behavioral vices which correspond to the

ills of a retentive anus and mistreated digestive system.

Here one may remark upon yet another coincidence, this time not

behavioral but geometrical (or, one might say, etymological) come upon

by means of the following inquiry: How is it that high society

identifies itself as high and its outside as low? How indeed. Although

this query will be met by its ready cast of pat answers—whether they be

architectural (because the powerful sit on high thrones and live in high

structures upon high ground), natural (because civilized power is

aligned to the celestial powers rather than the terrestrial), social

(because to bow is a sign of submission), or military (because in combat

the higher position is the advantageous one)—one might object that each

has got it ass-backwards. Man’s body is his world, his habitation. Given

that the body finds itself set in a world of unfolding powers through

which it must itself unfold, it develops a sense of its unfolding, a

sense that looks ahead, so to speak, a consciousness ever concerned with

a forward-thinking interest of survival.

Questions of categorization are the expression of man’s consciousness in

its grappling with the inner tensions it feels in the organs, especially

the digestive ones. The categories he settles upon to identify these

tensions once and for all are his rebellious cry that he will finally

forgo their continual playing out, that he will stake himself a

position, damn it all.

Moreover, man being the only animal who has not only developed an

erection but has developed into a walking erection, who places his oral

and anal passages on a level plane only when the dyke of consciousness

can no longer stand against the surging waves of sleep, he alone has

developed a consciousness deprived—by the force of gravity itself—of the

digestive and excretory sensations. He knows himself to be above their

inferior and unthinking comings and goings-on. Every external gesture of

raising or lowering he makes is merely a fitting sign of what he first

feels in his body, and then strives to reform his contrary surroundings

in the image of. Man (civilized man, we should say) is remarkable for

experiencing in his body a great discomfort and irritation (born of his

extreme anxiety and lack of respect for the gradual and time-consuming

digestive processes, which strike him as so terribly inefficient and

upsetting) and dedicating himself to making his escape. Like the

majority of those who draw up schemes for man’s relocation to

extraterrestrial colonies or to technologically-enhanced,

irritation-free post-bodies, he is not seduced by delusions of

democracy. The ascension of the consciousness from the body cannot be

achieved en masse; it will, on the contrary, be unreachable if not from

atop the mass.

So for the upper echelons and those who strive toward them, the

correlation between height and superiority, lowness and inferiority, is

fitting for no other reason than because it correlates to their

estimation of the body: the superior organs sit atop, keeping things

under control and dedicating themselves to the honorable tasks of

thinking and planning the escape from the body, from the inferior

organs, in particular the ones that gurgle and grumble down below,

urging and urging, failing to do anything honorable or socially

productive, distracting him from his important labors. It was that man

already felt himself to be higher, and for this reason did he build

throne and tower, temple and palace, that the world might better agree

with his tortured conscience.

And here we must remember that what is at hand is no mere issue of

excretion, for we can see, simultaneous to the difficulty and forcedness

of excretion in modern society, the negligent, hurried ingestive ritual

(often performed even when standing, walking, or driving, and with a

notable disregard for proper mastication and, even more disturbing, for

the enjoyment and savoring of the foods, which are more often viewed as

fuel for the consumer’s proverbial engine than as complex materials to

be ground down, turned over, refined, and absorbed) and the strained,

incomplete digestion whose symptoms include the host of stomach aches,

bloating, flatulence, belching and acid reflux (not to mention vomiting)

for which our society has become the butt of many a joke.

We can only agree with Nietzsche when he writes in his Genealogy of

Morals that “modern society is no ‘society,’ no ‘body,’ but a sick

conglomerate of chandalas—a society that no longer has the strength to

excrete.” In his Genealogy not only does Nietzsche trace moral unease

and guilt to digestive troubles, he also demolishes the false elevation

of mind over body:

When someone cannot get over a “psychological pain,” that is not the

fault of his “psyche” but, to speak crudely, more probably even that of

his belly (speaking crudely, to repeat, which does not mean that I want

to be heard crudely or understood crudely—). A strong and

well-constituted man digests his experiences (his deeds and misdeeds

included) as he digests his meals, even when he has to swallow some

tough morsels. If he cannot get over an experience and have done with

it, this kind of indigestion is as much physiological as is the

other—and often in fact merely a consequence of the other.—With such a

conception one can, between ourselves, still be the sternest opponent of

all materialism.—)

There is nothing particularly special about excrement, it being only a

stage in the process of matter’s circulation—nothing, that is, except

its tremendous capacity to communicate the details of such bodily

troubles, within and without the digestive tract, as may be existent in

the creature which produced it. Indeed, it can be observed that all

creatures capable of both expelling matter and investigating matter by

means of their senses are inclined to regularly probe their excrement

and to employ all the senses for this task. While some overimaginative

theories as to the purpose of this practice do persist, the fact that it

is a self-diagnostic measure, and a good one at that, is no secret to

anyone who has observed her own excrement during an illness. The fact

that, in this most excretaphobic of societies, it is still medical

practice to examine, albeit rarely, the night soil of a patient for

evidence of her or his internal goings-on is proof enough of the

diagnostic power of this substance. The fact that among the most

trending queries to the so-called Google oracle is the set “Why is my

poop (green/red/blue/yellow)?” is evidence not only that the modern

populace is still trying to listen to its bowels (and that the latter

are severely troubled) but moreover that a common knowledge of

excremental diagnosis is sorely lacking.

Yes, modern man seems to have no end to hiding his own nature from

himself. This fact is known better to the plumber than to any other, and

his clients are only too keenly aware that he, even more than the nosy

old lady next door with her flower-print blouse and the binoculars she

keeps close at hand, knows all about their dirty little secret. One

would not be amiss in suspecting that that popular specter of the

plumber’s crack, comical but for its suggestiveness, is in truth a crack

at that most quintessential of cracks in the very porcelain social

veneer whose holes the plumber is called to fill, whose leaks he is

prevailed upon to seal, and whose cracks he is induced to caulk. That in

carrying out such an unspeakably momentous task as the resurfacing of

the façade between society and its own decay—that in this very process

the man responsible might mistakenly reveal a crack in his own façade,

an indication of his own anality—well, there may be no better example of

the sort of irony which gives rise to what is known as low humor.

The undeniable fact which man strives to conceal from himself by means

of pipe and sewer, septic and treatment facility, is simply that every

entrance has its corresponding exit. Man would like to pretend himself

to be a one-way street, as he does when he pretends that no private

excretion corresponds to his conspicuous ingestion, just as when he

believes that no clandestine decay corresponds to the much-boasted

progress of his civilization. His absurd play is less one of smoke and

mirrors and much more one of passages and blockages. On the one hand, he

sets his mouth to moving overmuch, as if in letting it slack he might

remind his company—or himself—that this favorite orifice of his is

nothing more than the ornate and self-important gateway to that dark

passage, that long passage whose winding and grinding bears witness to

his being a creature of digestive capacities, and whose nether end

whispers of death and recurrence. On the other hand, he sets his hands

to the monumental task of erecting and retaining millions of miles of

passages, not unlike his own, a tremendous artificial digestive system,

not to mention the multitude of corresponding chambers, both private and

publicly private, all with their corresponding porcelain fixtures,

automatic flushing apparatuses, odor-masking agents, diaper-changing

stations, feminine product dispensers, sanitary hand-drying devices,

ecologically-reductive lighting, and discrete janitorial staff, for no

other reason than to keep himself from taking note of the fact that he

does not and cannot retain what he ingests. The enormity of waste

entailed in this insane system of waste disposal has only its most minor

portion in the mountains of hygienic tissue, paper towel, and other such

disposable products that find their way into the wastebaskets—the

greater wasting is dual: that of the vast quantities of potable water

rendered incessantly into wastewater with every flush, and that of the

equally enormous piles of rich excretory matter swept away to be wasted

by the algal colonies of the waste processing facilities.

There is something charming about man’s haughtiness in looking upon

defecation as somehow beneath him, in acting as if, despite all the

pleasure he enjoys in eating, he would consider shitting to be an

inconvenience at best and at worst a disturbing reminder of his

animality, his mortality. Something best to be cured by the powers of

modern innovation, and the sooner the better! There is something

terribly endearing about man’s denial of himself.

Soft feelings notwithstanding, and without suggesting that it is

possible—or desirable even—to banish self-denial from life, we must

insist upon flushing away the whole machine that chambers excretion and

channels excrement. Revolutionaries have long identified themselves with

the underground, and with good reason. Yet, just as Hocquenghem wrote

that “The bourgeoisie invented the notion of homosexuality and made it

into a ghetto. We must not forget this,” just so must we not forget that

it was the tight-assed bourgeoisie and clergy who mangled digestion,

forbid excretion from being pleasurable and intimate, and imprisoned

man’s greatest gift to the world beneath a million tons of concrete. It

is not to defend our murky tunnels that we fight, nor to seize the power

of the skyscraper and bestow it upon the sewer, but rather to expel the

whole artificial body and let it rot, that we may become intimate with

the fruits of our bowels and benefit thereby.