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Why shit now? Or, to put my question somewhat less ambiguously (and so somewhat less scandalously): why this recent upsurge of interest in excrement and visions thereof?
Perhaps the interest has to do with Sigmund Freud, in that doctor's exemplary clinical attention to the body and its products. When participating in the French-led "return to Freud," we may find ourselves necessarily turning back to shit, inspecting this low matter with high seriousness. Another contributing factor may be the rise of cultural studies. One way of distinguishing between cultures is to consider their differing attitudes towards excrement. Is shit, to a given culture, a good thing? An evil thing? A sacred--both good and evil--thing? Also there are those theorists who concern themselves with categories of value in the post-industrial, post-modern era. Jean Baudrillard, for example, in commenting upon the "consumer society," describes how everything in that society "is finally digested and reduced to the same homogeneous fecal matter....a controlled, lubricated, and consumed excretion (fecalite) is henceforth transferred into things, everywhere diffused in the indistinguishability of things and of social relations" (34-35). What are we to make of a world where the coprophiliac Ren and Stimpy--indeed, the coprolaliac Beavis and Butt-head--have become our children's role models? Are we experiencing a "paradigm shift" toward all-pervasive Excrementality? Is this the advent of an age where shit will be golden (here I pun on the Renaissance term "goldfinder": a seeker-out of excrement)? Are we seeing a future in which Sterculius, Roman god of dung, will rise from the ruined cloaca and reign supreme?
It is, of course, extremely difficult to say. What we can say with some certainty, however, is that nowadays excrement appears to be functioning as a sort of cohesive between various disciplinary discourses. It behooves one, therefore--lest one be counted among the theoretically unhip--to know one's shit.
The excremental vision," a now-familiar phrase in literary-critical circles, first appeared as a chapter title in John Middleton Murry's 1954 biography of Jonathan Swift. In that chapter Murry echoes a number of previous analysts (Dr. Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, D. H. Lawrence) in diagnosing Swift as suffering from a cloacal obsession--the best evidence for this diagnosis being Swift's scatological poems of the early 1730s, the thematic thrust of which can...