inglis, holmes -toiletry time

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2000 9: 223Time SocietyDavid Inglis and Mary Holmes

ModernityToiletry Time : Defecation, Temporal Strategies and the Dilemmas of

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Toiletry TimeDefecation, temporal strategies and the

dilemmas of modernity

David Inglis and Mary Holmes

ABSTRACT. The rhythms of human bodies are profoundly impli-cated with the time regimes that are dominant in different societies.This article seeks to explicate the relations between the temporal dispositions of one aspect of the body, its defecatory capacities, andthe chronological and spatial categorizations of modernity. This latter configuration is understood variously as being characterizedby: the social relations of the ‘civilizing process’ (Elias); capitalisteconomic relations (Marx); instrumental rationality (Adorno andHorkheimer); and patriarchy (feminism). Focusing on each of theseaspects of the modern allows us to chart historically the rise of aseries of temporal regulations over acts of defecation. However, following the position of Sigmund Freud, we trace out one of the keydilemmas of modernity: while the times when defecation occurshave come under increasing levels of guidance and administration,the human body and its faecal capacities still continue to somedegree to operate according to rhythms other than those imposedupon them, thus occasionally effecting a disorderly ‘return of therepressed’ in the realm of systematized time. KEYWORDS • bodilywastes • chronology • civilizing process • defecation • waste management

Arguably one of the great paradoxes of modernity is that often phenomena thathave been occluded during the genesis of that social formation appear onceagain after their disappearance to haunt the purview of the society that sought todeny their presence. This logic whereby the imperatives of banishment are subsequently plagued by the return of the repressed was identified in Freud’sstudies of dreams and the obsessions of neurotics, whereby the sexual energiesof infancy were seen to be restrained in the adult psychic economy, and yet also

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within that realm sometimes to be given free and unsettling play. There is a particular chronological element in this paradoxical relationship between vanquisher and vanquished, for that which was bound and confined in the pastreturns now in the present to bedevil the living, with the archaic and forgottenforcing itself upon an unhappy contemporary consciousness.

Nowhere was this temporal dilemma of the modern expressed more acutelythan in an area of human life which particularly engrossed the attention ofFreud. From his viewpoint, it was not only the fundamental sexual drives ofhuman beings that had been brought under ever more severe regulation in themodern period, only to break the walls of their prison and to reassert themselvesat a later date. It was also the case that exactly the same type of process hadoccurred in terms of capacities of the human body very closely related to thesexual instincts, namely the means whereby wastes were evacuated.1 InCivilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1957) argued that the modern world hadeffected ever more stringent sets of regulations over human defecatory capaci-ties, as successive attempts to master the revulsion, fear and loathing thatmodern western ‘civilization’ held for faecal products. Such filthy materialstroubled the modern mind precisely because they violated the imperatives ofcivilization for decorous and seemly order. The sight and smell of excreta represented a fearful affront to this regime, precisely in so far as these ‘traces ofthe earth’ betokened a more disorderly and foul archaic past. In that partlyforgotten yet still troubling age, a promiscuous humankind had revelled in itsown detritus, unmindful of the desiderata of faecal regulation. The modern consciousness sought desperately to deny its genealogical relation to thatancient pandemonium. And yet, paradoxically, that highly neurotic modern atti-tude towards bodily wastes was itself a product of the anxiety that civilizedhumanity felt at lapsing back into the state of the primeval swamp, from whichit had only recently and with the greatest of difficulty extricated itself.

Whether Freud’s ‘scientific myth’ of the faecal past of humanity is true in anyway or not, it still usefully draws our attention to an important premise of under-standing the nature of the modern, and its temporal structurings of behaviourand experience. We believe that it is productive to conceptualize the genesis ofmodernity as in part involving attempts to regulate increasingly the defecatorycapacities of human bodies in line with certain normative projects of what is‘acceptable’ behaviour. One crucial way of ensuring that subject populationsadhere to such strictures is to control the times when individuals may or may notlegitimately relieve themselves. We believe that the overall trajectory in themodern period is towards a situation whereby the toiletry time of all membersof the society comes under relatively high levels of control, such that the set oflegitimate times when defecation and urination may occur contracts consider-ably over the duration of the construction and subsequent development ofmodernity. Such control is of course partly constituted by rules and procedures

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allowing or denying access to certain locales which are defined, either by acertain group or by wider and more general value systems, as being legitimateplaces for defecation.

Although in this article we argue that the overall trend in the modern period isclearly towards much higher levels of limitation on when and where individualsmay relieve themselves, the specific ways in which such restrictions have cometo be created and implemented derive from a variety of sources. In the modernperiod, many different groups have had many different reasons for creating controls over the time humans may spend in toiletry activities. And quite apartfrom conscious attempts by certain groupings to impose particular forms ofpractice on others, part of the story of greater faecal regulation in the modernwest can be told from the point of view of unintended processes, which oftenarose and grew beyond the explicit awareness of the people involved in theirdevelopment.

In order to capture the complexity of the myriad ways in which the overall trajectory of greater control over toiletry time has occurred in the modern west,we will adopt the perspectives of several different schools of thought, each ofwhich allows us to focus on a particular nexus of actors, locales and forms ofspatio-temporal constraint, located either in the public sphere of the capitalistworkplace and other institutions, or the realm that came to be known as the ‘private’. By adopting the respective analytic categories and foci of Marx,Norbert Elias, Adorno and Horkheimer, and the feminist analysis of patriarchy,we do not mean to falsely reconcile often antagonistic modes of apprehension.Instead, we wish merely to utilize each, and in some ways against the grain oftheir respective arguments, in the service of two purposes. First, to conceive of modernity as a social formation which may be viewed under the rubrics ‘civilized’, ‘capitalist’, ‘instrumentally rational’, and ‘patriarchal’. Second, as away of illuminating the multiple and manifold ways in which Freud’s centralinsight holds true: that while modernity in its various guises brings a series oftemporal regulations of the faecal capacities of human beings, nonetheless thesphere of wastes frequently remains as a hectoring presence for a society thatwould like to exclude their very existence from its chronological and spatialpurview.

The Civilizing of Toiletry Time

In medieval Europe there seems to have been much less stress than in themodern period on hiding defecation from public view, by having it occur indelimited, ‘private’ locales. At this period, especially among the lower socialorders, most excretion took place outdoors, and there was little, if any, socialopprobrium attached to this form of defecatory display. Medieval towns had

INGLIS & HOLMES: TOILETRY TIME 225




very few latrines for public use, suggesting that the streets were the more likelylocus for defecation (Palmer, 1973: 16). As such ‘the burgesses . . . relieve[d]themselves anywhere . . . urinat[ing] inside towers and casemates, or in theporches of private houses in the less frequented streets’ (Leguay, 1984: 58). Thetempo of medieval life, therefore, was such that one could, on the whole, defecate where and when one liked. There were as relatively few constraints onthe places where people relieved themselves as there were on the times thatdefecation could legitimately occur. Peasants in the field or craftspeople in theurban centres could relieve themselves when the desire took them. This situa-tion began to change in line with wider developments in later medieval Europe.

From the perspective of Norbert Elias (1995), the ‘civilizing process’ is a setof trends that occurred over the duration of later feudalism, through the Age ofAbsolutism, and on into modernity. Such trends involved ever greater levels ofmonitoring by individuals of their own conduct. Individuals looked to their ownbehaviours and to those of other people, such that a network of observation andcounter-observation of appropriate actions spread through more and more sectors of society. One of the major effects of this new situation was that individuals had to engage with, and negotiate, very different temporal and spatial structures from those to which previous generations had been accustomed. The rhythms and spaces of feudal society, such as bringing the harvest to market at a set time each year, were replaced for an increasingly largeproportion of the population by an urban context which did not operate with the tempos and locales that had been familiar since time immemorial. Instead, the life of towns and cities in the early modern period was based upon novelspatio-temporal contours. This led to a situation where individuals had to negotiate new relations between themselves and the co-ordinates of time andspace. They had to learn which actions were appropriate in which circumstancesand locales. Individuals were required increasingly to know when particularactions were legitimate and when not. The trend over the period was for thesesets of expectations to become ever more elaborate, and thus for the forms ofsocial control exerted over individual actions in time and space to be ever morestringent and exacting.

One such conduct brought under progressively more rigorous forms of control throughout the period was defecation. From a situation where open-airdefecation was socially tolerated, over time there were moves towards con-demning such visible acts, in favour of making excretion occur in ‘private’locales, sealed off from public view (Elias, 1995: 105–17). Thus there was aseries of shifts in later- and post-feudal Europe from norms of faecal visibility tofaecal invisibility, that is to say, from defecation occurring in primarily ‘public’locales, to mostly happening in locations deemed to be ‘private’. From the later18th century onwards, the norm among elites was increasingly for defecation tooccur in a ‘water closet’. The name itself signified a salubrious form of defeca-





tion and disposal, located within a delimited toiletry space, where the individualcould not be seen by other people (Palmer, 1973; Wright, 1960). The changefrom one set of locales to another was concomitant with a move away from themedieval situation where individuals could defecate at whatever times theypleased. Appropriate periods for excretion increasingly became much more circumscribed, for if one could only relieve oneself in a ‘private’ space, thenone had to wait until such a space appeared, or until, at the very least, one wasfree from the gaze of other people. The trend over early modernity is thereforetowards an increasing level of deferral of the point in time when one actuallydefecated, relative to the point when one initially felt the need to relieve oneself.A situation where immediate relief, in both temporal and spatial terms, was permissible, was replaced by a context which demanded that the moment ofexcretion be delayed until an appropriate time and place presented themselves.

Such shifts could be seen as being concomitant with two further processes inregard to faecal mores in early modernity. The first was the development ofincreasingly negative evaluations of the qualities of excreta, from faecal products being viewed as having certain positive elements (such as their medicinal and agricultural value), to these being seen as possessing only whollynegative qualities (Camporesi, 1988: 11–12; Bourke, 1891/1968). Second, excreta were part of a wider set of phenomena which, from the later 18thcentury onwards, were less odorifically tolerated than they had been in previousyears (Corbin, 1986: 11–14). As a consequence, the olfactory aspects as well asthe more general qualities of excreta came to be seen in a much more negativelight than had previously been the case. Thus the period spanning later feudal-ism and early modernity paid witness to processes whereby excreta wereincreasingly viewed as filthy and odorific, and defecation, especially amongelites, increasingly had to occur in privatized locales. Such developments therefore can be seen as leading indirectly to new and more exacting forms oftemporal regulation of defecation.

There were also more directly chronological components involved in theprocess whereby excreta were increasingly viewed as revolting. It is arguablethat by the early 19th century, the bourgeois mindset had developed in such away that it denied that the bourgeois body created excremental products(Stallybrass and White, 1986). This can be seen in the fact that the bourgeoisieof the period strove to deny as much as was possible the presence, both visualand olfactory, of excreta within their purview. Increasingly throughout thecentury, defecation occurred in the hidden recesses of the water closet, and thenew systems of sewers in operation from the 1860s onwards, which bore awaythe evidence of such acts, were located deep under the streets of the city, farfrom public scrutiny (Reid, 1991).

Such forms of practice were predicated upon forms of self-representationwhich in turn were based upon the perceived difference between bourgeois





salubrity (bourgeois bodies symbolically did not excrete) and the filthy, excrement-producing corporeality of the proletariat, especially its lower rungs.In the regulation of subject populations, such as factory workers and prisoninmates, the control of time went together with faecal discipline, for ‘to fill thetime of the working classes was to conquer the risk of plebeian animality andprevent its resurgence’ (Corbin, 1995: 7). If the lower classes were associatedwith excrement, excrement in turn signified the human body’s organic qualities.It was precisely such corporeal qualities that the bourgeois mindset denied as toits own body’s character (Bakhtin, 1984: 29). The organic nature of faeces andthe body’s production of them symbolized not only the epitome of ‘filth’, butalso the fact that the body was itself organic, and thus subject to processes of decline and death (Corbin, 1986: 144). As a result, to deny the presence of excreta, by deodorizing them or hiding them from view, was to deny the efficacy of Time itself over human (that is, bourgeois) corporeality.

All of the above developments arguably initially resulted primarily fromsocio-cultural factors, which Elias locates as being the result of the more general civilizing process.2 Thus changes in the ways in which defecation wasregulated both chronologically and spatially may be traced to the developmentof an increasingly intricate social division of labour (see Durkheim, 1893/1984).Elias argues that changes towards greater self-regulation of conducts occurredin a context where individuals were more constrained than previously to operatein closely monitored, face-to-face interactional settings. Such settings were theresult of progressively more interdependent relations between classes which hadpreviously existed relatively autonomously of each other (Elias, 1995: 447).Thus shifts from relative excretory visibility to invisibility, and from immediateto deferred defecation, can be viewed as resulting from the development ofchains of interdependence, made manifest at both the collective and individuallevels, which were in turn the social expression of the increasingly complexdivision of labour in post-feudal Europe.

Capitalist Factory Time and Effluvial Control

The progressively more intricate division of labour in the west, which we haveso far examined in its social manifestations, may also be considered from thepoint of view of the development of the capitalist economy. Werner Sombart’sclassic account of the medieval division of labour argued that it involved a situation where ‘economic activities . . . were regulated solely in accordancewith the principle of a sufficiency for existence’, with the chronological relations of the economy being centred around ‘traditional’ tempos such as theautumnal harvest (Sombart, 1915: 16–17). If this account is convincing, thenthe transition to a capitalist economy in early modernity involved not only a





shift in attitudes towards the accumulation of wealth, from ideas based aroundsubsistence to imperatives of profit seeking, but in addition was comprised of analteration in the chronological aspects of economic relations, such that ‘chainsof production emerge[d] . . . [whereby] synchronisation of labour demand[ed]adjustment to a new time discipline’ (Rule, 1986: 135). In the new economic situation, the livelihood of an individual was dependent upon the livelihood of amultitude of others to whom that person was bound by a series of long-rangeconnections. As a result, the rhythms of life and work of all these various participants in the economic process became increasingly harmonized so as toallow the most efficient and profitable investment of capital. This new eco-nomic context, by progressively destroying the rhythms of the medieval economy, had great ramifications for the tempos of the human body, especiallyone accustomed generally to relieving itself wherever and whenever it pleased.

Ruefully regarding the lack of enthusiasm for work displayed by the factoryhands of the earliest phase of the capitalist enterprise, Voltaire noted that ‘theygo but faintly to work, as they say, with one buttock’ (cited in Golembiewski,1965: 161). The aphorism obliquely indicates the necessity of controllinglabouring bodies, including their defecatory capacities, if profit was to beextracted from them. One of the main means of ensuring such a situation is tosubject these bodies and their capacities to chronological discipline. ‘What wasneeded’, writes Pollard in his account of the beginnings of capitalist manage-ment techniques, ‘was regularity and steady intensity in place of irregular spurtsof work’ (1965: 181). The transition from the relatively unsystematic labourcharacteristic of feudalism towards the more standardized capitalist work practices of the early modern period meant that workers’ time came under novelforms of discipline and regulation (Thompson, 1967: 73). The extraction of profit came to depend on the careful calibration of the work rhythms ofemployees on the factory floor. Thus ever more complex forms of ordering themovements of workers were developed in order to control as much as possiblethe time wasted on extraneous activities beyond the pure act of production itself. Marx, reflecting on the nature of the temporal rhythms of capitalist production, noted:

[T]he capitalist is . . . careful . . . to ensure that his workmen are not idle for a single moment. He has bought the use of the labour-power for a definite period,and he insists on his rights. He has no intention of being robbed . . . for this purpose [he] has a penal code of his own. (Marx, 1867/1988: 303)

Just as the commodity was stripped of its use-value in favour of its worth inexchange, so too were the tempos of the forms of labour that created the com-modity denuded of the traces of a precapitalist past (Marx, 1867/1988: 130).From this Marxian perspective, the important element was no longer the worktask itself, but the ‘value of time when reduced to money’ (Thompson, 1967:





61). Thus the capitalist economy may be seen as being increasingly basedaround the uniform, homogeneous units of clock time, which decontextualizedlabour from the particularity of its instantiations in feudalism, and progressivelystandardized work to a metronomic beat. In this chronological context, ‘factorydiscipline’ was formulated often quite consciously by capitalist authorities as aset of controls over time for the purposes of extracting profit from human bodies seen as being ‘naturally’ indisposed to regular, standardized productionprocesses (see, for example, Taylor, 1947: 30–4). The recalcitrant body wastherefore made subject to chronologically expressed regulations over space andfreedom of movement in the factory locale. ‘Ideal-type’ regulations in the capitalist factory over bodily rhythms of the factory would include:

Rules prescribing the length of the working week and day, and the time allowablefor lunch and rest periods, usually accompanied by specific penalties for absenteeism, lateness, and loitering . . .

Rules restricting freedom of activity in the shop, including prohibitions on smoking, conversation, leaving machines, and entering other parts of the plant.(Caplow, 1964: 115)

The worker’s body is thus constrained in terms of what it may and may not do,and at what times. Following Marx, we may say that the tendency of capitalistorganization of work is towards the outlawing of ‘superfluous expenditure’, bethat of time spent away from the work activity, or of energy used up in non-work pursuits. In this light, the issue of the time taken for a worker to defecatebecomes an important aspect of the running of factories and of the capitalisteconomy more generally. This is particularly due to the various types of abuseof work norms the toiletry space opens up. As one commentator notes, ‘indi-vidual manipulations of norms are [at least potentially] open to everyone . . .[for example] a rule against smoking may be evaded by frequent visits to thelavatory’ (Fox, 1975: 92). Thus the control of access to, and time spent in, toiletfacilities becomes a crucial aspect of factory discipline.

The instillation of the appropriate bodily dispositions that would allowchronological imperatives to be met began each time a new group of workerswas inducted into the factory situation. ‘Once at work it was necessary to breakdown the impulses of the workers, and to introduce the notion of “time-thrift”’(Pollard, 1965: 183). This meant training the workers into a form of corporealitywhich involved regular hours of work and constant attendance at the machine.Thus, from at least the mid-19th century, rules such as the following werecommon: ‘Any person found from the usual place of work, except for necessarypurposes . . . will be fined 2d. for each offence’ (cited by Pollard, 1965: 184;emphasis added).

In a similar vein, Engels noticed that in the factories of northern England inthe 1840s, the operative must ‘eat, drink, and sleep at command. For satisfying





the most imperative needs, he is vouchsafed the least possible time absolutelyrequired by them’ (Engels, 1844/1987: 193; emphasis added). Within such acontext, defecation was just about tolerated, as long as the worker was quickabout it. As disciplinary rules became more stringent, and as the time nexus inwhich the labourer had to operate became more oriented towards precise calculation, such tolerance was often eliminated. The following account fromthe end of the 19th century as to the daily routine in English cotton mills vividlyillustrates the degree to which workers’ bodies were constrained to act inextremely demarcated fashions:

The toil is ceaseless; the machinery demands constant watching. Once on a timethis was not so; the machinery ran slowly, and the operatives had a fair amount ofleisure in the factory . . . [now] the machinery runs much quicker . . . From the firstsecond of entering the factory in a morning to the last turn of the wheels in anevening the operatives have no rest. Their feet are never still; their hands are fullof tasks; their eyes are always on the watch. (Clarke, 1899/1985: 42)

Thus the labour required of the workforce is of a type that demands constantapplication of the worker to the machine; without the constant presence of theoperative while the machine is running, production would cease to operatesmoothly, if at all. If workers were to release themselves from these exertions inorder to fulfill excretory needs, the continual production of the factory, and theprofits of the employer, would be endangered. Therefore it is not surprising tofind the above account offering the following observation: ‘In some places they[i.e. the workforce] are even “timed” when using the “conveniences”; and onlyallowed so many minutes for nature’s necessity, being fined if exceeding thelimit fixed’ (Clarke, 1899/1985: 44).

The timing of visits to toiletry facilities outside of official breaks such asmealtimes thus became an infringement of regulations designed to allow constant production within a delimited time-frame. The imposition of fines forperceived ‘idling’ during the hours demarcated as the period for work was acommon practice in factories of this period. Such practices could include ‘looking out [of] windows, laughing, or leaving [the] work station for the toilet’(Meacham, 1977: 110). An extreme, but telling, case of this variety is recordedas taking place in the 1890s, within a factory employing over 500 women. Afactory inspector found that a system was in operation where ‘employees were made to hand a tally to a male overseer as they entered the lavatory. Herecorded their time inside, forwarding his report to the manager, who fined them at the end of the month if their total exceeded four minutes’ (Meacham,1977: 110).

The logic of reducing the amount of time workers spend in the toilet is notmerely an artifact of the 19th century. Ruth Cavendish’s experience of a production line in a factory in the late 1970s is just one example of more con-





temporary ways in which management seek to couple the bodily dispositions oftheir employees with the chronological patterns of capitalist production. In thefactory Cavendish observed, time spent in the toilet was outside the periodexplicitly set aside for both work and official breaks. Visits to the lavatorytherefore constituted ‘unofficial’ rest periods: ‘[I]f they [the management] werepaying for the time, they could dictate what you did in it, and we [the line operators] were only supposed to go to the loo if it was an informal break’(Cavendish, 1982: 117).

In a similar vein, Huw Beynon’s study of the same period of the Ford plant atHalewood near Liverpool found that the toiletry practices there were also oriented around reducing as much as possible the time spent away from pro-duction. One interviewee remarked:

They expect you to work the 480 minutes of the eight hours you’re on the clock.They’ve agreed to have a built-in allowance of six minutes for going to the toilet,blowing your nose and that. It takes you six minutes to get your trousers down.(Beynon, 1973: 135; original emphasis)

These various examples of toiletry regulation illustrate that a factory subjectto such means of control may be seen not just as the space in which the workeris tied to the machine, but also a locale where departures from the machine forthe purposes of excretion are also subservient to the dictates of profit margins.This is because, first, the pace of industrial labour requires excretion to happenduring working hours as rapidly as possible, so that the machine remains unattended for as little time as necessary. Second, the time spent away from the machine during periods of work is subject to the same dictates. The set ofregulations and deterrents aimed at governing practices of excretion operate, inthe minimal case, through admonishment of the worker who spends ‘too muchtime’ in the toilet and, in the maximal case, by reducing the wage of the workerin proportion to time ‘wasted’ in that locale. Thus profit is derived from thelabour of the worker when (s)he is at her place, and deductions from wageswhile (s)he is in the toilet also serve imperatives for profit generation, or at leastmitigate against the level of lost profit. If the capitalist factory is taken as beingemblematic of the modern social order per se, then the controls over excretion inthat locale are indeed symptomatic of the overall set of regulations imposedupon human defecatory capacities in the modern period.

Instrumental Rationality and the Exercising of Excretion

The crux of Marxian analyses of capitalist modernity is that such a social forma-tion is a profoundly contradictory one, containing as it does elements of themost sublime achievements of humanity simultaneously with aspects that lead





to the utter degradation of its subjects. Within the terrain of neo-Marxistthought, probably the document that most perfectly encapsulates the negativecomponent of Marx’s thought is Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic ofEnlightenment (1944/1992). The essential premise of these authors’ critique ofmodernity is that it is based upon a fundamentally destructive form of instru-mental reasoning, for the quintessential modern condition involves the associa-tion of reason per se with calculation and planning. Such forms of regulation notonly involve control over non-human, external nature, but also over humanbeings, with the entire history of modernity being regarded by these authors as aprocess of increasing instrumentally rational enslavement of living minds andbodies. Chronological regimes that are in and of their essence modern can there-fore be seen as instantiations of an instrumentally rationalist attitude towardsboth human and non-human life, such that the tempos of modern spheres ofaction are fundamentally oriented around principles of domination throughregulation.

One of the key forms of thought that Adorno and Horkheimer locate as beingindicative of such forms of control is that of the Marquis de Sade. In his Juliette(1991) and The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (1990), de Sade dramatizes in the most brutal and explicit of fashions the dilemma of themodern, whereby enlightened reason that has aimed at promoting human free-dom turns back on itself such that it inadvertently promotes the enslaving of allhumanity. Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of de Sade, in like fashion to theirprose style more generally, is deliberately provocative and overstated (Buck-Morss, 1977; Rose, 1978). Awareness of this fact should prevent us from con-centrating upon criticizing the obvious hyperbole of their position, in favour ofseeing how their account can help us to understand particular chronologicalaspects of the faecal conditions of modernity. This is particularly the case as theMarquis de Sade’s view of human relations includes a notably clear and force-ful portrayal of how chronological regulation of human defecatory capacities isa very important aspect of modern disciplinary regimes which have been instantiated outside the economic sphere and factory context, locales privilegedby orthodox variants of Marxian analysis. Thus reading de Sade in the light ofDialectic of Enlightenment allows an understanding of the significance ofattempts of various regimes only indirectly related to the capitalist economy, toimpose controls over the times when particular bodies excrete. In this regard,such institutions can be regarded as indications of the impulses of the socio-cultural (rather than solely socio-economic) order of modernity to impose discipline on subject bodies, an analytic position shared in their own particularways both by Freud (see above) and by another major analyst of the modern,Michel Foucault (e.g. 1977).

In The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, which concerns the use andabuse of a group of unfortunates by a gang of aristocratic debauchees, de Sade





(1990: 242–3) writes that one of the statutes regulating the behaviour of thoseabducted into slavery, both general and sexual, is the following:

As it is strictly forbidden to relieve oneself anywhere save in the chapel, which hasbeen outfitted and intended for the purpose, and forbidden to go there withoutindividual and special permission, the which shall often be refused, and for goodreason, the month’s presiding officer shall scrupulously examine, immediatelyafter breakfast, all the girls’ water closets, and in the case of a contravention discovered in one of the above-designated place or in the other, the delinquentshall be condemned to suffer the penalty of death.

As Angela Carter (1987: 87) has noted, to control the places and times of defecation is to control the most elementary expression of individuals’ auton-omy to act as they please. It was precisely the ability to act in ways that oneautonomously desired that Adorno and Horkheimer saw as being at the heart of the paradox of the modern which de Sade so acutely represented: instead ofreason being used to further individual autonomy, the instrumental nature ofthat reason comes to create institutionalized systems of servitude, which haveeffects at both the corporeal and the spiritual levels.

A great deal of empirical material from the history of modernity may beadduced to illustrate the compelling nature of this contention. Throughout the19th century, strict control of the tempos of the bodies of subject groups was a key concern of the administrators of institutions such as prisons, hospitals,charitable workshops, schools and asylums (Corbin, 1995: 5). As noted earlier,regulation of toiletry time is concomitant with the development of controls over the spaces reserved for defecation. This relationship was expressed in theevolution of institutional forms of discipline throughout the 19th century. Forexample, in the hospital system, from around the early part of the century, therearose imperatives as to deodorizing the body of the patient. This process wasone which involved, at a general level, techniques of somatic control over bodily odours and, more specifically, the monitoring of the patient’s excretions(Corbin, 1986: 107). From this period onwards, regulation of the excretoryhabits of both patients and staff became stricter, resulting in a demarcation of certain places permitted for defecatory purposes, thus consummating in a‘public’ institution trends towards the privatization of defecation that had beencurrent in more general arenas of life since the later feudal period (see above).

Not only the faecal capacities of subject groups such as hospital patients, butthe defecatory potentials of all social sectors may be seen as coming underincreasingly more complex forms of spatial and temporal regulation. No groupcame under more scrutiny in this regard than children. In order to operate appro-priately within such a socio-cultural context, children had to be trained into thehabits both of defecating in legitimate locales, and of deferring the time ofexcretion until a period when the bowels could be exercised in private (Whitingand Child, 1953). Thus the environment of the school became one of the key





locales of faecal regulation. This locale had already been for a long period a sitefor the generation of more general forms of chronological control. From thelater 18th century onwards, schooling was arguably oriented around ‘the newuniverse of disciplined time’, instilling in youngsters a sense of the importanceof ‘time-thrift’ (Thompson, 1967: 84). English factory-schools of the periodwere frequently run by Protestant sects, which instilled into pupils a strongmoral aversion to wasting time (Pollard, 1965: 193; Thompson, 1967: 87–8).By the latter half of the 19th century, new and specific techniques of faecalregulation were being deployed in the scholastic setting (Corbin, 1986: 181). Atypical example from the early 20th century is given by Robert Roberts in hisaccount of working class life in the industrial north of England. His school inthe Salford slums had a regime based around ‘doorless privies’, which wereintended to open the private realm of the toilet up to examination by the authorities. Through being made visible, the pupils were discouraged fromwasting time, not just in terms of voiding their wastes, but also in that mostshameful of leisure pursuits, masturbation (Roberts, 1980: 135).

From the perspective of the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, suchdevelopments are explicable as manifestations of the ‘will to order’ characteris-tic of the instrumental reasoning that underpins modern socio-cultural con-ditions. However, Roberts’s example above also illustrates the fact that in manytypes of public institution, it was the ‘privacy’ of the place of defecation, thefactor that had become the most major imperative of bourgeois defecatorymores outside the institutional setting, that was precisely the problem to be managed within that setting. Toilets were places where inmates or patientscould slip away from the realm of instrumental regulation to waste hours doingprecisely those things that the regime of the institution forbade. From the mid-19th century, such potentially subversive places were brought under novelforms of scrutiny, opening up their hidden recesses to regulatory view.

This had already happened to some extent in the factory context. For example, one of the rules in Josiah Wedgwood’s factory in the late 18th centurywarned against any scribbling of graffiti in places such as the toilets: ‘any per-son writeing obseen or other writeing upon the walls either within or without theworks forfits for every offence 2 s. 6 d.’ (McKendrick, 1961: 44).3 Wedgwood’sregime was enforced by the active scrutiny of a gang of overseers. But thedevelopments in toilet management in non-factory contexts often did not relydirectly on observation by a supervisor. The threat of being seen was sufficient.Thus the toiletry system of the Parisian Ecole Militaire consisted of ‘latrines[which] had been installed with half-doors, so that the supervisor on duty couldsee the head and legs of the pupils’ (Foucault, 1977: 173). Michel Foucaultargued, somewhat in line with Adorno and Horkheimer’s position, that suchdesigns allowed a visual regime based around the ‘fine, analytical divisions . . .of an apparatus of observation, recording and training’ (1977: 173).





Such regimes were not merely visual but temporal as well. As bourgeois society outside the institution sought to train the infant into deferred defecationin private locales, so too did regimes based upon strategies of instrumental rationality seek to instill such habits into adults who were regarded as infantile.While children received rigorous potty training to make them defecate only attimes and places where such an act was permissible, the subject populationswithin mental institutions were also instructed, if not forced, to excrete accord-ing to a definite time-regimen, and not when their minds or their bodies desired.Some asylum authorities drew up complex plans to make inmates defecate at setintervals (Corbin, 1995: 5). Indeed, one French project involved asylumdwellers being placed into iron harnesses, in order to compel them to relievethemselves at certain times of the day, thus apparently ensuring that the bodybecame wholly subservient to the temporal structures of the institution (Corbin,1986: 125–6). It is at this point that the empirical evidence begins to paint a picture which resembles in various ways the nightmarish scenes of somatic andfaecal control under the auspices of a form of reason impregnated by domina-tion imagined in the previous century by the Marquis de Sade.

The Feminine Faecal and Temporal Constraint

The quotation above from The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom notonly illustrates the form of faecal slavery to which the victims of libertinismwere subjected, but since in this case the victims were women, it also shows the subjection of the female’s defecatory capacities to the spatial and temporalstructurings of a modernity conceivable as a patriarchal social configuration(Walby, 1990).

Freud’s reflections on the regulation of defecation by contemporary westerncivilization, while only too aware of the training undergone by young childrento render them faecally ‘civilized’, generally neglect two factors crucial to theseprocesses. First, that the regulation of defecatory acts involves a large-scalesystem of disposal of wastes, and while a great deal of this collection and disposal is carried out in the modern period by the water closet and the sewer, asubstantial amount of cleaning up is still carried out manually, and in manycases such tasks have been assigned to women. Second, that the training of thechild into the habits of the ‘civilized’ community is one generally ascribed tothe female housewife and mother, rather than to the male breadwinner andfather. These factors indicate that toiletry time, especially that of females, is not confined to the periods when individuals void their own wastes, but alsoencompasses the time those individuals spend on regulating and collecting thewastes of other people.

One might expect that a social order based around the hierarchical organiza-





tion of elite and subordinate groups would assign the disposal of human wastesto the least valued groups, due to the classification of such tasks and materials asbeing debased and unworthy that many societies operate with (Douglas, 1966;Moore, 1984). The time of subordinate groups is defined by elites as being worthy of being filled by such labours, whereas tasks like emptying latrines aretoo lowly for the time of the socially superior to be spent on. The tendency forcontemporary western women to be expected to carry out both the toilet trainingof infants and the disposal of their (and sometimes others’) wastes is not surprising if modernity is viewed as a fundamentally patriarchal social order.

The patriarchal subjection of the female in the domestic sphere is at a veryprofound level constituted through the structuring of chronological routines.Within the context of domestic labour, at one level the temporal routines ofhousework followed by the housewife are self-imposed. As one interviewee inOakley’s study of home-workers noted: ‘you have your own time, there’snobody behind you with a punch card’ (quoted in Oakley, 1974: 92). Yet atanother level, temporal routines and procedures are nonetheless set andfollowed which operate implicitly in the service of the reproduction of thedomestic sphere as one element in the overall patriarchal order. The chrono-logical control of an infant’s defecation is one aspect of a whole set of cadencesthat women seek to impose on the household in which they work, and which areat the same time imposed on women by the patriarchal logic of the role ofhousewife. Toilet training, a re-enactment of the civilizing process in miniature,may however prove to be a fraught process, precisely because its object, theinfant’s defecatory capacities, can often obstinately refuse to occur within thechronological demands that the housewife/mother would like to impose onthem. The child may defecate at precisely the point in time when least expectedor least desired, as another interviewee noted of the recalcitrance of her son todefecate at desired periods of time:

I’m trying to potty train him now . . . My God! I’m screaming and stiff with temper to get him on the potty, and you get him on it and he’s there about an hourbefore he does anything. The other day we were watching television, and he donea wee wee in the potty. I brought it out here, emptied it, and took it back for thenext one, and he done one – another one, within seconds – on the floor. (quoted inOakley, 1974: 110–1)

If the housewife and mother is condemned to be the creator of temporal routinesas regards defecation over which she has less than total control, the same situa-tion may be said to pertain today for women in other spheres outside the home.In a variety of extra-domestic locales, patriarchal modernity may be seen as regulating female toiletry time, while simultaneously denigrating its status infavour of its male equivalent. For example, in the sphere of paid work, whenmen enter traditionally ‘feminine’ occupations such as nursing, they may be





keen to distinguish themselves from their female counterparts by refusing tocarry out tasks related to the collection of excreta, such as the emptying of bed-pans (Game and Pringle, 1984: 111). Evidently, men’s time is regarded as beingtoo precious to waste on the collection of wastes, while women’s time continuesto be regarded as naturally encompassing the collection and disposal of detritus.

Furthermore, in the ‘public’ sphere more generally, recent research hasshown that women are systematically disadvantaged in terms of access to publictoiletry facilities. Women may be compelled to spend longer periods of time intoiletry facilities than men, due to factors such as differential forms of voidancein the female and male body, differences in clothing management, varyingforms of toilet etiquette and so on (Kira, 1995). However, at the same time itseems that public authorities and other bodies tend to provide proportionallymore facilities for men than for women (Edwards and McKie, 1996). Thus the average time spent in toilet facilities by a woman, already greater than theaverage time spent by a man due to the various factors above, is made evengreater still by the relative lack of facilities for women.

In this case, a patriarchal order is materialized in a crucial absence of facili-ties that would allow women to control their own toiletry time, rather than besubjected to the time-wasting vagaries of waiting in queues or seeking alterna-tive toiletry locales. In this sense, a patriarchal order is inscribed in the ways inwhich women are compelled to spend more time in the toilet, just as in the otherinstances we have looked at, individuals have been subjected to strategies thatreduce as much as possible the time they spend in such places. The control oftoiletry time can thus involve either direct measures to ensure a reduction in theperiod spent in defecation, or (probably less intentional) ways in which the sub-ordinate status of a group such as women is embodied in a lack of considerationby power-holders for their toiletry needs, leading to greater durations of the timeof these groups in comparison to others being squandered on defecatory acts.

Faecal Rupturings of Time-Regimes

Thus far we have examined various modern regimes of chronological regulationof defecation, under the rubrics of modernity viewed as ‘civilized’, ‘capitalis-tic’, ‘instrumentally rational’ and ‘patriarchal’. The theoretical terminologieswe have deployed may be taken to imply that forms of regulation and controlare generally successful in their operation, and that real individuals do indeedcome under their structurings of time and space. Yet there is ample evidence foreach of the fields we have studied to suggest that the operation of forms of faecal control is something that is better viewed as an often hard-won achieve-ment rather than as a condition guaranteed a priori.4 In order to comprehend theways in which the temporal constraints over human faecal capacities are fre-





quently disturbed and challenged, it is better to relinquish more pessimisticaccounts of total rational control over behaviours, such as that adumbrated byAdorno and Horkheimer. In their stead, we can consider the model of faecalrestraints postulated by Freud, which accounts for controls effected over defeca-tion and yet also gives ample space for examining the ways in which such formsof jurisdiction are often, if not constantly, under threat from the very faecal factors that have been suppressed.

Freud’s position is based around the contention that what modern westerncivilization has repressed is one of the essential psycho-sexual drives intrinsic tothe human being in its raw, ‘uncivilized’ state. Freud dubs this condition‘coprophilia’, the instinctual drive to be at one with, to touch and to smell, andeven to ingest one’s own faecal products. According to Freud (1957, 1962a),very ‘primitive’ peoples indulge such instincts as they are not under the aegis ofan orderly cosmology of civilization which abominates such practices. Childrenin modern society come into the world with such dispositions intact, and thusthe process of toilet training is essentially a mode of habituating children to actunder the auspices of civilization rather than respond to their inborn copro-philiac instincts (Freud and Oppenheim, 1966). Nonetheless, this habituation isnever complete or wholly effective, for the adult psyche is still tormented by theundercurrents of faecal desire repressed in early life (Freud, 1962b). In this way,an activity such as the formulation of toilet humour is the result of these normally hidden currents momentarily breaking to the surface, to the level ofconsciousness:

. . . forms of mental activity such as joking are still able to make the obstructedsource of pleasure [i.e. coprophilia] accessible for a brief moment, and thus showhow much of the esteem in which human beings once held their faeces stillremains preserved in the unconscious. (Freud and Oppenheim, 1966: 187)

Thus, as we noted above, the dilemma of a specifically modern consciousness isthat the coprophiliac elements which have been subjugated by civilization in theforming of that very consciousness itself, occasionally break free of their chainsto achieve temporary liberty. What was in the distant historical past the naturalhuman state of a love of excrement, a state brought under conquest by the psychic imperatives of the modern, suddenly reappears to disrupt the forms ofself-representation of the modern subject. The irruption against consciousnessthus performed is profoundly chronological in aspect for two reasons. In thefirst case, the archaic impulses which modern psychic structures have held incheck break into the present, demonstrating their persistence over time (Freud,1962b). Second, the modern consciousness, which believes itself to be free ofsuch discomfiting impediments, achieves this state of grace through a temporalsense which denies any link to the primeval and filthy past (Freud, 1970). Withthe irruption of the forbidden into the presence of consciousness, the latter’s





temporal sensibility is smashed as its mastery over the past is gainsaid by thepower of the archaic to appear unbidden once more.

The transient autonomy of the repressed coprophiliac instincts manifestsitself for the modern consciousness in more positive or more negative fashions.In the case of toilet humour, the return of the repressed offers a source of guiltypleasure, whereas in the case of other expressions of coprophilia, the reappear-ance of the latter becomes a source of unease, embarrassment and disquiet.Sometimes the two elements run together. For example, that staple of theschoolboy’s armoury of practical jokes, the ‘whoopee cushion’, invites laughterat the discomfort of the person who happens to sit on it, involuntarily producinga noise akin to the voiding of wind from the behind. The whoopee cushion canbe a particularly effective device for eliciting both mirth and embarrassment if itis placed under a seat in a highly decorous environment like the middle-classsitting-room. In such a setting, the place for defecation-related acts is the toilet,and the corresponding time when such acts are acceptable is when the indi-vidual is in such a space, hidden away from the gaze of others, and probably outof earshot too. Both the abashment of the victim of the whoopee cushion and theamusement (or disgust) of the onlookers is a product not only of the fact thatsuch an environment has been deemed unsuited for such emissions, but becausethe time in which the emission took place was also wholly illegitimate.

One does not have to accept fully Freud’s model of repression to accept thatthe human body’s defecatory capacities continue to subvert modernity’schronological and spatial regimes by making unexpected appearances on thesocial stage. For example, Norbert Elias’s (1995: 498) account of the civilizingprocess was based on a rejection of Freud’s assertion as to intrinsic sexualcapacities being repressed by civilization in favour of a model which suggeststhat there was a relative shift from lower to higher levels of regulation of practices, including faecal acts, between the end of feudalism and early modern-ity. Elias therefore rejects any assertions as to instinctual coprophilia in thehuman being, but argues that there did indeed occur a series of shifts from a situation where the production of faeces and wind were treated more sanguinelyin the medieval period, to a modern scenario where such phenomena are regarded much more negatively and brought under greater levels of regulation.

This can be seen through a juxtaposition of two representative examples fromthe medieval and modern periods respectively, one from the mid-15th centuryand the other from the early 18th century:

It is customary that, if any one happens to break wind, the by-standers should say:‘To the beard of him who owes no one anything’. In Vicenza, an old man, with along flowing beard, was summoned by a creditor before the Governor of the city,Ugolotto Biancardo, a learned and stern magistrate. The old man, in a loud voiceand with great prolixity, kept repeating that he was nobody’s debtor, that he owedno one anything: ‘Get away from here,’ said Ugolotto, ‘and remove that stinking





beard of yours, the stench of which incommodes us’. Quite abashed, the old manasked how his beard could be so offensive to the smell? ‘Why’ replied theGovernor, ‘it is replete with all the farts that men ever let, since they are sent to thebeard of him who owes no one anything’. The joke lowered the man’s tone, andset all the assistants laughing.5

It is very impolite to emit wind from your body when in company, either fromabove or from below, even if it is done without noise.6

The former example comes from a collection of humorous stories, the latterfrom an instruction manual in etiquette. Yet despite differences in genre, eachillustrates the attitudes of their respective periods to the relationships betweenanal emissions, the reactions of self and others to these, and the chronologicalmanagement thereof. In the former case, the act of farting produces not only inthe people in the story but also, we may assume, in the reader a form of (relatively) guilt-free laughter. However, the second source indicates that by the18th century, the imperatives for preventing such emissions at inopportunemoments (and the set of opportune moments for such phenomena was diminish-ing ever more at this period) are so great relative to previous centuries that farting would definitely result in high levels of embarrassment and distress fors/he whose body had slipped out of the network of regulation. The laughterstimulated in other people would primarily be a stifled and somewhat shamefulsnickering, at least among the elites who at this time more than the lower ordershave taken on the habits of ‘civility’, rather than the generally unabashed guffaw that would have been the response, probably among all social strata,several centuries earlier.

Thus the fart can be seen as an iconic factor in the construction of civilizedmodernity, on either Freud’s or Elias’s telling. Ironically, it was precisely therelative inability of spatio-temporal regimes to fully control bodily emissionssuch as the fart which led to ever greater levels of effort to regulate such factors.As we saw above, the account Elias gives of the development of the civilizingprocess is one based around a description of the means by which faecal actsbecame ever more tightly regulated. But it was precisely as more regulationswere developed to control excretory emissions that the perceived need to control such phenomena became more pronounced; and as the importance ofregulating such activities became more important, the offences perceived to begenerated by farts and unintended and uncontrolled defecation became all thegreater, thus stimulating even more stringent rules and regulations as to whenand where defecation and related actions could legitimately occur. In effectthen, the history of modern faecal control involves a dialectic whereby the failure of certain spatial and chronological systems of administration to fullycontrol the excretory leads to the creation of novel forms of regulation, which inturn are haunted by the spectre of failure to reign in a partly controlled but stillunruly and chronologically unpredictable faecal realm.





Conclusion: Faecal Freedom and the Paradox of the Modern

In this article we have reviewed from several perspectives how in the modernperiod excremental ‘traces of the earth’ and the bodies that create them havebeen brought under multiple forms of chronological and spatial guidance andadministration. Whether the modern is regarded, as from the viewpoints ofFreud and Elias, as a ‘civilized’ social order, or as a capitalistic or instrument-ally rational or patriarchal configuration, it is clear that the modern project,however conceived, is based around a series of attempts to control the times andplaces of human defecation. Whether the subject groups whose excretions arebeing temporally and spatially guided are factory workers, women, the victimsof libertinism or the population in toto, it remains the case that modernity is asocial order that involves unprecedented attempts to bring under the aegis ofregulated time the organic processes of the human body itself.

Nonetheless, the case of faecal regulation highlights one of the great dilem-mas of modernity. In this social configuration based on a radical unsettling ofestablished habits and entrenched traditions, the past comes, as both Marx andFreud knew in their own ways, to weigh like a nightmare on the awareness ofthe present. The exiled antique forever reappears on the horizon of a societyboth striving towards the future and seeking to relinquish the vestiges of a pastit regards as best forgotten. What reappears becomes a nagging danger andunspoken threat to the overlapping regimes of temporal constraint which seek tobring the human body under their auspices. At the same time as it exhibits aseries of chronologically expressed forms of the ‘will to power’, modernity alsopays witness to frequent displays of the great recalcitrance of the faecal capaci-ties of the body, when these refuse to act in line with desiderata of restraint anddemands for order. By considering the dialectic of corporeal control and faecalfreedom that has occurred over the last several centuries, we can begin toglimpse one of the great paradoxes of the modern: that more erratic pulses of bodily time still vibrate deep within a human frame born into a period ofapparent mastery by forms of time that seek to kill inconsistency.

Notes

1. For the sake of concision, we will use the word ‘defecation’ to refer to acts that produce either faeces or urine. Although there are important differences between theproduction of each material, this article will regard each as synonymous.

2. It was only towards the end of the 18th century that such socially generated attitudesand practices were coupled with the evaluations of the disease-ridden nature of faecesgenerated by medico-scientific knowledges (see Corbin, 1986: 47; Freud, 1957: 55;Elias, 1995: 443).

3. At around this time many factories also adopted regulations as to the ways in which





employees were allowed to express themselves linguistically. For example, the rulesof a late 18th century cotton mill had it that: ‘[w]hile at work . . . behaviour must becommendable avoiding all shouting, loud talk, whistling, calling foul names, all meanand vulgar language, and every kind of indecency’. Contravention of such rules waspunishable by fines (Pollard, 1965: 195).

4. This can be seen in some of the examples presented above. Robert Roberts (1980:135) noted that despite all the efforts of his school’s authorities, the pupils continuedto indulge their ‘bad habits’ while spending time in the toilets. Similarly, the produc-tion-line workers in Cavendish’s (1982: 115) study successfully manipulated the reg-ulations by ‘rush[ing] to the loo in work-time to add a couple of extra minutes to thebreak’.

5. From Poggio (1879: 162–3). Original circa 1459.6. From La Salle, Les Règles de la bienséance et de la civilité chrétienne (1729), cited in

Elias (1995: 108).

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DAVID INGLIS is a lecturer in sociology, University of Aberdeen. Hewrites and teaches in the areas of sociological and social theory, and thesociology of culture. ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, University ofAberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3QY, UK. [email: [email protected]]

MARY HOLMES is a lecturer in sociology, University of Aberdeen. Shewrites and teaches in the areas of feminist theory and the politics and cultures of representation. ADDRESS: as David Inglis.[email: [email protected]]


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