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VORTICES OF FORGETTING: THE TECHNOGENESIS OF FLUSHING MEDIA

by

Joseph Dawson Bookman

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy

degree in Communication Studies in the Graduate College of

The University of Iowa

December 2016

Thesis Supervisors: Professor John Durham Peters Professor Kembrew McLeod

Copyright by

Joseph Dawson Bookman

2016

All Rights Reserved

Graduate College The University of Iowa

Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

_______________________

PH.D. THESIS

_______________

This is to certify that the Ph. D. thesis of

JOSEPH DAWSON BOOKMAN

has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication Studies at the December 2016 graduation.

Thesis Committee: ___________________________________________ John Durham Peters, Thesis Supervisor __________________________________________ Kembrew McLeod, Thesis Supervisor __________________________________________ Tim Havens __________________________________________ Sasha Waters Freyer __________________________________________ Rita Zajacz

ii

“…an eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by streetlight from above, and from below by fiber optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting.”

—Ian McEwan, Saturday

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There was a time, early on in this process, back before I’d written a

single usable word, where I spent excruciating hours in a scholar study at

The University of Iowa’s Main Library staring at a stack of books I would

never read, peering into the intimidating glow of a mostly blank word

document. During this painful period, I often wondered if I would ever

get the opportunity to acknowledge people for their assistance in the

completion of this work that I had not yet even begun. Now that years

have passed and I am on the other side, I am filled with the sort of

gratitude that only comes through sweat, and with time. In this moment, I

am so deeply grateful for those who have helped me along the way.

First and foremost, I must thank my advisors John Durham Peters and

Kembrew McLeod, whose patience and unwavering support established

the conditions of possibility for my successful completion. Were it not for

their steady mentorship, this project would never have found its way into

the world. I owe each of these men more than I can say. Thanks also to the

other members of my steadfast committee: Tim Havens, who’s door was

always open during my years in Iowa City; Rita Zajacz, whose friendly

guidance has meant so much to me throughout my graduate career; and

Sasha Waters Freyer, whose service on this committee goes well beyond

the normal call of duty, and whose willingness to take me on as a student

changed my life in more ways than I can express here.

iv

I’d like to thank Joy Hayes for her mentorship when I originally

arrived at Iowa, and Rachel McLaren for her service on my pre-qualifying

committee. I would also like to thank Dan Chaon and Leighton Pierce for

their intellectual guidance during pivotal moments of my education.

Special thanks to Kyle Stine and Chad Vollrath, dear friends who have

also served as shadow advisors to me since I arrived in graduate school.

Thanks also to Marc Carlton, whose rock solid friendship has helped see

me through this long and difficult journey.

There are so many others whose help and support I can only begin to

acknowledge: Dan Faltesek, Niko Poulakos, Atilla Hallsby, Paul Johnson,

Alison Wielgus, A.C. Hawley, Becky Boyle, Jesse Damazo, Craig Webster,

Rod Troester, Matt Levy, Joe Beilein, Aaron Mauro, Tom Noyes, Eric

Corty, Till Heilmann, Miriam McMullen-Pastrick, Rylan Eshelman, Jared

Cates, Alex Mignolo, Susan Worley, Cheng Wong, Tom Sowders, Jamie

McCormick, John Kurtz, Mike Berlin, Ben Morton, Alicia Cozza, Kimberly

Jennings, Mike Connor, Ned Wilbur, Nathan Winker-Rhoades, Sofia

Karatza, Erik Schwartz, Jason Livingston, Nick Twemlow, Ben Kambs,

Erika Kambs, Eunice Kambs, Laughlin Siceloff, Ari Berenbaum, Emilio

Oliveira, Onnesha Roychoudhuri, Andrew Leland, and Richard Wiebe.

Thanks finally to my loving parents, Jack and Betsy, who have never

let me down; to my Godfather Ed for his lifelong friendship and

v

generosity; to my brothers, Dan, Wells, and Lake, who are always there

for me, each in his own way.

And thank you, Jill, my wife, for rolling with me all this time.

vi

ABSTRACT

An outgrowth of the recent “infrastructural turn” in the

humanities, this dissertation explores ways in which emerging flushing

infrastructures of the nineteenth century—specifically toilets, sewers, and

wastewater treatment systems—rearranged the coordinates of human

experience in the modern, developed world. The idea that flushing

technologies and techniques contribute to a process of technogenesis—a

process of technical exteriorization that is beyond human control but

which nevertheless contributes to the evolution of human consciousness—

offers a foundational perspective for this study. While flushing

technologies and techniques have powerfully enhanced certain human

capabilities, they have also affected humanity in a number of problematic

ways. This project examines how an expansive flushing media complex

emerged in the United States, and traces some of the cultural,

environmental and psychical consequences of these developments.

Central to this dissertation’s argument is the idea that specific technical

circumstances have had the effect of diminishing people’s comfort with,

and understanding of, waste processes. In the end, it argues that the

ubiquitous flushing technologies that permeate the developed world have

perpetuated a culture of forgetting.

In the broadest sense, this dissertation is a media-theoretical

exploration of the concept of flushing, and it adopts a theoretical lens that

vii

has been developed through cultural techniques scholarship of the past

few decades. This body of research works to break down and rebuild

conventional understandings of media and culture, and seeks to better

understand the ways in which medial technologies shape social and

cognitive orders. At the theoretical level, this dissertation works to extend

the reach of media studies. In addition to conventional media like books,

newspapers, TV, radio, film, and the internet, this view of media

encompasses any substance or process that effectively mediates—that is,

functions as a medium. At the stylistic level, this project answers the call

for alternative and experimental modes of dissertorial expression.

Blending academic, essayistic, and journalistic strategies, this work walks

a precarious line between creative writing and scholarly discourse. Such

boundary pushing aims to encourage future stylistic innovation within

the academy.

viii

PUBLIC ABSTRACT

An outgrowth of the recent “infrastructural turn” in the

humanities, this dissertation explores ways in which emerging flushing

infrastructures of the nineteenth century—specifically toilets, sewers, and

wastewater treatment systems—rearranged the coordinates of human

experience in the modern, developed world. While flushing technologies

and techniques have powerfully enhanced certain human capabilities,

they have also affected humanity in a number of problematic ways. This

project examines how an expansive flushing media complex emerged in

the United States, and traces some of the cultural, environmental and

psychical consequences of these developments.

In the broadest sense, this dissertation is a media-theoretical

exploration of the concept of flushing, and it adopts a theoretical lens that

has been developed through cultural techniques scholarship of the past

few decades. This body of research works to break down and rebuild

conventional understandings of media and culture, and seeks to better

understand the ways in which medial technologies shape social and

cognitive orders. At the theoretical level, this dissertation works to extend

the reach of media studies. In addition to conventional media like books,

newspapers, TV, radio, film, and the internet, this view of media

encompasses any substance or process that effectively mediates—that is,

functions as a medium. At the stylistic level, this project answers the call

ix

for alternative and experimental modes of dissertorial expression.

Blending academic, essayistic, and journalistic strategies, this work walks

a precarious line between creative writing and scholarly discourse. Such

boundary pushing aims to encourage future stylistic innovation within

the academy.

x

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................. xii

ANGSTIO-REFLEXIVE PROLOGUE .................................................................1

The Nature of the Pain .............................................................................1 Squirming in Public ..................................................................................6 The Knowledge Question ......................................................................11

INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................19 CHAPTER 1—WHAT IT MEANS TO FLUSH ...............................................27

A Zone of Constant Exchange ...............................................................27 The Spirit of Flushing ............................................................................ 31 Cultural Techniques ...............................................................................44 Flushing Media ........................................................................................51 Technogenesis ..........................................................................................65 The Forest of Media ................................................................................71

CHAPTER 2—THE RISE OF FLUSHING IN THE WEST ............................76

Nathan’s Bucket ......................................................................................76 To Flow, How Sweet a Thing ................................................................84 America Begins to Flush ........................................................................96 Flowing Water, Stinking Air ...............................................................102 The Telegraph Water Carrier and the Dry Earth Closet .................109 The Dawn of Flushing Consciousness ...............................................116

CHAPTER 3—THE RISE OF FLUSHING IN THE WEST, PART II: A CIVILIZING PROCESS .....................................................121

The Sociogenesis of Shame ..................................................................121 The Mechanization of Flushing ......................................................... 137 The Inaudio and The Naturo ...............................................................155 The Arrival of Flushing Society ..........................................................166

xi

CHAPTER 4—WHEN YOU FLUSH, WHERE DOES IT GO .....................174

Killer Microbes ......................................................................................174 A World Without Waste ......................................................................186 The Science of Sewage ..........................................................................191 The Deep Blue Sewer ........................................................................... 213 Invisible Backgrounds ..........................................................................224

CHAPTER 5—FLUSHING THE BODY ........................................................ 230

The Body’s Sewer ................................................................................. 230 The Royal Road to Health ................................................................... 237 Conclusion .............................................................................................255

CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................260

WORKS CITED ..................................................................................................267

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Peerless Water Closet Advertisement .................................... 139 Figure 2: Camden Pottery Company Advertisement ............................158 Figure 3: The Naturo Closet Bowl ............................................................162 Figure 4: Rural Political Delegate Cartoon ..............................................171 Figure 5: Rural Sanitation de Luxe Cartoon ............................................172 Figure 6: National Distribution of CSSs ...................................................225

1

ANGSTIO-REFLEXIVE PROLOGUE The Nature of the Pain

Anyone who’s done it knows that writing a dissertation involves its

own very special kind of pain and that learning how to manage and

endure this pain is a major part of what the process is all about. Pain is

always unpleasant, but all the worse when it’s self-inflicted. Such is the

pain of the dissertator:1 years ago, in a haze of naiveté, the dissertator

happily agreed to take on this assignment. He/she/ze was not

manipulated, threatened, or coerced in any way; no matter how you dice

it, the dissertator is responsible for his/her/hir own situation. Most hours

of most days, he/she/ze feels basically despondent and desperate and

depressed, and the only semblance of relief comes when the dissertator

temporarily manages to forget about the work, but avoidance is always a

doomed coping strategy, and the unfortunate reality is that any moment

of pain-free living that he/she/ze manages to steal back from the clutches

of dissertorial distress only serves to prolong the suffering and compound

his/her/hir feelings of inadequacy and regret in the end.

To the uninitiated all this may sound whiny, adolescent, First World

problem-ish etc., but those who’ve been through the gauntlet know that

the pain is 100% real. Over the course of my many years as a dissertator, 1 Often when I attempt to type this word, my word processor auto-suggests that the word I’m actually reaching for is dissipator, which seems perfectly appropriate, somehow.

2

I’ve often found myself reaching for metaphors in an effort to describe the

precise texture of the experience to others. When friends ask me how I’m

doing, I’ll typically say something like: “Still have weights on my feet;” or

in bitterer moments, some version of: “Still in jail.” These stock tropes do

an ok job of summing up a dissertator’s basic psychic predicament, but

the better metaphors—the ones with more emotional depth and which

slice through the experiential marrow with finer autoethnographic

precision—aren’t usually appropriate for casual conversation. The good

metaphors tend to be…off-puttingly dark.

The horrors of dissertating are absolutely sui generis. Don DeLillo and

David Foster Wallace have both compared the experience of writing a

novel to being stalked by a wailing, deformed infant 24 hours a day, and

while I’ve always enjoyed this metaphor for the novelist, it doesn’t work

as well for the dissertator, mainly I think because the feelings that a

novelist has for a novel are very different from the ones a dissertator has

for a dissertation. Novelists (like parents) have genuine love for their

creations; instinctual affection will always accompany their feelings of

shame and disgust. The balance of affection and revulsion skews

differently for dissertators. This has partly to do with the fact that

dissertators are not-so-subtley encouraged to cultivate disdain for their

own work. (The awful clichè that “the best dissertation is a done

dissertation” is the most obvious example of this brand of encouragement,

3

but other examples abound: people will tell you to “just hold your nose

and power through”; I even have a close friend whose advisor once told

him to “turn in a piece of shit”—awesome advice, according to this friend,

who now has a Ph.D.)

But the bigger issue is that despite the time, labor and care one invests

in bringing a dissertation into the world, the product—regardless of any

institution’s particular IP policy—never belongs to its creator. One could

argue that dissertations belong to the committees, departments,

universities, and/or whatever field a given dissertator is attempting to

fertilize/enrich; however, the view that becomes more common with each

passing year is that dissertations belong to no one. Those that aren’t

stillborn are orphaned; no matter how smart, polished or rigorous, all

dissertations are invariably destined for abjection and long futures of

inutility and neglect. This may be partially a matter of indexing: that

which is labeled a dissertation will probably be judged accordingly.

Dissertations belong to the lowest caste of formal writing; the Dalits of

publication, if you will.

It’s true that more enterprising/tenacious doctorate-holders find ways

of repurposing their dissertations in time. Since a dissertation is not and

never will be a book, the academic and publishing worlds agree that it is to

a certain extent acceptable to harvest vital organs, siphon off nutrient-rich

juices, saw off limbs, joints, appendages and what have you, so long as

4

you wield this raw organic matter toward the production of: a higher life

form. While this sort of recycling may offer a dissertation a possible

glimpse at redemption, it also contributes to its ultimate disgrace. How

cruel a fate to pass through this earth utterly and completely scorned and

then finally cannibalized for parts! Not even afforded a proper burial, in

the end.

In moments when run-of-the mill dissertorial malaise has tipped over

into over-the-top self-pity, I’ve occasionally found myself likening the

dissertator’s condition to that of a hypothetical torture victim. One

metaphoric hyperbole I’ve returned to time and again begins with the

image of a pillory in the desert. Picture the dissertator locked into the

classic pilloried pose, woodenly secured at the wrists and at the neck, but

as opposed to your traditional pillory where the hands are forced to

dangle ineffectually through the holes in the cross-plank, this modern

desert pillory has been modified with a horizontal shelf that juts out just

below the hand holes. You may have guessed that on this shelf there is a

keyboard and a monitor. The keyboard is just within reach of the

dissertator’s fingertips, though in order to reach the top QWERTY row

he/she/ze must extend his/her/hir distal phalanges to a tendon-taxing

degree. The computer—which is equipped with a reliable Wi-Fi

connection, an internet browser, and an old version of Microsoft Word—

runs on solar power and is always on. The computer also has FaceTime,

5

which is always open, and the computer’s webcam is always positioned so

that it always captures an ultra-close-up of the dissertator’s acne-crusted

face. The tiny webcam light glows green; every hour of every day, the

dissertator has no choice but to stare at his/her/hir own ugly face while

enduring the constant fear of the panoptically oppressed—he/she/ze may

feel alone in the desert, but he/she/ze knows that he/she/ze is also: being

surveilled.

It is summertime. The heat is sweltering and humidity levels are high.

The dissertator is skin-charred, parch-mouthed, lathered with oozing

sores; a steady stream of sweat drips down his/her/hir forehead and into

his/her/hir sunburned eyes. For the most part, there are no people or

animals in sight, but the odd mosquito does manage to wriggle its way

into the dissertator’s ear canal, and birds will occasionally shit on

his/her/hir head. Obviously the dissertator is miserable, but he/she/ze

knows that nothing will change about his/her/hir situation until

he/she/ze produces upwards of 50,000 smart-sounding words that

collectively somehow manage to contribute to an elusive thing called

knowledge. The dissertator finds the concept of “knowledge production”

scarily confusing and problematic, and suspects that he/she/ze lacks the

basic wetware capacity to even recognize a genuine knowledge kernel

should he/she/ze happen to stumble across one, let alone make a

6

convincing knowledge claim of his/her/hir own.2 Relatively early on in

the process, the dissertator is forced to come to terms with the fact that

he/she/ze will never make a meaningful contribution to the history of

ideas. This realization comes as a big time ego check, and it stings.

Squirming in Public

Once the dissertator comprehends the nature of the pain, it becomes

increasingly difficult to justify all the suffering. Day in, day out, the

dissertator stews over the same suicidal question: why go on? Satisfying

answers are hard to come by. Even if the dissertator was a relatively

upbeat/positive person in a previous phase of life, he/she/ze is unable to

put a positive construction on his/her/hir present situation. The prospect

of quitting is tempting but soul crushing; at the same time, the thought of

forging ahead seems totally pointless given the fact that the dissertator’s

gross mental deficiencies will prevent him/her/hir from ever completing

the job. There are no good solutions to this problem, and any attempts to

problem-solve provoke eye-watering panic. It’s a textbook double bind;

the dissertator is 100% boxed in.

Another major anxiety-inducer is that pretty much everyone the

dissertator comes into contact with—friends, enemies, parents, siblings,

2 And let’s please not lose sight of the fact that even if the dissertator were more confident in his/her/hir own mental abilities, it’s exceedingly hard to concentrate on academic tasks while drenched in sweat/covered in birdshit, etc.

7

mentors, students, colleagues, acquaintances, friends of friends, strangers

on the street—has an opportunity to watch him/her/hir struggle and flail

and generally humiliate his/her/hir self publicly. Although you wouldn’t

necessarily be clued into it until you’re around a dissertator or become

one yourself, it’s well known that dissertators are scarier and more

cracked out looking than non-dissertators. (To offer a bit of personal

testimony here: I remember passing one of my advisors in the hallway of

the Becker Building during the long winter of my first year ABD: “I see

you’ve got the whole Raskolnikov thing going,” he said with a smile, after

which I rushed to the nearest bathroom and encountered in the mirror an

intense-looking man, expression weary and wired, black peacoat, hair

wild, ears flaking skin, deep bags under a pair of dark murderous eyes;

and confronted with this reflection, had just one burning thought: Touché,

Dr. Peters. Touché.)

It’s also true that dissertators have an irrational fear of being judged.

Everyone on planet earth is judgey toward everyone else, and this

universal judginess results in people getting their feelings bruised all the

time, but the problem is worse for dissertators, because they are, as a rule,

jitteringly nervous and vulnerable and are liable to take offense to pretty

much anything anyone has to say, especially if it in any way calls attention

to their status as ABD. Almost all dissertators keep a running list of the

unpleasant diss-related questions that people have asked them over the

8

years (sort of like a revenge list, except that most dissertators are non-

action-oriented, and cowardly, and pose no threat to anyone except

his/her/hir self), and obsessing over these negative exchanges becomes a

constant feature of his/her/hir mental life. Because I am naturally prone

to wallow in resentment, and also because I’ve been ABD for a punishing

number of years, my own personal list is long. I’ll spare you a detailed

accounting of all my grievances and will just say for now that the question

“How is your dissertation going?” is abhorrently rude and unacceptable

and should be avoided at all costs.3

For a progress-related inquiry not to be wildly inappropriate, the

dissertator must broach the topic him/her/hir self, or else the question

must be professionally situated, i.e. it must come from the dissertator’s

boss, or advisor, or a member of his/her/hir committee. The problem is

that those privileged to ask questions about the status of the diss all have

power over the dissertator, and unfortunately these power-laden queries

are the ones that tend to inflict the worst psychological damage. Even the

kindest and most well-meaning advisors will unintentionally wind up

scarring their advisees for life.

3 The fact that so many people have asked me this question on a routine basis for so many years (including, unbelievably, fellow dissertators, who should absolutely know better) has caused me to suspect that at least one of two things are almost certainly true: 1) I am an unlikable person, and people take weird pleasure in watching me squirm; 2) most people I come into contact with are socially dumb.

9

Take, for example, Dr. McLeod. Everyone who knows Dr. McLeod

knows that he’s a gentle, patient and warmly supportive man;

notwithstanding a few inept/crotchety University of Iowa administrators

and maybe a handful of uptight people who have failed to appreciate his

pranks, everyone who knows Dr. McLeod loves him. It goes without

saying that I love him too, which made it all the more brutal when some

time ago, during a telephone conversation, he asked me a question that I

will never forget, a question that cut to the bone of my dissertorial

despair, and which temporarily brought me to my emotional knees.

We were talking, as usual, about my slow progress toward completion.

I learned awhile ago that “slow progress” is really just a euphemism for

mental weakness; I’ve also learned that for whatever combination of

reasons those who are mentally strong often have trouble engaging with

those who are mentally weak—direct contact with weakness has a

tendency to put the strong on edge.4 In those moments of conversation

when we arrive at the topic of my mental weakness, Dr. McLeod does a

reasonably good job concealing his discomfort, however if you know him

well, as I do, you can tell that he’s eager to move on to a different topic

ASAP—his speech quickens; his mood shifts; a slight but perceptible

4 The obvious exception/counter-truth is when strong people are preying on weakness, in which case the strong people are likely to experience excitement rather than discomfort, but this dynamic is obviously toxic to any healthy advisor-advisee relationship, and has certainly not characterized mine with Dr. Peters or Dr. McLeod, not in any way even remotely, not even close…

10

agitation creeps into his voice. What’s happening in these moments is that

Dr. McLeod is wracking his brain for empathetic words, but these words

don’t come easy, because when you get right down to it, given the two

people we’re dealing with here—Dr. McLeod and myself—once we begin

to take seriously the factors that differentiate us as human beings (e.g.

maturity level, talent, professional accomplishment, mental fortitude, etc.)

the situation winds up looking a lot like a Grizzly Bear who’s encountered

an ant who’s trapped beneath an oversized crumb. Even if we assume for

the sake of analogy that this is a super friendly Grizzly, one that’s

unusually warmhearted and kind and capable of trans-species empathy,

and even if we grant that this Grizzly has taken a special interest in the

plight of this particular ant—that he’s very much in the ant’s emotional

corner, truly and sincerely rooting for the success of this ant, etc.—at the

end of the day we’re still talking about bears and ants, creatures who, on

account of their very distinct ontologies, are capable of sharing only so

much common ground, and so try as this Grizzly might, it’s going to be

difficult for him to relate, period.

So but at some point during our conversation, Dr. McLeod asks: “Why

is this so hard for you?”

My end of the line must have gone silent for a spell, because I

remember hearing the opening violins from The Verve’s “Bittersweet

Symphony” as the world around me collapsed in a wave of white

11

shimmering light. If human brains came equipped with active cooling

fans, my brain fan would have been humming at high speed, because in

that moment my CPU was busy rendering a spectacular moving image:

one moment I saw myself perched on the guardrail of a highway

overpass; the next moment my body was taking flight: then I was moving

through space, elevating up, arching out, tilting down, frame by frame,

dropping into a swan dive.

Can you see me now? Falling through the air? Arms outstretched, back

straight as a pin, plunging headlong into the rush hour traffic below.

The Knowledge Question

Some months ago, in a low moment, I found myself awake in the night

Googling the phrase “what is knowledge?” This is sad, unhealthy

behavior, I realize, but on this particular night I couldn’t sleep and was

feeling especially down as I was struggling to write my way into a new

chapter (for me, new beginnings are always rough) and was also coming

to terms with a friendly but also sort of rattling email that I’d just received

from Dr. Peters, who’d casually suggested that it might at some point be a

good idea for me to prepare some thoughts about the nature of knowledge

(what is it? how do we go about presenting it? etc.) in case someone (e.g.

him) asked me to justify the knowledge value of my research during my

final defense. It shouldn’t have, but the truth is that this advice caught me

12

off guard, because even after years of doctoral training—reading the

books, writing the papers, engaging in the discussions, taking the exams,

attending the meetings, the conferences, being in all those rooms—I’d

never had my feet held to the fire on The Knowledge Question. Somehow

I’d managed to stagger my way through a quarter century’s worth of

classroom education without ever answering the question of where

knowledge comes from or how it blossoms into the world.

Part of my problem was that I arrived at grad school without any real

theory or philosophy training (looking back, my decision to enroll in this

program seems amazingly bold and naive—like signing up for league ice

hockey without pads/stick/skates, still fuzzy on the meaning of the word

“puck”, etc.), but the more fundamental issue for me has to do with my

basic attitude about learning, my general way of engaging the world of

ideas. Whatever knowledge is, I’ve never pursued it with much passion or

dedication. Not like I’m anti-knowledge. It’s more like I’ve always felt that

knowledge is something you acquire incidentally as you move through

life: if you’re essentially aware of your surroundings, if you’re at least

moderately curious and somewhat open to the possibility of experiencing

emotional and intellectual growth, knowledge finds ways of making itself

available to you one way or another.

But this is not the mentality of a serious scholar. A scholar’s job is to

hunt and produce knowledge (or at least attempt to produce it.) A scholar

13

believes (or at least fakes confidence in) his/her/hir capacity for

knowledge production. What then, precisely, do scholars believe

themselves capable of producing? Epistemologists will begin the process

of answering this question by working through the Problem of the

Criterion—by attempting, in other words, to nail down the specific criteria

that are required for knowledge to materialize and exist—but as it turns

out these criteria are not at all obvious, the maddening aporia being that

you can only recognize knowledge if you already know and accept

specific criteria for the existence of knowledge, but then you can’t possibly

determine reliable criteria for knowledge without first being able to

identify with certainty a concrete example of knowledge in the first place

(which you can then use to go about the work of establishing said criteria);

so while it’s possible to work backward or forward—to begin with an

assumed truth and work your way back to a theory of knowledge, or to

begin with a theory of knowledge and work toward establishing a

particular truth—there is no one reliable starting point, and no matter

what path you choose there’s an 100% chance that somewhere along the

way you’re going to adopt some questionable assumptions; and since we

all know that assumptions are by definition precarious and problematic,

the unfortunate bottom line is that no matter who you are or what you do,

the instant you decide to float a knowledge claim out into the world, you

14

automatically make yourself vulnerable to some angle of devastating

critique.5

Without going too far down the analytical rabbit hole, I’ll just state the

obvious and point out that The Question is very old and has been slippery

and convoluted from the very beginning. Were I interested in addressing

The Question with any degree of rigorousness, I might begin by parsing

the differences between ideas, concepts, and phenomena, or the

distinction between truth and experience; I might riff on how art,

philosophy and science each pursue knowledge differently, or discuss

how we tend to go about understanding the nature of perception. I could

define some intro-level epistemological jargon, or include a lit review-ish

summary of major players who throughout history have tried to tackle the

subject head on, beginning with old Greeks, working my way up through

famous medieval men and contemporary philosophers. Or if nothing else,

I might offer musings on the limited but robust nature of the empirical

5 Which means, basically, that when Dr. Peters suggested I prepare a few words about the knowledge value of my research, he was knowingly setting me up for failure, but for a couple of reasons I’m not overly upset about this: one, because at this late stage in my graduate career I’m more or less wise to the methods of my advisors—I know that whatever gauntlet-esque trials they put me through, they’re doing it with my best interests in mind (the fundamental principle being that I’m supposed to grow and learn from failure, emerge better/faster/stronger in the end, etc.) and, two, because I know Dr. Peters well, and I know that he’s not cruel or sadistic or mean-spirited in any way, it’s only that his mental strength is so freakish and beyond the norm of what everyday minds are capable of that he actually and sincerely believes that brain-crushing epistemological inquiry is fun—the same way your Rocks and your Schwarzeneggers probably think it’s fun when they attempt to deadlift 1500 pounds.

15

process, which I could perhaps then contrast to the role of humanities in

modern life.

But as you may have guessed, I’m not up for any of this. What’s more,

I don’t really think that this is what Dr. Peters had in mind back when he

originally asked me The Question way back when. To offer a bit more

context on this point: Dr. Peters posed The Question after reading a draft

of what I think was my third chapter, sometime during my third year

ABD. At this point in the process, he saw fairly clearly where I was

headed with the project, and was in a good position to assess its various

strengths and weaknesses and anticipate problems that I might run up

against down the line. While I’m sure he quietly observed that my

research was less than groundbreaking and that my ideas and analysis

were usually lacking in some fundamental way, he didn’t rub these facts

in my face (generally, I think Dr. Peters believed that I was moving

toward the completion of a passable thesis and did not want to

unnecessarily add to my suffering); what was genuinely beginning to

concern him, however, was my particular approach to “scholarship,”

which you (perceptive reader that you are) already sense is more than

averagely voice-driven, tends toward self-reflexive digression,

16

occasionally attempts to weave in bits of humor, and flouts many of the

established rules of academic writing.6

The conventional view is that scholarly writing should be formal,

meaning that it should be declarative, professional sounding, free of

casual language and/or slangy colloquialisms. These rules are all

designed to establish the scholar’s legitimacy as a proliferator of

knowledge; when all is said and done, the basic goal of formal writing is

to convey authority. But besides the fact that I’ve had issues with

authority ever since I was a kid and also think that formality is pretty

much a drag (for me, one of the main draws to professorial life is that I get

to wear jeans and hoodies to work), I’ve furthermore always been

suspicious of the epistemological arrogance that the “scholarly voice”

implies. The scholarly voice is a code just like any other code, meaning

that it’s ultimately just a mode of representation, a mediating element that

channels ideas through certain grooves of intelligibility. If voice functions

as camouflage for doctrine, the scholarly voice works to conceal the shaky

assumptions that motivate particular disciplinary agendas.

In general, I favor the embrace-your-limits school of personal

expression over the stodgy self-assuredness of academic discourse;

however, I also have some basic awareness of what a dissertation is

6 You will have noticed that I occasionally deploy the verboten second person pronoun, for example.

17

supposed to be and do, and of what the requirements are for earning this

degree. I may harbor certain punky tendencies, but I am also mostly risk-

averse, and a pragmatist at heart. Accordingly, throughout drafting and

revision I’ve done my best to produce a document that is at least quasi-

palatable to the academic community. The doctoral thesis you are about to

read is, in effect, a stylistic hybrid—part academic, part essayistic, with

certain hints of literary and journalistic influence scattered throughout. I

can’t say that this experimental form results in total aesthetic success, but

working in this mode was something I found myself needing to do, and in

the end had a certain functional utility as it allowed me to work on

developing my own voice as a writer (a project which played an

important role in motivating me back to the desk each day) while also

working toward the fulfillment of a significant academic requirement. I

understand that certain no-nonsense scholars will scoff in the face of this

explanation, and I accept that; I can only hope now that my committee

members here at Iowa are willing to see the value in the work that I have

done.

Over the course of this process, I’ve come to believe that the point of a

dissertation has less to do with producing knowledge than navigating a

certain set of knowledge coordinates. My working theory is that

dissertations function as a form of what Donald T. Campbell once referred

to as nested variation and selection. The concept of nested variation and

18

selection explains how organisms use knowledge to navigate specific

environments, and how knowledge is developed and refined as a result of

these navigations. According to this framework, basic knowledge—which

in the biological realm is often inherited through genetic codes—serves as

a kind of a guidance system for an individual organism’s exploration of

the world. Reliable knowledge is required for survival; at the same time,

individual acts of exploration work to test the boundaries of specific

knowledge systems. “In general, nested variation and selection occurs

whenever a simpler and faster process of variation and selection guides a

slower and more complex one by using knowledge in the past. The

process lies at the heart of what it means to learn.”7

From the point of view of the dissertator, nothing about the

dissertation experience is simple or fast, but in the grand scheme of

knowledge development, a dissertator’s labor is barely significant. A

dissertation’s only real significance comes through its ability to feed micro

amounts of data back into the larger system. Whether at the level of

individuals or civilizations, learning processes depend on this kind of

recursive feedback. When old knowledge is put to new tests, knowledge

evolves ever so slightly. In my most optimistic moments, I like to believe

that my work contributes productively to this process.

7 Gorman, Hugh S. The Story of N: A Social History of the Nitrogen Cycle and the Challenge of Sustainability. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013, 23.

19

INTRODUCTION

The work you are about to read has almost zero resemblance to the

concept I presented at my original prospectus defense so many years ago.

About the only intellectual through line is the concept of waste. The topic

of waste is so theoretically ripe, so loaded with rank possibility, it can be

(like odoriferous waste objects themselves) off-putting. But despite this

fact—or perhaps because of it—waste has somehow managed to sustain

my interest throughout the duration of this process. The word waste, like

the Latin vastus from whence it sprung, carries a sense of emptiness and

sterility, yet the concept is still overpoweringly fertile. Although waste

products commonly stink of death, so do they teem with life. You may

already know that a single gram of human excrement “can contain 10

million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm

eggs”;8 or that our very skeletons—all that will survive most of us after

we’re gone—are the result of a biological recycling program: all nucleated

organisms produce excess calcium as a form of waste, which eventually

gets used in the formation of bones.9 This sort of intrinsic opposition is

typical of waste studying, which often lands you directly at the threshold

8 George, Rose. The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008, 2. 9 Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.

20

of cosmic contradiction. The concept of waste is a bit like Derrida’s

“impossible object”: the “internal pocket larger than the whole.”10

Somehow, waste invariably manages to enclose its surroundings; like a

dreaded mafia whose turf happens to be metaphysics, waste always pulls

you back in.

I view waste alongside a range of other impossibly dense philosophical

concerns, but ultimately regard it as a kind of ever-shifting mega-

category, involving (or encompassing) problems of time, space, memory,

storage, transmission; notions of progress, efficiency and sustainability;

digestion, reproduction, perception, consciousness, anxiety and fear; all

the while tracing and embodying a series of fluctuating dichotomies:

public and private, interior and exterior, organic and inorganic, material

and symbolic, presence and absence, health and sickness, life and death.

Waste objects perpetually reveal themselves at intersections of natural,

social, psychological, economic, and political realms: they function

(depending on who you ask) as part of assemblages, apparatuses,

collectives and/or continuums; they are enfolded, entangled, enmeshed,

and entwined with ecosystems and subjectivities (human and non); they

are embedded with (and within) micro and macropolitical structures; they

are sites of malleability, instability, uncertainty, potential, and loss.

10 Currie, Mark. About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 125.

21

This dissertation is a meditation on the confluence of these various

currents. As you may have gleaned from the title, the pages that follow

begin to develop the idea of flushing media, a category of media that

includes toilets, sewers, and wastewater treatment systems. On both micro

and macro scales, flushing media organize people in time and space, and

in communities. In this sense, they function as infrastructural media, and

are arguably examples of what a few (mainly Iowan) scholars have called

logistical media, or “media of orientation”: media that “have to do with

order and arrangement first, and representation second, if at all.” 11

From the earliest glimmers of civilization, few media have exerted

such forceful organizational power as have those that facilitate septic

processes. Such media exercise a complex influence on physical and

psychic structures: they demand our attention, and attendance, yet repel

us mightily. They are important signifiers of social life. In cities, all shit

flows together as one. Where else do humans demonstrate such solidarity!

Generally a “backstage” undertaking, defecation nonetheless creates

interesting opportunities for human bonding. As necessary as breathing,

yet shameful as sex, the subject offers a chance to empathize, commiserate

and puzzle over confounding human dilemmas.

11 Case, Judd, "Geometry of an Empire: Radar as a Logistical Medium." University of Iowa, 2010, 1. Also see Peters, John Durham, “Calendar, Clock, Tower.”

22

Thanks to the work of Victorian epidemiologists, humanity has known

for approximately 1.5 centuries that sewage can spread disease; however,

our bio-psychic defense mechanisms for fighting against these diseases

began developing millennia ago. Even if humans have long been revolted

by their own waste products, revulsion levels appear to vary across

cultural lines. Sanitation professionals distinguish between fecal-phobic

and fecal-philiac societies—cultures that demonstrate greater or lesser

degrees of comfort with human waste.12

But while excremental attitudes and behaviors vary across time and

across cultures, and while septic technologies (and access to them) are a

cultural signifiers, markers of difference and symbols of economic

prosperity, shit itself is a wonderfully equalizing force. All of us make it;

all of it smells—shit is a bullet no one can dodge. Aziz Ansari has a funny

standup routine where he jokes about seeing Kanye West leave the

bathroom after a lengthy turn. For the punch line, Ansari recounts hearing

West exclaim: “Yo, just so you know I was on an important phone call...I

wasn't taking a shit!” Well known for megalomaniac behavior and

delusions of grandeur, the joke pokes fun at West’s infamous desire to

appear superhuman.

12 George, The Big Necessity.

23

It would seem that Kanye has inherited a complex that has haunted

powerful men for thousands of years. Archeological evidence suggests

that one particularly proud Egyptian pharaoh feared that acknowledging

his bodily functions would somehow diminish his divine status, and in an

effort to sustain the supernatural facade, he would sneak out of his palace

under the cover of night in order to relieve himself in the desert. 13 It is clear

that the proverb “cleanliness is next to godliness” has deep and enduring

historical roots, and few images strike us as less cleanly or godly than that

of a person hunching noisily over a commode.

In addition to developing the idea of flushing media, this dissertation

also conceptualizes flushing as a cultural technique. The term cultural

technique (from the German Kulturtechnik) is multi-layered and has

lately been subjected to regular interrogation and revision, and like so

much theoretical vocabulary, the term’s precise meaning is difficult to pin

down. The prevailing sense of the term alerts us to the fact that cultural

concepts have deep technical roots—the practice of farming precedes the

idea of agriculture, counting precedes formal numerical systems, dancing

precedes ballet, etc. In the words of Bernhard Siegert: “The concept of

cultural techniques highlights the operations or sequences of operations

13 Horan, Julie L. The Porcelain God: The Social History of the Toilet. Toronto: Carol Publishing Group, 1997.

24

that historically and logically precede the media concepts generated by

them.”14

Alongside other cultural techniques, waste management techniques

work to generate, define and police the boundaries between nature and

culture. From the time of ancient civilization, bodily waste deposits

helped determine the distinction between interior and exterior: texts

surviving from Ancient Greece suggest that “when appropriate facilities

were not available, individuals merely ‘went outside’ and used any

convenient place to urinate and even defecate.”15 But the distinction of

socially appropriate “inside behavior” vs. “outside behavior” has always

been culturally determined. For example, while the Greeks customarily

went ‘outside’ to relieve themselves, Herodotus writes about how

Egyptians did the opposite: believing that unseemly things should be kept

private, they reportedly carried out these functions inside shelters and

homes.16

But with the introduction of indoor plumbing, the seemingly simple

distinction between interior and exterior becomes more complicated. Like

human bodies themselves, plumbing systems are open-ended in the most

14 Siegert, Bernhard. "The Map Is the Territory." Radical Philosophy. (2011), 15. 15 Elly Heirbaut, Andrew K.G, Jones and Kathleen Wheeler. "Archaeometry: Methods and Analysis,” 25. 16 Vismann, "Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty,” 87.

25

literal possible sense: they contain openings at various ends. To what

extent does the interior/exterior distinction even make sense in an open

system? What circumstances allow these boundaries to become

permeable? And the cultural techniques perspective further compels us to

ask: “what ‘material’ instructions of operation come from a place that is

not under the agent’s control?”17 Flushing is a complex action composed of

both active and passive elements; tracing the interworking of these

elements—the “operational scripts” or “procedural chains of command”—

is a critical step in better understanding the role, or roles, that flushing

processes play in our lives.

During the long gestation of this project, I have been swayed by many

winds, and at different points have managed to convince myself that I

should focus my research on: corpses, hard drives, cameras, coltan,

cathode ray tubes, sewer robots, data miners, missing airplanes,

footprints, trees, sand, spoors, trackers, fossils, Osama Bin Laden, old

Nintendo cartridges, and the concept of wasted time. And while all of

these research pursuits reached their respective dead ends, they also all

contributed to the general world of ideas that I have now set out to

explore. My hope is that this dissertation will succeed in throwing light on

many of the issues that drew my curiosity to the concept of waste in the

first place, even if it has undergone radical shifts in course. 17 Ibid.

26

Now: let’s see where it goes.

27

CHAPTER 1 WHAT IT MEANS TO FLUSH

A Zone of Constant Exchange

Notwithstanding certain coprophilic tendencies, human aversion to

shit is profound; feces are embarrassing, malodorous, disease carrying,

and accordingly, we avoid them like the plague. No single action

illustrates this primal avoidance so powerfully as “the flush.” When else

in our daily lives can we press a button (or lever) and have physical

material literally removed from our home?18 This simple power of

banishment possesses an almost royal authority, perhaps lending a bit of

gravitas to the otherwise jocular term “porcelain throne.”

The character of specific latrine technologies reveals much about

social, cultural, and economic conditions, and helps define individual

relationships to environments both local and foreign. Most septic

technologies fall into one of two general categories.19 On the one hand we

have flush toilets and waterborne plumbing systems, which are

fundamentally technologies of exteriorization: they are (perhaps even

more literally than McLuhan had in mind) “extensions of man.” Pipes and

18 True, some of us use garbage disposals, but these are significantly less common. See http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Housing.html. 19 Elly Heirbaut, Andrew K.G, Jones and Kathleen Wheeler. "Archaeometry: Methods and Analysis ". Chap. 2 In Roman Toilets: Their Archaeology and Cultural History, edited by Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Eric M Morrmann Gemma C.M. Jansen, 7-20 Leuven: Peeters, 2011.

28

sewers function as external intestines that mediate our relations with

urban centers and the natural world. Just as digestive tracts work to

evacuate waste from a body’s interior, plumbing externalizes waste from

buildings and homes. Bathrooms represent a special border zone of

transmission: the most private of rooms, they nevertheless possess unique

and direct channels with the outside world. They are sanctuaries for

secretive disposal, designed for the concealment of activities and

elimination of evidence.

On the other hand, we have sanitary containment systems, which as

their name suggests, are non-networked and self-contained. The primary

drawback of containment systems like composting toilets, cesspits, and

long drop outhouses is that excrement, once deposited, will not

immediately be removed, and will thus accumulate over time. If used

regularly, these systems begin to smell unpleasant, and eventually, they

fill to capacity. There are no pipes, no sewers, no rushing water to wash

the waste away. One way or another, the end game of any containment

process involves some version of shoveling shit.

The differences between containment and flush technologies are

elemental, and embedded within this distinction we can identify deep

histories of power relations. The flush is not merely an action, it is also a

statement; by flushing, the flusher appears to say: this is no longer my

concern. Any time a person hands shit off to someone else—either

29

directly, in the case of servants emptying an employer’s bedpan; or

indirectly, as when city dwellers send waste swirling down into the

sewers—we can observe certain power dynamics at work.

At the societal level, it is clear that the near-universal revulsion we

have for human waste has long played an important role in the

development of social hierarchies. Over time and across cultures, the

handling of human waste is frequently assigned to lower ranks, classes or

castes.20 It is widely known, for example, that the Indian caste system (a

system that still holds sway in practice, if not in law) is built at least in

part upon the subjugation of waste-handlers.21 Dalits, the lowest of all

Indian social ranks—so low that they are excluded from the caste system

and labeled “Untouchable”—are historically responsible for removing

excrement from clogged sewers and dry latrines.

Even today, many children born into Dalit families are forced to clean

feces for pennies. This work contributes to their lowly status, and

consequently Dalits are routinely subjected to extreme prejudice.22 Gandhi

spoke out against the subjugation of Dalits, calling it the “shame of the

nation,” and arguing that “the best thing would be for everyone to

20 Smith, Virginia. Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 21 George, The Big Necessity. 22 Ibid., 92.

30

dispose of his own waste.”23 With typical righteousness and precision, he

calls attention to a crucial locus of inequity: the outsourcing of waste.

Clearly, there is something inherently oppressive about disavowing one’s

own waste products. If willing to give it a moment’s thought, most would

admit that it is selfish to pass shit off to others, and that an

incontrovertible ethic undergirds the belief that people should “take care

of their own shit.” As it happens, most of us don’t, and those of us who

live in flush societies are all the more removed from our own digestive

consequences. This contributes to a long list of problems, as Gandhi and

many others have pointed out.

And but so while I am on board with Gandhi (always a safe bet, I’ve

learned), the point of this dissertation will not be to moralize about the

evils of flush technology.24 It is quite clear that waterborne sewage

processes have contributed to a complex range of developments—some

good, others bad—and more to the point, as actor-network theorists and

cultural techniques scholars have convincingly shown, attempts to blame

specific technologies for social problems are altogether misguided.

Culture and technology are not independent variables that can be neatly

separated, nor do they fuse into one beastly entity impervious to

23 Gandhi, M.K. Yeravda Mandir. Ahmedabad Navjivan Press, 1935. Cited in George, The Big Necessity, 97-98. 24 For the record, I am personally grateful to have reliable access to a flushing toilet.

31

meaningful analysis. Rather, technologies and cultural techniques (which

let us just say for now describe the range of physical, mental and social

processes that develop in relation to the development of machines)—exist

“in a zone of constant exchange.”25 And it is exactly this zone that this

dissertation sets out to explore.

The Spirit of Flushing

“Flush” is one of the more connotatively voluptuous words I know.

Pleasantly onomatopoeic and vitally allusive, it functions handsomely as

noun, adjective, or verb. With each utterance flush calls forth a stream of

cognates and kindred syllables: lush, blush, gush, hush, rush, plush,

whoosh, wash, fresh. Recalling both the flow of rivers and the flutter of

birds, it summons dual spirits of water and air. Flushing suggests a sense

of revitalization and/or rebirth. And despite its fouler associations, the

word still manages to resound in the realm of fantasy and dreams. The

word brims with optimism, offering suggestions of purity, abundance,

vigorousness, lustiness, fertility, cleanliness, and even outright perfection.

How much better to be flush than broke! And we all know a royal flush

wins every time.

25 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. "Cultural Techniques: Remarks." Theory, Culture & Society: Special Issue on Cultural Techniques 30, no. 6 (November 2013): 3-19.

32

But flushing clearly has a dark side too. Interestingly (given its septic

connotations) flushing can signal embarrassment. It can also refer to lavish

or wasteful habits.26 For a time during the nineteenth century, the word

was associated with pugilism, and to this day it retains a sense of violence.

For military tacticians, flushing describes a method of drawing opponents

out from cover, and as a general rule, the term tends to imply both

suddenness and aggression. Whether it is a rush of blood to the face, a

surge of emotion, water gushing through a riverbed or down a toilet bowl,

the act of flushing is powerful, immediate, and unforgiving.27

From its earliest usage, the word has maintained affinities with water.

Referring first to a mere “pool or puddle,” flushing eventually came to

describe water that moves.28 With the clear exception of card play, (which

had incorporated “the flush” into its technical vocabulary by the early

sixteenth century) and the additional exception of currency and wealth (it

seems that people were flush with money beginning in the early

seventeenth century, if not before) early meanings point to essentially

organic processes and things: birds, rivers, passions, blood. By the late

seventeenth century, we can observe a confluence of technical and organic

forces shaping what it means to flush. John Ray, 1691: 26 OED Online. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

33

Then the Vessels we call Arteries, which carry from the Heart to the several Parts, have Valves which open like Trap-doors, and give Blood a free passage out of the Heart, but will not suffer it to return back again thither; and the Veins, which bring it back from the several Members to the Heart, have Valves or Trap-doors which open inwards, so as to give way unto the Blood into the Heart, but prevent it from running back again that way…So the pulse of the Arteries is not caused by the Pulsation of the Heart, driving the Blood through them, in manner of a Wave or Flush.”29

While Ray’s discussion clearly pertains to biological circulatory

functions, his phraseology points toward the word’s emerging technicity.

Flushing is closely associated here with the concept of a valve, which

brings its meaning in line with modern plumbing. During the nineteenth

century, the word was used increasingly to describe industrial processes:

mill wheeling, coal mining, brick leveling and drain cleansing. Even if the

first septic flushing occurred thousands of years before, the technology

was lost for centuries and with few exceptions it was not until the

nineteenth century that toilets would again begin to flush.

The concept of flushing is as natural as it is technical. Nature is always

flushing, and people have long taken advantage of nature’s inherent

flushing powers. The earliest technique for flushing human waste—a

technique that is still commonplace today—makes sanitary use of flowing

rivers or streams. This early practice helped draw and define the

important distinction between upstream and downstream, a matter

29 Ibid. See Ray, John, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation: In Two Parts, 273.

34

relevant not just for aquatic conveyance, but also public health. The idea

of “natural flushing” has informed research across a variety of disciplines.

Neuroscientists have recently suggested that our brains may be cellularly

designed to flush toxins away as we sleep.30 Geologists have argued that a

“volatile flushing” process may play an important role in certain volcanic

eruptions.31 In agricultural contexts, flushing refers to at least three distinct

processes: a method for bovine superovulation and embryo

transplantation, a practice of cleaning out a cow’s uterus with saline

solution, or a procedure of increasing the nutrient loads for livestock in an

effort to stimulate fertility. Alternative medical practitioners promote a

variety of techniques for flushing the gallbladder and the liver, and yogis

still recommend the “salt water flush” as an effective way to improve

colonic hygiene.

Flushing promises to purify—with urgency, and with force; it vows to

make ugliness disappear. Unfortunately, such promises always contain a

treacherous blend of fiction and fact. While flushing succeeds in removing

unwanted material, it does so through a process of displacement rather

than erasure. To flush is to push material out of one system and into

another. Put very simply: flushing is a good way to move stuff around. A

30 "Brains May Flush Toxins While We Sleep." National Institute of Health. 2013. 31 Carmelo Ferlito, Massimo Coltorti, Gabriele Lanzafame, Pier Paolo Giacomoni. "The Volatile Flushing Triggers Eruptions at Open Conduit Volcanoes: Evidence from Mount Etna Volcano." Lithos (2014): 447-55.

35

perfect flush transports undesirable elements beyond perceptual range,

rendering them sightless, odorless, soundless, textureless, undetectable.

But again, this material is never entirely purified or destroyed; at best it

gets filtered and broken down, at worst it is merely displaced.

Flushes inevitably result in unwanted consequences; they produce

externalities by design. The fantasy that removal=purification is essential

to the logic of flushing. Dreams of immateriality that have accompanied

the rise of digital culture involve analogous processes of displacement, a

similar concoction of truth and lies. In this sense, the logic of flushing

shares deep affinities with the logic of The Cloud.

How is flushing different from other forms of waste disposal? What

separates flushing from dumping, incinerating, compacting, or burial?

First: water. Its unique relationship to earth’s most precious liquid

bestows flushing with a distinct air of purity and vitality, and its aqueous

nature contributes to its intrinsic ephemerality. Water moves constantly,

and without such movement there would be no flushing. Like the ocean,

the concept of flushing retains an air of mystery—as though it belongs to a

system that is self-purifying and immeasurably vast. Because the medium

of water encourages gradual scattering and dissolution, it is tempting to

think that all flushed material eventually dissolves into the vast network

of filtration channels extending from glacial meltwaters down through

mangrove swamps. This was more or less the fantasy held by nineteenth

36

century engineers who promoted the dumping of sewage into public

waterways. These adherents of miasma theory believed that toxic sewage

could infect the air, but would become neutralized by water. Thus, the

largely mistaken belief that water is capable of purifying itself governed

much of the sanitation policy during this time.32

No other disposal strategy seems quite so expulsive; flushing triggers

near-instantaneous rejection of the past. It shares with incineration the

characteristic of being irreversible—it is no more possible to “unflush”

than it is to “unburn”—but whereas burning transforms, flushing ejects.33

Flushing is an aggressive first step in a long process of fragmentation,

randomization, and decay. Unlike dumping or burying, its logic is

profoundly accelerative; through a forceful denial of toxic history,

flushing promises to move us rapidly into a cleaner, brighter future.

John Scanlan has remarked that all deteriorating matter “embodies a

time that exists beyond our rational time,” and that all processes of

32 It is true that oxygen-laced water can encourage the decomposition of certain organic wastes, but we now know that a multitude of disease-carrying pathogenic microorganisms thrive in contaminated water. Even if these early claims of self-purification contained a modicum of truth, they were largely based on faulty science, and were clearly exaggerated. See Benidickson, Jamie. The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage. Vancouver: UBC Press. 2007, 116. 33 True, blockages can and do occur, and repressed substances can reemerge when septic systems fail. But the act of flushing has no precise negative counterpart. A broken sewer pipe is not the inverse of flushing toilet. Toilets do not run in reverse.

37

decomposition belong to a “shadow world” which operates according to a

temporality of decay.34 His argument suggests that flushing works

alongside technologies of obsolescence to promote the temporal logic of

progress and Western individualism: “what begins with the

rationalization and privatization of excremental waste ends in the

ubiquity of fashion — both the water closet and the fashion boutique

thrive on the power of disposal to abolish the past, and to cleanse, empty,

and adorn the present.”35 By evacuating history, the flush guarantees new

beginnings. No other disposal strategy seems quite so capable in this

regard.

The flush finally marks a point of transfer from the interior/individual

to the exterior/collective. Above all else, perhaps, it describes a process of

exteriorization, and accordingly, it offers an interesting lens through

which to analyze interior/exterior and public/private divides. Along

these lines, the concept provides a way to engage old conversations from

new vantage points. From Plato to McLuhan to Leroi-Gourhan to Derrida

to Bernard Stiegler, theorists have focused on the idea of exteriorization,

particularly the exteriorization of memory, and a series of important

questions arise from these discussions: how does technical outsourcing of

memory affect people’s biological ability to remember? Does the 34 Scanlan, John. On Garbage. London: Reaktion Books, 2005, 34. 35 Ibid., 36.

38

exteriorization of memory make individuals more vulnerable to social or

political control? Is memory technical, as they say, all the way down? The

Derridean notion that “no interiority precedes exteriorization,” that

technical processes have helped shape and constitute biological processes

from the very beginning, has helped shape a generation of theorists’ ideas

about the concept of memory.

But for whatever reasons (perhaps we can detect a certain nervous

narcissism here) brainy thinkers tend to be more interested in neurological

processes than in digestive ones. Among other things, this dissertation

aims to nudge thinking toward the intestinal. Even if “waste studies” have

gained significant traction across different sectors of the academy, certain

forms of detritus are still more fashionable than others. It seems fair to say

that sewage management has never been a sexy topic, nor will it likely

become one anytime soon; nevertheless, it is an undeniably important

aspect of civilization: social, cultural, political and psychic currents always

converge in sewerage flows. In the words of Victor Hugo, (and high on

the list of all-time famously septic quotes): “The history of man is

reflected in the history of sewers.”36 Archeologists and garbologists have

long made the case that we can learn a great deal about people by

examining their waste products; this dissertation points out that the

36 Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. New York: Carleton: 1862.

39

methods and mechanisms we use to handle our waste products reveal

things about humanity as well.

I proceed from a media-theoretical perspective that seeks to challenge

“the fiction of sovereign subjectivity.”37 Following the path laid out by

cultural techniques research, I assume that our interactions with

technologies are not one-sided, that the nonhuman realm of technologies

and techniques shape and constrain human bodies and behavior even as

humans play important roles in introducing these things into the technico-

material world. If it is true, as Nietzsche/Kittler assert, that “our writing

tools are also working on our thoughts,” why not extend this logic to

waste-handling tools?38 If you become, as Bruno Latour holds, “a different

person with a gun in your hand,” might it be fair to think that flushing

technologies transform us into something different as well?39

Given its material, ideological, and metaphoric potency, it is striking

that the concept of flushing has not received more attention than it has.

The concept ricochets through any number of social, cultural and

environmental versions of history, and is a lodestone for a wide range of

37 Vismann, Cornelia. "Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty ". Theory, Culture & Society: Special Issue on Cultural Techniques 30, no. 6 (November 2013): 83-93, 88. 38 Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986, 200. 39 Latour, Bruno. “A Collective of Humans and Non-Humans: Following Daedulus’ Labyrinth.” In Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, 174-215. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, 179.

40

theoretical concerns. In many ways, the story of flushing parallels the

development of capitalism itself—a bolder claim-maker might wish to

argue that flushing has played a formative role in constituting the logic of

modernity. But my goals here are modest. At one level, this dissertation

introduces the concept of flushing as a potentially generative concept for

the field of media studies. On another level, it sets out to explore the ways

in which flushing techniques have penetrated various technological and

cultural milieus since the middle of the nineteenth century. I also contend

that flushing is a significant late-stage component of what Norbert Elias

has famously called “the civilizing process,” and cautiously suggest that

flushing has been and continues to be one of the more important cultural

techniques of our time.

There can be no doubt that the relocation of septic disposal processes

from the private to the public realm is a significant turn in the history of

civilization. While this shift was never all-encompassing—for billions of

people, storing and processing bodily waste is still to this day an

essentially private responsibility—for billions more, urinary and

excremental handling has become one of the many parts of life that we are

apparently comfortable outsourcing to a vast and hazily understood set of

sociotechnical constituents. This dissertation examines some of the forces

that helped bring this state of affairs about.

41

Chapter 2 focuses on a moment in mid-nineteenth-century United

States history when flush plumbing technologies were gaining popularity

for the first time. By examining the historical context that gave rise to

these early plumbing technologies, this chapter traces the various

factors—social, cultural, environmental, and technical—that contributed

the development of flushing infrastructure. My analysis focuses

specifically on the literal and metaphorical currents that shaped the inner

and external realities of midcentury Americans. Following this period of

rapid technological change, flushing would become the dominant septic

disposal method in the United States.

Extending the historical analysis begun in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 looks

at the interplay between flushing and “civilization” in late-

nineteenth/early-twentieth-century United States, applying and

elaborating on ideas developed by Elias and Alain Corbin. Elias effectively

demonstrates the ways in which shifting attitudes about bathroom

etiquette helped drive the development of “civilized” society—though

flushing practices do not take center stage in his discussion, they fall

generally in line with his overarching analysis. Above all, Elias is

interested in tracing the “bio-psychological refinement of human manners

and habits over time.”40 Besides being great fun to read, Elias’ research on

40 Smith, Clean, 16-17.

42

medieval etiquette reveals patterns through which the public discussion of

“natural functions” becomes verboten in the west.

Elias traces a gradual process of intensifying bodily repression

between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. During this period, natural

functions increasingly become associated with shame and social disgrace;

accordingly, these topics are regarded as inappropriate for public life, and

relegated to the private realm. Elias views this process as neither

technologically determined nor separate from technical developments.

Rather, he regards these changing attitudes as the product of an ever-

shifting exchange between sociogenetic and psychogenetic discoveries,

and a corresponding technical apparatus that rises up to meet evolving

social needs.

What role has flushing played in this process of “bio-psychological

refinement”? I argue that it has served to heighten the tension between the

“private nose and the public eye.”41 I follow a logical thread spun by

Dominique Laporte, whose History of Shit develops Freud’s claim that the

rise of civilization can be traced back to the decline of the olfactory sense;

41 el-Khoury, Rodolphe, Introduction to: Laporte, Dominique. History of Shit. Translated by Nadia Benabid anf Rodolphe el-Khoury. Cambridge, Massachusetts The MIT Press, 2000.

43

such a decline was, for Freud, “an inevitable outgrowth of the civilizing

process.”42

In Chapter 4, I examine developments in wastewater treatment

processes around the turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States. At a

time when microbiology was revolutionizing science and reconfiguring

attitudes about public health, new sewage treatment technologies were

altering people’s relationship to a multitude of environments, and were

complicating the nature of the interior/exterior divide. Technologies such

as filters, activated sludge processing, and the Haber-Bosch process for

fixing nitrogen all had important infrastructural consequences, which I

explore. Finally, Chapter 5 looks at an interesting but mostly forgotten

moment in United States sanitary history: a late-nineteenth century craze

for colonic flushing. Reviewing the ideas and mistaken medical beliefs

that gave rise to this fad, I attempt to show how the popularity of body

flushing had much to do with other flushing technologies and techniques

that were developing during this same period of time.

I aspire for this project to be more than a mere reapplication or

repackaging of old ideas. To a certain extent, of course, it will be that—

such is the nature of this genre. But in better moments, I hope I succeed in

pushing the boundaries of media thinking. I follow the impulse most

closely associated with (so-called) German media theory, which yearns to

42 Ibid.

44

expand our concept of media, and which views media as essential role

players in social and cognitive processes. At the most basic level, this

culture-technical approach works to achieve better, more textured

understandings of existence—of what it means to be human in a vast,

uncertain, and mostly non-human world. I have hope that in some small

way an investigation of flushing can speak to these cosmically charged

issues; at the very least, I hope to illuminate with some degree of precision

the ways in which flushing technologies and techniques function in the

modern world.

Cultural Techniques

Cultural techniques have only recently begun making waves across the

Atlantic, but the history of the idea has well-established foundations in

Germany. Tracing the conceptual evolution of the term, scholars have

identified three main phases of usage. During the first phase, which

begins around the end of the nineteenth century, the term belongs to the

realm of agricultural engineering: cultural techniques of this era refer to

the sciences of ploughing, irrigation, and—appropriately enough, given

the topic at hand— drainage.43 Beginning in the 1970s, the term begins to

refer to “the skills and aptitudes necessary to master the new media

43 Parikka, Jussi. "Afterward: Cultural Techniques and Media Studies." Theory, Culture & Society: Special Issue on Cultural Techniques 30, no. 6 (November 2013): 147-59, 150.

45

ecology”:44 such skills include reading, writing, basic math, and later (in

the 1980s), literacy in information and communications technology.45 The

latest sense of cultural techniques, which has been debated and refined

(again, mainly in Germany) over the past 15 years, moves past a

“traditional middle-class understanding of culture” that characterizes the

second phase.46 No longer is culture a word reserved for an artsy sphere

dominated by literature, painting, dance, sculpture, etc. Cultural

techniques now work to breakdown and rebuild conventional

understandings of media and culture by examining the “operative chains

that precede the media concepts they generate.”47

Put in a slightly different way, cultural techniques seek to reveal ways

that infrastructural media—a term that may be used to describe a wide

range of medial technologies from clocks, candles and cash registers to

whistles, windows and wells—shape social and cognitive orders.48 It is a

mode of inquiry that constantly works to decenter the human subject, or

44 Winthrop-Young, "Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks," 5. 45 Siegert, Bernhard. "Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory." Theory, Culture & Society: Special Issue on Cultural Techniques 30, no. 6 (November 2013 2013): 48-65. 46 Ibid., 47 Ibid. 48 Examples borrowed from a John Durham Peters syllabus, Spring 2011.

46

rather to show “the extent to which the human actor has always already

been decentered onto the technical object.”49 To continue with Siegert: the

concept “implies a plurality of cultures and abandons a one-sided

conception of human-thing relations that privileges human beings”50; it

“always comprises a more or less complex actor network that includes

technical objects and chains of operations,”; and finally points to “a world

of the symbolic, which is the world of machines.”51

In an effort to guard against conceptual bloating, some have sought to

narrow the term’s definition. Most notably, Thomas Macho has argued

that the concept should be limited to only those technologies that allow

for “self-referentiality” or “pragmatics of recursions”; cultural techniques

must, in other words, engage in “symbolic work.”52 For Macho, cultural

techniques must be able to refer back on themselves. One can write about

49 Siegert, Bernhard. "Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic." Grey Room no. 47 (2012): 6-23, 8. 50 Ibid., 7. 51 Ibid., 7-8. (As I attempt to establish some parameters for cultural techniques, I draw heavily on Siegert for several reasons. First, at present, he remains one of a few scholars whose work on cultural techniques has been made available in English. Second, his explanations are, in my view, more precise and complete then others presently available. Finally, his framework for cultural techniques seems most accommodating for my project.) 52 Macho, Thomas. "Second-Order Animals: Cultural Techniques of Identity and Identification." Theory, Culture & Society: Special Issue on Cultural Techniques 30, no. 6 (November 2013): 30-47, 31.

47

writing, one can take a photograph of a photograph; thus these

technologies—what he calls “second-order techniques” (as opposed to

non-referential “first-order techniques” like fire building, cooking, or field

tilling)—offer unique possibilities for self-reflection and identity

formation.

Adhering strictly to Macho’s standards, flushing does not qualify as a

cultural technique. You cannot flush about a flush; flushing does not seem

to perform any symbolic function. Or does it? Responding to Macho,

Siegert points out that a variety of first-order techniques that Macho

wishes to exclude from the party do play significant symbolic roles.

Ploughs, for example, can and have been used to draw lines in the earth,

establishing symbolic boundaries between farmland and the city ; likewise

doors, in their ability to open and close, “process and render visible the

distinction between inside and outside.”53 Following this thread of logic,

the toilet seems to function analogously to the door; just as flushing seems

parallel to the act of opening or closing, each flush helps to define and

reaffirm the boundaries of the building or home. Flushing determines the

kind of matter that is acceptably kept inside, and that matter which must

be relegated to the exterior. The toilet, like the door, is thus a “both

53 Siegert, "Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory," 60.

48

material object and symbolic thing, a first- as well as a second-order

technique.”54

The concept of flushing permeates natural, social and technical realms,

and like all cultural techniques, acts of flushing “precede the distinction

between nature and culture.”55 In his introduction to Theory, Culture, and

Society’s Special Issue on Cultural Techniques (the most comprehensive

elaboration of the concept available in English to date) Geoffrey

Winthrop-Young describes how cultural techniques operate in a sort of

netherworld between nature and culture. Pointing out that culture is

“structurally opposed to nature,” Young observes that nature and culture

only exist through opposition and separation: nature is that which is

decisively off limits to culture, and vice versa. This situation creates a

fundamental challenge for cultural techniques:

…which of the two domains does this act of creation by means of separation belong to? Is using a plough to draw a line in the ground in order to create a future city space set off from the surrounding land itself already part of that city? In that case matters would be easy: culture creates itself in an act of immaculate self-conception that is always already cultural. Culture would be culture all the way down. Or do the operations involved in drawing this line belong to neither side? A proper understanding of culture may require that the latter be dissolved into cultural

54 Ibid. 55 Siegert, "Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory," 62.

49

techniques that are neither cultural nor natural in any originary sense because they generate this distinction in the first place.56

If ploughs draw symbolic lines, flushing technologies move material

across and between, reifying borders with each and every flush.

Alongside doors, cultural techniques for excreting and managing bodily

waste must be regarded as foundational to the development of social and

spatial organizations. In one of the founding documents of cultural

techniques research, Cornelia Vismann writes: “techniques always wrest

something away from nature.”57 What does flushing wrest away? One of

the more obvious wrestings occurs as flushing modifies natural processes

of decomposition and regeneration. Rather than allowing waste to remain

in situ where it can get worked on and broken down by natural elements,

flushing technologies work to channel and transport waste products off

land and into watery zones. Once waterborne, waste products take on

new qualities and present new hazards to human health; waterborne

sewage also throws humans into more abstract relations with our own

waste products.

It is true that, over time, we generally move toward relational

abstraction with the waste we produce: most waste management

strategies work to keep waste out of sight/mind, and natural patterns of

56 Winthrop-Young, "Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks," 5. 57 Ibid., 88.

50

decay and renewal eventually transform waste products into new sources

of life, complicating if not altogether obliterating their status as waste. But

flushing uniquely accelerates this abstraction by immediately moving

waste beyond our perceptual range. Toilets function much like tiny local

event horizons, one-way valves connecting us to a massive but essentially

incomprehensible Unknown.

In the end, I am less interested in lobbying for flushing’s legitimacy as

a bonafide cultural technique than in engaging in a kind of questioning

that is generally associated with this body of research. Jussi Parikka

describes how cultural techniques allow us to “talk about the material

practices that sustain and enable ‘culture’, which necessarily involves

humans and non-humans. Cultural techniques forge links between

cultivation of environmental things and cultural realms.”58 An

investigation of flushing can help move this project along.

In The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage, Jamie

Benidickson, working from a platform of environmental law, asks: why

have the consequences of flushing not registered more explicitly on the

public consciousness?59 This dissertation spins a different set of questions:

how has the logic of flushing gone to work on the public unconscious?

58 Parikka, "Afterward: Cultural Techniques and Media Studies," 150. 59 Benidickson, The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage, 4-5.

51

How has the act of flushing informed or bled into different facets of the

western technological milieu? Has the routine act of flushing inscribed our

minds and bodies in perceptible (or imperceptible) ways? To what extent

do flushing technologies (to borrow an admittedly tired phrase)

“determine our situation”? What is flushing’s relationship to modernity?

And, finally, how might the concept of flushing contribute to our

understanding of media?

Flushing Media

If media studies research focusing on toilets seems like an indulgent,

off topic, or somehow superficial endeavor, let us begin with the fact that

more than 1/3 of the human population does not have access to one,

which means that each day approximately 2.5 billion people defecate on

the street, on the beach, in the woods or into a plastic bag.60 Media scholars

have lately spilled much ink over the problem of the “digital divide,” and

while uneven access to digital technology is surely an issue worthy of

attention, the “septic divide” is arguably a more pressing concern.

Alongside access to water, food, and healthcare, access to toilets is one of

the core humanitarian issues of our—of any—time. And if it is difficult to

get people to pay attention to global hunger, it is many times more

challenging to get people to think about the management of bodily waste.

60 George, The Big Necessity, 2.

52

Technologies of waste management are crucially important to life on the

planet, yet receive scarce attention from most of us. After ignoring such

issues for much of my own life, I have elected to throw in with the

attention givers. This is not to say that my research will promote any

specific humanitarian agenda, or contribute to policy discussions in any

serious way. My point is that this theoretical journey is ultimately rooted

in naked realities, problems and concerns that are decidedly

nonspeculative, issues that fall squarely within categories of lived

experience.61

Within septic niches of the academy, it is something of a cliché to cite

the taboo or neglected status of human waste in order to justify the value

of discussing it. In the words of one representative toilet scholar: “It is a

route worth taking, precisely because of the shadow under which it

normally falls.”62 But these shadows are perhaps not so dark as they were a

few years ago, as a recent wave of writing has set out to explore various

issues relating to human waste. Scholars from a diverse range of 61 Personally, I am captivated by and invested in the world of hardcore theory; at the same time, I tend to wince in those moments when my own ideas get caught up in discourses and distinctions which are, as some like to say, “purely academic.” So, if you happen to experience moments of this dissertation that seem stale or pedantic, or where I seem to be straying a bit afield, I urge you in advance to pause, close your eyes, and conjure up the image of shit in a plastic bag. Wherever you find yourself in this document, I believe this image will help remind you of the big picture stakes. 62 Noren, Harvey Molotoch and Laura, ed. Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, Nyu Series in Social and Cultural Analysis. New York: NYU Press, 2010, 1.

53

backgrounds— including environmental history, social history, sociology,

urban planning and public policy, gender studies, law, architecture and

design—have all taken a renewed interest in matters urinary and

excremental.

I say renewed, because academic interest in shit is nothing new. Freud

was a famous fecal enthusiast, Lacan picked up these enthusiasms where

Freud left off, and at least since Mary Douglas’ seminal text Purity and

Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo, anthropologists,

social and cultural theorists have regularly wrestled with notions of dirt,

filth, disgust, and “the abject.” But over the past few decades, the amount

of writing on the subject has increased rather substantially. This is perhaps

due in part to gradual shifts in social norms (as bathroom humor has

become more commonplace in the realm of pop culture, the academy has

also seemed more willing to embrace greater degrees of theoretical

grotesquerie); or perhaps the fact that matters of earthly finitude are (for a

variety of urgent reasons) in scholarly vogue has contributed to the rising

interest in waste studies more generally.

Whatever the cause, septic matters are increasingly on the academic

agenda, and scholars great and small have lately been getting in on the

action. When not doing interviews with Vice Magazine, The Believer, The

Guardian or Salon, hipster super-intellect Slavoj Žižek has admirably still

made time to think and write, and in recent articles and lectures he has

54

repeatedly commented on the ideology of toilet design in western

civilization. Comparing the conventional styles of toilets in France,

England, and Germany, he observes how national cultural identities are

reflected in the varying structures of toilet bowls. French toilet design

places the outflow drain near the back of the bowl, which allows for the

immediate erasure of excremental evidence. Traditional German toilets, in

contrast, have the hole in the front of the toilet, which delays the

disappearance of waste. Anglo-Saxon toilet design has a bowl filled with

water, so that feces will float freely until they are flushed.

For Žižek , these variants of design represent “ideology at its purest.”63

He argues that the three designs embody a contemporary manifestation of

a late eighteenth-century notion of a “European trinity,” consisting of

French, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon civilizations. Philosophers who

espoused this idea believed that these three nations combined to form the

spiritual core of European civilization: “Each of the three stands for a

certain political principle, and for a certain sphere of society.”64 Žižek sees

in each toilet design reflections of national identities and ideological

orientations: the French design, which allows for the immediate

liquidation and removal of waste, seems indicative of France’s leftist

revolutionary spirit; the water-filled bowl embodies Anglo Saxon

63 Žižek, Slavoj. "Zizek on Toilets." In GoogleAuthors, 2011. 64 Ibid.

55

liberalism, rationalism and economic pragmatism; and the German toilets,

which allow for inspection of the feces before they are flushed,

demonstrate Germanic tendencies toward conservatism, philosophy and

poetic sensibility.

Žižek leverages this example in an attempt to illustrate the idea of

what he calls an “unknown known”: a vehicle through which ideology

does its work. Responding to a much-celebrated/much-ridiculed tripartite

theory of knowledge that then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put

forth in a 2002 press conference, Žižek introduces the idea of an unknown

known as a way of highlighting a significant flaw in Rumsfeld’s structural

logic. During the Defense Department news briefing, Rumsfeld famously

divided all knowledge into three categories: 1) “known knowns,” those

things that we know that we know (I know, for example, that I have five

fingers on each hand, and as much as I can be certain of anything, I can be

certain of this knowledge); 2) “known unknowns”: those things that we

know we do not know (for example, I am certain that I do not know what

lies at the bottom of the ice crusted ocean on Europa, Jupiter’s potentially

life-harboring moon); and 3) “unknown unknowns”: things that we do not

know, but do not know that we do not know. Blind ignorance, in other

words.

In the aftermath of the press conference, Rumsfeld was praised for his

apparent analytical brilliance and criticized for seeming manipulative,

56

obfuscatory and pointlessly abstract. These early responses to Rumsfeld

were generally reactionary and undeveloped, but in 2004 Žižek wrote a

short article showing how Rumsfeld’s epistemological system omits a

significant category—the most significant category, as it turns out: that is,

“the ‘unknown knowns,’ the things we don’t know that we know—which

is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge which doesn’t

know itself,’ as Lacan used to say.”65 Žižek’s point is that seemingly

neutral material objects are embedded with ideological impulses that

structure collective attitudes and beliefs. Objects such as toilets are not

merely utilitarian; they are in fact loaded down with prejudicial inklings,

political tendencies, entire of histories of belief. And because these items

seem ordinary and apolitical, because vulgar material objects are the last

places that most of us generally think to be capable of producing

ideological effects, these are the very sites where ideology functions with

least resistance.

So while I enjoy this analysis, and while I concede that Žižek may well

be onto something here, my interest in toilets will lead me down

somewhat different paths. My analysis will focus more on technological

infrastructure, and less on ideological representation—specifically, I am

65 Žižek, Slavoj. "What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib." inthesetimes (2004). http://inthesetimes.com/article/747/what_rumsfeld_doesn_know_that_he_knows_about_abu_ghraib.

57

interested in exploring the mediatic character of septic technology. In

carrying out this analysis, I will also seek to expose “unknown knowns”

that may be lurking within our septic systems, but the unknown knowns I

seek to identify are perhaps of a different order than those Žižek sees at

work in toilet design. The ones I am after are lurking within various

organs, biological and technical, that mediate our wordily experiences. I

will attempt to demonstrate some of the ways that flushing media shape

and texture our day in, day out lifeworld routines, and influence certain

unconscious processes.

First and foremost, flushing media are media of transmission—they

serve as conduits between interiors and exteriors, surfaces and

subsurfaces, public and private realms. Interestingly, however, they can

perform important storage functions as well. Archaeologists have found

drains to be excellent storage containers for cultural and bioarchaeological

data, and on certain archeological sites, drains enjoy a second life as a

storage medium after their first life as a transmission medium has come to

an end.66 Material bio-traces lodged in sewers can contain significant

archives of data about nourishment, disease, diet, and hygiene. (Whether

thousands of years old or produced just a few moments ago, human waste

66 Elly Heirbaut, Andrew K.G, Jones and Kathleen Wheeler. "Archaeometry: Methods and Analysis,” 7.

58

is an important carrier of information—“too much information,” you

might say.)

Ironically, flushing media, which are designed to remove material as

quickly and thoroughly as possible, turn out to be exceptionally robust life

preservers. Clogged drains and latrines can shield plant, animal, and

mineral matter from elements that would otherwise lead to their

decomposition. Furthermore, because drains generally fill over discrete

periods of time, the material they collect can be very precisely dated,

making them excellent repositories for historical data.67 Remarkably, long

after a person’s flesh has rotted way, their shit can still communicate.

Using micromorpholological analysis, archaeologists can determine the

dietary habits of ancient people: what they ate, how they cooked their

food, whether they suffered from malnutrition or disease.68

Evidence of sewers and flushing technology goes back thousands of

years. In the fourth millennium BCE, the Sumerian civilization

constructed an irrigation and wastewater drainage system that ran

67 Ibid. 68 Grazer, Aude, Stafanie Hoss, Eddy Owens, Gabriel Zuchtriegal and Monika Trumper "Non-Roman Forerunners." In Roman Toilets: Their Archaeology and Cultural History, edited by Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Eric M Morrmann Gemma C.M. Leuven: Peeters, 25.

59

through Lower Mesopotamia.69 By 2500 BCE, the Indus valley civilization

had constructed a system in the city of Mohenjo-daro capable of

channeling sewage through drains and into the Indus river. 70 Pipes from

King Minos’ palace at Knossos date back to about 2000 BCE., and were

used to connect interior latrines with exterior sewer systems that were

designed to be flushed with rainwater.71 The palace also contained a

bathroom on the first floor equipped with a reservoir of water intended

for flushing, which is the earliest known flush toilet in the history of

civilization.72 Archeologists have uncovered remains that indicate the

prehistoric island city of Theros, which was founded around the

fourteenth century BCE , had developed a system that connected indoor

toilets directly to sewerage networks.73

But despite their ancient technological origins, developments in sewer

technology are remarkably uneven across history; (as Laporte wryly puts

69 "Sewage Collection System ". In Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste, edited by Carl A. Zimring and William L. Rathje. Thousand Oaks, CA Sage, 2012, 801. 70 Cooper, P.F. "Historical Aspects of Wastewater Treatment ". In Decentralised Sanitation and Reuse: Concepts, Systems and Implementation, edited by G. Zeeman and G. Lettinga. P. Lens: IWA Publishing 2004, 12. 71 Wright, Clean and Decent, 7. 72 Angelakis, A.N, D. Koutsoyiannis and G. Tchobanoglous. "Urban Wastewater and Stormwater Technologies in Ancient Greece." Water Research no. 39 (2005): 210-220, 212. 73 Ibid., 216.

60

it: “Where its anal constituent is concerned, civilization does not follow a

rhythm of linear progress.”)74 By the sixth century BCE, Greeks had

developed the technical ability to develop a sewer system, yet they did not

actualize on this technological expertise until the fourth century BCE;

more strikingly, regardless of the fact that underground sewer technology

had been developed millennia before, the first Parisian sewer (which was,

incidentally, above-ground) wasn’t installed until 1374.75 And with the

exception of one forward-thinking Elizabethan water-closet (a custom-

made luxury for the Queen), English plumbing sophistication would not

approach the level of the Knossos flushing system until midway through

the eighteenth century.76

Unfortunately for sanitation professionals, city officials, and nearly

everyone else who lives in, around or downstream from a municipal

waste management operation, the construction of sewers does not

instantly solve a city’s sanitation problems. Channeling waste into the

sewers may be a good first step toward creating a sanitary urban

environment, but the Achilles’ heel of many sewer systems is that they

frequently overflow.

74 Laporte, History of Shit, 26. 75 Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste, 803. 76 Wright, Clean and Decent, 7.

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The problem of overflowing sewage has dogged humanity for

centuries. During the middle ages, Nuremberg’s open sewer system

would regularly become overwhelmed with waste, and at such times,

sewage would have to be carted away and deposited outside the city.77 By

the nineteenth century, many civil engineers had begun to use numerical

calculations in an effort to anticipate and manage large volumes of

overflowing wastewater. But even as technology advanced, overflow

continued to present a titanic obstacle for sanitation planners, and the

problem persists today.

Most westerners tend to ignore matters related to raw sewage

processing, but if forced to the confront the issue, it is nice to imagine that

sewers function as part of a closed sanitary system. Vaguely familiar with

the concept of sewage treatment, many still naively assume that sewage is

conveyed, treated, and purified before being released back into the world.

In fact, vast quantities of sewage never receive treatment at all. One of the

main reasons for this is that older sewer systems were not constructed to

endure the large volume of wastewater that surges with heavy rain. In

some municipalities, modern improvements like closed circuit monitoring

and chemical degreasing have enhanced sanitation officials’ ability to

monitor and prevent buildup and blockage; but even so, the basic

77 Horan, The Porcelain God, 22.

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infrastructure of modern sewer systems are often products of nineteenth-

century design.78 These systems were built to accommodate far fewer

urinators/defecators than exist today, and subjected to 21st-century

population stress, contemporary sewers are frequently overwhelmed.

Drainage limitations compound the problem. Concrete-clad cities have

paved over the earth’s natural drainage mechanism (dirt), so rain often

has nowhere to go but down the drainpipe and into the sewers.

The New York City sewer system reaches capacity about once a week.79

The countermeasure for this is an action known as Combined Sewer

Overflow, a procedure that releases large volumes of raw sewage into

nearby bodies of water.80 While this process is not particularly well

publicized, neither is it secret. The nyc.gov website plainly states:

“Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) happen when a wastewater

treatment plant or parts of the sewer get too full, usually when there’s a

78 See http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/reports/state-of-the-sewers-2013.pdf 79 George, The Big Necessity, 31. 80 The term “2-step flow”—generally associated with Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz’ “opinion leader” model of communication—might have been more appropriately reserved for describing processes of municipal sewage management. The first step in this flow occurring with the flush of the toilet; the second as sewers are flushed out into the waterways.

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big rain event or snowstorm. When this occurs, wastewater is sent straight

into our waterways, without being treated.”81

During an especially forceful downpour, even a tenth of an inch can be

enough to cause an overflow.82 At these times, millions of gallons of

sewage are discharged into the Upper New York Bay and Gowanus

Canal. This practice is obviously problematic: millions of Americans each

year suffer illnesses after having come into contact with contaminated

water. But even after thousands of years of sewerage technology, policy

makers and sanitation managers frequently have no better options at their

disposal.83 As experts will tell you, the choice is clear: either release raw

sewage directly into waterways or have it bubble up through floorboards

in basements across the city. Rose George puts it this way: “Sanitation in

the Western world is built from pipes and on presumption. Despite the

technology, the engineers and the ingenuity of modern sanitary systems,

despite the shine and the progress of flush toilets, even the richest, best-

equipped humans still don’t know what to do with sewage except move it

81See http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/harborwater/nyc_waterbody_advisory.shtml 82 George, The Big Necessity, 31. 83 No pun intended.

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somewhere else and hope no one notices when it’s lured untreated into

drinking water sources.”84

Over a century ago, at a breakfast meeting in Buffalo, President Teddy

Roosevelt openly questioned the practicality and civility of this practice:

“We claim to be a civilized people, and civilized people ought to know

how to dispose of the sewage in some other way than putting it into the

drinking water.”85 But over a century later, the same basic practices

endure. Even as sewage management technologies have become more

sophisticated with time, our sewers continue to overflow.

“The chief business and ultimate end of life,” Lewis Mumford writes,

“is the physiological process of evacuation.”86 From the deepest origins of

civilization, and even before, humans have been forced to negotiate this

basic fact, and these negotiations always require the materialization of

technologies (the durable devices and machines that result from applied

scientific knowledge) and the development of techniques (the various

ways our minds and bodies have learned to interact with the material

84 George, The Big Necessity, 6. 85 Quoted in George, The Big Necessity, 37. 86 Mumford, Lewis. The City in History New York Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961, 214.

65

world.)87 Together, technologies and techniques help shape and define the

infrastructural conditions that govern human life. Examining these

hidden-in-plain-sight phenomena can reveal much about the nature of

lived experience, and may even enable us to peer down into the recesses

(to borrow a Heideggerian phrase) of our “non-lived past.”88 I hold the

view that human heritage is as technical as it is biological; the history of

humanity is joined at the hip—and at the eye, nose, ear, hand, and, yes,

colon—to the history of tools and machines.

Technogenesis

There is no surgical laser beam of thought that drives home the

argument of this dissertation; my ideas will never boil down to one tidy

claim about flushing, media, septic infrastructure, or cultural techniques.

You will find here, in the end, arguments layered within arguments, ideas

nestled within ideas. My research chases a few primary theoretical

concerns, and in the process, my discussion winds down various

interconnected paths. As a methodological model, I rather like Norbert

Elias’ approach in The Civilizing Process, where he characterizes his work

as a kind of gradual accretion of facts and ideas that can only be fully 87 See Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. 88 For an elegant unpacking of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein and his departure from Husserlian phenomenology see: Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 2. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 4.

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understood in totality. Such work, by design, requires that you arrive at

the end before you can truly appreciate the beginning.

To the extent that this study coheres around any one single thesis or

idea, I borrow thinking from the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler,

whose anthropologically focused theories of technology conceptualize

humans as essentially prosthetic beings.89 The idea that media technologies

function simultaneously as both prostheses and amputations is a famous

McLuhan point too, however Stiegler, inspired by the philosophy of

Gilbert Simondon, goes further by suggesting that individuality is a

process that emerges in constant relation to social and technical systems.

This process, which he calls transindividuation, is rooted in a

coevolutionary, indissoluble relationship between humans and technics

that precedes any fixed notion of the individual.90 When Stiegler asserts

that “Beginnings have effects that are themselves re-beginnings,” he is

suggesting that psychic developments are co-constitutive, mutual

articulations between individuals, social networks and technological

milieus.91

89 Stiegler, Technics and Time 2. 90 Following Simondon, Stiegler uses the word transductive to describe this relationship. 91 Stiegler, Technics and Time 2.

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One of the major takeaways from Stiegler’s work is his view that

humans and technics are essentially correlated, that human evolution is

primordially interlinked with the evolution of tools and machines, and he

uses the term epiphylogenetic to describe the way in which humans evolve

“by means other than life.”92 To make his case, he directs our attention to

the “dawn of hominization, that is, of corticalization.”93 For Stiegler, one

critical piece of evidence is Leroi-Gourhan’s observation that cortical

evolution more or less peters out with the Neanderthal, yet since then,

somehow, technical innovation has continued to evolve, lately at rapid

pace. This fact offers confirmation that “technical differentiation since the

Neanderthal has occurred outside and independent of the biological

dimension.”94 Humans, then, are weirdly capable of evolving outside of

themselves through a process of exteriorization that has been part of the

evolutionary game from the very beginning.

Although Stiegler is particularly concerned with technologies of

memory (mnemotechnologies), the framework he develops extends to

humanity’s relationship with technology as a whole, and I use this general

92 Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies, 65. 93 Stiegler, Bernard. Technics And Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford Unversity Press, 1994, 142. 94 Stiegler, Bernard. "Memory." In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, 353. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 73.

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theoretical platform as a kind of jumping off point. If we are willing to

imagine that systems of memory storage—from ideogrammatic writing to

alphabets up through the iPhones, Watsons, and data farms of today—

have evolved independently from the germ line, if we believe that the

development from mnemotechniques (basic strategies for storing

memory) to advanced mnemotechnologies (technologies that

systematically organize and process memories) have developed as part of

technical, non-biological evolutionary program, then we must also assume

that other biological processes, such as digestion, have undergone

epiphylogenetic development as well.95 Methods of conveying and treating

human waste have accelerated right alongside the development of

mnemotechnologies, and while hominid intestines tend to grow shorter as

brain sizes increase, the basic character of the human gut hasn’t changed

dramatically since the Anthropoid Apes.96

Borrowing from his teacher Derrida, who was developing an idea from

Plato, Stiegler argues that technology is a Pharmakon (literal translation:

illness and cure.) Pharmaka technologies materialize as technical

exteriorizations that are simultaneously poisonous and medicinal. Plato’s

95 Ibid., 67. 96 See Milton, Katharine. "A Hypothesis to Explain the Role of Meat-Eating in Human Evolution." Evolutionary Anthropology 8, no. 1 (1999): 11-21. Also See Mitchell, P.C.V. “On the intestinal tract of mammals.” Trans Zool Soc Lond. XVII: 437-536.

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original point was that writing is a “poisonous remedy” in that it

produces forgetfulness in humans even as it enhances memory capacity

by preserving thought in durable media.97 Stiegler takes up this idea and,

piggybacking off both Marx and Derrida, argues that pharmaka

technologies contribute to an ongoing process of proletarianization (a

Marxian term that describes the dwindling economic prospects of those

who are deprived access to the means of production.)

For Marx and for Stiegler, proletarianization is a process that deprives

the worker of technological knowhow and restricts the worker’s social

mobility. Stiegler sees proletarianization as the product of

grammatization, a Derridean idea that describes “the process whereby the

currents and continuities shaping our lives become discrete elements.”98

Stiegler views grammatization as the process that explains the history of

technical exteriorization and the history of human memory. The central

idea here is that grammatization and proletarianization alter the

relationship between humans and technics over time. Exteriorized

technologies—even household appliances like toilets—reconfigure

psychical organizations and reshape technological milieus.99 The rise of

flushing media clearly exemplifies the way in which technological 97 Stiegler, Bernard. "Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon." Culture Machine 13 (2012): 1-19. 98 Stiegler, Critical Terms for Media Studies, 70. 99 Ibid.

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development can affect the psychic circumstance of individuals. As waste

flows are increasingly consolidated, as sewage is conveyed and treated in

increasingly complex ways, and as the biological consequences of human

life become increasingly subsumed by obscure economies of waste

management, people become progressively more disconnected from their

own waste products. Flushing ushers in new possibilities for comfort and

for crisis. The convenience of flushing always comes at a cost.

In the chapters that follow, I will not engage deeply with the details of

Stiegler’s philosophy (in fact, his name rarely comes up), but the idea that

flushing techniques contribute to what Stiegler and others have called

technogenesis—a process of technical exteriorization that is beyond human

control but which nevertheless contributes to the evolution human

consciousness—offers a foundational perspective for my study. I take the

view that flushing technologies are pharmaka that extend human abilities

but which also contribute to a loss of knowhow. I use Stiegler’s theory as

an orienting device, a lens through which to examine a particular moment

of technological history.

At a broad level, I argue that individuals in flushing societies no longer

know how to care for their own shit. We have been conditioned to pass

shit off pass off to others, as a routine practice and as a way of life. While

this loss of knowhow may not restrict social mobility in a strict Marxian

sense, it significantly affects the psychic lives of individuals and

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collectives. This dissertation attempts to explain how this situation came

to pass.

The Forest of Media

The fruits of my investigation are earned through historical research,

but the study of history is never straightforward business. History

involves theory (just as theory involves history.) There are no certain

methods, and there are many competing schools of thought for how best

to approach the past. Certain Benjaminians, envisioning their projects in

cosmic-astronomical terms, imagine themselves sifting through the space-

time of history in search of luminous “constellations”; Foucauldians,

preferring earthier analogs, liken themselves to genealogists and/or

archaeologists—depending on what strain of Foucauldian they

hope/claim to be—focusing their attention on various kinds of discursive

residue: traces of past power structures that somehow manage to exert

lingering influence on the present. There are still old school historians

who stubbornly stand their ground, brazenly embracing grand narrative

frameworks and championing a sort of Go Big or Go Home approach to

scholarly production;100 and of course, there are plenty of other camps out

there, too, hovering happily (or awkwardly) on the sidelines or in the

wings. 100 Not to say that either Benjamin or Foucault went small.

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Regardless of which camp one chooses to align with, the reality is that

academics are very frequently persuaded into a predictable set of

predetermined grooves, feeling the need to adhere to methods that have

been debated, honed, problematized and vetted by smallish groups of

folks who have identified themselves and each other as being basically in

the know. There are plenty of good reasons for this, I realize—as I

understand it, this is roughly what it means to work within “a field.” And

fields, we know, should not be breezily spurned: their tilling works to

advance all orders of learning, and if you believe that such a thing as

knowledge production is a worthy goal, it is blatantly self-defeating to

disregard or condemn all the fertile sprouting that healthy fields produce;

nevertheless, if I am honest about my own native disposition, my

particular attitude toward academic life, I must confess that fields tend to

provoke in me a kind of agoraphobic terror: standing out in the open,

subject to the leering gaze others, I inevitably feel…exposed.

Personally, I prefer the woods.

Lucky for me, the field of media studies is woodier than most. This is

not to say that these woods are always welcoming, or that it is ever

possible to roam them freely without fear of surveillance or reproach; I

only mean to point out that this field is not so neatly manicured as many

of its neighbors. Over the past decades, media studies has embraced a far-

flung collective of research agendas: from histories of pre-cinematic

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technology to television industry studies, media framing to critical race

analysis, cybernetics to various materialist-anthropological investigations,

media research has become an expansive enterprise.101 I will leave it to

others to debate whether or not the field (or should we even call it a field?)

has become too bloated and chaotic for its own good; for now, I’ll limit

myself to the following point: media studies offers safe harbor to all these

divergent interests because it has, at some level, committed itself to the

rigorous exploration of the “general condition for human life at any

moment of its evolution.”102

This is an essentially anthropological—and in some ways geological—

concern, and it is along these anthropologic and geologic axes that my

interests in media tend to lie. The strains of media theory I work with

scrutinize the material structures that help shape and process human

experience; they focus on processes and events rather than ideological

content, on medial conditions as opposed to media effects. This kind of

theorizing, in the words of Eva Horn, requires a “broadening of [media’s]

analytical frame, which becomes more a certain type of questioning than a

discipline in itself.”103 Such questioning plainly extends the reach of media.

101 Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies. 102 Ibid, xiii. 103 Horn, Eva. "There Are No Media.” Grey Room 29 (2008): 6-13, 8.

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In addition to conventional media like books, newspapers, TV, radio, film,

and the internet, media research may now focus on any substance or

process that effectively mediates—that is, functions as a medium—which

includes a sweeping list of artifacts and phenomena from towers, shofars

and sundials to water, fire and air.104

The critical question is, then: does such questioning open onto

astonishing wormholes of possibility, or onto hole-peppered cans of

worms? In the world of lesser scholarship, such differences are not always

immediately clear, but I will strive to make them so throughout the

duration of this work. The fault line that divides grounded theory from

theoretical muck may be shifty, but it’s always there, and I believe it’s

important to make this line discernible to readers. What follows will not

be an attempt to produce media history—as some recent German media

historians suggest, media histories do not always need to be written, they

can also be found.105 Identifying this path to discovery will surely involve

some thrashing in the underbrush, but worthwhile explorations usually

entail some thrashing along the way; (furthermore, a part of me has

always believed that it is “better to wander, even to get lost, than to follow

104 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds. 105 Siegert, Bernhard. "Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Studies." Grey Room 39 (2008): 26-47.

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a hewn path.”)106 As I stand here at the trailhead, I set out to adopt the sort

of macro-temporal analytical frame that highlights processes, flows, and

operative sequences—those theoretical currents that point media thinking

back toward anthropological and geological questions: what distinguishes

humans from animals? What distinguishes our current epoch from others

throughout geologic time?

Toilets, for one.

106 "Introduction: Shoulders to Stand On." In Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any Should There Be How About These, edited by John Durham Peters Elihu Katz, Tamar Liebes, Avril Orloff. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.

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CHAPTER 2 THE RISE OF FLUSHING IN THE WEST

Nathan’s Bucket

Not long ago I spent some time with a couple of off-the-grid

homesteaders on a mountain in northern Maine. This was not a research

trip (family commitments can wind up landing you in some rather

unlikely zones) but at one point the topic of my dissertation came up in

casual conversation, and I found myself, as dissertators sometimes do,

having to summarize my research interests to a stranger in the woods. By

now, I had refined my elevator pitch to a single word: “toilets.” (Having

suffered through my own hopelessly vague research explanations for

months, I finally discovered that this simple response was a wonderfully

effective way of sidestepping a persistently irritating topic of

conversation—upon hearing this one word, most people either think that I

am joking, in which case they will usually just sort of smile awkwardly

and allow the conversation to shift course, or else they think that I am

serious, in which case they will often have some toilet-related joke, story

or observation that they are suddenly eager to share; in either event, the

conversational ball bounces out of my court and into theirs, and from this

point on I get to nod encouragingly while my interlocutor does the

talking—much preferable to hearing myself stammer aimlessly, I’ve

found.)

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In this particular instance, the stranger who asked me about my

work—Nathan turned out to be his name—appeared to take my research

agenda seriously. His eyes lit up as he informed me that back at his camp,

maybe a mile or two away, he was in possession of an object that I might

“find interesting.” Soon I learned that the item in question was a

homemade camp-style commode—a simple piece of sanitary equipment

that he had engineered a few weeks before. Circumstances prevented me

from laying eyes on this object, but Nathan’s description left a vivid

impression: “Just picture a five-gallon paint bucket with a toilet seat duct-

taped to the rim…” The picture arrived easily, and has remained with me

since.

For those of us habituated to flush technology, plastic shit buckets are

not common features of everyday life, and if we happen to come across

one, the encounter is likely to make an impression. Our impressions may

vary (to some, the shit bucket will seem curious or sad; others may respect

its simplicity and/or economy; others still may find something humorous

about it; and then of course there are those for whom it will provoke

feelings of deep animal disgust) but regardless of how shit buckets

manage to impress themselves on flushers, the point is that they are in

some way impressive. A shit bucket located within a flush society is not a

neutral object; rather, it stands out and demands our attention. Mary

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Douglas’ famous phrase “matter out of place,” which she coined to

describe dirt, could just as well be used to describe Nathan’s bucket.

We flushers live in a world where it is relatively easy to make shit

just…disappear. The vast majority of flushers will view toilets that do not

flush waste but instead hold it, store it, keep it contained, as decidedly

inferior to stereotypical cloud-white, flush-capable johns. How did we

arrive here as a culture? How is it that flush toilets (a resource

squandering device designed to pass shit off to others) came to seem

civilized, while non-flushing shit buckets (a resource efficient technology

that encourages self-reliance) came to be viewed as primitive?

Alexander Kira has shown how attitudes toward human waste have

varied dramatically across cultures and over time. “Not only are our

negative attitudes toward body wastes learned rather than ‘natural’ or

instinctive,” he argues, “they are also of relatively recent origin.” At

different points humans have been known to use urine as soap, laundry

detergent, dishwashing liquid, and hand cleaner; human excrement has

been used variously in medicine, agriculture, religious rituals, and on

occasion, it has even been used as an ingredient to flavor food.107 Young

children are notoriously laid back when it comes to interacting with fecal

matter. At what point, then, do bodily wastes cross over into the category

107 Kira, Alexander. The Bathroom. Viking Press, 1976. 94-95.

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of the abject? What forces help shape the contours of this abjection, or

contribute to modulations in human perception?

We know that these sorts of questions are typically addressed through

psychoanalysis—the likes of Freud and Kristeva have made massive

meals out of such concerns time and again. But here, even if I occasionally

gesture toward certain strains of psychoanalytic thought, I will approach

these questions from an alternative vantage. In an effort to trace specific

processes that have helped structure attitudes about bodily waste in the

west, I choose to ask: what are the “procedural chains and connecting

techniques” that have influenced our consciousness? Focusing particularly

on the rise of flush plumbing in the United States, I will attempt to

perform a “techno-material deconstruction”108 that reveals ways in which

innovations in plumbing technology have served to reconfigure

Americans’ relationship to a multiplex of environments: homes,

communities, cities, and the natural world. I conceptualize flushing as an

“envirotechnical” process—one which “encapsulates and specifically

foregrounds this dynamic imbrication of natural and technological

systems”—and situate plumbing technologies within the framework of

other emerging infrastructural media of the nineteenth century.109

108 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. "Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks." 109 Prichard, Sara B. "An Envirotechnical Disaster: Nature, Technology, and Politics at Fukushima." Environmental History 17 (April 2012): 219-43, 223.

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The history of plumbing in the United States is interesting, and in

some ways unique, because of the particular blend of centralized and

decentralized forces that contributed to its development. During the early

years of the transition, the invention and adoption of flushing

technologies was in many ways an organic, piecemeal development—not

the direct result of a newly centralized urban plan. To be sure, centralizing

forces helped to accelerate and clinch this transition, especially in the late

nineteenth century, but this was not the primary reason that people first

began to gravitate toward flush plumbing. A close examination of

nineteenth-century plumbing technology shows that early flushing was

largely a “local” impulse, even if it was encouraged by broader national

(and international) trends.

In developing my analysis, I explore how flush plumbing technology

has contributed to broader technogenetic developments; I also explore

ways that flushing processes have served to complicate the boundaries

between interior and exterior spaces in the modern world. Plumbing

devices and septic management systems have played significant if

sometimes neglected roles in the overarching drive toward “networking

the world”—110if, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued, “the railroad

reorganized space,” so, too, did the sewers (as roads and rivers did before

110 Mattelart, Armand. Networking the World, 1794-2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000.

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them).111 And like so many other infrastructural developments, their

expansion involves a convoluted blend of bureaucratic planning and

private decision-making. Parsing the strands of these processes of

innovation can help us to better understand the conditions that nourished

their development, as well as the consequences of their implementation.

The roots of this discussion penetrate a theoretical substrate that

positions humans as subordinate components of larger technical systems

and processes rather than as the primary causative agents of all

technological activity. If we humans were ever in control of our tools and

machines (a dubious assertion to begin with), it is clear that the process of

losing control began some time ago.112 Geologists have lately theorized that

we have transitioned into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene,

which is witnessing a new set of earth changing processes brought forth

by industrial civilization. Typically these geologists choose to emphasize

ways in which human activity has contributed to our shifting geological

landscape (the proposed name of this epoch clearly reflects this emphasis);

111 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey. Oakland: University of California Press, 1986, 45. 112 If this statement strikes you as even remotely hyperbolic, I invite you to set aside this document and drive to the nearest wilderness area, remove your clothes and lock them—along with your keys, phone, and any food morsels that you may have brought along—inside your car; then walk in the opposite direction of the road until nightfall; at which point stop, count to 10, and ask yourself: do I feel in control?

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however, some have begun calling this anthropocentric viewpoint into

question.

P.K. Haff, for example, has proposed the term “technosphere” in an

effort to shift focus away from the environmental effects caused by

humanity and instead call attention to the wide-reaching network of

technical phenomena that serve to modify and entrain human behavior.

Haff affords technology the same geologic status as water, organisms, or

the earth’s crust—planetary systems so expansive and penetrative that

they can be said to constitute their own unique sphere (hydrosphere,

biosphere, lithosphere, etc.) He argues that digital communication and

transportation networks have extended their reach to such an extent that

is it now necessary to conceptualize technology as a globe-spanning,

geologic force. The technosphere, he contends, is manifest in nearly every

aspect of human life—from “needles, motors and medicines” to

“nominally human activities” like filling out tax documents or watching

TV.113

The idea of a technosphere falls right in line with the notion of

technogenesis: as technology permeates the ecology of this planet, it also

affects the social and psychical development of the humans that live here.

113 Haff, P. K. "Technology as a Geological Phenomenon: Implications for Human Well-Being." In A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene, edited by C. N. Waters, Zalasiewicz, J. A., Williams, M., Ellis, M. A. & Snelling, A. M. The Geological Society of London, 2014, 302.

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As I’ve already made clear, this perspective will guide my thinking

throughout this study. For me, the critical issues involve those feedback

mechanisms that serve to enmesh biological and technical systems: how

have flushing practices become integrated into the technosphere? And

how have these processes of integration come to penetrate consciousness

and affect behavior? Most would instinctively argue that the choice of

whether or not to flush the toilet is one that remains squarely under an

individual toilet user’s control. But is this really the case? True, during any

given trip to the restroom, an individual may elect to flush or not flush;

but could an individual choose to not flush 50 times in a row? Or ever

again? Surely I do not need to spell out the sanitary or social consequences

of this potentiality, and my point here should be plain: for those of us who

engage regularly with flush technology, the decision of whether to

depress the tank lever can never be considered wholly or categorically

within our control. Myriad forces bear down upon us, shaping our actions

and thoughts; at the same time, our thoughts and actions give rise to a

wide range of technical configurations that serve to generate and reinforce

the very same forces that may encourage our flushing habits. These

processes contribute powerfully to the way we humans experience the

material world—and were I not deeply affected by them myself, I would

never have given Nathan’s bucket a second thought.

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To Flow, How Sweet A Thing

Why did people begin to flush? Momentum for septic flushing began

to pick up rapid speed around the mid-nineteenth century, both in

England and in the United States, but there is no obvious reason why

people felt the need to introduce running water into their homes at this

particular point in time (remember that the nuts and bolts of such

technology had been around for millennia). Less clear still was why so

many rural residents went to such great lengths to secure an amenity that

had previously been regarded as nonessential. Nevertheless, the mid-

nineteenth century was for American plumbing what the late 1920s were

for Hollywood or what the past few decades have been for mainland

China: a time of upheaval and opportunity, technical innovation and

entrepreneurial experimentation, shattering of convention and evolution

of desire. As is so often the case in times of sweeping infrastructural

change, America’s plumbing revolution arose patchily and without

certain trajectory.

In order to answer the question of why people begin to flush in the

United States, we need to examine the complex of forces that were

shaping the lives nineteenth-century Americans. How did the inner-lives

of these citizens correspond to the outer worlds they inhabited? How did

they understand the functioning of their bodies in relation to the character

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of their environments? These are questions that historian Conevery Bolton

Valenčius has already taken up.

In The Health of the Country, her study of nineteenth-century settlers

and their perceptions of the American frontier, she reveals deep-seated

connections between these settlers’ understandings of physical health and

their attitudes about their physical surroundings. Valenčius shows how

environments penetrated the inner lives of individuals, arguing that “the

exterior world and the human body were not as separate as they are

now.”114 Her research suggests that nineteenth-century Americans

possessed “a complicated interior geography of sensation, movement, and

flow” and that people made sense of interior bodily rhythms—cycles of

reproduction and digestion, sickness and well-being, growth and decay—

in terms of environmental, economic, social and political realities.115 These

“imaginative geographies” functioned like psycho-spiritual compasses,

guiding behaviors and influencing subjectivities as people struggled to

survive in a harsh and rapidly changing world.116

The concepts of balance and flow are key for Valenčius as she reveals

ways that various medical misunderstandings—including a persistent

belief in humorism—influenced nineteenth-century American 114 Valenčius, Conevery Bolton. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. New York: Basic Books, 2004, 3. 115 Ibid, 53. 116 Ibid. p. 263.

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consciousness. Bodies were commonly conceived of as fluids in motion;

human health was seen to be regulated by competing flows of

nourishment and contamination. In a fluid world, settlers on the frontier

strove to achieve physical and psychical equilibrium, imagining that the

vitality of their environments had direct consequences for the health of

their bodies and the clarity of their minds. For these Americans, nature

and self flowed together as part of the same seamless vision of reality.117

To be sure, flow-based understandings of reality are not peculiar to

nineteenth-century America. Since at least since the time of Laozi (b. 571

BCE), the concept of flow has been celebrated for embodying ideals that

promote spiritual fulfillment, emotional stability and physical well being,118

and the idea actually resides at the heart of an entire branch of western

117 Ibid., 261. 118 Tao Te Ching, Verse 8. The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to. It flows to low places Loathed by all men Therefore, it is like the Tao. (Positive psychology of the eighties and nineties built upon such Taoist teachings, pursuing research designed to expose barriers that inhibit learning processes. These scholars were most interested in identifying the forces that shape motivation, engagement, and immersive experience—factors and conditions that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi associates with “staying in the flow.” )

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philosophy that dates back to Heraclitus.119 Philosophies of becoming (as

opposed to being) emphasize the fluctuant, transient, palpitating nature of

all existence; Heraclitus crystalized this perspective when he noticed the

impossibility of stepping into the same river more than once.120 Since then,

philosophical enthusiasm for flow has trickled down through myriad

academic tributaries. Economists fixate on the dynamics of capital and

market flows, the flowing of natural resources and manufactured goods.

World systems theorists envision the shifting patterns of global

dominance in terms military flows, media flows, and the flow of

commodities. Urban planners imagine space according to its ability to

promote flow and mobility; similarly Feng Shui practitioners work to

encourage the flow of chi.

Over the past century, thinkers of various stripes have put forth a

range of flow-based theories of society and culture. From Lazarsfeld and

Katz’ 2-step flow, to Raymond Williams’ writing about the constant flow

of mass media, to the cultural imperialism debates that attempt to assess

the relative forcefulness of competing cultural flows, researchers have

119 Rahn, John. "The Swerve and the Flow: Music’s Relationship to Mathematics." Perspectives of New Music 42, no. 1: 130-49. 120His famous phrase “ta panta rhei,” which translates as “everything flows,” also shares an etymological connection with the word diarrhea.

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maintained a long lasting interest with flows of communication.121 In one of

their dazzlingly opaque formulations, Deleuze and Guattari have

theorized that biological and social activities are propelled by a complex

“flow-producing machine.”122 For Kittler, the very concept of a medium

ceased to matter the instant that data flows entered the digital sphere.

From the perspective of hard science, the driving forces of nature are

very often attributed to or explained by powers of flow: conveyance of

electricity depends on the flow of current; fluid dynamics are governed in

part by “flow regimes.” Flow chemistry combines fluid in order to

produce continuous chemical reactions. Meteorology measures direction

of air circulation according to levels of zonal and meridional flow. Among

other things, evolutionary biology works to track the flow of genes, and

taking a cue from these biologists, some students of history like to imagine

history itself as one epic evolutionary process flowing magnificently

across the grand expanse of time.123

121 And if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you already know that Flow is also the name of online tv and media studies journal (established 2004). 122 See Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. NewYork: Random House 1965. 5: “…there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast—the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows.” 123 For more on this, see http://www.flowofhistory.com/

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Today in casual conversation the word continues to carry positive

connotations. Flowing is by and large preferable to ebbing, and even if we

resent the advice, we have all at some point been encouraged to go with

the flow. The concept suggests a combination of power, pragmatism,

natural wonder and otherworldly grace. For whatever reasons, flow is a

notion that humans can relate to and identify with; the idea of continuous

motion is both primally intuitive and engagingly abstract; flow offers an

uncommonly pellucid lens through which to scrutinize the nature of life

and our ephemeral roles within the phantasmagoric stream of earthly

commotion.

Humanity’s fascination with flow finds literal expression during

several critical phases of civilizational development: first, with the

development of irrigation agriculture in Mesopotamia in the 4th or 5th

millennium BCE;124 a millennium or two later with the emergence of the

first sewers systems in the Indus Valley; flow-based tech ascends to new

heights with Roman aqueduct engineering in the final centuries BCE, and

Persians develop it further still with wind-powered grain grinders and

water pumps in the latter part of the first millennium AD.125 But the idea of

flow achieves new significance in the mid-nineteenth century when flows 124 Goldsmith, Edward and Nicholas Hildyard,. "Traditional Irrigation in Mesopotamia." http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/45/traditional-irrigation-in-mesopotamia/. 125 "Wind Power's Beginnings (1000 B.C. -1300 A.D.)" http://telosnet.com/wind/early.html.

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of electrical current, oil, molten metal, railway traffic, credit and liquid

capital erupt in a confluence of currents that collectively announce

modernity. These technological flows served as a kind of urban analogue

for environmental flows that were shaping consciousness of settlers on the

frontier.

These imagined connections between bodies and environments were

operative on both literal and figurative levels. In political discourse and in

private correspondence, people used similar metaphors to describe the

functioning of inner bodies and outer terrains, but they also drew concrete

connections between their inner functions and their material

surroundings.126 Water—a substance that flows through bodies as well as

cities and lands—was more than just a necessity for life; it was a critical

element in an intellectual framework that conceptualized civilization as

dependent on flow for survival. It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that

immediately following the invention of the telegraph and the

contemporaneous development of the railroad, just a few years after

electrical current began flowing through telegraph wires from New York

to California, plumbers and sanitary engineers began contributing to this

epoch of envirotechnical change by developing techniques for managing

flows of sewage, and by introducing a tsunami of earth’s most famously

flowing substance into millions of homes across the western world.

126 Ibid.

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Flushing technologies are linked to the concept of flow from the very

beginning (after all, there can be no flushing without flow), and well

before flushing became prominent in the United States, leaders of the

sanitation movement in England were already developing a vision of a

society whose toilets and sewers continuously flushed and flowed. A

breakout year for the movement was 1842, the year when Sir Edwin

Chadwick published his highly influential “Report on the Sanitary

Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain.” The report,

which detailed the appalling living conditions of working-class

Londoners, helped propel an international movement for improved access

to water supplies and more hygienic systems of sewage disposal.127

Earlier and more emphatically than most, Chadwick promoted the

benefits of flushing. He believed that solutions to London’s sanitary

problems could be achieved through a radical revamping of urban

infrastructure, and he extended the logic of new wastewater disposal

regulations by proposing the development of a small-bore pipe sewer

system, with the dream of transforming the city into a “self-flushing

mechanism” capable of carrying waterborne waste out of homes and into

self-purifying sewer systems beneath (and beyond) the city.128 His

enthusiasm for flushing processes—both the flushing of water closet

127 Ibid. 128 Ibid., 86.

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waste as well as the flushing of waste through the vasculature of the city

sewers—was grounded in his belief that flushing served as a critical step

toward the betterment of public health:

Are you aware that a new practice has arisen of preventing the accumulation of deposits in the sewers, by flushes of water, which remove all deposits weekly, and so far prevent the year's accumulation and corruption of deposits in the sewers? If this system were enforced in the city, have you any doubt as to the extensive prevention of disease and mortality which would be thereby effected amongst all classes? Certainly it would be a great boon, in a sanitary point of view, to the population of the city of London. I am so much convinced of this, that in my own house I put a stick under the handle of the water-closet, so as to have a continued flow or flush of water for some length of time; this I do to remove any accidental accumulation. Of course the flushing of the common sewers would have the same effects.129

Central to his vision was a vastly expanded network of sewer pipes

designed to promote clean, fast, and reliable sewerage flow. He

campaigned aggressively against any management process that he

thought might enable stagnation; for Chadwick, good sewage was fresh,

dilute, and swiftly flowing; bad sewage was thick, sluggish, and blockage-

prone.130 He referred to his proposal as an “arterial-venous” system and

imagined that by pumping continuous flows of running water into, out of,

129 Chadwick, Edwin. "Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain." 1842, 228. 130 Hamlin, Christopher. "Edwin Chadwick and the Engineers, 1842-1854: Systems and Antisystems in the Pipe-and-Brick Sewers War." Technology and Culture 33, no. 4 (1992): 680-709, 684.

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and throughout the city, a sanitary balance could ultimately be achieved. 131

Running water would function as the blood of the city, and healthy blood

flow would be the key to warding off pestilence and disease.

In order to achieve this result, it would of course be necessary to

prevent excess rainwater from filtering down into the sewer system

(otherwise sanitation managers would never be able to regulate precise

movements of inflows and outflows across an extensive network of pipes;)

but regardless of the challenges, Chadwick was captivated by the

possibility of achieving septic equilibrium—he theorized that if water

inputs and sewerage flows remained constant, sewers could be designed

to flush themselves.132

Although Chadwick’s speculations were often misguided—he was a

firm exponent of miasma theory, which mistakenly held that disease

spreads through contact with toxic air rather than germs—his determined

efforts nonetheless helped promote reform. Chadwick, like many early

reformers, viewed putrefactive odors as the true enemies of healthy living

(it was not until the late 1870s and later that germ theory began to gain

significant traction); but despite their scientific inaccuracy, these reformers

enjoyed much success in influencing urban development. Blind to actual

causes while dead set on identifying solutions, “sanitation reformers often 131 Ibid., 683. 132 Ibid.

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demanded a fundamental restructuring of the physical basis of urban

life.”133

Beginning in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the implementation of

water carriage sewage gradually began to replace privies and cesspools

throughout London, and by 1848, sanitary officials had established the

Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, a centralized body charged with

overseeing management of the city-wide sewer system, with Chadwick at

the helm.134 The commission responded to failures of private-lot waste

removal by initiating a massive re-channeling of urban waste products. A

year before establishing the commission, Parliament enacted a law

requiring residents to empty private water closets into public sewers—

prior to 1815, this practice had been explicitly banned.135

But as the city attempted to actualize Chadwick’s vision, it soon

became apparent that his ideas were better in theory than in practice. His

hydrological imprecision rivaled his epidemiological ignorance;

misunderstandings regarding pipes’ ability to withstand pressure resulted

in frequent breakages and malfunctions. Even more significantly, his

133 Peterson, Jon A. "The Impact of Sanitary Reform Upon American Urban Planning, 1840-1890." Journal of Social History 13, no. 1 (1979): 83-103, 84. 134 "Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage." edited by Carl A. Zimring and William L. Rathje: Sage, 2012, xxx. 135 Peterson, “Impact of Sanitary Reform,” 85.

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dream of carrying sewage tracelessly beyond the perimeter of the city

never came to pass.

While it is true that new flushing techniques succeeded in removing

unwanted waste from Londoners’ homes, they did so by channeling this

waste directly into the Thames.136 In the summer of 1858, a historically

powerful stench enveloped the city: this “Great Stink” was largely a result

of the flushing practices that Chadwick had labored to implement. A man

of fierce passions and myriad enemies, he was in 1854 expelled from the

General Board of Health.137 The job of sewering London would ultimately

fall to a cadre of Chadwick’s sanitary rivals—most notably the water

engineer Joseph Bazalgette.

In a broad sense, however, Chadwick’s vision still prevailed. When

Chadwick thought to jerry-rig the handle of his toilet in an effort to

produce, in his words, a “continued flow or flush,” he tapped directly into

a techno-cultural slipstream that was, at that very moment, reconstituting

the perceptual fibers of the modern world. His aspiration to achieve

continuous flows of water grew out of a vital array of contemporaneous

discourses that positioned the idea of flow at the heart of modern

136 Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map, 207. 137 Hamlin, “Edwin Chadwick and the Engineers,” 708.

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dreams.138 As the pace of technological development accelerated, flows—

literal and figurative—were increasingly viewed as a critical ingredients in

recipes for healthier, happier, more spiritually fulfilling lives.

America Begins to Flush

During the first several decades of the nineteenth century—even as

major sewer projects were developing in France, Germany, and Great

Britain—the United States was still a sparsely sewered land. Americans

still generally regarded waste management as a private responsibility:

rather than conceptualizing septic technology and public waterways as

facets of a single system, they were viewed—practically and legally—as

distinct processes.139 A variety of local laws forbade the depositing of

private water-closet waste into public drains, and while middle-class

138 Thinkers close to Chadwick were also pondering the relationship between health and flow. In his writing on “Pleasures, Pains, and their kinds,” Chadwick’s mentor Jeremy Bentham positions the “flow of health” and “flow of spirit” as noteworthy players in his taxonomy of pleasurable sensation. Chadwick’s friend and fellow sanitary reformer Thomas Southwood Smith (who incidentally carried out a public dissection of Bentham’s body three days after his death) theorized that individual human bodies and entire social bodies engage in a “vital process” of particle exchange: he imagined that an integrated stream of bio-particles flowed from human bodies directly into the social sphere; he thus conceived of the city “as a place of flows, movement, and circulation” where “the body and the city were quite literally at one.” See Joyce, Patrick, ed. The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences. New Brunswick: Routledge, 2014, 106. 139 Ogle, Maureen. All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2000.

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Americans increasingly enjoyed the benefits of modern plumbing

systems, they often did so without connections to city water supplies.140

It’s true that by the 1840s major cities like New York and Boston had

begun the process of developing public waterworks programs, which had

the dual effect of transitioning sewage management out of private hands

into municipal authority and dramatically increasing overall water usage

throughout the city.141 These first major systematic sewer projects in the

United States were all modeled directly on English designs.142 John H.

Griscom, a vocal Chadwick enthusiast and high profile physician from

New York City, was among those who led the charge for American

Sanitary Reform. During his brief appointment as City Physician, he

lobbied the New York City’s common council for the establishment of a

dedicated “health police” who would be directly responsible for enforcing

local sanitation law.143 While his initiative failed, Griscom would go on to

write the “The Sanitary Conditions of the laboring population of New

York,” which outlined the various sanitation crises facing the city and

argued that poor sanitary conditions encouraged moral depravity.

140 Ibid. 141 Peterson, “Impact of Sanitary Reform.” 142 Ibid. 143 Loving, David A. The Development of American Public Health, 1850-1925. ProQuest, 2008, 39.

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By 1850, only a handful of American cities (Boston, Philadelphia,

Chicago and NYC) had functioning municipal waterworks systems;

nevertheless, in urban and rural environments alike, flush plumbing was

on the rise.144 This is an interesting development. Why would homeowners

with no access to city water suddenly yearn to flush? Even if they caught

wind of new sanitation advancements through newspapers, domestic

periodicals and/or word of mouth, they were geographically

disconnected from these urban infrastructures, so there was no clear

technological imperative to introduce flush plumbing into their homes.

Yet with increasingly frequency they did. Early septic solutions were

often experimental, homespun, and functioned with varying degrees of

efficiency and reliability; in cities and rural areas alike, it was a time of

experimentation and transition. Manuel De Landa describes how large-

scale urban developments are always a combination “of self-organized

meshworks of diverse elements, versus hierarchies of uniform elements,”

pointing out that “meshworks and hierarchies not only coexist and

intermingle, they constantly give rise to each other.”145 In the realm of

urban planning, this distinction can be illustrated through two polar

144 Schultz, Stanley K. and Clay McShane. "To Engineer the Metropolis: Sewers, Sanitation, and City Planning in Late-Nineteenth-Century America." The Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (1978): 389-411, 391. 145 De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 2000, 32.

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developmental processes: “conscious manipulation of urban space by

some central agency” on the one hand, and “the activities of many

individuals, without any central ‘decider’” on the other. 146 De Landa’s

theorization precisely captures the pattern of forces that shaped the

transition from containment to flush plumbing in the United States. Even

as the number of public waterworks facilities grew steadily over time, the

business of plumbing was still at midcentury a mostly localized

enterprise, and accordingly, both amateur and professional plumbers

experimented with a wide range of solutions in their attempts to

introduce running water and flush toilets into homes.

Maureen Ogle has argued that the rise of plumbing in the United

States must be considered “within the dual contexts of reform and

convenience.”147 For Americans, the perceived need for modernized

plumbing arose less from a crisis in sanitation (as it did in Paris or

London) than “from a broader desire to create excellent domestic

environments and thereby effect national progress.”148 The ideal of “good

housekeeping” was becoming more firmly linked to notions of citizenship

and national pride, and increasingly, modern plumbing fixtures were

146 Ibid, 30. 147 Ogle, 35. 148 Ibid.

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regarded as essential features of a proudly kept home. But how did these

changes unfold? How was it that middle-class Americans were beginning

to regard indoor plumbing as a necessity?

In the United States, the rise of flushing may best be understood as the

result of two mutually reinforcing impulses that were becoming

heightened and more pronounced in the rapidly evolving technological

milieu of the nineteenth century: 1) a desire to put greater distance

between oneself and one’s waste products, and 2) a desire to achieve this

distance instantaneously. A number of factors undergird this cultural

development. First: even if sanitation failures in the United States had not

reached the crisis levels that they had in some European cities, American

urban centers were still far from pristine: cesspools were a ubiquitous

feature of American urban landscapes, as were noxious smells which

perpetually permeated the air.149 Foul conditions worsened as population

densities increased, and in time, a sanitary reform moment took root in

the United States as it had elsewhere.

But the nation was also going through a broader set of modernizing

shifts that influenced attitudes about waste management. Ogle has shown

how Americans began to see plumbing in a new light during the

149 Stone, May N. "The Plumbing Paradox: American Attitudes toward Late Nineteenth-Century Domestic Sanitary Arrangements." Winterthur Portfolio 14, no. 3 (1979): 283-309, 292. Also see Griscom, John H. Uses and Abuses of Air. New York: Redfield, 1854.

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midcentury period: they were beginning to perceive “water closets and

washbasins in the same way that they perceived the great pumping

engines and spinning machines at Lowell, Massachusetts—as

manifestations of the energy and superiority of an extraordinary

civilization, one that was, they believed, unlike anything in Europe or

elsewhere.”150 This shift in perception fostered a new spirit of technical

innovation. While municipal engineers and city officials were working to

implement large-scale sewer systems and waterworks facilities,

homeowners from Maine to California were experimenting with new

ways of managing their household waste. Plumbing technology was not

yet standardized, and there were few legal or technical guidelines in place

regulating how things should be done. It was not until the final decades of

the century that a fixed set of legal standards were established to regulate

plumbing installations; in the absence of codes and certain rules,

handymen, homeowners, and self-taught plumbers learned to tinker with

water and waste management solutions on their own terms.151

It was not until the late-nineteenth century that flushing toilets of the

kind we recognize today became commonplace, and your typical

plumbing installations of the midcentury period would seem strange if

not outright unrecognizable today. They were, many of them, stopgap 150 Ogle, 159. 151 Ibid.

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technologies, which quickly became obsolete as septic infrastructures

expanded their reach mightily by the century’s end. Lacking standardized

parts or systemized sanitary regulations, plumbers with varying degrees

of aptitude and experience emerged in droves (unsurprisingly, perhaps,

plumbers developed a reputation for incompetence during this time.)152

Like any technological revolution, the development of flush technology

was the result of painstaking experimentation. For several decades during

the midcentury period, the national drive toward sanitary improvement

was relentless, and the competing theories about best plumbing practices

congealed in a vibrant body of sanitary literature. Though frequently

overlooked, this period of invention marks a critical moment in

civilizational development.

Flowing Water, Stinking Air

Almost five centuries ago, Montaigne matter-of-factly declared: “The

principle care I take in my lodging is to avoid heavy, stinking air.”153

Modern readers easily understand this aversion. Air in life is like sound in

film: we don’t notice it unless something is off, but if/when something

goes afoul, our sense organs take instantaneous offense. Smells have a

152 Stone, “The Plumbing Paradox.” 153 de Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958, 229.

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powerful effect on mental life. The air we breathe continually conveys

scent-filled molecules to our noses and brains, and even if we humans

tend not to identify as olfactory specialists, we in fact possess great

powers of scent detection.154 Neuroscientists know that smells are actually

primordial packets of information: when an odor molecule hits the

sensory neurons inside our nose, it stimulates an electrical charge; this

signal travels quickly to our brain’s olfactory bulb, a neurological relay

center that distributes the signal to other parts of the brain for more

complex processing.155

From our deepest biological roots, smells have complicated the

interior/exterior divide. Olfaction is unique in that it is our “only dual

sensory modality”:156 in an interesting evolutionary turn of fate, humans

evolved two distinct kinds of nasal signals: those that originate outside the

body (orthonasal), and those that originate from within (retronasal).157

154 Recent research suggests that humans can detect at least a trillion distinct odors. See http://www.nature.com/news/human-nose-can-detect-1-trillion-odours-1.14904 155 "Making Sense of Scents: Smell and the Brain." Society for Neuroscience, http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/senses-and-perception/articles/2015/making-sense-of-scents-smell-and-the-brain/. 156 Rozin, P. "'Taste–Smell Confusions' and the Duality of the Olfactory Sense." Percept Psychophys. 31, no. 4 (1982): 397-401. 157 Shepherd, Gordon M. "Smell Images and the Flavour System in the Human Brain." Nature 444 (2006): 316-21.

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Orthonasal stimulation occurs when smells from our environment

penetrate our nasal cavity; retronasal stimulation occurs when, as we eat

food, molecules move between the mouth and the nasopharynx,

ultimately arriving at the olfactory epithelium, which communicates the

perception of odor to the brain.158 Even as our olfactory apparatus

perceives odor from the outside world, it also works to generate sensation

from within the mouth. No two sensory systems intermingle quite so

intimately as do olfaction and taste, and their direct physical relationship

penetrates psychic depths. When you encounter an offensive stench and

your stomach beings to churn, it is likely because you fear the possibility

of tasting whatever rancid substance has actually produced the smell.159

Interior/exterior divides are complicated in new ways when indoor

plumbing fixtures are incorporated into the home. As indoor plumbing

technology spread, installers of water closets quickly faced the challenge

of eliminating unpleasant odors from within the living quarters: since the

source of these smells were now originating from within the home, a new

set of techniques were required to evacuate these unpleasant smells to the

outside world. While a variety of factors influence the pervasiveness of

septic odor—style of water closet, the floor plan of the home or building

158 When smells influence our perception of flavor, we can observe this retronasal functioning at work. 159 Rozin, 397.

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and the proximity of the water closet to other living spaces, the age and

quality of plumbing materials used, the skillfulness of assembly and

installation, etc.—there is one device whose primary task became to

prevent bad smells from entering the home: the trap.

The trap, which according to one nineteenth-century sanitary manual

is a ”suitable bend or dip in the pipe, which retains sufficient quantity of

water to prevent the passage of sewer-air,”160 establishes a new kind of

threshold within the home. In conjunction with water and waste pipes,

traps create physical boundaries that separate water closets from the

outside world. In a time when the public’s fear of sewer gas was deep-

seated and widespread, the trap became an especially vital site for

technical experimentation. “It is impossible to exaggerate the importance

of having efficient traps,” writes S. Stevens Hellyer in 1877, “for what are

they but doorways to the waste-pipes and soil-pipes…”161 Like doors, traps

process the distinction between interiors and exteriors and sacred and

profane zones by carrying out both material and symbolic functions.162 In

160 Gerhard, William Paul. House Drainage and Sanitary Plumbing. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1898, 77. 161 Hellyer, S. Stevens. The Plumber and Sanitary Houses: A Practical Treatise on the Principles of Internal Plumbing Work, or the Best Means for Effectually Excluding Noxious Gases from Our Houses. 4th ed.: B.T. Batsford, 1887, 35. 162 See Siegert, Bernhard. "Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic." Grey Room no. 47 (2012): 6-23.

106

addition to suppressing odors, traps were believed to suppress a range of

evil, pestilential and/or “mischievous” elements that were widely

associated with putrefaction.163 Hellyer again: “There are a " thousand

gates to death! Few are wider, or open more readily, than those in our

own homes, when unlocked by noxious gases or bad air from drains.”164

For Hellyer and many others, plumbing traps represented direct gates to

hell, and accordingly it was of the utmost importance that these gates only

be permeable from one direction.

Because traps were crucial components of any properly functioning

water closet, they were simultaneously vehicles of innovation and topics

of considerable debate. Within nineteenth-century sanitary discourse,

questions and disagreements about traps abound: Must traps be self-

cleansing? Is it necessary to trap all the plumbing fixtures within the

home, or just the main drain? What are the best solutions for ventilation?

Or are traps even necessary? No issue was more hotly contested than trap

design, and a brief survey of nineteenth-century sanitary literature reveals

an almost absurd list of trapping solutions.165 Among drainage analysts,

163 Brigg, John. "Unsuspected Sources of Mischief from Sewer Air." In The Practitioner, 1875, 234. 164 Hellyer, The Plumber and Sanitary Houses, xi, preface to the first edition. 165 You have your Bell traps, D traps, gulley-traps, Antill’s Patent Trap, Adee’s patent stench-traps Claughton’s trap, Mansion traps, Weaver’s disconnecting-traps, V-dip traps, Beard and Dent’s 4-inch patent cast-lead trap, the Helmet trap,

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opinions were fierce: one expert would claim that “The old ‘cesspool trap’

is, next to the pan-closet and the D-trap, the worst device ever

proposed…”,166 another would assert that common water traps are “in

every way defective.”167 The perceived dangers of faulty trapping elevated

the stakes of these debates beyond the level of mere convenience: trapping

was, in the eyes of many, truly a matter of life and death.

While the development of the plumbing trap was designed to

eliminate the presence of stinking odor, it did so by requiring the

perpetual presence of water within homes; thus, the constant flows of

water that were so crucial to Chadwick’s vision of septic equilibrium

became thoroughly incorporated into many American’s daily routines.

The sanitarian Osborne Reynolds points out in 1872 that even “the best

trap will not act unless it has water in it; and, since water evaporates, there

must be a constant, at least a frequent, supply of water through the trap to

Bower’s patent sewer gas trap, Anti-D trap, S traps, Half-S trap, the Du Bois trap, Connoley’s Globe trap, Stiff’s interceptor sewer-trap, Pott’s Edinburgh air-chambered sewer trap, Molesworth’s trap, Hellyer’s Triple-Dip Trap, Smeaton’s Eclipse trap, the Eureka sewer air-trap, and Brandeis’s Climax trap, just to name a few. 166 Gerhard, 83. 167 Waring, George E. The Sanitary Drainage of Houses and Towns Riverside Press, 1876, 99.

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render it effective.”168 Alongside faucet-heads, traps demanded ever-

flowing endowments of fresh H2O.

In cities with municipal water access, it did not take long before people

began taking these resources for granted. Popular early flushing devices

known as “hoppers”—common midcentury fixtures which required

running water in order to flush waste off the sides of a funnel and down

into a trap beneath the floor—were egregious water squanderers: one

Boston Water Board study from the 1850s revealed that 25% of users left

their hopper running even when it was not in use, wasting outrageous

quantities of water each day.169 It is in some ways surprising the ease and

rapidity with which people habituated to flush technology. From the

standpoint of energy utilization and resource consumption, flushing is

nightmarishly inefficient. Instead of saving water, it hemorrhages it;

rather than harnessing the native energy supplies stored in waste matter,

flushing channels this untapped energy beyond harnessable range,

frittering away potentially valuable reserves. Yet despite these obvious

disadvantages, once water was readily available within the home, flushing

quickly presented itself as the preferred septic management solution.

168 Reynolds, Osborne. Sewer Gas, and How to Keep It out of Houses. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 1872. 169 Ogle, 78.

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Americans in rural areas went to extraordinary lengths in an effort to

furnish their home with flowing water, even when it made less practical

sense than alternative solutions. For many nineteenth-century Americans,

finding new ways to promote the flow of water through plumbing fixtures

became a kind of obsession. For city dwellers who were connected to

municipal waterworks, flush systems offered some practical advantages,

but any rural plumber interested in developing a flush system needed first

to establish a reliable water supply, which often presented a stiff (and

sometimes insurmountable) challenge. Because of the considerable

variation in climate, topography, and proximity to water sources, there

was no one-size-fits-all formula for conveying water into rural homes.

The Telegraph Water Carrier and the Dry Earth Closet

Rural Americans devised a variety of techniques for accessing reserves

of water. One popular solution was to install cisterns that provided

temporary water supplies to interior fixtures. These cisterns were

sometimes located outside the home—either buried or propped on raised

legs; other times cisterns were stored inside the home, installed in

basements or attics.170 Another common technology—the hydraulic ram—

was a relatively simple, valve-based pump capable of conveying water

170 Ibid., 39.

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uphill and into homes.171 But many country dwellers—still unrestricted by

Government regulations and sanitary codes—simply dreamed things up

as they went along. One such dreamer—a scarcely known, nineteenth-

century inventor-entrepreneur—was a man named James D. Willoughby.

Judging from the patent records he left behind, it would appear that

Willoughby was a man who believed firmly in the pursuit of efficiency.

Had Willoughby kept a journal, or had such a journal survived, it seems

plausible that the surviving pages would have been filled with lengthy

puzzlings over the many random technological deficiencies that plagued

his daily life. Willoughby was fixated on the idea of “improvement,” and

accordingly, his inventions tended to be less groundbreaking than

ameliorative. Between 1858-1878 his patent registrations include: an

“improvement in seed-planters,” an “improvement in hot-water heating

apparatus,” an “improvement in sealing cans and bottles,” an

“improvement in governors for steam-engines,” an “improvement in

steam and vacuum pumps,” and an “improvement in submarine

explosive projectiles.” His patent portfolio reveals an impressive array of

midcentury technological concerns—agricultural, transportation, military,

and domestic—and reflected in his various improvements are a

constellation of technical ambitions that collectively helped to hurl the

United States into modern times. 171 Ibid, 41.

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A decade before many of his other inventions, in November of 1849,

Willoughby submitted a patent application for an “Apparatus for raising

and carrying water.” In the body of his letter to the United States Patent

Office, he offhandedly calls the device a “telegraph water carrier”—

curious, given that it was neither electronic nor telegraphic in any

legitimate sense. In essence, it was really just a pole-wire-pulley

contraption that moved buckets of water swiftly (not instantaneously)

across short distances, and while the design was novel enough to garner

positive publicity on a national scale (one Wisconsin newspaper called it

“the most ingenious, simple and practicable machine for raising and

conveying water ever invented”)172 its utility was not particularly far-

reaching or long-lived. Like Willoughby’s other improvements, the device

seems interesting more for the social, cultural and technical shifts it

signals than for its specific contribution to technological history.

Of particular interest are the technical forces that helped bring such an

invention into the world: why would Willoughby imagine a pulley and

bucket system in specifically telegraphic terms? Perhaps it is simply that

he thought the name had a pleasingly modern ring, but it seems probable

that something more is simmering beneath this surface. In his well known

172 Janesville Gazette, November 29 1849. http://newspaperarchive.com/us/wisconsin/janesville/janesville-gazette/1849/11-29/.

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article on “The Case of the Telegraph” James Carey points out that “the

telegraph brought about changes in the nature of language, of ordinary

knowledge, of the very structures of awareness.”173 For Carey, these altered

“structures of awareness” involve the emergence of various discourses—

utopian, dystopian, critical and optimistic—that circulated in the wake of

the telegraph’s invention. One of the many radical changes that Carey

attributes to the telegraph is the arrival of a new “temporal frontier.”174 He

argues that the major consequences of the telegraph—“The effective

separation of communication and transportation” and what some were

already declaring to be “the annihilation of space and time”—radically

remapped the structures of perception and patterns of communication.175

Even if flush toilets and telegraphs have very different technical

genealogies, they share some striking similarities. Both sets of

technologies embrace the pursuit of instantaneity, aspire to immaterial

conditions, surrender basic processes of communication to vast

infrastructural networks, and accordingly enable individuals to act more

impressively upon environments at considerable distance. Both

173 Carey, James W. "Technology and Ideology: the Case of the Telegraph." In Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New Brunswick: Routledge, 2008, 2. 174 Ibid, 20. 175 Ibid.

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technologies, in their own distinct ways, work to alter people’s

consciousness of space and time. Interestingly, it may even be possible to

trace mutual technical roots back to the mechanics of clockwork: The

inventor of the first working electrostatic telegraph, Francis Ronalds,

developed his system around two synchronized clocks separated by eight

miles of insulated wire;176 the first patent for a flushing toilet was issued to

a watchmaker—Alexander Cumming in 1775.

Whether or not flushing practices worked to influence people’s

perception of time in the modern world, we can plainly observe that

flushing techniques contributed to a meshwork of infrastructural activity

that collectively ushered in a new temporal frontier. We can appreciate the

power of this contribution more fully by turning our attention to another

viable septic solution that was also competing for dominance in the

nineteenth-century marketplace: the “dry earth closet.” Invented by the

Reverend Henry Moule in the late 1850s, the dry earth closet “worked on

the principle that dry earth had the ability to absorb substantial amounts

of moisture and odor, and that this principle could be applied to human

176 Norman, Jeremy. "The First Working Electric Telegraph." http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=519.

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excrement.”177 Moule’s system offered a practical alternative to waterborne

systems, and some believed it to be far superior to flush technology.

While there were many variations in earth closet design, most models

consisted of a wooden box containing a galvanized iron pan, and a

rectangular back serving as a container for the storage of dry earth. These

earth containers were equipped with mechanical components that allowed

users to periodically discharged dry earth atop accumulations of

excrement. At its core, the earth closet was a modernized containment

system. Rather than attempting to remove waste instantaneously from the

home, earth closets were designed to mitigate the offensiveness of

excrementitious odors while also streamlining the process of manual

waste removal.

Earth closets possessed several distinct advantages over flush systems.

First, unlike flushing toilets, earth closets afforded people the opportunity

to utilize the natural energy reserves stored in human waste. Second,

earth closets did not release toxic bacteria directly into water supplies, a

factor which worked to curtail the spread of waterborne disease. (By the

time earth closets hit markets, many doctors were already arguing that

water closets had increased the likelihood of contracting diseases like

177 Sipe, Brian M. "“Earth Closets and the Dry Earth System of Sanitation in Victorian America.” Material Culture 20, no. 2 (1988): 27-37, 28.

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cholera and dysentery.)178 Finally, earth closets did not require or depend

on a steady supply of water. In addition to saving water resources, earth

closets dispensed with the hassle of conveying water from point A to

point B while also guarding against the various calamitous outcomes that

could result from faulty plumbing.

By 1870 these advantages seemed promising enough for the American

sanitary engineer George Waring to make the following bold prediction:

“It is barely two years since the first complete description of the Earth-

Closet was published in America…yet it may already be said that the

Earth Closet has gained such a foothold that its universal adoption (except

in houses in which there are water clusters supplied from public water-

works) is certain.”179 Waring’s forecast was of course wrong: earth closets

were rarely as odorless as their manufacturer’s claimed, and the allure of

flush technology was ultimately too great for earth closets to gain long-

term traction. But had Waring been right—had a subjunctive history

resulted in a possible past and future where dry earth systems prevailed

over water-based plumbing—the nature of westerners’ relationship to

waste would have been altered in an elemental way. In this alternate

178 Waring, The Sanitary Drainage of Houses and Town, 1. 179 Waring, George E. Earth-Closets and Earth Sewage. The Tribune Association, 1870, 3.

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reality, buckets might still be the primary vehicle of septic disposal in the

west.

The Dawn of Flushing Consciousness

In the rapidly changing technological milieu of the nineteenth century,

the dry earth closet could not—did not—survive. In this new world filled

with flows of train traffic and electrical current, a world where people

imagined themselves connected to the fluidity of their surroundings—

where bodies, lands and cities seemed part of a seamless system of flow—

toilets would soon begin to flush. Over the course of a few decades, flush

toilets rose to become the standard septic management solution in the

United States, and by the first decade of the twentieth century, Americans’

desire to instantaneously evacuate waste from homes was being fulfilled

millions of times each day throughout the western world.

Listing off the “Essential Requirements for Sanitation in Dwellings,”

one 1909 treatise on waste management advised that “The house should

have a perfect sewerage system, by means of which all liquid household

wastes are instantly removed from the building.”180 At the time of this

treatise’ writing, nearly every major United States city had developed its

own working sewer system, and among cities whose population was over

180 Gerhard, William Paul. The Water Supply, Sewerage and Plumbing of Modern City Buildings. New York: J. Wiley, 1910, 5.

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30,000, more than 70% had established municipal waterworks.181 The latter

half of the nineteenth century witnessed a series of technological

innovations, as well as major advancements in sanitary engineering and

public health, which paved way for a culture of flushing. By the turn of

the twentieth century, Chadwick’s vision of a continuously flushing

society had in some ways become a reality.

The externalizing functions of flush plumbing reconfigured the

relationship between sheltered interiors and the outside world. Buildings

and homes are first and foremost defensive mechanisms: they defend us

from wind and rain, heat and cold, the predation of hungry animals, and

the voyeuristic proclivities of other human beings. But with the

introduction of toilets, traps and drains, homes go on offense as well as

defense—they become conveyers of water and waste, consumers of

precious resources and ejaculators of unwanted material.

Like other components of shelter, plumbing traps help define an

interior space; however, unlike other domestic border zones such as

chimneys, windows and doors, traps introduce into our protective

structures a distinctive Achilles heel. Traps offer a potential way in, a back

door—but not just any back door—a particularly hazardous back door, a

back door that is specifically designed to suppress and contain the abject.

181 McShane, Stanley K. and Clay Schultz. "To Engineer the Metropolis: Sewers, Sanitation, and City Planning in Late-Nineteenth-Century America." The Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (1978): 389-411, 395.

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Traps are dark focal points of insecurity within the home: as gateways to

realms of disease and decay, these sites are especially vulnerable to

opening up possibilities for the return of the repressed.

With the introduction of pipes and traps, homes engage in a new sort

of communication with the outside world, a kind of communication that is

at once ever-open and always guarded, clandestine to the core but also in

constant contact with elements beyond its walls. It’s worth noting that the

word communication has been—since at least the nineteenth century if

not before—a stalwart contributor to the vocabulary of sanitation: pipes

communicate with sewers and drains; water communicates disease.182 A

healthy respect and awareness for eco-interconnectedness has been built

into the foundational grammar of plumbing; at the same time, looking

back, the development of techniques for the communication of human

waste has led—to speak rather generally about attitudes held here in the

west—to a basic inattention toward how waste products perpetually exert

themselves across time and space. The too-frequent adoption of this view

has at least something to do with the way humans have learned to

manage their anxiety about septic processes: we have learned—through

our distinct technical practices—to flush our anxieties away.

182 The word communication is still printed on some manhole covers. It is also probably worth noting that the word communication itself may be traced back to the Latin communicare, which means to make common, but which can also mean to contaminate.

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The transformative consequences of flush technology are difficult to

overstate. Today the average American flushes the toilet 5 times at a cost

of 18.5 gallons of water per day, which amounts to 5.7 billion gallons

across the nation.183 Flush toilets are not solely or even primarily

responsible for the world’s water scarcity problems—sinks, showers,

bathtubs and washing machines collectively account for the majority of

water that flows through household drains, and modern toilets

themselves vary considerably in the amount of water they individually

require184—but the act of flushing has affected consciousness about natural

resources and the environment. The moment that toilets begin to flush, a

strange paradox presents itself: flushing humans imagine themselves

further removed from the natural world even as they contribute to new,

propulsive streams of natural traffic.

Besides the fact that the particular components of flush technology

like tanks, pipes, bowls, traps etc.—instruments specifically designed to

alleviate our anxiety about certain natural functions—are themselves

composed of natural elements like water, metal, and clay, these

components perversely wind up throwing us into neurotic new relations

183 Fishman, Charles. The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. New York: Free Press, 2011, 4-5. 184 Mack, Alison and Eileen R. Choffnes.. "Global Issues in Water, Sanitation, and Health.” Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. 2009.

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with our own bodily functions, creating both physical and psychic

distance between our bodies and the waste matter we create. Abject

material—which Kristeva describes as that which we “permanently thrust

aside in order to live”—becomes doubly thrust aside once flushed.185 This

two-part process of exteriorization has a significant effect on how we

imagine our relationship to our own biological processes, our habitats,

and our location within and responsibility to the various ecosystems we

inhabit.

The mid-nineteenth century was thus an important turning point in

the development of American consciousness, and alongside other

technologies, flush plumbing had an important role to play in determining

these new structures of awareness. American attitudes about waste were

beginning to undergo a significant set of technogenetic transformations,

which would continue to play out in years and decades to come.

185 Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

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CHAPTER 3 THE RISE OF FLUSHING IN THE WEST, PART II:

A CIVILIZING PROCESS

The Sociogenesis of Shame

I am proud to report that it’s been over three decades since I last

emptied my bowels onto a bathroom floor. This impressive streak

stretches back to 1984, back when I was three. I can only assume that I

spent my first few years of life as most infants/toddlers do—reveling in

excremental mayhem—but I remember next to nothing about this primal

phase of development. As an adult, my one dim memory of toilet training

centers on an otherwise unremarkable morning or afternoon when, during

an unsupervised potty-break, some unfortunate miscalculations resulted

in my misconstruing the appropriate drop zone…a nasty crisis ensued,

and I suddenly found myself confronted with a harrying set of decisions.

The image that stands out most vividly in my mind is of my family’s

contoured toilet rug, which under normal circumstances would have been

an impeccable Carolina blue, but which in this moment resembled a mud

wrestler’s athletic towel. Other traces of fecal inaccuracy were visible

around the lip of the bathtub and base of the sink. Although I was old and

wise enough to know that this situation required an urgent response, it

took several moments of sober contemplation to determine my next move.

My options broke down accordingly: 1) alert local authorities, 2) endeavor

to remedy the situation myself, or 3) feign total ignorance.

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Option 1 may have seemed like the obvious and responsible path, but I

knew this course of action was sure to invite groaning waves of parental

disapproval—perhaps disciplinary consequences, even—and so naturally

was the first to get Xed off the list. Opt. 2, while honorable, was

pointlessly labor intensive. So it was that after careful consideration Opt. 3

emerged as the only actionable plan.

For better or worse, my memory ends here. What to make of it? It’s

true that in all likelihood the details I’ve just relayed bear only a loose

relation to historical reality—and I suppose it’s even possible that my

brain roguishly fabricated a false remembrance out of thin air—but

whether or not the memory I’ve described corresponds to an actual lived

event is really beside the point. I mention it now because the incident, real

or imagined, focuses attention on that precise moment of behavioral

maturation when we humans begin to understand our biological functions

as being part of a larger social, cultural, and technical shaping process. By

the time we’ve grown incapable of flinging wild streams of shit guiltlessly

out of our bodies and into the world, we have begun to surrender a part of

our interior selves to an external order. Once this external order penetrates

consciousness, it becomes part of our psyche forever. There is no turning

back.

In his epic exploration of The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias shows

how this external order results from the evolution of specific social

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structures and details the ways in which a particular blend of sociogenetic

forces has structured modern behavior in the west. His curiosity reflects a

Freudian interest in shame and revulsion, and in an effort to diagnose the

specific process through which “people’s behavior and psychical habitus”

underwent significant changes in western society, he examines the social

and historical mechanisms that came to moderate varying thresholds of

disgust among Europeans between the fifteenth and eighteenth

centuries.186 A keen observer and tenacious researcher, Elias pours over the

details of centuries’ worth of etiquette manuals as he documents a trend

toward increasing bodily repression among the upper classes in Europe,

with specific emphasis on Germany and France. His general findings

point to the conclusion that European attitudes regarding natural

functions become increasingly inhibited during this time.

“It is impolite to greet someone who is urinating or defecating,” writes

Erasmus in 1530.187 That Erasmus even felt the need to clarify this

particular point of courtesy suggests that “neither the functions

themselves, nor speaking about them or associations with them, were so

intimate and private, so invested with feelings of shame and

186 Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Malden. MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1939, xiii. 187 Cited in Elias, 110.

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embarrassment, as they later became.”188 Such changes demonstrate more

than a shifting of psychical structures, they pertain to what Elias describes

as Europeans’ “total way of life…the whole structure of their existence,” a

structure which defines the relationship of individuals to the entire social

realm.189 Elias pays attention to specific technological developments as he

investigates the nature of these larger infrastructural transformations. In

eleventh-century Venice, for example, he describes how the fork was

considered such an excessive luxury that when a group of ecclesiastics

heard reports about a Venetian dogaressa who dined with the use of a

two-pronged eating utensil, they were so offended that they felt

compelled to “call down divine wrath upon her.”190 He goes on to note that

five centuries would pass “before the structure of human relations had so

changed that the use of this instrument met a more general need.”191

Flush toilet technology was similarly viewed with suspicion before its

widespread adoption, and should accordingly be regarded (as Kees Van

Dijk has argued) as “one of the symbols of the drive toward civilization.”192

188 Elias,114. 189 Elias, 59. 190 Cited in Elias, 59. 191 Elias, 59-60 192 Dijk, Kees Van. "Soap Is the Onset of Civilization." In Cleanliness and Culture: Indonesian Histories edited by Kees Van Dijk and Jean Gelman Taylor. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011, 4.

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Despite the fact that water closet technology had been known to

Europeans since the end of the sixteenth century, several centuries would

pass before the technology would be embraced on a wide scale.193 Part of

this has to do with the fact that the technology had yet to be perfected.

Early systems would frequently leak or overflow, and before the

development of traps, unwanted smells could easily rise out of holding

tanks or cesspits and into homes. But in addition to these mechanical

deficiencies, there was also a widespread perception that flush technology

was pointlessly extravagant. Early on, flush toilet systems were criticized

for their decadence; part of the civilizing process was a gradual

restructuring of these widespread attitudes and beliefs.

Elias’ work on the civilizing process has inspired a long list of scholars,

among them Alain Corbin, whose book The Foul and the Fragrant remains

one of the more notable contributions to this vein of research. Similarly to

Elias, Corbin documents the transformation of bourgeois sensibilities in

France from the middle ages up through the nineteenth century, but

whereas Elias’ analysis takes on the broader effects of the civilizing

process, Corbin focuses on one impressive sensory development: the

metamorphosis of olfactory sensitivity. Mapping out the trajectory of

scientific and medical discourse over several centuries, Corbin argues that

193 Dijk, 3. And elsewhere.

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a “revolution in olfactory tolerance” accompanied the rise of the bourgeois

mentality in France.194 Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries,

he documents an abrupt lowering of the threshold of people’s tolerance to

fetid smells; he shows how during this time “odors simply began to be

more keenly smelled.”195

Given that this transformation begins to gain momentum before any

significant accumulation of industrial pollution, Corbin attributes this

development at least partially to the effects of emerging scientific theory.

New research and experimentation was in the process of rapidly

reorienting the concerns of the scientific establishment, and a general

wariness of putrefactive elements was giving way to a new emphasis on

the value of sanitation and deodorization. By the mid-eighteenth century,

sanitation experts were advising against the use of animalistic scents (e.g

musk) commonly used in perfumery; bodily processes like menstruation

and defecation had become deeper sources of anxiety and distrust;

processes of decomposition like the decay of corpses and carcasses had

likewise come to be viewed as urgent cause for sanitary concern.196

194 Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 195 Corbin, 56. 196 Freud is well known for making similar arguments. In developing his theory of organic repression, he notes that babies are not typically grossed out by foul smells, and concludes that revulsion toward fecal matter develops between infancy and adulthood. He also attributed the “atrophy” of the human olfactory

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In Corbin’s view, all of these developments were the result of a

“utopian plan to conceal the evidence of organic time.”197 This is an

interesting thought, especially given the revolutionary time management

techniques that would ultimately result in time’s mechanization and

standardization during roughly this same period of history.198 The

distinction between organic time (those temporalities marked off by

seasonal changes, biological arcs of growth and decay, the metronomic

patterns of respiration and the predictably rhythmic pumpings of blood)

versus technical time (the temporality of clockwork and machines,

beginning with local timekeeping devices like sundials, hour glasses and

water clocks and developing into the highly mechanized Coordinated

Universal Time, regulated by ultra-precise atomic clocks calibrated down

to the last leap second) opens onto a domain of hardcore philosophy that I

will not be tackling head on. Nonetheless, the extent to which flushing

practices contribute to the emergence of new temporalities is a nagging

question that I continue to pause and wonder at, and which invariably

nudges my thinking toward one or another theoretical snarls: has time

sense to the adoption of an upright posture, which shifted the primary erotic sense from smell to sight. 197 Corbin, 90. 198 See Thompson, E.P. "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism ". Past and Present 38 (1967): 56-97.

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always been, as Mark Hansen asserts, “imbricated with technics”?199 And if

so, would it not seem sensible to view flushing techniques—given their

primal, practical and logistical significance—as a relevant site to

contemplate such imbrication?

Septic infrastructure has a clear spatial dimension. Toilets and sewers

are designed to move and redistribute waste, often across great distances;

they are embedded within material structures that span physical space

and open up channels within and between physical systems. But septic

infrastructure has a temporal dimension, too. Before-after structures of

temporality are built into the logic of flushing; each stage of a flushing

process plays a discernible role in the segmentation of past, present and

future materialities. If toilets aren’t processors of time itself, they work to

process the evidence of its passing, and in doing so, function as critical

nodes in highly distributed technical networks responsible for (among

other things) influencing temporal perception. Toilets are unique sites of

temporal contestation where an array of technical and organic forces

collide and swirl into one another with each and every flush.

I am not suggesting that waterborne plumbing singlehandedly

ushered in a new way of experiencing time, nor am I encouraging

philosophers to peer down toilet bowls and into sewers in an effort to

199 Hansen, Mark B.N. "Living with Technical Time." Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 2 (2009): 294-315, 299.

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glean new insights about the nature of time itself. What I am suggesting is

that toilets are crucial players in expansive technical networks that

collectively work to influence phenomenological conditions. Dave Praeger

has recently argued that increasing discomfort with bodily waste in the

west stems from an “ideology of fecal denial,” a belief structure rooted in

Victorian moralism, which associates natural functions with savagery and

animalistic tendencies.200 But for me, this explanation doesn’t go far enough

in attempting to explain the causes or implications of our flushing

behavior. Following Corbin, one can’t help but wonder if the lowering of

the thresholds of sensory tolerance involves something more than mere

“fecal denial”—and of course I’m gesturing here toward the possibility of

temporal denial, a denial of organic time.

Corbin explores ways in which the heightening of olfactory sensitivity

was part of a broader pattern of phenomenological upheaval, one element

in a perceptual revolution spreading “polymorphously throughout the

whole of society.”201 He concludes that new systems for the privatization of

waste and containment of odor, along with the development of new

techniques for disinfection and sanitation, contributed to the gradual

“individuation of social practices,” a trend which encouraged new

200 Praeger, Dave. Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product. Feral House, 2007. 201 Corbin, 84.

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varieties of narcissism.202 Citing the example of the first English-style flush

toilets installed at Versailles—which were reserved for the private use of

the King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—he suggests that private water

closets were among those technologies that helped redefine contours of

personal space, and which redrew boundaries between public and private

realms.

This process of social, cultural, and sensory reorganization prefigures

much newer developments. (Though I won’t be the one to do it, it may

very well be possible to trace a coherent lineage from Marie Antoinette’s

water closet to Kanye West’s selfie stick.)203 Again, the key point here is

that infrastructural alterations can and do rearrange the coordinates of

human experience. As new technologies fold into existing ones, various

physical and cognitive remappings occur. Nigel Thrift has argued that

technologies like barcoding, SIM cards and RFID have contributed to the

“standardization of space,” a series of developments he sees on

revolutionary par with the nineteenth-century standardization of time.

These elaborate systems of track-and trace technology, which materialize

at the stage of computational inscription, have come to form a new kind of

global infrastructure, constituting a “‘technological unconscious’ whose 202 Corbin, 83. 203 Though if you are persuaded by Paul Frosh, selfies have less to do with narcissism than what he calls kinesthetic sociability…See Frosh, Paul. "The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability." International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1607-28.

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content is the bending of bodies-with-environments to a specific set of

addresses without the benefit of any cognitive inputs.”204

It is not difficult to imagine ways that septic infrastructure might seep

into this technological unconscious as well. In an analysis of Les Misérables,

Rosalina de Carrera calls attention to this very connection when she

observes that “Both the unconscious and the sewers function like

archives.”205 In their mutual capacity to contain and preserve the past, both

embody elements of what Freud calls the “memory-trace”: hidden,

ghostlike records that linger at the threshold of retrievability. Flush toilets

are nothing if not repressors, and viewed en masse, they constitute the

frontline of one of the planet’s most repressive technical regimes.

Toilets play an interesting role in the process of polymorphous change

that Corbin has described partially because they are among those

technical actors that fly sneakily below our radar even as they integrate

themselves into the fabric of our day-in, day-out routines. Whether we

notice them or not, these hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructural components

work on our actions, thoughts, and dreams. The introduction and

standardization of flush toilets in Americans’ homes—a process I have

already begun to explore and which I will explore in additional detail over 204 Thrift, Nigel. "Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of Position." Environmental and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2002): 175-90, 177. 205 Carrera, Rosalina de la. "History's Unconscious in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables." MLN, no. French Issue (1981): 839-55, 840.

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the course of this chapter—is a major development that changed the

nature of domestic space in the west. Since entering the home, flush toilets

have worked as quasi-secret agents in a sensory revolution that continues

to take place beneath our (increasingly sensitive) nose.

As we briefly ponder the influence that flush toilets have had on the

domestic sphere, it will help to momentarily focus our thinking on home

spaces in general: What are homes like? What are they for? We know that

homes are for living, sheltering, nesting, cozying; other than wombs, they

are the most intimate and primordial of all interiors. We also know that

our memories of homes can be peculiarly intense. (Few triggers set our

minds so forcefully adrift as when we recall some redolent detail from our

childhood residence—take a moment to let your mind wander back there,

if you like…) Gaston Bachelard—theorist of dreams, and daydreams in

particular—regards the home as “our first universe, a real cosmos in every

sense of the word.”206 He locates the house alongside fire and water as a

primal element capable of luring us into the realm of reverie, the psychic

region where “memory and imagination remain associated, each one

working for their mutual deepening.”207 Bachelard considers the house a

hotbed for oneiric experience, a space which possesses through its powers

206 Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. New York: The Orion Press, 1964, 4. 207 Bachelard, 5.

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of evocation the ability to transport the past into our present

consciousness.

If the house is indeed a cosmos, flush toilets aspire to the condition of

black holes. Flushing action simulates a black hole’s relentless

gravitational pull, and functions according to similarly evacuative logic. If

other parts of the home tend to nourish reverie and remembering,

flushing toilets offer us a way to forget. Tank levers not only evacuate

abject material but the memory-trace of these unwelcome presences as

well.

Several other scholars have picked up where Elias and Corbin left off,

building upon their evidence, and extending the implications of their

ideas. David Inglis, for one, has argued that the sensorium of modern

French and English citizens undergoes radical transformation during the

nineteenth century precisely when modern sewer systems revolutionize

waste handling practices in London and Paris. Inglis begins by showing

how Europeans’ perception of waste evolved significantly over a period of

several centuries. In medieval Europe, he argues, city dwellers were so

accustomed to being in the presence of massive excremental accumulation

that they did not find the site and smell of human waste particularly

offensive. Following Elias, he notes how the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries brought about a gradual relegation of natural functions from the

public to the private realm, and briefly explores ways that eighteenth-

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century medicine—particularly the widespread belief that fecal odors

contain life threatening, miasmic elements—served to heighten

Europeans’ discomfort with bodily waste.

Development of sewer systems created new fears of horrible disease-

ridden gasses lurking beneath their homes. At the same time, the sewers

served to channel waste products out of public view, and eliminated dung

heaps and cesspits whose odors had until then perpetually vitiated the

city air. The upshot of all these developments was a new socio-political

emphasis on deodorization—both above ground and within the sewers

themselves. New systems of sewage processing and sewer flushing were

designed to eliminate festering stenches, thus “reducing smells unpleasant

to the bourgeois nose.”208

Allen Chun has also noted a “clear association between toilets and

civilizing processes.”209 Observing that the introduction of toilets in

Ancient Rome was part of a larger set of institutional shifts (e.g. the

emergence of public baths) he views toilet culture within the context of

broader cultural developments, particularly those relating to cleanliness,

etiquette and sanitation. (The connections between toilets and cleanliness

run deep in language: some of the earliest usages of the word toilet 208 Inglis, David. "Sewers and Sensibilities: The Bourgeois Faecal Experience in the Nineteenth-Century City." In The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013, 126. 209 Chun, Allen. "Flushing in the Future: The Supermodern Japanese Toilet in a Changing Domestic Culture." Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2002): 153-70, 155.

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pertain to matters of washing and grooming.) Chun’s research, which

focuses on the toilets of contemporary Japan, works to show how changes

in toilet technology figures into larger social and domestic orders. His

analysis suggests that changes in toilet technology are extensions of social

drives, and in many ways a “barometer of civilized values”;210 accordingly,

“the evolution of the toilet has to be seen as part of that larger complex of

cultural values that ties civility to civilization.”211

In this chapter, I tread down a path blazed by these and other scholars,

hopefully plotting a course that is more penetrating than reiterative.

Taking a methodological cue from Elias, I turn to the archives in an effort

to situate this chapter’s analysis atop a grounded, historical foundation.

My work here attempts to tease out one thread of this civilizing process

that has helped to weave the fabric of western culture over the past

several centuries. The archive I’ve chosen to work with is The Plumber’s

Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review, a national periodical

published between 1881-1927.212 After careful consideration, I settled on

this particular journal for a combination of reasons. First, The Plumber’s

Trade Journal’s (referred to hereafter as TPTJ) period of publication aligns

with the temporal frame my study. The present chapter picks up

210 Chun, 169. 211 Chun, 155. 212 The bulk of my research focuses on the period between 1897-1922.

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chronologically where the previous one leaves off, as I will now shift focus

from the mid-nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. Second, the

journal provides a reliable historical record of shifting trends in turn-of-

the-century plumbing in the United States, which by extension offers an

interesting reflection of American values and attitudes during this time.

Third, this archive is conveniently available online as part of the

HathiTrust Digital Library.

A part of me would have preferred an archive that was more expressly

focused on late-nineteenth-century bathroom etiquette, however by this

time it seems that civilizing processes had taken hold to such an extent

that public discussion of natural functions was generally avoided in the

west. Those etiquette manuals I did consult ignore the topic almost

entirely, and I was unable to identify any alternative sources which

offered reliable information about flushing habits during this period.

Thus, even if TPTJ was something of a fallback archive, it turns out to

have been rewarding to work with, and ultimately, I think, a good tool for

the job.

The Mechanization of Flushing

If you’ve lately run short on reading material (and if you happen to be

anyone other than the five committee members professionally required to

read this document, it seems probable that this is the case) I might actually

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recommend spending a lazy afternoon flipping through the pages of TPTJ

as it offers one of the weirder windows onto technological history that

you’re likely to run across anytime soon. Were you able to fit such an

afternoon into your busy schedule, you would come away possessing at

least a few groovy bits of knowledge that are pretty much unacquirable

elsewhere. You would learn, for example, that the Titanic was a model of

toilet bowl well before it was ever a sinking ship, that the word Argo was

the name of a boom valve water closet a century prior to being the name

of an Oscar-winning film, and that for some Americans living in those

decades immediately before or after 1900, the word Tabasco would have

sooner triggered mental images of hot water boilers than bottles of hot

pepper sauce.

Over the course of your reading, ad copy for many provocatively-

named inventions would likely jump off the page and captivate your

imagination. Zinc-coated slip nipples, automatic cock grinders, anti-

scalding douche valves, and Climax sanitary plugs are just a few of the

curiosity-piquing product lines that may happen to catch your eye.

If you stuck with TPTJ for any length of time, you’d be sure to

encounter a steady stream of random facts, and would perhaps come

away knowing that in the year 1910 more than a million typewriters were

in use in the United States, or that in 1905 the world’s largest water pipe,

which was over a mile long, was constructed with half-inch steel plates,

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held together by two hundred tons worth of rivets, and located along the

Canadian side of Niagara Falls.213

You’d get to know—and maybe even develop an odd sort of affection

for—TPTJ’s prominently featured columnists like Albert E. Hyde, whose

reliable column “The Southern Master Plumber: Ramblings of a Traveling

Man” would become your go-to source for intel relating to sanitation

developments below the Mason-Dixon line.

You’d encounter your fair share of uninspired poems grappling with

plumbing-specific themes.

And I can safely guarantee that within the first half hour of reading,

you’d have winced at at least one racist joke.

Certain artifacts would be just plain unfathomable. A recurring

illustration of a toilet bowl beaming down from outer space, for example:

213 "The Largest Water Pipe in the World." The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 38 (1905),146.

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Figure 1: Peerless Water Closet Advertisement

_______________________________________________________________

Source: The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review (1904),

677.

Other random discoveries, like a classified listing for “Beautiful

Angora Kittens, in exquisite colors, long shaggy fur, charming

dispositions, very stylish,” may cause you to pause and wonder briefly at

the finitude of long-dead humans, or their long-dead animal friends.214

If you’re unable to spend focused mental time with century-old

plumbing literature, I won’t judge you. Modern life being what it is, I am

214 Walnut Ridge Farms CO. 1903. "Beautiful Angora Kittens.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 33, 541.

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sensitive to the fact that few can carve out time for this sort of luxuriation.

Luckily, I’m here to provide some highlights. Over the course of my

research, I’ve identified a few noteworthy patterns, which collectively

help illuminate the intermingling forces that have contributed to the

development of flushing practices in the United States. The

advertisements for flush toilet models brought to market between 1898-

1922 demonstrate several prevailing trends. Manufacturers and buyers

were generally preoccupied with a handful of common concerns, most

notably the pursuit of reliability, efficiency, automation, instantaneity, and

finally (for lack of a better word) immateriality (a category which here will

refer to the pursuit of invisibility, odorlessness, and inaudibility.)

Of these concerns, the goal of reliability is perhaps the least surprising.

If you desire to have a toilet at all, it makes that you’d want it to function

properly over time. The goal of reliability isn’t an element of the civilizing

process so much as it is a basic feature of humanity’s relationship with

technology. The desire to invent tools that work well is as ancient as it is

modern—indeed, the process of technical refinement has clear Neolithic

roots. It would come as a surprise to no one that there are many examples

of ads bragging about a given toilet model’s superb workmanship or

mechanical perfection, so I will look past this issue for now, and move

onto less obvious findings.

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Promises of efficiency are also more or less unsurprising; indeed, the

drive toward heightened efficiency is one of the more prominent features

of modernity. When Henry James proclaimed his “earnest aversion to

waste” in 1909, he was speaking as a representative of “a culture in which

efficiency, economy, and the elimination of waste were increasingly

heralded as industrial and social ideals.”215 Thorston Veblen was a

seriously devout follower of this anti-waste strain of socioeconomic

theory, as were many of his contemporaries. Effective utilization of waste

resources was such a high priority for late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-

century thinkers that many scientists and philosophers viewed nature

itself as a vast waste zone. This view presented “an image of an untamed

wilderness, an external nature, awaiting the attentions of the civilizing

process.”216

The turn-of-the-century plumbing establishment shared these attitudes

and convictions. Seemingly off-topic TPTJ articles like one published in

1899 entitled “Harnessing the Earth: How the Waterfalls of the World Pay

Tribute to Man’s Ingenuity—Unlimited Electrical Energy Produced and

Transmitted Hundreds of Miles” (penned fittingly enough by one

Theodore Waters) demonstrate such affinities. A belief in the virtuousness

215 Raitt, Suzanne. "The Rhteoric of Efficiency in Early Modernism ". Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 1 (2006), 835. 216 Cooper, Timothy. "Peter Lund Simmonds and the Political Ecology of 'Waste Utilisation' in Victorian Britain." Technology and Culture 52, no. 1 (2011): 21-44, 24.

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of efficiency and in humanity’s ability (or responsibility) to unleash the

potential of earth’s natural resources helped shape the bedrock of values

that propelled the development of plumbing technologies during this

time. This attitude suggested that the legacy of western civilization

depended on people’s ability to put their nature-mastering skills to good

use; when tools failed to live up to their full potential, humanity faltered.

Waters demonstrates this mindset clearly when he makes reference to the

Aqua Marcia, the great Roman aqueduct in Tivoli, noting that “The

hydraulic efficiency of this structure was always recognized to be very

great, but for hundreds of years it remained useless, a ruin of past

greatness.”217

The pages of TPTJ are littered with suggestions for ways to maximize

efficiency by converting waste into energy. The Combined Cragin

Garbage Crematory & Hot Water Heater Company advises readers to

“Burn the garbage, save your coal.”218 The Kliely Waste Heat Utilizer

claims that its special design prevents boilers from squandering

potentially useful heat, so that “every degree of heat added to the return

217 Waters, Theodore. “Harnessing the Earth: How the Waterfalls of the World pay Tribute to Man’s Ingenuity—Unlimited Electrical Energy Produced and Transmitted Hundreds of Miles.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 26 (1899), 146. 218 The Combined Cragin Garbage Crematory & Hot Water Heater Co. 1902. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 30, 401.

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water means so much coal saved.”219 The Nethery Hydraulic Valve

Company matter-of-factly encourages readers to “Waste no water.”220

If many midcentury toilet designs (like the continuously flowing

hoppers mentioned in Chapter One) turned out to have been prodigious

water wasters, by the turn of the century reducing water usage had

become a clear priority for manufacturers and consumers, and the

question of how to achieve the strongest flush with minimal water flow

was an important technical concern. TPTJ toilet ads tend to celebrate

products’ flushing efficiency and/or flushing power. One characteristic ad

placed by Thomas Maddock’s Sons Company proclaims that their

“Madera” toilet design “uses mighty little water for a closet with such a

strong flushing action.”221 (Elsewhere the ad reminds us that “This fact is of

real importance in communities where water is metered.”)222 Almost fifteen

years prior to the Madera’s debut, Standard Sanitary Manufacturing

219 “The Kiely Waste Heat Utilizer. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 39 (1906), 104. 220 Nethery Hydraulic Valve Company.1903. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 33, 207. 221 Thomas Maddock’s Sons Company. 1915. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 58, 125. 222 Ibid.

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introduced their “Syphon Washdown Closet,” claiming it offered

consumers “the full sanitive effect from the least quantity of water.”223

Despite this trend toward heightened efficiency, some companies

ignored the issue of conservation entirely, focusing their message instead

on their products’ brute evacuative strength. The “Haas Direct Flushing

Frost Proof Closet”, for example, was apparently capable of delivering a

“continuous powerful flush” as long as its seat was occupied.224 (By the

late-nineteenth century, consumers of certain toilet models could choose

between “seat action” and “push button” flush mechanisms; I will return

to this point shortly.) The makers of the Codru Siphon reported that “this

closet had a perfect wash in the bowl, having a continuous flushing rim,

as there are no projections to allow any soil to collect.”225 And an Ideal

Manufacturing Toilet Company ad asks “Why it is it that the Ideal Low

Tank Combinations have become so popular?” Answer: “THEY give a

strong and powerful flush, and a large ample refill.”

Alongside efficiency and power, design simplicity was also considered

desirable. In some ways this drive toward simplicity can be seen as an

extension of the logic of efficiency: fewer parts, fewer things to break. The 223 Standard Sanitary Manufacturing. 1901. “Syphon Washdown Closet.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review, 183. 224 Haas, Philip. “Haas Direct Flushing Frost Proof Closet.” 1906. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 39, 497. 225 “Positive Action in Flushing.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 58 (1915): 207.

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“Argo” closets proudly had “no screws, washers, packing or valves

necessary in adjusting the flush.”226 Forgoing float valves or after fill tubes,

the “M-K Double-Flush Combination” was marketed as being “practically

indestructible and as simple as the simplest high tank closet.”227 One

American Valve & Tank Company ad plainly announced their brand with

the words “Simplicity, Economy and Durability.”228

In these advertisements, we can observe a range of civilizing currents

already beginning to coalesce: avoidance of the discussion of natural

functions in favor of a kind of discourse that focuses on economy,

technical refinement, and personal convenience. Corbin has noted that in

the period leading up to the olfactory revolution in France, linguistic

variations foreshadowed the sensorial shifts that were about to occur, at

one point remarking that in the seventeenth century your average

Bourgeois citizens engaged in an “obscene twisting of syntax” in their

effort to avoid any mention of excrementitious activity.229

These sorts of syntactical gymnastics did not originate in seventeenth-

century France; toilet euphemisms have a long history all their own. 226 The E.W. Fisher Co. 1906 . “The Argo Closets with Boom Valves.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 39, 476. 227 Kretschmer Mfg. Co. 1910. “The M-K ‘Double Flush Combination The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 47, 329. 228 American Valve & Tank Company. Plumbers Trade Journal. 1915 The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 58, p. 58. 229 Ibid.

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Examples can be traced back to scripture: Judges 3 describes the murder of

King Eglon who was in the process of “covering his feet” in the “summer

chamber” (i.e. relieving himself in the outhouse) when his killer surprises

him; this same passage describes “dirt” spilling out of Eglon’s guts after

he is stabbed in the stomach. By 1579, outhouses were commonly referred

to as “little houses,”230 and over the past few centuries, a long list of

euphemisms have come into and fallen out of fashion: from washrooms

and powder rooms to thrones and honeypots, toilets have provided

enduring inspiration for innovative slang.

In the United States, by the twentieth century, simply ignoring the

vulgar specifics of septic experience was considered appropriate etiquette,

and TPTJ ad copy smoothly glosses over the foul realities of waste,

directing readers’ thoughts away from sewers and cesspits and toward

concepts of cleanliness, durability, and attractive design. Fascination with

automation plays an important role here as well, as references to

automated features and instantaneous mechanical action are

commonplace throughout TPTJ. In 1899, the Ideal Manufacturing

Company introduced “The Ideal Volumeter,” a pressure regulating flush

valve which could reportedly flush water closets “with the same amount

230 OED Online.

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of water at each operation regardless of fluctuations in pressure”; the

device, Ideal goes on to claim, was “perfectly automatic.”231

A few years later, the “Watrous Aquameter” was introduced to

market, which like the Ideal Volumeter was apparently capable of

“automatically measuring the water for each flush.232 A Nethery flush

valve from 1902 even allowed for multiple settings: it could be configured

for either one or two distinct flushes with distinct basin re-fill, at each

touch of the button.”233 (The trend toward automation and instantaneity

extends beyond toilets and flush valves to a range of other plumbing

products. Makers of The Gabel Automatic Instantaneous Water Heater

claimed that their product was not “just an experiment” but rather was

“the practical economical water heater for the 20th century people.”234 The

improved Douglas-Acme Flush Instantaneous Water Heater

[manufactured, incidentally, by The Instantaneous Water Heater Heating

Company headquartered in Chicago] was capable of “heating water

231 Ideal Manufacturing Company. 1901. “The Ideal Volumeter.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 29, 167. 232 Federal Company. 1904. “The Watrous Aquameter. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 35, 17. 233 “Nethery Flush Valves.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 32 (1902): 198. 234 Gabel Manufacturing Company. 1901. “The Gabel Automatic Instantaneous Water Heater.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 33, ii.

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instantly” while maximizing efficiency and minimizing the production of

carbon waste.)235

As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, manufacturers were by this time

incorporating push button technology into their designs, and push button

interfaces placed the possibility of instantaneous action literally at

consumers’ fingertips. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, push

buttons were still newfangled technology, but were in the process of

penetrating a variety of new technical domains. The Eastman Company

was among the first to offer push buttons to consumers: “You push the

Button, we do the rest”236 declares one well-known Kodak camera ad from

1890. A half-decade later, another Kodak ad riffs on the same theme: “One

Button Does it; You press it.”237 Buttons were by this time appearing in

elevators, as doorbells, and fire alarms.238 Patent records reveal that push

235 The Instantaneous Water Heater Heating Company. 1904. “The improved Douglas-Acme Flush Instantaneous Water Heater.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 35, 285. 236 Cited in Duke University Digital Collections: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/eaa_K0005/. Also: For a well organized compilation of push button references, see: http://www.rachelplotnick.com/button/button-archive?field_year_value_op=%3D&field_year_value%5Bvalue%5D&field_year_value%5Bmin%5D&field_year_value%5Bmax%5D&page=1 237 Cited in Duke University Digital Collections http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/eaa_K0537/ 238 Bernard, Andreas. Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator. New York: NYU Press, 2014, 167.

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buttons were also being used as novel paging devices: wealthy

homeowners desiring a sleek and easy method for calling servants would

occasionally install help buttons directly into the floorboards of their

home.239

As early as 1898 certain toilet models were arriving to showrooms

equipped with push button flushers. Flush buttons provided an

alternative to seat-activated flush systems (where flushing action would

trigger under the weight of a human body) pull-chains, and levers.

Despite its increasing availability, the technology was far from perfect,

and even some manufacturers openly discouraged potential buyers from

going the push button route. In one 1905 advertisement for “The

Diamond” Lowdown Tank, A.Y. McDonald & Morrison Manufacturing

conceded that even though The Diamond could be made available with

three different flush valve options—“thumb lever, push button or pull”—

on the basis of “appearance and utility” they believed that buyers would

prefer the thumb lever.240

But even if push buttons weren’t considered to be the most

practical, reliable or elegant flushing solution, they may have seemed

attractive to those consumers who hoped to achieve a more automated

239 Delano, Charles. "Push-Buttons for Electrical Purposes." 1891. 240 A.Y. McDonald & Morrison Manufacturing. 1905. “The Diamond Lowdown Tank.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 38, 7.

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flushing experience. The very idea of push buttons must have seemed

appealingly modern, at least to some: the world was now a place in which

hands and fingers could easily be made into the extension of sophisticated

machines. In his cultural history of the elevator, Andreas Bernard has

argued that the nineteenth century represents a “rupture in our

perception of technical processes,” and that this rupture is at least

partially attributable to push button technology.241 Engaging with Hans

Blumenberg, Bernard observes that push buttons are the sole visible

elements of hidden systems that sever “the visible connection between

cause and effect.”242 The sequence of automated actions that result from a

single button’s pressing are mostly abstracted from the human sensorium,

and thus begin to enter into the category of enigma.

Blumenberg’s salient point, which Bernard extends, is that push

buttons activate machines rather than produce specific mechanical results.

This distinction stems from a specific set of technological shifts: “In the

transitions from crank to lever to push button, the last analogy between

activating and activated power disappears, namely direction.”243 Bernard’s

point here is that the movement of the button-pushing finger is always the

same and independent from the direction of the mechanical process it

241 Bernard, 165. 242 Ibid. 243 Bernard, 167.

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activates. (Obviously he has the elevator in mind, where an identical

finger movement can trigger the elevator to travel up or down.)

Toilet flush technology operates on the cusp of this distinction between

activation and production. Pushing down a tank lever is not quite so

seamless a means of activation as pushing a button—downward

movement of a handle still produces a consistent upward movement of a

toilet’s flush arm and flapper valve. But the specific mechanical

differences between flush levers and flush buttons are not so significant;

what is critical here is the historical entanglement of these devices. Both

mechanisms were being deployed and were competing for viability

during the same historical moment 120 some odd years ago, yet neither

one ever truly won out.244

Today, whether your toilet flusher is a push button or a handle will

depend largely on where you live—certain countries favor the buttons,

which now tend to be more water efficient, and some governments have

even offered rebates encouraging the installation of water-saving dual-

flush commodes. (Even if you don’t own one, you’ve used one: those

tanks with the two gibbous-like half-buttons, one for partial-flush, the

other for full.) Regardless of which flush mechanism turn-of-the century

consumers opted for—lever, chain, seat or button—they were witnessing

244 While high tank, pull-chain toilets do still exist, they are relatively uncommon.

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and contributing to the formation of a new sociotechnical regime, one in

which automation and instantaneous action had become drivers of

technological development and consumer desire.245

In his lecture on “Pragmatism and Religion,” William James captures

the idealistic essence of this regime when he imagines a world “where

every desire is fulfilled instanter.”246 He knows that such a “fully rational

world” does not yet exist, but also recognizes that certain modern

technologies embody the dream of instantaneous possibility: “We want

water and we turn a faucet. We want a Kodak-picture and we press a

button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we

buy a ticket.” Though he fails to mention flush toilets, he easily could

have. Faucets, photographs, telephones, and toilets are all, in a sense,

preprogrammed: users “hardly need to do more than the wishing—the

world is rationally organized to do the rest.”247

Benjamin, in his work on Baudelaire, traces the roots of push button

technology back to the mid-nineteenth century invention of the match. In

match technology he famously observes that “a single abrupt movement

245 Lift knob flush actuators—those little flush knobs that you pull up rather than push down—are not featured in the literature of this period, although you may occasionally come across them today. 246 James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Lecture VIII, 1907. 247 Ibid.

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of the hand triggers a process of many steps,” arguing that the match

ushered in a number contemporaneous technologies which functioned

according to a similar physical and phenomenological logic.248 Benjamin

also sees new forms of organic-technical interaction (such as lifting the

telephone receiver or snapping a photograph) as playing discernible roles

in the structuring of modern experience. Haptic sensations (like the

experience of pressing a button) conjoin with optic ones (like staring at

traffic on a frenetic city block) and together they subject “the human

sensorium to a complex kind of training.”249

It does not appear in this moment that Benjamin has toilets in mind

either; nevertheless, these theoretical currents flow easily toward

flushing.250 Like operating a camera or a telephone, flushing a toilet

requires an abrupt hand movement which precipitates a multi-step

process; and as this dissertation has suggested from the very beginning,

acts of flushing work to affect the human sensorium in a variety of

complex ways. Earlier in the same passage, Benjamin remarks: “Comfort

isolates; on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to

248 Cited in Bernard, 167. 249 Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: 1938-1940. “Some Motifs on Baudelaire.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003, 328. 250 In this same essay, Benjamin speaks of “testing the fruitfulness of Freud’s hypothesis in situations far removed from the ones he had in mind when he wrote,” (317) so I’m hoping he would not object.

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mechanization.”251 (Benjamin takes this point from Sigfried Giedion, who

elsewhere writes about mechanization of the bathroom during the turn-of-

the-century period.)252 Even if Benjamin’s mind is elsewhere, it would be

difficult to generate a more perfectly succinct description of humanity’s

relationship with flush toilet technology: comfort, isolation,

mechanization—these are all core conditions that flushing techniques

work to stimulate and produce.

It is hopefully clear by now that flushing media were critically

important players in a dazzling array of technical phenomena that were

altering social and sensorial processes in the west. These processes

generally involved the offloading of organic processes onto technical ones;

as automated technology became more fully integrated into people’s lives,

the large technical systems that supported these systems of automation

swiftly receded from human view. Let me just pause and interrupt myself

to say that what I am describing here is, I realize, a not-so-sophisticated

rehashing of a common sociological theme: arguments that modernity

may be characterized by a tendency toward standardization and

mechanization have been circulating widely for over a century. My point

here is to suggest that these tendencies are also constitutive of certain

251 Benjamin, 328. 252 Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command: a contribution to anonymous history. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948.

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civilizing processes, and that we can observe these processes playing out

as clearly—or more clearly—inside turn-of-the-century restrooms as

anywhere else in the modern world.

The Inaudio and The Naturo

There is another element of this process of perceptual transformation

that I’ve mostly neglected thus far: sound. (“To think sonically is to think

conjecturally about sound and culture,” writes Jonathan Sterne.253 For the

next few paragraphs we’ll be following this lead…) Throughout decades

of TPTJ’s publication, there is a remarkable emphasis placed on the

problem of unwanted heating and plumbing noise; accordingly, much

marketing energy is devoted to the promotion of noise-minimizing

fixtures. John Picker has discussed how incessant street noise drove

certain Victorian writers and intellectuals to install soundproofing within

their homes;254 TPTJ evidence suggests that noise generated from within

the home was a source of significant irritation as well.

While there is rarely any mention of bodily or digestive noisemaking

(another symptom of the civilizing process already well underway), TPTJ

articles and advertisements consistently call attention the problem of 253 Sterne, Jonathan. "Sonic Imaginations." In The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne, 1-18. New Brunswick: Routledge 2012, 3. 254 Picker, John M. "The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space, and Urban Noise." Victorian Studies (1999/2000): 427-53.

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undesirable mechanical sound. “The thumping of steam heating pipes is a

most troublesome matter about a house,” announces one TPTJ editorial. A

variety of ad campaigns make it clear that toilet sounds and flushing

noises were regarded as equally troublesome. In the late 1890s, Henry

McShane manufacturing company heavily marketed their “Celo” Low

Down Combination toilet on the basis of three succinct claims: 1) “Has no

equal.” 2) “Works Perfectly” 3) “Is noiseless.”255 Standard Sanitary

Manufacturing’s “Syphon Washdown Closet” provided “a perfect flush

with the minimum amount of noise.”256 Pierce, Butler & Pierce

manufactured a water closet that was, purportedly, “Silent.”257 Makers of

the “Monarch Water Closet” claimed this model was “noiseless in

refilling.”258 Likewise, the manufacturers of the “Volmer Frost-Proof After

Flush Closet” claimed that this model possessed a tank that “could not be

heard” filling.259 A bit more modestly, Nethery Hydraulic Valve Company

255 Henry McShane Manufacturing Company. 1898. “Celo Low Down Combination.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 23, 137/169/201. 256 Standard Sanitary Manufacturing.1898. “Syphon Washdown Closet” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 23, 183. 257 Pierce, Butler & Pierce. 1903. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 33, 329. 258 Monarch Closet Valve Company. 1910. “Monarch Water Closet. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 47, 229. 259 Zero Valve and Brass Manufacturing. 1899. “Volmer Frost-Proof After Flush Closet.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 26, 227.

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described their flush valves as “practically noiseless,” promising that they

would never “hammer or pound.”260 The Standard “Devoro” was,

according to Standard, “the most advanced type of the Syphon Jet Closet.

By employing an entirely new form of structure, noisy operation is

eliminated.”261

In some cases, sound-suppression—even more than efficiency,

reliability, or technological appeal—appears to have been the primary

factor motivating consumer decisions. By 1915, certain toilet

manufacturers had even gone so far as to introduce product lines with

names that specifically called attention to their hushed mechanics.

Gaylord Sanitary had their “Auto-Silent” line—a “noiseless closet” that

“won favor because of its space and water saving features.”—262and

Camden Pottery Company had rolled out its “Inaudio” Closet

Combination. One prominent Inaudio ad features a pencil sketch of a

toilet bowl positioned at the mouth of a pristine mountain stream. The

copy reads: “STILL WATERS. As silent as a slow flowing river is the

Inaudio Closet Combination. In many of America’s finest homes is the

260 Nethery Hydraulic Valve Company. 1902. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 32, 198. 261 Standard Sanitary Manufacturing. 1915. The Devoro. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 58, 60. 262 Gaylord Sanitary. 1915. “Auto-Silent.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review Plumbers Trade Journal 58, 193.

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Inaudio to be found, for its simple beauty as well as its silent flushing

recommend it to all. The bathroom adjacent to living rooms makes silent

flushing imperative.”

Figure 2: Camden Pottery Company Advertisement

Source: The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review

(1915), 333.

Let’s pause to observe the rather striking fact that if we were to take

this ad’s message at face value, we might assume that out of all the

possible sounds likely to be emitted from a restroom, the most shame-

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worthy—from the standpoint of civilized decorum—are mechanical.

When these copywriters call attention to the bathroom’s proximity to the

living space, they make no mention of flatulence, only the sound of

flushing. In a way this makes plain sense—these particular ad men are

selling toilets, not fart mufflers. That said, it doesn’t take much academic

contortion to read this text as an example of bodily anxieties getting

displaced onto a technical object. The ad’s reference to flushing sounds is

not so much euphemism as a kind of organic-technical transference. It

makes little sense that flushing sounds would be considered so

displeasing in and of themselves; the offense stems from their rank bodily

association.263

The relationship between flushing and nature is also worth

considering here. There is no question that an appeal to nature is central to

the Inaudio ad’s rhetorical strategy. There are no humans present

(humans are conspicuously absent from almost all TPTJ toilet ads), just a

lonely commode—a Robinson Crusoe of toilets— stranded in the natural

world. Nature, the ad suggests, is a place of tranquility, cleanliness, and

rejuvenation. In the absence of humanity’s toxic influence, the earth’s

natural cleansing powers are capable of producing the ultimate kind of

263 Just as fingers may be regarded as extensions of the push button, flush sounds may the thought of as sonic continuation of streaming urine or rumbling bowels.

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purity. Sewage, we are led to believe, does not exist in nature—as if nature

were inherently sanitary.

The very process of human digestion has been inextricably linked the

idea of nature for centuries.264 The term “natural functions,” a staple of

Elias’ vocabulary, is not uncommon today, and has already made several

appearances so far in this study. Variants of the phrase “call of nature”

have been performing euphemistic duty since at least the sixteenth

century. The earliest OED entry for the phrase dates back to 1538, from

Adam Abell’s: Roit or Quheill of Tyme: “Thai fenȝit to pas furth to thare

nedis of natur.”265 A more intelligible entry from George Sinclair’s Satan’s

Invisible World Discovered comes a century and a half later, when a

character is observed “Steping to the door to ease his nature.”266

C.H. Muckenhirn, an aptly named toilet manufacturer from Salem,

New Jersey, extended and capitalized on these very associations when it

introduced its Naturo Closet Bowl sometime around 1904. This particular

toilet utilized an alternative design, the most distinguishable feature of

which was an upward angling of the bowl, which forced the user to

assume a slight seated incline. The manufacturers based its design on the 264 As have vital functions, sexual desires, menstrual discharges—any number or life-sustaining processes that humans tend to consign to the “natural” realm. See Douglas, Purity and Danger. 265 OED online. 266 Ibid.

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claim that “the common form of the closet produces an unnatural and

cramped position of the body of the user” and that “The Naturo Closet

makes a proper position compulsory.”267

Today this may seem like a transparently bogus claim, but to many at

the time it was apparently quite persuasive. Quack physicians and

pseudo-experts swooped in to endorse the product, and even the

reputable civil engineer William Paul Gerhard chimed in with pseudo-

scientific support, reporting that a conventional level toilet seat “is not

only uncomfortable and leads to a cramped position of the body, but that

it is physiologically incorrect, because it causes a constriction of the long

intestine or descending colon”; meanwhile, Gerhard suggests that The

Naturo closet compels “the user to assume a physiologically correct

position when seated, i.e, a posture which favors an easy and complete

evacuation of the rectum.”268

267 C.H. Muckenhirn.1906. “The Naturo Closet Bowl.”The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 39, 218. 268 Gerhard, The Water Supply, Sewerage and Plumbing of Modern City Buildings John WIley & Sons,161-162.

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Figure 3: The Naturo Closet Bowl

_______________________________________________________________

Source: The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review

(1904), 248.

Such scientifically dubious claims were not uncommon during this era.

Patent medicine marketers were known for frequently disseminating

fallacious marketing materials. The Food and Drug Administration and

the Federal Trade Commission did not begin promoting consumer

protections until 1906 and 1914, respectively. But even today, debates over

what makes for the “most natural” evacuative pose are alive and well. As

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I write this, Wikipedia has an entry entitled “Defecation Postures” which

leads with the following declaration: “Humans use one of three types of

defecation postures to defecate: squatting, semi-squating, or sitting.”

Many over the years have argued that squatting is a healthier or somehow

physiologically preferable to sitting,269 and any American who’s traveled to

rural China will or has used a public toilet in France will know that

defecation-procedure is one of the more visceral factors that can possibly

contribute to culture shock.

Were you to Google this topic today, you may get hits for a guy named

Jonathan Isbit, an inventor living in Boone, North Carolina, who runs a

smallish online business peddling his “Nature’s Platform.” Isbit’s

invention, which looks like a horseshoe-shaped card table, will assist you

in squatting over a western-style toilet. Isbit suggests that a squatting

defecatory posture may help prevent diseases like diverticulosis, colitis,

and colon cancer, and quotes Alexander Kira prominently on his

homepage: "We must bear in mind that, while we regard the use of the

[sitting toilet] as natural, we represent only a relatively small percentage

of the world's population, and a percentage that may be said, in an

269 Alexander Kira makes this argument in The Bathroom. Also see: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/08/dont_just_sit_there.html

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absolute sense, to be wrong, insofar as we have allowed civilization to

interfere with our biological functioning."270

This way of thinking invites us to consider the possibility of the

“essential technicity of all human beings.”271 Were André Leroi-Gourhan (a

man committed to exposing the ways in which technologies and

techniques have influenced evolutionary development) to have picked up

on this line of inquiry, he may have been interested in posing anatomical

questions about the future: should human beings survive, what might our

digestive systems look like 20,000 years from now? Will they evolve as

result of our shitting strategies? Is toilet technology affecting our intestinal

packaging, or exerting gradual influence over the strength of our

kneecaps, or the curvature of our spines?272

Underlying all of this is the idea that technologies and techniques not

only have effects on but are also in some sense constitutive of natural

phenomena, an idea that runs absolutely counter to any sort of hardline

nature-culture divide and which acknowledges a complex interplay of

natural, technical, and human elements in the emergence of civilizing

regimes. I will not spend any time considering whether or not

270 Cited in Nisbit, Jonathan. "Nature's Platform." http://naturesplatform.com/. 271 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 16. 272 Leroi-Gourhan does discuss how the intestinal biology of primitive humans resulted in our preference toward “fleshy food” over herbaceous plants, which in turn influenced early patterns of social group formation.

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technologies can ever succeed in persuading humans toward a more

“natural” state,273 I merely wish to call attention to fact that this idea has

affected certain attitudes about civilization.

Barbara Penner observes that “Society cannot be separated from

technology; instead, society and technology are bound together in

overlapping and intertwined networks that mutually shape each other

and which produce new hybrids of features, fixtures and spaces in their

turn.”274 I’ll toss nature into this swirling pool of forces which shapes and is

shaped by cultural and technological forms. Our ideas about nature, as

well as natural processes themselves, have as much to do with civilization

as toilets, sewers, buttons, bombs, or algorithmic code. Sidestepping for

now any sort of rigorous interrogation of the concept of nature,275 I’ll

briefly land again on Siegert’s point that “cultural techniques precede the

distinction of nature and culture.”276 The distinction between nature and

culture is, in itself, technical. People used toilets (patches of moss; holes in

273 As I express in my introduction, I think such lines of thinking are inherently misguided. 274 Penner, Barbara. Bathroom Objekt Series. London: Reaktion Books, 2013, 13. 275 (Whose power, Latour reminds us, comes largely from the fact that this term is almost “always used in the singular,” and that “When one appeals to the notion of nature, the assemblage that it authorizes counts for infinitely more than the ontological quality of ‘naturalness,’ whose origin it would guarantee.”) Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard University Press, 2004, 28-29. 276 Siegert, Bernhard. "Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory,” 62.

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the mud) before there were toilets. Flush technology is just the latest

development in a process that’s been unfolding for millennia—since

before the idea of nature meant anything at all.

The Arrival of Flushing Society

At the close of the nineteenth century, Mr. David T. Kenney from

Plainfield, New Jersey invented a forward-thinking sanitary device.

Kenney was, according to one TPTJ product reviewer, “a practical

plumber” in possession of “fine mechanical ability.”277 The primary

purpose of Kenney’s new machine was to precisely regulate the amount of

water that passed through flushing toilets, and its design depended on a

large water holding tank—usually installed in an attic or upper-level

floor—that would pipe water as needed into the toilet fixtures located

variously around homes and office buildings. His device was called: The

Flushometer.

For a period of a few years, TPTJ editors appeared to have been

enthralled with Kenney’s invention. Between a series of trade articles and

an aggressive paid advertising campaign, the Flushometer was successful

in dominating prime real estate for several volumes of TPTJ’s publication.

Ad’s for the Flushometer cited a long list of its advantages: in addition to

277 “The Kenny (sic) Flushometer.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 23 (1898), 296.

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its ability to regulate precise water volumes, the device was said to save

on installation and maintenance costs, free up valuable space within living

and working quarters, remove the aesthetically objectionable water tanks

from users’ field of view, reduce the potency of foul air within lavatories,

enable architects to design well-lit, properly ventilated bathrooms,

promote sanitary conditions, “be positively noiseless in its operation,”

operate “automatically,” and offer a powerful flush.278 To his plumbing

contemporaries, Kenney’s device seemed “to have provided for every

requirement of a sure, thorough and practical flushing device.”279

From the standpoint of a nineteenth-century plumber, the Flushometer

represented the culmination of many dreams. Here was a machine that

claimed to satisfy the chief goals of modern sanitation: it was reliable,

efficient, automatic, scientifically precise; its guts were hidden from view,

and it could eliminate odors without producing a single sound. It

presented itself as an all-in-one sanitary solution, and as its name

suggested, all of these capabilities stemmed from a refinement of a single

technique: flushing.

In the July-December 1899 volume of TPTJ—the very same issue that

features “A complimentary letter” written by W. & G. Audsley Architects

278 The Kenney Company.1898. “The Kenny Flushometer.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 23, 300. 279 “The Kenny (sic) Flushometer.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 23 (1898), 296.

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professing the virtues of the Flushometer system, and Flushometer ads

printed every few dozen pages—there is a short editorial (whose text is

wedged between diagrams of state-of the-art plumbing work just installed

in Pittsburgh’s brand new Heinz building) entitled: “The Dry Closet

System of Closets Condemned in Atlanta.” The article’s opening

paragraph reads as follows:

At last the system of dry closets have been condemned in Atlanta. The writer well remembers how on one occasion he prepared plans and specifications and made a bid on putting plumbing and steam heating in one of our new school buildings, and submitted same to board of education to have them returned to him unopened, so thoroughly was the board satisfied with the dry closet system.280

After centuries of sanitary developments in the west, flush technology

was finally triumphing once and for all over its primary sanitary

alternative, the dry earth system. In the years that followed, flushing

technology would come to dominate sanitation infrastructure in the

United States. Products with similar capabilities to the Flushometer, like

The Watrous Aquameter and the Ideal Volumeter, would soon appear,

presenting the Flushometer system with unwelcome competition (The

Kenney company even went so far as to sue Ideal, claiming the Volumeter

280 “The Dry Closet System of Closets Condemned in Atlanta.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 29 (1901), 78.

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infringed on their patent rights, but the litigation failed.)281 In the end, none

of these tank-concealing flush systems would endure; the sight of tanks

inside restrooms did not turn out to be as bothersome to consumers as

some early inventors thought it would be; more efficient and more

versatile flush technologies would ultimately develop into the toilet

designs that Americans are familiar with today.

As I have been arguing, these developments in flush technology

contributed to a powerful set of civilizing currents that were influencing

attitudes, perceptions, social and environmental shifts in the west. For

Elias, “the civilizing process involved three fronts in need of taming:

pressures inside people, pressures between people, and pressures

between people and non people.”282 Flushing techniques were working

vigorously along all three fronts during the late-nineteenth and early-

twentieth centuries. At the psychological level, flushing nourished the

tendency toward increased bodily shame and disgust that had been

developing in the west for some time. As flush technology worked to

remove waste from people’s presence and conceal it from their senses, it

also served to heighten their discomfort with bodily processes; as waste

removal techniques became more refined, aversion to natural functions

281 “The Ideal Volumeter Not an Infringement.” The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 30 (1901), 390. 282 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 159.

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became more pronounced. Likewise, as septic processes became more

automated and mechanized, the burden of waste management was placed

decreasingly on individuals and increasingly on social, political, and

environmental systems. Now more than ever, personal waste was

becoming political waste—shared, abstracted, concealed and dispersed.

Organic processes continued to be passed off onto a range of technical

systems, further clouding the already murky distinction between natural

and cultural-technical realms.

Once flush technology had become a baseline amenity of modern

American households, it also became a symbol of regional, cultural, and

socio-economic divides. A cartoon from a 1904 issue of TPTJ depicts a

“Rural Political Delegate” (with a suspicious resemblance to Abraham

Lincoln) washing his face with toilet water.283 (The sign on the wall reading

“Don’t Blow Out The Gas” was evidently taped to wall in anticipation of

the delegate’s arrival—the implication being that rural folk were as

ignorant about gas lighting technology as they were about modern

plumbing.) A few years later, another similarly disparaging cartoon,

simply captioned “Rural Sanitation de Luxe,” shows a hillbilly caricature

283 “Rural Political Delegate.” 1904. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 35, 624.

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enjoying a makeshift outdoor shower which he’s made from a circular

tub, a watering can, and a piece of string.284

Figure 4: Rural Political Delegate Cartoon

Source: The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review

(1904), 624.

284 “Rural Sanitation de Luxe.” 1910. The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review 47, 76.

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Figure 5: Rural Sanitation de Luxe Cartoon

Source: The Plumbers Trade Journal Steam and Hot Water Fitters Review

(1910), 76.

As these cartoons demonstrate, flush toilets were quickly becoming a

dividing factor between present and the past, the city and the country, the

civilized and the uncouth. Automation and instantaneity were new buzz

concepts being used to promote a variety of plumbing products and

designs, and by the early-twentieth century, being civilized meant (among

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other things) outsourcing waste material at the touch of a button. The

civilizing process has always involved a refinement of our approaches to

waste handling and processing, but flush toilets mark a critical new

development in these proceedings. Along with abject material, toilets

devour memory: each flush is a vortex of forgetting. The consequences of

flushing do not end after the bowl empties and the tank refills, they

proliferate out into the world, persist as splintering materialities, and

linger in the depths our technological unconsciousness. Flush toilets are

vital components of larger technical systems, held together by elaborate

cultural-technical connective tissue, that affect the psychical currents of

modern life. Can you think of any more obvious or elemental precursor to

the delete button? I cannot.

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CHAPTER 4 WHEN YOU FLUSH, WHERE DOES IT GO?

Killer Microbes

Where I live in Western NY, I have my own septic system, and my

water supply is a small pond that I can see from the back window of my

home. I have no access to municipal water or sewer (hoping to get city

water out here some day; Town of Westfield, are you listening?) but for

now my water is filtered through a semi-elaborate systems of micron-

filters, charcoal media and UV light that effectively turns scuzzy surface

water into clean and potable H2O.

At the time I purchased the property the septic system was failing. I

learned this when a woman from the county health department came to

my home and poured red dye down my toilet; a few minutes later my

yard was red. Due to the way that the property lines are drawn, my septic

field is problematically situated at a higher elevation from the pond. I

remember standing outside my home with the health inspector as she

stared up at my red yard, and then back down at the pond. She had a

nervous smile on her face when she turned to me and said: “This isn’t

good."

In a previous era, a few tricklings of sewage upslope from a water

supply wouldn’t have raised more than an eyebrow or two. Now people

know better. Any person today who expresses a preference “not to eat

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shit,” also—in a very literal sense—proclaims a will to survive. At least

since the discovery of the comma-shaped bacillus Vibrio Cholerae—first

by the Italian anatomist Filippo Pacini in 1854 (whose findings were

mostly ignored) and then again three decades later by the German

physician Robert Koch (who knew nothing of Pacini’s work)—humans

have known that ingesting raw sewage has potentially lethal

consequences. Vibrio Cholerae is one of the many microscopic pathogens

that thrive on unsanitary conditions. Stephen Johnson summarizes the

matter simply: “what the Vibrio cholerae bacterium desires, more than

anything, is an environment in which human beings have a regular habit

of eating other people’s excrement.”285

This discovery functions as a sort of denouement in one of the higher

stakes detective dramas of the nineteenth century, and symbolizes the rise

of bacteriological science as well as the triumph of germ theory over

miasma theory. It also contributes to the rise of a technological revolution

that transformed infrastructural conditions for broad swaths of humanity.

Today, under any bathroom floor or outside any bathroom wall, there lies

an expansive network of pipes, people, microbes and machines; and every

time you flush the toilet, you inevitably wind up communicating with a

vast world of activity that extends beyond any one person’s sensorial

reach. The nature of this communication is complicated, but an

285 Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map, 40.

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exploration of it can clarify our thinking about the nature of

environments, culture, and reality itself. Septic communication is not a

process based on information exchange or individual expression; rather,

flushing, like other cultural techniques, is “an act that creates order by

introducing distinctions.”286 Acts of flushing operate on the cusp of the so-

called nature-culture divide, working to process the distinctions between

interior and exterior, home and gutter, cleanliness and abjection, septic

and aseptic conditions.

Susan Strasser has pointed out that “trash is created by sorting” and

that “nothing is inherently trash.”287 Ultimately, sorting may be the

essential mechanism through which all waste comes into being. Septic

waste, for instance, is sorted in several stages. Our bodies, like the earliest

cellular membranes, are primary sorting devices which separate valuable

energy from less useful organic material. Toilets, sewer lines, septic tanks

and leach fields perform further sorting duties. In cities with established

municipal wastewater facilities, the final stage is sewage treatment, a set

of processes that collectively work to sort liquids and solids, humans and

microbes, minerals and organic matter.

286 Siegert, Bernhard. "Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Studies." Grey Room 39 (2008), 23. 287 Strasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Owl Books, 1999, 5.

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Your average flusher does not have a precise understanding of these

processes. In her article “Flushing the Toilet has Never Been Riskier,”

Mary Anna Evans begins by observing that most Americans would be

“hard-pressed to answer this simple question: When you flush, where

does it go?”288 For those 80% of American citizens who rely on municipal

wastewater treatment services (as opposed to those who own and manage

their own septic systems), each flush whisks waste “immediately off the

premises, never to be seen, smelled, or considered again.”289 Each day,

billions of people consign their waste to oblivion with a single, unthinking

movement of the hand; if flushing is forgetting, then modern plumbing

technology has invited amnesia on a massive scale.290

Although people have been managing sewage for millennia,291 reliable

sewage treatment techniques are only about a century old.292 The first

major boom in sewage treatment science began in the late nineteenth

288 Evans, Mary Anna. "Flushing the Toilet Has Never Been Riskier." The Atlantic, 2015. 289 Ibid. 290 See Scanlan, John. "Valuing Disorder: Perspectives on Radical Contingency in Modern Society." University of Glasgow, 2001. 291 Pretty much all writers who tackle the topic of waste treatment eventually point out that there’s a reference to shit disposal in the Old Testament: “Thou shalt have a place also without the camp, whither thou shalt go forth abroad. And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee.” Deuteronomy 23:12-13. 292 Huler, Scott. "How Does Sewage Treatment Work " Scientific American, 2010.

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century, right alongside the rise of flush toilet technology, both in Europe

and in the United States. Urban population growth, developments in

bacteriological science, and discoveries relating to the perils of waterborne

disease all contributed to an increasing awareness that introducing raw

sewage into water supplies is treacherous to public health.

Humanity’s discovery of bacteria pulled the curtain on a seething

underworld of life. Anthony van Leeuwenhoek first peered into this

world in the 1660s when he observed “animalcules”—the single-celled

organisms we now know as protozoa—under a microscopic lens, however

it took more than two centuries for science to learn that these single-celled

creatures could be carriers of disease. Koch and Pasteur tend to get the

lion’s share of credit for these discoveries, but these sorts of breakthroughs

are always the result of complex meshworks of activity—involving

players human and non—that sometimes congeal in moments of humanly

revelation.

Latour goes to elaborate lengths to make this case. For him, currents of

science and politics develop from the power relationships of the various

actors involved. He likens Pasteur’s role in this process to that of the first

observation balloons, which “made the enemy visible.”293 In this sense,

Pasteur’s project was not dissimilar to Freud’s: “Both announced that they

293 Latour, Bruno. The Pasteurization of France. Harvard University Press 1993, 24.

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were speaking in the name of invisible, rejected, terribly dangerous forces

that must be listened to if civilization was not to collapse.”294 As their ideas

gained wider acceptance, they came to be regarded as wizardly

interpreters of dark secret worlds—worlds that had all along lurked in the

shadows, but were just now finally coming into humanity’s view.

Humans could now see and understand that the world was swarming

with tiny agents. One French science writer aptly captured this shift in

consciousness when he declared: “There are more of us than we

thought.”295 This new awareness had major consequences for sanitation. By

1884, the sanitary engineer Baldwin Latham understood that “sewage in

no case should be allowed to intermix with the pure natural water of the

country, so as to lead to its pollution,” arguing that sewage can and

should be purified—by chemical or mechanical means—before being

released into oceans or streams.296 Three years later—and one year before a

landmark public hygiene bill was proposed in France—The Massachusetts

Board of Health founded the world’s first water purification and sewage

treatment facility in Lawrence, MA.

294 Ibid., 40. 295 Cited in Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 35. 296 Latham, Baldwin. Works of Sewerage and House Drainage. New York: Engineering News Publishing Co. , 1884, p. 7.

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All of these developments signal a radical perceptual shift that

parallels the civilizing developments I discuss in the previous chapter. In

Mumford’s words: “Pasteur altered the conception of both the external

and internal environment of organisms.”297 Conditions previously thought

to be inhospitable to life turned out to be lush breeding grounds; a soap

scrubbed countertop turned out to be a site of genocide. It was a strange

new reality: the universe suddenly seemed as small as it seemed big.298 Not

only were these tiny enemies visible, they were alive. In a window of just

a few years, humanity succeeded in achieving an entirely new perspective

on essential matters of life and death.

Wastewater treatment researchers quietly positioned themselves at the

epicenter of this perceptual revolution. Working with microbes as well as

against them, these scientists set out with the clear objective of removing

pathogenic bacteria from perilous sewage. They labored at the juncture of

human and non-human realms in their effort to make the world a safer

place for human beings. Their methods were more refined, but their work

was in some ways similar to that of lowly night-soil men (the waste-

haulers who came in the night to empty out residential cesspits): both

297 Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects Mariner Books, 1968, 475. 298 Such awareness was perhaps not entirely new. There is a long history of pondering the scalability of the cosmos. Voltaire’s “Micromegas” depicts an alien man who was “8 leagues tall” and who could fit a whale on the surface of his thumbnail, for example.

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were focused on providing humans relief from their own excrement. The

science of sewage treatment obviously required a new set of tools: night-

soil men used buckets and wheelbarrows; the sanitary engineers’ devised

sorting mechanisms that were operational on a microscopic scale.

The primary technology used to sort disease-carrying bacteria from

water was, and is: the filter.

Filtering mechanisms are crazily old. As natural phenomena, they may

very well date back to the beginning of time. Evolutionary selection is, in

many ways, an epic filtering process, and here on earth, filters are an

essential requirement for survival. Our planet is thankfully equipped with

an atmospheric filter that insulates us from extreme temperatures and

from harmful radiation. Water and oxygen—the very ingredients of life—

would be horribly poisonous were it not for the purifying filters they pass

through. Plants are effective air filters; sand and rocks are good at filtering

water; water itself filters out substances like light and sound, as do other

elemental filtering media like clouds, trees and dirt.

Filtering is an essential component of life in the sea: gills filter oxygen

from water; baleen filters out water as it captures plankton and krill (new

archeological evidence suggests that filter feeding reptiles may date back

more than two hundred million years.)299 Land beasts are filterers, too:

299 Hays, Brooks. "Scientists Identify Oldest Herbivorous Filter-Feeding Marine Reptile." UPI (2016).

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lungs filter air; brains filter information (humans’ capacity for mental

modeling—a term which describes our ability to imagine and assess

potential risk scenarios—give us the ability to filter out possible futures

before they have even had a chance to occur.) All sense organs are filters,

and perception is always the result of sensory filtration: at the most basic

phenomenological level, filters are the key determiners of what we call

reality. Membranes are cellular filters; clothes are filters for the skin.

Language is a filter for the mind.

As technology, filters have been around since the inception of

civilization (Hippocrates is known to have filtered water through cloth;

one could reasonably argue that shelter building is a basic act of filter

construction) and are ubiquitous in the modern world. Today, filters are a

requirement for a range of electronic, chemical, audio and photographic

processes; we find them on the end of cigarettes and see references to

them on labels for bottled water and hard spirits; they are components

inside our household appliances; we use them to manage our email

accounts; programming and algorithmic filters define our interaction with

screens and have come to mediate our experience with digital realms.

As is thus obvious, the concept of filtration is theoretically fertile. For

Freud, the psyche is an elaborate filtering system. Filtering is a key idea

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/05/09/Scientists-identify-oldest-herbivorous-filter-feeding-marine-reptile/9471462803576/.

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for cyberneticists and information theorists (and signal filtering is a

foundational issue for communication theorists more generally.) The

economist Robin Hanson has theorized about an astronomical Great Filter

in attempt to resolve Fermi’s Paradox, which 1) suggests that there is a

high probability that extraterrestrial could have developed interstellar

travel within the Milky Way galaxy, and 2) observes that there is zero

credible evidence that aliens have ever visited earth. Hanson attempts to

explain this apparent contradiction by imagining the existence of a cosmic

sieve that sifts through “simple dead stuff and explosive life,” and which

prevents advanced life from moving freely about the universe.300

The concept of filters has also inspired math-heavy theorizing in the

fields of physics, engineering and topology, and it should go without

saying that filtration is an essential media concept, too. As that which

always functions in between, the filter’s status is inherently medial; filters

do nothing if not mediate. Kittler regards the filter as an essential media

operation.301 In his work on cultural techniques, Siegert also argues that

filtration is central to many media processes: it serves to distinguish

signals from noise, distill messages from channels, “filter symbolic from

300 Hanson, Robin. "The Great Filter -- Are We Almost Past It?”, 1998. 301 Kittler, Fredrich. Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey and Wutz, Michael. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

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the real.”302 For Siegert, filtering lies at the heart of any cultural-technical

approach to media theory: “The basic operation of those cultural

techniques responsible for processing the distinction between nature and

culture, or barbarism and civilization, is a filtering operation.”303

If “nature-culture processors” exist anywhere in this world, you will

almost certainly encounter them inside sewage treatment facilities. The

technical/physical/biochemical transformation of waste into water is a

relatively concrete embodiment of an abstract idea: like all cultural

techniques, sewage treatment techniques work to process the “transition

from non-distinction, to distinction, and back.”304 The distinction between

nature and culture is nowhere clearer, or murkier, than in the guts of a

trickling sewage filter, or in the bowel-like settling tanks of a waste

treatment plant. Sewage treatment is a powerful example of humanity’s

drive to distinguish itself from its own ecosystem, to transcend—or

dominate— the continuous cycles of replenishment and decay that define

our earthly experience. If culture works to differentiate the flow of life,

death, time and space, examining these moments of cultural-technical

differentiation can provide a necessary perspective on our present 302 Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. Meaning Systems Fordham University Press, 2015, 15. 303 Siegert, Bernhard. "Cacography or Communication?”, 32. 304 Siegert, Bernhard. "Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory." Theory, Culture & Society: Special Issue on Cultural Techniques 30, no. 6 (November 2013): 48-65, 62.

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infrastructural situation. Of course, once you head down this path, the

questions you wind up arriving at are, inevitably, heavy: How did we get

here? What is the nature of reality before culture steps in? No easy

answers here, but these are the stakes, in the end.

This chapter extends upon the previous chapters’ analyses by

exploring the rise of wastewater treatment in the United States. It

examines some of the ways that these treatment technologies helped

configure emerging flushing infrastructures in the late-nineteenth and

early-twentieth centuries, and considers the ways in which these

developments factored into humanity’s changing relationship with the

modern world. The consequences of wastewater treatment turn out to be

both real and imagined: filters and other treatment techniques actually

function a lot like gates—gates that swing between organisms and their

environments. As treatment systems filter nutrients from waterways,

pathogens from digestive tracts, and anxiety from human consciousness,

they manage the flow of material and symbolic elements and help define

the circumstances of individuals and communities. An investigation of

these processes can, I believe, reveal interesting clues about what it means

to be human today.

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A World Without Waste

Let’s first of all agree—at least provisionally—that in a world without

humans, there would be no sewage. Fox turds, probably. Mountainous

heaps of guano, yes. In certain rivers, fish would possibly still dine on

grassy hippopotamus dung.305 Humans are not unique in their capacity for

fecal production: all other variables remaining constant, it seems

reasonably safe to assume that in the absence of humans, our earth’s

surface would still be generally shit-splattered, just as it is now.

But there would be no sewage. Sewage very obviously requires the

existence of sewers, which requires technical and cultural consolidation,

sorting, the demarcation of space, the galvanization of technical systems.

Sewage is produced through human powered processes of separation,

differentiation, convergence, direction, and redirection. There can be no

sewage without civilization—and at this point in history, it is very

difficult to imagine civilization without sewage.

Yet it is precisely this kind of imagining that gives rise to the

development of sewage treatment. We know that civilization can prosper

without sewage treatment facilities (the nature of sanitation practices for

the bulk of human history serves as evidence for this point). Sewage

treatment science marks a shift in humanity’s relationship with its own

environment. Wastewater treatment systems fall generally into the

305 See BBC’s Life, episode 4.

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category of logistical media: among other things, sewage treatment

technologies “arrange people and property in time and space.”306 They help

shape the physical and biological conditions that affect humanity’s

potential for survival: they alter landscapes, affect population patterns

and prolong life expectancy.

At the same time, and just as significantly, the development of these

technologies signals a new human posture toward the nonhuman world.

The very concept of sewage treatment signifies a distinctly modern

impulse to reconfigure or circumvent the structures of recursion that

characterize all living systems. In this sense, wastewater treatment

prefigures later developments in information science and genetics. All of

these pursuits on some level involve the human tampering with ecological

circularity—practices that people sometimes associate with the idea of

playing God.

The science of turning waste into water blossoms in part from an

unlikely blend of pragmatism and idealism: the dream of a waste-free

universe. The roots of this impulse run deep through modernity. Many

nineteenth-century scientists, sanitarians, engineers, political economists

and philosophers were preoccupied with the idea of waste, and strove to

promote efficiency by developing new techniques for waste utilization.

306 Peters, John Durham. "Calendar, Clock, Tower”, http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/peters.pdf, 16.

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Waste was the adversary; healthy productivity or efficiency was the goal.

From this ideological vantage, it appeared that the flourishing of

humanity depended on its ability to reduce—if not outright eliminate—

the existence of waste in all its forms.

The modern war on waste unfolded on many fronts; waste utilization

was a guiding force for a range of moral, intellectual, and commercial

pursuits. Then as now, physicists were concerned with the problem of

wasted energy. Industrialization encouraged the commodification of

untapped “wasted” resources. As Timothy Cooper puts it: “Valorizing

nature’s natural surplus through the application of new techniques was at

the heart of this conception of waste utilization…Post-Enlightenment

renderings of waste therefore constituted it as neglected utility.”307

Outlining a history of the concept of waste, Lauri Koskela, Rafael Sacks,

and John Rooke see this period—stretching roughly from the early-

nineteenth to the early-mid twentieth century—as generating the

“classical notion” of waste, a notion which contributes to, and also

develops from, the rise of principles of scientific management.308 Frederick

Taylor, Teddy Roosevelt, and Henry Ford—all prominent champions of

307 Cooper, Timothy. "Peter Lund Simmonds and the Political Ecology of 'Waste Utilisation' in Victorian Britain," 28. 308 Koskela, Lauri, Rafael Sacks and John Rooke "A Brief History of the Concept Of Waste in Production." Paper presented at the 20th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction, 2012, 3.

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the “Efficiency Movement”—promoted efforts to eliminate labor and

material waste from a variety of governmental, educational, and industrial

processes.

Even before the rise of Taylorism, Charles Babbage spent considerable

energy pondering the problem of wasted labor, and worked to improve

the efficiency of energy-wasting machines; his dream of developing a

“universal language” was also aimed toward reducing unnecessary

confusion (i.e. minimizing communicative waste.)309 Jeremy Bentham’s

famous panopticon prison has been described as a polycrest (tool with

multiple uses), originally conceived as “a world without waste, a world in

which anything left over is immediately reused, a superusable world”310—

the quintessential utilitarian design. Balfour Stewart and P.G. Tait’s

Unseen Universe (1875), an ambitious attempt to reconcile science and

religion, offers a fantastic explanation for “the apparently wasteful

character of the arrangements of the visible universe.”311 The idea that

energy was a scarce physical and moral resource was common among

309 See Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Vintage, 2012. 310 Miller, Jaques-Alain Miller and Richard Miller. "Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device." October 41 (1987): 3-29. 311 Tait, Balfour Stewart and P.G. The Unseen Universe. New York: The Macmillan and Company 1875, 155-156. Focusing specifically on the idea of the dissipation of energy in the universe, they theorize the existence of cosmic memory bank, which puts apparently wasted energy into productive use. Thanks to Chad Vollrath for this lead.

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Victorian physicists. Crosbie Smith describes how the concept of the

dissipation of energy “linked together the natural and moral orders.”312

Scientists like James Thomson, whose vortex turbine attempted to

maximize the energy efficiency of high-pressure water, believed that

energy waste should be kept at “the minimum that nature would allow.”313

All these ideas were in the air in that moment when sewage treatment

science first emerged. In stark contrast to the planned obsolescence

economy that would come to characterize American consumer culture of

the twentieth Century (a development that Vance Packard famously

documents in his exposé The Waste Makers) the nineteenth century was a

period of acute waste consciousness (Heather Rogers has described it as

an era when “almost nothing went to waste.”)314 Sanitation experts

traditionally approached the problem of sewage management from two

separate vantage points—treatment on the one hand and utilization on the

other—but before the refinement of filtration and purification techniques,

312 Smith, Crosbie. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 313 Flood, Raymond, Mark McCartney, Andrew Whitaker. Kelvin: Life, Labours and Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 314 Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: The New Press, 2006, 36. (Susan Strasser makes a similar point. See Strasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York, Holt Paperbacks, 2000.

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“treatment” simply meant removal.315 By the 1880s, wastewater

purification processes were being developed through rigorous empirical

testing and analysis. After this moment, the term wastewater treatment

begins to describe those techniques capable of neutralizing the toxicity of

sewage.

The Science of Sewage

The revolution in sewage treatment science did not transform the

world overnight. Midway through the twentieth century, many major

American cities (e.g. Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis) still had no sewage

treatment capabilities whatsoever; these cities handled their untreated

waste the same way sanitation experts had a century earlier: by dumping

it into the nearest river, lake or steam. Similar practices persist today. As

of 2005, nearly 300 Chinese cities lacked adequate sewage treatment

facilities.316 Canadians still flush 200 billion liters of raw sewage into their

waterways annually.317 And here in the United States, Combined Sewer

Overflow—one of the primary culprits of sewage related-disease—

315 Corfield, W.H. The Treatment and Utilization of Sewage. London: Macmillan and Co., 1887. 316 Worldwatch Institute. "Nearly 300 Chinese Cities Lack Sewage Treatment." 2013. 317 Macqueen, Ken. "Canada Dumping Raw Sewage into Its Waterways." In The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2013.

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regularly unleashes a flood of harmful pathogens that leads to millions of

illnesses each year. In moments of overflow (which are usually the result

of stormwater accumulation) torrents of raw sewage are released into

oceans and lakes. Hence the significant increase in cases of gastrointestinal

illness in the aftermath of heavy rain…318

Sewage treatment is still nowhere near a universal practice, but should

nevertheless be regarded as one of the major technological developments

of the last century and a half. Today, from a technical standpoint, no water

is too dirty to purify. Modern filtration systems can easily turn disgusting

shitwater into crystal clear drinking water in a matter of hours. The

nineteenth-century dream of eliminating sewage through purification has

recently resurfaced in a new, modified form: wastewater purification has

come to be viewed as an essential component of an ambitious vision for

solving a global water crisis that many fear is imminent, if not already

underway.

Industrial-scale sewage treatment is now a multi-step process. After

sewage flows from toilets to treatment plants, the sewage is screened for

large objects before being subjected to Primary Treatment. In this initial

stage, the wastewater is introduced into settlement tanks that separate out

318 Drayna, Patrick, Sandra L. McLellan, Pippa Simpson, Shun-Hwa Li, Marc H. Gorelick. "Association between Rainfall and Pediatric Emergency Department Visits for Acute Gastrointestinal Illness." Environmental Health Perspectives 118, no. 10 (2010): 1439-43.

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water from solids; near the end of the settling process, soaps, greases, and

oils are skimmed off the surface of the water. Secondary Treatment

involves a biochemical technique for stimulating aerobic digestion—

what’s known as the activated sludge process. Tertiary Treatment

removes particles from the water through a series of deep sand filters.

Finally, ultraviolet light treatment is used to kill any remaining harmful

bacteria.319

Citizens of the nineteenth century would have consumed untreated

water on a regular basis. Most cities lacked any sort of municipal water

treatment technology. “Primary treatment” may have meant the removal

of trash or dead creatures from a water supply, but for the most part,

secondary or tertiary levels of treatment were not yet available. Similar to

flush toilet technology, which enjoyed a long, intermittent history before

its eventual rise to infrastructural prominence, water treatment techniques

also have ancient roots. Greek, Sanskrit and Egyptian writings outline

various methods of water treatment, from boiling to gravel filtration, as

early as 2000 BC. Municipal water treatment facilities can be traced back at

least to Ancient Rome (the Roman water commissioner Sextus Frontius at

319" Huler,“How Does Sewage Treatment Work.”

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one point writes about a settling reservoir that fed into one of the city’s

aqueducts.)320

Despite these ancient precursors, in the mid-nineteenth century few

cities had established any sort of municipal-level filtration or purification

systems. From the perspective of water treatment science, the turn of the

twentieth of century was a groundbreaking period of time. The rise of

bacteriology coincided with other major developments in the west:

economic shifts from agriculture to manufacturing and corresponding

population shifts from rural to urban areas necessitated more centralized

approaches to sanitation and urban planning. Wastewater collection and

treatment methods played a vital role in motivating these new urban

designs.321

The Lawrence Experiment Station was at the forefront of the

burgeoning field of wastewater treatment research. Founded in the late

1880s by the Massachusetts State Board of Health, the station’s primary

purpose was to develop scientific strategies for purifying water and

sewage.322 For several decades, the station carried out cutting edge sewage

320 Baker, M.N. "Sketch of the History of Water Treatment." American Water Works Association 26, no. 7 (1934): 902-38, 903. 321 Walsh, Michael J. "Re-Engineerining the Engineering Profession for the 21st Century." Paper presented at the Cities of the Future/Urban River Restoration, 2010. 322 Clark, H.W. "An Outline of Sewage Purification Studies at the Lawrence Experiment Station." Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 19, no. 4 (1927): 448-52.

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purification research, and the station’s notable achievements were

meticulously documented in papers, articles and books published during

that same period of time.

Researchers at the Lawrence Experimental Station focused their

analyses on a range of chemical, physical, and biological processes,

specializing above all in the science of filtration. The development of

water filtration techniques was already well underway a half-century

earlier, long before the discovery of bacteria. The first slow sand filter was

(successfully) put into use by London’ Chelsea Water Works Co in 1829,

and developers of the public waterworks in Richmond, Va. attempted

(unsuccessfully) to filter the entire city’s water supply as early as 1832.323

But as a dedicated research facility, the Lawrence lab was able to apply a

systematic approach to their study of sewer water treatment, and the

knowledge generated from these investigations helped propel the science

of purification into the modern age.

Many of the lab’s first attempts at purification (1887-1888) centered on

the method of intermittent sand filtration. These early studies built upon

inventions and observations made earlier in the century, meticulously

testing a range of variables relating to the biological and chemical filtering

properties of sand. Their preliminary conclusions led them to believe that

323 Baker, "Sketch of the History of Water Treatment."

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the two most important factors in achieving purification were “oxygen

and time,” concluding that “the power of any material to purify sewage

depended almost entirely in its ability to hold the sewage in contact with

air.”324

Testing on gravel filters began in 1889, and early analyses showed that

gravel was capable of filtering sewage at significantly faster rates. In a

short time, they reached the conclusion that: “The essential conditions of

filtration are very slow motion of thin films of liquid over the surface of

particles that have spaces between them sufficient to allow air to be in

contact with the films of liquid.”325 They also determined that the presence

of bacteria were required to promote the process of nitrification.

Nitrification—the two-step process whereby ammonium is converted

into nitrites, and then subsequently to nitrates—was a focal point of the

lab’s research. (The grand opening of the station roughly coincided with

Russian microbiologist Sergei Winogradsky’s discovery of nitrifying

bacteria.) A bio-chemical reaction that occurs under certain environmental

conditions inside certain species of bacteria (Nitrosomonas and

Nitrobacter), nitrification is part of a larger process of removing nitrogen

from sewage, and is a crucially important step in wastewater treatment.

324 Clark, 449. 325 Ibid.

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As nitrification experiments progressed, scientists’ quickly observed that

wastewater had to pass through bacterial films slowly enough to allow the

bacteria to perform their nitrifying functions. This observation led to the

refinement of the trickling filter, a technology that is still common today.326

By the early 1890s, scientists had clearly identified the essential

components required for wastewater purification: minerals, air, microbes

and time. Lacking one or more of these components, satisfactory

purification would not occur, and arranging these elements in precise

purificatory balance demanded a delicate collaboration of humans,

bacteria, and rocks and/or sand. Human-microbial relations were taking

an interesting turn. Just a few decades before, microbes had operated

mostly below the radar of human perception.

When John Snow first examined the water at the infamous Broad St.

Pump—epicenter of London’s devastating 1854 cholera outbreak—he was

thrown off by the clarity of the water: though he had suspicions that this

particular water source was toxic, the water looked perfectly fine.327

Writing in 1934, reflecting back on a few decades of water treatment

science, one sanitation historian noted that “It was not until comparatively

recent times that the aim [of water treatment] was other than reduction of 326 For a humorless accounting of these developments, see H.W. Clark’s Eight Years’ Work with Trickling Sewage Filters at the Lawrence Experiment Station, University of Michigan Library, 1907. 327 Johnson, The Ghost Map.

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turbidity.”328 Modern treatment techniques were born in that moment

when water clarity ceased to imply water cleanliness. It also occurred in

the moment when scientists realized that not all microbes are life-

threatening. Certain bacteria are out to kill us, but others can help us

survive.

“Media in general have a history of exposing the limits of our

accustomed access to the world we inhabit.”329 In this particular historical

moment, filter media were clearly exposing the limits of human

perception, on multiple sensory levels. Primary senses that humans had

always relied upon to detect danger—smell, sight, and taste—turned out

to be largely incapable of detecting bacterial threats. Water that looked,

smelled and tasted the “most pure” could, under certain unlucky

conditions, wind up being the most deadly.

The revelation of the fact of microbes altered the structure of the

human living system in fundamental ways. Manuel De Landa has

observed that “microorganisms interact not only with our organic bodies

but also with our institutions, exerting section pressures on them and

thereby acting as sorting devices…”330 The impact of pathogenic bacteria

on humanity did not—does not—begin or end with sick and/or dead 328 Baker, 902. 329 Brown, Bill. "Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by Mark B.N. Hansen W.J.T. Mitchell, 49-63: University of Chicago Press 2010, 54. 330 Landa, Manuel De A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 72.

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people. These microbes played a critical role in convincing nineteenth-

century citizens to follow through on a number of uncomfortable

operations: tearing up streets to install new pipes beneath cities,

submitting to a range of cumbersome sanitary regulations, loosening their

grip on long-held beliefs regarding the toxicity of miasmic air.331 Things

could have gone down very differently, but people were afraid, and the

power of this fear contributed to far-reaching perspectival and

infrastructural transformations.332

One major transformation in the United States was a trend toward

increased population density. Clearly population patterns are complex

phenomena that can’t be explained by or attributed to a single causal

factor; trends in population density are affected by many variables,

including physical geography, climate, political and economic stability,

and resource availability. But sewage treatment and population density

have an especially interesting relationship. For one, increases in

population density were among the primary factors that led to the

development of sewage treatment science in the first place (it seems

doubtful that pastoral societies would have ever attempted to purify

wastewater.) Sewage treatment science emerges at a time of rapid

population growth, and at a time when much of this growth was

331 Ibid. 332 Ibid., 172.

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occurring in major urban centers. The development of sewage treatment

techniques was largely an attempt to alleviate the biological pressure that

these newly dense populations were placing on urban environments.

Again, people living in cities desperately needed relief from their own

rapidly accumulating waste.

Early tests at the Lawrence station addressed this problem by

attempting to improve purification efficiency, and annual reports over a

twenty to thirty year period reveal impressive gains in the amount of

sewage that scientists were capable of purifying each day. One of the

major steps forward was the development of the activated sludge process,

a technique which grew out of experiments carried out at the Lawrence

station, and which was widely accepted as an effective treatment strategy

after British a pair of scientists, William Arden and William T. Lockett,

reported their findings to the Society of the Chemical Industry in 1914. In

tracing the history of the technique, one sludge scholar remarks that “The

activated sludge process can be considered as having been spawned when

man first attempted to relieve obnoxious conditions arising from

wastewater by blowing air through it.”333

It is, in other words, an aeration technique. Arden and Lockett’s 1914

paper—“Experiments on the Oxidation of Sewage Without the Aid of

333 Sawyer, Clair N. "Milestones in the Development of the Activated Sludge Process." Water Pollution Control Federation 37, no. 2 (1965): 151-62, 151.

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Filters”—outlines the key elements of the process. The essential design

introduces oxygen and aerobic microorganisms into wastewater, which

results in the synthesis of new cell material as well as the biological

oxidation of organic waste.334 After the initial aeration process, solids are

allowed to settle in sedimentation tanks before being reintroduced into the

aerated wastewater. The results of the process are similar to filter

treatment: both processes metabolize organic matter into stable inorganic

forms.

Activated sludge processing turned out to be a much more efficient

method of sewage treatment. Lawrence Experiment Station reports show

that maximum disposal rates leapt from between 500-750 people per acre

per day using filter technology to 150,000 people using activated sludge

procedures.335 This research marks a clear turning point in the history of

wastewater treatment. During the first decade of the twentieth century,

most sanitary engineers agreed that municipal-level wastewater treatment

was still not worth the cost. Support for municipal water filtration and

disinfection systems had, by this time, garnered widespread support, and

334 Municipal Wastewater Effluents and Sludge in the Production of Crops for Human Consumption; Commission on Geosciences, Environment and Resources; Division on Earth and Life Studies; National Research Council. "Municipal Wastewater, Sewage Sludge, and Agriculture." In Use of Reclaimed Water and Sludge in Food Crop Production The National AcademiesPress, 1996. 335 Clark, "An Outline of Sewage Purification Studies at the Lawrence Experiment Station."

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these engineers argued that the value of wastewater treatment would be

minimal if drinking water supplies were to be treated anyway.336

Meanwhile, from 1900-1914, The Progressive Movement lobbied

aggressively to protect water quality, and the passage of new sanitary

legislation and stricter enforcement of environmental laws resulted in

increased support for municipal wastewater treatment facilities.337

By the time that the activated sludge process arrived on the scene,

momentum was gathering in support of establishing wastewater

treatment systems in cities across the United States. Various methods of

treatment were becoming technologically feasible and economically

viable. In addition to filtration and activated sludge processes, scientists

had also been working to refine methods of chemical precipitation, which

as the name suggests, involves adding reactive chemicals to the raw

sewage which aid in the purification process. With these various tools and

techniques at their disposal, sanitary engineers were prepared to begin the

process of institutionalizing wastewater treatment on a massive scale.

In 1916, the first activated sludge plant was built in San Marcos, Texas.

Over the course of the next two decades, hundreds of activated sludge

systems were operating in major cities across the world, treating more 336 Burian, Stephen J., Stephan J. Nix, Robert E. Pitt,, and and S. Rocky Durrans. "Urban Wastewater Management in the United States: Past, Present, and Future." Journal of Urban Technology 7, no. 3 (2000): 33-62. 337 Ibid.

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than a billion gallons of sewage each day.338 Wastewater treatment facilities

were no longer a controversial proposition; by midcentury, they were a

standard feature of urban infrastructure. Roughly half of the United States

population had access to some level of wastewater treatment by 1960.339

The Clean Water Restoration Act (1966) offered a series of federal grants

that would promote further wastewater plant construction in subsequent

years.

This was, by any account, a significant development. Humans were

learning how to manage their relationships with the planet in new and

complex ways. They were combating and cooperating with a diverse

range of microscopic organisms, and they had achieved a more nuanced

understanding of how their own biology interacted with surrounding

ecosystems. They had also taken another step in distinguishing

themselves from other forms of animal life. Like cooking, wastewater

treatment is a technique that works on matter in the exterior world as a

strategy to manage processes that unfold on bodily interiors. As far as I

know, wild mammals do not possess formal strategies for purifying dirty

water. This is not because—as some might assume—their feral biology has

no need for such processes. Giardia is common in deer, moose, caribou,

338 Cooper, P.F. "Historical Aspects of Wastewater Treatment.” 339 Krause, John Downey and Lucretia. "Us Wastewater Treatment History." In On the Water Front, Rocky Mountain Water Quality Analysts Association, 2015.

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gorillas, dogs, foxes, coyotes, and seals, and I’ll go out on a limb and

assume that these animals would all prefer to drink non-contaminated

water, given a choice.

Despite the wide-reaching consequences of wastewater treatment,

these technologies did not move humanity very much closer to achieving

the dream of a waste-free world. They might have, perhaps, had history

unfolded differently; during the first years of the twentieth century, policy

makers and engineers were still seriously puzzling over the economic

logic of various waste utilization processes. Despite the common

knowledge that human sewage has value as fertilizer, there was no real

consensus about whether attempting to harness this fertilizing potential

was ultimately worth the effort. “Sewage farming”—the practice of

routing wastewater into agricultural land—was already a relatively

common practice (some 50 sewage farms were operating in Britain by

1875, and about a dozen in the United States by the turn of the century)

but because these farms presented a long list of environmental problems

(contamination of crops, clogged soil pores, noisome odors, etc.) they were

still widely viewed as an unattractive solution.340

Many efficiency-minded sanitation experts held out hope that

wastewater treatment plants could perform double duty as fertilizer

340 "Municipal Wastewater, Sewage Sludge and Agriculture." In Use of Reclaimed Water and Sludge in Food Crop Production The National Academies Press, 1996.

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production facilities. While acknowledging certain challenges, one 1912

report entitled “The Fertilizing Value of Sewage and Sewage Sludge—A

Sanitary and Economic Problem” ultimately drew optimistic conclusions

about the possibility of utilizing sewage sludge as fertilizer: “Sludge has

value and as the processes of drying, pressing and fat separation are

improved, and also as nitrogen advances in price, as seems inevitable,

sewage sludge will become or greater agricultural value than it is at

present…”341

Given the information available at the time, this was a reasonable

projection. A growing industrial agricultural economy was rapidly

consuming the readily available reserves of fixed nitrogen (many of these

reserves were being imported from South America in the form of sodium

nitrate mineral deposits and nitrate-rich guano.) As commercial farms

continually strove to maximize yields, they consumed fixed nitrogen

supplies faster than natural processes could replace them. By 1912, it was

growing clear to many observers that new forms of fixed nitrogen would

be required to keep up with global demand. As urban population

densities steadily increased, so did accumulations of sewage sludge: a

cost-effective method of extracting nitrates from sludge would have

proved both environmentally sensible and economically rewarding, and

for a time, such a plan seemed very promising.

341 Cited in Clark, 451.

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In 1925, The Milwaukee Sewerage Commission actualized this basic

vision when it finalized construction of The Jones Island treatment plant—

a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment and sludge processing facility. At

the time that it opened, the Jones Island plant was the largest activated

sludge facility ever constructed, and its capabilities were magnificent. As a

wastewater treatment center, it had the capacity to process 128 million

gallons of sewage each day; as a fertilizer producer, the facility was

capable of drying and wrapping a hundred tons of fertilizer each day.342

This dried fertilizer, which had approximately 6% nitrogen content, could

immediately be applied to farmland; rather amazingly, the City of

Milwaukee had implemented an industrial-scale method of turning

sewage into cash.

For a few flickering moments of history, the Jones Island plant would

have seemed like a game changer: early successes at Jones Island signaled

exciting new possibilities for sanitation and agriculture; it was beginning

to look like large-scale sewage processing might very well succeed in

satiating commercial agriculture’s prodigious appetite for nitrates. But as

history would have it, this technology failed to revolutionize sanitation

and agricultural economies in the way some would have predicted. The

technology pioneered at Jones Island would not catch on like wildfire; in

342 Gorman, Hugh S. The Story of N: A Social History of the Nitrogen Cycle and the Challenge of Sustainability, 78.

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following years, few cities would wind up investing in sewage-to-fertilizer

treatment systems. The reason for this failure of proliferation is no

mystery: as it happened, the rise of waste treatment in the United States

coincided with another majorly transformative technological

development, one that changed the nature of industrial agriculture,

modern warfare, and the chemical ecology of the planet.

If you’re familiar with the Haber-Bosch process, you’ll know that this

extraordinary innovation single-handedly upended the global nitrogen

economy. By subjecting nitrogen and hydrogen gas to high heat and

pressure, the Haber-Bosch process offered a way to manufacture vast

quantities of ammonia, which could then be used in a range of

applications, from farming to weapons production. While other laboratory

techniques for producing ammonia had been developed in earlier years,

none were efficient enough to compete with existing nitrate resources on

an open market.343 This new technology, which was developed in

Germany—first by the chemist Fritz Haber, who invented a laboratory-

scale version of a high-pressure device, and then by the BASF employee

Carl Bosch, who devised ways of ramping up production so that the

process could be functional on an industrial scale—was capable of

producing ammonia cheaply enough to undercut global competition.

343 Ibid.

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Completed in 1914, Bosch’s first machine was capable of producing

198 pounds of ammonia per hour.344 In the years following its

development, the process was shrouded in secrecy, and the ammonia it

produced was primarily used to fuel the German war effort. Haber would

go on to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918 for “the synthesis of

ammonia from its elements,” and by the early 1920s, this new scientific

knowledge would slip out of German hands. Haber-Bosch facilities

appeared in France, England, and the United States, and lab-synthesized

ammonia started to flow cheaply around the world.

In a world without the Haber-Bosch process—a world where nitrate

fertilizer was scarce and the global hunger for nitrogen inputs depended

largely on dwindling supplies of South American reserves, which were

largely under British control—the Jones Island plant would have almost

certainly remained a cutting edge fertilizer production facility for years. In

such a world, it seems very likely that other American cities would have

adopted similar technology and implemented similar sewage-to-fertilizer

production facilities en masse. But in the world we live in, The Jones

Island plant was becoming obsolete even before it treated a single gallon

of wastewater. In an ammonia abundant economy, the steep investment

required to construct such a facility is unlikely to pay off. While the Jones

344 TFI Voice: The Blog of the Fertilizer. "Fertilizer History: The Haber-Bosch Process." 2014.

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Island plant would continue to produce and market its fertilizer product,

it would not inspire many other sewage treatment facilities to follow suit.345

But even in a world with the Haber-Bosch process—a world that has

been transformed by it in myriad ways—the dream of profiting off the

fertilizing capacity of sewage never completely died. The nineteenth-

century obsession with waste utilization has resurfaced more recently in

the guise of ecological modernization theory and sustainable energy

discourse. Given the fact that, as of today, Haber-Bosch facilities have

successfully processed half of all existing nitrogen atoms in developed

countries—meaning that, as I write this, half of all the nitrogen atoms in

my body have at some point passed through a Haber-Bosch processing

facility—it should come as no surprise that this tremendous reactive

capacity has come with a considerable price tag.346 Many blame the process

for a range of unintended consequences—including unsustainable

population growth, deteriorating soil quality, fertilizer runoff leading to

water pollution and eutrophication,347 which in turn has led to a sharp rise

345 Gorman, The Story of N. 346 Ritter, Steven K. "The Haber-Bosch Reaction: An Early Chemical Impact on Sustainability." Chemical and Engineering News 86, no. 33 (2008). 347 An excess of nutrients in the water can lead to algal blooms which deplete available oxygen for other aquatic life.

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in the number of oceanic dead zones.348 Furthermore, manufacturing

ammonia is an energy intensive enterprise that requires the consumption

of fossil fuels and contributes to climate change. Today, scientists hold out

hope that they will soon develop more energy efficient methods of

producing ammonia on a commercial scale. In the meantime, there are still

those that have faith in harnessing the value of sewage.

The past decade has seen a number of sewage-to-fertilizer treatment

facilities spring up across North America. In 2005, Ostara Nutrient

Recovery Technologies Inc. embarked on an ambitious plan to establish a

sewage recycling plant in Edmonton, Canada;349 the city of Detroit

approved a $683 million plan to build a “biosolids350 dryer facility” in

2013;351 the following year, the VitAg Corporation, a company specializing

in fertilizer production, secured over $100 million in financing to build a

biosolids-to-fertilizer plant in Zellwood, Florida;352 and the Blue Lake

348 Marine biologists use the term “dead zone” to refer to areas of the ocean affected by hypoxia (reduced oxygen levels in water). Low oxygen concentrations can result in total marine die-offs and the creation of dead zones, what are essentially oceanic deserts. 349 Mavinic, Don. "Sewage-to-Fertilizer Solution to Be Launched in Edmonton." Environmental Science & Engineering Magazine, 2006. 350 PR-speak for sewage sludge. 351 "Human Waste as Farming Fertilizer? Detroit May Become Top Producer of Dried 'Biosolids'." http://michiganradio.org/post/human-waste-farming-fertilizer-detroit-may-become-top-producer-dried-biosolids#stream/0. 352 "Vitag Closes on More Than $110 Million in Financing." Business Wire, 2014.

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Wastewater Treatment Plant in (appropriately named) Shakopee,

Minnesota, which is currently operational, processes wastewater from the

twin cities and produces an average of 32 dry tons of fertilizer each day.353

Even before these recent ventures, sewage sludge (those semi-solids

that remain after primary, secondary and tertiary treatment) has routinely

been outsourced to farms for fertilizing purposes. The extent to which this

sludging of edible crops is a menace to public health has been the source

of debate and occasionally public outrage. Sewage sludge typically arrives

on farms heat-dried (or “cured”) but otherwise untreated. Any hazardous

material that may have been flushed down toilets—heavy metals,

pharmaceuticals and other toxins—can easily seep back into the food

supply via the sludge. These newer treatment facilities all claim to

produce clean fertilizer product, but regardless of whether their fertilizers

are actually safe, these cities and companies will all bear the burden of

convincing citizens and investors that sewage-to-farm practices are

economically smart and ecologically sound. (PR management is always a

challenge for sewage-peddlers: whatever you want to call it—the yuck

factor, ick factor, etc.—the idea of sewage entering back into the nutrient

cycle will always gross some people out.)

353 "Blue Lake Biosolids Stabilization Facility". Water Design Build Council http://waterdesignbuild.com/water-design-build-projects/blue-lake-biosolids-stabilization-facility/.

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Of course people have used human waste as fertilizer long before there

were wastewater treatment plants. For much of human history, the use of

human excreta for fertilizer was the norm in many cultures.354 In China’s

Tai lake region, farmers still practice millennia-old fertilizing techniques:

residents store their urine and excrement in ceramic tanks and concrete

pits where they cultivate manure that they eventually use to fertilize their

crops.355 A group of Mexican farmers in the State of Hidalgo recently

objected to the development of a new wastewater treatment plant because

they feared they would lose access to the free-flowing wastewater that

trickled down from Mexico City’s sewage canal system, which they had

used as their primary fertilizer source for generations; (as one farmer put

it: “Without that water, there is no life.”)356

But despite the survival of these ancient techniques, and renewed

interest in sewage utilization in certain municipalities or segments of

industry, humanity is nowhere close to “closing the loop.” Sewage sludge

remains an essential byproduct of most any wastewater treatment process.

These residual semi-solids are disposed of in various ways—they can be

354 Esrey, Steven A., Ingvar Andersson, Astrid Hillers, Ron Sawyer. Closing the Loop: Ecological Sanitation for Food Security. Publications on Water Resources Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, 2000. 355 Wang, E.C. Ellis and S.M. "Sustainable Traditional Agriculture in the Tai Lake Region of China ". Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 61 (1997): 177-93. 356 Malkin, Elisabeth. "Fears That a Lush Land May Lose a Foul Fertilizer." The New York Times, 2010.

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dried, burned, applied to farmland, dumped in landfills or abandoned in

forests; here in the United States, it was legal to dump sewage sludge into

the ocean until 1992, when terms outlined in the Ocean Dumping Ban Act

of 1988 finally came into effect—but as a hazardous remainder, they will

always require special attention and care. As both material and as symbol,

sludge embodies many of the hopes, dreams and fears of humans living

today. Like any hazardous material, sludge inspires dread, incites debate,

spurs grassroots political action (the website www.sludgenews.org asks:

“Are you a sludge victim?” and provides a forum for sludge victims to

share their stories.) Meanwhile, recent research suggests that toxic sludge

contains significant quantities of gold and silver.357 A series of technological

challenges makes sludge mining an economically questionable pursuit,

but as you may have guessed, people are out there working the problem.

Where there are rumors of gold, there will always be prospectors, and the

dream of turning shit to gold never seems to die.

The Deep Blue Sewer

The development of flushing technologies in the late-nineteenth and

early-twentieth century set humanity on a certain course. Today, the

system is open: as waste treatment systems are currently designed,

357 Cornwall, Warren. "Sewage Sludge Could Contain Millions of Dollars Worth of Gold." Science, 2015.

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leftovers will always fall out of human-managed waste channels and into

the larger ecological channels that are beyond humanity’s direct control.

For such systems to function, there must always be an outlet, an opening,

an exit, a place beyond. Waste treatment facilities are also waste

producers, and they require mechanisms of releasing that waste back into

the outside world.

Very often “outside world” turns out to mean “large body of water,”

and anyone reading deeply into the history of waste treatment will

encounter the phrase “The solution to pollution is dilution” with

unrelenting frequency. The ubiquity of the phrase stems largely from the

fact that this misguided belief formed the basis of much failed sanitation

policy of the nineteenth century; the roots of the idea, however, stretch

back thousands of years. As we know, humans are magnificent polluters,

and in our ongoing attempt to rid our land-based habitats of undesirable

elements, humans have long treated oceans as dumpsters. Ancient Greeks

viewed the ocean as an “unclean element,” an acceptable site for a range

of polluting activities. Their sewer and drain systems (primarily designed

to convey storm and wastewater rather than sewage) often terminated in

oceans or rivers; citizens used seawater as a receptacle for household

waste, and polis authorities sometimes chose to symbolize their

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condemnation of disgraced politicians by throwing their jewels and

statues into the sea.358

Archeologists, geologists, and garbologists all know that ocean floors

are fascinating dumping grounds that contain deep (if incomplete) records

of past life. One (now slightly dated) study estimates that 10% of all ships

in the history of shipbuilding are still resting at the bottom of the sea.359

Approximately three million broken boats are still submerged today (less

than 1% of which have been explored by humans.)360 Along with wreckage,

the ocean floor is laden with riches—$60 billion worth of sunken treasure

all told.361 As MH370 searchers are learning the hard way, less than half of

one percent of the ocean floor has been mapped carefully enough to detect

objects smaller than a few meters in size.362 Notwithstanding the occasional

358 Lindenlauf, Astrid. "The Sea as a Place of No Return in Ancient Greece." World Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2003): 416-33. 359 See Uchupi, Kenneth Orris Emery and Elazar. The Geology of the Atlantic Ocean Soringer-Verlag, 1984, 886. 360 Bennett, Jay. "Less Than 1 Percent of the World's Shipwrecks Have Been Explored." Popular Mechanics, 2016. 361 Ibid. 362 Copley, Jon. "Just How Little Do We Know About the Ocean Floor?" Scientific American 2014.

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successful salvage operation363 (or stupidly lucky diver)364 these sunken

treasures will not be recovered anytime soon.

Human physiology is not designed for underwater survival;

nevertheless, for tens of millennia people have been drawn to the ocean

and have endeavored to penetrate its mysterious depths. Evidence of

deep-sea fishing dates back 42,000 years,365 and experts agree that humans

have been plunging breathlessly downward since 4500 BC, if not before.366

Early free divers learned to harvest valuable resources—crustaceans,

mollusks, pearls—from accessible sea floors. Ancient Greeks became

especially skilled at gathering sponges, which they used for a variety of

medical and domestic purposes.367 As early the 6th millennium BCE,

seafaring traders in the Persian Gulf had acquired sophisticated

shipbuilding skills and were using maritime routes to transport their

ceramic goods around the Middle East. Today, on the island of Crete,

dolphin and fish can still be seen swimming across the frescoes at the

363 Pappas, Stephanie. "Sunken Treasure Ship Worth Billions Possibly Found after 300 Years." Live Science, http://www.livescience.com/53027-sunken-treasure-ship-found.html. 364 Sangalang, Jennifer. "Fla. Family Finds $1m of Sunken Spanish Treasure." USA Today, 2015. 365 O’Connor, Sue, Rintaro Ono and Chris Clarkson. "Pelagic Fishing at 42,000 Years before the Present and the Maritime Skills of Modern Humans." Science 334, no. 25 (2011): 1117-21. 366 Marx, Robert F. Into the Deep. Ontario: Von Nostrand Reinhold Limited, 1978. 367 Ibid.

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palace of Minos at Knossos, (a replication of an original that dates back

3500 years.)

Despite this long history of oceanic adventuring, deep-sea exploration

is still a new frontier, and humans have much to learn about deep-water

environments. Casual observers often point out that humanity’s march

through time has broadly involved astronomic success and oceanic

failure: that Hubble-powered science allows humans to peer out toward

the origins of the universe at objects some 13 billion light years away,

while a Boeing 777 lost at sea eludes expert search teams for years on end

reveals a serious incongruity of expertise, and points to the conclusion

that we are still not very much more familiar with the specifics of our own

planet’s sea floor than those ancient sponge gatherers were.

But such characterizations are not entirely fair. The past few decades

have witnessed many new discoveries that have shed light on the nature

of oceanic depths. We now know that the ocean floor is largely abyssal

plane—flat, muddy, and dark—but that dispersed variously throughout

these deserts are remarkable feats of life.368 The deep sea is home to

booming microbial populations—bacteria, protists, archaea, and

unicellular fungi—which collectively constitute the majority of the ocean’s

368 Dover, Cindy Lee Van. The Ecology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

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biomass.369 And despite the deep sea’s generally homogenous

environment, its ecology is remarkably diverse: the deep sea provides

home to a stunning diversity of species (rivaling the diversity levels of

healthy tropical rainforests on land.)370 In the 1970s, scientists first

discovered deep-sea hydrothermal vents during a research expedition

along the Galápagos rift.371 Since then, scientists have observed wildly alien

vent communities blossoming on ocean floors all across the planet.

Headline-making species like red-tipped tube worms, hairy-clawed yeti-

crabs, and tiny heat loving shrimp who can survive temperatures

upwards of 700 degrees F have captivated the attention of marine

scientists and have led to serious theorizing that hydrothermal vents may

contain secrets about the origins of life on earth.372

The deep sea, like deep time or deep space, is a topic that naturally

invites cosmic musing. (In moments when I’m feeling especially worn

down by the drudgery of the work week, I sometimes Google “weirdest

369 Mitchell L. Sogin, Hilary G. Morrison, Julie A. Huber, David Mark Welch, Susan M. Huse, Phillip R. Neal,, and and Gerhard J. Herndl Jesus M. Arrieta. "Microbial Diversity in the Deep Sea and the Underexplored ‘‘Rare Biosphere,” PNAS 103, no. 32 (2006): 12115-20. 370 Dover, The Ecology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents, 8. 371 Mottle, HW Jannasch and MJ. "Geomicrobiology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents". Science 42, no. 2 (1985): 717-25. 372 Passary, Sumit. "Extreme Shrimp Thriving near Hydrothermal Vents May Hold Clues to Alien Life. Tech Times, 2014.

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sea creatures” and spend a few trippy minutes scoping out all the aliens.

Nothing packs a dose of primordial perspective quite like staring into the

jaws of a Fangtooth Fish…) Here in 2016, the deep sea makes headlines

regularly. (As I peruse the internet today, an article entitled “Deepest part

of the world’s ocean is incredibly noisy, scientists say” has some front

page real estate at cnn.com.)373 But despite the ocean’s exotic allure (or

perhaps in some ways because of it) it is still common for humans to treat

it—as the Ancient Greeks did—as an abstract “away-place,” a place of no

return.374 The ocean—which has become a dumpsite and graveyard for vast

arrays of life—is a wasteland (or, if you prefer, wastewater) par

excellence.375 If you visit the EPA’s website, you can click your way

through to an illuminating section entitled “What was Dumped into the

ocean before 1972?” (the year that the Marine Protection, Research and

Sanctuaries Act was passed.) The United States Government answers their

own question with a long list of examples: sewage, acid, various

373 Imam, Jareen. "Deepest Part of the World's Ocean Is Incredibly Noisy, Scientists Say." (2016). http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/05/world/deep-sea-audio-recording/?iid=ob_homepage_deskrecommended_pool&iref=obnetwork. 374 Lindenlauf, "The Sea as a Place of No Return in Ancient Greece." 375 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 53.

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petroleum products, toxic pulps, heavy metals, containers of radioactive

waste.376

I’m sure you’re already aware that today’s oceans are filled with trash

(5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris floating in our planet’s seas to date.)377

The Great Pacific garbage patch (sometimes called the Pacific trash

vortex), the world’s most epic accumulation of floatsam, has achieved a

rash of publicity over the past decade. The patch (roughly the size of

Turkey and growing each year) owes its existence to human appetite for

plastic and to the idiosyncratic rotational currents of the North Pacific

Gyre. At least one science writer has compared the gyre to a toilet bowl

that doesn’t flush.378 (What does not get flushed by the Gyre is a mixture of

microplastics, which may or may not even be visible to the eye, and larger

flotsam like shoes, bags, and fishing nets.)

So but in addition to being a garbage heap, the ocean is also a sewage

tank (the Latin exaquare, which gives us the English word “sewer,” means

“to carry away water” and in this sense the ocean is the great-grandaddy

376 "Learn About Ocean Dumping." US Environmental Protection Agency, https://www.epa.gov/ocean-dumping/learn-about-ocean-dumping. 377 Parker, Laura. "Ocean Trash: 5.25 Trillion Pieces and Counting, but Big Questions Remain." National Geographic, 2015. 378 Walton, Marsha. "The Pacific "Toilet Bowl That Never Flushes"." In CNN SciTechBlog, 2008.

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of all sewers.) Before the London Convention of 1972,379 there had been few

international agreements relating to ocean dumping of any kind;

accordingly ocean dumping was rampant, and largely uncontrolled across

the globe. Since then a series of measures at both national and

international levels have collectively worked to mitigate the problem of

ocean pollution, but problems obviously still persist. As I’ve noted

repeatedly, ocean dumping of raw sewage is a common practice today,

and cruise ships alone dump about a billion gallons of minimally treated

sewage into oceans ever year (not unlike old trains whose toilets would

empty directly onto the railroad tracks.)380

Along with harmful pathogens, sewage contains a mixture of minerals

and chemical nutrients that disturb the balance of oceanic ecosystems.

Coral reefs are particularly vulnerable, and sewage-related stressors have

caused dramatic deterioration in reefs across the world. When sewage

enters the ocean, it ferries in all sorts of agents that may be harmful to

aquatic populations: inorganic nutrients, metals, endocrine disruptors,

pathogens, solids and sediments.381 The interactions that occur when such

379 Also known as The Convention on the Protection of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter of 1972. 380 Guilford, Gwynn. "Cruise Ships Dump 1 Billion Gallons of Sewage into the Ocean Every Year." Quartz (2014). http://qz.com/308970/cruise-ships-dump-1-billion-tons-of-sewage-into-the-ocean-every-year/. 381 Thurber, Stephanie L. Wear and Rebecca Vega. "Sewage Pollution: Mitigation Is Key for Coral Reef Stewardship." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1355 (2015): 15-30.

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strange brews flow through reefs are as yet poorly understood, but initial

evidence suggests these encounters are plainly detrimental to coral

health.382

The infamous “106-mile dumpsite” in the NW Atlantic—a stretch of

deep water used by New York and New Jersey as a dumping zone for 42

million wet tons of sludge—is one of the most studied ocean dumpsites to

date.383 A crude summary of these research conclusions might read: the

solution for pollution is NOT dilution. When you dump toxic sludge into

the deep ocean, it does not evenly disperse into nothingness. Much of it

sinks to the bottom, mixes in with seafloor sediments, and becomes snack

food for rapidly multiplying species of benthic polychaete worms.384

Marine biologists have come to view abundances of such worms as

indicators of pollution, and demise of healthy benthic ecologies.

My goal here is not to bullet point the environmental consequences of

sewage outfalls or sludge dumps—hundreds if not thousands of sources

already document these problems in excruciating detail. What continues

382 Ibid. 383 Robertson, A. Offshore Disposal - Results of the 106-Mile Dumpsite Study: Water Column and Sediment Fates. Oxford: Taylor & Francis, 1997. 384 Bothner, M.H., H. Takada, I.T. Knight , R.T. Hill, B. Butman, J.W. Farrington, R.R. Colwell, and J.F. Grassle. "Sewage Contamination in Sediments beneath a Deep-Ocean Dump Site Off New York." Marine Environmental Research 38, no. 1: 43-59.

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to interest me are the ways in which flushing processes mediate

humanity’s relationship with the so-called natural world. How did these

techniques become integrated into our daily lives? How have historical

forces influenced their development, and how have they come to alter

humanity’s relationship with nonhuman elements? Flushing processes

that begin inside toilet bowls always bleed outward for a time, but tides

eventually turn, and the residual consequences of flushing literally and

figuratively cloud the waters flowing along so-called nature-culture

divides.

De Landa reminds us that “Culture is not a completely separate sphere

of reality, but instead mixed with flows of organic (and even mineral)

materials.”385 Flushing media—including toilets, sewers, wastewater filters

and other treatment systems—operate in the border zones between

environment and culture. Like water swirling in a glass or waves crashing

against a beach, these border zones are always in motion. Their precise

contours are impossible to pin down; nevertheless, these zones contain

clues about what it means to human in the modern world.

“The notion of flushing contains a peculiarly modern aspect; it throws

up associations with newness and motion, not to say the very fluidity of

385 De Landa, 111.

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modern life.”386 To flush and filter matter is to break it down beyond the

limits of human perception, to relegate it to a realm of existence that

borders on the status of immaterial. Flushing humans are trained in a

process of “strategic forgetting,” a process which operates through social

reflex and technical division.387 The word shit has an etymological affinity

with words like science, scissors, and discern, all of which have to do with

the idea of separation and demarcation; flushing media extend the process

of biological detachment through exteriorization and mechanization. The

memory of flushed materials recedes from human consciousness, but

waste matter never completely disappears. The consequences of flushing

are always hovering at the perimeter.

Invisible Backgrounds

A majority of the Combined Sewer Systems in the United States—older

sewers that collect rainwater and sewage in a single pipe; the sewers that

are responsible for Combined Sewer Overflows—are today cluttered

around the Great Lakes.388 I happen to live smack dab in the middle of this

dense arrangement of CSSs. My home is located between two cities (Erie,

PA and Dunkirk, NY) that every so often discharge large volumes of raw 386 Scanlan, Valuing Disorder, 226. 387 Ibid. 388 The rust belt is also a sewage belt, it turns out.

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sewage into Lake Erie. Even with modern treatment systems in place,

these systems will reach their max capacity during big snow melts or

excessive rain, and in these moments sanitation authorities have no other

recourse but to release thousands of gallons of untreated sewage directly

into the lake.389

Figure 6: National Distribution of CSSs

Source: "Report to Congress: Combined Sewer Overflows into the Great Lakes Basin." Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Wastewater Management, 2016.

389 According to the EPA’s report to congress, Erie, PA had 7 “untreated events” in 2014.

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My commute to work offers several sweeping views of Lake Erie. On

clearer, sunnier days, the lake takes on a turquoise, almost tropical hue (if

you didn’t happen to know that you were on the road to Erie or Buffalo,

you might mistake this little stretch of I-90 for someplace far more

glamorous) and occasionally on my drive to or from work I’ll look out at

the lake and ponder what’s happening beneath the water’s surface. In

hours or days or weeks, somewhere along this coast, outfall pipes will let

loose floods of effluent into these waters. Much of the time this effluent

will be treated—were it not for this regular process of treatment, I doubt

I’d be seeing quite so many boats out on the water as I do today, nor

would I see quite so many signs for Lake Erie Perch at local BBQ stands

during the warmer months—but in those moments when, by necessity,

these discharges are untreated, the lake undergoes a sort of

transformation: it becomes, in the words of one staff writer for The Buffalo

News, “a 241-mile-wide-toilet.”390

These sanitation systems in place along Lake Erie are generally

representative of the sanitation situation in the United States today. No

one likes the idea of dumping sewage into the lake, but for many cash-

strapped cities replacing old infrastructure is out of the question, so they

continue to make do with the systems they have in place. Stretching back

390 Pignataro, T.J. "Heavy Rains Turn Lake Erie into a Toilet." The Buffalo News, 2013.

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to the nineteenth century, the development of sewage management and

sewage treatment science has been motivated by one of two utopian

visions: the fantasy of creating a world without waste, and the dream of

relegating waste to a place far, far away. Neither pole is even remotely

attainable, and both obscure humanity’s embeddedness within larger

ecological regimes.

Recently, as I was doing some reading about waste in Ancient Greece, I

came across a reference to an obscure Cypriot vase painting dating back to

the eighth century BCE, which depicts a boat creature, perhaps a human,

defecating overboard into the mouth of a hungry fish.391 Also recently, in

an effort to learn more about an illegal sewage dump that occurred a few

years ago in a creek near my home, I found myself perusing a local Topix

thread entitled “Raw Sewage in the Gorge?” This forum had just three

brief contributions: “taxpayer” from Dunkirk NY, wrote “Gross!”; a user

named “Stripes” posted “Who cares”; and Don from Depew, NY simply

observed: “fish food.”392

This weird wormhole between the ancient Cypriot vase painter and

Don from Depew offers a gentle reminder that humans haven’t changed

all that much over time. The vase painting, which deals with the idea of

391 Lindenlauf, "The Sea as a Place of No Return in Ancient Greece." 392 If the link still lives, see: http://www.topix.com/forum/city/westfield-ny/TPB3V97EPTKC909LK.

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waste utilization as well as waste removal, foreshadows modern

sanitation concerns by almost three thousand years. Humans puzzling

over the idea of waste is clearly nothing new. What has changed are the

techniques for managing waste, the scale of human operations, and the

environments in which we live.

“The most salient characteristic” of modern technology, Paul Edward

observes, “is the degree to which most technology is not salient for most

people, most of the time.”393 McLuhan gets at a similar idea when he quips

that fish know nothing of water. Infrastructure functions like an “invisible

background,” a technological substrate that enables certain possibilities

while obstructing others.394 Such embeddedness allows humans to flourish,

but also leaves us vulnerable to significant dangers.

Here in the rustbelt, many cities will be stuck with their CSSs for years

and decades to come. Such is the nature of infrastructure: even if it’s

outdated or occasionally fails, it does not easily disappear. Infrastructure

is recalcitrant: it results from complex interactions that unfold over

considerable periods of time; it fights its way into the world, and fiercely

resists replacement. Infrastructure is a commitment in both the active and

passive sense: it involves elements of committing and of being committed to. 393 Edwards, Paul N. "Infrastructure and Modernity: Scales of Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems." edited by Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, 185-225. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 185. 394 Ibid, 191.

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Societies commit to developing specific infrastructures; individuals are

committed (as psychiatric patients are committed) to specific social,

cultural, psychic, technological and environmental conditions.

Flushing media can be set into motion by individuals, but they

inevitably engage processes that are beyond the control of even the most

elaborate technical systems. No matter how advanced wastewater

treatment facilities become, they are still dependent on processes of

biodegradation whose speeds and scales create trouble for human

operators. For better or worse, there is no way to get out from under

nature. Large technical systems are always constrained by larger, more

elemental infrastructures, in the end.

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CHAPTER 5 FLUSHING THE BODY

The Body’s Sewer

If the sequencing of previous chapters has followed a sort of linear

conceptual progression, beginning with the development of flush toilet

technology, moving on to the mass marketing of toilets and then finally to

the topic of wastewater treatment—loosely following the path that septic

waste must take as it passes through technical infrastructures and back

into the so-called natural world—the end of this study brings us, in a

strange way, back to the beginning, or even back to before the beginning,

back to before waste is passed off to pipes, back to the original

wastemaker itself, the body.395 My discussion still focuses on the United

States around the turn of the twentieth century—but as opposed to the

previous chapters, the technologies and techniques I examine here are not

directly connected to the nation’s broader septic infrastructure—at least

not in a concrete, material way. Instead, this chapter traces some of the

ways that body flushing techniques of the period can be viewed as 395 Readers who have made it this far may have expected this chapter to have begun as others have: in the first-person, with an essayistic recounting of some personal memory, a light anecdote designed to segue into more serious matters of history and theory—an entrée into the chapter’s primary intellectual concerns. Alas, my reservoir of personal experience will not help me set the stage this time around. The chapter you are about to read focuses on the idea of colonic flushing—which means, basically, that I’ll be writing about enemas —but since I have never received an enema, neither administered nor even witnessed the administering of one, I am in no position to offer apposite personal testimony here.

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extensions, continuations, or symptoms of the larger matrix of flushing

activity that was developing during this same period of time.396

At the precise moment when flush toilets and wastewater treatment

systems were becoming common in cities across the United States, new

scientific awareness and shifting attitudes about the dangers of human

waste helped precipitate a nationwide fad in colonic cleanse therapy. The

force largely responsible for propelling this interest in colonic hygiene was

the fear of autointoxication, a disease theory that arose in the wake of

bacteriology and which claimed that the source of most (if not all) human

disease could be traced directly to putrefactive processes unfolding within

the intestinal canal. Promoters of the theory believed that decomposing

matter packed in the colon could, under certain festering conditions, seep

out of the digestive tract and contaminate other parts of the body. The

theory held, in other words, that faulty biological design caused the

human body to poison itself.

Autointoxication theory did not materialize out of nowhere. Since

antiquity, humans have expressed suspicions about the toxicity of 396 For style and for simplicity, I will use the terms enema, colonic irrigation, and body flushing quasi-interchangeably. Strictly speaking, an enema is an anal syringe procedure that tends to use little water and injects liquid into only a limited portion of the bowel; colonic irrigation offers a full-on drenching of the colon (usually for a sustained period of time). “Flushing the colon” was a term commonly employed among nineteenth-century hygienists to describe a colonic irrigation process. For more on this distinction, see Sullivan-Fowler, Micaela. "Doubtful Theories, Drastic Therapies: Autointoxication and Faddism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries." The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 364-90.

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intestinal contents. Physicians of ancient Egypt theorized that disease

could arise from excremental decay; Hippocrates suggested that disease

was related to the byproducts of partially digested food.397 A clear

precursor to autointoxication theory emerged in the eighteenth century

when Johann Kampf introduced the doctrine of infarctus, which

attributed disease to fecal impaction, and encouraged widespread enema

use in France.398

But autointoxication put a modern spin on these suspicions by

incorporating germs into the conceptual scheme. The proof of the

existence of microscopic pathogens convinced some members of the

medical establishment that bacteria-laden fecal channels were responsible

for breeding disease inside the human body. The first articulations of

autointoxication theory appeared in German in the late 1860s, but the

theory’s breakout moment occurred in France two decades later when

Charles Bouchard published Leçons sur les auto-intoxications dans les

maladies.399 Bouchard’s chapters on the toxicity of urine, blood, and

intestinal contents describe a human body under assault. He envisions the

body as a kind of horribly toxic container, claiming that every human

397 Sullivan-Fowler, 365. 398 Ibid. 399 Noll, Richard. "Historical Review: Autointoxication and Focal Infection Theories of Dementia Praecox." The World of Biological Psychiatry 5, no. 2 (2004): 66-72.

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being is “always working toward his own destruction.”400 According to this

view, human survival depended on the body’s ongoing ability to rid itself

of internal poisons through various evacuative mechanisms.

As these ideas proliferated, people sought ways to combat the evils of

autointoxication, and during their search for a cure, many became

convinced that enemas could be used to eliminate poisons from within the

body. If colons were the source of sickness, it seemed logical that colonic

irrigation—a procedure that targeted the nucleus of the perceived

problem—could prove successful in removing disease before it spread. By

the end of the nineteenth century, rhetoric about the health benefits of

“internal hygiene” spurred significant demand for enema products

throughout the United States and Britain. This chapter explores this rather

unusual moment in technological history, a moment when the

development of techniques for flushing waste from homes, buildings and

cities happens to coincide with a rising interest in flushing the human

body.

Philipp Sarasin has shown how nineteenth-century hygienists

conceived of the human body as a “medium-machine,” a conception that

was rooted in the medial a priori of telegraphic communication.401 The

400 Bouchard, Charles. Leçons Sur Les Auto-Intoxications Dans Les Maladies. 1887. 401 Sarasin, Phillipp. "The Body as Medium: Nineteenth-Century European Hygiene Discourse." Grey Room 29: 48-65.

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arrival of the telegraph changed the way that hygienists imagined the

functioning of the nervous system, and hygienic discourse invoked

telegraphic metaphors in an effort to explain brain anatomy. Cable

networks offered a compelling conceptual model, and hygienists began to

imagine that neural pathways were channelers of sensation, thought, and

human will. The brain appeared to be just “one apparatus among many

others” and the nervous system began to look like “a much more complex

network than the term central organ ever allowed.”402

I view the body flushing techniques of this period as an outgrowth of

broader technogenetic developments, and explore how emerging flushing

infrastructures of the mid-late nineteenth century constitute the technical

and medial a priori for turn-of-the-century colonic flushing practices.

Indoor plumbing had a significant effect on the way that people

understood their digestive functions. The introduction of flushing toilets

and sewers, which encouraged imaginings of continuously flushing urban

systems—cities with self-cleansing technical bowels capable of purifying

themselves from within—invited new ways of thinking about the body.

Sewers were to intestines as telegraphs were to brains. As bodies

increasingly interacted with flushing technologies, as digestive processes

extended outward from colons through toilets into sewers and beyond, it

402 Sarasin, 62.

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became increasingly possible to imagine the body itself as an instrument

which required flushing treatment.

Were it not for the emergence of flush plumbing, the enthusiasm for

colonic flushing would not have gained the momentum that it did. This

chapter traces connections between the flush plumbing and colonic

flushing in certain strains of nineteenth-century hygienic discourse. In

developing my analysis, I focus my attention on the life and works of

Charles Alfred Tyrrell—a writer, quack physician, and peddler of bogus

medical devices—who was one of the period’s more emphatic exponents

of autointoxication theory. I take a close look at his pseudoscientific

medical writings (which are, in effect, thinly veiled sales pitches for his

company’s enema equipment) in an effort to tease out some of the social

and cultural forces that helped define this historical moment.

I approach Tyrrell not as a major shaper of history but as someone

whose ideas and work embody particular cultural phenomena and whose

legacy helps us better understand the development of flushing in the west.

The theory of autointoxication and the corresponding trend in colonic

irrigation reflect, in one way, increased anxiety about septic processes. In

another way, these developments can be seen as permutations of the

civilizing process that I explore in Chapter 3. Intensified feelings of bodily

disgust combined with knowledge (and ignorance) about the nature of

pathogenic bacteria contributed to shifting attitudes about the body’s

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interior. Those who believed in autointoxication were confronting a new

kind of terror: their fears stemmed not just from the fact that waste is

repulsive and dangerous upon its expulsion from the body, but much

more terrifyingly, because it now appeared that these waste products

constituted a kind of deadly sleeper cell lurking menacingly within the

body and undermining health at all times.

As I’ve mentioned, the history of enema administration is long, and

over the course of many centuries, enemas have been used to deliver a

variety of substances (including tobacco smoke, coffee, beer, honey, holy

water, and poison) into rectal cavities across the globe. Enemas are

prominently (and sometimes erotically) featured in seventeenth and

eighteenth century paintings, and medical treatises published during this

same period recommend their use as treatment for a range of conditions.403

But colonic cleansing techniques of the nineteenth century emerge from a

very different cultural and technological circumstance; the forces shaping

their development are in some ways distinct from those of previous eras.

In his well known essay on “Techniques of the Body,” Marcel Mauss

examines the ways in which specific body actions like washing, digging,

sitting, walking, running, and swimming result from a kind of cultural,

psychological, and biological entrainment, a complex shaping process that

403 See Dixon, Laurinda S. "Some Penetrating Insights: The Imagery of Enemas in Art." Art Journal (1993).

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educates the body in the precise execution of certain moves. While my

exploration of body flushing will not attempt to excavate the genesis of

body rhythms in quite the same way, I share Mauss’ interest in the

“physio-psycho-sociological assemblages” that contribute to the

realization of particular techniques.404 The nineteenth-century craze for

colonic irrigation is a curious phenomenon, and this chapter sets out to

explore how and why it took form the way it did.

The Royal Road to Health

Even without accessories or attachments, the human body is a

remarkably capable flushing device. From the moment of birth and even

before, bodies are self-contained knowledge systems: they know what

they need, what they don’t, what they would prefer to invite inside, and

what substances they must reject at any cost. The body welcomes

nutrients and targets toxins for deportation. And regardless of whether

toxins originate within the body (endogenous) or enter in from the outside

(exogenous), the body has built-in mechanisms for flushing them out.

The primary toxin-flushing channels are intestinal and urinary (livers

and kidneys are essential intermediaries in these processes); trace

quantities of toxins are also expelled through sweat. Our brains possess a

dedicated poison monitor, the area postrema, which triggers a

404 Mauss, Marcel. "Techniques of the Body." (1934), 85.

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regurgitative response (vomit) if/when it detects dangerously high toxin

levels circulating in our blood. While certain body cleansing techniques

like hand washing and teeth brushing have been proven to benefit our

health, there is no credible scientific data to support the idea that

techniques for internal cleansing, such as colonic irrigation, are in any way

effective in flushing toxins from our systems. Healthy diet and exercise

help the body run clean, but bodies are naturally configured to flush

unwanted material all by themselves, without special care.

Had Charles Alfred Tyrrell any faith in the body’s ability to flush itself,

his life may have wound up taking a much different course. To be fair, it’s

difficult for us to know how seriously Tyrrell took himself or his own

ideas—existing biographical data is scarce—but if we are to take his own

words at face value or infer anything from the fact that he spent decades

researching and promoting colonic irrigation procedures, we might

assume that this man on some level believed in the salutary value of the

“internal bath”; at the very least, we can conclude that he was, for

whatever reasons, a man obsessed with enemas. In a series of books and

articles, Tyrrell stylizes himself as an adventurer-entrepreneur, a native

Englishman who travelled far and wide (Japan, India, China, Australia,

New Zealand, South Africa) and who suffered debilitating illness before

discovering the extraordinary benefits of colonic flushing. He describes

his arrival in New York City in 1887 or 1889 after traveling for several

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years in the far east.405 Broke, dispirited, paralyzed on his left side, he

claims to have been briefly hospitalized before being introduced to the

treatment that would change his life: “Just at this critical juncture, the

wonderful curative virtues of the flushing treatment were brought to my

notice…the result was magical.”406

There is every reason to be skeptical of Tyrrell’s own account. Records

clearly show that he claimed to be an MD years before he ever earned a

medical degree; he also claimed to have invented his patented enema—

“the J.B.L [Joy, Beauty, Life] Cascade”—when in fact he obtained the

patent from another inventor, Henry M. Guild.407 But the extent of his

fibbing, quackery, or charlatanism has limited bearing on the details of my

analysis. In the pages that follow, I am ultimately more concerned with

the character of Tyrrell’s ideas—where they came from, what they

reveal—than with the substance of his medical advice. Even if Tyrrell was

a liar and a fraud, his writing throws light on the cultural-technical

situation that gave rise to his business—and these are the very conditions

that have been the focal point of my study all along.

405 His accounts vary. In Tyrrell, Charles A. "The History of the Internal Bath ". The Art World 3, no. 4 (1918), he reports the date as. 1887 in the History of the Internal Bath. In Tyrrell, Charles A. "The What, the Why, the Way of Internal Baths." edited by Tyrrell's Hygienic Institute, 1916, he reports 1889. 406 Tyrrell, "The What, the Why, the Way of Internal Baths,” 9. 407 Sullivan-Fowler, 381.

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Tyrrell published the first edition of his magnum opus, The Royal Road

to Health, or The Secret to Health without Drugs in 1894, and in the following

decades, it generated sufficient readership to sustain its publication

through at least 260 editions.408 The book, which offers a blend of fake

science, personal testimony, and musings about health and nature,

purports to be a treatise on the subject of healthy living, but is ultimately

just an elaborate piece of promotional material for Tyrrell’s Hygienic

Institute, the supplier of the J.B.L Cascade. Tyrrell’s motives are as

transparent as his claims are absurd; he’s a shameless hyperbolist and his

declarations are amusingly over-the-top. But even if his arguments are

difficult to swallow, his message is carefully crafted and relentlessly

consistent, and his skills as a promoter are evident both in his flamboyant

rhetorical style and in his habit of wielding scientific jargon in the service

of “common sense” appeals.

Nothing if not a passionate businessman, never hesitant to proclaim

the greatness of his product, Tyrrell promises his readers that his patented

J.B.L Cascade is effective in treating an astonishing range of maladies and

conditions (e.g. erysipelas, dyspepsia, rheumatism, typhoid, bilious fever,

dystentery [though this treatment requires a “fountain attachment”],

headaches, dropsy, appendicitis, diabetes, milk fever, liver and skin

408 I’m working mainly with the 260th edition, published in 1920, though I’ve spent time with the 240th edition and the 28th edition.

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disease, pneumonia, gonorrhea, obesity, uterine displacement, paralysis,

constipation, “lost manhood,” common colds, etc.)409 Encouraging

everyone to take in a steady of diet of nature’s purifying ingredients—

“pure water, sunlight, fresh air, diet and exercise”—he also maintains that

any prescription for ill-health must include a routine practice of “flushing

the colon.”410 No matter how intestinally irrelevant the condition might

seem to you or I, Tyrrell insists on the curative capacity of colonic

flushing:

“During pregnancy the ‘Cascade’ and Antiseptic Tonic should be regularly used twice a week by which means the absorption of the poisonous waste matters of the system into the circulation is avoided, and the future health of the infant assured.”411 “The regular use of the ‘Cascade,’ perfect rest, strict attention to diet, and judicious massage has been very helpful in ataxia.”412 “Hernia or Rupture — is the escape of some portion of the viscera through an abnormal opening and takes its particular name from the locality in which the protusion occurs, although the inguinal is the most common form…The treatment is obvious—use the ‘Cascade’ faithfully…”413

409 Tyrrell, Charles A. The Royal Road to Health or the Secret of Health without Drugs. 260 ed. New York: Tyrrell's Hygienic Institute, 1920. 410 Ibid., 71. 411 Ibid., 208-209. 412 Ibid., 208. 413 Ibid., 200.

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“Diseases of the Skin — These usually have their origin in constipation, therefore the first thing to be done is to relieve this condition of the colon by daily use of the ‘Cascade’ and Antiseptic Tonic.”414 “Cholera Infantum — is a disease that can be easily cured by flushing the colon, using a double quantity of the Antiseptic Tonic in the water. It is purely a disease of the alimentary canal, consequently, cleansing that passage affords relief.”415 “Sore Nipples — Do not require anything but a little cream or olive oil applied to them, with occasional applications of cold, wet cloths when they are hot and painful, and occasional fomentations when they are cracked and sore—but do not fail to ‘flush the colon.’”416

Should an infant experience convulsions, Tyrrell recommends that you

“Get the little sufferer into a hot bath as quickly as possible…Next, direct

your attention to the bowels.”417 When confronting a case of measles, “The

first thing to be done is to bring out the rash, which is quickly done, by

flushing the colon.”418 The solution to alcohol abuse? “First get the alcohol

out of the system by flushing the colon daily.”419 Hemorrhoids? “First

empty the colon using the ‘Cascade’ and the Antiseptic Tonic, thus

414 Ibid., 181. 415 Ibid., 214. 416 Ibid., 209. 417 Ibid., 15. 418 Ibid., 214. 419 Ibid., 201.

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removing the cause, then the inflammation will subside…”420 Epilepsy?

“Remove the accumulation in the colon with the ‘Cascade’ and the

Antiseptic Tonic.” Peritonitis? “Flush the colon vigorously.”421

To bolster these claims, Tyrrell provides testimonials and reports from

doctors and patients—both in The Royal Road to Health and in additional

promotional materials—who testify to the remarkable healing power of

his flushing products. One J.B.L. Cascade advertisement from 1897

includes an excerpt from a letter purportedly written by Newark’s Police

Commissioner: “Your Cascade is a marvel. The most perfect appliance for

‘flushing’ ever dreamed of”; the same ad quotes a Mr. A.A. Bennett from

North Attleboro, Mass, who calls the Cascade “one of the greatest

blessings to man.”422 Another promotional pamphlet, which dedicates

several continuous pages to reviews and endorsements, offers further

enthusiastic descriptions: “a godsend”; “works like a charm”; “no money

could induce me to part with it”; “It is perfection. Any other word comes

short of a real description, or praise.”423

420 Ibid., 193-194. 421 Ibid., 183. 422 Forest, William E. The New Method in Certain Chronic Diseases Ad Other Cases, a Guide to Hope Treatment of the Sick 12 ed. New York: The Health Culture Co., 1897, 296. 423 Tyrrell, "The What, the Why, the Way of Internal Baths.” (No page number).

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The extravagance of these declarations would eventually attract the

attention of the mainstream medical establishment, and in time, Tyrrell

became an obvious target for the American Medical Association’s (AMA)

fraud awareness campaign. One 1912 article in the Journal of the American

Medical Association (JAMA) denounced the Cascade as a “piece of pseudo

medical claptrap,”424; a few years later, another JAMA article condemned

Tyrrell's medical philosophy as “bizarre and fantastic to the point to

silliness.”425 Tyrrell would never publish in legitimate medical journals and

would always conduct his business outside the confines of major medical

institutions. To this day, the AMA archives maintains a file on Tyrrell’s

Hygienic Institute in their Historical Health Fraud and Alternative

Medicine Collection in Chicago.

But even in the face of negative publicity, the Cascade continued to sell

at considerable cost,426 and after experiencing business failure earlier in his

career, Tyrrell died a wealthy man.427 How are we to make sense of his

success? What blend of forces contributed to this enthusiasm for enemas?

424 "Propaganda for Reform." The Journal of American Medical Association 58, no. 3 (1912), 213. 425 "Propaganda for Reform." The Journal of American Medical Association 88, no. 1 (1917), 50. 426 6 bucks a unit in 1898, plus an additional buck for the fountain attachment. Tyrrell, Charles A. "The What, the Why, the Way of Internal Baths." 427 Sullivan-Fowler, “Doubtful Theories.”

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Tyrrell was a gifted salesman certainly, but in a moment where civilizing

forces were continuing to take hold in the west, a period when the

discussion of ‘natural functions’ were still very much taboo, savvy

salesmanship alone cannot explain the rising popularity of an instrument

as vulgar as an anal syringe.

Clearly, a combination of factors precipitated its use. As I’ve already

suggested, the fear of autointoxication, new awareness about the

importance of hygiene and the danger of germs all contributed to the

Cascade’s appeal. The concept of colonic irrigation may have additionally

tapped into people’s natural (if repressed) fascination with bodily

processes (this may have been especially the case among women who

were interested in demystifying their own physiology.)428 The Cascade

also afforded new opportunities for sexual stimulation, which likely

served as a subtextual selling point.429

But in addition to these factors, the trend in body flushing should be

viewed in terms of the larger sociotechnical shifts that accompanied the

rise of flushing technology generally. For one, enema administration is a

private matter, and the newly pervasive private water closets that arose as

part of emerging flushing infrastructures provided convenient safe spaces

428 Ibid., 377. 429 On a number of occasions, Tyrrell recommends that stroking areas around groin during the use of the cascade. See Sullivan-Fowler, “Doubtful Theories.”

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for use of the Cascade. Even more importantly, however, the development

of flushing technologies influenced attitudes about waste and

purification—ideas that significantly affected the way that people

perceived their relationship with the so-called natural world. Tyrrell, who

was clearly in tune with these shifts, consistently conceptualized the body

and body flushing in terms of mechanical or natural processes.

Such frameworks are built into Tyrrell’s rhetorical strategy from the

very beginning. Early in The Royal Road, as he lays groundwork for his

argument, Tyrrell compares the human body to a home with indoor

plumbing. “If the principle drain in a dwelling becomes choked,” he asks,

“what is the consequence?”430 Perpetuating the logic of miasma theory, he

goes on to describe a home engulfed with pestilential gas, a home whose

drains are clogged, whose atmosphere is poisoned, and whose inhabitants

continually spread contagion to one another. Such a home is a danger to

itself and its occupants; however, it is pointless to disinfect such a home,

Tyrrell argues, “until the drain is clear.”431 Calling the colon the “main

drain of the human body,” he extrapolates accordingly: “…if it be

necessary, for sanitary reasons, to keep the house drains clean, how vitally

430 Tyrrell, The Royal Road To Health, 29. 431 Ibid., 30.

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important is it to keep the main outlet of the physical system free from

obstructions.”432

He immediately goes on to compare the human body to another

domestic mechanical system: a coal stove. Though the stove metaphor is

not quite as effective or precise as the drain metaphor, the logic he applies

is essentially similar: if a coal stove burns for long enough, it will

eventually become clogged with ashes; when these ash accumulations

reach a certain critical mass, it becomes necessary to “dump the grate.”

Taking no chance that this metaphor might be lost on his readers, Tyrrell

hammers home the point: “The moral is obvious; dump the grate of the

human system—in other words, empty the colon.”433

Elsewhere Tyrrell refers to the colon as “the physiological sewer”;434 he

also describes the body as “a living machine”435 and a “wonderfully

complex piece of mechanism.”436 At one point he compares the inner-

workings of the digestive system to the gears of a mechanical watch,

remarking that “The presence of a grain of sand in a watch will retard its

movements, if not arrest them altogether. What, then, must be the result of 432 Ibid. 433 Ibid. 434 Ibid., 41. 435 Ibid., 70. 436 Ibid., 144.

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an accumulation of impurities in the physical system?”437 In characterizing

the body in machinic terms, Tyrrell channels thinkers like René Decartes

and Julien Offray de La Mettrie, whose mechanistic physiology influenced

so much nineteenth-century philosophy; at the same time, Tyrrell is

dialing into the particularities of his own technical surroundings, which

notably included massive new plumbing infrastructures, then only a few

years old. In his attempt to explain the science of digestion, Tyrrell

naturally thinks in terms of sewers and drains. The very idea of “flushing

the colon,” the conceptual centerpiece of The Royal Road, develops out of a

consciousness that is saturated in the context of preexisting flushing

technology.

Enema technology may be ancient, but it does not appear that ancients

conceived of this treatment as a form of flushing. (My research has not

been exhaustive, but thus far I’ve found no evidence that “flushing the

colon” was a concept prior to the nineteenth century.) Regardless of

whether the concept of body flushing predates the nineteenth-century

revolution in flush plumbing, there is no question that idea of flushing is a

foundational component of Tyrrell’s philosophy. Over the course of The

Royal Road, the word flushing appears two dozen times; Tyrrell explicitly

conceives of the body as a poisonous repository in need of constant

flushing attention. Not unlike Edwin Chadwick’s dream of a continuously

437 Ibid., 15.

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flushing sewer system, a system designed to flush out “accumulation and

corruption,” Tyrrell views colonic flushing as the key to eliminating

corrupt elements from within the human body.438

Tyrrell’s ideas are not original—far from it. In fact, he openly borrows

the concept of colonic flushing from Dr. A. Wilford Hall, whose pamphlet,

Dr. A. Wilford Hall's Hygienic Treatment for the Cure of Disease, Preservation

of Health and the Promotion of Longevity Without Medicine was published in

Canada in 1890. If you glance at both texts, you will not need to engage in

close reading or discourse analysis to see that The Royal Road is in many

ways a mere repackaging of Hall’s ideas. The arguments and rationale for

flushing treatment, the explanation of the procedure, the review of

possible applications and anticipation of possible objections—all the basic

features of The Royal Road—are present and fully formed in Hall’s

pamphlet. Several of the examples and descriptions are nearly identical,

and Tyrrell even goes so far as to include a print of the human digestive

tract directly after the title page of The Royal Road, which is precisely

where Hall included a very similar diagram in his pamphlet a few years

before.

Hall also compared colon flushing to sewer flushing. Harboring

familiar miasmic suspicions, Hall describes a clogged sewer whose air

seeps perniciously up into the home: “To purify the residence the sewer

438 Chadwick, “Report on Sanitary Conditions,” 228.

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below should be flushed till the passageway is clear to its very outlet.” By

that same logic, he argues that “flushing the colon through mechanical or

hydraulic means” can remove clogs and “free the colon of its putrid

contents.”439 (For advocates of colonic flushing, it seems that the sewer

comparison was too good to pass up—Alcinous B. Jamison, another writer

and physician associated with Tyrrell’s Hygienic Institute, advises in 1901

that “Evacuation should be accomplished twice a day…thus obtaining a

good daily flushing of one’s sewer.”)440

While Hall and Tyrrell conceptualize human physiology in technical

terms, they also seem convinced that technologies and techniques

somehow have the ability to bring humans into closer alignment with

nature. The idea that colonic flushing is essentially “natural” turns out to

be one of the central themes of both Hall’s pamphlet and The Royal Road.

Hall concludes his pamphlet by responding to skeptics who may regard

the procedure as “contrary to nature ”:

To object to this flushing process on the ground that it is contrary to nature, and that it casts discredit upon the wisdom of the Creator, is superstitious nonsense. It is no more contrary to nature than the artificial use of cathartics or emetics, the use of spectacles, ear-trumpets, artificial teeth, cork legs or crutches for the lame.

439 Hall, Wilford. "Dr. A. Wilford Hall's Hygienic Treatment for the Cure of Disease, Preservation of Health and the Promotion of Longevity without Medicine.” Toronto: The Simpson Publishing Company, 1890, 20. 440 Jamison, Alcinous B. Intestinal Ills. New York: Tyrrell's Hygienic Institute, 1919, 207.

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It was once (200 years ago) almost a disgrace for a man to carry an umbrella, because God had not revealed it, and because it was supposed to evince weakness, effeminacy, etc. Now it is quite popular. We have many prejudices yet to outgrow. Man's intellect was given to him as an aid by which he could discover wherein nature had failed to meet his wants and supply the deficiency; and without a single doubt the greatest of all these discoveries, involving as it does the perpetuation of good health and the prolongation of life, is this process of the heroic flushing of the colon.441

Hall shares Tyrrell’s flair for hyperbole, and his sense of “the heroic” is

vexing to say the least; nevertheless, his overarching message is clear:

technological forces do not necessarily stand in opposition or

contradiction to natural ones. Tyrrell takes up the same issue and spins

out a very similar argument in The Royal Road:

The first objection I am confronted with is, ‘it [flushing the colon] is not natural.’ I will willingly concede that point, and will add that neither is an obstructed and engorged colon natural. We are living (in a large measure) an artificial life. In his barbaric state man obeyed the calls of nature without regard to time or place, and is safe to assert that under those conditions an obstructed colon was an unknown quantity. But in deference to the demands of civilized life we disregard Nature’s calls and defer the response until a convenient opportunity presents itself, and for this violation of natural law a penalty is inflicted. An obstructed colon, therefore, being itself unnatural, man is obviously justified in using the brains that Nature has endowed him with to cleanse it. An artificial limb is unnatural, but would the same objection hold good that because a man has had the misfortune to suffer amputation, he must therefore limp through life on crutches, rather than use the mechanical substitute that man’s ingenuity has devised?

441 Hall, 51.

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Common sense teaches us, and experience has amply confirmed the teaching, that flushing is not only the easiest, but the most effective means of accomplishing this purpose; and it is unmistakably the most harmless, inasmuch as we use Nature’s most simple and effective cleansing agency in the process—pure water. Sickness is in itself unnatural, and until the system can be restored to its natural condition reason plainly shows us that we must cooperate with Nature and assist in removing these impurities from the system, a task which our disregard of her warnings has prevented us from accomplishing. Cathartics simply excite the excretory processes, and stimulate Nature to a violent effort to expel them, the unnatural exertion being followed by a feeling of languor, for all purgative action is debilitating. Flushing, on the contrary, acts directly on the accumulated matter in the colon (which cathartics never do), and instead of causing an unnatural excitation of any of the natural processes, it induces a calm, restful feeling and a sense of profound relief.442

Together these passages spell out the promise of colonic flushing

treatment, which supposedly purifies and invigorates the body,

guarantees health and vitality, and fights productively against sickness

and disease. Like other prosthetic techniques (e.g. using an umbrella or

crutches) flushing is also a technique of exteriorization, a technological

strategy for enhancing physiological capacity. In the end, these men claim

that flushing is as natural as it is technical; it offers a way for humans to

“cooperate with nature” and restore humanity to its most “natural

condition.”

For Tyrrell, a civilized society is also a constipated one. Civilizing

forces, which impose a rigid set of social and cultural codes, alienate

442 Tyrrell, The Royal Road To Health, 60.

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humanity from its natural state, and the trappings of civilization require

humans to live and behave in unnatural ways. But colonic flushing

promises to offer a corrective to this problem; Tyrrell wants readers to

believe that a device like the Cascade will enable the human body to

function more naturally than it otherwise would or could. This framework

assumes not only a definite nature-culture divide, but also a belief that

technologies and techniques are the key to overcoming this divide. His

suggestion is that technicity offers a way of reconciling the oppositional

currents of nature and culture.

If we are to believe that the fad in colonic flushing is in some way

related to the revolution in flush plumbing, if we view these phenomena

as part of the same matrix of cultural and technical activity, we are left to

observe at least one interesting contradiction: flush plumbing appears to

have perpetuated civilizing tendencies; colonic flushing, not so much.

Again, one of Tyrrell’s main points is that the uptight, retentive behavior

characteristic of civilized life actually contributes to the internal poisoning

of the body. He summons wild statistics in support of his case: “Seventy

per cent of the colons of the human family (living under civilized

conditions) are impacted and some of them terribly so”;443 taking a shot at

443 Ibid, 18.

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those who advocate the use of cathartics444 he claims that “At least fifty

percent of people in civilized communities are slaves to the purgative

habit, the system refusing to fulfill its functions without unnatural

excitation.”445

Tyrrell directly links colon health to intestinal regularity, which

civilizing forces tend to discourage:

The horse and ox promptly obey the call of nature; they know no time or place, and are blessed with clean colons. So are the natives of Africa. But the demands of civilized life insist upon a time and a place. Business, etiquette, opportunity, and a thousand and one excuses stand continually in the way, and nature’s call is put off to a more convenient season.446

By pitting civilization and good health against one another, Tyrrell

strengthens his pitch for the Cascade. His reasoning also serves as a

response to potential critics. Flushing, he claims, is natural, healthy and

functions as an antidote to the constipating effects of civilization. The

basic subtext of his argument reads something like: sure, it may not seem

“civilized” to insert a rubber syringe up into one’s own anus, but such

insertions may turn out to be rather pleasurable, and are in any event

preferable to horrible illness and/or death. If you accept his faulty 444 Tyrrell, who is staunchly anti-drug and deeply critical of cathartic treatments, voices this disapproval throughout The Royal Road. You will have observed this sentiment in the previous quoted passage. 445 Tyrrell, The Royal Road To Health, 62. 446 Ibid., 40.

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assumptions as fact, as many Tyrrell’s readers clearly did, it is not difficult

to see how the treatment gained significant traction during this time.

The idea that we might somehow be able to purify our bodily interiors

was—is—a mightily tempting thought. Like sewers and flushing toilets,

Tyrell’s internal baths promised to cleanse bodies from within. His

promises were false, but false promises often contain important truths

about culture. Colonic flushing practices of this era grew out of a very

specific social and technological milieu, and ideas about flushing reflect

evolving attitudes about health and waste. During Tyrell’s lifetime, the

discourse of sanitation and modern plumbing worked in conjunction with

material developments to influence attitudes about sanitation and

medicine. The popularity of colonic flushing rose alongside a new

flushing media complex, which was re-shaping the cultural-technical

landscape of the nineteenth-century United States.

Conclusion

This chapter has emphasized the developments in colonic flushing

during the late nineteenth-century period, but I should again point out

that seeds of these developments were sewn many years before. I

described near the beginning of this chapter that enema treatments have

enjoyed popularity variously across history (it is rumored, for instance,

that Louis XIV of France received more than 2000 enemas over the course

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of his life)447 but it is also true that enemas were reasonably prevalent in the

United States earlier in the nineteenth century, well in advance of

autointoxication theory.

Serious Mormon trivia buffs may know that Joseph Smith was an avid

colon flusher. Multiple sources testify as to his regular use of enemas, and

he appears to have been a firm believer in the treatment well before Hall

and Tyrrell ever began their promotions. Smith’s personal secretary,

Benjamin Johnson, describes one particular time in September of 1839

when Smith was ill and bedridden. Johnson nursed Smith throughout the

duration of this sickness, which lasted several weeks. Reflecting back on

this difficult period, Johnson recalls that “about the only treatment he

[Smith] would receive was a flush of the colon with warm water, perhaps

tinctured slightly with capsicum and myrrh or a little soda and salt.”448 In

his autobiography, Johnson also remarks on Smith’s flushing habits:

“…the sanitary treatment of copiously flushing the colon with water,

much upon the present ‘Hall System,’ was about his [Smith’s] only

remedy.”449

447 Yates, Alayne. Compulsive Exercise and the Eating Disorders: Toward an Integrated Theory of Activity. New Brunswick: Routledge, 1991. 448 "Patriarch Benjamin F. Johnson's Letter to George F. Gibbs." Doctrine of the Priesthood 17, no. 5, 6. 449 Johnson, Benjamin F. My Life's Review Missouri: Zion’s Printing and Publishing Co., 1947, http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/BFJohnson.html.

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The fact that Smith flushed before most toilets ever did reminds us of

the complexity of this cultural and historical situation. It is too simple, too

determinist—and just plain inaccurate—to say that the invention of flush

toilets gave people the idea to experiment with body flushing techniques.

What I have tried to suggest here is that technological circumstances of the

late-nineteenth century helped situate and frame certain understandings

of the human body. These technological circumstances themselves grew

out of a complex combination of social, cultural, and technical forces, a

process I explore to some extent in previous chapters.

In 1919, JAMA published a paper entitled "Origin of the so-called auto-

intoxication symptom,” which marks the demise of autointoxication

theory. Step by step, the article dismantles the assumptions upon which

autointoxication theory is based, and concludes that “Those who believe

that intestinal stasis can account for a long list of disease conditions have

little proof to offer for their views…the old ideas of insidious poisoning

lead to the formation of hypochondriacs.”450 In subsequent years, belief in

autointoxication theory would steadily diminish. During the 1930’s, E.J.

Borzilleri, a man affiliated Tyrrell’s Hygienic Institute, would go on to

revise and expand Tyrrell’s original work before republishing The Royal

450 Alvarez, Walter C. . "Origin of the So-Called Auto-Intoxication ". The Journal of American Medical Association 72, no. 1 (1919): 8-13, 13.

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Road under his own name.451 New editions of Borzilleri publication would

continue to appear until late the 1940s, at which time Tyrrell’s Hygienic

Institute appears to have been dissolved.

Today, certain alternative medical practitioners still espouse the

virtues of colonic flushing even as mainstream medicine continues to

reject claims that such treatments are in any way beneficial. (There is also

a growing body of evidence that suggests they pose significant threats to

human health.452) But despite lack of evidence to support its effectiveness,

colonic hydrotherapy is still the basis of a profitable industry. Celebrities

(e.g. Jennifer Aniston) have occasionally endorsed colonic irrigation

procedures, which has helped stimulate consumer interest in the

treatment. In recent literature, the term “colonic flushing” has been

replaced by terms like colonic irrigation, colonic hydrotherapy, or, simply,

colonics, although practitioners still use words like flush (or purge) when

describing the details of the procedure.

451 Throughout this chapter, I have, for style, chosen to abbreviate the title of Tyrell’s original work as The Royal Road. I should now note that when Borzilleri republished the book, he officially drops the “To Health,” and titles his version The Royal Road. 452 See Wanjek, Christopher. "Study Dumps Colon Cleansing as Useless and Dangerous." (2011). http://www.livescience.com/15912-colon-cleansing-useless-dangerous.html.

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Paul Virilio has observed that “When you invent the ship, you also

invent the shipwreck.”453 This bit of wisdom applies wonderfully to

transportation, energy and media technologies, but it also makes sense for

medicine, which has a long history of pointless procedures and

dysfunctional treatments that ultimately do more harm than good.

Colonic flushing is part of a long lineage of misguided medicine—from

trepanation (the ancient technique of boring holes into human skulls) to

bloodletting to recent misadventures in pharmaceuticals. This chapter has

focused on a specific moment of technological history, but the ideas I

explore open onto broader questions about the history of ideas. Heidegger

famously notes that technology reveals its essence in moments of

breakdown; culture similarly reveals itself through histories of mistaken

belief. Ideas that arrive in the world without basis in fact or truth offer

strange windows onto the consciousness of particular cultures. And

cultivating a better understanding of the relationship between culture,

technology, and consciousness has been the central goal of this project

from the beginning.

453 Virilio, Paul. Politics of the Very Worst. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999, 89.

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CONCLUSION

You may have heard the story about the observant engineer, who, in

the early days of television, before commercials ran on hundreds of

channels 24/7/365, discovered that measurable dips in municipal water

pressure corresponded directly to the television networks’ schedule of

commercial breaks.454 You may have also heard that between 8am and 9am

today, as millions of New York City residents are going about their

morning sanitary routines, the volume of wastewater coursing through

the city’s wastewater plant more than doubles—a daily event now

referred to as “the big flush.”455 And you do not need to have read this

entire dissertation to have some basic awareness that flush toilets

collectively consume absurd quantities of potable water. Each year, flush

toilets account for as much as 27% of all water consumed in American

homes,456 and each day, wastewater treatment plants wind up treating

about 34 billion gallons of wastewater across the United States.457

454 "A Flip of the Switch Solves TV Problems." The Daily Herald from Chicago Illinois, 1998. 455 Radiolab. Podcast audio. Poop Train, 2013. http://www.radiolab.org/story/poop-train/. 456 "Indoor Water Use in the United States.” (2016). https://www3.epa.gov/watersense/pubs/indoor.html. 457 “The Sources and Solutions: Wastewater.” (2016). https://www3.epa.gov/watersense/pubs/indoor.html.

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These simple facts remind us that flushing the toilet is not a solitary

act. We might typically think of flushing as something that occurs in

private, but the truth is, when we flush, we communicate directly with the

outside world. Flush levers do not draw much attention to themselves;

nevertheless, they are powerful actors in our daily lives. For billions of

people across the planet, flushing has become as natural and routine an

action as turning a doorknob or raising a spoon to the mouth. This process

of naturalization has brought forth wide-ranging effects.

This dissertation has attempted to show how the development of

flushing technologies in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries

resulted in a range of cultural, psychical, and environmental

consequences. I have theorized flushing as a technogenetic process (i.e. a

process of exteriorization that is evolving separately from the human

germ line), and have attempted to show how flushing technologies have

developed into critical components of modern envirotechnical systems

(i.e.“historically and culturally specific configurations of intertwined

‘ecological’ and ‘technological’ systems, which may be composed of

artifacts, practices, people, institutions, and ecologies.”)458 Flushing systems

of the nineteenth century and early-twentieth centuries represent one such

458 Pritchard, Sara B. Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône. Harvard Historical Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011, 19.

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cultural and historical configuration that played a crucial role in shaping

habits, attitudes, and beliefs in the modern, western world.

Following a media-theoretical path developed by Bernhard Siegert and

others, this dissertation has also invited readers to conceptualize flushing

technology as media technology. Like other media technologies, flushing

media are liminal forces that work to establish distinctions, even while

managing to elude these distinctions themselves.459 When we depress tank

levers or buttons, our bodies work in conjunction with pipes, tanks and

valves to engage in complex processing acts. Flushing the toilet is an

elemental example of how routine technical actions begin to dissolve

natural and cultural distinctions in our daily lives.

Plumbing technologies of the nineteenth century worked to process

distinctions between interior and exterior in new and powerful ways. As

Jenni Calder has discussed, the emergence of modern middle class

consciousness involved the development of techniques of separation that

marked off domestic space from the rest of the world. Describing the

nature of urban Victorian conditions, she writes: "There was dirt, there

was noise, there was human excrement, there was starvation, there was

crime, there was violence [in the urban world]. [...] To have an interior

459 See Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. "On Siegert's "Cultural Techniques" and Sprenger's "Medien Des Immediaten." http://bernardg.com/blog/siegert-sprenger-review.

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environment that enabled such things to be forgotten was a priority of

middle-class aspiration.”460

Such forgetting is a basic feature of life in the modern, developed

world, and flushing technologies have enhanced humanity’s capacity to

forget. The handle on the toilet is the septic equivalent to the delete button

on our computer keyboards: once depressed, bad stuff seems to vanish,

and we like to imagine that these undesirable elements have permanently

disappeared. But of course this isn’t true. Just as data can be recovered

from broken hard drives, the consequences of flushing continue to lurk in

our pipes and in our waters, like ghosts in our machines. Flushing, then,

not only involves passive forgetting, but also active repression.

This dissertation has focused on the micro rhythms of a particular

technological revolution, and while it is true that this revolution has had

wide-reaching, planet altering consequences—consequences that will

continue to reverberate and affect the world far into the future—the

framework of this study is still very limited. I have dealt almost

exclusively with flushing in the west, and specifically the United States, to

the neglect of nations and cultures whose histories have materialized into

very different sets of infrastructural conditions. The septic divide that

separates those who have access to flushing technology and those who do

460 Quoted in Picker, John M. "The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space, and Urban Noise,” 15.

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not is one of the major social and environmental justice issues of our time,

and this study only begins to gesture toward the importance of these

issues.

There is also much more work to be done to adequately develop the

concept of flushing media. A toilet, which is simultaneously a site of

production and consumption, is a flushing medium par excellence. But

flushing processes and mechanisms exist everywhere in our world. Acts

of flushing operate on the cusp of essential processes of rejuvenation and

externalization; they pertain to matters of cyclicality, recursivity,

repression and release. The concept of flushing opens onto other zones of

theory that I have not even begun to address here. How, for example, does

the concept of flushing pertain to gender? Plumbing technologies are in

some ways uterine, in some ways phallic; they variously work to contain

and ejaculate. And to what extent are flushing processes a driving force in

nature? Volcanoes, watersheds, and oysters might all be theorized in

flushing terms. But these and other questions will have to wait for another

time.

The anthropocentric bias of this dissertation is self-evident, but this

anthropocentrism has at least taken some of the lessons of actor-network

theory, object-oriented ontology and above all cultural techniques

research into account. At a general level, this study has worked to deepen

our understanding of how non-human forces shape human affairs. As

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much as anything, this dissertation has reiterated the call for

infrastructural awareness. The more light we manage to throw on the

hidden backgrounds of our daily lives, the better we can make sense of

humanity’s peculiar situation on planet earth.

Writing on the cultural technique of seafaring, Siegert asserts “What

humans do with ships matters less than what seafaring does with and to

them.”461 The same could be said for humans and sewage. (In either case

we’re dealing with objects cast out to sea…) At the same time, I would

argue that it’s still worth considering the lives of those who came before

us, those who have contributed, in however minuscule a way, to grand

processes of infrastructural development. In the very first words of Control

Revolution, James Beniger writes, “One tragedy of the human condition is

that each of us lives and dies with little hint of even the most profound

transformations of our society and our species that play themselves out in

some small part through our own existence.”462 Among other things, this

dissertation has worked to acknowledge those mostly forgotten plumbers,

scientists and sanitarians whose lives and labor were woven into the

invisible backdrop of modern civilization. In a world of so much

461 Siegert, Bernhard. "Medusas in the Western Pacific: The Cultural Techniques of Seafaring." In Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real New York: Fordham University Press, 2015, 69. 462 Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Harvard University Press, 1989, 1.

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forgetting, perhaps such small acts of remembrance are valuable for their

own sake, if nothing else.

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