On Ruining My Career

Music: VNV Nation: Matter + Form Many have advised me, from my early days in graduate school up until relatively recently, that I ought not publish on this or that because it would not be good for my career. I recall fondly all the advice--much of which I heeded--during the interviewing process (for example, if your research is on the devil, it would behoove one to diversify a monochromatic wardrobe). I recall one scholar suggesting that if Mike Allen published my adolescent thoughts on "what constitutes publishable rhetorical criticism?" it would--and I quote--"ruin his career."

I think what's been more ruinous to our discipline is a lack of risk taking (this is certainly the case with the new VNV album). Tomorrow I will submit for review and publication the riskiest yet: an essay on shit. If this doesn't destroy my career, then the only thing left is to do an autoethnography of my having sex with a goat and a young male prostitue in my office at school, while making my class in argumentation theory watch and take notes, to the soundtrack of German power-noise music. So here goes:

ShitText: Gluttony in Reverse, or, Toward a New Coprophilic Style

RUNNING HEAD: ShitText

MANUSCRIPT HISTORY: Different versions and portions of this essay have been presented under the title "Same Shit, Different Conference" at the 2003, 2004, and 2005 annual meetings of the National Communication Association in Miami, Chicago, and Boston respectively

AUTHOR NOTE: Delightfully retained for the purposes of blind review,

ABSTRACT An argumentative account of text, body, and (the) discipline as fields of shit.

KEY WORDS: academic publishing, actionism, analationality, anal object, autoethnography, babies, body body body body body BODY, bio-power, confession, constipation, dispositif, embodied text (constipation), farts and farting, fascism, globalization, gold, governmentality, homo economicus, hygienic apparatus, Foucault, Frenchness, Freud,, laxitativity, masochism, money, narcissism, performance, performativity, perfumetivity, phallus, poop, postmarxism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, piss and pissing, public address, pride, repression, scato-power, shit and shitting, shitliciousness, sphincteralationality, surveillance, textuality, turd fuckery, Ziploc(r) baggie

We represent the International of excreta, the stinking turds of the new planetary order! We are fragmented, dispersed, they can sweep us away with their water hoses and then sterilize the ground with disinfectants and pesticides! If we are united, they won't be able to flush us down the drain! -The Metro Defecator (Goytisolo 36)

Thus spoke the anal character in Juan Goytisolo's novel State of Siege, a street-shitting prophet who calls for the "foul-smelling tide" of the rabble to choke the streets and temples with an inescapably human hyle, an irreducible excess no perfume or elaborate hygienics can completely eradicate. To be sure, the Defecator understood the anal imaginary: in the beginning there was a turd, and this turd was gold. Yet if the State was to emerge, the "rustic swill" of one's privates must be packed privately away, domesticated, perfumed, and transmuted into money; one had to mind one's own business for the business of a public to emerge (Laporte).

As is the case with all economies, the anal imaginary is both social and individual (see Brown 202-206). In his elaboration of the development of subjectivity in childhood, for example, Freud is careful to remind us that the first gift one has to offer is, in fact, shit. But shitting is also that erotogenic pleasure that one is to first repress for membership in a given public. In the original occasion of self-conscious shitting-upon first encountering the symbolic as law, the command to "shit in this little potty"-the child "has a glimpse of an environment hostile to [her] instinctual impulses. . . . From that time on, what is 'anal' remains the symbol of everything that is to be repudiated and excluded from life" ("Infantile" 187, n. 1). Potty training is the moment when we become self-conscious, social subjects, enfoldments of norms, customs, and habits that comprise our social realities and that introduce us to an anal economy that we must subsequently repress (see Frankel). Potty training is thus the originary site of civic performativity, that primary, empirical moment of public subjectification, literally the first command performance of citizenship.

In light of anal disciplinationality, the Metro Defecator represents a figure who has regressed to embrace his anality as a way to resist transnational capitalists: "Our foul-smelling tide," reports the prophet, "will immobilize your beautifully tailored executives on the sidewalks . . . will fill your mansions with a stench that will chase the inhabitants out and then infiltrate the offices and banks till it reaches the safe deposit boxes and transmutes the gold and the banknotes into shit" (Goytisolo 36)! As the governance of the nation state gives way to governmentality and the society of discipline metamorphoses into the society of control, so does bio-power deepen the regulation of all life, particularly in terms of what goes into and exits from our bodies (Deleuze, "Control" 169-176; Deleuze, "Postscript" 177-182; Foucault, History 135-159). The Defecator is a good role model for materialist scholars and practitioners because he resists imperial globalization by taking back his anus, celebrating the excesses of his own productive capacity and calling for others to do the same. Indeed, it is precisely the celebration and production of the anal object-that from which we are most alienated-that the consumerist logics of capitalism can be thw(f)arted: consumerism is countered with bodily excess, prideful overproduction, gluttony in reverse.

Among other things, Goytisolo's novel is symptomatic of a global repression of anality and the consequent emergence of a sadistic subjectivity whose lifeworld is now governed by the sado-masochistic norms of giving and withholding. To resist the sadistification of Self that results in fascism, as well as the evaporation of material labor and the arrival of immaterial labor (which, of course, threatens a more insidious form of exploitation), there must not be a multitudinous "refusal to work," but a popular proliferation of excessive bodily production (see Hardt and Negri 203-204).2 To wit, in order to resist the pernicious effects of transnational capitalism, we should return to the old Actionist, Yippist, and Scumfuc strategies of shitting in public. Like Günter Brus, Abbie Hoffman, and G. G. Allin, the Defecator is a refreshing figure precisely because he reminds us of the Real in the midst of a blob-like Empire that "is planted with a virtuality that seeks to be real," as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it (359). The typical gesture of crusty socialists when confronting the reality of postmodernity-if only in theory, which is surely an index of its arrival-is to point to either the international division of labor and the persistence of agrarian economies on the one hand, or the "concrete constitutive effects" of exploitation and the survival of violent, oppressive sovereignties on the other (see Lazarus 94-138). This tired wind-bagging needs some good shit, and to this end in this essay I argue for a new coprophilic style of public address or performance (viz., of shitting/speaking within a public) as a means for contending with an increasingly totalizing, consumerist hygienics that has infiltrated every domain of social life, most especially the field of academic publishing.

Want more of this shit? Find an HTML draft of of the essay here.

Long live the new flesh. Word.