Research Project:
Toilet Science and the Rise of Sewer Protestantism
“Toilet-philes argue that civilization began not with the advent of written language but with the first toilet. Waste control allowed individuals to quit wandering the earth trying to escape their dung and finally settle down. Just as these users of the proto-toilet settled down on a patch of land, they too settled down on their toilet. Could this be true? That the histories of civilizations are primarily explained through their relation to toilets; toilets as an object of power, a religious artifact, a site for innovation? Toilet Science is our framework to investigate this claim.
In this essay on Toilet Science and the following Rise of Sewer Protestantism, we are attempting to establish a historical and philosophical lineage tying our butts to the toilet beyond Freudian clichés, tying our bathrooms to the sewer systems and tying our sense of waste management to its spiritual and ideological implications.
The first part of the essay describes what we call the Vertical Dimension. The Vertical Dimension describes the ways in which toilets have historically enacted a linear integration of waste management infrastructures, ideological coercion, politics of the body and ultimately the way property relations establish its cultural logic. This trajectory does not point to a strict historical lineage but rather a correlation, or a speculation on a genealogy suspended between squatting and sitting as it traverses through the first, second and third reformations of the toilet. In investigating the Vertical Dimension we are interested in following the rise of Sewer Protestantism, a distinct reading of the history of Protestant spirituality and ideology through its relation to shit.
The Vertical Dimension of Toilet Science is contrasted to its Coriolic Dimension. The Coriolic Dimension includes all the unflushable entities and their cultural and political superstructures. This is a space that is irreducible to the linear integration of the Vertical Dimension. Instead, the Coriolic Dimensions is about a dwelling and lingering around the contested reality of pooping bodies and their dubious subjectivation. The Coriolic circles around the toilet, meshes with its plumbing and leaves traces which surpass the mirage of a future casted in purity.
Toilet Science is a scientific undertaking insofar it commits to a integrative desire, a foundational direction towards integrating the Vertical and Coriolic elements of this historico-political inquiry. Toilet Science is inherently integrative, how can these different dimensions speak to one another, what is the liminal object between the ideological scat-mahcine and the unflushable homunculus? Yet, the stubborn problems in integrating the Vertical and the Coriolic makes Toilet Science into a mapping of a fundamentally ambivalent body as we find ourselves dwelling around the loo.
This essay outlines Toilet Science as a method and discursive space that describes a fundamental ambivalence inherent to all things-toilets. Between the Vertical Dimension and the Coriolic Dimension of Toilet Science, a space of unsettlement and paradox emerge – from the intimacy of infrastructures, to the impossible desire of a future where everything is flushable. We follow a crooked line from revelations, the first flush toilets, property rights and the terror of the unflushable entities of this world. It is our goal to describe this ambivalence which orient Toilet Science as a theoretical proposition.”
- Introduction to the essay “Toilet Science and the Rise of Sewer Protestantism”
Works
Toilet Science and the Rise of Sewer Protestantism - Video
Toilet Science and the Rise of Sewer Protestantism - Essay
All of my gold + Fig.1 Ergonomics of the most intimate