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Toiletry Time : Defecation, Temporal Strategies and the Dilemmas of

Modernity
David Inglis and Mary Holmes
Time Society 2000 9: 223
DOI: 10.1177/0961463X00009002005
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http://tas.sagepub.com/content/9/2-3/223

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Toiletry Time
Defecation, temporal strategies and the
dilemmas of modernity
David Inglis and Mary Holmes

ABSTRACT. The rhythms of human bodies are profoundly implicated with the time regimes that are dominant in different societies.
This article seeks to explicate the relations between the temporal
dispositions of one aspect of the body, its defecatory capacities, and
the chronological and spatial categorizations of modernity. This
latter configuration is understood variously as being characterized
by: the social relations of the civilizing process (Elias); capitalist
economic relations (Marx); instrumental rationality (Adorno and
Horkheimer); and patriarchy (feminism). Focusing on each of these
aspects of the modern allows us to chart historically the rise of a
series of temporal regulations over acts of defecation. However,
following the position of Sigmund Freud, we trace out one of the key
dilemmas of modernity: while the times when defecation occurs
have come under increasing levels of guidance and administration,
the human body and its faecal capacities still continue to some
degree to operate according to rhythms other than those imposed
upon them, thus occasionally effecting a disorderly return of the
repressed in the realm of systematized time. KEYWORDS bodily
wastes chronology civilizing process defecation waste
management

Arguably one of the great paradoxes of modernity is that often phenomena that
have been occluded during the genesis of that social formation appear once
again after their disappearance to haunt the purview of the society that sought to
deny their presence. This logic whereby the imperatives of banishment are
subsequently plagued by the return of the repressed was identified in Freuds
studies of dreams and the obsessions of neurotics, whereby the sexual energies
of infancy were seen to be restrained in the adult psychic economy, and yet also
TIME & SOCIETY copyright 2000 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), VOL.
9(2/3): 223245
[0961-463X; 2000/09;9:2/3;223245; 014756]

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within that realm sometimes to be given free and unsettling play. There is a
particular chronological element in this paradoxical relationship between
vanquisher and vanquished, for that which was bound and confined in the past
returns now in the present to bedevil the living, with the archaic and forgotten
forcing itself upon an unhappy contemporary consciousness.
Nowhere was this temporal dilemma of the modern expressed more acutely
than in an area of human life which particularly engrossed the attention of
Freud. From his viewpoint, it was not only the fundamental sexual drives of
human beings that had been brought under ever more severe regulation in the
modern period, only to break the walls of their prison and to reassert themselves
at a later date. It was also the case that exactly the same type of process had
occurred in terms of capacities of the human body very closely related to the
sexual instincts, namely the means whereby wastes were evacuated.1 In
Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1957) argued that the modern world had
effected ever more stringent sets of regulations over human defecatory capacities, as successive attempts to master the revulsion, fear and loathing that
modern western civilization held for faecal products. Such filthy materials
troubled the modern mind precisely because they violated the imperatives of
civilization for decorous and seemly order. The sight and smell of excreta
represented a fearful affront to this regime, precisely in so far as these traces of
the earth betokened a more disorderly and foul archaic past. In that partly
forgotten yet still troubling age, a promiscuous humankind had revelled in its
own detritus, unmindful of the desiderata of faecal regulation. The modern
consciousness sought desperately to deny its genealogical relation to that
ancient pandemonium. And yet, paradoxically, that highly neurotic modern attitude towards bodily wastes was itself a product of the anxiety that civilized
humanity felt at lapsing back into the state of the primeval swamp, from which
it had only recently and with the greatest of difficulty extricated itself.
Whether Freuds scientific myth of the faecal past of humanity is true in any
way or not, it still usefully draws our attention to an important premise of understanding the nature of the modern, and its temporal structurings of behaviour
and experience. We believe that it is productive to conceptualize the genesis of
modernity as in part involving attempts to regulate increasingly the defecatory
capacities of human bodies in line with certain normative projects of what is
acceptable behaviour. One crucial way of ensuring that subject populations
adhere to such strictures is to control the times when individuals may or may not
legitimately relieve themselves. We believe that the overall trajectory in the
modern period is towards a situation whereby the toiletry time of all members
of the society comes under relatively high levels of control, such that the set of
legitimate times when defecation and urination may occur contracts considerably over the duration of the construction and subsequent development of
modernity. Such control is of course partly constituted by rules and procedures

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allowing or denying access to certain locales which are defined, either by a

certain group or by wider and more general value systems, as being legitimate
places for defecation.
Although in this article we argue that the overall trend in the modern period is
clearly towards much higher levels of limitation on when and where individuals
may relieve themselves, the specific ways in which such restrictions have come
to be created and implemented derive from a variety of sources. In the modern
period, many different groups have had many different reasons for creating
controls over the time humans may spend in toiletry activities. And quite apart
from conscious attempts by certain groupings to impose particular forms of
practice on others, part of the story of greater faecal regulation in the modern
west can be told from the point of view of unintended processes, which often
arose and grew beyond the explicit awareness of the people involved in their
development.
In order to capture the complexity of the myriad ways in which the overall
trajectory of greater control over toiletry time has occurred in the modern west,
we will adopt the perspectives of several different schools of thought, each of
which allows us to focus on a particular nexus of actors, locales and forms of
spatio-temporal constraint, located either in the public sphere of the capitalist
workplace and other institutions, or the realm that came to be known as the
private. By adopting the respective analytic categories and foci of Marx,
Norbert Elias, Adorno and Horkheimer, and the feminist analysis of patriarchy,
we do not mean to falsely reconcile often antagonistic modes of apprehension.
Instead, we wish merely to utilize each, and in some ways against the grain of
their respective arguments, in the service of two purposes. First, to conceive
of modernity as a social formation which may be viewed under the rubrics
civilized, capitalist, instrumentally rational, and patriarchal. Second, as a
way of illuminating the multiple and manifold ways in which Freuds central
insight holds true: that while modernity in its various guises brings a series of
temporal regulations of the faecal capacities of human beings, nonetheless the
sphere of wastes frequently remains as a hectoring presence for a society that
would like to exclude their very existence from its chronological and spatial
purview.

The Civilizing of Toiletry Time

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

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very few latrines for public use, suggesting that the streets were the more likely
locus for defecation (Palmer, 1973: 16). As such the burgesses . . . relieve[d]
themselves anywhere . . . urinat[ing] inside towers and casemates, or in the
porches of private houses in the less frequented streets (Leguay, 1984: 58). The
tempo of medieval life, therefore, was such that one could, on the whole,
defecate where and when one liked. There were as relatively few constraints on
the places where people relieved themselves as there were on the times that
defecation could legitimately occur. Peasants in the field or craftspeople in the
urban centres could relieve themselves when the desire took them. This situation began to change in line with wider developments in later medieval Europe.
From the perspective of Norbert Elias (1995), the civilizing process is a set
of trends that occurred over the duration of later feudalism, through the Age of
Absolutism, and on into modernity. Such trends involved ever greater levels of
monitoring by individuals of their own conduct. Individuals looked to their own
behaviours and to those of other people, such that a network of observation and
counter-observation of appropriate actions spread through more and more
sectors of society. One of the major effects of this new situation was that
individuals had to engage with, and negotiate, very different temporal and
spatial structures from those to which previous generations had been
accustomed. The rhythms and spaces of feudal society, such as bringing the
harvest to market at a set time each year, were replaced for an increasingly large
proportion of the population by an urban context which did not operate with
the tempos and locales that had been familiar since time immemorial. Instead,
the life of towns and cities in the early modern period was based upon novel
spatio-temporal contours. This led to a situation where individuals had to
negotiate new relations between themselves and the co-ordinates of time and
space. They had to learn which actions were appropriate in which circumstances
and locales. Individuals were required increasingly to know when particular
actions were legitimate and when not. The trend over the period was for these
sets of expectations to become ever more elaborate, and thus for the forms of
social control exerted over individual actions in time and space to be ever more
stringent and exacting.
One such conduct brought under progressively more rigorous forms of
control throughout the period was defecation. From a situation where open-air
defecation was socially tolerated, over time there were moves towards condemning such visible acts, in favour of making excretion occur in private
locales, sealed off from public view (Elias, 1995: 10517). Thus there was a
series of shifts in later- and post-feudal Europe from norms of faecal visibility to
faecal invisibility, that is to say, from defecation occurring in primarily public
locales, to mostly happening in locations deemed to be private. From the later
18th century onwards, the norm among elites was increasingly for defecation to
occur in a water closet. The name itself signified a salubrious form of defeca-

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tion and disposal, located within a delimited toiletry space, where the individual
could not be seen by other people (Palmer, 1973; Wright, 1960). The change
from one set of locales to another was concomitant with a move away from the
medieval situation where individuals could defecate at whatever times they
pleased. Appropriate periods for excretion increasingly became much more
circumscribed, for if one could only relieve oneself in a private space, then
one had to wait until such a space appeared, or until, at the very least, one was
free from the gaze of other people. The trend over early modernity is therefore
towards an increasing level of deferral of the point in time when one actually
defecated, relative to the point when one initially felt the need to relieve oneself.
A situation where immediate relief, in both temporal and spatial terms, was
permissible, was replaced by a context which demanded that the moment of
excretion be delayed until an appropriate time and place presented themselves.
Such shifts could be seen as being concomitant with two further processes in
regard to faecal mores in early modernity. The first was the development of
increasingly negative evaluations of the qualities of excreta, from faecal
products being viewed as having certain positive elements (such as their
medicinal and agricultural value), to these being seen as possessing only wholly
negative qualities (Camporesi, 1988: 1112; Bourke, 1891/1968). Second,
excreta were part of a wider set of phenomena which, from the later 18th
century onwards, were less odorifically tolerated than they had been in previous
years (Corbin, 1986: 1114). As a consequence, the olfactory aspects as well as
the more general qualities of excreta came to be seen in a much more negative
light than had previously been the case. Thus the period spanning later feudalism and early modernity paid witness to processes whereby excreta were
increasingly viewed as filthy and odorific, and defecation, especially among
elites, increasingly had to occur in privatized locales. Such developments
therefore can be seen as leading indirectly to new and more exacting forms of
temporal regulation of defecation.
There were also more directly chronological components involved in the
process whereby excreta were increasingly viewed as revolting. It is arguable
that by the early 19th century, the bourgeois mindset had developed in such a
way that it denied that the bourgeois body created excremental products
(Stallybrass and White, 1986). This can be seen in the fact that the bourgeoisie
of the period strove to deny as much as was possible the presence, both visual
and olfactory, of excreta within their purview. Increasingly throughout the
century, defecation occurred in the hidden recesses of the water closet, and the
new systems of sewers in operation from the 1860s onwards, which bore away
the evidence of such acts, were located deep under the streets of the city, far
from public scrutiny (Reid, 1991).
Such forms of practice were predicated upon forms of self-representation
which in turn were based upon the perceived difference between bourgeois

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salubrity (bourgeois bodies symbolically did not excrete) and the filthy,
excrement-producing corporeality of the proletariat, especially its lower rungs.
In the regulation of subject populations, such as factory workers and prison
inmates, the control of time went together with faecal discipline, for to fill the
time of the working classes was to conquer the risk of plebeian animality and
prevent its resurgence (Corbin, 1995: 7). If the lower classes were associated
with excrement, excrement in turn signified the human bodys organic qualities.
It was precisely such corporeal qualities that the bourgeois mindset denied as to
its own bodys character (Bakhtin, 1984: 29). The organic nature of faeces and
the bodys production of them symbolized not only the epitome of filth, but
also the fact that the body was itself organic, and thus subject to processes
of decline and death (Corbin, 1986: 144). As a result, to deny the presence
of excreta, by deodorizing them or hiding them from view, was to deny the
efficacy of Time itself over human (that is, bourgeois) corporeality.
All of the above developments arguably initially resulted primarily from
socio-cultural factors, which Elias locates as being the result of the more
general civilizing process.2 Thus changes in the ways in which defecation was
regulated both chronologically and spatially may be traced to the development
of an increasingly intricate social division of labour (see Durkheim, 1893/1984).
Elias argues that changes towards greater self-regulation of conducts occurred
in a context where individuals were more constrained than previously to operate
in closely monitored, face-to-face interactional settings. Such settings were the
result of progressively more interdependent relations between classes which had
previously existed relatively autonomously of each other (Elias, 1995: 447).
Thus shifts from relative excretory visibility to invisibility, and from immediate
to deferred defecation, can be viewed as resulting from the development of
chains of interdependence, made manifest at both the collective and individual
levels, which were in turn the social expression of the increasingly complex
division of labour in post-feudal Europe.

Capitalist Factory Time and Effluvial Control

The progressively more intricate division of labour in the west, which we have
so far examined in its social manifestations, may also be considered from the
point of view of the development of the capitalist economy. Werner Sombarts
classic account of the medieval division of labour argued that it involved a
situation where economic activities . . . were regulated solely in accordance
with the principle of a sufficiency for existence, with the chronological
relations of the economy being centred around traditional tempos such as the
autumnal harvest (Sombart, 1915: 1617). If this account is convincing, then
the transition to a capitalist economy in early modernity involved not only a

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shift in attitudes towards the accumulation of wealth, from ideas based around
subsistence to imperatives of profit seeking, but in addition was comprised of an
alteration in the chronological aspects of economic relations, such that chains
of production emerge[d] . . . [whereby] synchronisation of labour demand[ed]
adjustment to a new time discipline (Rule, 1986: 135). In the new economic
situation, the livelihood of an individual was dependent upon the livelihood of a
multitude of others to whom that person was bound by a series of long-range
connections. As a result, the rhythms of life and work of all these various
participants in the economic process became increasingly harmonized so as to
allow the most efficient and profitable investment of capital. This new economic context, by progressively destroying the rhythms of the medieval
economy, had great ramifications for the tempos of the human body, especially
one accustomed generally to relieving itself wherever and whenever it pleased.
Ruefully regarding the lack of enthusiasm for work displayed by the factory
hands of the earliest phase of the capitalist enterprise, Voltaire noted that they
go but faintly to work, as they say, with one buttock (cited in Golembiewski,
1965: 161). The aphorism obliquely indicates the necessity of controlling
labouring bodies, including their defecatory capacities, if profit was to be
extracted from them. One of the main means of ensuring such a situation is to
subject these bodies and their capacities to chronological discipline. What was
needed, writes Pollard in his account of the beginnings of capitalist management techniques, was regularity and steady intensity in place of irregular spurts
of work (1965: 181). The transition from the relatively unsystematic labour
characteristic of feudalism towards the more standardized capitalist work
practices of the early modern period meant that workers time came under novel
forms of discipline and regulation (Thompson, 1967: 73). The extraction
of profit came to depend on the careful calibration of the work rhythms of
employees on the factory floor. Thus ever more complex forms of ordering the
movements of workers were developed in order to control as much as possible
the time wasted on extraneous activities beyond the pure act of production
itself. Marx, reflecting on the nature of the temporal rhythms of capitalist
production, noted:
[T]he capitalist is . . . careful . . . to ensure that his workmen are not idle for a
single moment. He has bought the use of the labour-power for a definite period,
and he insists on his rights. He has no intention of being robbed . . . for this
purpose [he] has a penal code of his own. (Marx, 1867/1988: 303)

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

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61). Thus the capitalist economy may be seen as being increasingly based
around the uniform, homogeneous units of clock time, which decontextualized
labour from the particularity of its instantiations in feudalism, and progressively
standardized work to a metronomic beat. In this chronological context, factory
discipline was formulated often quite consciously by capitalist authorities as a
set of controls over time for the purposes of extracting profit from human
bodies seen as being naturally indisposed to regular, standardized production
processes (see, for example, Taylor, 1947: 304). The recalcitrant body was
therefore made subject to chronologically expressed regulations over space and
freedom of movement in the factory locale. Ideal-type regulations in the
capitalist factory over bodily rhythms of the factory would include:
Rules prescribing the length of the working week and day, and the time allowable
for lunch and rest periods, usually accompanied by specific penalties for
absenteeism, lateness, and loitering . . .
Rules restricting freedom of activity in the shop, including prohibitions on
smoking, conversation, leaving machines, and entering other parts of the plant.
(Caplow, 1964: 115)

The workers body is thus constrained in terms of what it may and may not do,
and at what times. Following Marx, we may say that the tendency of capitalist
organization of work is towards the outlawing of superfluous expenditure, be
that of time spent away from the work activity, or of energy used up in nonwork pursuits. In this light, the issue of the time taken for a worker to defecate
becomes an important aspect of the running of factories and of the capitalist
economy more generally. This is particularly due to the various types of abuse
of work norms the toiletry space opens up. As one commentator notes, individual manipulations of norms are [at least potentially] open to everyone . . .
[for example] a rule against smoking may be evaded by frequent visits to the
lavatory (Fox, 1975: 92). Thus the control of access to, and time spent in, toilet
facilities becomes a crucial aspect of factory discipline.
The instillation of the appropriate bodily dispositions that would allow
chronological imperatives to be met began each time a new group of workers
was inducted into the factory situation. Once at work it was necessary to break
down the impulses of the workers, and to introduce the notion of time-thrift
(Pollard, 1965: 183). This meant training the workers into a form of corporeality
which involved regular hours of work and constant attendance at the machine.
Thus, from at least the mid-19th century, rules such as the following were
common: Any person found from the usual place of work, except for necessary
purposes . . . will be fined 2d. for each offence (cited by Pollard, 1965: 184;
emphasis added).
In a similar vein, Engels noticed that in the factories of northern England in
the 1840s, the operative must eat, drink, and sleep at command. For satisfying

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the most imperative needs, he is vouchsafed the least possible time absolutely
required by them (Engels, 1844/1987: 193; emphasis added). Within such a
context, defecation was just about tolerated, as long as the worker was quick
about it. As disciplinary rules became more stringent, and as the time nexus in
which the labourer had to operate became more oriented towards precise
calculation, such tolerance was often eliminated. The following account from
the end of the 19th century as to the daily routine in English cotton mills vividly
illustrates the degree to which workers bodies were constrained to act in
extremely demarcated fashions:
The toil is ceaseless; the machinery demands constant watching. Once on a time
this was not so; the machinery ran slowly, and the operatives had a fair amount of
leisure in the factory . . . [now] the machinery runs much quicker . . . From the first
second of entering the factory in a morning to the last turn of the wheels in an
evening the operatives have no rest. Their feet are never still; their hands are full
of tasks; their eyes are always on the watch. (Clarke, 1899/1985: 42)

Thus the labour required of the workforce is of a type that demands constant
application of the worker to the machine; without the constant presence of the
operative while the machine is running, production would cease to operate
smoothly, if at all. If workers were to release themselves from these exertions in
order to fulfill excretory needs, the continual production of the factory, and the
profits of the employer, would be endangered. Therefore it is not surprising to
find the above account offering the following observation: In some places they
[i.e. the workforce] are even timed when using the conveniences; and only
allowed so many minutes for natures necessity, being fined if exceeding the
limit fixed (Clarke, 1899/1985: 44).
The timing of visits to toiletry facilities outside of official breaks such as
mealtimes thus became an infringement of regulations designed to allow
constant production within a delimited time-frame. The imposition of fines for
perceived idling during the hours demarcated as the period for work was a
common practice in factories of this period. Such practices could include
looking out [of] windows, laughing, or leaving [the] work station for the toilet
(Meacham, 1977: 110). An extreme, but telling, case of this variety is recorded
as taking place in the 1890s, within a factory employing over 500 women. A
factory inspector found that a system was in operation where employees
were made to hand a tally to a male overseer as they entered the lavatory. He
recorded their time inside, forwarding his report to the manager, who fined
them at the end of the month if their total exceeded four minutes (Meacham,
1977: 110).
The logic of reducing the amount of time workers spend in the toilet is not
merely an artifact of the 19th century. Ruth Cavendishs experience of a
production line in a factory in the late 1970s is just one example of more con-

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temporary ways in which management seek to couple the bodily dispositions of

their employees with the chronological patterns of capitalist production. In the
factory Cavendish observed, time spent in the toilet was outside the period
explicitly set aside for both work and official breaks. Visits to the lavatory
therefore constituted unofficial rest periods: [I]f they [the management] were
paying for the time, they could dictate what you did in it, and we [the line
operators] were only supposed to go to the loo if it was an informal break
(Cavendish, 1982: 117).
In a similar vein, Huw Beynons study of the same period of the Ford plant at
Halewood near Liverpool found that the toiletry practices there were also
oriented around reducing as much as possible the time spent away from production. One interviewee remarked:
They expect you to work the 480 minutes of the eight hours youre on the clock.
Theyve agreed to have a built-in allowance of six minutes for going to the toilet,
blowing your nose and that. It takes you six minutes to get your trousers down.
(Beynon, 1973: 135; original emphasis)

These various examples of toiletry regulation illustrate that a factory subject

to such means of control may be seen not just as the space in which the worker
is tied to the machine, but also a locale where departures from the machine for
the purposes of excretion are also subservient to the dictates of profit margins.
This is because, first, the pace of industrial labour requires excretion to happen
during working hours as rapidly as possible, so that the machine remains
unattended for as little time as necessary. Second, the time spent away from
the machine during periods of work is subject to the same dictates. The set of
regulations and deterrents aimed at governing practices of excretion operate, in
the minimal case, through admonishment of the worker who spends too much
time in the toilet and, in the maximal case, by reducing the wage of the worker
in proportion to time wasted in that locale. Thus profit is derived from the
labour of the worker when (s)he is at her place, and deductions from wages
while (s)he is in the toilet also serve imperatives for profit generation, or at least
mitigate against the level of lost profit. If the capitalist factory is taken as being
emblematic of the modern social order per se, then the controls over excretion in
that locale are indeed symptomatic of the overall set of regulations imposed
upon human defecatory capacities in the modern period.

Instrumental Rationality and the Exercising of Excretion

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

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to the utter degradation of its subjects. Within the terrain of neo-Marxist

thought, probably the document that most perfectly encapsulates the negative
component of Marxs thought is Adorno and Horkheimers Dialectic of
Enlightenment (1944/1992). The essential premise of these authors critique of
modernity is that it is based upon a fundamentally destructive form of instrumental reasoning, for the quintessential modern condition involves the association of reason per se with calculation and planning. Such forms of regulation not
only involve control over non-human, external nature, but also over human
beings, with the entire history of modernity being regarded by these authors as a
process of increasing instrumentally rational enslavement of living minds and
bodies. Chronological regimes that are in and of their essence modern can therefore be seen as instantiations of an instrumentally rationalist attitude towards
both human and non-human life, such that the tempos of modern spheres of
action are fundamentally oriented around principles of domination through
regulation.
One of the key forms of thought that Adorno and Horkheimer locate as being
indicative of such forms of control is that of the Marquis de Sade. In his Juliette
(1991) and The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (1990), de Sade
dramatizes in the most brutal and explicit of fashions the dilemma of the
modern, whereby enlightened reason that has aimed at promoting human freedom turns back on itself such that it inadvertently promotes the enslaving of all
humanity. Adorno and Horkheimers reading of de Sade, in like fashion to their
prose style more generally, is deliberately provocative and overstated (BuckMorss, 1977; Rose, 1978). Awareness of this fact should prevent us from concentrating upon criticizing the obvious hyperbole of their position, in favour of
seeing how their account can help us to understand particular chronological
aspects of the faecal conditions of modernity. This is particularly the case as the
Marquis de Sades view of human relations includes a notably clear and forceful portrayal of how chronological regulation of human defecatory capacities is
a very important aspect of modern disciplinary regimes which have been
instantiated outside the economic sphere and factory context, locales privileged
by orthodox variants of Marxian analysis. Thus reading de Sade in the light of
Dialectic of Enlightenment allows an understanding of the significance of
attempts of various regimes only indirectly related to the capitalist economy, to
impose controls over the times when particular bodies excrete. In this regard,
such institutions can be regarded as indications of the impulses of the sociocultural (rather than solely socio-economic) order of modernity to impose
discipline on subject bodies, an analytic position shared in their own particular
ways both by Freud (see above) and by another major analyst of the modern,
Michel Foucault (e.g. 1977).
In The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, which concerns the use and
abuse of a group of unfortunates by a gang of aristocratic debauchees, de Sade

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(1990: 2423) writes that one of the statutes regulating the behaviour of those
abducted into slavery, both general and sexual, is the following:
As it is strictly forbidden to relieve oneself anywhere save in the chapel, which has
been outfitted and intended for the purpose, and forbidden to go there without
individual and special permission, the which shall often be refused, and for good
reason, the months presiding officer shall scrupulously examine, immediately
after breakfast, all the girls water closets, and in the case of a contravention
discovered in one of the above-designated place or in the other, the delinquent
shall be condemned to suffer the penalty of death.

As Angela Carter (1987: 87) has noted, to control the places and times of
defecation is to control the most elementary expression of individuals autonomy to act as they please. It was precisely the ability to act in ways that one
autonomously desired that Adorno and Horkheimer saw as being at the heart
of the paradox of the modern which de Sade so acutely represented: instead of
reason being used to further individual autonomy, the instrumental nature of
that reason comes to create institutionalized systems of servitude, which have
effects at both the corporeal and the spiritual levels.
A great deal of empirical material from the history of modernity may be
adduced to illustrate the compelling nature of this contention. Throughout the
19th century, strict control of the tempos of the bodies of subject groups was
a key concern of the administrators of institutions such as prisons, hospitals,
charitable workshops, schools and asylums (Corbin, 1995: 5). As noted earlier,
regulation of toiletry time is concomitant with the development of controls
over the spaces reserved for defecation. This relationship was expressed in the
evolution of institutional forms of discipline throughout the 19th century. For
example, in the hospital system, from around the early part of the century, there
arose imperatives as to deodorizing the body of the patient. This process was
one which involved, at a general level, techniques of somatic control over
bodily odours and, more specifically, the monitoring of the patients excretions
(Corbin, 1986: 107). From this period onwards, regulation of the excretory
habits of both patients and staff became stricter, resulting in a demarcation
of certain places permitted for defecatory purposes, thus consummating in a
public institution trends towards the privatization of defecation that had been
current in more general arenas of life since the later feudal period (see above).
Not only the faecal capacities of subject groups such as hospital patients, but
the defecatory potentials of all social sectors may be seen as coming under
increasingly more complex forms of spatial and temporal regulation. No group
came under more scrutiny in this regard than children. In order to operate appropriately within such a socio-cultural context, children had to be trained into the
habits both of defecating in legitimate locales, and of deferring the time of
excretion until a period when the bowels could be exercised in private (Whiting
and Child, 1953). Thus the environment of the school became one of the key

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locales of faecal regulation. This locale had already been for a long period a site
for the generation of more general forms of chronological control. From the
later 18th century onwards, schooling was arguably oriented around the new
universe of disciplined time, instilling in youngsters a sense of the importance
of time-thrift (Thompson, 1967: 84). English factory-schools of the period
were frequently run by Protestant sects, which instilled into pupils a strong
moral aversion to wasting time (Pollard, 1965: 193; Thompson, 1967: 878).
By the latter half of the 19th century, new and specific techniques of faecal
regulation were being deployed in the scholastic setting (Corbin, 1986: 181). A
typical example from the early 20th century is given by Robert Roberts in his
account of working class life in the industrial north of England. His school in
the Salford slums had a regime based around doorless privies, which were
intended to open the private realm of the toilet up to examination by the
authorities. Through being made visible, the pupils were discouraged from
wasting time, not just in terms of voiding their wastes, but also in that most
shameful of leisure pursuits, masturbation (Roberts, 1980: 135).
From the perspective of the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, such
developments are explicable as manifestations of the will to order characteristic of the instrumental reasoning that underpins modern socio-cultural conditions. However, Robertss example above also illustrates the fact that in many
types of public institution, it was the privacy of the place of defecation, the
factor that had become the most major imperative of bourgeois defecatory
mores outside the institutional setting, that was precisely the problem to be
managed within that setting. Toilets were places where inmates or patients
could slip away from the realm of instrumental regulation to waste hours doing
precisely those things that the regime of the institution forbade. From the mid19th century, such potentially subversive places were brought under novel
forms of scrutiny, opening up their hidden recesses to regulatory view.
This had already happened to some extent in the factory context. For
example, one of the rules in Josiah Wedgwoods factory in the late 18th century
warned against any scribbling of graffiti in places such as the toilets: any person writeing obseen or other writeing upon the walls either within or without the
works forfits for every offence 2 s. 6 d. (McKendrick, 1961: 44).3 Wedgwoods
regime was enforced by the active scrutiny of a gang of overseers. But the
developments in toilet management in non-factory contexts often did not rely
directly on observation by a supervisor. The threat of being seen was sufficient.
Thus the toiletry system of the Parisian Ecole Militaire consisted of latrines
[which] had been installed with half-doors, so that the supervisor on duty could
see the head and legs of the pupils (Foucault, 1977: 173). Michel Foucault
argued, somewhat in line with Adorno and Horkheimers position, that such
designs allowed a visual regime based around the fine, analytical divisions . . .
of an apparatus of observation, recording and training (1977: 173).

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Such regimes were not merely visual but temporal as well. As bourgeois
society outside the institution sought to train the infant into deferred defecation
in private locales, so too did regimes based upon strategies of instrumental
rationality seek to instill such habits into adults who were regarded as infantile.
While children received rigorous potty training to make them defecate only at
times and places where such an act was permissible, the subject populations
within mental institutions were also instructed, if not forced, to excrete according to a definite time-regimen, and not when their minds or their bodies desired.
Some asylum authorities drew up complex plans to make inmates defecate at set
intervals (Corbin, 1995: 5). Indeed, one French project involved asylum
dwellers being placed into iron harnesses, in order to compel them to relieve
themselves at certain times of the day, thus apparently ensuring that the body
became wholly subservient to the temporal structures of the institution (Corbin,
1986: 1256). It is at this point that the empirical evidence begins to paint a
picture which resembles in various ways the nightmarish scenes of somatic and
faecal control under the auspices of a form of reason impregnated by domination imagined in the previous century by the Marquis de Sade.

The Feminine Faecal and Temporal Constraint

The quotation above from The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom not
only illustrates the form of faecal slavery to which the victims of libertinism
were subjected, but since in this case the victims were women, it also shows the
subjection of the females defecatory capacities to the spatial and temporal
structurings of a modernity conceivable as a patriarchal social configuration
(Walby, 1990).
Freuds reflections on the regulation of defecation by contemporary western
civilization, while only too aware of the training undergone by young children
to render them faecally civilized, generally neglect two factors crucial to these
processes. First, that the regulation of defecatory acts involves a large-scale
system of disposal of wastes, and while a great deal of this collection and
disposal is carried out in the modern period by the water closet and the sewer, a
substantial amount of cleaning up is still carried out manually, and in many
cases such tasks have been assigned to women. Second, that the training of the
child into the habits of the civilized community is one generally ascribed to
the female housewife and mother, rather than to the male breadwinner and
father. These factors indicate that toiletry time, especially that of females, is
not confined to the periods when individuals void their own wastes, but also
encompasses the time those individuals spend on regulating and collecting the
wastes of other people.
One might expect that a social order based around the hierarchical organiza-

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tion of elite and subordinate groups would assign the disposal of human wastes
to the least valued groups, due to the classification of such tasks and materials as
being debased and unworthy that many societies operate with (Douglas, 1966;
Moore, 1984). The time of subordinate groups is defined by elites as being
worthy of being filled by such labours, whereas tasks like emptying latrines are
too lowly for the time of the socially superior to be spent on. The tendency for
contemporary western women to be expected to carry out both the toilet training
of infants and the disposal of their (and sometimes others) wastes is not
surprising if modernity is viewed as a fundamentally patriarchal social order.
The patriarchal subjection of the female in the domestic sphere is at a very
profound level constituted through the structuring of chronological routines.
Within the context of domestic labour, at one level the temporal routines of
housework followed by the housewife are self-imposed. As one interviewee in
Oakleys study of home-workers noted: you have your own time, theres
nobody behind you with a punch card (quoted in Oakley, 1974: 92). Yet at
another level, temporal routines and procedures are nonetheless set and
followed which operate implicitly in the service of the reproduction of the
domestic sphere as one element in the overall patriarchal order. The chronological control of an infants defecation is one aspect of a whole set of cadences
that women seek to impose on the household in which they work, and which are
at the same time imposed on women by the patriarchal logic of the role of
housewife. Toilet training, a re-enactment of the civilizing process in miniature,
may however prove to be a fraught process, precisely because its object, the
infants defecatory capacities, can often obstinately refuse to occur within the
chronological demands that the housewife/mother would like to impose on
them. The child may defecate at precisely the point in time when least expected
or least desired, as another interviewee noted of the recalcitrance of her son to
defecate at desired periods of time:
Im trying to potty train him now . . . My God! Im screaming and stiff with
temper to get him on the potty, and you get him on it and hes there about an hour
before he does anything. The other day we were watching television, and he done
a wee wee in the potty. I brought it out here, emptied it, and took it back for the
next one, and he done one another one, within seconds on the floor. (quoted in
Oakley, 1974: 1101)

If the housewife and mother is condemned to be the creator of temporal routines

as regards defecation over which she has less than total control, the same situation may be said to pertain today for women in other spheres outside the home.
In a variety of extra-domestic locales, patriarchal modernity may be seen as
regulating female toiletry time, while simultaneously denigrating its status in
favour of its male equivalent. For example, in the sphere of paid work, when
men enter traditionally feminine occupations such as nursing, they may be

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keen to distinguish themselves from their female counterparts by refusing to

carry out tasks related to the collection of excreta, such as the emptying of bedpans (Game and Pringle, 1984: 111). Evidently, mens time is regarded as being
too precious to waste on the collection of wastes, while womens time continues
to be regarded as naturally encompassing the collection and disposal of detritus.
Furthermore, in the public sphere more generally, recent research has
shown that women are systematically disadvantaged in terms of access to public
toiletry facilities. Women may be compelled to spend longer periods of time in
toiletry facilities than men, due to factors such as differential forms of voidance
in the female and male body, differences in clothing management, varying
forms of toilet etiquette and so on (Kira, 1995). However, at the same time it
seems that public authorities and other bodies tend to provide proportionally
more facilities for men than for women (Edwards and McKie, 1996). Thus
the average time spent in toilet facilities by a woman, already greater than the
average time spent by a man due to the various factors above, is made even
greater still by the relative lack of facilities for women.
In this case, a patriarchal order is materialized in a crucial absence of facilities that would allow women to control their own toiletry time, rather than be
subjected to the time-wasting vagaries of waiting in queues or seeking alternative toiletry locales. In this sense, a patriarchal order is inscribed in the ways in
which women are compelled to spend more time in the toilet, just as in the other
instances we have looked at, individuals have been subjected to strategies that
reduce as much as possible the time they spend in such places. The control of
toiletry time can thus involve either direct measures to ensure a reduction in the
period spent in defecation, or (probably less intentional) ways in which the subordinate status of a group such as women is embodied in a lack of consideration
by power-holders for their toiletry needs, leading to greater durations of the time
of these groups in comparison to others being squandered on defecatory acts.

Faecal Rupturings of Time-Regimes

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

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quently disturbed and challenged, it is better to relinquish more pessimistic

accounts of total rational control over behaviours, such as that adumbrated by
Adorno and Horkheimer. In their stead, we can consider the model of faecal
restraints postulated by Freud, which accounts for controls effected over defecation and yet also gives ample space for examining the ways in which such forms
of jurisdiction are often, if not constantly, under threat from the very faecal
factors that have been suppressed.
Freuds position is based around the contention that what modern western
civilization has repressed is one of the essential psycho-sexual drives intrinsic to
the human being in its raw, uncivilized state. Freud dubs this condition
coprophilia, the instinctual drive to be at one with, to touch and to smell, and
even to ingest ones own faecal products. According to Freud (1957, 1962a),
very primitive peoples indulge such instincts as they are not under the aegis of
an orderly cosmology of civilization which abominates such practices. Children
in modern society come into the world with such dispositions intact, and thus
the process of toilet training is essentially a mode of habituating children to act
under the auspices of civilization rather than respond to their inborn coprophiliac instincts (Freud and Oppenheim, 1966). Nonetheless, this habituation is
never complete or wholly effective, for the adult psyche is still tormented by the
undercurrents of faecal desire repressed in early life (Freud, 1962b). In this way,
an activity such as the formulation of toilet humour is the result of these
normally hidden currents momentarily breaking to the surface, to the level of
consciousness:
. . . forms of mental activity such as joking are still able to make the obstructed
source of pleasure [i.e. coprophilia] accessible for a brief moment, and thus show
how much of the esteem in which human beings once held their faeces still
remains preserved in the unconscious. (Freud and Oppenheim, 1966: 187)

Thus, as we noted above, the dilemma of a specifically modern consciousness is

that the coprophiliac elements which have been subjugated by civilization in the
forming of that very consciousness itself, occasionally break free of their chains
to achieve temporary liberty. What was in the distant historical past the natural
human state of a love of excrement, a state brought under conquest by the
psychic imperatives of the modern, suddenly reappears to disrupt the forms of
self-representation of the modern subject. The irruption against consciousness
thus performed is profoundly chronological in aspect for two reasons. In the
first case, the archaic impulses which modern psychic structures have held in
check break into the present, demonstrating their persistence over time (Freud,
1962b). Second, the modern consciousness, which believes itself to be free of
such discomfiting impediments, achieves this state of grace through a temporal
sense which denies any link to the primeval and filthy past (Freud, 1970). With
the irruption of the forbidden into the presence of consciousness, the latters

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temporal sensibility is smashed as its mastery over the past is gainsaid by the
power of the archaic to appear unbidden once more.
The transient autonomy of the repressed coprophiliac instincts manifests
itself for the modern consciousness in more positive or more negative fashions.
In the case of toilet humour, the return of the repressed offers a source of guilty
pleasure, whereas in the case of other expressions of coprophilia, the reappearance of the latter becomes a source of unease, embarrassment and disquiet.
Sometimes the two elements run together. For example, that staple of the
schoolboys armoury of practical jokes, the whoopee cushion, invites laughter
at the discomfort of the person who happens to sit on it, involuntarily producing
a noise akin to the voiding of wind from the behind. The whoopee cushion can
be a particularly effective device for eliciting both mirth and embarrassment if it
is placed under a seat in a highly decorous environment like the middle-class
sitting-room. In such a setting, the place for defecation-related acts is the toilet,
and the corresponding time when such acts are acceptable is when the individual is in such a space, hidden away from the gaze of others, and probably out
of earshot too. Both the abashment of the victim of the whoopee cushion and the
amusement (or disgust) of the onlookers is a product not only of the fact that
such an environment has been deemed unsuited for such emissions, but because
the time in which the emission took place was also wholly illegitimate.
One does not have to accept fully Freuds model of repression to accept that
the human bodys defecatory capacities continue to subvert modernitys
chronological and spatial regimes by making unexpected appearances on the
social stage. For example, Norbert Eliass (1995: 498) account of the civilizing
process was based on a rejection of Freuds assertion as to intrinsic sexual
capacities being repressed by civilization in favour of a model which suggests
that there was a relative shift from lower to higher levels of regulation of
practices, including faecal acts, between the end of feudalism and early modernity. Elias therefore rejects any assertions as to instinctual coprophilia in the
human being, but argues that there did indeed occur a series of shifts from a
situation where the production of faeces and wind were treated more sanguinely
in the medieval period, to a modern scenario where such phenomena are
regarded much more negatively and brought under greater levels of regulation.
This can be seen through a juxtaposition of two representative examples from
the medieval and modern periods respectively, one from the mid-15th century
and the other from the early 18th century:
It is customary that, if any one happens to break wind, the by-standers should say:
To the beard of him who owes no one anything. In Vicenza, an old man, with a
long flowing beard, was summoned by a creditor before the Governor of the city,
Ugolotto Biancardo, a learned and stern magistrate. The old man, in a loud voice
and with great prolixity, kept repeating that he was nobodys debtor, that he owed
no one anything: Get away from here, said Ugolotto, and remove that stinking

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beard of yours, the stench of which incommodes us. Quite abashed, the old man
asked how his beard could be so offensive to the smell? Why replied the
Governor, it is replete with all the farts that men ever let, since they are sent to the
beard of him who owes no one anything. The joke lowered the mans tone, and
set all the assistants laughing.5
It is very impolite to emit wind from your body when in company, either from
above or from below, even if it is done without noise.6

The former example comes from a collection of humorous stories, the latter
from an instruction manual in etiquette. Yet despite differences in genre, each
illustrates the attitudes of their respective periods to the relationships between
anal emissions, the reactions of self and others to these, and the chronological
management thereof. In the former case, the act of farting produces not only in
the people in the story but also, we may assume, in the reader a form of
(relatively) guilt-free laughter. However, the second source indicates that by the
18th century, the imperatives for preventing such emissions at inopportune
moments (and the set of opportune moments for such phenomena was diminishing ever more at this period) are so great relative to previous centuries that
farting would definitely result in high levels of embarrassment and distress for
s/he whose body had slipped out of the network of regulation. The laughter
stimulated in other people would primarily be a stifled and somewhat shameful
snickering, at least among the elites who at this time more than the lower orders
have taken on the habits of civility, rather than the generally unabashed
guffaw that would have been the response, probably among all social strata,
several centuries earlier.
Thus the fart can be seen as an iconic factor in the construction of civilized
modernity, on either Freuds or Eliass telling. Ironically, it was precisely the
relative inability of spatio-temporal regimes to fully control bodily emissions
such as the fart which led to ever greater levels of effort to regulate such factors.
As we saw above, the account Elias gives of the development of the civilizing
process is one based around a description of the means by which faecal acts
became ever more tightly regulated. But it was precisely as more regulations
were developed to control excretory emissions that the perceived need to
control such phenomena became more pronounced; and as the importance of
regulating such activities became more important, the offences perceived to be
generated by farts and unintended and uncontrolled defecation became all the
greater, thus stimulating even more stringent rules and regulations as to when
and where defecation and related actions could legitimately occur. In effect
then, the history of modern faecal control involves a dialectic whereby the
failure of certain spatial and chronological systems of administration to fully
control the excretory leads to the creation of novel forms of regulation, which in
turn are haunted by the spectre of failure to reign in a partly controlled but still
unruly and chronologically unpredictable faecal realm.

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Conclusion: Faecal Freedom and the Paradox of the Modern

In this article we have reviewed from several perspectives how in the modern
period excremental traces of the earth and the bodies that create them have
been brought under multiple forms of chronological and spatial guidance and
administration. Whether the modern is regarded, as from the viewpoints of
Freud and Elias, as a civilized social order, or as a capitalistic or instrumentally rational or patriarchal configuration, it is clear that the modern project,
however conceived, is based around a series of attempts to control the times and
places of human defecation. Whether the subject groups whose excretions are
being temporally and spatially guided are factory workers, women, the victims
of libertinism or the population in toto, it remains the case that modernity is a
social order that involves unprecedented attempts to bring under the aegis of
regulated time the organic processes of the human body itself.
Nonetheless, the case of faecal regulation highlights one of the great dilemmas of modernity. In this social configuration based on a radical unsettling of
established habits and entrenched traditions, the past comes, as both Marx and
Freud knew in their own ways, to weigh like a nightmare on the awareness of
the present. The exiled antique forever reappears on the horizon of a society
both striving towards the future and seeking to relinquish the vestiges of a past
it regards as best forgotten. What reappears becomes a nagging danger and
unspoken threat to the overlapping regimes of temporal constraint which seek to
bring the human body under their auspices. At the same time as it exhibits a
series of chronologically expressed forms of the will to power, modernity also
pays witness to frequent displays of the great recalcitrance of the faecal capacities of the body, when these refuse to act in line with desiderata of restraint and
demands for order. By considering the dialectic of corporeal control and faecal
freedom that has occurred over the last several centuries, we can begin to
glimpse one of the great paradoxes of the modern: that more erratic pulses
of bodily time still vibrate deep within a human frame born into a period of
apparent mastery by forms of time that seek to kill inconsistency.

Notes
1. For the sake of concision, we will use the word defecation to refer to acts that
produce either faeces or urine. Although there are important differences between the
production of each material, this article will regard each as synonymous.
2. It was only towards the end of the 18th century that such socially generated attitudes
and practices were coupled with the evaluations of the disease-ridden nature of faeces
generated by medico-scientific knowledges (see Corbin, 1986: 47; Freud, 1957: 55;
Elias, 1995: 443).
3. At around this time many factories also adopted regulations as to the ways in which

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employees were allowed to express themselves linguistically. For example, the rules
of a late 18th century cotton mill had it that: [w]hile at work . . . behaviour must be
commendable avoiding all shouting, loud talk, whistling, calling foul names, all mean
and vulgar language, and every kind of indecency. Contravention of such rules was
punishable by fines (Pollard, 1965: 195).
4. This can be seen in some of the examples presented above. Robert Roberts (1980:
135) noted that despite all the efforts of his schools authorities, the pupils continued
to indulge their bad habits while spending time in the toilets. Similarly, the production-line workers in Cavendishs (1982: 115) study successfully manipulated the regulations by rush[ing] to the loo in work-time to add a couple of extra minutes to the
break.
5. From Poggio (1879: 1623). Original circa 1459.
6. From La Salle, Les Rgles de la biensance et de la civilit chrtienne (1729), cited in
Elias (1995: 108).

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HOLMES : TOILETRY TIME

DAVID INGLIS is a lecturer in sociology, University of Aberdeen. He

writes and teaches in the areas of sociological and social theory, and the
sociology of culture. ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, University of
Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3QY, UK. [email: soc103@abdn.ac.uk]
MARY HOLMES is a lecturer in sociology, University of Aberdeen. She
writes and teaches in the areas of feminist theory and the politics and
cultures of representation. ADDRESS: as David Inglis.
[email: soc085@abdn.ac.uk]

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