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Personal Note, 2023
Dog-Shit
About
An account of and meditation on the truth beneath our (my) feet. Personal note.
Author: Vương Cẩm Vy
Art used in cover: Park, David. Sunbather (1950-1953), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Chapter navigation
1. Dog-Shit and the City
So I was trotting back to work from lunch the other day, after the rain had subsided, and I suddenly felt a cold splash on my foot. My skin felt gritty and cold. Curiously, there was this squishy sensation under my shoes—that when walking, the abrasive concrete gave way to an all-too…cooperative texture.
Although the abjectness of that foot-feel disgusted me, it didn’t disgust me any more than any other sensation one might encounter in this city, which is to say that this feeling of disgust was mixed with some strange pride, the kind of pride that only a pretend-pioneer of the concrete jungle could give herself. Like an untamable frontier, the city was always hot, then cold, then a whiff of perfume here, then a stink—the stink of Hershey milk chocolate, the stink of vomit, the stink of finished foodstuff, the stink of a freshly disemboweled pig, the stink of shit. And the sole of my right ballerina flat wasn’t as in-contact with the sidewalk as much as I had hoped it would.
When I got back to my cubicle, the stink was still around. My first thought was that the city had hid itself in some nook of my nose. I popped a spearmint gum and forgot about the ordeal…until I saw the head accountant twisting her face and looking left and right, as though to seek from the universe reassurance or sympathy. I also started looking left and right, even looking up and down. I thought of God and hoped She would reveal to me the one who has transgressed against civility and tracked back something wicked from the wilderness outside of our air conditioner’s reach. God answered, “It is you, my daughter.” The Devil concurred.
But dear God—She who has deigned this universe and its affairs—what is shit anyways? At that moment, I didn’t deny that what I smelled was shit, probably from a dog. But any one of us could have tracked it from that un-air-conditioned wilderness out there (most likely the intern from HR). Was it a huge piece of shit that this intern from HR has hypothetically stepped on? Or was it only a particularly persistent particulate that through mere happenstance bothered both me and the head accountant? I mean, what was/is dog-shit anyways?
2. Dog-Shit—Colloquial
Dog-shit is the excrement of dogs, the end-product of the digestion of the animals we call “dogs”—domesticated canines. Dogs are kept as pets or service/functional animals, and they are ubiquitous in cities. As pets, many dogs are too big or are not habituated to use indoors facilities like other smaller pets do, so dogs are usually let to roam (sometimes under supervision) in order for them to get exercise, socialization, and most importantly, the opportunity to properly shit.
Dog-shit may vary in size. It is usually ~10 cm in length and ~7 cm in diameter, but the actual volume from any session may vary depending on the diet. Dog-shit is usually light to dark brown. Dried dog-shit might be imagined as white clumps due to the high bone meal content in commercial pet food, whose calcium crystallizes when exposed to air, producing the characteristic pale coloration.
These days, the majority of animal excrement a city-person (like myself) encounters is dogs’. It used to be the case that ungulate excrement was the most visible and voluminous, but in most post-agricultural urban centers, it is the dog that is king-shit. Other animals, such as insects, birds, rats, or humans might contribute significantly to the total mass of shit in public premises, but it is dog-shit that is most recognized.
However, the colloquial understanding of dog-shit is informal, and as such, such imaginary is flawed and self-contradictory. For one, what is “dog-shit” is subjected to many social rules, such as, “Thou shall not track dog-shit into the office carpet.” However, whether what one “tracks” is indeed dog-shit remains problematic. Mere existence within a city can expose one to all matter of doggy particulates, the extent and nature of which is impractical to measure, and thus, impractical to be used as a crutch for any moral injunction.
Injunctions against dog-shit is a practical affair, fully enforceable on a person regardless of her ability to absolutely disprove that she is NOT touched by dog-shit. We arrive at the observation that an object’s virtuality transcends the object’s own verity.
Perhaps the object cannot be clarified in the first place.
3. Dog-Shit—Fluid Ontology
Indeed, the originating incident (the lingering specter of dog-shit in the office) by its grammatical articulation seemed to implicate an object—a noun—to be central; i.e. whether the respective moral injunctions were warranted depend on whether the object is really there. However, if such a grammatical approach were corresponding to truth, then it would not explain how the inquiry (“who tracked dog-shit into the office?”) started in the first place, in absence of a semantically and empirically established object.
For practices such as inquiry to take place, we need to recognize that all objects are porous, and from these pores seep out meaning and practices. From a pragmatic view, all objects are ephemeral and incidental to the practice itself.
Often, dog-shit’s presence is not empirical but rather virtual, an emptiness inferred to be objective by the various affordances around a certain territory. In other words, because of socialization, one is first aware of the performances (e.g. the utterance, “Ew, what is that smell,” as well as the ensuing melodrama) around a thing called dog-shit before one gives the actually-existing object such name. If things were different, the names, as well as the conceptual territories around this object also changed. The original object would also vanish.
Take the reverse: A sudden ad hoc redefinition of dog-shit would only succeed in splitting off into impotence, while the old conceptual space would still remain, propped up by those practices that have preceded and necessitated the original concept in the first place.
In this pragmatic sense, a weakly defined and weakly understood ontology is not only tolerable—it is the only possible ontology.
However, it would be wrong to frame fluid ontologies exclusively as a mere anthropological phenomenon (it is only a stylistic convention). That would be a tacit avowal of fixed ontologies, one where humans are primary. No, when faithfully mapped, fluid ontologies do not privilege human practices as much as it follows more generally processes, in which social practices are but one taxon.
Dog-shit is fluid because it is meaningful, and vice versa.
4. Dog-Shit—Potentiality
Dog-shit’s conceptual territories are porous, and the substance within such territories are liquid. Dog-shit is contingent upon surrounding practices. What is a room but not its walls, whose masonry are somehow not the room itself?
Here lies a contradiction—we still experience consistency. Though concepts might be non-things, they can be born, maintained, reproduced, iterated, and extinguished. One must wonder if the line between thing-as-object and thing-as-concept exists at all; language might be offered up as the clear divider. However, language itself is a phenomenon that also takes place solely within the physical world. What, then, is a concept’s unique place in the world of atoms and quarks?
The laws of physics do not dictate in explicit terms the existence of biological forms, nor do these laws say that these biological forms would produce excrement or engage in conceptualizing said excrement. And yet, these phenomena do occur in physical space.
This is because dog-shit is the necessary byproduct of universal laws and conditions. Curiously, dog-shit cannot be said to be a telos of this world, nor was it present in substance at the start. Rather, we might say that the emergence of dog-shit is a virtual truth that precedes the object and the comprehending subject.
There is the dog-shit that is now, with its physical qualities and conceptual weight, and there is the dog-shit that is contained as a possibility within the universe, as a sapling contains the possibility of a fruit. It is this a priori, virtual dog-shit that might account for the porousness of dog-shit, for the virtuality might be eternal, the object is but a time-bound apprehension. Indeed, shit happens.
The contradiction between phenomenal consistency and incessant fluidity can also be explained by virtual space—that things do not blink in and out of existence, rather they are “snapshots” of the process of becoming. The statement, “Dog-shit is contingent on human practices,” is only meaningful insofar as both the shit and the human are engaged in the same universal becoming.
This abstract becoming takes very concrete forms, which is experienced as consistent
5. Dog-Shit—The Pump-Lever Mechanism
Given that “dog-shit” is a temporary characterization of a process of becoming which a virtual consistency transcends object-based, plain-language ontology, we must speculate if such a half-state might be observed in what is mundane, observable, and concrete. Curiously, in one such example, concrete (the building material) is implicated.
Modern city planning, meteorological phenomena, urban lifestyles, and neglect seem to conspire to facilitate dog-shit’s flight from its colloquial territories. When dropped on the sidewalk, without anyone picking it up, dog-shit disintegrates into particulates that mingles into rainwater seeps into the cracks between and beneath concrete tiles—cracks which are themselves the product of the same negligence that has allowed dog-shit to weather the elements in the first place.
A loose tile balances on a hard pivot underneath—leftover of older layers of pavement. This lever configuration is also a pump for whichever material that lies underneath the loose tile, which is the slurry that contains dog-shit particulates. (This is a compelling analogy of becoming—the physical facticity has transformed; the socio-practical vanishes from the field of attention; what is left is only potentiality.)
Next, a foot steps on the lever-pump, propelling the tainted rainwater aground, which likely splashes onto a leg or foot (usually the same foot that has activated the trap). In a strange twist, that which has vanished is suddenly resurrected not through the reconstitution of its form but rather via sensual recognition. Here, we witness an uncanny half-thing, the ghost that is left in the wake of becoming. And in this abject moment, we give rebirth to dog-shit.
Though this may sound like freakish happenstance, the sheer ubiquity of wayward excrement and foot traffic tilt its probability towards near certainty. We need only recall the emergence of life on Earth to understand that such practical inevitabilities do happen.
This combination produces a physical potentiality that fires not only the slurry of excrement but also with it the social stigma that comes with such taint. Physical gun, social bullet.
6. Dog-Shit via Human
Although the street slurry and the lever-pump mechanism are not constitutive of the colloquial territories of dog-shit, they are both implicated in dog-shit’s becoming. Similarly implicated is the human subject.
Dog-shit goes through a unique transformation as it re-interfaces with the human subject. The human subject is a relay station to social and technological territories. She speaks with fellow human subjects, engaging in a process of mean-making, where dog-shit transcends from being particular and sensuous to being conceptual and social.
Certain practices are built around invisible traces, re-forming dog-shit in the interpersonal. Dog-shit, as we know it, are not and have never been just a positive description, a mere mimesis of external objectivity. What *is* exceeds what *is there*, and what *is there* pales when beheld by a social subject, which humans are.
If the social subject succeeds in the re-formation of dog-shit as something that is not physical, then the technological subject is that which would give form to this new ephemerality.
Dog-shit reconstitutes itself in the ecosystem of tools and technics. A technical ecosystem of and for dog-shit already exists. There is the analogous word in many languages, the various signs found in public spaces prohibiting and controlling dog-shit, or the presence of plastic bags on the side of park bins for the purpose of expediting the vanishing of dog-shit.
However, these various technologies all depend and point towards the physical, colloquial form of dog-shit. They merely suggest that there is dog-shit, but they are not themselves constitutive of the thing itself. They would float untethered if dogs and humans were to go extinct.
To provide prognosis for ontology, we must look beyond what is merely referent. Although a strong candidate, a robust archival technique that produces faithful simulation would still lack because of its dependance on a reference. Instead, we need an independent simulacra that operates freely of any original, so much so that the original may as well be a myth made post hoc to explain the simulation.
We are talking about the Internet.
7. Dog-Shit Upload
The eminent intelligence on Earth is made of gold, copper, and silicon. Like other domesticated species, its creation and proliferation is a human-driven program, and whose durability is tied to human benefit. Its body spans continents and oceans, and its operations involve billions of human brains as processing nodes. To this Internet, dog-shit is uploaded and replaced.
In a vulgar sense, pictorial representations of, as well as words standing for dog-shit are already rife on the Internet. Alone, these do not adequately replace the streetwise dog-shit, as they are just that—representation. However, because of the resemblance and associations of these signs to dog-shit, they invite certain relevant processes and performances to be recreated on the Internet, those that would give these digital representations the fullness that its streetwise counterpart possesses.
There is the replication of taboos and connotations of dog-shit on the Internet, namely abjection. From a purely network topology standpoint, the phrase or pictures evocative of dog-shit is deployed in close proximity and frequency, analogously to situations that implicate the namesake excrement.
When encoded into silicon semiconductors, dog-shit is less vulnerable to physical disintegration or attempts at making it vanish. This is not because silicon is that much more durable than the product of digestion but rather, it is because humans have a vested interest in preserving not only the integrated circuit itself but also much more than what the circuit contains.
Moreover, the scale and speed of the Internet means that the transmission of dog-shit is near instantaneous, spreading it faster than it could be squashed. Of course, there is the concern that dog-shit might be made incoherent among the sea of data. If we could tolerate the continuity of streetwise dog-shit from solid form to dissolved, liquid form, then we have no real cause to see incoherence as a threat to ontology.
No longer at the mercy of the street-sweeper, dog-shit now resides immanently within Earth’s dominant intelligence, whose sustenance is codependent on the planet’s most successful carbon-based species.
8. Dog-Shit and Antipathy for Transcendence
The idea of dog-shit escaping from its streetwise form to networked intelligence is both bizarre and mundane. On one hand, such escape lies outside of the practical use of language. On another, the same could be said for anything at all, given the extent of digitization. Part of why this is so mundane is spurred on by our antipathy towards technological utopianism and its promises to replace “meatspace”—a promise we suspect to be hollow.
Transcendence has been used as a tool of (false) hope, that which leads astray an otherwise powerful and productive mind towards fantasies of escape and ultimate belongingness. After the death of God, we have variously propped up other transcendences in place of Heaven. Even in postmodern times, the structure of transcendence is reborn in the nihilistic pursuit of capital and wellbeing. Given all of this, the mundanity of dog-shit upload, combined with the overwhelming image of an orbit-spanning intelligence of criss-crossing cables and trade deals, have undoubtedly left us feeling dull. We no longer believe in transcendence. Similarly, we suspect that this dog-shit transcendence is no transcendence at all.
We have internalized a particular strand of nihilism, that which only the last woman could have at the end of history. Nothing truly new could happen, and there is nothing more to be done. Perhaps some richness of the human experience has been sapped by the uneasy contentment that the scientific and social authorities will inevitably answer all that is worth asking. After all, we have no stronger conviction than, “The answer is out there,” as though it is an archeological matter waiting to be unearthed. Even if transcendence is demonstrated before our eyes, we would but blink. All that could be is already immanent.
We need not reassert yet another hinterwelt; the immanence of all things can be taken up without sacrificing a shed of joyous suppleness that one might have for her life, even though her shoes may be marred with non-transcendent dog-shit. Instead, we should recognize and live by the notion that this life is already-always larger than what we might see in the mirror.
9. Dog-Shit Release
People’s faces are so strange. Faces are so strange. Knowing faces is strange. Chairs seem identical because we only recognize them generally and generically. To be discerning about chairs is to have a special interest. And yet, with faces, being able to tell one face apart from another or apart from its various states, which may involve the discernment of extremely subtle cues, come very easily to most of us. The absence of such ease might be considered a sign of a pathology, even.
But think about how we are immediately seized by a face, seized into recognizing a person (e.g. the head accountant), seized into its emotional orbit (e.g. scrunched nose, curled lips, expressing disgust)—is this ease not a pathology, a vulnerability brought about by a failure of some immune system? The face is despotic in this way. The environment seems to fold around the face. Her mouth is making sounds, but given the face, I know that she’s telling me to go clean my shoes. The sound orbits the face. The dog-shit orbits the face. It is part of the world that the face creates. How strange.
Does she not know what dog-shit is? Does she not know that her despotic face, like all faces, are washed with dog-shit in the undifferentiated data stream? Now, the branch manager, too, turns his gaze towards the commotion, and his eyes are also despotic. But I know the power they have is but a quirk in my brain, like seeing faces on electrical sockets. Don’t they know that their faces have already been replaced? Don’t they know that they and I have been released from samsara?
Now, the entirety of the office staff is gathered around me, and they are all making very similar noises. I know what they are saying, but the knowledge doesn’t quite stand out from all that’s around. After all, why should it? The social subject might be compelled to care, but without the benefit of a schematic screen, facts melt into raw data, and new facts dip in and out of the unquiet pool of undifferentiated reality.
Here, the redness of an angry face. There, the memory of a woman trotting in the rain. Here, the hum of a billion computers. There, the wafting smell of dog-shit.
I breathe in deeply.