ancient cities

696 Sewer
sewer and define its place within an episteme, it is
possible to question the role of the sewer in the
constitution of subjects (i.e., Baron Georges-Eugène
Haussmann’s modernization of Paris involved a
radical expansion and modernization of the city’s
sewer system, which by 1878 was approximately
600 kilometers long). This in turn brings us to
critically analyze the associations that connect
sewers and waste to specific groups of subjects
(e.g., the untouchable caste [or Dalit] in India and
South Asia and the homeless in Western societies).
Referring to the work of Michel Foucault and Ian
Hacking this approach can be characterized as a
form of historical ontology or dynamic nominalism
that focuses on how the interaction between
the practice of naming and what is named shapes
the lived world. By regarding the sewer as the
intersection of a set of dynamic discursive and
technological processes with the material world, it
is possible to open up the critical space that is necessary
for social critique and social change.
The Sewer as Underworld and Dreamscape
The sewer is hidden below the foundations of the
city. This fact alone brings with it a whole series of
metaphysical associations with what can broadly
be referred to as the underworld. The stigma of its
spatial location is further compounded by what
the sewer both conceals and transports, yet, despite
the fact that it traffics in the offensive by-products
of urban life, its labyrinthine passages remain the
object of a forbidden sense of wonder. There is an
almost irrepressible curiosity that is associated
with the sewer. It is this curiosity that compels us
to wonder what exactly is under the manhole. This
sense of wonder gives rise to the diverse representations
of the sewer in both literature and film. In
our imaginations we discover a vast underworld
swarming with a seemingly infinite variety of
criminals, outcasts, and monsters. From Victor
Hugo’s description of the sewers of nineteenthcentury
Paris in Les Miserables, to the giant alligators
of Thomas Pynchon’s V. and the elaborate
underworlds found in the work Haruki Murakami,
to films such as Them! (1954), Alligator (1980),
and C.H.U.D. (1984), the sewer is the site of the
impossible, the monstrous, and the transgressive. In
literature and film the sewer acts as the stage where
our transgressive fantasies can be played out.
Within the lived city the sewer plays a similar
transgressive role as it provides us with a space in
which the imaginary excess of our desires can be
freely deposited. In this sense the dense network of
sewers and service tunnels that reside just below
the surface of the city exist as a nostalgic remnant
of the first architectural object: the labyrinth. Like
the labyrinth, the sewer is built to both conceal
and contain. Yet, this still leaves us with the question
of what is being contained and who it is being
concealed from. With regard to the labyrinth, this
answer is simple: Minos commissioned Daedalus
to build the labyrinth to contain the Minotaur and
therefore conceal his shame (the Minotaur was the
progeny of Minos’s wife Pasiphaë and a bull). The
Minotaur—unlike its close relatives the centaur
and the satyr—shares none of man’s nobility precisely
because its head is bestial and thus it serves
as the paradigmatic symbol of the uncontainable
and unthinking desire of the unconscious. Much
like the labyrinth of Greek mythology the sewer
conceals the lower and shameful aspect of life. Its
function is to contain this bad form of life and thus
separate it from the good. As such, it is the site of
a perpetual and compulsive expulsion, but the
expulsion is always necessarily incomplete. It contains
the shame of the body’s base functions, but it
is incapable of eliminating these functions altogether.
Despite all of the intricacies of containment,
filtration, and treatment, there is still waste and
contamination. The sewer is thus an irreducible site
of both revulsion and transgressive fantasy.
Based on a psychoanalytic approach, Jacques
Lacan argues desire becomes evident at the point at
which the demand for sanitation extends beyond
the need for it. This desire is not a relation to an
object but to a lack. It is the desire to close the gap
that is constitutive of subjectivity and, by extension,
the city. It is the desire for an ideal city and
the ideal form of life that it promises to contain. It
is the desire for this ideal that compels the subject
to designate a form of life that is a “waste” and to
thus extend the contamination of the sewer by
associating it with areas of human waste. The
sewer and its contamination thus become an
attempt to define and localize the gap that exists
between the actual and ideal. The subjects that live
in or near the sewer become a lower form of life or,
to borrow Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben’s
terminology, they become “bare” life. Yet, despite