Everyone Poops: Consumer Virtues and Excretory Anxieties in Locke’s Theory of Property

• Author: Laura Ephraim
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211048420
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211048420

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(5) 673 –699

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211048420

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Article

Everyone Poops:

Consumer Virtues and

Excretory Anxieties

in Locke’s Theory of

Property

Laura Ephraim1

Abstract

It is a problem that the environment is often seen and treated as a reservoir

of resources awaiting human use. How did this outlook arise? This essay

analyzes a formative moment in the constitution of the environment as a

buffet of goods to be consumed: seventeenth-century efforts by agricultural

improvers, including John Locke, to eradicate waste. Locke’s theory of

property prohibits the wasteful spoilage of food and charges mankind with

a responsibility to cultivate, incorporate, and thereby appropriate earth’s

nonhuman eatables—what I call his “partition of the digestible.” But eating

both underwrites and unhinges Lockean property rights, for all food contains

materials that cannot be used by the body and must be excreted from it.

Poop and pee serve as visible (and smelly) reminders that consumption is

inhabited by, and thus cannot resolve, waste. Even the improvers’ ostensible

solution of repurposing excrement as manure to produce more food just

creates more waste: this “peristaltic circle,” as I describe it, is voracious

and expansive. Circular waste-eradication projects are best understood

1Associate Professor of Political Science, Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Laura Ephraim, Associate Professor of Political Science, Williams College, 24 Hopkins Hall

Drive, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA.

Email: laura.ephraim@williams.edu

1048420PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211048420Political TheoryEphraim

research-article2021

674 Political Theory 50(5)

as enabling preconditions for the wastefulness of linear, take-make-waste

political economies, not their antidote.

Keywords

Locke, property, waste, excrement, capitalism, ecology, consumption

“The environment” is not what its definite article makes it seem: an object, or

collection thereof, that is susceptible to human manipulation, exploitation, or

protection because it stands apart from us and our agency to intervene. Rather,

we are in and of it. And, as Donna Haraway (2016), Bruno Latour (2017), and

Timothy Morton (2018) highlight, this “it,” this so-called environment, is

more verb than noun, a co-constitutive flux of mutually imbricated human

and nonhuman elements. Yet, the impression of the environment-as-object is

stubborn, because that impression is at once both a misleading fiction and

part of a remarkably successful, if always incomplete, world-building praxis,

through which nonhuman and liminally human bodies get conscripted to

serve as things-to-be-used. Over time, this asymmetrical objectification of

earth’s dynamic interspecies swirls actually produces a material reality that

approximates the oppositions imposed upon it, at once tangibly facilitating

and ideologically justifying human domination and ownership of nonhuman

and dehumanized beings. The story of this partial but consequential instantia-

tion of environmental objecthood is among the most important and least

understood aspects of the history of capitalism, as Jason W. Moore (2015)

emphasizes. This essay analyzes a formative episode within that history: the

seventeenth-century agricultural improvement movement. How did a cadre

of improvers, including especially one John Locke, contribute to making the

environment seem—and in certain undeniable, though contestable, respects

actually be—a manipulable, exploitable buffet from which to take and con-

sume useful objects and into which to deposit useless waste?

I hasten to add that this way of putting the question misleadingly suggests

that the values of utility and disposability were as tightly linked in capitalism’s

agricultural beginnings as they are in today’s “linear” or “take-make-waste”

political economies (Lacy et al. 2020, 5–6). On the contrary, the improvers’

zeal for use was matched only by their abhorrence of waste. Locke and his

fellow agricultural reformers contributed to reshaping the earth into a reposi-

tory of stuff-to-be-taken precisely through their efforts to ensure that every-

thing in God’s creation would be used and nothing wasted. Locke’s readers