Purity and danger: new shit for old in Santa Barbara at the turn of the millennium

In the late 1990s the citizens of Santa Barbara in Southern California experienced twin shocks that destabilized their understanding of their shit, obliging them to reconsider both the degree to which they could detach themselves from their own bodily detritus, and their personal and collective responsibility for managing it. Contamination of a famous surfing beach was traced using new DNA technologies; stringent new EPA regulations about disposal of sewage brought a novel substance, ‘biosolids’, into public awareness. As the Santa Barbara waste regime evolved, so too did its materialities – which forms and kinds of matter were considered waste; which were viewed as recuperable or beyond redemption; which were valued, tolerated or feared; which of their material and symbolic characteristics were emphasized or ignored in the debates or strife that arose around their recognition and their management. Technological innovations facilitated these ontological shifts and their redistributing of purity, responsibility and blame. From the perspective of the new materialism, Santa Barbara’s history of shit vividly illustrates the ambiguities, inconsistencies and mutability of our categories of clean and dirty, dangerous and safe, innocent and guilty – even when they refer to such apparently unambiguous and timeless matter as excrement.