Civilization and Its Incontinence: On the Closed Effluvial Loop of Intellectual Labor

At some point in his prolific career, spanning the 1960s to the 1980s, the cartoonist B. Kliban—he of the popular cat calendar fame—drew a less family-friendly portrait, entitled simply “Intellectual.” This image depicts a typical specimen of the type, somewhat reminiscent of Sigmund Freud, complete with smoker’s pipe. The intellectual in question is naked, and on all fours. Not only that, he has some kind of tube-like device linking his anus to his brain. (The “plug” inserted into his behind is connected to a kind of “thinking cap” attached to the top of his head.)

The intellectual is thus efficiently rendered a ludicrous figure: an earnest consumer of his own refuse. This satirical portrait is surely one of the most literal “anti-intellectual” images we could imagine. And yet I can confirm that it amused at least some of those who were, so to speak, the butt of the joke. (I first saw this image in the mid-1980s, when my father—a classic boomer intellectual—was chuckling in response to it.)

What might such a crude, vernacular representation of such a persistent cultural type tell historians of the distant future, or indeed alien anthropologists from another galaxy, about that strange species known as “the intellectual”? First—and no surprises here—the cartoon reinforces the stereotype that the quintessential twentieth-century intellectual is gendered male: bearded, bespectacled, contemplative, and upper middle class.

Some further clues as to the subject’s identity and lifestyle sit partially out of frame: to the right, some expensive-looking tomes, arranged in order on a bookshelf, and to the left, a pop-modernist chair. The former suggests erudition, while the latter implies at least passing familiarity with the postwar zeitgeist. But what of the startling nudity? Thanks to the way the intellectual has been rendered here—on hands and feet, like an uncanny domestic pet—the lack of clothing conveys a strong sense of creaturely vulnerability.

This is tempered by the intellectual’s implacable, patriarchal confidence. He is not so much exposed but composed in this unexpected posture, as if he assumes such a position every day. The subject’s genitals are obscured by his left thigh, so there is, mercifully, no unsolicited distraction in terms of phallic insistence. Instead, we have the characteristic pose of the “bottom,” in this case, submitting to the “top” of his own mind.

Whatever cogitative operation this fellow is involved in, it does not seem to concern anyone else. The image thus traces a human ouroboros. As such, this intellectual is a perfectly self-sufficient being, akin to the reunited halves of the original humans, in Plato’s Symposium, who now exist once more, enamored with their own solipsistic completion. Or perhaps this analogy is too benign. Perhaps the caricature is closer to a one-person “human centipede”—self-suctioned by the mucus membranes of the great thinkers of the past.1 Here, channeled and reanimated in the ruminating crouch, Socrates, Aquinas, Descartes, and Wittgenstein are also, in a sense, on their hands and knees—daisy-chained together in this bookish man’s mind, ingesting the posthumous peristalsis of each other’s discursive legacies in an abject circle of self-reference. Talk about scatological positivism!

According to Kliban’s caricature, intellectual labor is evidently something best performed alone, naked. Like voiding our bowels, thinking should also be done in the privacy of our own home (albeit, in this case, in something like a study). The tubular device, conducting material between mind and colon—it is not certain in which direction—might be a kind of mental enema. From this, we can safely surmise a critique of the intellectual in which his mental output is judged equivalent to the eventual yield of his digestive system. Thinking, for its own sake, is conflated with mammalian waste.

And yet, this waste is not being wasted in the common sense of the word, of being flushed down the toilet. Quite the contrary. The biological by-product at issue is recycled back into the mind, to be “processed” by the intellect once more. Shit is presumably refined into insight, which then travels back through the body of the intellectual, only to be pushed out into further internal epiphanies.

Is this some kind of perpetual-motion machine? Is it a perfect system, with zero waste? At this point we might be tempted to contrast Gramsci’s celebrated “organic intellectual” with this aberrant subtype—the “compost intellectual.” A thinker who thrives on the rejected and the expended. After all, what is more fecund than feces?

A vocal minority of actual intellectuals throughout modern history have been scandalously sympathetic to the idea that the brain is in fact an essential part of the human digestive system. Rabelais, Sade, Nietzsche, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, and Kristeva, for instance, did not automatically recoil from our more animalistic regions and functions. They understood them to be a vital part of the whole human lot.

What the body rejects has much to teach us about who we really are, especially concerning the lasting fables we tell ourselves to disavow the fact that we squat like monkeys many times a day, in between our lectures and our inspired compositions. This is something the surrealist director, Luis Buñuel, also well understood, when he reversed the bourgeois dinner party to feature diners sitting formally on toilets, arranged around the table, while these same guests are obliged to sneak away to a small, private chamber in order to enjoy their food in shameful solitude.2

And yet, returning to the cartoon itself: We might well wonder what the books have to do with all this. Indeed, we might justifiably assume that at some point the perverse device must surely be unplugged and put aside, to allow the input of new information—new ideas, new theories, new arguments—to flow into, and re-nourish, the mind. Otherwise, the intellectual would be a site of sheer entropic futility—surely the intended inference, and comic lesson, of the original image.

Hence the significance of the bookshelf. The intellectual turns to these most crucial tools of his trade when he finally tires of the taste of his own waste. And yet, what are books if not excretions of other minds? If not the glorified toilet tissue smeared with the ink-blot waste products of other people’s mental strainings? The unfortunate residues of a general failed continence? The wan matter that manages to escape writer’s blockage?3

Such is the contemporary attitude to (and, most troublingly, attitude of) so-called intellectuals in our own time. Books are viewed with suspicion: useful only as design objects to garnish a display home’s chic “aesthetic,” or else as bodiless pdfs meant to be fed into ChatGPT for bullet-point content summaries. As the high-profile tech bro Sam Bankman-Fried notoriously said: “If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”4

Most of the books currently available on Amazon weren’t written by people at all, but spat out by AI-powered machines. We are reaching a true crisis moment in the culture, as bots spew out words to be digested by other bots, to be reconstituted into the same snake-like autophagic system. Perhaps this is what the dark priests of Silicon Valley really meant when they came up with the millenarian concept of the Singularity: a vast single network, sucking deep on its own output, in a sexless, onanistic frenzy. Indeed, it is this belated realization that has led to the replacement of the term “singularity” by “enshittification” in the discourse.5

If Kliban were to update his cartoon for our own age, the intellectual would no doubt look less like an archetypal psychoanalyst and more like a popular podcast bro, or airport nonfiction TED-talker. Moreover, the mind-anus linkup device would not be a rubber tube but a fiber-optic cable, connected to YouTube, since today’s intellectuals are resolutely digital (even if they do insist on eating only “organic” food). What is a “hot take” if not something our brain pushes out under the pressure of a deadline and too much coffee?

The twenty-first-century thinker might cringe at the very word “intellectual”: a term that seems stranded in the quaint corridors of the crumbling ivory tower. And yet these new concept-peddlers, in their black turtleneck sweaters, are happy to leverage the continuing cultural capital of the cerebral figure, this time in the crypto-coin context. Those associated with the alt-right, or the so called “Dark Enlightenment,” have a strategic understanding of the intimate connection between scatology and eschatology. As such, they promote excremental nihilism among the terminally online super-spreaders of 4chan and Reddit.

Those edgelord intellectuals who have managed to help shape the fantasies and ambitions of the current powerbrokers are joyously complicit in the enshittification of the world. These cynical reincarnations of Ayn Rand understand the world to be less a weight on one’s shoulders than a vast, insanely profitable sewage system. They are shadowy gondoliers, steering us along the alimentary canals of the internet, helping to create a gamified mediascape in which all posts are, in fact, shit posts.

In short, the intellectual, as a species, has mutated in our own age into the cyborg “thought leader” or “conceptual influencer” of the Big Think grift. And yet, it is these self-described leaders who most enthusiastically follow the order from on high to help dilate, and hold open, Steve Bannon’s infernal cybernetic orifice: the same one he himself happily admits he uses to “flood the zone with shit.”6