Dominique Laporte (2000) _History of Shit_, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury [first published in French as _Histoire de la Merde_ in 1978], Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Like Arendt, in which polis and the citizen-subjects are made active through speech - made politically active - animated through the act of narration. The traditional concept of the public sphere rests on this principle and exerts a symbolic violence on the aesthetics of speech (who speaks and on what). This is the organized violence of democracy (or violence of participation) founded on the opposition of taste and disgust. 

The intervention of Dominique Laporte is to verify that modern power is founded on the aesthetics of the public sphere and in the agency of its citizen-subjects but that these are conditions of the management of human waste. He insists that in parallel to the cleansing of the streets of Paris from shit, the French language was similarly cleansed of Latin words (to establish official French, in an edict of 1539, without 'foreign leanings'). Both public space and language were cleaned and policed, as purification requires 'submission to the law'. As Laporte puts it: 'Without a master, one cannot be cleaned.' (2000: 2); and:
'If language is beautiful, it must be because a master bathes it - a master  who cleans shit holes, sweeps offal, and expurgates city and speech to confer upon them order and beauty.' (2000: 7) 

What is lost is what lies in excess of cleanliness, that which goes beyond articulation. Language was purged of its 'lingering stink' (although, Laporte quotes Barthes to clarify that it is not the word shit that smells, 2000: 10) to become purer and invested with authority: 
'Purified, language becomes the crown jewels, the site of law, of the scared text, of translation and exchange. There the muddied voices and their dialects are expurgated of their dross, losing their pitiful "remnants of earth" and the vie fruits of their dirty commerce. Guttersnipes and merchants cannot sully the virginal emblem of power, for the King's language does not wash them of their sins. But neither does it abandon them to their sinful state. Rather, it cleanses the fruit of their common labor, elevating it to the divine place of power freed from odor.' (2000: 18)

The desire for clean language or code, as well as clean cities, sublimates shit and the management of human waste. But this cannot be simply wiped or flushed away and is crucial for a fuller understanding of aesthetic and political expression. Information not only wants to be free, it wants to be dirty.