Divining the Sewer

If divining is discerning, what might the divination of the sewer reveal? Alongside trickling waters and the fluid movements of bodies, sewers contain our digital data flowing through fiber optic cables. This confluence of excremental matter and digital activity, of base materialism meets incomputable immateriality, circulates a collective body of life and living—of dietary practices, pharmacological habits, distractions, dalliances—and our subconscious desires traced through cookie trails and microbiota alike. Once those traces of movement have been detected, the divination of the sewer may offer a glimpse of a circulating social body—and its strangeness—that would otherwise remain repressed or obscured. This essay addresses the movement of our collective body through its material and immaterial flows, in order to divine how belief systems are entangled with both embodied practices as well as digital activities. What is the social imaginary that resides in the sewer? Perhaps the act of divining is more revelatory of the circulation of beliefs than the movement of submerged waters.