Читать книгу The Smell of Risk - Hsuan L. Hsu - Страница 6

Richard Powers’s epic novel Gain (1998) chronicles the intertwined growth of the United States, the corporation, and the deodorized body. Tracing a soap manufacturing firm’s growth into a multinational conglomerate, Powers charts how the corporation interfaces with everyday, multifaceted relationships ranging from the molecular to the global scale. A pivotal moment in the two centuries of corporate history spanned by the novel occurs when the botanist Benjamin Clare, having shipped with the United States Exploring Expedition (1838–42), is stranded near the South Pole. After spending a few minutes struggling to pull the ship around, Clare realizes that the air has relieved his fear of death: “All terror over the disintegrating Peacock vanished, like the visions of an opiate dream. A perfumed thread entered Clare’s nostrils: an old, life-long friend. Yet he had never smelled its like. A scent wafted upon him, a redolence for all the world like the smell of a forgotten existence. . . . Fetid fragrance had so ruled his every inhalation [aboard ship] that the thing he smelled, out on the ice, was the sachet of scentlessness: air before the employment of lungs.”1 Fresh, scentless air after a lifetime lived in the closed spaces of cities, dormitories, factories, and ships has the calming effect of an “opiate.” There is something uncanny about this inodorate scent, at once unprecedented and evocative of a “forgotten existence” or old friend. “Air before the employment of lungs” is air that can’t be sensed at all—it enables Clare to breathe without the consciousness of breathing. Surmising that the cold polar air caused heavy odorant molecules—“those smells that otherwise relentlessly bombarded human nostrils”—to drop away, Clare finds that both his own position as the ship’s botanist and the fate of the ship itself have become “a matter of indifference” (G, 61). His life is changed not by the ship’s miraculous deliverance from the polar maze of ice but by the existential shift triggered by “his first whiff of nothing” (G, 61).

Clare’s olfactory revelation conveys a paradoxical “sense of the senses’ lie” (G, 61). The smell of nothing gives material expression to a modern sensorium premised on the suppression of the embodied senses of touch, taste, and (especially) smell. Months after this scene, Clare encounters another, similar smell when exchanging botanical knowledge with the High King of Fiji. The king introduces Clare to a rhizomatous tuber that “possessed a faraway smell, an astringency that Clare would not have been able to detect until a few months before” (G, 65). This root—which Clare carries back to New York and names Utilis clarea—becomes the key ingredient in Clare & Company’s leading nineteenth-century product, Native Balm Soap. By translating polar scentlessness into a subtly scented product, the soap manufacturer renders deodorization—along with its associated ideas of individual responsibility and self-care—into a highly profitable “opiate” of the masses.

Native Balm draws its appeal from the myth of the “ecological Indian,” as well as early white ethnographers’ representations of “Indians’ innate sweetness of odor.”2 As Powers puts it, “The age of steam produced certain unprecedented shocks to the skin unknown to earlier ways and races. Live as the natives once did, and these shocks might disappear. Unnatural skin needed a natural cure, a cure whose formulas machine progress had somehow mislaid” (G, 132–33). Smelling almost—but not quite—like nothing at all, Utilis clarea promises sensory relief from the ambient environmental “shocks” associated with modern technologies. Clare & Company literally deracinates the root, detaching it from any reference to the iTaukei (Fijian) people in the course of renaming it and stamping “the profile of a noble Brave” on each bar of soap (G, 134). Although Clare is initially “as interested in the plant’s fictive attributes as in any real properties” when the king of Fiji tells him about the root, this very distinction derecognizes iTaukei botanical knowledge—along with any medical or spiritual properties that may have been attributed to the root—as “fictive” (G, 65). Even the name Utilis clarea dismisses an entire range of attributes: whereas “The King called the root by a name that meant either strength or use,” Clare’s naming highlights its utility (utilis) while associating it with both the light of enlightenment (clarea) and his own significance as its putative “discoverer.”

Utilis clarea channels both Indigenous botanical knowledge and US stereotypes about Indigeneity into a product that promises to ameliorate modernity’s ever-increasing risks. As Clare’s brother realizes, “they could solve the needs of progress by selling the very condition that the need remedied” (G, 133). This insight about risk’s capacity for generating new markets echoes sociologist Ulrich Beck’s observation that, as opposed to the finite demands of hunger and need, “civilization risks are a bottomless barrel of demands, unsatisfiable, infinite, self-producible.”3 Its Native American associations and its subtle scent (“it smelled like the liniment that the angels applied in God’s own sickroom”) are sufficient to make Native Balm a nationwide “health” sensation—the product on whose profits Clare & Company’s future enterprises are founded (G, 132). Yet, as Powers points out, in the 1840s there was no government agency of business regulation to determine whether Native Balm was indeed “restorative” in its health effects or whether it was a toxic product “pack[ing] a delayed punch more poisonous than henbane” (G, 133).

A century and a half later the corporation’s ongoing failure to investigate and disclose risks associated with its products—which by the 1990s encompass a vast range of synthetic products including pesticides, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and plastics—is juxtaposed with the illness narrative of Laura Body, a middle-class neighbor of Clare & Company’s Midwestern headquarters who is slowly dying of ovarian cancer. Powers sets the stage for Clare’s revelatory encounter with the scent of scentlessness by cataloguing the outdoor smells that flow in when Laura opens the window to air out her stuffy hospital room:

The breeze that flushes these rooms imports its own aromas: stubborn lilacs and stultifying magnolias. Ozone from dry lightning, forty miles distant. Swiss almond decaf from the new coffee shop, half an hour from its red-eye opening. Organophosphates wafting in from the south farms. Undigested adhesives slipping up Clare’s smokeless stacks. The neighbors’ gerbil food and scoopable cat litter wafting over her fence in two parts per billion.

But mixed together in the air’s cross-breeze, these smells sum to a shorthand for freshness. The day’s background radiation. (G, 53)

In contrast with Clare’s “whiff of nothing” in the polar regions, the outdoor air of Lacewood, Illinois, is no purer than the hospital’s “unpleasant odors” (G, 53). Whether or not Laura herself detects them, the narrator catalogues a motley mix of smells that includes the natural and the synthetic, the local and the imported, domestic and everyday objects, as well as the sublime lightning storm and the dystopian image of invisible emissions emanating from the Clare chemical plant. How many of those synthetic scents were fabricated by the Clare corporation or one of its many subsidiaries? The overall effect pulls in two directions: on the one hand, a “shorthand for freshness” that could easily pass as fresh air for a long-acclimatized local like Laura; on the other hand, a looming “background radiation” suggesting that those airborne adhesives, organophosphates, and cat litter particulates may have contributed to the onset of Laura’s cancer.

In charting this trajectory from an industrially produced, chemically engineered soap that associates Indigeneity with deodorization to Laura’s illness and a class-action lawsuit against the corporation, Gain provokes many of the questions explored in this book. How did deodorization become conflated with middle-class ideas of health and morality, and how was it mobilized as a putative antidote to modernity’s pervasive and unpredictable health risks? How did the ideology of deodorization intersect with ideas about racial difference—whether the racial “innocence” attributed to Native Americans or the racial depravity and dystopian hypermodernity attributed to Black and Asiatic bodies? How do nineteenth-century beliefs about noxious miasmas—along with techniques of atmospheric manipulation designed to address those miasmas—persist in the present? And how did proponents of deodorization smooth over the contradiction between the ideal of pure air and synthetic deodorizing products like Native Balm? Or the contradiction between the doctrine of deodorization and the real atmospheric disparities necessitated by capital expansion—for example, the carcinogenic fumes disseminated by Clare & Company’s suppliers, factories, and products not only in Laura’s hometown of Lacewood, but increasingly in sites of extraction and subcontracted manufacture located throughout the Global South? And how might the suppressed potentialities of scent—the unspecified “strength” of the Utilis clarea root that Clare obscures in favor of its “utility”—be excavated and reactivated in the interest of redressing capitalism’s unevenly distributed atmospheres?

These questions emerge from a set of aesthetic problems arising at the intersection of olfaction and environmental risk. Commonly mobilized as a tool of “citizen science,” the sense of smell is a widely available resource for detecting unfamiliar and potentially dangerous materials in the atmosphere: in the words of the psychophysiologist G. Neil Martin, smell is “the first chemosensory custodian of survival.”4 Although olfaction often occurs on an unconscious level (particularly in societies where it is devalued as a source of knowledge), a recent study of odor mixture discrimination found that humans can discriminate among more than one trillion olfactory stimuli.5 Because olfaction is physiologically connected to the limbic system (a key neurological site of emotion and memory),6 descriptions of unwelcome smells exert immense rhetorical force. In the early stages of local struggles over toxic exposure, olfaction often plays a “starring role.”7 As historian Joy Parr explains, “Smell has a history as warning of contamination linked to practices of self-preservation; its interiority . . . is historically often a ground for authoritative truth-telling.”8 For example, the activist Lois Gibbs reports that even before she was fully aware of its chemical risks she was disturbed by the smell of Love Canal: “The closer I got to the canal, the more I could smell it. I could feel it, too, it was so humid. The odor seemed to hang in the thick air. My nose began to run, and my eyes were watering.”9 Although such olfactory descriptions underscore smell’s insidious effects on the breather’s body, they also register how atmospheric toxins settle and recirculate—their “agitations, suspensions, and sedimentations”10 throughout the more-than-human world, flowing in and out of water, soil, plants, and nonhuman animals. Smell’s viscerality and chemical vulnerability make it a powerful tool for communicating about atmospheric toxins even when some of those toxins are scentless: although some of the more than two hundred organic chemical compounds found at Love Canal may be undetectable by smell, they are all metonymically indexed by Gibbs’s unsettling account of the air’s thick odor.

Yet smell is also notoriously difficult to discern, describe, and recall—at least for subjects of Western modernity who are trained to neglect it. These difficulties are compounded by the socially constructed nature of olfactory experience, which superimposes cultural significations upon the chemical characteristics of odorants: thus, Native Balm has both materially cleansing (emulsifying) properties and a slightly astringent scent that, for many Americans, signifies “freshness.” The social construction of smell informs—and is informed by—the social construction of environmental risk perception, such that smells thought to be unpleasant (for example, the smells of an ethnic restaurant) may be perceived to be more harmful than inodorate or pleasant-smelling substances (e.g., a perfume or scented pesticide).11 Thus, the human body’s most sensitive tool for detecting invisible chemical threats across space is also deeply ambiguous, fraught with uncertainty, socially constructed, culturally neglected, and resistant to representation.

These problems with olfactory epistemology and representation have contributed to the denigration of smell in Western aesthetics. At least since the Enlightenment, smell has been framed as too immersive, imprecise, subjective, interactive, involuntary, material, promiscuous, and ineffable to convey aesthetic experience: as Kant puts it, smell is a vehicle of sensual “enjoyment” rather than “beauty.”12 The Smell of Risk grows out of my conviction that these very qualities of olfaction make it an especially effective vehicle for staging and thinking about problems of environmental risk. For risk, too, is immersive, imprecise, subjective, interactive, involuntary, material, and resistant to representation. A sense that is at once materially embodied and spatially extensive, olfaction offers writers, artists, and activists a powerful tool for exploring modernity’s stratified geographies of risk.

My own investment in the kinds of knowledge and intimacy made available by smell can be traced back to an experience of toxic exposure. Years ago, when I was moving away from Berkeley to take up my first full-time position, I slept in my apartment shortly after it had been repainted. There was a faint odor of paint fumes in the bedroom, but a combination of exhaustion, nostalgia, and trust (the paint had had several days to dry, I told myself) made me decide to spend one more night in the apartment that had been my home for the last six years. I woke with a headache, a mild case of asthma, and an attenuated sense of smell. For weeks after that I could barely detect familiar scents of cooking, plants, body products, or loved ones. Fifteen years later, my olfactory sensitivity has improved somewhat, but it’s impossible to know whether it has recovered fully. What had I lost? Only years later, when I initiated this research project, did I come to understand the profound stakes of this partial anosmia: it eroded a sense with powerful connections to the neurological seat of memory and emotion, as well as an important tool for detecting environmental risks. The smell of paint fumes was not just a sign of toxicity—the smell was itself an intoxicating airborne substance whose long-term effect was, ironically, to consign me to a partially deodorized experience of the world. On the other hand, this experience with anosmia has made me acutely aware of the richness of olfactory chemosensation, not only as a tool for sensing unevenly distributed toxins but also as a pathway to ecological and social intimacies that, like scents, often refuse to be contained.

This introductory chapter develops a framework for approaching smell as a contested—though often overlooked—tool for sensing the dynamics of atmospheric differentiation that have been vital to capitalism’s processes of colonization, racialization, extraction, industrialization, urbanization, uneven development, and environmental depredation. The following sections consider how the recent turn toward interdisciplinary research on atmospheres nuances accounts of modernization as a teleological history of “deodorization”: instead, framing the cultural suppression of smell as a process of differential deodorization draws attention to the insidious ways in which atmospheric disparities literally get into people’s bodies. I then suggest that scholarship in materialist ecocriticism—informed by recent research on olfaction in the fields of sensory studies and environmental history—can help us better understand how aesthetic projects have variously sustained, contested, and presented alternatives to differential deodorization.