Читать книгу The Smell of Risk - Hsuan L. Hsu - Страница 9

“The man who pulls his perfumed handkerchief from his pocket treats all around to it whether they like it or not, and compels them, if they want to breathe at all, to be parties to the enjoyment.”51 This example from a foundational text of modern aesthetics—Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790)—disqualifies smell as a medium of aesthetic judgment because it infringes on the perceiver’s body and mind. Rather than judging smells from a position of disinterestedness and autonomy, bystanders are unwittingly immersed, their bodies penetrated by odor. Kant’s aversion to the “chemical” senses of smell and taste stems from his acute awareness of their affective power and their trans-corporeal materiality: “In the case of smelling and tasting, the components of the smell and the salts of the fluids of the body are first dissolved and then absorbed by the organs, and only then do they produce their effect.”52 Ironically, Kant’s example of the difficulty of containing smell is itself a deodorizing instrument of olfactory mitigation: although its purpose is to protect its user against unpleasant smells, the perfumed handkerchief itself imposes on the autonomy of others. This instrument of personal deodorization intended to mask unpleasant odors enacts a sort of atmospheric violence, “compel[ling]” any living, breathing person in its range to “enjoy” its heady scent by taking it in as both sensory stimulus and chemical composition.

Kant was not alone in denigrating olfaction’s subjective, passive, and chemical properties: “The philosophers and scientists of [the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] decided that, while sight was the preeminent sense of reason and civilization, smell was the sense of madness and savagery.”53 This “philosophical abjection” of smell in Western thought has continued into the twentieth century,54 when Max Nordau identified “smellers” as “degenerates” whose atavism goes back “to an epoch anterior to man,” Sigmund Freud postulated that smell lost its significance as humans evolved to stand erect in a way that exposed their genitals to sight, and Adorno and Horkheimer wrote that “when we see we remain what we are; but when we smell we are taken over by otherness. Hence the sense of smell is considered a disgrace in civilization, the sign of lower social strata, lesser races and base animals.”55 The consequences of this osmophobic (smell-fearing) tradition include not only the deodorization of Western aesthetics and criticism but also the equation of the modern subject with both an inodorate body and an attenuated sense of smell. Elaborating on the connections between deodorization and the sensory requirements of capitalism, Jones writes,

Various interlocking, subjectivating regimes (Enlightenment science, positivist philosophy, professional specialization, colonial politics, capitalist market developments, aesthetic formalism, et al.) worked together to produce a profound bureaucratization of the senses throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. . . . No amount of sniffing and snuffling can remove the evidence of that long process; the modern subject emerged precisely via these various regulations of the disorganized mammal . . . this segmenting of the human sensorium for industrial and epistemological use.56

In addition to sustaining this “bureaucratization of the senses,” claims to inodorateness also disavow differential deodorization as an ongoing—indeed, increasingly pronounced—means of reproducing social, environmental, and embodied disparities. Having removed smell from the proper domain of critical thinking, the subject of deodorization (a term that denotes both a subject who values deodorization and someone subjectified through deodorization’s rituals, products, and aversions) is ill equipped to produce or analyze olfactory knowledge and thus lacks robust archives, methods, and concepts for engaging with this vital mode of embodied ecological experience.

If philosophers and critics have had relatively little to say about the aesthetics of smell, marketing experts have long known that olfactory air conditioning can enhance the appeal of French fries, new car interiors, casinos, and even beer-scented darts.57 As a recent Harvard Business Review article notes, “Scented environments have been shown to reduce typos made by office workers; improve the perception of product quality; increase purchase intent, average unit sales, and duration of a retail visit or stay among consumers; and boost the willingness of consumers to pay more for a product.”58 Research on the chemical senses has been dominated by corporate interests and the search for new markets: in a discussion that pertains to both flavor and scent research, Sarah Tracy writes, “The molecularization of taste and smell extends expert understanding of chemosensation throughout the body, such that the eater’s body-mind is more accessible to the goals of corporate capital.”59 In addition to olfactory marketers, mood enhancement therapists, crowd control weapon manufacturers, memory researchers, and activists wielding stink bombs have found diverse applications for olfaction.

Precisely because it’s so seldom the object of sustained attention, smell is a powerful medium for orienting and communicating our affective predispositions: in her influential theorization of the atmospheric transmission of affect, Teresa Brennan writes that “[the] process whereby one person’s or one group’s nervous and hormonal systems are brought into alignment with another’s . . . works mainly by smell; that is to say, unconscious olfaction.”60 Thus, affect is communicated not only when “[people] observe each other but also because they imbibe each other via smell.”61 Psychologist Silvan Tomkins coined the term “dissmell” to identify an innate affect modeled on the way in which humans register and communicate a defensive response to a noxious odor: “the upper lip and nose are raised and the head is drawn away from the apparent source of the offending odor.”62 Geographers and environmental studies scholars have also noted the importance of smell as both an integral affective component of the sense of place and a tool for detecting invisible environmental changes—including potential threats. In theorizing the concept of “smellscape,” geographer J. Douglas Porteous draws attention to the immersive and emotive force of smell as a dimension of spatial experience.63 Insofar as it attunes us to spatial distinctiveness, olfaction is also particularly well equipped for the task of sensing—and orienting our visceral responses to—geographic disparities.

Despite its marginalization from Western philosophy, smell has recently emerged as a powerful medium for communicating risk perceptions in literature, olfactory art, and environmental justice discourses. Experiments with smell as a formal and thematic element range from the literary detective’s hypersensitive nose to the naturalist novel’s obsessive descriptions of bad smells, from stink bombs deployed by environmental activists to the illness narratives of people with multiple chemical sensitivity, from multimedia artworks that incorporate smell to diasporic and Indigenous works that challenge racial and colonial smellscapes. These experiments in olfactory aesthetics enrich our language for describing and communicating smells while strengthening our capacities of olfactory distinction and recall. For, as Bruno Latour details in his discussion of the odor kits used to train professional “noses” for the perfume industry, the capacity to “be affected” by “a richer odoriferous world” is not based on innate ability but acquired through practice.64 Olfactory researcher George Dodd explains that approaching smell through language “strengthen[s] the neural pathways in the brain itself and, in turn, that helps you to become better at smelling things.”65 In her illuminating study of literary engagements with psychophysics, Erica Fretwell suggests that literature may also function as “a sensitizing mechanism, a ‘kit’ not simply for differentiating feeling but more broadly for learning to be affected.”66 Olfactory aesthetics matters not just because it represents how we smell but, more importantly, because it modulates—and, in many cases, sharpens—our (deodorized) sensitivity to odors and their intoxicating chemical intimacies. Refusing Kant’s aesthetic values of autonomy and disinterestedness, smell foregrounds the entanglement of bodies and environments: because breathing is necessary to living, olfactory aesthetics is critically situated at the intersection of air conditioning and biopolitics.

The Smell of Risk builds on work in the growing field of olfactory literary and cultural studies, which has illuminated understandings of both smell and deodorization across a range of genres and historical eras. Hans Rindisbacher, Janice Carlisle, Emily Friedman, and Catherine Maxwell have detailed how British and European authors mobilized and reshaped historical understandings of olfactory differences as well as the transformative force of specific olfactory objects such as tobacco, sulfur, and perfume.67 Scholars of US literature such as Christopher Looby, Stephen Casmier, Daniela Babilon, and Erica Fretwell have interrogated olfaction’s complex entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, and power relations.68 Beyond the US context, Indigenous studies scholars such as Warren Cariou and Vicente Diaz have posed vital questions about decolonial approaches to olfaction inherent in practices such as sweetgrass smudging and Chamorro navigational techniques. The following chapters are also indebted to studies of olfaction in art criticism and cultural studies, such as notably Jones’s work on art and the senses and Jim Drobnick’s wide-ranging publications on olfactory art.69

While these contributions have significantly advanced our understanding of how olfactory perception inflects ideas about social identities, memory, and place, research on olfactory aesthetics has seldom considered smell as a vehicle for sensing and conveying environmental risk. The critical tendency has been to focus on the semiotic dimensions of smell while downplaying its material dimensions. To contextualize smell’s environmental and health implications, I turn to scholars of environmental history and sensory studies. In his foundational study The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (1982), Alain Corbin tracks the profound transformations in health, governance, urban planning, architecture, and culture brought about by miasma theory and deodorization initiatives in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France.70 Building on Corbin’s work, Melanie Kiechle’s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (2017) demonstrates how olfactory framings of environmental health in the nineteenth-century United States extended from public health campaigns and city planning to everyday interactions with scented products, household manuals, and domestic architecture.71 Sensory historians and anthropologists have documented how olfactory rhetoric has been mobilized to control and exclude Black, Asian diasporic, Indigenous, and Dalit populations in ways that subject racialized bodies to environmental violence and often also misrepresent the effects of those environmental disparities as innate racial characteristics.72 These studies illuminate olfaction as a sense fraught with uncertainty and ambiguity insofar as it blends representational and material modes of communication.

As the fields of sound studies, food studies, and haptics have expanded our understanding of sensory aesthetics well beyond its traditional focus on visual form, olfaction has remained largely neglected by cultural critics. Given the ways in which vision prioritizes a liberal model of putatively disembodied perception, olfactory aesthetics demands a nearly unthinkable shift in what Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible,” or “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”73 Deodorized spaces, bodies, and ways of thinking orient our common culture, but deodorization also requires the aesthetic suppression of those who inhabit pungent spaces or bodies, or those who indulge in smell as a mode of embodied environmental perception. Both the devaluation of smell and the removal of (some) noxious smells deploy the sensorium in the service of sustaining a sensus communis74—the shared sensory order that in turn delineates the limits of community. For Rancière, a political aesthetics always involves “a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible”—a process he nevertheless explains in visual terms: “a spectacle does not fit within the sensible framework[,] an expression does not find its meaning in the system of visible coordinates where it appears.”75 To think with smell is not only to redistribute the sensible but to develop a sensory alternative to the system of Western aesthetics and its tendency to downplay invisible, environmental slow violence by framing the atmosphere as an empty space between (ocularcentric) subject and object rather than apprehending it as a material, biopolitical medium.