Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 57

Peddling Eros

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Sp>erber, therefore, prefers to talk of smells as part of a symbolic
rather than a semiotic system. The latter for him aims at simplicity,
freedom from ambiguity and contradiction, and ideally a one-on-one
relation of signifier and signified. The S)mibolic system, in contrast, is
associative, evocative, multi-referential, and far from unambiguous.
It is only in a limited sense a system of conununication. It connotates
more than it denotates its objects. Historically this unpredictability
of the categories and referents that olfactive verbal encoding or
olfactive recognition are apt to bring to light, led to the deep distrust
of that sensory modality in the nineteenth century, the Victorian age,
the age of Biedermeier and poetic realism. This age is bent on getting
a grip on the rapidly changing everyday reality and thus favors
cognitive processes (not only for the sense of smell) that produce easy
and uniform response to and recall of specific external stimuli. This is
a desideratum in a cognitive environment that is turning from sensory
impression to abstract information processing, skipping the level of
external sensory stimulus altogether.
The olfactory, however, has an environmental sense. It is a
contextualizing sense. Olfactory p>erception is "percevoir un context
plutdt qu'une odeur . . . . une odeur n'a aucune existence significante
propre et n’a pas d'etiquette sp^ciale" (emphasis added).^^ It
triggers recall not of the scent once encountered, but of a situation or a
person associated with it. While such unpredictability of effects
made the olfactory unsuited for the Victorians it has become the
sense's greatest (post)modem allure. Smell appears as the ultimate
aura, surface and depth simultaneously, denoting as well as hiding its
double origin in sexuality and death. It creates a halo that involves
both subject and object.
Despite all this, the history of olfaction can be told as a rational
tale. In fact, the project of enlightenment, the project of modernity in
the broad sense, that gained its decisive momentum in the eighteenth
century, can be understood as the project of deodorizing and
subsequently re-odorizing both the public and the private spheres.
Over the past two or three centuries, the master plot has consisted in
cleaning up both the body politic and one's individual body,
eliminating bad odors (which only in the process of cleaning up came
to be labeled bad), then reinfusing into those realms the new,
pleasant, culturally approved odors, perfumes, and scents. This
program opens new spaces for aesthetics--for an olfactory aesthetics