Unit IV

Smelling the Arts

Scientific Basis of Smell

• a chemosensory phenomenon with sensory cells (olfactory sensory
neurons)
• the social basis has trained the brain to make the body respond to the
smell it detects

Smelling in the Social Perception of Art

• least useful when compared with other senses
• used heavily for recognition of the mind and body, harnessing social
engineering of smells deemed in everyday practice as: good or bad,
likeable or unlikeable, desirable or undesirable, exclusive or inclusive

The Sense of Smell

• discriminates not of the self’s doing but of social engineering of an
already established, accepted, and rendered acceptable hierarchy of
smell, objects, surroundings, body, community, and nation that
embody the smell
• the objects, bodies, and nation in turn, are not separable from the
condition of the contact of olfaction and experience, or the
phenomenology of the experience of smell

The Act of Smelling

• an event involving Scientific, Biological and Universal experiences to
coalesce into the experience of smell itself
• the body serves as a receptacle for socially engineered experiences of
smell, including the body’s reaction to the experience of smell itself
• smell becomes for the body a symptom of what is acceptable in society
or not

The Act of Smelling Across the Lifespan

Infant
• initially cannot detect smell

 • has erogenous zones experiencing everything instantaneously

• in due rearing, excrement is deemed bad

Child
• toilet training is instilled through a control of time and sense of smell
• newer experiences with smell is also regimented to further introduce
to the socially desirable and undesirable smell

Teenager
• smell is further regimented
• surveillance and disciplining of the body
• menstruation, body, odor, smell of the group of choice, smell of
newer social experiences

Adulthood
• gives rise to new social experiences
• smell of partner’s perfume, smell of newborn or child—rearing
realities, smell of sick—bed

The Power of Smell

• emanates from the body’s likely acceptance of what society deems
desirable or not, smell and the experience that goes with the olfaction
• the body engineers itself for society as society engineers the body for
integration
• smell that is biologically acquired and transmitted, and individually
motivated, is socially engineered for acceptance and tolerance by the
state, allowing variation to smell preferences of individuals and
communities

Smell and Gender Sexuality

• there are smells considered feminine and masculine, and sexualized
because heterosexual becomes the normative experience in smell
• the smell of products (scented candles and chocolates) are imbued in
heteronormative ways, eliding the possibility of other sexual olfaction
experience

Other Contexts of Smell

• racialized and ethicized
• connotes the privilege of a particular religious denomination in the
country
• generational—exuding a preference for youthful bodies than the smell
imbided in the experiences of infants, children, and senior citizens

The Self and the Sense of Smell

• the self is recognized and unrecognized through the senses like smell
• the body is overdetermined to conform to socially acceptable standards
of smell, even as the self can also defy such standards
• from the self, sense- making is attributable to the capacity of the self to
negotiate the norms of society, including the standards of smell set by
capitalism

The Home and the Sense of Smell

• determined by bodies living in it
• home is overdetermined by class, gender and sexual, racial and ethnic,
and religious and generational backgrounds
• sense-making is home-making provoking insights into how it is made
or rendered for its inhabitants, transforming space into a home or a
place we continuously return to

The Community and the Sense of Smell

• socially-generated for acceptance and tolerance
• analyzed for its modalities of formation and transformation and
critiqued in whose interest such modalities are invested in and
reproduced
• the homes become a community formed and transformed based on
negotiations with hegemonic forces and interests
• creates an even inclusive—belonging, compared with the regular
belonging in its sense—making experiences
• the nation is experienced also divergently and differentially from other
national cultures and formations

 “Analyzing smell is analyzing the sense-making processes involved in the

production and reception of the smell.”

The Elements of Olfactory Experience

• the sense of smell gives rise to the perception of odors, meditated by
the olfactory nerve
• when the signal reaches a threshold, the neuron fires, sending a signal
traveling along the axon to the olfactory bulb, part of the limbic system
of the brain
• interpretation of the smell begins, relating the smell to past
experiences and in relation to the substance(s) emitted

The Perception of an Odor Effect

• involves the physiological part—detection of the stimuli by the
receptors in the nose and processed by the brain
• odor feelings are very personal perceptions
• individual reactions are related to gender, age, state of health, and
personal history
• common odors that people are used to are less noticeable to the
individual than external or uncommon odors due to habituation
(affects the ability to distinguish odors after continuous exposure)

For most untrained people, the process of smelling gives little information
concerning the specific ingredient of an odor while experienced people,
like perfumers, can pick out individual chemicals in complex mixes
through smell alone.

Odor Perception
• a primal sense; enables pleasure; can subconsciously warn of danger
• man has 350 functional olfactory receptors and can distinguish a
diversity of odors approximately 10,000 scents
• the ability to identify odors varies among people and decreases with
age
• there are sex differences in odor differentiation

Categories of Primary Odors

musky perfumes or aftershave
putrid rotten eggs
pungent vinegar
camphoraceous mothballs
ethereal dry cleaning fluid
floral roses
pepperminty minty gum