By Francis Raven
The feeling of the fact, to smell it.1
We have lost our sense of smell for two primary reasons: (1) postmodern critiques of Truth (with, as they say, a capital ‘T’) have taken hold and (2) people lie. The loss of smell results in the loss of taste, which results in the loss of pleasure (that is, depression). The first source of our postmodern depression is self-inflicted, while the second is a result of the inevitable transience of late capitalism (but, of course, the second source thrives on the existence of the first. That is: where would capitalism be without relativism?).
The liars have won and all that means is that they have muddied the waters. Disguised their smell and thrown us off their trail. Or, more likely, they have covered somebody else in shit.
When Arthur Anderson shredded Enron’s documents something happened to truth: it got boring. A messy smell is worse than no smell at all. The history of wood is the diminishment of its solidity. From (‘druid’) to the absolute rule of law in the lex spoletina to your grandfather’s cabinetry passed down from generation to the next through Pottery Barn’s urban-chic “you can be fashionable too” Friends phase through Ikea’s “put it together yourself” business plan through the malnourished pockmarked sunken chins of Tennessee’s chipboard mills through and past the daily paper’s pulp (and unto the truth that more people read the NYTimes online than in print) and finally through Arthur Anderson’s venerable history and into the petty wastebasket of history.
And when they shredded the paper they didn’t know it would be the end of the company. And when they shredded the paper they didn’t know it would make wood (and by metaphor, truth) boring.
A ponderosa pine smells like:
Vanilla.
They shred the paper.
Have you ever tried to read a trashcan full of shredded paper? It’s boring. There is nothing to follow; nothing to trace out.
To be cosmopolitan is to discern, distinguish, to separate out.
Only, at least, the truthishness of identity allows us to separate one thing from another thing.
It smells like, ohh I remember.
Smells like clearcutting.
1 As far as smells go, “normal individuals have the ability to discriminate as many as 10,000 odors and perfumers can discriminate up to 100,000 odors” But it is not that there are 100,000 variations of a relatively small number of smell modalities but that there are actually 100,000 smell modalities. As H.T. Lawless writes, “smells all seem so distinct as categories as to be unrelated. Thus the qualitative range of olfaction seems quite wide compared to taste.” That is, the set of the categories of smells is arguably equivalent with the set of smells themselves. This means both that normal people cannot learn them and that given a “supersmeller” (other names for people with an acute sense of smell are ‘nose’ and ‘perfumer’) he could not communicate to normal smellers about them.
Smell categories are typically less consistently used than are taste categories. Bill Nesto, discussing how different wines should be judged writes, “The character and balance of a wine’s taste are ultimately more consistent indicators of quality than a wine's aroma.” And when organizing items (Tastes, in this case) into categories it is important that those categories be (fairly) consistently used. Second, (and possibly the cause of the fact that smell categories are used more inconsistently than taste categories)
The pleasure/disgust valence or the “hedonic saturation” of smell is less hard wired than the pleasure/disgust valence of tastes. For a sense to be hedonically saturated means that its aesthetic component cannot be separated from its perceptual component. As Linda Bartoshuk writes, “Acceptance of sweet and rejection of bitter appear to be hard-wired while the affect associated with odors depends much more on experience.”
We have lost our sense of smell for two primary reasons: (1) postmodern critiques of Truth (with, as they say, a capital ‘T’) have taken hold and (2) people lie. The loss of smell results in the loss of taste, which results in the loss of pleasure (that is, depression). The first source of our postmodern depression is self-inflicted, while the second is a result of the inevitable transience of late capitalism (but, of course, the second source thrives on the existence of the first. That is: where would capitalism be without relativism?).
The liars have won and all that means is that they have muddied the waters. Disguised their smell and thrown us off their trail. Or, more likely, they have covered somebody else in shit.
When Arthur Anderson shredded Enron’s documents something happened to truth: it got boring. A messy smell is worse than no smell at all. The history of wood is the diminishment of its solidity. From (‘druid’) to the absolute rule of law in the lex spoletina to your grandfather’s cabinetry passed down from generation to the next through Pottery Barn’s urban-chic “you can be fashionable too” Friends phase through Ikea’s “put it together yourself” business plan through the malnourished pockmarked sunken chins of Tennessee’s chipboard mills through and past the daily paper’s pulp (and unto the truth that more people read the NYTimes online than in print) and finally through Arthur Anderson’s venerable history and into the petty wastebasket of history.
And when they shredded the paper they didn’t know it would be the end of the company. And when they shredded the paper they didn’t know it would make wood (and by metaphor, truth) boring.
A ponderosa pine smells like:
Vanilla.
They shred the paper.
Have you ever tried to read a trashcan full of shredded paper? It’s boring. There is nothing to follow; nothing to trace out.
To be cosmopolitan is to discern, distinguish, to separate out.
Only, at least, the truthishness of identity allows us to separate one thing from another thing.
It smells like, ohh I remember.
Smells like clearcutting.
1 As far as smells go, “normal individuals have the ability to discriminate as many as 10,000 odors and perfumers can discriminate up to 100,000 odors” But it is not that there are 100,000 variations of a relatively small number of smell modalities but that there are actually 100,000 smell modalities. As H.T. Lawless writes, “smells all seem so distinct as categories as to be unrelated. Thus the qualitative range of olfaction seems quite wide compared to taste.” That is, the set of the categories of smells is arguably equivalent with the set of smells themselves. This means both that normal people cannot learn them and that given a “supersmeller” (other names for people with an acute sense of smell are ‘nose’ and ‘perfumer’) he could not communicate to normal smellers about them.
Smell categories are typically less consistently used than are taste categories. Bill Nesto, discussing how different wines should be judged writes, “The character and balance of a wine’s taste are ultimately more consistent indicators of quality than a wine's aroma.” And when organizing items (Tastes, in this case) into categories it is important that those categories be (fairly) consistently used. Second, (and possibly the cause of the fact that smell categories are used more inconsistently than taste categories)
The pleasure/disgust valence or the “hedonic saturation” of smell is less hard wired than the pleasure/disgust valence of tastes. For a sense to be hedonically saturated means that its aesthetic component cannot be separated from its perceptual component. As Linda Bartoshuk writes, “Acceptance of sweet and rejection of bitter appear to be hard-wired while the affect associated with odors depends much more on experience.”
