Critique of Pure Osmology

Like Marx and Trinculo, Simon Hajdini smells something fishy. Why do smells lack proper names, requiring us to refer to them by “source names” (such as “fish-like smell”) or “step-names” borrowed from another sensory modality (such as the “sweet smell” of a rose)? Most, if not all, of the objects of our other senses have proper names, such as “sweet” and “sour,” “red” and “green,” “warm” and “cold,” and “high-pitched” and “low-pitched” (not to mention onomatopoeias). Why are smells the only “proper sensibles” (as opposed to “common sensibles” accessible to more than one sense) bereft of names of their own? Why do we suffer from “a universal olfactory anomia” (3)? And how is this phenomenon related to the deodorization of commodities?

To answer these questions Hajdini (with whom I have collaborated on a paper on Žižek) draws on clues to be found in chemistry, biology, anthropology, linguistics, literature, psychoanalysis, and the critique of political economy. In chapter 1 of What’s That Smell? he argues that in order to name objects our ancestors had to ignore or, where possible, eliminate their smells. This is partly due to the close relation between smelling and becoming. As Heraclitus might have put it, it is impossible to smell the same river twice (8). Repressing smells enabled us to form relatively stable names of relatively stable beings. Developing this insight in chapter 2, Hajdini claims that “[w]e only smell that which inhabits the excarnated edge of Being” (51). He supports this thesis through close readings of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog.” In chapter 3 he explains how Freud’s purportedly novel account of the evolutionary genesis of humanity’s horror odorum repeats and represses a recurring motif of post-Enlightenment thought. Finally, in chapter 4 he provides a Marxist interpretation of Sándor Ferenczi’s account of the process by which childhood love of excrement leads to adult love of money. Noting that the key feature of (abstract) value is its disavowed smelliness, he concludes by observing how in Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite the recovery of a sense of the excremental abject generates proletarian solidarity.

Hajdini anticipates several possible objections to the thesis of olfactory anomia. First, it might be thought that we don’t suffer from it at all, for we don’t typically notice our reliance on source names and step-names. Hajdini brings this out in his discussion of H.M. (Henry Molaison), the famous patient whose botched brain surgery prevented him from forming new memories. Researchers noticed that he suffered from a particularly acute form of olfactory anomia. What they confidently recognized as the smell of cloves he identified as “fresh woodwork” or “dead fish, washed ashore” (4). As Hajdini points out, this inability to summon familiar source names was not a failure to name the smells themselves. On the contrary, the researchers were no better off in resorting to expressions such as “smell of cloves.”

Second, it might be thought that words such as “fragrant” and “stinky” are proper names of smells. Yet as Hajdini observes in an important note, “fragrant” and “stinky” are evaluative terms that register the “hedonic values” (149n4) of smells rather than their qualitative characters. A possible counterexample is the Arabic word zankha, which is used to refer to an unpleasant smell on dishes. An analogous example in the register of taste is the Japanese word umami, which literally means “delicious,” but which was adopted to designate the specific flavor of glutamic acid, the main ingredient in monosodium glutamate (MSG). However, glutamic acid is not the only flavor that Japanese speakers call umami (at least until recently). Likewise, there is no single chemical, or even family of chemicals, that English speakers call “fragrant” or Arabic speakers zankha.

This leads to a third objection, which is that smells can be given precise scientific names. Expert perfume smellers can identify their chemical components, just as expert wine tasters can those of wines. However, wine tasters need not avail themselves of this special vocabulary. Acquiring such expertise arguably amounts to enhancing one’s capacity for source-naming rather than to learning to give proper names to qualia. In Sellarsian terms, it is the scientific image of smells (C₈H₁₀O), not their manifest image (smell of rose), that chemical formulas designate. As Hajdini explains in Lacanian terms: “the odorant as the object-source, the ‘real stuff’ of smells, is reducible not to some empiricist-vitalist materiality of matter, but rather to the ‘phantom-like’ materiality of the letter, or to scientific ‘literalization.’ The letter is the ‘real stuff’ of odors: C₈H₁₀O stands for the pure and purely literal materiality of the odorant object colloquially called ‘rose’” (24).

A fourth objection is that olfactory anomia is not completely universal. Some natural languages do have proper names for smells. Hajdini is well aware of this. He mentions the example of Jahai, a language spoken in the Malay Peninsula (149n2). Far from undermining his thesis, this exception underscores the link between olfactory anomia and the commodity form, for the Jahai people have a gift economy. By restricting his analysis to exchange societies Hajdini shifts the focus of his project from nature to culture, or rather to the normative transition from nature to culture: “The first culture war is the war against smells” (106). Xenophobia’s first form is osmophobia. Likewise, the most insistent form of obsessional neurosis is bromidrophobia (the fear of smelling bad to others).

Hajdini traces the “deodorization of reality” (108) back to the beginning of Western metaphysics. He does not mention Thales, for whom the non-smelliness of pure water might have made it seem like a good candidate for a universal stuff (though its colorlessness and tastelessness could have played a role as well), but he seems to have Anaximenes as well as Nietzsche in mind when he imagines Adam’s first words being “Bad air! Bad air!” (28). The idea that language requires fumigation is attributed to Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus. His remark that it is impossible to step into the same river even once suggests to Hajdini that it is impossible to identify an object without leaving behind “indivisible” “smell-objects” (21) or “smell-crumbs” (45) (a term Hajdini borrows from Süskind). Aristotle reports that Cratylus eventually gave up speaking in favor of pointing (8). Hajdini suggests that this amounted to an attempt to naturalize names rather than to signify prelinguistic reality (10).

According to Plato, Cratylus believed that genuine names (if such there be) must have a natural rather than conventional relation to their objects. In the dialogue aptly named for him Plato goes back and forth on this question before tentatively concluding that names are conventional. Hajdini argues that what enables names to express the essences of things for Plato is their status as source-names (7). The reason Socrates is reluctant to acknowledge that there are forms of hair, mud, and dirt in the Parmenides is that such excremental objects are incapable of deodorization (107). When Parmenides assures him he will one day change his mind it would be by realizing that although hair, mud, and dirt smell, their forms do not. To draw this conclusion Socrates would need to abandon his assumption that forms exemplify themselves. Parmenides shows that the self-exemplification of the form of the large leads to an infinite proliferation of forms of the large (the paradox that Aristotle called the “Third Man”). In the case of the form of smelly things, the problem would arise with self-exemplification itself, or what we might call the Second Smell. Hajdini observes that the lack of proper names of smells shows up in a “loop of classification where a given quality is the common attribute of a certain number of objects, which include among them this quality itself.” Although whiteness is not white in the way that white things are white, “for any set of objects qualified in virtue of a given olfactory quality, there is One that qualifies all other objects—and itself” (26). Perhaps this is why, in the Timaeus, Plato denies that smells are unified objects. A smell is a “half-breed” or “half-formed thing” (ήμιγενές), hovering somewhere in between the formless receptacle and fully formed sensible particulars.3 In the Republic, Socrates attributes to fragrant smells the seemingly unique ability to give intense pleasure unaccompanied by pain (584b).

Just as cosmology, for Timaeus, is the study of the universe, so osmology, for Hajdini, is the study of “the universe’s remainder” (75). Speculative osmologists from Herder to Fichte to Freud have attributed the taboo against touching excremental objects to “the evolutionary advent of human bipedalism,” a scenario that Kafka makes fun of in his ruminations on “the evolutionary advent of canine bipedalism” (70). Freud’s mistake, for Hajdini, was to treat the repression of smell as an evolutionary phenomenon rather than as the structural basis of signification. (A similar objection could be raised against Bataille’s account of why we find the smell of shit repulsive.) According to Jean-Claude Milner, Lacan went beyond Aristotle, Freud, and Saussure by taking the basis of signification to lie not in “the principle of reflexive identity” (A = A)—the fundamental principle, for Hajdini, of deodorized ontology—but in the principle of “reflexive oppositivity” (A ≠ A) which characterizes the predicament of olfactory subject and object alike insofar as smelling involves the dissolution of each (60–1). Lacan subverted the classical ontological conception of truth as adequation by substituting for it the formulas “I, truth, speak” (81) and “I think where I am not, and I am where I think not” (87). Hajdini gives the latter a Nietzschean twist by reformulating it as “I smell where I am not, and I am, where I do not smell” (88). For Lacan, the prohibition against olfactory touch, i.e., smell, shows up in language as a “prohibition against phonic touch” (113). Yet it was Nietzsche rather than Lacan who “attributed the greatest value to the nose’s prophylactic capacity for sniffing out the bullshit of Socratic philosophy, Christianity, and the German spirit alike” (156n77; cf. 169n43). What Lacan characterizes as the pre-signifying play of “llanguage” (lalangue) (or what Kristeva calls “the semiotic”) is the hair, mud, and dirt of everyday language (la langue).

Hajdini’s book begins with an epigraph from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (1). As he goes on to explain, Juliet’s statement illustrates the phenomenon of olfactory anomia by passing “from a name to a smell—that is, from naming to a void of naming” (1). Something similar happens at the beginning of King Lear when Gloucester moves in the opposite direction from an unnamed smell to a proper name: “Do you smell a fault? . . . Do you know this noble gentleman, Edmund?”4 Juliet seeks to avoid the threat of nominal determinism by telling herself that the thing we call a rose would smell as sweet if it had a different name, and that Romeo would likewise retain his dear perfection were he not “Romeo” called. By contrast, Gloucester seeks to evade a kind of olfactory determinism when he assures Kent that the issue of his malodorous deed (sex with someone other than his wife) has a Christian name that makes him smell as sweet as his lawful son Edgar: in brief, Edmund would retain his dear perfection were he not “bastard” called.

Another relevant passage from Shakespeare is one that Marx loved to cite: Timon of Athens’s characterization of gold as the “common whore of mankind.”5 Like Marx, Hajdini traces the origin of value back to its smelly—indeed, stinky—source. Just as certain smells give us pleasure without being preceded or followed by pains, so others give us pain without being preceded or followed by pleasures. The paradigmatic case of the latter is the smell of shit. Following Ferenczi, Hajdini argues that the progressively deodorized chain that leads from shit to mud to sand to stone to coin culminates in “the deject in its oppositional determination” (109). Class position is marked by degrees of stinkiness, as Marx implies when he refers to the lumpenproletariat as the “passive dung heap” of capitalist society. This idea is nicely illustrated at the end of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (141). As Hajdini explains, when the bourgeois Dong-ik holds his nose so as not to smell the outcast Geun Se, the worker Kim Ki-taek recalls Dong-ik’s similar reaction to his own smell. Suddenly aware that Dong-ik would not retain his dear perfection if he did not possess a great deal of money, Kim picks up a knife and kills him (145). Like Kent, Kim smells a fault no proper name can deodorize. Thanks to Simon Hajdini we can now understand the phrase “smells like proletarian spirit.”