Coda: Collective, Intersensorial, Incommensurable

This book has explored a series of concepts and aesthetic experiments that exemplify the affordances of olfactory worldmaking. Through close analysis of narratives and practices oriented by scent, we have explored how smellscape redistributes access to sensory memory, how olfactory projects such as conjure materialize microclimates supportive of black life and cultural continuity, and how speculative narratives deploy scent to stage desires and kinships that exceed the scope of liberal humanism. Across all these examples, olfactory worldmaking leverages the collective nature of atmosphere to reshape the scope and contours of lived, breathed, and embodied community.

I would like to conclude by reflecting on two complicating factors—intersensoriality and incommensurability—that I have not had sufficient space to address in detail, and that I hope will offer helpful cues for future research in olfactory aesthetics. This book’s focus on smell has limited its attention to the complex and open-ended ways in which olfaction interacts with other senses. While I have not directly engaged the recent intersensorial turn in sensory studies,1 many of the examples studied here have highlighted smell in relation to other senses: visual representation in Cariou and Stout’s artworks, erotic memories of touch and taste in Tanaïs’s memoir, temperature and atmospheric motion in Yi’s exhibition, the haptics and taste of tentacular and vampiric interactions in Butler’s novels. Centering smell destabilizes our sensorial norms, challenging us to relate differently to other senses—including the typically dominant senses of vision and hearing—through the transcorporeal, chemosensory, affective, visceral, and atmospheric experiences activated by olfaction.

Incommensurability highlights tensions between worldmaking projects, and reminds us that worldmaking is not inherently “good” or “bad.” Instead, we must consider the tensions between different projects of reparative worldmaking—for example, between the desired and memory-suffused smellscapes of diasporic and Indigenous breathers, or between fragrance-free spaces that are accessible to people with environmental sensitivities and BIPOC microclimates oriented by a shared scent (for example, a conjure ritual, a durian feast, or an olfactory art installation). Attention to worldmaking may help clarify and communicate what is at stake in different and potentially incommensurable olfactory projects. This requires attention not only to what smell communicates but to its opacity—to the untranslatable, unruly qualities of olfactory responses. Smell’s tendency to resist full disclosure—its subjective, contingent, indeterminate, and nonrepresentational qualities—is not something to be overcome or made transparent through sensitization, translation, or machine learning. Olfactory ethics should be framed not only as the expansion of olfactory tolerance and understanding but as the acknowledgment of limits to olfactory communion. These limits reframe atmospheric violence and repair not as occasions for expanded sympathy but as conditions from which we might work toward “solidarity in incommensurability.”2

These issues are not only topics for further research but also reminders of the need for modesty in sensorial research. Studying smell as a way of making and remaking worlds conveys both the capaciousness of what smell can do and the limitations of our sensorial habits and methods. Collective, intersensorial, and incommensurable processes of olfactory worldmaking underscore how little we know about what smelling is or what futures might emerge from any olfactory encounter.