Pascale Cumming-Benson

Absorb, seep, perfuse, fume, exhale, submerge. Discourse seems to abhor olfactory indeterminacy and volatility. But discourse is discursus, to run off in different directions, a dispersal, the action of running about. It is in formlessness that the olfactory finds its shape – words for smell pertain to liquids, smoke and breath, drawing in other sensory modes and tactile sensations.

My project is an essay that traces the attitudes to the olfactory, collecting disparate moments, words and ideas that resonate with how the sense of smell has come to be thought of. I wanted to provide a different kind of writing on the sense of smell that would confront some of its common tropes, and explore how these came to be. Historically devalued as the mysterious and unsociable sense, modernity attempted to constrain this disorder. The neutered space evacuated by smell was to be colonised by artificially produced scents.

The sense of smell’s qualities of immediacy, volatility and submergence that had a role in its suppression in fact give smell currency in a culture of experience. It is within these indeterminacies that the olfactory can be found. When ingested, smell is either revivifying, an ‘experience’ – or a source of excess, corruption, consumption and decay…