Scent’s subjective dimension and immediacy need not be a ground for demoting it. Georg Simmel’s Sociology of the Senses proposes that the non-conceptual impressions sensory stimuli impart form both personal identity and our social self. In an early break from natural and social-scientific dualism, Simmel contends that sociology should concern itself with the ‘microscopic-molecular’ aspects of impression, decision, and thought-formation. This ‘micro-sociology’ would then, in Simmel’s view, come to inhabit a subdiscipline in sociology. Simmel transposes the seemingly insignificant interaction of the social organism into constitutive elements of human (and more than human) sociability. Part of this analysis stems from Simmel’s framework of viewing sociability as a force of its own, above and beyond the actors in the network of sociality based in its pure form as ‘the free-playing interactive interdependence of individuals’ without any ‘ulterior end’.35
This emphasis on play as key to understanding the ontology of life and freedom, finds resonances in the magnum opus of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, as well as in Robbins’s novel. For Gadamer, play is a ‘mode of being’ that defies the purposiveness of the willed agent while simultaneously honing an earnestness enthralled in the play at hand.36 Like scent, play ‘renews itself in constant repetition’, and Gadamer claims it to be a substrateless activity.37 The etheric uncanniness of scents riding on the invisible air, flitting in and out of our perception, often plays an underestimated role in the free action of human and other beings. Yet, this playful quality emerges from the proper disposition towards smell as a real-time mercurial activity distracting us from cramped anxieties about the past or future anticipations.
As smell is a major vehicle for relaying precognitive information that causes us to act, often in life-changing ways, Enlightenment thinkers have resented this sense often recalcitrant to the pure abstraction of ratiocination. For, as we have all experienced, there is nothing pure about scent; it is always a mélange, picking up both intended and lingering odours. The hazard of smell to Euclidean, Prussian or capitalist orders is that it acts as a force majeure, overriding the most rigorous institutional interests to control environments and subjects.
Robbins’s world has none of this denigration of instinct, which his characters access through their own odours and the inebriating plant essences they incorporate into their beings. Throughout Jitterbug Perfume, intellection is seen as a barrier to the spiralled rationality that is recombinant with emotion, echoing Schiller’s Nietzschean declaration that ‘it takes more than a day or a generation to undo the cumulative blunders of 2000 years of Intellectualism’.38 Repeatedly Claude LeFever, the businessman in the family, exclaims to his brother Marcel, ‘I would never have allowed LeFever to insure your nose for a million francs were I not convinced of its infallibility … Your snout will solve the puzzle even if your intellect should not’ (p. 13). In becoming attuned to one’s surroundings on a non-mediated level through the directness of scent, the labyrinth of the mind and the accompanying layered (and often mistaken) judgements are revealed to be hindrances as much as help.
Smelling the Sublime
Whether frangipani, jasmine, sandalwood or rose otto, aromatic tones, like their musical counterparts, accomplish much in transporting us from whatever pain and suffering we may be sitting in. The renaissance of aromatherapy is testament to the importance of plant smells as a gateway to nature we cannot live peacefully without. The dizzying array of extraction methods for scents also stirs distinct nuances and overtones into out-of-the-way crevices of our being. Though the nineteenth century soon would bring synthetic compounds, giving us the obnoxiously shrill perfumes found today, plant-based perfumes have been used by humans since our very beginning.
Through reintegrating smell into our ontological repertoire, we reclaim our vulnerability to the environment not as a danger, but as a cord to the past and future that does not require tying up our cerebral cortex with calculations, doubts and worries. The plant–human chimera that we already always have been, according to Robbins, permits bypassing in many instances the reptilian part of our brain that holds on to ideologies and fears precipitating violent conflict and overreactions.
Of course, a refined sense of smell has not always historically been used for cultivation. Just as readily, differences of bodily odour have been used as a trope for the uncleanliness of certain races to justify their oppression. Jay Geller describes Walter Benjamin as attempting to ‘rescue smell and mimesis from their anti-Semitic identifications and release their redemptive possibilities’.39 His study of the role of aromatics in Benjamin’s writings conjures various instances in which the odour of a people is a stand-in for wider prejudices. The charge of giving off a stench is perhaps the most grievous social faux pas one can passively make. For Freud, ‘smell and smell-related terms signify the gravest offenses to the social contract.’40
‘Elevated above the earth and plants’, Kant writes, ‘it is no longer smell that dominates, but rather the eye.’41 Thus the faculty of smell connects us with the earth and plants; as long as we remain vulnerable to smell, tethered to the outside world, we remain earthbound, plant-like. Kant describes smell as ‘taste at a distance’; but even this distance is ‘insufficient mediation’ against evocating pulsing mémoire involontaire that act upon the body and psyche, rendering the subject porous and penetrable.42 It is precisely ‘[b]ecause it is taste at a distance’ that ‘smell actually comes closer to us than taste, into the lungs, even if it is farther from the (now indeterminate) object-source’, Jeffrey Librett notes.43 Penetrating to the fathoms, for Kant ‘smell is contrary to freedom’ as choice and control fall away to enmeshment and mixture with one’s environment, immersed in a sensuous heteronomy rather than pure autonomy.44
Kant’s fear of smell, and of being affected by outer circumstances, is precisely the Enlightenment misconception that transcendence from the bodily, both the environmental and earthly, provides the keys to freedom. Such a conception of freedom becomes predicated on one’s ability to rip oneself from context, rather than to accept as a plant inevitably must, the literal thrownness (in the Heideggerian sense) of a being born into a milieu, willy-nilly, without necessarily deciding such a destiny entirely for oneself. The transcendent as identified with a god removed from entanglements, rather than understanding god as the entanglements themselves, obliges Enlightenment thinking to privilege mobile, unattached, worldly, aloof and unhinged qualities over accepting interdependence, rootedness and implication as unavoidable ontological foundations for our and perhaps all existence.
The captivating force of olfaction works in both directions according to the Heideggerian notion of capture (Benommen). It both distances one from assertions of experiential ownership, and it also transports beyond the limitations of our circumscribed reality and limited prioritisation. The lack of self-ownership smell embarrassingly reveals for Kant, in smell’s ability to alter our moods as well as attune our thoughts and perceptions to intensely wished-for or unexpected environmental encounters, lays bare the porosity of body, extending into the environment. In the same vein as Kant’s depreciation of scent, for Freud, olfactory experience is foremost in constituting a rejection of our humanness (which he characterises by sight), and a descent into our animality and sexuality, in addition to those murky things which grab hold of us through preconscious olfaction but never become consciously noted.45
Freud’s concentration on musky smells, from the perspective of phytoaromatics, is misplaced. For Robbins’s Marcel LeFever, Wiggs Dannyboy, Kudra and Alobar, the saps and distils of plants are not meant to cover up, but to transmute through the admixture of plant unguent and human. A perfume is not, like plastic surgery, meant to obscure some sort of vestal failing, but instead aromatics intertwine with the very ontogeny of the anointed. The phyto-remedy serves as an epigenetic sluice to titillate dormant potentialities in our only semi-fathomed DNA.
Perhaps no philosopher has valued the instinctual wisdom attached to odours li
ke Friedrich Nietzsche. An aromatic physiognomist, Nietzsche diagnoses disease – corporeal and conceptual – through the smell of a thing. As western culture has shunned the animal and plant sides of ourselves, valuing instead whatever we have conjured to count as exclusively human, or worse, as gods temporarily embarrassed with our bodies, our semiotic capacities too have been shunted. Nietzsche speaks of books as experienced not just as read, but also through ‘imbibing their odor’.46
Yet, it is not at all clear that Nietzsche has made peace with smell. In On the Genealogy of Morals he write: ‘Whoever still has a nose to smell with as well as eyes and ears, can detect almost everywhere he goes these days something like the air of a madhouse and hospital.’47 Promising and moral boundedness (or is it moribund-ness?) carries with it its origins through the ‘odour of blood and torture’. Kant’s categorical imperative likewise ‘smells of cruelty’ for Nietzsche.48 The smells inhabiting Nietzsche’s world are normally those of rotting flesh (e.g., ‘I have to smell the entrails of some ill-constituted soul!’49) rather than the fluorescent luminescence of live or distilled plant material.
One of the rare instances in which Nietzsche lauds an aroma is in connection to plant material. He writes that when the human is made out of a plant, carved from a tree, in this instance, the crooked timber of humanity that Kant so deplored as hopeless, overcomes these fleshly limits. It is through connecting to that plantlike aspect of ourselves, that for Nietzsche someone can ‘turn out well’:
That a well-turned-out person pleases our senses, that he is carved from wood that is hard, delicate, and at the same time smells good. He has a taste only for what is good for him; his pleasure, his delight ceases where the measure of what is good for him is transgressed. He guesses what remedies avail against what is harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger.50
Smelling good, the metric Nietzsche uses to determine the soundness of an organism, argument or phenomena, then seems to be connected with the type of thing out of which it is made. Rotting flesh smells bad; fresh, vigorous wood imparts genuine nobility.
Meat is eaten; the age of animals is also that of eating animals, of eating and being eaten. Plants, on the other hand, do not necessarily need to be killed to be eaten, nor eaten to be ingested. The leaves of a tree, or the leaves of a lettuce can be plucked without doing real damage to the plant (same with fruiting mushroom bodies of subterranean fungi). It is through imbibing plant consciousness in various ways that immortality is achieved, according both to Robbins’s characters and many indigenous cosmologies. Eaten, drunk, fermented, inhaled, smoked, topically: plants offer a delight for every orifice. Like the thousand-year-old pu-erh tea bushes in Yunnan Province, China, through the ageing and mellowing of time, the rough tannins of personality and resistance are worn away, enabling the true ferment (firmament) of the essence of the plant-person to shine through. The wisdom of the aged plant confers on the human the rhizomatic perspective.
At the beginning of Nietzsche’s chapter ‘Why I am so Wise’ in Ecce Homo, he demonstrates his true value by claiming unique cultivation of his olfactory sense: ‘I have a subtler sense of smell for the signs of ascent and decline than any other human being before me.’51 Perhaps it is the goaty odour of that animalistic quality in humans which disturbs him into writing, which he notes as a constant distraction from other forms of perception and intellection. Nietzsche never resolves the annoyance of animal odours through the sublime promise of plant perfumes that Robbins conjures. Instead, Nietzsche remains suspicious of the scents he perceives, even as he esteems the olfactory faculty.
The ambiguity of smell, providing access to the divine as well as the hellish, never calls for erasure, however, in Robbins’s adventure. In erasing smells, memory can also be erased. Scraping away the scent of a long-aged home, many a hermit may feel completely out of place. Deodorisers do not just cover up existing scents, but also cover up personal histories, connections to past memories embedded in the rebroadcast acquisition of odour stimuli. The regime of covering up with brash chemicals, rather than converting the foul to fair through the transubstantiation of taking in the body of a plant, presents a lacquer of salubriousness under which mephitic abandon festers.
Through the religious quality of perfume, anointing oneself with the holy aroma of the perfect perfume (with the perfect beet base note), one transubstantiates. From the millenarian fantastic insights of Marcel LeFever to the utopian mission of Wiggs, the quest for trans-scent-dance through surrender to the immortal scent magnetises all who learn of it. Beyond being an art, perfumery for Robbins’s cast carries a viscous, ambiguous religiosity, forever teetering on heretical.
Conclusion
As the infrangible plurality of plants bursts forth from our human consciousness, the hoarding individuality of the age of the animal human skips forward, lightening up the dense red-in-tooth-and-claw zero-sum game of reptile-brain politics. Robbins’s vision of humanity’s future is not a technological one of artificial intelligence, but a biocultural remembering of the always already present information channels abandoned by the civilisations Gandhi so eyebrow-raisingly mistrusted.52 The information encoded in the light of the sun, the mycorrhizal murmurings among plant roots permeating the undersoils of ecosystems, the memory stored in the molecular structure of water particles – these are the sensitivities awaiting our growing attunement to the vegetal world. Much like Nagel’s famous question, considering what it is like to be a plant, or rather the vegetal phenomenology of attempting to inhabit vegetal consciousness as a human, allows the unfolding of the petals of peace humanity so deeply craves.
This refreshing turn of trope Robbins offers, not of a technological utopia but of a vegetalista receiving power and knowledge directly from the plants and ultimately their source of knowledge, the sun, propels the journey of Jitterbug Perfume off the rails of playbook fiction into the spiritual domain of magical realism.53 The current realist turn in philosophy, with all of its speculative varieties, might benefit from the biological variety of magical realism, which paradoxically stays grounded in the natural processes of life and death rather than taking flight into the supernatural. Returning to the Greek and Persian root of the word (magos, magush), magic is keenly connected to the ability to experience and accomplish, which comes from ardent learning of the natural world, hands submersed in soil. Visceral connection to nature opens up our ability to find wonder and guidance. Becoming an instrument of a higher power, in this case the sun, humans follow plants in doing the sun’s bidding, getting out of our own preconceived way.
Human evolution, differentiating increasingly towards the light of plant consciousness, isn’t a return to some primitive past, but entails expanding consciousness into the stillness of knowing that comes unmediated, without priests or politicians. It is a shedding of rusted-out armour, a recovery from collective industrially-triggered anosmia, rather than a retreat. Robbins’s vision for the future eschewing mechanistic or even digital fantasies of artificial intelligence (based of course on the mammalian human mode), instead spins plant consciousness to network isolated humans to other organisms serendipitously, while reclaiming instinct as not merely an animalistic sense, but concordant with the deep wisdom of plants – a hitherto unrecognised and under-valued form of plant knowing. Robbins’s intercession transcends Western fetishisation of the symbolic (our forte!) and understands that plant consciousness offers a more immediate, less emotionally loaded access to the hexagonal refractions of reason. Reclaiming instinct and reason together, unified in the vegetal being available to us, exhales the animal burden of chronic time, efflorescing the present progressive to release rather than gather tense.
8 The Question of the Vegetal, the Animal, the Archive in Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz
Graham J. Murphy
In her introduction to Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal, Sherryl Vint valorises the worldbuilding endemic to science fiction (
sf) because ‘only the worldbuilding of fiction, something at which sf excels, is adequate for conveying the fullness of life before it has been contained within the reductive categories we use as shorthand to constrain the complexity of the world into units that can be grasped by rational thought’.1 One of the most ubiquitous methods for constraining the complexities of our world is the deployment of a pervasive human–animal species boundary that repeatedly privileges human at the expense of animal, often ignoring the fact humans are animals. This human–animal species boundary, however, is not the only species boundary that reductively constrains our lives; Western society is also largely afflicted by what evolutionary biologist Monica Gagliano calls a ‘plant blindness’2 that routinely marginalises or outright dismisses plants from critical inquiry. Aristotle, for example, ‘first positioned plants outside of the sensitive life domain and used plant insensitivity as the key criterion to differentiate between plants and animals’.3 This has had a remarkable (and devastating) impact upon vegetal knowledge because of Aristotle’s poor comprehension of plants themselves: ‘[the] “Father of Science” was no scientist himself’, Gagliano observes, ‘as he was interested in postulating rather than experimentally testing his ideas. And specifically in regards to [sic] plants, we had to wait until the seventeenth century for experimental botanists to start recognising some of the fallacies in his fundamental assumptions.’4
Plants in Science Fiction Page 18
