The Politics of Smell: Between Biopolitical Manipulation and Posthumanist Disorder

A broad art history of smell is waiting to be written. This history would likely reflect, in succession: the productive dirty smells of industry in dialectical rapport with the sanitary air conditioned spaces of modernity; the simulacral fumes and hybrid multicultural offerings of postmodernity; and finally, our global, neocolonial present where unseen gases terrorize the planet and its ecological well-being parallels the bodily health of our microbiomes. In this paper I home in on the olfactory microbiome specifically—which recent studies find mirrors our gut microbiome—as an aesthetic and political domain of human and nonhuman bodies. I begin with an analysis of smell and food in François Lyotard’s important exhibition Les Immatériaux from 1985, offering a novel reading of this well-trodden display by arguing that its synesthetic dimensions toggle between, on the one hand, biopolitical control through the sensory transmission of affect and, on the other, posthumanist becomings-animal that elude total capture. I then discuss two contemporary case studies implicating the olfactory microbiome: Mathias Kessler’s The Taste of Discovery, 2009 and Mara Smrekar’s ongoing K-9_Typology project, especially its iteration as K-9_Typology: Ecce Canis from 2014. Like Les Immatériaux, these examples serve to thematize the two-fold pharmacology of the politics of smell. Kessler’s work, in its send-up of the perfume industry, critiques the opportunistic manipulation of human olfaction, while Smrekar’s, in its ambient co-mingling of human and dog serotonin as art performance and installation, offers a messier zoopolitics residing beyond the more superficial aromas of capitalist speculation.