Beyond intersubjectivity in olfactory psychophysics II: Troubles with the Object

• Published in: Social studies of science Vol. 50; no. 3; pp. 474 - 502
• Main Author: Alač, Morana
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.06.2020; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Dominance; Enactment; Ethnography; Intersubjectivity; Laboratories; Odorants; Odors; Olfaction; Psychophysics; Semiotics; Smell; Submerging; Visual observation; olfaction; environment; ethnomethodology; sensory ethnography; materiality
• ISSN: 0306-3127; 1460-3659; 1460-3659
• DOI: 10.1177/0306312720915646

This article takes advantage of the sense of smell’s peculiar spatiality to reflect on how we may render our engagement with the world other than through manipulating well-defined objects. The lived spatiality associated with olfaction is not reducible to the known parameters of ‘distant observation’ and ‘reaching toward’, familiar from the visual and tactile modalities. Instead, olfactory spatiality is one of immersion: Odors ask us to give up our dominance while we continue to be involved. The article attends to this immersive quality of the sense of smell by tracing multimodal, embodied qualities of mundane events in a laboratory of olfactory psychophysics, also considering the spatial organization of laboratory chambers, and how researchers fashion their bodies while they recognize the frailty of their enterprise. To engage these complexities, the article illustrates an exercise in experimenting with re-production, re-enactment and re-experiencing. While the exercise functions as a reflection on how to orient a laboratory study to non-ocular dimensions of science, the article, in parallel, enquires into semiotic articulations of smell experiences. By pointing out how smell language, rather than being ‘mute’, speaks the spatial quality of our olfactory experiences, it concludes the argument against the olfactory ineffability, initiated in the sister essay on ‘troubles with the Subject’.