~*DiScOnTeNt*~ v1.3 & 🎂 33% Off
w/ an Essay on Abjection + Silueta’s Pre-Sale + Q1 Flights + more 🤓
Hey there,
I’m trying out something new! This fall I’ve been writing a lot about perfume and more, and I’ve got enough words down on the page now that I finally feel ready to successfully keep an actual newsletter going on a steady (well, steadier) basis. So I’ve moved ~*DiScOnTeNt*~ over to Substack, which was made for writers, and which will enable better distribution of my writing. This platform will also host and distribute audio discussions and podcasts, and if you keep reading, you’ll learn why that matters. So ~*DiScOnTeNt*~ newsletters will look more like this from now on, with sales info limited to an announcement section like the one below, along with links and banners, like the one for Silueta just below this paragraph, throughout the newsletter. On that, let’s get to the…
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Pre-orders for Silueta: A Perfume Because of Ana Mendieta are now available at $80 for a 15mL travel bottle size, with samples set to $12. These prices will stay intact until 15 January 2022, when a 15mL bottle’s price will bump up to $90 and samples will bump up to $15. Shipments of orders will begin dropping between 20 January and 31 January.
Each of the Perfumer’s Incenses Cones are now back in stock, in limited quantities.
You can now begin pre-ordering Materials Flights for next year’s first quarter, of which there will be five Flights covering Roses, Jasmines, Animalics, Greens, and Synthetic Musks. Corresponding Flight Salons will occur on Sunday afternoons at 3pm ET on the dates and times listed below:
Piggybacking off the previous announcement: until 15 January, the purchase of any single Flight is set at $35. Beyond that, all are available in bundles of two for $45, bundles of three for $65, bundles of four for $85, and bundles of all five Flights for $100—so if you purchase all five at once, you receive one Flight and access to its corresponding Flight Salon for free. After 15 January, Flight bundles will no longer be available, and all Flights will be sold individually at $30 each. So you’d be wise to pre-order these Flights! (If you purchase any of these Flight options, please indicate which Flights you’d like in your order notes so that your shipment can contain all the appropriate Flights.)
I’ve mentioned on social media that in the coming year, I’ll be discontinuing both the 50mL full bottle-sized perfumes and the 15mL travel bottle sizes in favor of 30mL bottles only. When this happens, I’ll also be shifting to using real labels on the face of bottles (currently the labels are included on the bottoms of bottles) in place of the colored enamel thumbprints that currently occupy the face of bottles currently. I can’t be sure when I’ll run out of full-sized 50mL and travel-sized 15mL bottles, but I’d expect them to all go before the middle of next year. So if it’s important to you, as I know it can be for many, that your collection of a particular brand’s work exists in matching bottles, this is your chance to pick up what bottles containing the enameled thumbprint you currently lack. Below is a stock update for your awareness:
Sets of four 15mL travel-sized perfumes—Buen Camino, Playalinda, Spite EdT & Spite EdP—are marked down to $205 through 31 December.
All purchases of Intra Venus in 15mL travel-sized bottles are just $75 from now thru 31 December.
Orders over $100 between now and 31 December will receive one free 7.5mL pen spray of your choice. (Intra Venus and Silueta are not available in pen spray sizes. Please indicate which pen spray you’d like in your order notes!)
At the very end of this newsletter, after the essay, you’ll find a code only available for use by ~*DiScOnTeNt*~ subscribers which will enable 33% off all purchases or 33 hours beginning the moment I hit “send” on this newsletter. This sale is in celebration of my 33rd birthday, which was last Thursday. (My apologies this newsletter and this sale are coming at you late. I had a lot of writing to edit, and then over the weekend I was sick. I’m better now, and fortunately, it wasn’t COVID.)
Below is the second installment of the four-part essay series I began with the first issue of ~*DiScOnTeNt*~. It’s over 10k words and may take around 40–45 minutes to read. I’m not sorry. Because…
On or before 5 January, you’ll receive one more email from me via this new Substack presence for ~*DiScOnTeNt*~ which will include a recording of me reading the essay aloud in its entirety. So if you don’t care to read all 10k words of the piece yourself, you can wait for that recording to come your way. And since I’ll be doing that anyway, I’ve also decided to…
Turn ~*DiScOnTeNt*~ into a podcast. More news on that will come with the follow-up to this newsletter which will be delivered on or before 5 January.
Finally, because I hate when it’s all about me, and because I don’t believe Chronotope has a chance in hell of thriving without being part of a healthy ecosystem of other independent perfumeries, I want to begin using some, small space within each issue of ~*DiScOnTeNt*~ to highlight another perfume by another indie perfumer that I’ve been enjoying recently. This perfume is not included here because the perfumer and I have worked out any kind of agreement; in fact, the perfumer highlighted below doesn’t even know their work will be appearing here. It’s here purely because I’ve been appreciating it lately and want to suggest you try it out yourself. The perfume is:
Orris Forest Eau de Parfum by Maher Olfactive (2021, by Shawn Maher)
It is a fantastic piece of work, especially if you’re an orris lover (and I certainly am). What makes it so striking to my nose, and delightful for me to wear, is the use of a subtle fig accord, which just about never works on my skin. The only fig accord that’s ever truly worked on me is the one found in Old Navy’s discontinued cheapie perfume, Sea Salt & Fig, which I consider a great but which is, for better or worse, also an ambroxan bomb. Beyond it, fig’s been a pretty fruitless pursuit for me. So for Maher to give me an orris-heavy perfume that also manages to nail fig means that I love it and think it’s just a really clever piece of work.
Now onto the writing! It’s a rather long piece, I’ll admit. But I hope you’ll find it’s worth your while—and please, by all means, share it with / forward it to whomever you like. And if you feel so inclined, you’re more than welcome to contribute thoughts / reactions / responses to the thread via Substack. I’d be delighted if you did so, really. All my best,
—CWM
PS: For those who may see this and aren’t yet subscribed to ~*DiScOnTeNt*~, please:
The Abject and American Perfumery
(~10,500 words / 45-minute read)
It’s probably no surprise that around the time Chronotope reached its first anniversary of being open back in August, I began wondering what the fuck I’d done.
I meant this quite literally: what the fuck had I done with Chronotope so far? What kind of operation was I running? Was my company respectable? Was I trustworthy? Or were both I and it just laughable jokes? Further, was I seen as serious about my craft, capable of standing next to my peers as a competent competitor? Or was I easy to dismiss, considered manic and batshit? Further, did I care if it was the latter? Why or why not? And what did my work mean, both to me and to my customers? Again, what the fuck was I doing with, and through, my practice of making and selling perfume?
I want to attempt finding an answer to this question within this piece of writing, which is the second in what I’d promised to be a four-part series for ~*DiScOnTeNt*~ that I began with its first issue more than six months ago. I also want to make an argument in favor of perfume as an unexceptional art. But to do so, I first need to answer for WTF?
Several weeks ago, I was elated to receive news that a special, print-only, single-edition issue of Broccoli—a weed culture magazine that resists the genre’s typically heavy-handed application of Jackass-ery found in psychedelic rags like High Times—was finally ready, after two-and-a-half years of development, to be sent to press and distributed. Called Mushroom People, it contains a short article I wrote which centers on the habit of perfume lovers of decanting and trading our favorite perfumes with each other. For the piece, which I centered around the sorely missed indie brand Apoteker Tepe’s mushroom-and-violet-leaf perfume After the Flood, I was able to speak with Holladay Saltz, Apoteker Tepe’s founder and nose. She provides my favorite line in the article, which also happens to be my favorite line about scent anyone’s ever said or written:
“Smells are maps of parallel realities.”
This statement has stuck with me since she and I corresponded. Over the time since, I’ve jotted it down in journals and scribbled it onto a Post-It that’s stuck to the monitor on my desk. I’ve scrawled it onto a mirror in my bedroom in dry-erase marker, used it as a screensaver on my old laptop, dropped it into casual conversation and more. Her words remind me of what my job as a perfumer actually is: to use all the beauty and ugliness and wonder of this world to present a reality through scent that is not, at present, my own—but that can be…if I blend it into existence, that is.
I’d like to return, briefly, to Los Angeles, the site of the first and last essay I wrote for ~*DiScOnTeNt*~, where we find homes built by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Mayan Revival style. Each are visually iconic for their stark, exaggerated monumentality, and all are built in alignment with Wright’s mission to infuse American architecture with its own vernacular that distinguishes it from the architecture of Europe. The homes are also remnants of Wright’s most difficult years—reminders of his grief after the love of his life, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, and her two children were murdered on the same day that Taliesin, his home and working studio in Wisconsin, was razed to the ground. In so many ways, the Mayan Revival homes are purpose-built for, and specifically designed to house, Wright’s ghosts.
Or, at least, this is how most academic and armchair historians of American architecture describe the homes. A deeper analysis offered by descendants of the indigenous communities who occupied this continent prior to colonization exists, and their perspective is a critique of the homes that reveals Wright’s failure at his own mission: rather than producing an architecture with uniquely American vernacular, he merely rebranded the old, continental European colonial tactic of orientalism and brought it to its new home within our North American context. And whereas a continental European’s orientalist gaze may have projected as far away from, say, France, as China is, Wright’s Stateside gaze that appropriates Mesoamerican cultures and the European practice of orientalism alike projects into its immediate vicinity.
Horror stories in the States commonly revolve around haunted houses in part because Americans are hyper-aware that our civilization is built atop, as it’s said, “Indian burial grounds.” And Wright’s LA homes look, to many, like the ultimate haunted houses, with the fear factor set to its most extreme. Ennis House, the largest of them, was even used as the haunted mansion for the 1959 film House on Haunted Hill, and filmmakers have returned to it time and time again since to capture films in the thriller and horror genres in its halls and in its shadow. This understanding of the Mayan Revival homes manages to provide a kaleidoscopic rationale for why they feel they way they do: so somber and depressive, but also sinister, somehow, at the same time. It’s not because Wright built them to contain the ghosts of Mamah, her children and his own grief, but instead because the homes’ existence at all reminds those who view them of blood that was only just recently spilled on the land they occupy. Wright may have wanted to give his beloveds’ ghosts spaces to occupy in their afterlife, but the manner in which he did so reinscribes colonial violence on-site. And in doing so, Wright ensured his own ghosts are never able to occupy the homes alone. They are forever in the company of many, many others.
I mention this to emphasize how important it is that we, as American perfumers and lovers of American perfume, remain cognizant that a uniquely American version of orientalism exists in at least one art form, and that if it can crop up in architectural practice, surely it can crop up elsewhere—and especially within our field, with its modern roots in Europe’s imperial powers, that we already know to be complicit within the project of orientalism to begin with. I hope Wright’s architecture can supply me, my readers, and others who work in the profession outside of Europe with a cautionary tale. And I can already think of a few American brands whose ethics of extraction might be called into question once we conduct this necessary bit of introspection about the work we all do here.
What does it mean, for example, when a white Stateside perfumer forages a key material, at little to no cost, for one of their products from land designated a National Park? While it may be clear that the perfume which results from such extraction takes an active hand in the ongoing settler colonial project, what’s less clear is whether or not the work continues the historical legacy of orientalism as it exists in perfumery into the present, and in doing so updates it so it can live and thrive on American soil. Does the resulting product need to dabble in and drag out indigenous tropes to do so? Or does the fact that it delivers a white settler’s perspective on an indigenous material render it an example of North America’s own version of orientalism—one which aims not at the cultures found east of Europe, but instead to those that once controlled this place, in addition to the lands south of the US border, nonetheless?
I’ll let you think on that.
Here, now, I want to celebrate recent wins in ridding perfumery of its clearly spoken, contemporary orientalism: this year, thanks to the ongoing action of several players in the industry—among them writer Sue Busto, creative director Yosh Han, and perfumer Dana El Masri in particular stand out—various industry figureheads and organizations including Fragrantica, Michael Edwards’ Perfumes of the World database, and the Perfume Society out of the UK committed to discontinuing their use of the O-word as the name of a genre of perfume. That’s great progress!
But tossing out the O-word from its most common use in contemporary perfumery as a generic title is absolutely not tantamount to discontinuing the fallacious, subjugating project of orientalism altogether—and especially not if we’re willing to let it merely morph into a new form that exists here, across the Atlantic. Letting go of perfumery’s heavy-handed insistence on appropriating culture will require we actively work toward better conditions for the people and lands of the global south—including advocating for freedom of self-determination for all who currently occupy it.
Or, to put it bluntly, to support their ability to leave the perfume supply chain if they so desire. We only have many of these materials because of violent histories. Who am I to say they deserve to still be used? Who am I to say that I deserve to use them?
And if smells are maps of parallel realities,” then what sort of maps can we, as perfumers from the Americas, draw? What kind of structures can we build into existence that might actually resist those old, toxic traditions? Now that we know our dislocation from Europe is not sufficient in and of itself for helping create art that gazes into a better future instead of continuing to operate inside feedback loops that only play echoes of a violent past, what are we in the Americas to do?
What am I, as an American perfumer whose work seeks to find a solution, to do?
This fall and winter, I’ve spent a lot of time sitting with another question—one I’ve received almost daily since opening up Chronotope: “what kind of perfume do you make?”
It’s a strange question at face value: Is the speaker wanting to know what genre my perfumes are? Do they want to know if I make solids or sprays? When I sit with it a moment, though, the question isn’t particularly senseless. I know that what I’m really being asked is “how does your perfume smell?” and that the person asking me knows I’ll never be able to supply an answer that quite suffices. It’s a question infused with grace in this way, and I’m thankful for that. But I get caught off-guard when I’m asked it regardless. I always think, I could call all of my perfumes “florals,” I suppose. But that isn’t sufficient. No answer really is.
I finally found my way to the answer I currently use within another bit of my written work—this time in a short essay that appeared in another perfumer’s Studio Series, which was published just before I launched Chronotope. There, I claimed perfume “has a long, long history of outlasting states. No doubt it will outlast ours […] No state can stop us from making perfume about ourselves, finally. Or, more accurately, again.” Here: a thesis statement for my practice that I wrote and had published prior to pushing the brand out into the world.
I zero in on “perfume about ourselves,” ultimately. Chronotope has always, for me, represented an intentional attempt to relocate perfumery not to any one sovereign nation or another, but instead to evict perfume from its current residence in the imagination. As in, within the wearer’s individual imagination, in addition to the plural sense. As in the collective imagination, or, what I suppose some might call the collective unconscious. Which, I’d add, is also where the idea of nations exists—for no nation exists until many people who imagine the nation to be real together band together to defend it. Instead, I’ve made deliberate attempts to re-house perfume so that if it has a home at all, a site of origin or object of inspiration, that home is decidedly not what does not exist in reality and takes up space in the imaginary, in the unconscious, at the level of desire or dreams, but that which absolutely does exist in reality: the body itself.
The body I refer to most frequently in my work is, of course, my own, and this much, I think, is already clear: Buen Camino specifically refers to the very real bodily breakdown I experienced as I walked that old Spanish trail. Playalinda is a very real nude beach that I have taken my very real nude body to many, many times, and the lover in the narrative for that perfume is a very real ex. Spite EdT is a bit more complicated to explain in terms of the/my body—but as I’ve admitted more than once, the sales copy I wrote for the perfume is a half-fakeout: the project was originally a rose perfume I worked on with the man whose body I reference along with my own in Playalinda, and when we split, I ruined the draft of that perfume with isobutyl quinoline and ethyl maltol. I had to (spitefully) wash him (his body) out of the blend in order to continue working on the project. It made me too sad to face that formula to continue working on it after the breakup. So I had to ruin it.
Then I launched the brand. And I’ve told the story of how exposed I felt many times already. So to try and alleviate the shock of this sudden sense of exposure, Spite EdP became an attempt to not portray my story, to cover my body—or even to forcibly remove it from the work. But I smoked Parliaments like a vintage train engine burns through coal during the formulation process for that perfume, and I wound up portraying my body in spite of my efforts, as the majority of people who’ve worn it and say it smells like a cigarette, or even an ashtray, are aware. And where I pulled that ex out of Spite EdT, I put his presence back into the work in Spite EdP: he smokes cloves. Both my mother and brother also claim that they smell my grandmother in Spite EdP. She died during the time that I was polishing off the formula, and they’re right: I can smell her in there, too. She’s there in the white rose.
I doubled down on this attempt to remove myself from the work with the Citationals Series perfumes, which are explicitly not inspired by me or my story, but which contain, or refer to, bodies nonetheless. Engaging with the artist Hannah Wilke’s ideas for my recent release, Intra Venus, brought sincere joy every day. And through Hannah’s work, I learned to come to terms with the direct representations of myself in the launch perfumes. I now see them as not quite as solipsistic and narcissistic, not quite as exposing, as I once thought. Hannah has this great quote: “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the personal, why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?” (Abdy 1). Of course, I’m not a woman, but I’ve never worked in a field that isn’t homophobic, that hasn’t sought to rub out this part of myself from my work—or even not credit me at all for work contributed, even when that work has gone on to be great—so I understand what she means more than you might initially guess.
Before you scoff at me, a man, for saying this, here’s one scenario I’ve encountered in every professional workplace I attended before I began working in perfume: I’m sitting in a meeting during which a tense fight has broken out between a man and a woman. They’re arguing about whose idea—his or hers—is better. The day before, or maybe even that day, or maybe several weeks before, I’ve sat through a conversation with this same woman at lunch, for example, or in spare time in between jobs, or maybe at an offsite happy hour in which she’s bemoaned to me how difficult it can be to be a woman in the workplace. She’s told me that women are constantly being talked over by men—something about which I’ve never had any doubts, because I‘ve watched it happen all the time. She’s also expressed that part of how women are talked over in the workplace is that when women will toss out an idea, it will be ignored by the group, but when a man in the room expresses the same idea within the next five minutes, the group accepts it, implements it, and even celebrates his genius.
Today, however, as this fight is happening in front of me, I recognize that the idea she’s presented as hers actually isn’t hers, but one of mine. She knows this, and I know this, and her quick glances my way acknowledges this fact. Yet since she also knows that I know of her complaint about men talking over her and stealing her ideas, she knows that if I interrupt to say, “that’s my idea,” I’ll be putting her complaint into action and in fact lending my stature as a man in the room to the side against her, to the side she complained about to me, to the side that seeks to talk over her and claim her work as its own, even though in this instance, the idea in question isn’t hers at all. And today, since the other man is already fighting her because what’s now seen as her idea is better than his, and this hurt his ego, I can’t step in and say that it was my idea all along, because if I did so, I’d be ganging up on her with the other man, even though what they’re both arguing about is not her idea, but mine that she’s stolen. To claim the idea as mine would, in a very sick way, render me into the day’s ultimate misogynist—even though I haven’t done anything but had my own idea stolen.
I can’t rightly say I know a gay man this hasn’t happened to. It’s something we—as in gay men—talk about. And I bring it up it to say that it takes time to learn how to handle this sort of thing, and that fortunately, a legion of other gay men, and women, who worked before I did have handled it before me and figured out ways to work in spite of it. Part of handling it involves leaving your body in the moment, allowing yourself to flee the room, so that you don’t carry on with bitterness after witnessing your work be treated like shit. Another part of it involves rooting yourself even deeper in your own body and feeling pride for work you know is yours, even if you aren’t credited for it. Another part of it involves knowing when to engage embodiment and speak up, call bullshit, claim what’s yours. To involve your body in the scenario. To take up space, so to speak, much the way that Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta did.
In any case, that’s not a dynamic I have to worry about happening much anymore since I now work alone. And since I now work alone, and therefore no longer have to feel as if I need to flee my body, I include my body in my perfumery. One of the ways I’ve done so, I’ve realized, is that I’ve conducted most of the formulation for each of the perfumes directly onto my body, right onto my forearms and sometimes my legs, and occasionally onto my chest if I’ve run out of canvas elsewhere.
But I remain convinced that even in this job, I’ll also need to flee my body eventually. For example if I am to ever take on any client work, which I wouldn’t mind doing in the new year now that I feel a bit more practiced at perfumery, then I’ll need to displace myself, at least to some extent. It might be the first time I’ve done so for a job without having to in order to escape an instance of homophobic erasures, which is a blessing. But I anticipate the need to do so eventually. So I’ve tried to do so in the composition I created for Silueta, which I formulated almost entirely on paper scent strips and in beakers. It made sense for the project—for if I exist in that perfume at all, I’m there as an invisible hand—or a shadow. Or a silueta. But even if Intra Venus and Silueta do not document my physical body, per se, as they’re focused not on me but on others, these two women, Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, they are still no less about the body than any of the perfumes I made before them which take their inspiration from my body itself.
Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta were, of course, body artists. And the body, of course, is the site where perfume finds its intended manifestation and activation. In this case, why should it not also be the site where perfumery finds its inspiration?
And it’s here that I have a proposition to make. I want to argue that American indie perfumers should concern ourselves with a perfumery of the abject. By this, I mean a perfumery that is abject in and of itself, as I’ll argue mine is below, as well as perfumery that abjects itself away from rigid, generic models of modern and contemporary perfumery as we currently know and understand them—in particular those that originate within a European (French) context and which attempt to attain the exceptional stature of art. For if the body is the intended site of activation for perfume, it is also the primary site of the abject, which is, per critic Hal Foster, who wrote about Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s use of the term:
“[…] a category of (non)being […] what a subject must get rid of in order to become a subject at all. It is a fantasmatic substance that is both alien to the subject and intimate with it, too much so in fact, and this over proximity produces a panic in the subject. In this way, the abject touches on the fragility of our boundaries, of the distinction between our insides and outsides” (Foster 13–16).
To be sure, I intend to evoke a Pan-Americanism as I make this argument, not strictly to assign perfumers from the States this responsibility while ignoring all other American nations. As for a working definition of the abject, I point to its acute delineation in The Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Bulgarian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, who argued the abject is that which exists in a state of being cast off from a body—not always a corporeal body but a body that is incorporated nonetheless—in a manner that disturbs and disrupts conventional wisdoms. Or, in her own words: the abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4).
As we know, perfumery is associated the world over with one nation in particular, France, where perfume is also seen as part of the national heritage, and key to understanding the national identity. France is also where perfume production, beginning with education, is most systematized and professionalized. Yet here in the States, and also in Canada, in addition to a small but growing contingency of Latin American countries, particularly Mexico and Argentina, perfumery has been proving to be a viable and successful enterprise as well—even though we, in these continents, altogether lack a systematized pipeline of perfumery education that leads to careers in the profession, rather unlike what exists and is established in France. Compared to that incorporated, French pipeline, which dominates the global market from that nation, then, the American perfumer may well be “The one by whom the abject exists […] thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings […] Instead of sounding himself as to his ‘being,’ he does so concerning his place: ‘Where am I?’ Instead of ‘Who am I?’ […] And the more he strays, the more he is saved. For it is out of such straying on excluded ground that he draws his jouissance […] He secures the latter’s judgement, he acts on the strength of its power in order to condemn, he grounds himself on its law to tear the veil of oblivion but also to set up its object as inoperative” (8-9).
In turn, that which is “abject confronts” the dominant power. “It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling.” The abject is “a frontier, a repulsive gift” which “keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant […] We may call it a border; abjection is above all an ambiguity. Because, […] it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary […] abjection itself is a composite of judgement and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives” which “preserves what existed” while, at the same time, “becomes separate[…] in order to be” (9-10).
I included a statement Holladay made in the Mushroom People piece that considers scent in these terms, those of the abject, which I think we can find useful here: “[t]he funny-wonderful-holy thing about smells,” she says, “is that […they] pass into, within, through us.” In this statement, smell, which I’ll inflate to include perfume, is “a fantasmatic substance,” that does not merely sit on our skin and evaporate over time but instead transgresses our physical, bodily “boundaries,” standing to produce within us a desire to accept it or abject it. Anyone who’s called a perfume a scrubber understands this—and even those who have oversprayed a great perfume know that even the best can be at once “intimate with” us and also “too much so.”
I know all too well that perfume’s “overproximity” can “[produce] a panic” because there are plenty of perfumes that contain butyric acid, which makes me wretch. And in this way as well as in instances when perfume can, and does, make me cry, because it’s triggered a long-lost memory, I also know that perfume can “[touch] on the fragility of our boundaries.” In either instance, whether I’m barfing or crying, what is happening to my body, what the perfume has worked through my body to make occur, is an instance of abjection; crying and weeping alike are both bodily functions in which we abject substances. To restore balance, “to become a subject” capable of being a properly functioning human once more, we must “get rid of,” we must abject, the vomit or tears—or in some cases, also the perfume that triggered such a reaction. Even the way that we most commonly apply perfume onto our bodies is an instance of abjection: we spray it on with an atomizer. We abject it from its bottle.
What is abject is also what is socially rejected. And as A.S. Barwich writes in Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind, human interest in the nose and the study of olfaction as a whole have a long history of being cast aside by ordinary people and the scientific fields alike: “Olfactory physiology,” she writes, “was mostly unchartered territory until the end of the nineteenth century. Such oversight was not coincidental. It seemed hard to measure and visualize how smells are processed […] It was far from obvious what smell was. Throughout history, odors had been the invisible essence of things. But what was the essence of smell? […]
“Popular theories, especially psychoanalysis, were occupied with grander generalizations about human nature and society. Smells did not fit that aim. Sigmund Freud, who notoriously associated everything with an expression of sexuality—or the repression thereof—hardly mentioned olfaction. It played a minor role in the analysis of modern humanity. Freud linked the rise of human civilization to the adoption of bipedalism and, regarding the elevation of the nose from the ground, saw a declining importance of smell in human psychology. Besides, Freud reduced any prolonged preoccupation in adult humans as an abnormality and marker of archaic instincts (in addition to a fixation on anal sexuality). He left it at that.
“This dismissive attitude was not an exception. When smell did attract attention, it occurred in the context of psychosis, especially female psychosis—such as in the Treatise on the Nervous Diseases of Women by the English doctor Thomas Laycock in 1840. Anthropological scholarship strengthened the prejudice that a keen sense of smell was an attribute of primitive cultures and opposed to civilized mankind” (36-7).
Smell itself, that is, has been seen as abject for most of modern history. And in Smellosophy, Barwich traces the development of academic and scientific thought since 1840 through the present day. Now, science is more aware of how smell works due to the innovative experiments of 2004 Nobel Prize winners Linda Buck and Richard Axel, whose efforts resulted in the “discover[y of] what would eventually be identified as the largest multi gene family in the mammalian genome” (54). Suddenly, Barwich claims, “[o]lfaction, a minor footnote in the history of science, was catapulted into mainstream research” (55), but to say that scientists have come upon any kind of stabilizing consensus on smell which regards the matter of olfaction as somehow able to be accepted is overstatement by a longshot. Scent’s importance to humans continues to be debated and debatable, and smell continues to be marginalized even as it gains traction within the various fields of scientific research.
In Barwich’s words:
“Ask six people working in olfaction what odors are, and you get six—if not more—answers. A chemist will tell you about the most minute details responsible for the odorous quality of a molecule. See that hydroxyl group over there? The biologist is going to shake her head to emphasize that odors are more than chemical structures; rather, they are signaling functions in organisms. Olfaction plays a behavior role. The neuroscientist will nod before remarking that these behavioral functions come down to the activity of neurons firing in the brain. At this point, the cognitive psychologist might intervene to say that such strict behaviorist or neural perspective is not enough to understand the mental mechanisms that embed odors in the cultural landscape of cognition. Consider the role of memory, language, and learning in odor experience! A philosopher could add that while smells seem to convey mental images of things in the world, like apples or roses, their experience often borders on the fine line that separates conscious from unconscious awareness as a fleeting and transient quality. How can we be sure that what we perceive is real? The perfumer will lean back in bewilderment, wondering why no one is talking about the distinct aesthetic experience and hedonic appeal of smell. After all, you can tell a tale, entice a crowd with a fragrance. All of these viewpoints are correct; none captures the nature of odor entirely. Such a mosaic of perspectives makes it tricky to frame the discussion about the material basis of smell and how it connects to the characteristics of its perception […] Whose perception is ‘correct’? The question appears as ill-posed” (80-81, 90.
Smell is, for lack of a better word, complicated, and as such, people throughout history, including the vast majority of scientists, have underestimated and continue to “underestimate the impact of smell on their mental life and decision-making. Most people, when asked which sense they’d give up, opt for smell without hesitation. This sounds reasonable since modern civilization relies heavily on information processed by vision and audition. But the general disregard for the nose is worryingly high and often misguided.” (90)
Barwich recalls an anecdote offered to her by Jay Gottfried, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, to support her argument that this disregard carries some inherent threat, writing, “I heard a philosopher speak about how losing the sense of smell was a kind of constriction of time and space. For example, if we could smell the seawater right now, that gives us a greater sense of the world. She felt very trapped within time and space than if she had access to her sense of smell. That was a really eloquent way of framing things” (91).
And indeed, in the closing to his book Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times, University of Paris Honorary Professor Robert Muchembled claims he “was tempted to conclude with a somewhat ironic word of advice to perfume designers to try playing with musk-based scents” (169) but was “surprise[d]” to identify the Americas’ perfumery production as “exactly where it was already happening,” (168). American perfumers, Muchembled claims, are already at work “add[ing] a touch of spice to the olfactory monotony of our standardized world and break[ing] away with the trend to reject our animality.” He calls out Canada’s niche perfume brand Zoologist for its success at this endeavor, especially as brand runner Victor Wong’s seems to operate “at complete odds with North American tastes,” crediting Stateside Millennials for Zoologist’s success in the marketplace. This—my—group of consumers, Muchembled claims, are now responsible for a particularly North American trend toward preferring “animal scents” like linden blossom, castoreum, musk, ash, civet, and others, all previously understood to be abject, and therefore undesirable, by Stateside consumers. Muchembled proposes this may be Millennials’ way of “claim[ing our] own animality in a technological, virtual world” signified by an “urge to break away with the dominant tradition of scentlessness [and i]n doing so […] reconnecting with a long-overlooked sense, reacting to scent signals that tie sexuality to a degree of beastiality” (Muchembled 168). Continuing, he claims that “American perfumers play with the cliche of French masculinity, redolent with voluptuous odours and driven by amorous urges” through the scents we make in a kind of “subliminal nod” that may as well be a “Millennial[…] parody” of the “American view of French masculinity” (169). In brief: many younger American consumers are now desiring for our bodies to smell musky, even abject, and perfumers in the Americas are responding to that desire.
And there’s my intervention in the conversation, whether or not I knew it when I came upon the name of my business. Whether or not I knew it, I know it now. In English, my brand’s name means “time-space.” Chrono-tope. As the name suggests, every perfume I’ve made is an an attempt to represent time and space. So to answer my own question—“What the fuck have I done?”—I’ve realized that I’ve done so via depicting the human body itself—my body—with a degree of literalism even if what I’ve set out to depict isn’t kosher but is, instead, rather abject (dirty hair, pus). I’ve done so by representing via scent various abject experience the body undergoes (breaking feet, having skin punctured with intravenous needles). I’ve also attempted to depict a metaphorical abject with the two projects named Spite, a word which is, itself, quite frequently understood to refer to an abject emotion. No wonder I was delighted to read that my second attempt, in Spite Eau de Parfum, caused Mark Benhke of colognoisseur.com to wonder “about [my] intent” and identify “the nascent Chronotope aesthetic” to be one which “asks a perfume lover to find the unlikable, likable […] There is an opportunity to find a way to enjoyment,” he wrote. “You just have to keep at it” (Benhke 1).
I don’t want to confuse readers, however. I do not think, nor am I arguing, that the abject has never been teased out by perfumers from Europe or desired within a European context by European consumers. Because to some extent, this has long been a goal of both perfumers and those who seek perfume, including those from Europe, of course. As Barbara Herman reminds us in her book Scent and Subversion, much of what we now call classic perfumery is subversive and abject inasmuch as it defies how “perfume is thought of in the popular imagination,” writing that rather than “something to cover up our bad smells, in many ways, perfume can also be a meditation on the human body, if not an outright celebration of its riotous odors.” Herman credits Etat Libre d’Orange’s Secretions Magnifique’s “biological accords” as “the new millennium’s first olfactory pornography, exposing body parts where they were earlier merely suggested and using olfaction to turn the body inside out” (9). I’d add Italian brand Bogue’s DOULEUR! made with Freddie Albrighton, of the UK, to a list of recent abject perfumery from Europe for its heavy-handed use of a blood accord, and while I’m here with blood notes, I’ll also add UNUM’s But Not Today to the list, which takes its inspiration from a line uttered in the film Hannibal as well. There’s also Jean Desprez’s classic French perfume Bal A Versailles and UK brand Papillon’s Salome, each of which aim to smell like cast-off underwear—pants if you’re British. Italian brand O’Driù infamously directed buyers of its perfume called Peety to add their own urine to the bottle of that piece of work. And Norweigian chemist Sissel Tolaas is world-renowned for her work in perfumery of the abject, with fragrances based on skunk—a North American mammal, for what it’s worth—as well as dog shit, male fear, and the environmental pollution of Mexico City. It’s intriguing to me that Tolaas returns, time and again, to the Americas for excavation of what is abject, and it humors me that she’s exerted the energy of crossing the Atlantic to find what was disgusting in Mexico City. Hasn’t she been to Paris? Or does her action merely support my own argument, that Europeans view the Americas as particularly abject? I’ll gladly go with the latter.
Further, it’s in French writer Marquis de Sade that the abject makes its way most potently into world literature, and, as I’ve already stated, the Bulgarian-French philosopher Kristeva is who defined the abject as I’m applying it here. Clearly, I’m not, in some way, trying to claim the abject is somehow an essentially American category, nor am I attempting to claim that Americans are somehow responsible for the abject’s presence in perfumery. I am also not arguing that the abject should be our territory and ours alone to explore. I intend merely to say that if there exists any group of perfumery professionals who might stand to benefit from taking abjection up seriously as a prime subject matter to be explored in our work, it’s those of us who are already, to the European body of power that still largely controls the perfume industry on a global scale, considered abject in the first place.
Doing so, I think, might help us avoid the trap of orientalism that I mentioned at the beginning of this piece of writing. One of the most wicked deceptions of perfumery in the European (French) tradition has always been that as it bottles the literal material of the global south exploited by European power, including the labor of people trapped under European imperial rule, it both hides that power and renders it beautiful, so to speak, for all who spray it on their bodies. In turn, in the European tradition, perfume creates a demand for the continued occupation and exploitation of those dominated lands and people.
I hate speaking of this in the abstract, however, as if I’m somehow 30,000 feet over the issue looking down, because it renders those dominated people into some kind of faceless mass. I hate it especially now, when the fact is that I’m entangled in the web of it all myself as a player within the industry the same as anyone else. So to make my argument more personal, I’ll point to how I haven’t yet and do not plan to use real vanilla, for example, because I can’t see any positive benefit to my doing so. My reasoning goes like this:
Vanilla’s history as a commodity first reveals colonial power’s displacement of a plant indigenous to Central America to Madagascar, after which it reveals that French power’s habit for profiting off the labor of enslaved Africans like Edmond Albius, aged only 12, who invented the technique for pollinating the vanilla orchid that’s still used into the present day. Though he was no longer enslaved when he died in poverty, it wasn’t his innovation in orchid husbandry which ensured his freedom, just the French declaration of a law banning slavery in France’s colonies. Into the present, vanilla’s story is still ugly, as the crop is currently implicated in the worst famine that Malagasy people have ever endured. Several factors about the current vanilla economy are responsible for this, including the crop’s extreme market volatility year-to-year, its vulnerability to devastation by cyclones and disease, crops being stolen by pirates, and farmer efforts to thwart those pirates which include harvesting the plant early, which degrades the quality of the final product that goes to market and thus exacerbates market volatility, and farmers’ relatively small land holdings, which make those holdings uniquely susceptible to pirates and plague alike.
The irony of my not using vanilla at all, of course, is that even my choice not to use any isn’t a neutral one. If I did use vanilla, my money might make its way to Madagascar and put a dollar in a starving farmer’s pocket. I could also, of course, choose to source vanilla from, say, Mexico—but I fear that cartel involvement in Mexican vanilla production ensures my money might enable human rights abuses there. As the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And before moving on, I want to make clear that what I’ve said regarding my thoughts on vanilla shouldn’t be applied to another perfumer’s use of the material. The thoughts are mine and mine alone.
And this was only a demonstration of the logic underlying my claim that European perfumery’s legacy is one particularly entangled with the history of colonialism and conquest—which isn’t to say that American perfumery’s history is not. But as my retelling of the history of vanilla demonstrates, American historical involvement in the industry is frequently one that aligns American crops and those who cultivated them originally as the exploited, not the exploitative, players within that history. This is not the same thing as saying that white Americans like me do not carry the legacy of colonialism with us, nor is it akin to claiming that we are not part of the broader project of settler colonialism. I am, however, attempting to draw a distinction between what it would mean for me to use vanilla in my perfume as compared to what it would mean for someone in France to do so. At least at this point in history…
And to be crystal clear, I absolutely do want my perfume to be worn and enjoyed—and I’m therefore very glad that Mark Benhke and my customers have found that “way to enjoyment.” I have little interest in making ugly-smelling perfume, per se; I abide by Luca Turin’s suggestion that in order for something to be called perfume, it must smell good enough to wear on the body. But if I do make what is considered “ugly” perfume by those who pledge allegiance to the work that came from France in the last 150 years, so be it. Because it’s in this way that I want to impress upon readers Stateside perfumery might benefit from nurturing a project of abjection in our work.
That is, I make this argument not so that we should to narrow our range of subject matter to be explored to that which is ugly, but instead, to say that exploring what is abject about perfumery is a project I think Statesiders might be uniquely poised to take up as a subject matter and run with in order to contribute something positive to global perfumery in turn. Because we are the other, abject players within this industry; we are who is already cast off. Each of us demonstrates that the craft does not obey or abide by borders. Each of our presences within the marketplace disrupts the idea of perfumery stabilized around one particular nation, France. And as we do our work, we put into action the form’s inherent impurity.
As Alexis Shotwell outlines in her book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, impurity remind us “[T]here is no primordial state we might wish to get back to, no Eden we have desecrated, no pre-toxic body we might uncover.” Or: no original purity of French perfume ever existed, no purity of American perfume ever will, and there is no state any of us can return to where the form of perfume can once again become purely of one nation or another because it never was to begin with. For as we know all too well, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Many of the supply chains—like the ones for nutmeg and vanilla, just to name two—that those of us in the fragrance industry rely on are relics and remnants of European colonialism. Its shadow looms and looms, casting a cold, dark draft the likes of which we’d need to step into Ennis House to feel. What stands to change as we look ahead into the future is how we conduct ourselves as creatives and business people who operate within that shadow anyway, and what it might take for us to conduct ourselves as ethical participants in this industry is that we don’t extend that shadow’s reach even further.
First and foremost, then, we must be up to the challenge of confronting that perfume belongs to everyone, and therefore, it belongs to no one head-on. As I’ve written before, if that looks like anything to me, at the very least it looks like rejecting perfume as a marker of national identity. But the more I work with the form, the more it begins to look like perfume that is not so obsessed with beauty as a target or a goal. It begins to look like a perfumery that isn’t always “positive” but instead a perfumery which sees the inherent toxicity in forced positivity and says, “no thanks.” It begins to look like a craft which denies any concept of total purity and, therefore, classic beauty. It looks like a craft that leans into that which is abject. For where humanity is and always has been, impurity always was and always will be, too. Where we are, what is abject will be, too.
For my part, I consider my most recent release, Intra Venus, my most abject perfume yet. Within it, I combined mastic and a wasabi accord to represent the puncturing of Hannah Wilke’s body by the intravenous needles she displays in her Intra Venus photographs, which were taken toward the end of her life. Mastic has found frequent use in medical settings, including within medical adhesives used to hold down intravenous needles so they lie flush with the skin. For the wasabi accord, I blended a molecule called delta-3-carene, a bicyclic monoterpene that occurs naturally in turpentine and which therefore contributes to the sinus-opening effect of wasabi, with an incredibly powerful sulfurous molecule called p-Mentha-8-thiol-3-one—one of the mercaptans, which are widely considered the most foul molecules in existence. They’re responsible for the revolting scent of swamp water, rotting meat, skunk, halitosis, rotting cabbage, and the way someone’s urine smells after they consume asparagus.
The foulest and most dangerous mercaptan, methyl mercaptan, is present in most human bodies at nearly all times, and particularly within our intestinal tracts, where it forms during digestion, but also, therefore, in our bloodstreams. As a neurotoxic thiol—or a molecule which bonds particularly well with mercury—methyl mercaptan can cause major damage to various vital organs in people with cirrhosis, or scarring of the liver, and it has also been detected in high dosages in the bodies of people with various forms of cancer. The organ most susceptible to methyl mercaptan are the lungs, which can experience edema due to the over-presence of the molecule, and the brain trails close behind them, in second place. Methyl mercaptan can accumulate in the brain, and when it does, because it is a thiol, it attracts and bonds with any mercury the bloodstream happens to carry, which eventually causes poisoning.
Given all this, you’d think humans would stay as far away from mercaptans as possible. For the most part, we do—at least if we have power; mercaptan is among the molecules commonly cited in studies that unveil sites of environmental racism. Simply put, too much of it, like too much of anything, is deadly. Those who live near areas that emit it, in particular marshes and dump sites, live shorter lives.
But intentional exposure to mercaptans also saves many lives—for as they’re such a toxic molecule to humans, we’re able to smell them in very extreme dilution. Mercaptan can, therefore, act like a warning.
As a child, I accompanied members of my mother’s family on multiple occasions to an annual memorial service that takes place in Rusk County, Texas, just off one of the major highways. The town, called New London, is marked by a grand cenotaph and was once a thriving settlement that represented a hopeful future for East Texans, as it was among the various sites in the Pineywoods region that struck it rich. In 1930, the US economy looked like absolute, abject hell, but Rusk County had oil. Its school district held 15 of these wells itself and the district claimed a tax valuation of $20 million plus the profits it made on its wells, making it one of the richest in the country.
With all that oil money, they built a school of steel and concrete in 1932 on a sloping hill that was intended to last decades, if not a full century or longer. It cost $1 million, the equivalent of nearly $20 million today. Its stadium was one of the very first to boast electric lights. The district football team, called the Wildcats, took their name from “wildcatter,” a nickname for oil prospectors. For the people of New London, the Depression didn’t really happen. Their future was bright.
Then on March 18, 1937, at 3:17 p.m., a shop teacher named Lemmie R. Butler turned on an electric sander that caused a spark which resulted in an explosion that survivors claimed made the school walls bulge before the roof—built out of steel and concrete—lifted off the building and crashed back down. When the roof fell back down, the school’s walls collapsed. And the explosion claimed hundreds of students’ and teachers’ lives. Natural gas had collected underneath the school in the space between the sloping hill and the floorboards. Many died immediately, and more died because they couldn’t get out from under the rubble.
After the New London School explosion, regulators of the oil and gas industry in Texas began mandating that mercaptans, usually methyl mercaptan, be added to natural gas in trace quantities, and the rest of the country followed suit. Now when we smell a mercaptan, our reaction to it—moving away from it, and fixing the gas leak it makes us aware of—ensures we don’t die in our sleep. Or in an explosion.
It isn’t a perfect solution. Scientists estimate one in every 1,000 people are unable to smell mercaptans, including methyl mercaptan. People who cannot smell mercaptans still die of asphyxiation by natural gas leaks, and we have not yet invented an artificial nose that can detect them reliably. But if 999 don’t die due to detecting the presence of mercaptans in natural gas, then that neurotoxic class of molecules has, after all, become useful and beneficial for us to smell from time to time. Or, what is most abject can also be precisely what is beneficial, and what is most pure can be deadly. This is a good reminder that our ideas concerning a host of subject matter must remain porous to ever be of any positive use.
And Intra Venus EdP won’t endanger you, reader: the p-Mentha-8-thiol-3-one it contains is colloquially called ribes mercaptan. It’s synthesized from buchu and also makes its way into blackcurrant flavoring. It’s what provides the jolt at the beginning of the perfume which, to me, smells like a spark, or the way shooting stars look, or like the smoke of filaments sizzling in a midcentury flashbulb. By my count, it’s gone within seconds. In an entire gallon of the perfume, I use only one drop of the stuff, and it’s diluted down to a mere 1% before I plop it in.
I’ve heard one customer that the perfume carries the stench of the halitosis they had during their years with cancer, as their body changed due to radiation and other therapies they were exposed to. From another customer, that the perfume smells like the their late husband when he’d returned home from the chemo ward. This customer thanked me for giving her the chance to smell him again. From another, like the sweat their partner left on their clothes when they’d return from chemo as well. And from yet another, again, like the chemo ward, only from their time battling off cancer in it themselves. This last customer told me the difference between the actual ward and the perfume was that the perfume smelled like a chance to revisit the ward without the fear they had when they were a patient in it the first time(s). Coming to know of Hannah Wilke’s end-of-life portraiture, seeing her defiant face in the images as she existentially stared down her own illness and recognizing on Hannah’s body in the images marks their body had once carried themselves, and being able to peruse this—Hannah’s—work while sniffing my perfume, which reminded them of their time in hospital, was helping them rewrite their memory of those traumatic years, with all that fear, with something “hopeful.”
That’s what the fuck I’ve done. These are the parallel realities I map with perfume.
I’m so honored to do this work.
I’ve not had cancer, but I’ve known it. Last year, I spent quarantine tending to the health of my sick and dying shih tzu, who had become, as dogs tend to do, my best friend. I rescued him when he was ten, didn’t plan to have him for more than a year or two as he was in bad shape. He gave me double that and then some. Then he got intestinal cancer. It hurt him so badly he wouldn’t allow himself to release his bowels, and when he did he would cry the saddest sound I’ve ever heard in my life. By contrast, the scariest sound I’ve ever heard is one I heard when was when I was younger, maybe eleven or so, when I heard the screams of a mother rabbit delivering newborns straight into the mouth of a chicken snake, who had slithered into her cage upon smelling her blood. The snake was eating her brand-new babies as they crowned. It pulled them out of her.
As my dog died slowly last year, his stomach swelled to the point that he eventually couldn’t walk, much less go to the bathroom without assistance, but he never lost his appetite. He took stool softeners for about four months before he died, and around three weeks before he passed, he stopped crying when he released, gave himself over to the pain and softeners, and just let it out. He stayed, more or less, by my side during all this time, and if I was within eyeshot of him, he would gaze at me, I’d know, and I’d hold him in a towel and rub his face, tell him I loved him as he passed everything, remind him that it was alright, that I didn’t mind if he got it on me, even. Then I’d bathe him, gently, and tuck him into bed for a nap, and then I’d clean up the mess. For those last months, the floor in my home was covered completely, from wall to wall, with towels and sheets, so that I’d just be able to collect them and throw them away once he was finished.
The smell simply didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was that I was there to do what I could to help him, if it meant only being present with him as he endured the pain of his cancer. I came to appreciate jasmine more than ever during this time because spraying jasmine through the house and on both of us also meant giving indole, a molecule found in feces and jasmine alike, an equal match. I came to understand indole as the smell of love, even, and I sought out the most indolic jasmine I could find, then I added more indole to it. I used that jasmine in Spite EdP and Intra Venus.
I recall Kristeva on abjection again: “One does not know [what is abject], one does not desire it, one joys in it. Violently and painfully.” Sometimes, that is, what is perceived to be ugly is exactly the opposite. When I see a picture of my late dog, I somehow smell that jasmine throughout our house in my mind. And I think, how dare anyone call that dog shit abject. I loved that dog shit. I loved it because it was his.
Eventually, if I’m lucky to live long enough, maybe I’ll become like him. Maybe, someday, we all will. Maybe we’ll all have someone who loves us enough to clean our shit up for us, and eventually comes to love our shit, too, even, because as long as our shit is there, so are we. If we’re lucky enough.
Fuck cancer.
I have much, much more to say about abjection in art, and especially the abject as it operates within perfumery, specifically within American perfumery. I have so much more to write about in regard to what it means that I am taking up this self-assigned task of promoting the idea of American perfumery as abject, and to write about and say in regard to the way that the abject is racialized in both my country and the Americas more generally. I’ll do much of this in the next installment of this essay series. For now, where I’ll leave things is with these closing thoughts:
By calling for us in the Americas to aim for a perfumery of the abject, what I’m really saying is that I’m calling for our perfumery to remain aesthetically unexceptional. By this I am not proposing a kind of, in Arne de Boever’s words, horizontally directed “aesthetic relativism according to which anything is art, and anyone is an artist” (9). Rather, I mean to reject the notion that perfumery is exceptional precisely so that our work does not replicate the craft’s own, modern history, which was, much like the country from which I write, borne out of the French Rococo period of the Enlightenment, with all the liberalism that followed it, which eventually gave way to the broken neoliberal state we currently flounder about within.
As Eugénie Briot reminds us in “From Industry to Luxury: French Perfume in the Nineteenth Century,” it was during the century of the Age of Enlightenment in France that and the one following it when the French “perfume houses became highly dependent on one another” because “none of them […] could produce the entire range of essences necessary for perfume production.” However, Briot continues, this part of perfume history is more or less glossed over, and “[h]istorical studies of the perfume business have ignored the existence of hundreds” of players within Parisian perfumery in favor of “about twenty […] figures” who “belonged to dynasties. The careers of most of the perfumers from humbler origins were overshadowed by the major figures, and the profession’s reputation for accumulating fortunes was always based on the fame of the great names” (278). Many of these names, that is, came from pre-established wealth, used perfume to further expand their fortune by way of turning their names into brands, and then leveraged the power of their brands to become “elected representatives, revealing the influence that their fame conferred on them” (279). By the end of the nineteenth century, “positioning their product as a luxury” enabled perfumers to build “the image of a profession whose social success and wealth became proverbial and formed part of their professional group identity” (293-4).
In the interwar period, a hundred years or so ago, the profession’s hold on its claim to power was challenged and ultimately reinforced in France as perfumery professionals allied with the fashionable haute couture ateliers, such as Ernest Beaux’s partnership with Coco Chanel, whose allegiance with the Nazi Party is well-documented and widely cited elsewhere. If any doubts lingered about my earlier claim that perfumery and French power held hands merrily, I hope they’ve now been settled.
What the industry has experienced since the 1990s is a veritable flatline in sales—or what some may see as a fall from power. I won’t speculate why this has been the case, though I do, of course, have my suspicions. What I will say is that with the fall came the emergence of people like me and the other American independents into the industry, and subsequently something akin to the industry’s return to that earlier state containing hundreds, if not thousands, of players—most of whom have no claim to seats of real power at all. Rather than celebrate this moment as one of democratic victory, however, I think we should be cautious and skeptical of it. For it’s in precisely this kind of moment that, if history tells us anything, counter-hegemony rises as a force to replace the current hegemonic power, and in doing so, implements yet another hegemonic power to seat in the latter’s place. Put another way: after the French Revolution came the Reign of Terror.
So rather than argue we see the moment as one which gives us the opportunity to withdraw from the institution that is perfumery writ-large all so we can assign a new institution into existence, I think we should, instead, engage the one that already exists—and I’ve proposed here that we do so as abjectly as we can. As Chantal Mouffe writes, in Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art in a Flat World, “To believe that existing institutions cannot become the terrain of contestation is to ignore the tensions that always exist within a given configuration of forces and the possibility of acting in a way that subverts their form of articulation […W]e should discard the essentialist idea that some institutions are by essence destined to fulfill one immutable function” (100-1). So my argument is not one promoting that we pretend we might somehow re-create perfumery in our own image. That can never happen as long as we are altogether ill-equipped to somehow break away from what perfumery has been to us all along. We will never be pure. And even if we could be, to do so would be to, in Mouffe’s words, foreclose on “an immanent critique of [the institution]” itself (66)
Rather, by emphasizing the abject in perfumery, we’ll instead be implementing that critique “whose objective would be to transform [the institution] into a terrain of contestation […and] creat[e] a multiplicity of agnostic spaces where the dominant consensus is challenged and where new modes of identification are made available” (66-8). Or, Instead of celebrating “the destruction” of the institution “as a move towards liberation,” our task should be to develop its “progressive potential” by “converting [it] into [a site] of opposition to the neoliberal market hegemony” (71).
Barbara Herman puts it more simply: “It seems to me that efforts to elevate perfume to the level of art, worthy of recognition by arbiters of culture, ignore the fact that perfume doesn’t need their imprimatur. The way that scents are loved, disseminated, and analyzed […] nowadays suits its anarchic, nonhierarchical, and antiauthoritarian form. If the medium is the message, perfume’s message is subversive. It doesn’t need validation or ratification; its power is in the underground […] Perfume offers materiality in the Internet age of disembodied virtuality, an economy of touch, interactivity, and sensuality” (13). And that materiality, reader, is precisely what I point to as evidence for my claim that American indie perfume is, and should remain, unexceptional.
But I’ve already written and have asked you to read something nearing 11,000 words here, which has likely taken upwards of 30 or even 45 minutes or so of your time to read. I’m not sorry. I promised two more installments in this four-part series, however, so I’ll return to my argument next time.
And I’ll leave things, for now, precisely where I’ll return to this argument next time, with this image of Ana Mendieta covered in flowers:
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Chronotope’s new perfume, Silueta—and that you’ve enjoyed and will continue to enjoy Intra Venus Eau de Parfum.
I hope you enjoy them in all their unexceptional, abject beauty.
WORKS CITED
Barwich, A.S. Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind. Harvard University Press, First Edition, 2020. Print.
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