Upcoming Talk (March 2016): "Vials and Vinaigrettes: The Manipulation of Odour in 18th-century French Science and Society" at the DBSECS-Conference “Flavours of the Eighteenth Century”in Brussels

Co-Work with Donna Bilak: http://dbilakpraxis.com

Smells are a natural product that is recreated artificially in scientific and societal contexts. This paper considers 18th-century French theories of olfaction from the twinned perspectives of contemporary intellectual and behavioural structures to look at continuities and discontinuities in the production and use of odours. On the one hand, scientific views around the materiality of odours were changing: chemists such as Romieu, Prévost, Fourcroy, and Berthollet proposed and demonstrated that odours were elicited by volatile airborne particles. This signalled a shift in the material understanding of the chemical and psychological causality of smell. Its newly found corpuscular nature provided smell with an experimental accessibility that allowed for the investigation of smells as transmitters of infections and therapeutic remedies in public perception. While experimental ideas of control and purification started to characterise odour as a scientific object, this reification also led to a prolonged disassociation of research on the causal materiality of odours from studies of their psychological and merely subjective effects. On the other hand, the social role of smell in feminine ideals of beauty and behaviour drew upon popular understandings of the airborne nature of smell. In this context, the therapeutic manipulation of air was administered through objects of personal adornment like the vinaigrette, i.e. a small container with a perforated top containing pungent aromatic substances used as an inhalant to stimulate or restore consciousness – a physiological reaction that was enacted as a codified form of etiquette. Our collaborative exploration illuminates the blurred boundaries of smells as an epistemic and cultural object in this period. In what ways did popular conceptions of odour and air connect with contemporary scientific inquiry, or, conversely, limit it?