Olfaction and Taste: Invasive Odours

and Disappearing Objects

Fiona Borthwick Sociology, University of Wollongong

The metaphorisation of sight and hearing, the objective senses, dominate the founding ideas, or philosophemes, of Western philosophy. The senses of taste and smell are of little relevance in the formation of conceptual knowledge or in classificatory systems; they are, by virtue of their dissolving objects, incapable of giving objective knowledge in Western metaphysics. Derrida and Ulmer developed a metaphorology that exploits the chemical basis of the subjective senses of taste and smell. The anthropology of the senses takes this questioning of metaphysics into issues of how olfaction and taste function in sociality. In the routine practices of everyday life, is olfaction able to create the sense of community that it does in rituals? Or, has the repression of smell in humanity’s evolution towards ‘civilisation’ muted the connective ability of multiple odour particles? In a culture and metaphysics that presumes the separability of the self from the other and the self from the object, is there a place for senses that make a nonsense of separation and objectivity through their state of meaningful dissolution? Through philosophy’s metaphorisation, has taste been stripped of its sensuousness and made a sense for aesthetics and not flavours and textures? In a metaphorics premised in judgement and discernmenf can taste be a sense that founds sociality? In blurring the boundaries between self and other that are necessary to forni and maintain the distinction, the dissolvability of smell and taste makes another metaphorics and other socialities possible.

Of all the senses, that of smell-which is attracted without objectijling-bears clearest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become the ‘other ’. As perception and the perceived-both are united-smell is more expressive than the other senses (Horkheimer and Adorno 1979: 184).

Introduction Taking the work of Jacques Derrida and Gregory Ulmer on the metaphorisation of the senses in Western philosophy and the work of some ‘sensorial’ anthropologists, including Nadia Seremetakis ( 1994), Paul Stoller (1 989), David Howes (1 99 I ) and Constance

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Classen (1993), this essay examines the sociality of olfaction and taste in everyday life. Derrida’s analysis, or deconstruction, of Western metaphysics is also a critique of how the metaphorisation of sight and hearing form the premises of concept formation and categories of knowledge. Western philosophy privileges the senses of sight and hearing and does so through stripping away their sensuousness and, relatedly, their cross-modal functions with the other senses.’ Derrida’s critique of metaphysics operates at the level of the sensorium. Reading analyses from anthropology in relation to the Western sensorium offers the possibility of disrupting the continuum through which the senses are experienced in the routine of everyday life. Retaining the framework and premises of the classificatory schemas that maintain five separate senses, how different are the possibilities for subjecdobject relationships in the metaphorisations of taste and smell compared to those of sight and hearing?

As Derrida (1 982, 1986) argues, smell and taste-the subjective senses-are not used as a basis for the philosophemes of Western thought.2 Smell is simply ignored, of no relevance to conceptualising the object, formulating the idea, giving objective knowledge. Taste is slightly more complicated since it has been metaphorised into the sense of judgement, which, arguably, gives it the characteristics of and philosophemes that support sight. In taste, as the sense of judgement, what is left behind after the Aufhebung is taste’s sensuousness and the implications this has for objectivity. In Western thought the division of the senses into categories of objectivity and subjectivity allowed a dialectical process to l i f t and preserve the objective aspects of the senses to found conceptual knowledge and to devalue what is cancelled, since an immersion in subjectivity cannot found categories or conceptual knowledge.’ This is especially relevant to taste and smell.

Many theorists have argued around these ideas, including, for example, Derrida ( 1986), Foucault (1979), lrigaray (1985). Jay (1994), Clifford (1986), Stafford (1994), and Stoller (1989). Anthony Synnott’s (1991) account of the history of Western philosophy clearly shows a substantial use and reliance upon the metaphorisation of the senses to found philosophical ideas, and the greatest preponderance of these philosophies draws on sight and hearing. Kant’s classification based in subjectivity or objectivity is one example of how philosophy metaphorises the senses; this kind of division is also present in Hegel’s philosophy of aesthetics (1975). In Kant‘s anthropology the objective senses, hearing and sight and, with qualifications, touch, give the subject knowledge of the external object without arousing consciousness o f the affected organ ( 1974:32). The subjective senses, taste and smell, give the sub.jcct ‘more log an idea of our enjoyment of the object than knowledge o i the external object’ (1974: 33) . Derrida outlines this argument: .the movement of metaphorization (origin and then erasure of the metaphor, transition from the proper sensory meaning to the proper spiritual meaning by means of the detour of figures) is nothing other than a movement of idealization. Which is included under the master category oT dialectical idealism, to wit. the rel6ve (nufiebung)’. (Derrida 1982:226). What cannot he idealised, due to its immersion in the sensory. cannot be metaphorised through ‘the detour of figures’. Allan Bass. in commenting on the difficulty of translating these two terms, says that: ‘Aufhehung literally means “lifting up”; but it also contains the double meaning of conservation and negation. For llegel, dialectics is a process of Aujhebung: every concept is to be negated and lifted up to a higher sphere in which it is thereby conserved’ (in Derrida 1982:19-20, fn. 23). Derrida is concerned with how philosophy has lifted/metaphorised the senses from the sensible to the intelligible, and also with the mobilisation of what i s left behind, that is, taste and smell.

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Although all the senses necessarily fimction in relation to the external objective world, the fundamental difference between what Kant calls the objective and subjective senses lies in how the object in taste and olfaction becomes part of the body. Seeing an object requires the mediation of light to create an image in the retina. In this process the object remains unaltered and intact; it does not need liquefaction to be experienced. Similarly, in hearing a sound emanate from an object, the object remains intact and the experience is of sound waves vibrating in the ear. To taste an object it must be dissolved in the process of gustation in order for the taste buds to experience a flavour and for the throat to swallow what was the intact object. In this process the object is clearly altered. In olfaction the object emanates airborne odour particles that become part of the cilia in the nose. In this process the object, like sight, remains intact, and possibly unaltered unless the odours are from putrefaction, and particles of air, like light waves, mediate between the subject and the object. To push the relevant point, the important difference is this: when throughout these processes does the object, as defined in Western philosophy, cease to have the status of ‘object’; that is, a thing definable through its separation from the subject? Clearly in taste the dissolution of food in saliva must blur its object status. In olfaction the emanation from the object, that is, the airborne particle, becomes part of the nose in a way that often has a very different effect than the way in which an image becomes part of the body. Is the dissolution of the odour particle exactly the same as the light ray’s image in the eye? For metaphorisations that found conceptual knowledge, the answer is that odours and taste blur the separability of the subject and object, and hearing and sight maintain the distinction. In summary, the senses must obviously be in relation to an object; the issue is how these relationships have been metaphorised and the possibilities they have for sociality. The physiology, philosophemes and sociality of olfaction and taste are discussed separately; although they have some important similarities, especially the attribute of dissolvability, they are also different.

Olfaction Odour and olfaction disrupt the metaphysical premises that use sight and hearing as their support; the metaphorisation of sight in philosophy supports the whole subject/object dichotomy and all that flows from it. Odour does not fit easily into the subjectlobject split. Its status as an object is questionable: its composition cannot be clearly defined (McBurney and Collings 1977:67, Coren et al. 1994:277), it cannot be classified, it cannot be mapped onto a geometric model (Sekuler and Blake 1994:414) and, unless examined microscopically, it cannot be seen at all. It simply has potent effects within the body through the part of the brain linked with emotions, the limbic system. An odour could be understood as an object in relation to the subject, but only as long as the subject does not smell it; once an odour becomes part of olfaction its status as object is completely lost in the subject’s body, in the experience of olfaction. Just as a classificatory system based on geometric models does not work for odours, neither does the sight-based split between subject and object. In the experience of taste and olfaction, with the dissolution of the object, there is only an effect. The chemical senses provide the possibility of a metaphorics that disrupts that of traditional metaphysics. The dissolvability, the lack of a form and the difficulty in classifying odours gives olfaction an entirely different basis to the certitude of form, the separability of object from subject, and the distancing, of the objective senses. This different basis is what Derrida draws on to develop different philosophemes.

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Philosophemes of decomposition Ulmer’s (1985) reading of Derrida introduces the limitations of thought, idea and theory in a metaphysics predicated on the objectivising of sight and hearing that has occurred through philosophy’s metaphorisation of the senses. Ulmer suggests that part of Derrida’s project is to allow the other senses to break away from the conceptual terrain of eidos, with its direct philological link to sight through Plato’s theory of forms. Articulation and decomposition are part of, according to Ulmer, Derrida’s metaphorology, philosophemes whose metaphors evolve from the senses of taste and smell (Ulmer 1985:36). The effect of this metaphorology is to shift the rationale of the sensorium away from eidos and the dominance of sight and hearing to thought to a consideration of the contribution from taste and smell. Ulmer suggests that Derrida’s punning or homophonic strategy distorts the clarity and certitude of philosophical metaphors; Derrida’s ‘new mimesis, in short, is based on homophonic resemblance’ (Ulmer 1985:5 I).

Decomposition, Ulmer argues, functions by extending articulation to smell and taste by finding an analogy for thought that does not depend on the objective senses. Derrida’s experiment with decomposition was, according to Ulmer, done in relation to Hegel’s hierarchy of the senses. In Hegel’s system the material of ideality is light and sound; and voice, in relation to hearing, animates sound allowing the movement from a more sensible existence to the representational existence of the concept. This is part of the process that, according to Ulmer, Derrida is challenging, namely, the idealising and appropriating operations of metaphysics. One aspect of Derrida’s strategy involves challenging the metaphysical or dialectical interpretation of metaphor as a transfer from the sensible to the intelligible (the AuJhebung). The first step is to reverse the direction of the metaphorics: ‘The philosophemes are to be deconstnrcted by an examination of their metaphors- specifically, the vehicles, the senses or sensible aspect of the organs, . . . excluded thus far from theory’ (Ulmer 1985:54). Derrida argues that ‘[e]ffluvium generally designates decomposing organic substances, or rather their product floating in air, that kind of gas hanging over marshes for awhile, and a kind of magnetic fluid also. So the text is a gas’ (Derrida 198659). As part of the particular sensible, effluvium cannot provoke thought; the text of a fart is gas, not an object that can be contemplated in a metaphysics that privileges the separability of the sensible from the intelligible and the subject from the object .

Odour and olfaction, unlike speech or utterances, do not function on the premise of intention or intentional communication. This is obviously why Derrida uses the chemical senses to generate another, decompositional, mode of writing in which intention is replaced or diminished by iterability and the homonymic principle of association. Smells have meaning through associations; objects have meaning through a word that describes them, which has meaning within a language, which is also part of the iterability of language. But the experience of an object gives it its definability, its limitability, within a metaphysics premised in presence. Odours cannot be reduced to objects and can defy, experientially, this limitation to meaning. In looking at an orange, it can be named as orange and be understood as one; its smell can also be described as being like an orange; but does this capture the quality of its scent, or is there more to it than ‘orange’? Derrida’s decompositional writing is an attempt to open philosophemes to the qualities of olfaction and taste which may also open a way to write odours beyond a reduction to the subjectfobject split. Just as odour opens other (currently unrealised) possibilities for language, it opens different possibilities for sociality.

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Orfaction and sociality: conditions of possibility Olfaction is analysable on a more general level and as a specific experience. Within a given historical period and within certain cultural meanings, olfaction generates a spectrum of meanings or experiences. Each individual is constituted within these conditions of possibility but has hisher own experience of odours which has the potential, through the interaction of the individual’s peculiarities with the social-cultural meanings, to disrupt the more general level of olfaction. Probably the most obvious and most general condition of possibility for olfaction is what Freud calls the repression of smell through the evolution of the human species towards ‘civilisation’ (1985: 289, fn I ) . With some similarity to Freud, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest: ‘Hence the sense of smell is considered a disgrace in civilization, the sign of lower social strata, lesser races and base animals’ (1979:184). Pleasure through olfaction can only be taken by the civilised man through efforts to find and destroy ‘bad’ smells, this gives an ‘unrationalized pleasure in the experience’ (1979:184). Odours, in the process towards what passes as civilisation, pose a threat to ‘good’ order. They exceed boundaries; in fact, boundaries are meaningless to a free floating airborne chemical. They are uncontrollable, they cannot be switched off or shut out. And they lack meanings based in reason. Thus, in Western culture olfaction was marginalised in the push towards rationality. As noted above, odours have a very immediate effect-and the potential to momentarily overwhelm the subject-through the olfactory system’s link to the limbic system; these factors combined, give another possible explanation for associating olfaction with irrationality and emotion. The diminution of the importance of olfaction is a casualty of the drive towards the intellectualisation of modem life.

Corbin, in his book The Foul and the Fragrant (1994), gives a history of what he calls the ‘olfactory revolution’ that occurred in France during the mid-eighteenth century. Olfaction, unlike now, played a critical role in everyday life. During this period it was believed that air acted on the living body in multiple ways: through contact with skin, exchanges through pores and through ingestion (1994:l I ) . Also, ‘no one at that time doubted that air also held in a state of suspension the substances given off by bodies’ ( I 994: 13). According to Corbin, in the mid-eighteenth century olfaction became the primary mode of investigating and understanding sicknesses and any disease experienced by humans; whereas now sight is the primary investigative sense. This olfactory revolution ended with Pasteur’s discovery that disease was transmitted by infectious germs and not by unpleasant odours (Corbin 1994:223).

Obviously there is no point in suggesting a return to the pre-Pasteurian importance of smell; odours do not cause diseases and therefore cannot found a sensorium in this way in the twenty-first century. However, there is still the legacy of this belief in the strong, visceral and irrational responses individuals have to some odours, which is possibly a cultural legacy from pre-Pasteurian olfaction. For example, there is nothing intrinsically harmful in the odour that emanates from a very sweaty undeodorised man (or woman) in a gym. But, no matter what he looks like, this odour forms a barrier, something to be overcome for people to become socially involved with him. Most responses would simply be ‘oh, yuk’ or ‘how revolting’; even though no harm comes from the odour, negative associations are made between sweat and the desirability of the person concerned. Odours clearly have a function in what or who the subject finds attractive or repulsive. It seems to have a silent role, more affective than cognitive, and it seems as though it hnctions socially to assess and judge the other (cfcoren et al. 1994:279). Less obvious in its function in

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sociality than sight and hearing, olfaction still mediates relationships between subjects. Olfaction has the past as a condition of possibility. A primary modem condition of

possibility, in the age of consumer capitalism, is how olfaction has been shifted to the visual register. This is not to argue that olfaction no longer functions physiologically as it always has, but rather to suggest an image frequently defines an odour before the odour is experienced. This occurs in a vast array of products, including, most obviously perfume and deodorants, and even ‘lemon fresh’ cleaning products. After a brief history of the Listerine advertising images, Classen et al. comment: ‘we may say that the effect of the Listerine and other ads for deodorant products was to open a gap between self and body, and to insinuate the product being promoted into that gap’ ( 1 994: 186). The advertising of personal ‘freshness’ products has generated, and still does, the desirability of the ‘clean’ smell associated with the product. Clearly if an individual has the odour of an undeodorised body, then he or she is generally defined as unclean and undesirable. In the process of modem advertising olfaction has been taken from the subjective body and mediated through images. The smell of the body is now separated from a sense of self by images of desirability and cleanliness and represented back to olfaction as a deodorised body. This is more a question of how olfaction, in these cases, has been made into a primarily visual mode than it is a question of the undeodorised body being more authentic than the deodorised body. Socialities are now often mediated through an image-based odour rather than a bodily response to the odours of another body.

Olfaction and sociality To the extent that odours are composed of molecules that can be inhaled by more than one person, they can be part of a social experience and form a basis for sociality, that is, a relationship between subjects. This is illustrated in Howes’ comments on the role of smell in the socially binding practice of ritual. Howes suggests several ways in which smell is used in rituals:

... the burning of incense creates an ‘intersubjective we-feeling’ among the participants in a rite as each is forced to introject particles of the odour ... What is more, the use of incense ‘provides for the senses a symbolic representation of the invisible action (communion) that is taking place’ ..., that is, it supplements a deficiency in the way we see things. (Howes 1991:134)

In a ritual, olfaction becomes the sensory experience that binds individuals into a group. Odour is the common substance that all participants can share and inhaling the odour becomes an act that symbolically represents communion, community. At least in ritual, olfaction, through the participants sharing of the odour and ritual practices, has the capacity to mediate or facilitate or even establish a social relationship. The central question is whether olfaction, in an everyday situation, hnctions in a socially binding way, or whether it binds through a kind of dialectic sociality. As Derrida argues, olfaction and gustation generate different philosophemes to hearing and sight; but does the sociality of smell evade the fixing, categorising and negating effects of the sight-based Hegelian dialectic (in, for example, Sartre:1992 and Lacan:1977a, 1977b)? Does olfaction have a sociality of its O W ?

Smell and taste have a much more associative way of meaning than the objective senses that support Hegelian metaphysics. Olfaction liberates the subject from the search for meaning as a link between intention and its fulfilment through a correct response. Odours

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are meaninghl through associations based on experiences with little cognitive or intellectual information involved. Gell’s (1 977) analysis highlights the capacity of olfaction that allows the subject to transcend the ordinary to reach an ideal world. This is olfaction as a means of transport to a somewhere else which is made possible through some sort of relationship between memory and the direct link that olfactory stimulus has with the limbic system in the brain. This relationship usually excludes any kind of reasoning; the initial effect of olfaction is the sense of being transported, especially when a long forgotten smell is freshly experienced. Proust’s elaboration on the capacities of smell and taste has a similar, transporting effect to the senses themselves:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. (Proust 195758)

The thing is tasted through its entry into and dissolution in the body; the experience of eating involves swallowing the masticated object which is perhaps why, as Proust describes, taste can seize the memoryhody with just an essence from things past. The associations made through smell and taste are non-linear and often not sensible; they undermine the rationality of Western thinking and the assumed separability of subjects from each other. The associative imperative of olfaction cannot be denied, it has an effect before censorship is possible.

As Howes (1991) suggests, odours can be shared through the introjection of airborne chemicals, which offers the potential for another sociality; one based on the sharing of a common element that enters separate bodies. Odours are both specific in effect and their meanings are shared through a culturally inscribed context. Odours thus allow for a sociality through the shared experience of an odour and through the transcendence of the mundane, everyday world of subjects and objects. Through their effect in the body, the sharing of an odour is qualitatively different to the sharing of a sound or the sight of an object. The sharing of a dissolved substance that affects each body in culturally similar and personally unique ways opens a relationship between self and other that moves towards disrupting this illusory division. Subjects can share the same vision and odour. Considering sight and smell as discrete modalities experiencing the object in each is similar but also, importantly, and perhaps, subtly different. In olfaction the mediator, that is, the airborne odour particle, between the object and subject, is both an emanation of the object and the medium that dissolves in the body to meaningfilly affect the subject. Odour particles are both the mediator and medium that affects the subjects involved. In vision the mediation, light rays, bounce off the object to create an image or reflection in the eye that the brain then interprets. In seeing an object, the image of the object is shared; in olfaction, an airborne particle of the object is shared. As Horkheimer and Adorno note, in the opening quote to this essay, the efficacy of olfaction lies in the unity of the perception and the perceived, which can obviously happen for multiple subjects simultaneously. These processes offer the possibility of different socialities. Sharing an experience that is mediated through light waves is potentially different to being separate but, arguably, joined through sharing the emanations of an odorous object. Two subjects can feel the effects of the same odour in their bodies: who is subject, other, or object? Where are these positions

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located in a sociality occurring through the dynamic of olfaction? Does the dynamic of odours breach the individualisation of the subject in a sight-based culture? Does olfaction overcome the dynamic of the dialectic?

Prima facie, it seems that olfaction does not escape the dynamic of the Hegelian dialectic. It could be said that odours and olfaction have developed to define the other in a way similar to sight’s definition of objects. In smelling the other’s odour the subject is able, firstly, to define the self through a difference in smell and, secondly, the subject can negate the other as the not-I based on a difference in odours. Or, if the subject finds the other’s odour attractive, the other can become a kind of olfactory mirror to the subject’s attractiveness. This is clearly a reading of olfaction in terms of the dynamic of sight. But does olfaction disrupt this Hegelian dynamic?

Intra-subjectively, olfaction does disrupt the self-object relationship. Odours are not objects and enter into the body in a way that cannot be defined as though an odour was an object; for the odour to have an effect it becomes part of the body, an effect without an object. In this way Hegelian metaphysics cannot be read into olfaction; the subject cannot move out to the object, there can be no sublation; the subject and object are one.

The inter-subjective possibilities of olfaction are more complex. The cells in the nose take the stimulus directly to the brain, specifically the limbic system. Thus, an odour has an effect before a conscious meaning is given. Also, as Howes notes: ‘the sense of smell is the liminal sense par excellence, constitutive of and at the same time operative across all of the boundaries we draw between different realms and categories of experience’ (1 99 1 : 13 1-2). Odours are always in process, they can be in several places at once, shared by many, and are continuous, not segmented in meaning or effect like language. This makes them, as Howes argues, the sense of transition; he defines the transitional phase as that ‘which intervenes between the “separation” of the individual from his or her previous position in society and the “aggregation” of the individual to his or her new position’ (1 99 1 : 135). Like Cell’s phenomenology of transcendence, odours facilitate a movement between boundaries; they float between borders bringing about a change within the subject. Juxtaposed with the physiology and the phenomenology of odours is the securely bounded modem individual. Contentiously, olfaction is denied its transitional effect through the subject’s constitution as the individual that is separate fiom other similarly constituted individual subjects. The cultural intolerance of one’s own, and the other’s body odour suggests that, as Howes comments, ‘In this way we both assert and maintain our respective individualities’ (1991 : 145). Thus the denial of olfaction’s capacity for transition, of boundary disruption is lost and replaced with a Hegelian denial of the otherness of the other. Instead of the odour disrupting the boundary, odour functions to reinforce the difference between individuals. Although, in the case of body odour, the differences between individuals are founded in a sameness; most if not all individuals have a body odour. Howes suggests that deodorising rituals effectively negate ‘any mediation between your self and my self at the olfactory level. Only in this way are we able to appear to each other as separate (and discreet) individuals’ (1991: 145). This process is easily linked to the capacity of sight to define, separate, distance, in short to individualise.

Very often the individualisation of the subject and deodorising rituals do combine in socialities to preclude the full impact of olfaction. But to assert lhat this is the complete explanation of the effects of olfaction in this era is contentious for at least two interrelated reasons. Even with the plethora of deodorants and perfumes, each body wears, or exudes, these in a slightly different way and the perfume or deodorant of an individual often becomes that individual’s odour. How often is someone recognised by his or her perfume

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or after shave trail? The deodorised body can still cause the disruption to another individual through the absorption of the other’s odour-chemicals into their body. Although, in this episteme, the individual is clearly defined and well established as a mode of human life, the physiology of olfaction, or the return of the repressed pleasure-giving capacity of olfaction, often still allows the odour to have an effect before the other is defined as other and denied a transitional effect. Also, there still remains part of the other within the subject; in this way something escapes sublation; all is not reduced to an externalised object to be taken up into the dialectic. Olfaction opens the possibility, through the actual embodiment of the other, of another kind of sociality that acknowledges the inter- connection with, not the complete separation of, the subject and the other. Further, it begins to shake the grou:id that holds the subject-other relationship, that is, it shakes the sight-based separability of self and other. As Horkheimer and Adorno comment: ‘When we see we remain what we are; but when we smell we are taken over by otherness’ ( 1979: 184). If sociality was theorised through smell, how different it could be! Where would the self end and other begin?

On taste, Taste, judgement and the possibilities of sociality ‘To be tasted, a substance must be soluble: it must dissolve upon contact with saliva’ (Sekuler and Blake 1994:437). Taste is the sensation of a dissolved object penetrating the taste buds on the tongue and surfaces of the mouth. Flavour is the combination of taste with the other sensations, including the temperature, texture and consistency, of whatever is in the mouth (1994:436). In the process of taste there is no object-subject split. Once the object is placed into the mouth and the actual taste of the object is experienced, saliva has dissolved the object; the object becomes part of the body-subject as a condition precedent to taste. A metaphysics premised in sight’s subject-object split cannot include the object’s dissolvability.

Derrida’s reading of taste locates it as a sense in a mouth that vomits, which contrasts to the auto-affective speaking mouth in Western philosophy. Taste and the process of tasting, unlike odours and olfaction, have not been reasoned out of philosophy but, instead, have been incorporated into it through the taste buds’ capacity for discernment, the capacity to differentiate between tastes (which, ironically, is at least as much to do with smell as taste). In reducing taste to issues around judgement, what has been left out of the metaphorisation are the other aspects of taste that make the whole process of eating so wonderful: the experience of flavour (for example, the differences between a salad based in basil and one in coriander), as opposed to the defining of these differences, and the other sensuous aspects of taste which include the texture of the food, its temperature, its consistency. In the aestheticisation of taste where is the touch of taste, the feeling of food swirling around the mouth, the affect of odour on taste? The absence of the subjective aspects of taste allows the aestheticisation to occur; philosophy leaves taste with its capacity to judge pleasure through a visual metaphorics, not a tasty metaphorics. The aesthetisation of taste is about partaking of the object at a distance and not about the internalisation of the dissolving object. The rnetaphorisation of taste in philosophy leaves behind only qualities that are similar to sight and to an external aesthetics, not the pleasure of eating. The actual process of eating, of tasting, does have obvious aesthetic possibilities, but the sensuousness of the process is omitted and the taste buds’ capacity for isolating, discerning and judging is retained. The aesthetisation of taste is movement away from the bodily sense of taste to the bodily sense of sight; a sensuousness that is apt for sight but not taste.

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In contrast to the aesthetisation of taste, Derrida writes a philosopheme based in the physiology of gustation. In ‘Economimesis’ ( 1 98 1) Derrida argues that Kant’s aesthetics cannot include the disgusting. For Kant, the functioning of the mouth is essentially irrelevant, lost in the beauty of the sounds it makes. Derrida argues that for Kant the highest form of human expression is ‘the spoken, that it says what it expresses and that it passes through the mouth, a mouth that is self-affecting, since it takes nothing from the outside and takes pleasure in what it puts out’ (1 98 1 : 17). The sense of hearing gives Kant, according to Derrida, expression through an absolute interiority. Expression occurs through the mouth but is generated from within, through the ability to hear oneself speak. Kant’s privileging of the sounds that emanate from the mouth in a way that gives the illusion of auto-affectivity is, for Derrida, an exemplary orality; for Kant the mouth is for the arts of singing and poetry, not for eating and tasting food. Whatever does not submit to the idealising interiority of the metaphorisation of hearing in Kant’s system must become vomit, disgusting, unable to be swallowed or interiorised.

For Kant the only thing that cannot become art, be beautiful, is ‘that which excites disgust’-dis-tuste in the original text (in Derrida 198 1 :22). Thus, argues Derrida, the disgusting cannot be represented, named or announced as a sensible object because either one of these would place the disgusting ‘into the auto-affective circle of mastery or reappropriation’ (1 98 1 :22). To deconstruct the privilege of speech Derrida explores the other functions of the mouth that are excluded in the (Hegelian) philosopheme. Kant’s reading of taste through the metaphorics of hearing removes taste from the sensuous world of the mouth and effectively places it into the idealised world of the ear and the eye; in short, it becomes Taste, no salt and no saliva. Derrida’s ‘new’ philosopheme gives back a sensuousness to taste that is of taste and not of hearing, sight or an imposed aesthetisation. Ulmer adds that the organ of the new philosopheme is the mouth that bites, chews, tastes: ‘the organs of speech in the mouth and throat are examined now for their metaphoric potential in terms of their other function-not to exclude speaking in the way that the orthodox philosopheme of the voice-ear circuit excludes eating, but to “think’ their “surplus”’ (198557).

Two contrasting modes and metaphorisations of taste occur in a Songhay village, and in eighteenth century England. The former involves taste as a physical experience: food that speaks directly to the body. The latter involves Taste that has moved out of the body to become allied with sight in order to make judgements about the other. What do these versions of taste have to say about taste in everyday life? Does taste subvert the individualisation of the subject and the metaphoric of judgement?

In his book The Taste of Ethnographic Things (1989), Paul Stoller relates the story of a woman called Djebo. Stoller comments: ‘Djebo’s sense of taste is sensual and subjective; Kant’s sense of Taste is rarefied and objective’ (1989:24). Djebo was responsible for cooking the compound’s sauces. Stoller reports that her sauces were generally acceptable and he also stresses that the Songhay place a great deal of value on the quality of sauces served to guests. The day before Stoller’s departure Djebo prepared a wonderful sauce: a locust bean sauce flavoured with peanut flour. Stoller and his co-fieldworker, Cheryl Olkes, complimented Djebo on her meal. She left and returned to linger in their hut for thirty minutes and then left. According to Stoller this was a way of asking for money, but he and Olkes could not give her any; they would have had to give any money to the compound head. On the last day of Stoller’s visit, Djebo served a ‘bad sauce’ made from fukko hoy. It was the worst sauce he had tasted; others said it tasted like bird droppings. ‘From everyone’s perspective, the bad sauce was in bad taste’ (Stoller 1989: 19).

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That night Djebo’s horrible fukko hoy expressed sensually her anger, an anger formed from a complex of circumstances. She wanted her sauce to be disgusting. Djebo prepared a sauce to be rejected, cast away, spit out. Put another way, Djebo’s sauce was the symbolic equivalent of vomit, something that our bodies reject. In the most literal sense Djebo’s sauce was distastehl. ( 1 989:22)

In this culture the taste of food is clearly a medium of sociality, especially in relationships between members of the compound and their guests. The qualitative experience of food is a means of forming and strengthening social relationships through the experience of taste. Taste is mediated through the physicality of preparing and then eating the food.

Derrida’s argument about the removal of taste from the mouth into taste as judgement and distance can be read into Howes and Lalonde’s discussion of taste in eighteenth century England (1991). They comment: ‘The declining certainty of the visual appears to have exacerbated the suspicion and anxiety that had recently come to pervade the social’ ( I 99 I : 129). Thus, they argue, there is no surprise in the eclipse of sight as the ‘metaphor for evoking the prudent and judicious disposition’ ( 1 99 1 : 129). The central feature of this disposition was to make distinctions. As Hume noted in the middle of the eighteenth century: ‘Where the organs are so fine as to allow nothing to escape them, and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition, this we call delicacy of taste, whether we employ the term in the literal or metaphorical sense’ ( I 965: 1 1). Howes and Lalonde suggest that Hume’s aesthetic was based not on a composition, but on its dissected, differentiated parts, on its component sensations; confused sensations were, Howes and Lalonde argue, an abomination to Hume. In Hume’s rendering of taste the pleasure of enjoying flavours in eating is metaphorised into discovering aspects of self that preclude comparisons with certain distasteful others.

In some similarity to Derrida’s arguments about Kant, taste in the eighteenth century lost its sensuousness and became the model for forming judgements based on the types of distinctions that the bodily sense of taste can make. Taste for those who ate Djebo’s sauce was about ingesting an unpalatable food and the social meanings or consequences that this act involved. Unlike Taste, it did not involve dissection and discernment about flavours; the impact of the bad sauce was primarily social and much less so individual. Versions of Hume’s metaphorics of taste still hnction in the late twentieth century. In being able to assert that someone has done something of questionable taste, the one making the assertion can be differentiated from the tasteless in a very positive way. This metaphorics of taste limits the possibilities for sociality. No longer an organ for the dissolving of the object in a swirl of saliva and gustatory pleasure, the mouth has been metaphorised out to be replaced by an essentially intellectualised process of judging the object whole.

Taste in a metaphorics of judgement Does philosophy’s metaphorisation of taste, its rarefaction and movement out of the body to the intellect and judgement, make bodily taste irrelevant to sociality? In Stoller’s story of Djebo, taste clearly has a social function, a link between self and other. Ackerman comments: ‘The other senses may be enjoyed in all their beauty when one is alone, but taste is largely social. Humans rarely choose to dine in solitude, and food has a powerful social component’ (1 990: 127). She elaborates: ‘If an event is meant to matter emotionally, symbolically, or mystically, food will be close at hand to sanctify and bind it’ ( 1 990: 127).

But has taste become so distanced from the body that its contribution to sociality has diminished to nothing, or to little more than an overcoming of this distancing on special

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occasions? In everyday life, how much eating is now done by the subject alone in his or her own world in, for example, situations when eating occurs in front of a television, or computer screen, or while reading? Even with others, eating in these contexts is basically solitary. In these contexts, how relevant is taste? Does it become lost as the subject is immersed in visual stimuli? How much attention is actually given to the tastes of the food being eaten in situations where the subject looks and eats? Has the aesthetisation of taste become conjoined, in these everyday experiences, with the acts of looking and listening- to the extent that its relevance to sociality is lost, or extremely muted?

In one of Seremetakis’ essays she discusses the Greek practice of the grandmother moulding breadcrumbs in her mouth to be fed to a baby. In this way the senses ‘are the sites where matter is subjected to signification. Semiosis here is inseparable from interpersonal exchange’ (Seremetakis 1994:27). The child experiences the food as a shared substance, a mixing of salivas. The senses do not have a literality in this exchange; there is more going on than simple consumption, more than a taste experience. Seremetakis suggests: ‘The act of exchange is registered on the senses that seal it as a social relation ... A common Greek expression is “she was taking the food out of her mouth to feed him” referring literally to how one was raised and metaphorically to how two people relate’ (l994:28-9). According to Seremetakis, the storage of memory in the senses functions through the effect of the deferment of consumption. The grandmother defers her consumption of the bread to feed the child: ‘To defer and to store is to place into alterity, the self registering substance and emotions in the other’ (1994:29). The storage in the memories of the grandmother making the bread mould and the child’s consumption of the bread is an exchange between them that encodes the material world; in this way, the consumption of bread becomes a practice that is potentially forever marked as a social relation, as an exchange of emotions, even when the grandmother no longer feeds the child. This is the kind of sensory experience that Seremetakis is arguing has been forgotten in modernity. Generalising to make a point, she notes that baby food is now mass produced and already liquetied and fed to babies by a child care worker or a busy mother, with grandmothers often living away from the nuclear family on the periphery of child care. Also, much of communal eating is now done in front of the television, or by members of the community sitting alone doing their own thing. There is little deferment of consumption that functions as an encoding of material life for storage of the senses in memory in these two examples from modem everyday life; instead, there is simply more often the act of consumption without a process that facilitates an exchange of sensory knowledge and feeling. There is, for example, no ‘interpersonal exchange’ or deferment of consumption in drinking Coke; i t does not need to be part of a material, sensory life stored in memory because, to exaggerate only slightly, it never changes from being ‘present’ in everyday life.

Sharing food, especially if cooked by the participants, is like sharing part of the body; eating together opens the possibility for more intimate relationships. A metaphorics of taste that, for example, stems from what Seremetakis describes in the Greek practice of the grandmother making saliva moulded bread for a baby, can potentially found a social relationship. However, in a culture that assumes the separability of the individual from the social and with a metaphoric of taste that functions to differentiate acceptable standards from the unacceptable, it seems that the social aspect of taste is now muted. The potential exception to this occurs in social situations that centre around eating, including special celebrations and daily family dinners, in which shared food functions, like it does in the Songhay compound, as a mediation between individuals. The setting for taste, that is, the gathering of diners to share food. is possibly always social; but taste itself is only

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occasionally an overt part of sociality. The communal meal is the nexus between the Derridian mouth and the mouth of

Western philosophy. The former is the chewing, eating, sensuous mouth, and the latter is the mouth that speaks, the mouth complicit in the ear-eye circuit. In Western culture the speaking mouth would very often dominate the sociality, with the food and drink as the sensuous basis from which the socialities around speech can occur. There is no doubt that the ingestion of food plays a role in establishing and facilitating a social occasion; there would be a very different sociality without a meal as the purpose of the gathering. But how effective, and how affective, can taste, rather than judgement, be in an often desensualised Western body?

Another philosopheme, another sociality Odour and olfaction call into question the foundation of Western metaphysics: the separability of the self from the other. A metaphysics founded on the metaphorisation of sight and hearing, on the superiority of objectivity, intellect and reason, produces a lived sense of the separability of self from other. Through blurring the boundaries necessary to create and maintain the distinctions between self, other and object, the characteristic dissolvability of smell and taste makes another metaphorics and another sociality possible, the substance of which is necessarily speculative!

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