Part 2 Hyper-capitalism and agency

DEOODORIZATION=CLEANLINESS=NEUTRALITY=PERFUMEY=SHOPPING

The detection of a perfumey scent as part of the ambience that pervades mall spaces and is made indistinguishable from clean or fresh air through the systems of air-conditioning carries with its questions of agency in regard to personal olfactory boundaries of breathers/ consumers and furthermore notions of olfactory design for agents advertising, branding and selling their products in mall spaces.

The mall as a space does not only function as a display of products and goods, but often represents as a temple of commerce that alters the want/need structures of people to strengthen their perceived need of new products in exchange for money (Haug 2009, 84 and Stuart 2018, 43. Following the analysis by Wolfgang Haug (2009, 156), which is indebted and an update to the Frankfurt School’s critical analysis of burgeoning consumer culture of the 20th century, consumers learn how to consume and behave towards the prospect of consumption through their engagement with the mall. As breathers entrenched and necessarily exposed to the smells of the mall, this includes the transformation of their own olfactory agency in how to smell good, presentable and atmospherically adjusted to their larger olfactory culture as well as adjusting towards the social and political qualities of these scents.[1] To be concrete, the smells we encounter during our visits to malls, our usage of scented products and their advertisement as expressions of beauty, alter our understanding and sensing of what smells ‘good’ and ‘acceptable’, making us act towards these scents and olfactory outliers accordingly.

Regardless of the intention and control exerted to create the overarching perfumey deodorization in spaces of commerce, its potential as an agent of sensory design altering the olfactory life worlds of its consumers deserves further consideration. Following Ece Canli’s (2020, 293) assessment of design affecting not only the lifeless material world in forming and aestheticizing it to please and affect, but becoming an agent that conveys and transforms the identity and action radius of the people that are subjected to it, the perfumey smell of the mall can be understood as a “design-being” with active, human characteristics itself. The act of designing environments, materials or scents then appears as “ontological design” (Canli 2020, 290),[2] with designer’s working as creators of experience and materials reflecting the social and cultural structure of their creation.

In turn, these design-beings influence and alter the people experiencing them, transforming thought-to-be-sovereign agents into “body-things” (Canli 2020, 294). These assemblages of corporeal/ sensory experience and materiality yet again refer to the formation of identity and agency through material actors, such as smells. Following John Potvin’s (2020, 5) assessment of “design as the very thing and thingness of identity” and link to human agency, Canli invokes the inextricable connection of the material world and human bodies in regards to agency and forming our socio-political reality. In line with the politics of the senses and sensory formations discovered when shifting sensory experience beyond the visual (Howes/Classen 2014, 5-6), social materiality is expressed, reflected and carried forward by human and material actors alike. Agency as such is not inscribed but situated in the relation or co-presence of body-things and design-beings. Materials become subjects and (human) bodies are reiterated assemblages of materiality situated in atmospheres that depend on the co-presences of subjects and objects (Böhme 2001, 74 and Ficher-Lichte (2014 [2004], 315). In the case of olfaction and us as breathers in various spaces, agency arcs into the atmospheric and ambiance, rendering our breathing an assemblage of different material constitutions and the olfactory atmospheres as agents in their own right.

Without a doubt, the spaces we encounter are intentionally designed, controlled through their employment of air-conditioning and ambient scenting. This affects how people as consumers act and react in these spaces, creating what could be considered ‘commercial atmospheres’ in the ambience of a perfumey smell. This smell, however, especially in conglomeration with other smells, incidental and controlled employment within the whole space of a mall, must be considered as an agent itself, altering and transforming consumers and designer’s experiences of spaces. In other words, the ambience of the scent has the ability to alter our experience of a space and this goes beyond controlled elements and intended affects to become an expression of a social materiality existing beyond direct influences of commerce.

Again, betwixt and between the knowledge of agencies running through and mending only in the relations between design-beings and body-things, I breathe design as an atmosphere making power experiential; felt through our sense of smell. Exploring the mall as a church of vows made for better living, defining identities and the satisfaction of cultural, social as well as aesthetic needs, sensory design needs to be contextualized within power relations of modern commerce. This includes a perspective that touches upon the epistemological value of smelling the mall in trajectories of hygienization, ambience, differential deodorization and power. This can be achieved through reading Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as a contemporary analysis of democracy in modern society and capitalist structures in the vein of critical theory.

As subjects as body-things merge with design-beings in their co-presence and experiential relation, these occurrences take place within the contexts of a transactional world of neoliberal commerce. Mbembe regards this transactional world as embodying a new form of animism (2019, 108), distinct from ancient or indigenous forms of agency and animism. Before, agencies and the co-agency of existing in a shared world were “key elements in the nurturing and circulation of vital forces” (Mbembe 2019, 107). What constituted a person as a sovereign being and subject was always thought of in an composition with the materialities of the world. According to Mbembe, this kind of co-existence and sharing of agency in a transactional world was rejected by modernity as the “childhood of man” (Mbembe 2019, 108). This childhood, I pose, was also a multisensorial state of existence, wherein the common hierarchies and ocularcentristic (Drobnick 2006, 3) value systems of our sensorium where not as strongly developed as they are now. In modernity, there was a split in living in accordance with the material world into a dualism that hegemonized human agencies and control over the material world.

Today, many want to capture for themselves the forces, energies, and vitalism of the objects that surround us, most of which we have invented. We think of ourselves as made up of various spare or animate parts. How we assemble them and for what purpose is the question that late modern identity politics raises so unequivocally (Mbembe 2019, p. 108).

A new animism and reinstating of a transactional world deems the material world under direct influence and as human product of invention. The assemblage of materialties, which constitute subjects are made to function under the premise of identity politics and consumerist behavior, without contributing to an experience of shared experiences. This altered ontological reasoning appears to be ingrained in contemporary neoliberal structures, where the “convergences and fusion” between human actors and materials such as artifacts and technologies act as supplements and augments for us and are “transfigured and transformed by us” (Mbembe 2019, 108). As Mbembe stresses the danger of this faux return to animism, and this is decidedly not the relation of design-beings and body-things Canli envisions, I want to focus these ideas and their consequences for sensory experience and design. This state of neoliberal utilization stands beside the knowledge of how we experience as assemblages or body-things and how the environments we dwell as design-beings need to be considered in the connections of aesthetics, epistemology and control.

As subjects, we understand and experience ourselves in the negotiations and relations between ourselves as assemblages and the materialities we perceive, want and purchase. In other words, the transactional world we encounter is necessarily the world of (sensory) design wherein identities and agencies ‘play out’. In my sensorial shift, becoming a breather of mall, the perfumey smell discussed above can be experienced as the operationalization of what Mbembe deems the impoverishment of the real (2019, 109). In its heavy usage of aromatic effects as ingredients, such as Ambroxan and ISO-E-Super, the perfumey smell of commerce can be rendered as the utilization of market research and data collection that is driven by commercial gain and is shaping and shifting the experience of the real apart from commercial benefits as such.

Scents such as Dior Sauvage may still be considered artistic at their core, with a perfumer as artist using his skill, ideas, time and creativity to create a scent – this holds true at its very idealistic core. Yet, modern mass perfume operates within a conglomeration of research, fragrance consulting and marketing. The sovereignty of perfumer and a scent made is adjacent to the gathering of data and testing and optimizing a scent in the context of various actors and an understanding of economic value. No major scent by designer brands that is present in perfumery and directly affects our experiences of the spaces and the perfumey smell as such is a product of sheer creativity and sovereignty emanating from a single creator – just in the same way as no creation is unaffected by the olfactory experiences and culture it is embedded in (Wilhelm 2015). The perfumey smell then appears as the expression of the market and its mechanics of generating value, diminishing both agential potentials of design-beings, body-things and the ambiences created:

It has reached a point where today, knowledge is increasingly defined as knowledge for the market. The market in turn is increasingly reimagined as the primary mechanism for the validation of truth. Since markets themselves are increasingly turning into algorithmic structures and technologies, the only useful knowledge today is supposed to be algorithmic. Instead of actual human beings with a body, history, and flesh, big data and statistical inferences are all that count, and both are mostly derived from computation (Mbembe 2019, p. 109).

These trajectories, which can be applied as design under the premise of the market, are made in reference to Matteo Pasquinelli’s theory of a meta-data society and algorithmic reason.[3] This reason “is a form of rationality whose finality is about the understanding of vast amounts of data according to a specific vector, the recording of emerging properties, and the forecasting of tendencies” specified in its purpose of creating meta-data, or “information about information” (Mbembe 2019, 109) under the scope of consumption. This reason overtakes sensory experience and a sovereignty to perceive and create freely as it tends to permit only what it predicts, turning the reality of cultural production outside the logic of consumption into an anomaly or “enemy” to be staunched via “statistics, modeling and mathematics” (Mbembe 2019, 109). This in turn leads to “epistemic obsolescence” (Mbembe 2019, 109) that disregards experience beyond meta-data and a matrix of selling and being sold to.

Power, thus, is increasingly about identifying patterns or connections in random data, in a context in which the opposition between information and knowledge, knowledge and data, data and image, thinking and seeing, appears to collapse. Computational and algorithmic logic is now found at the very source of general perception (Mbembe 2019, p. 109).

An attempt of defying this logic that renders subjects “capable of deliberation and choice” to “deliberating and choosing consumers” (Mbembe 2019, 110) is posed by Mbembe in finding a new reason that allows for different modes of seeing and measuring.

If yesterday the modern rational subject’s raison de vivre was to fight against myth, superstition and obscurantism, the work of reason nowadays is to allow for different modes of seeing and measuring to appear. It is to help human subjects to properly identify the threshold that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable, the quantifiable and the unquantifiable, the computable and the incomputable. It is to help them understand that technologies of calculation, computation, and the quantification do present us with one world among many actual and possible worlds. Therefore, as Paquinelli argues, different modes of measuring will open up the possibility of different aesthetics, of different politics of inhabiting the Earth, and, we may add, of sharing the planet (Mbembe 2019, p. 113).

I want to stress the possibility of generating different aesthetics and pose this new rationality as sensory, experiential and in relation with materialities. Mbembe extends Pasquinelli to grasp the peril democracies and societies face in a neoliberal world and stresses the need for a critique of technologies in this process (Mbembe 2019, 112). In turn, contemporary aesthetics, and a critique of experience in the realm of commerce necessitates a critique of design tendencies and practices, especially those that intentionally or incidentally include a multi-sensory scope. In the setup of malls and commercial spaces, we still experience the mirroring of sensory hierarchies, with visual and acoustics means reiterating the measurable and controllable gains made through technologies and new media especially. Interaction in these spaces draws closer to a virtual reality that is ‘realer’ and more visceral than the actual realms of experience.[4] In incorporating the sense of touch, taste and smell into a new aesthetics and design of spaces we allow for the alteration of these technologies of measurement, information and control, even if this sensory expansion is used for profit and control.[5]

In sensory design and the olfactory design of spaces the sensory channels of experience render and critique the market and its trajectories without reproducing the same logic of commercialization. For one, through the ability of smells to create atmospheres and an ambiance of a timespace that cannot be fully controlled and air-conditioned away. It is here that the remaining immeasurability and lack of technological means of measuring the responses to scented environments stresses the corporality of lived experiences (Diaconu 2005, 182). The uncontrollability of scents attributes the social signification of our environments, especially when it cannot be obscured, or alterations of the ambiance render artificiality to prominent to ignore. Hans Rindisbacher (2006), for instance, uses smell as the signifier of atrocities and violence in his analysis of stories of concentration camp survivors.[6] Here smells break the system of obscuring the violence perpetrated against the inmates in its inability to suppress the bad smells of dirt and refuse. While the perfumey smell is markedly different from this example, the instances in which this smell of cleanliness and commerce is broken marks the artificiality of these spaces and the intent of creating a space of luster for consumption. This can be in the simple example of food smells perpetrating mall spaces or every time a bad smell is able to rise amidst this new neutrality. Olfactory experience, walking through the mall as a breather, is a channel of experiencing the world. The designs made to entice as well as instance where these designs and stakes of control fail alter “vital signs about the invisible core of things” (Barwich 2020, 81). From the standpoint of utilizing these trajectories, marketers use the unconscious ways or secondary-to-consciousness qualities of olfaction, regarding a new way to sell through what may have been disregarded in favor of visual and acoustic theatrics. As consumers or designers, we must acknowledge the modulating capabilities of smells and their usage in making epistemic judgments.[7]

The chemistry of perfumery and the assemblage of a perfumey smell in malls pit sovereignty or self-determination against each other. I question if the perfumey smell, the ambience generated through the discernibility of the smallest factions of olfactory control is the olfactory reiteration of “reducing the Earth to financial problem and a problem of financial values” (Mbembe 2019, 113). The perfumey smell stands as a new form of creating a neutrality of enticement, in which scent is not muted and silenced, but allowed as an effect of silver luster that pervades the environment. This special kind of olfactory white (Barwich 2020, 106), points towards a new ideal of subject and personal olfactory agencies. The smell of financial success and modernity is no longer found in the association with opulent scents of naturally occurring ingredients but lies within the enhancement of minimalist renderings of what we have been made to associate with inoffensive cleanliness and hygiene.[8] Further even, smelling perfumey as a scent or in the atmosphere appears to “obscure the political through capital” (Mbembe 2019, 116) as ‘selling and being sold to’ within the beauty of commercializable experiences.

As a breather of perfumes as materials that still retain an artistic quality beyond their price tags of 80-300$ (or rather open ended), this awakes a crisis of representation and finding meaning in the designed olfactory environment I encounter. Are these experiences made to act as yet another “deodorization of public spaces: in enabling me to “orientalize” my private space (Diaconu 2005, 183) with niche products that smell artistic and ‘out-of-the-box”? Why then do I take offence in the employment of commercially viable scents for personal and environmental scenting? Buying a scent to create an own sense of community (Diaconu 2005, 232) with fellow breathers and establish distance to others is part of my identity, the assemblage as body-thing. The design-being of perfumey ambience binds consumers in their communal enterprise of fashioning their identities and doing this in a safe and allegedly neutral environment. My nose allows me to breathe in both materialities at once, become aware of these scents in their intended and unintended values, their aesthetic span opening towards a political and moral dimension of these air-conditioned spaces.[9] The conditioned air of malls teems with the use of scents to control our behavior and the uncontrollability of everything that happens in these spaces. As the perfumey smell itself is a reiteration of neoliberal forms of enticement and subduing our experiences to the logics of the market, moving through these spaces and breathing in these ambiances still allows for a variety of meaning and opens up to the critique of these very operationalizations of the sensory. As we face the epistemic obsolescence of subjecting our sovereignty under a commercial world that relies on the reproducibility of algorithmic knowledge, sensory experience and design may retain a different logic as well. The epistemic collides with style when thinking about how malls create enticement, especially when considering breathers before onlookers or listeners of these environments. Faced with the cyclical notion of enticement and air-conditioned spaces suggesting who or what smells ‘good’, ‘enticing’ or ‘successful’, smelling through the mall and knowingly experiencing this perfumey smell might point us towards the obsolescence of style and enticement as well – in turn making us aware of how sensory design may be employed for and against us in the future.

Though the long-term ecological implications of this trajectory may be disastrous, from a strictly merchandising point of view, it is the air we breathe. Style and changes in style, once part of a privileged competition among merchant princes, have become routine ingredients in almost everybody’s lives from the clothes we wear to our daily gruel. With the institutionalization of ‘style obsolescence’, the perpetual challenge to offer something new became a cornerstone of business planning. While corporations, and political institutions, and people of wealth and power employ and project images of stability for themselves, daily life – for most Americans – carries a visual message of unpredictability and impermanence (Stuart 2018, p. 49).