It seems that the elimination of smell from the cultural discourse - smells are not a topic of discussion in modernity - has been replaced by its elaboration through commercial discourse. Marketers have discovered what academics and other arbiters of culture have ignored: SMELL MATTERS TO PEOPLE.

In the modern West, the topic of smell is repressed and its social history ignored. This powerful denigration has had a lasting effect on its status. Even on those rare occasions when it is the subject of popular discourse - for example, in certain contemporary works of fiction - it tends to be presented in terms of its stereotypical association with moral and mental degeneracy. Smells are rather eliminated from society and then reintroduced as packaged agents of fantasy, a means of recovering or recreating a body, an identity, a world, from which one has already been irrevocably alienated.By examining different instances of the operation of smell like a code, the interrelation of smell, power and society are revealed.

sissel tolaas