THE HISTORY OF SENSIBILITIES: OF THE STANDARD OF TASTE IN MID-
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND AND THE C I R C U l a T I O N OF SMELLS IN
POST-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE
David Howes and Marc Lalonde
The cultivation of the five senses is the work of
all previous history.
Karl Marx
Economic and PbilosopbicManuscripts
There are certain readily conspicuous
shifts in the balance between the senses
c o n c e r n e d in the h i s t o r y of Western
consciousness. I By far the most conspicuous
shift is the setting apart of sight from the
other senses at the beginning o~ the modern
era. Martin Jay sums up the received wisdom
on this subject as follows: "with the rise of
modern science, the Gutenberg revolution in
printing and the Atbertian emphasis on
perspective in painting, vision was given an
espleciall~etweenOWerful role" in mediatinsel~ the
9 P . *
relation mind and reality,
society. 2
The difficulty with the overview Jay
Provides is that it ignores. certain less
. lastin
. g
and therefore less conspicuous shifts m the
intensity, with which European societies have
attended now to one sense, now to another,
within the modern period9 Simply put, the
hierarchy of the senses has revolved, as well as
evolved, over the past four centuries. Thus,
while we ma~, now live in a "civilization
of the image which is at the same time
a "society of surveillance, "3 this condition
is a distinctly postmodern phenomenon and
David Homes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at
Concordia University, Montreal. Marc Lalonde is a
Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Religion at
Concordia University.
Dialectical Anthropology 16:125-135, 199 I.
9 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
should not be allowed to obscure our
understanding of earlier epochs. We think in
particular of the "golden age of olfaction" in
revolutionary and post-revolutionary France
as brought to light-in a recent book by Alain
Corbin,4 and of the curious preoccupation of
English writers of the mid-eighteentli century
with the sense of taste, as noted by Walter
Ong. 5
It is with the case of the latter writers,
essayists such as Alexander Pope, Dr. John
Armstrong, and especially the philosopher-
and critic David Hume - - all of whom g~ave
gustation uncharacteristic emphasis in their
writings m that we shall be most centrally
concerned in this essay. Of course, these men
used the word "taste" in an analogical manner
to refer to taste in poetry and art or style of
living. But as Ong maintains, this analogical
tastehad "indubitable, real connections with
the sense of taste. .6 It would have been open
to these writers to use the time-honored
m e t a p h o r of "the inner eye" in their
discussions of how we discriminate between
things and make judgments, but for some
reason they preferred to use a ~ustatory
idiom. Why? Why was taste in fooa so much
on the mind o f the eighteenth-century
thinker? And why did that mind choose taste
over siight (or hearing) to evoke its most
essentialoperation m that of judgment?
 126
In a t t e m p t i n g to answer these two
q
uestions, our aim ~s to advance a thesis
9 . 9
which ts of relevance to the sociology, as well
as to the history of the senses. That thesis
may be put as follows: wbere social boundaries
become confused, the discursive space devoted to
the proximity of tbe senses (taste or smell) tends
to increase at the expense of tbat normally
reserved to tbe distance senses (si~gb.t and bearing).
The inspiration behind this thesis comes
from Mary Douglas' work on the body as a
"medium of expression' of society, z It is her
claim that "there are pressures to create
consonance between the perception of social
and physiological levels o7 experience. "s This
drive for consonance can be discerned behind
the tendency towards bodily expressions of
a b a n d o n m e n t (such as trance) in those
c o m m u n i t i e s where the level of social
organization is "low" or "simple." That is, we
refer to communities where the pattern of
roles is relatively unstructured compared to
the marked concern with formality and
distance in more structured societies. Bodily
style is, therefore, an index of the degree of
i m p o r t a n c e a s o c i e t y a t t a c h e s to the
maintenance of its internal divisions. In what
follows, our aim is to extend Douglas' insight
and show how the ever-shifting presence of
the different senses to and in consciousness
may also be e x p l a i n e d by reference to
changing social pressures.
A remark o-f Alain Corbin's (whose work
on the French fascination with olfaction in
the years surrounding the Revolution of 1789
will be discussed at length in Part III) may
help to illustrate more precisely the direction
of our argument. Corbin states that it is
necessary" "to relate divergent modes of
p e r c e p t i o n to s o c i a l s t r u c t u r e s . " He
elaborates:
It would be futile to analyzesocial tensions and
conflicts without accounting for the different
kinds of sensibilities that decisively influence
them. Abhorrence of smells produces its own
form of social power. Foul-smelling rubbish
appears to threaten the socialorder, whereas the
reassuringvictory of the hygienicand the fragrant
promises to buttress its stability?
As this q u o t a t i o n reveals, there is an
intimate link between the sense of order in
soc!ety and the perception of odor in the
environment: the social and the physiological
interpenetrate.
We wish to emphasize thepreliminary,
exploratory character of what follows. Our
principal aim has been to draw attention to a
blind spot. So much attention ,has been paid
to the h e g e m o n y of sight in Western
thought since the Enlightenment that the role
of the other senses in giving rise to what is
distinctive about m o d e r n i t y - above all, its
stress on individualism as opposed to the
corporatism of the Middle Ages - - has been
sorely overlooked. By exposing the organs of
taste and smell to the same sort of critical
scrutiny as Michel Foucault has lavished on
the eye, we may go part of the way toward
curing us of the very myopia that landed us
"In the Empire of the Gaze. "1~
I. THE GUSTATORY REVOLUTION
IN ENGLAND
The E n g l i s h , it w o u l d seem, have
t r a d i t i o n a l l y prepared their food in the
simplest possible style9 As Margaret Visser
remarks, "British cuisine has always despised
and rejected as frivolous, dishonest, or merely
confused Continental concoctions; the ideal
has always been ' t h e best ingredients,
undisguised'. TM In keeping with this frugal
disposition, the English have tended to shun
fruits and vegetables. Such foods were
t h o u g h t to i n c i t e and n u r t u r e h u m a n
weaknesses of every sort. Even in twentieth-
century England, "boarding schools for boys
seldom provided their pupils with milk, fruit,
or salads largely because they were considered
unnecessary luxuries, feeble and female foods
which were unlikely tq, help in turning, out
real men. 12Indeed, the real British man has

always prized the homely dish of viand above
all else. This dedication to artless cuisine,
h o w e v e r , has f o s t e r e d an u n f l a t t e r i n g
~oerCeption of British gastronomy. As one
od historian has commented, the English
festive board has generally been ' d u l l ,
tasteless, and lacking in food value or in
savour." 13
A c c o r d i n g to S t e p h e n M e n n e l l , 14
eighteenth-century England was greatly
impressed with the country lifestyle and its
unadulterated culinary practices. Unlike the
French, the Eng,!ish were not swayed by the
reputedly more refined cooking methods of
the sophisticated courtly or city chef. In fact,
the English often ridiculed French cuisine,
relying as it does on sauces for achieving
unique tastes. The English also despised
Southern European cookmg, characterizing it
as "greasy, r e e k i n g ' w i t h garlic, and
'swimming in olive oil/Olive oil and garlic in
c o m b i n a t i o n was, of c o u r s e , a l m o s t
hilariously dreadful. "15 But why did the
English insist on such bland dishes? It seems
they liked it that way: plain and simple.
The preceding characterization of the
English palate may appear to contradict the
thesis advanced above. If English cuisine was
actually appreciated for its unexciting and
uninspiring qualities, what possible "real
connections" might it have with the marked
concern for taste during the eighteenth-
century? There seem to be tour reasons.
The first relates to the fact that it is only
when people are sure of enough to eat that
taste becomes important: "When food is
s h o r t , p e o p l e are less s e l e c t i v e . "16
Significantly, numerous sources concur that
food supplies became increasingly secure as of
1750. The increased security was made
possible by the extension of trade, the
P ro g ressive
. division of labor in a growin g
commercial economy, and also by the process
of state formation and internal pacification. "~z
After 1750, then, only "suppressed" famines
continued to occur. This development took
the meaning out of quantitative consumption
127
as an expression of social superiority. Is
H e n c e f o r t h , the emphasis would be on
quality rather than quantity, or delicacy
rather than gluttony.
The extension of trade combined with
imp.rovements in trans, port also augmented
the Influx of exotic foods from other
continents. Delicacies such as turkey, corn,
tomatoes, certain types of beans, sugar, exotic
fruits m and above all, tea - - which were first
introduced to the English fare during the Age
of Discovery, were now more available to
more people. 19 This rush (as it must have
seemed) of new tastes must in itself have
p r o d u c e d a r e s p o n s e , even f r o m the
u n i n s p i r e d eater. It w o u l d have been
impossible to ignore the potential vanity of
one's diet.
A t h i r d p o s s i b l e r e a s o n for t h e
eighteenth-century English emphasis on taste
may have to do with the shift in European
cooking procedures inaugurated by the chefs
of the city courts of Renaissance Italy. The
Italian chefs discovered that different and
unique tastes are best achieved by combining
a variety, of foods into one dish, as opposed to
the traditional practice of enhancing the taste
of the one basic staple by means of spices.
This innovation spread to the noble courts of
France in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, but did not really come to influence
English cooking styles until the eighteenth-
century. 2~As noted previously, this ]nfluence
remained minimal. Nevertheless, it would
have been impossible for the tastebuds of the
eighteenth-century Englishman not to register
a new range of combinations.
The final reason taste suddenly became
the object of so much attention would seem
to be bound up. with the eighteenth-century
surge in n a t t o n a l c o n s c i o u s n e s s . As
mentioned above, the discovery of new
worlds meant the discovery of new foods.
However, this newfound variety did not lead,
as one might expect, to i n t e r n a t i o n a l
cuisines, but [rather to] an emphasis on
national identities and certain foods and
128
dishes. "21 Thus the competition for empire
among the European countries also sparked a
rivalry for the national dish. Eacfi nation
began to develop its own kind of menu quite
sel]~-consciously. In this light, we might take
issue with the kind of menu the British had to
offer, but we cannot deny that they at least
had a menu. To eat British food was to affirm
one's participation in the British nation in a
more resolutely self-conscious way than could
have been the case previously. 22
To sum up, tt appears that the most
salient factors-under'l~ing the eighteenth-
century English "affair" with taste included:
the increased security of food supplies; the
more even distribution of new foods from the
colonies; the "after-taste," as it were, of the
Italian culinary revolution; and the pursuit of
the national dish and menu. The combined
effect of these factors was to shift the
gustatory experience from the mar~ins of
consciousness to its center, as well as to
~ rovoke a new, more intense awareness of
oth variety and boundedness - - particularly
the boundedness of the nation. In this way a
certain consonance was achieved between
hysiological (i.e., gastronomic) and social
vels of experience.
II. TASTE AS A MODE OF SOCIAL
DISCRIMINATION
Let us now consider how the same socio-
logic that inspired the pursuit of the national
dish came to form the intellectual sphere - -
in particular the sphere of judgment in
matters literary or aesthetic, which the
eighteenth-century called judgments of
taste." As Ong suggests, the fact that taste, the
sense whicfi "aBove all d i s c r i m i n a t e s ,
d i s t i n g u i s h i n g w h a t is a g r e e a b l e or
disagreeable, "2~ became the medium of
intelligence can be explained sociologically in
terms of the growing number o f acts of
discrimination "men of society" were having
to make.
The a c t i v i t y of j u d g m e n t which is
involved in reading and writing has been
m e t a p h o r i c a l l y linked with taste since
classical t i m e s . H o w e v e r , t h e r e is an
important difference between what classical
writers, such as Seneca, and eighteenth-
century writers, such as Hume, understood
the term "taste" to comprise. The former did
n o t d w e l l on the d i f f e r e n c e s of each
individual's palate, or what could be called
the subjective, particularizing aspects of taste.
Rather, the ancients understood taste in terms
of the processes of ingestion and digestion.
They reasoned that the mouth (considered as
an organ of perception) enables one "to
appropriate the external world, literally to
ingest it. Thus, by metaphorical extension the
sense of taste can reter to the process of
learning m physical ingestion is like mental
ingestion m or to the f r u i t y of judgment. "24
Taste was thus as universal as it was objective
for the ancients.
In the beginning of Hume's work OL the
Standard of Taste (1757), he notes that: The
great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion,
w-hich prevails in the world, is too obvious
not to have fallen u n d e r e v e r y o n e ' s
observation. "2s Hume is therefore ignoring
the very fact about taste that was most
obvious to the ancients - - its role in the
process of digestion either of food, or of a
tradition. What motivated Hume to stress the
particularizing, subjective aspects of taste at
the same time he sought to arttculate its
standards.~26 As suggested above, the new
emphasis may have had to do with the
increased number of acts of discrimination
"men of society" were having to make.
Eighteenth-century European society was
wracked by social change. Transformations in
the economy had brought about a significant
expansion of the middling classes, and the
growth of cities had the effect of throwing
people together in unprecedented numbers as
well as situations. As Richard Sennett
observes, the "material conditions of life in
the city weakened any trust people could
place in the natural,' routine labelling of
others by origin, family, background, or
occupation. "27 This obliteration of traditional
divisions - - that is, of the lines of the older,
feudal social order m provoked considerable

anxiety: "In 1750, Lord Chesterfield cautions
his son never to allude to the family of a
person to w h o m one is being introduced,
because one n e v e r k n o w s for sure w h a t
emotional relationship exists between a person
and his family, nor can one, in the
'confusions' of London, even be sure that one
has a family pattern straight. "2s
How was one to steer one's way through
a social gathering, never mind the streets b f
L o n d o n , w h e n s e n t i m e n t had (virtually)
usurped the place of s t a t i o n vis-a-vis the
d e t e r m i n a t i o n and r e g u l a t i o n of social
r e g u l a t i o n s ? T h i s was t h e q u e s t i o n on
everybody's mind as time-worn protocols of
behavior (such as gestures of greeting) proved
less and less effective guides to intercourse. Of
course, some assistance in this matter was
provided by the customary system of visual
markers of social posmon:
Appearances on the streets of London... two
centuries ago were manipulated so as to be precise
indicators of social standing. Servants were easily
distinguishable from laborers. The kind of labor
performed could be read from the peculiar clothes
adopted by each trade, as could the status of a
laborer in his craft by glancing at certain ribbons
and buttons he wore. In the middle ranks of
society, barristers, accountants, and merchants
each wore distinctive decorations, wigs, or
ribbons. The upper ranks of society appeared on
the street in costumes which not merely set them
apart from the lower orders but dominated the
street.29
That sight played an important role in social
i n t e r a c t i o n in the 1700s is undeniable, as
Sennett's description of the customary system
of visual differentiation attests. Moreover, we
k n o w that numerous sumptuary laws were
passed so as to enforce this-oculm method of
social division. However, the very fact that
such enactments were necessary indicates that
the c l o t h i n g s y s t e m was open to abuse.
Indeed, cases of fraud seem to have been quite
common, as more and more persons o f the
129
lowly,,, orders dressed beyond their" stauon."
The labourer and mechanic will ape the
lord, complained Jonas Hanway,!n 1752. 30
This difficulty of laborers aping lords
suffices to illustrate the limitatfons of the
visual, both as a mode of social differentiation
and as a medium of thought. Sight is tied to
an objective, static conception of reality. 3~ It
also has the disadvantage that it reveals only
exteriorsY Thus, sight implies that truth is a
visible quality, something one can "see" and
h e n c e c o n t r o l . B u t in t h e s o c i a l a n d
intellectual t u r m o i l of the mid-eighteenth
century, all appearances came to be shadowed
in doubt. The "truth" of another person's
social standing was no longer obvious at first
glance. Significantly, even beauty came to be
u n d e r s t o o d as n o q u a l i t y in t h i n g s
themselves [but s o m e t h i n g w h i c h ] exists
m e r e l y in the m i n d w h i c h c o n t e m p l a t e s
them. "33 In short, nothing could be taken for
granted, at least not in the elite social circles
w i t h w h i c h we are c o n c e r n e d here. T h e
declining certainty of the visual appears to
have exa-cerbated the suspicion and anxiety
that had recently come to pervade the social:
the fear of others as unknown prompted
remarks like Chesterfield's counsel that one
cannot keep one's own private affairs too
secret'. "34
G i v e n t h i s b a c k g r o u n d , it is n o t
surprising that taste should have eclipsed sight
as ihe medium of intelligence, or rather, the
m e t a p h o r for e v o k i n g t h e p r u d e n t and
judicirous disposition. What was central to
that disposition was the capacity to make
d i s t i n c t i o n s , as b e c o m e s a p p a r e n t f r o m
H u m e ' s d e f i n i t i o n of w h a t ]s meant by
"delicacy of taste":
As the qualities of sweet and bitter, or beauty and
deformity may be found in a small degree, or may
be mixed and confounded with each other [in a
given composition],it often happens that the taste
is not affected with such minute qualities, or is
not able to distinguish all the particular flavours,
amidst the disorder in which they are presented.
130
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.3s
It will be noted that taking something in "as a
whole" is q uite . . forei g n to Hume's aesthetic:
the emphasts ~s rather on dissecting every
object (be it a meal or a work of art)into its
component sensations. Confused sensations
w e r e as a b o m i n a b l e to H u m e as t h e
"confusions of London" were to Chesterfield.
In f a c t , H u m e ' s e s s a y r e a d s l i k e a
transposition into the sphere of letters of
precisely those skills that were necessary to
get along in the social sphere.
While Hume's avowed purpose in Of the
Standard of Taste was "to mingle some light of
the u n d e r s t a n d i n g w i t h t-he feelings of
sentiment, what he actually succeeded in
doing was quite the reverse) 6 By choosing
taste as h i s l d i o m (rather than sight, or for
t h a t m a t t e r , d i g e s t i o n ) , he r a d i c a l l y
sentimentalized judgment, taste being one of
the so-called "affective senses." In so doing, he
also l e g i t i m a t e d a new m e a n s of social
differentiation and identification - - namely,
association based on taste. That this was his
ultimate purpose becomes apparent from the
following passage:
a delicacy of taste is favourable to love and
friendship, by confining our choice to a few
people, and making us indifferent to the company
and conversation of the greater part of men. You
will seldom find that mere men of the world,
whatever strong sense they may be endowed
with, are very nice in distinguishing characters, or
in marking those insensible differences and
gradations, which make one man preferable to
another. 37
It is ironic that Hume insisted so adamantly
that the "principles of beauty" are universal,
while at the same time c o n f i n i n g t h e i r
apprehension to such a restricted class of men
n a m e l y , " m e n of s o c i e t y " w i t h the
re q.uisite. " P ractice" or "ex P erience 9,,38. Then
again, his was an age prone to make umversal
declarations, such-as-the "Declaration of the
Rights of Man," and then immediately find
ways of discriminating among people such
that this class would not have to associate
with the greater part of them.
T h i s t e n d e n c y was w h a t a b o v e all
distinguished the eighteenth-century social
order based on contract and sentiment, from
the feudal social order based on objective
status. The latter n o t only dictated the
divisions of society, but also prescribed how
those who belonged to different divisions
were to interact. In the absence of any such
d e t e r m i n a t e guidelines, the e i g h t e e n t h -
century had to invent new, more subjective
(and u l t i m a t e l y a r b i t r a r y ) s t a n d a r d s of
differentiation. Hence the English 'affair"
with taste which, although it did nothing for
British cuisine (that remains as bland as ever),
did do something for those who thought they
had taste"; it permitted them to indlviduate
themselves.
To sum up,. we have seen that as long as
social divisions remain clear and
unambiguous, the distance senses suffice to
monitor the boundaries of class. However,
when social boundaries are cast in doubt, and
finer discriminations become necessary, then
the e m p h a s i s shifts to the p r o x i m i t y or
"affective" senses - - as we have just seen with
regard to taste in the case of eighteenth-
c e n t u r y England, and as we are about to
discover regarding smell in revolutionary
France.
III. T H E O L F A C T O R Y R E V O L U T I O N
IN F R A N C E
We argue here that the sense of smell
played the same role in the reconstitution of
the French social imagery at the close of the
eighteenth-century as gustation played in the
transformation of Englifh cultural
consciousness a few decades earlier. Much of

the following analysis is based on Alain
Corbin's brilliant "archeology" of odor and
the French social imagination in The Foul and
the Fragrant. 39
According to C o r b i n , there was a
veritable "floocl of discourse" about smell
beginning a few decades prior to the French
Revolution and continuing past the turn of
the century. The reasons for this flood are
unclear. For one thing, there is nothing to
suggest that the actual level of stench (which
had-long been considerable) changed. Thus,
the change must have been a change at the
level of perception only.
The new alertness to the s e n s o r y
environment was most acute among the elite.
It may be that this awareness was respired by
the diffusion of the sensualist philosophy of
Locke and Condillac. It could also be that it
was provoked by the connection between
putrid odors and disease remarked upon by
certain contemporary men of science. One
thing is certain, however: tolerance of smell
suddenly came to define social status. The
higher one's status the lower one's tolerance9
It was t h i s m o r e t h a n a n y t h i n g that
precipitated the golden age of olfaction.
Under the "ancien r~gime of sensory
values," a premium was placed on potency.
For example, the best protection against
disease,was thought to be "smellingstrongly
oneself (bathing was therefore looked upon
askance), and it was commonly assumed that
the more pungent a man's "aura seminalis"
the greater his power of sexual attraction. 4~
Because these beliefs in the virtues of
odoriferousness were so deeply set, when the
emphasis shifted to inoffensiveness following
the Revolution, improvements in bodily
hygiene remained slight. Indeed, even amonjg
the bourgeoisie, they were pretty much
confined to preserving "the appear'ance of
cleanliness." Maintaining this appearance
involved, for example, always having a fresh
change of clothing, or washing such parts of
the skin as were exposed to public view.
These advances might seem modest to us,
but they loomed very large at the time.
Indeed, the symbolic, barely perceptible,
131
odour of cleanliness that emanated from
linen," which came to characterize "the
deodorized bourgeois," was loaded with social
significance. According to Corbin, "the
absence of intrusive odor enabled the
individual to distinguish himself from the
putrid masses, stinkin~ like death, like sin,
and at the same time justify the treatment
meted out to t h e m . "41 This treatment was
based on the observation that it was in places
where people confusedly crowded together
(ships, hospitals, theaters, etc.), and smells
became jumbled, that epidemics tended to
originate. It followed that the best way to
disinfect the atmosphere was to uncrowd
people andprevent smells from mingling.
The reformers, with the help of architects
and sanitary engineers, went about this task
of redistributing people with a vengeance.
Public and private space was divided up in
myriad new ways, and vents were installed in
all sorts of buildings and habitations to ensure
a constant circulation of air. Particularly
loathsome to the reformers was the collective
family bed of the laboring and peasant classes.
The latter appreciated it for its warmth; the
r e f o r m e r s saw in it an i n c i t e m e n t to
p r o m i s c u i t y and incest. Sleeping was
therefore pnvatized, by order, and so too
were o t h e r b o d i l y f u n c t i o n s , such as
defecation (henceforth confined to public
toilets as opposed to street corners). Ideally,
according to the hygienists, each and every
function of the body-should be confined to a
separate room or space. Hence the boudoir,
bathroom, bedroom, dining room, and so on
of the modern home. (At the time, only the
haute bourgeoisie were able to afford houses
conforming to all these specifications.)
The proliferation of rooms within the
bourgeois dwelling, and the introduction of
vents, had the effect not only of clear!,ng the
air, but also bringing individuals into a new
encounter with their own bodily smells and,
as such, c o n t r i b u t e d decisively to the
development of a new narcissism. 9 " "42
The
individual could contemplate his or her own
unique scent, and thus acquire a sense of and
forhis or her own uniqueness as a person, a
132
self. 43 This absorption of consciousness by
smell, or rather aroma, particularly the aroma
of a loved one, reached its apogee in the
poems of Baudelaire. (It met its nemesis in the
novels of Zola.)
The preceding discussion should suffice
to demonstrate ttie truth of Corbin's claim
that it is "from the sense of smell," more than
any other sense, that one gains the "fullest
picture" of such,, key. p o s t r e v o l u t i o n a r . ,
developments as the rise of narctsslsm, the
retreat into private space, the destruction of
primitive comfort [i.e., the demise of the
family bed], the intolerance of promiscuity. 44
Just as one social order replaced another
following the Revolution, so did one sensory
order replace another. It is legitimate to
wonder whether the former would have
succeeded as it did had it not been "inspired"
by the latter.
Yet the preceding discussion pales in
comparison with what Corbin describes as
"the great swing in attitudes that was to give
uncontested supremacy to the visual.
- - " 1' 45
Th~s
"
shift dates from the mid-nineteenth-century.
It was at this point that reformers suddenl)r
began to descry the want of light in both
public and private spaces. Significantly, they
used the same language to denounce poor
lighting as had formerly been used to put
down putrid odors: uncertain light was "a
threat "to health, zeal for work, and sexual
morality. "46 Foul odors no longer spelled the
same danger, possibly because the widespread
deployment of chemical disinfectants, soap,
and eau de cologne had radically reduced thdr
discernibility. Now what concerned people
was the smoke that billowed from the
factories, but this smoke "aroused concern
not so much because of its odor as
because it was dark and dense and attacked
the lungs, b!ackened facades, darkened the
atmosptiere. 47 This visual bias with respect
to the detecuon
9 of " polluuon
" " remal"n s w i t h
us today:
Findings suggest that the strongest physical
stimuli influencing awareness of air pollution are
particulates, soiling of buildings and household
objects by dusffall, and reduced visibility caused
by haze. Awareness of air pollution obviously
depends heavily upon visual perception. This
finding takes on particular significance because
many toxic gaseouspollutants cannot be seen?s
The fact that we moderns are more conscious
ofpollution in the visual register than in the
olfactory or gustatory registers may well
y point to ours being "normal times," - - times
in which social boundaries between people
need only be policed, rather than invented.
CONCLUSION
We have ~,resented a somewhat different
picture of the sensory profile of the mid- to
late-eighteenth century than is found in the
work of so renowned an historian as Michel
Foucault. 49 According to Foucault, sight is
the dominant (and dominating) sense of the
m o d e r n era; we live in a "society of
surveillance." In his account, there has been a
steady progression in the power of the gaze to
organize both knowledge and society since
the Enlightenment. It was the reorganization
of the space of the prison, hospital, and
workplace in accordance with the "principle
of individualizing partitioning" under the
"scrupulously 'classificatory' eye" of the
master-disciplinarian that crystallized this
tendency and laid the foundations for the
scopic regime of contemporary Western
society, s0
The evidence presented here concerning
taste in England and smell in France suggests
that Foucault's preoccupation with the visual
may be mispla-ced. R~tther than a steady
~ rogression or intensification of sight, we
ave glimpsed some of its vicissitudes relative
to taste and smell. The question which this
alternative picture raises is whether it was
visuality that created the individuality of
modern society, 51 or merely cemented a
change that was effected by other sensory
means. Sight is e m i n e n t l y capable of
structuring a field and of distributing objects
or individuals within that field. But it is not
as discriminating as taste or smell. We suggest

that it was the enlistment of the latter senses,
w i t h their p o w e r to attract and to repel as
well as t o m a k e d i s t i n c t i o n s , t h a t helped
catalyze the novel distribution of individuals
Notes
. Part of the research on which this essay is
based was made possible by a grant from the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada (no. 410-88-0301).
. Martin Jay, "In the Empire of the Gaze:
Foucault and the Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-century French Thought," in
David Couzens Hoy, (ed.), Foucauh: A Critical
Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p.
117. See further Donald Lowe, Historyof
Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982); Robert Romanyshyn,
Technology as Symptom and Dream (London:
R o u t l e d g e , 1989); David Le Breton,
Anthropologie du corps et modernit~ (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1990).
. See R i c h a r d K e a r n e y , The Wake of
Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan trans.,
(New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor
and the French Social Imagination, Miriam
Kochan, Roy Porter and Christopher
Prendergast trans., (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1986).
. Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some
Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967),
pp. 4-5.
. Ibid., p. 5.
7. Like Douglas, we would acknowledge our
indebtedness to the pioneering work of
Marcel Mauss. See his "Body Techniques," in
Sociology and Psychology: Essays, Ben Brewster
trans., (London: Routledge, 1979). For a
further elaboration of Mauss' views, see David
Howes, "Les techniques des sens,"
133
into classes, as opposed to estates or ranks,
that distinguishes the m o d e r n from the pre-
m o d e r n era. H a v i n g d o n e t h e i r w o r k , t h e
affective senses could-recede again, leaving the
job of policing the new boundaries to sigl~t.
Anthropologie et Soci~t~s, vol. 14, 2 (November
1990), pp. 99-115.
. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations
in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books,
1982), p. 70.
. Corbin, op. cir. 1986, p. 5.
10. Jay's point in the seminal essay which bears
this title is that Foucault's preoccupation with
and hypercritical attitude toward the
normalizing, objectifying power of "the gaze"
(medical, penal, philosophical, etc.) grew out
of his "embeddedness in a larger discourse,
which he never himself problematized" (lay,
op. cit., p. 195). That discourse, the "anti-
ocular counter-enlightenment" tradition in
twentieth-century French philosophy, which
was spearheaded by Merleau-Ponty and Sartre,
had to denigrate vision so as to unseat
Descartes. Descartes was perhaps the greatest
visualizer of all time, and his ocularcentrism
(intimately related to his mind-body dualism)
had a lasting impact on Western philosophy
and culture. The present essay expands on
Jay's insight by undertaking an "archaeology
of perception" which focuses on the relations
between the senses, instead of simply
projecting current sensory biases (and
philosophical disputes) backwards in time h la
Foucault.
11. Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner
(Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 1986), p.
18.
12. Ibid., p. 222.
13. Reay Tannahill, Food in History (St. Albans,
Hefts.: Paladin, 1973), p. 239.
14. Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating
and Taste in England and France from the
Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1985) pp. 127-133.
134
15. Visser, op. cit., p. 255.
16. Mennell, q0. cit., p. 21.
17. Mennell, op. cit., pp. 26-32.
18. This substitution of an interest in quality for
that in sheer quantity represented a major
break with medieval cooking and eating.
Mennell states that: "Differences in diet
between the estates of society [in the Middle
Ages] were more striking than the differences
between various countries of Western Europe"
(ibid., p. 322). The reduction of social
inequalities in the distribution of foodstuffs
grew apace with the diversification of national
cuisines.
19. Tannahill, op. cit., p. 204; Roy Porter, English
S o c i e t y in the E i g h t e e n t h C e n t u r y
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 236.
20. Mennell, op. cir., pp. 63-71; Tannahill, op. cit.,
p. 232. Regrettably, it is beyond the scope of
this essay to discuss the sociological
underpinnings of the evolution of taste in
food in Renaissance Italy or prerevolutionary
France.
21. Tannahill, op. cit., p. 204.
22. The popularity of William Hogarth's
paintings may be related to this surge of
consciousness: "People loved his beer-
guzzling, roast-beef-eating, four-square
Englishmen, the 'dread and envy' of
starveling, bare-foot, onion-nibbling French
peasants, oppressed by lecherous Popish
priests and mincing courtiers" (Porter, op. cir.,
p. 22).
23. Ong, op. cir., p. 117.
24. Victoria Kahn, "The Sense of Taste in
Montaigne's Essais," Modern Language Notes,
95 (1980), pp. 1269-1291, at p. 1269.
25. David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste and
Other Essays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1965), p. 3.
26. There is a deeper issue here having to do with
how the unhinging of taste from the digestive
process was connected with the unhinging of
judgment (or "practical rationality") from
"tradition" or "dogma." On the way in which
"criticism" usurped the place of "tradition" as
the basis of judgment and the sole arbiter of
valid truth claims from the eighteenth-century
onwards, see Charles Davis, Theology and
Political Society (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), pp. 104-107, and
Alasdair Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1988). For a highly
insightful account of what the "judgment of
sense" involved prior to the eighteenth-
century, see David Summers, The Judgment of
Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of
Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987).
27. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New
York: Knopf, 1977),p. 60.
28. Ibid., p.62 (emphasis added).
29. Ibid., p. 65.
30. Porter, op. cit., p. 240.
31. See, e.g., Hans Jonas, "The Nobility of Sight:
A Study in the Phenomenology of the
Senses," in S.F. Spicker, (ed.), ThePhilosophy of
the Body (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970).
32. Ong, op. cit., pp. 117-118.
33. Hume, op. cit., p.6.
34. Sennett, op. cit., p.63.
35. Hume, op. cir., p. 11.
36. Hume, op.cit., p. 10. In other words, Hume
subordinated reason to passion in more senses
than one.
37. Hume, op.cit., p. 27.
38. Hume, op. cit., pp. 17-18. Hume's project (like
Kant's) was so successful that it is only
recently that the ruse of taste has been
exposed - - that is, that taste has come to
receive the kind of sociological attention it
deserved all along. See Pierre Bourdieu, La
Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1979).
39. Corbin gives a further account of his
methodology (and also comments on the
present essay) in "Histoire et anthropologie
sensorielle," Anthropologie et Soci~t&, 14(2)
(November 1990) p. 13-24.
40. Corbin, op. cir. 1986, pp. 37, 65, 71.
41. Corbin, op. cit., pp. 182, 143. See further
Annick Le Gu&er, Les Pouvoirs de L'odeur
(Paris: Editions Franqois Bourin, 1988), pp. 43-
52.
42. Corbin, op.cit., p. 95.
 135

43. See David Howes, "Olfaction and Transition: Evans, (ed.), Environmental Stress (Cambridge:
An Essay on the Ritual Use of Smell," The Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 111.
Canadian R e v i e w of Sociology and 49. On the notion of "sensory profile," see
Anthropology, 24, 3 (1987), pp. 398-414, at p. David ttowes and Constance Classen,
412. "Sounding Sensory Profiles," in David Howes,
44. Corbin, op. cir., p. 231. (ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A
45. Corbin, op.cit., p. 154. Reader in the Anthropology of the Senses
46. Corbin, op.cit. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
47. Corbin, op.cit., p.133. forthcoming).
48. Gary Evans and Stephen Jacobs, "Air 50. See Foucault, op. cir., pp. 135-169.
Pollution and Human Behaviour," in Gary 51. As is maintained by Romanyshyn, op. cit., and