The rage I feel toward affected eccentricity/curiosity and pin headed intellectualism, the cardboard signaling of sympathy with an apparently beleaguered expert under the withering assault of mean words from bad men(poor Cambridge doctor), the servile deference toward credentialed and institutionally supported projects however inane. The kind of thinking that gives thinking a bad name.

Not a single person who feels the need to say this thesis sounds ~interesting~ will read the dissertation, could ever be bothered to read it, would be capable of reading it, or will even remember it ever existed in two weeks. No one interested in this issue cares about literature, academia, or even smells. It’s interesting how “interesting” generally functions as a simplistic compliment, a patronizing filler word, yet it’s just about all anyone can come up with to describe their positive thoughts on the subject. Anything better than misogyny, am I right?

The problem is not that the thesis is recondite, or that the language is overly specialized. The language is troglodytic, incompetent, and everyone seems too #interested# to notice. Far more troubling than random pseudo sapiens rushing with their /interesting/ shields to the defense of an ivory tower damsel, is the institutional seal of approval on language and thinking that is brazenly barbaric, unwieldy and muddled.

I have a major issue that alienates me from the smartest people in the world in that I tend to read and think about things rather than find them interesting. Let’s read the first interesting sentence of the thesis abstract, which also doesn’t at all read like an abstract:

“This thesis studies how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse-the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates-in structuring our social world.”

It seems that a claim is being made that a language of smell creates an imagination of smell that in turn structures our social world, and that the point of the thesis is to study the registering of this importance in literature. I.e. English literature has something to tell us about how important it is that certain words used to describe smells influence our perception and create or reinforce hierarchies. There’s a bit of sense in this, if we’re reading charitably, but the phrasing has us on shaky ground right from the start. Then this:

“The broad aim of this thesis is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell’s application in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures.”

What does it mean for underlying logics to facilitate the application of something? Use of logic in the plural is pure bombast; there’s no real idea there, maybe something like association could be passable. Also the word establish is grandiose as well. What we have here is not so much an argument, even the outline of one, as a tangle of assertions with an imprimatur of scholarship. Really all of this is an indulgence of association, a kind of grad school couch session with a psychologist, or a game of mad libs.

Later, the apparent claim that the language of smell creates an imagination and then also creates and/or subverts power structure is undermined by a claim that smell invokes identity and signifies worth in an inarguable manner that short circuits reflexivity, and an acknowledgment that smell produces strong bodily sensations and emotions. How do we square this acknowledgement with the commencement or frame of the thesis that the way smell is talked about and registered in literature has a casual power to create an imagination and various power structures? We went from logics that facilitate application of creating structures to strong bodily sensations and short circuited reflexivity. Is it the language or the sensation that is primary in all these creations/underlying logics, are there feedback loops, why does literature matter in all of this, is it merely registering the importance of smell as discourse, or is it constructing a discourse/logic that then creates structures and imaginations that lie in what relation exactly to strong sensations? Maybe this all gets untangled over hundreds of pages, but my bet is that it only gets knottier and more tedious. I hope all those interested people do get around to reading the whole thing and help clarify these matters for me.

Every line of the abstract is a syntactic clown act. Even if you think smell in literature is a worthy topic of a thesis, which it could be, it’s disheartening to know that saying things like “situating contemporary relevance” turns someone into a doctor. With intellectuals like this, who needs idiots?