“The investigation of the olfactory is the investigation of everything else.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
Tag Archives: Hans Rindisbacher
Olfactory silence
“In their loss, smells have become a literary topic of our time, as much as they are a topic of the world of science and technology and of business.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
Seasonal Greetings!
“B. O.” is the indispensable Other of the perfume and fragrance industry, despised and feared at the same time; to be eradicated, yet its raison d’etre.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
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Perfumes
“Perfumes are the soft-focus lense on our rough daily existence. They are the invisible, user-friendly interface in daily human interaction. They are sheer present – yet we have unearthed their primordial past. They seem pure phenomenon – yet they contain memory, erratic and unpredictable. And although they seem to lend themselves so well to the game of pure simulation, they do have dark and uncanny origins.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
Disorder of things
“The specific problem with the olfactory in this respect is that its linguistic structure of reference always throws us back into the disorder of things.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
Associative potential
“Smell is, with its storing and retrieving characteristics, an associative and expansive rather than an distributive and limiting sensory mode. The lack of terminological paradigms as they exist for colors necessitates linguistic detour through the metaphoric, that is a breach of reference level in the text each time we attempt to describe smells adjectivally. The same holds true for the common reference to smells in terms of their origins. “It smells like” or “the smell of” expresses relations of combination and contiguity rather than of selection and similarity. These two points may serve as a preliminary explanation of why the sense of smell is so often considered the most apt to trigger memory. Its very linguistic structure brings up an Other, a reference to the outside.” – HANS RINDISBACHER