Mark Smith
Appearances
The Planet Reigate Podcast
49: Our report on the big Harlequin meeting and the Morris Men’s group which may not dance to see 100 years… and more
You can replace equipment and you can replace a roof, but you can't replace the people who know how that building works and how things slot together. I'm really concerned that any sort of medium or long-term option that is put in place, any of these options here, won't work without the people. And I don't believe that this council has exhausted all available options or avenues of discussion.
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
We fetishize the ocular. We look at the visual as the preeminent source of truth and reason.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
And I think what sensory historians try to do is say, hang on a minute, historians should examine all of the senses themselves.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
All of a sudden, what was implicit is now explicit. And all of a sudden, your world has increased by a factor of five. So history becomes much more robust, more meaningful.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
If you were to explain how that case actually worked just by relying on eyewitness accounts, you'd have no idea why that case was so important. If you don't pay attention to smell, you've really missed the foundation of modern segregation in the United States.
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
We're in New Orleans. This is in the aftermath of the Civil War. Slavery is being abolished.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
But a new system of bodily control, social authority has been erected and that's called segregation.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
And what you have is a group of whites who want to segregate railroad cars in New Orleans. One of the things about New Orleans is that it has a very high African-American population and a very, very robust elite African-American population that has been there for many, many years. And they want to push back against the segregations.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
And they choose him because he is visually ambiguous. He is considered to be black under Louisiana's statute. But visually, he looks white.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
Segregation is based on the assumption that race can be seen and always detected. In other words, that race can be fixed, that it is a stable category. And we know that race is an invention. It functions to fulfill the mandates and imperatives of people who have power at the time. So here they have Homer Plessy, and they say, we want you to go onto the white car.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
And it's Homer Plessy, because he's trying to prove a point, that has to tell the conductor, sir, I'm on the wrong car because I'm black. So what you have here, is a really powerful illustration of the fact that you cannot see race in all instances. And if you can't see them in all instances, then how on earth could you erect an entire system on segregation that assumes that you can detect race?
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
So we're in the courtroom, and the way that it's framed is these black leaders in this parish in New Orleans are trying to say, hang on a minute. If you want to prosecute my client, Homer Plessy, for violating a segregated car statute, for going into the wrong car, surely you have to be able to say, well, we could identify him as black. please tell us how you know that my client is black.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
Because if you can't tell us that, then he's innocent. And Louisiana's prosecuting attorney replies to this claim by the defense counsel. He said, well, I don't really need to see him to know that he's black. I don't need to see his race. I can smell it.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
And what the prosecutor argued was... My eye might not be up to the task of locating race and identifying Homer Plessy's race, but my nose is. And that's the conceit, right? That's the invention. They're not true. They're inventions. But if you have the authority to make the claim that you smell, it becomes the social truth broadly accepted.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
I mean, it doesn't matter if Homer Plessy is innocent or guilty. What matters is that people have now articulated very clearly that they can rely on the sense of smell in order to adjudicate judicial cases, and that relying on that argument is going to have long-term implications.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
If you don't pay attention to smell, you won't reveal the power hierarchies of that time. You'll actually be in a kind of blind spot because, hang on a minute, that's natural, isn't it? And the whole idea behind power is to naturalize it. It's always been this way, it is this way, and it will remain this way.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
The smell of your mother, the smell of your first child, the smell of pain, the smell of working out, These are things that kind of knit your experience together. And if you take them out of your sensory experience generally, you're not going to have that more robust sense of your own past.