Chemical Freshness, Chemical Fetish: On Toxicity and the ‘New Car Smell’

Time: 12:00pm
Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation

Throughout Shapiro’s fieldwork on domestic chemical exposure in the United States, the “new car smell” or simply the “new smell” was the primary idiom through which research participants expressed awareness to indoor air. This talk tracks the historical development of the new smell, its economic logics, and its phenomenology that belies embodied apprehensions of toxic injury. While the chemical bouquet of the new car smell was born out of post–World War II car fervor, it is now applied to a broad range of synthetic products and has been spun off into “new smell” colognes, candles, and upholstery sprays. The new car smell imbues potentially harmful exposures with pleasure. Fixation on the new smell as an index of exchange value masks the chemical exposure that the aroma also indicates. Such smells are commodity fetishes as their sensuous aspects, their chemical substance and its molecular effects on the body, are obscured by their “supra-sensible” value (Marx) and as a result produce “habitual submission” (Debord).

Shapiro is a doctoral candidate in medical anthropology at the University of Oxford. Beginning in November 2013 Nick will take up a five-year research fellowship at Goldsmiths College in London. He works at the intersection of anthropology, citizen science, environmental health, and critical theory. His studies revolve around indoor air quality in the United States.