Tim Schütz: Odor Diary

When I first looked at the image, it reminded my of the “god-trick” or “view from nowhere” discussed in Feminist STS in debates on objectivity. This is not surprising given that it is a satellite image. The image description, in turn, is very rich in communicating the history of the place, how toxicity is governed and what it was like to grow up in what is certainly a “toxic assemblage.” The distant and sober satellite image is therefore in contrast to the evocative experience of smell that the image description points to. On the one hand, it highlights one of the description’s scholarly arguments, namely that senses like smell are easily underrepresented. On the other, without the description, the satellite image itself does not communicate this theoretical argument.