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This article is adapted from What’s That Smell? A Philosophy of the Olfactory, out from MIT Press.
Class differences tend to push to the fore in unusual places. Our belonging to a social class is betrayed by our appetites. Take, for instance, a scene from The Nanny Diaries, a 2007 comedy starring Scarlett Johansson. The film tells a story of a college graduate who, following a misunderstanding, starts work as a nanny for an affluent Upper East Side family. Settling into their home, the nanny admires and is drawn to the immense collection of commodities gathered there signaling wealth, until finally looking into the fridge. The viewer expects her to be equally taken in by food as she is by other commodities. But no: with an expression of aversion she says, “Tofu cutlets? Ugh. Yuck.” When it comes to food, the ruling class has no class. The nanny would have happily swapped places with her bourgeois counterpart, but having to eat tofu cutlets is taking it a step too far. Our stomachs are class conscious, observant of the class divide.
Nowhere is this inscription of class into our sensibility featured more prominently than in Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite. The film’s entire premise and plot revolve around the socially divisive role of smells. A tale of two four-person South Korean families—the affluent Parks and the pauperized Kims—the movie reflects on the deepening of social inequalities in Asian’s fourth-largest economy (and in the world at large). With social mobility declining, the social ladder is replaced by a glass floor, separating the “dirt spoons” (heuksujeo) from the “gold spoons” (geumsujeo). The Kims are declassed members of the working class, its outcasts. They are (barely) surviving on odd jobs, which they can’t do very well, and hence they are economically useless. They live in a semi-basement flat (banjiha), signaling their place at the very bottom of the social ladder, and hence their literal debasement and subordination. To paraphrase the title of Freud’s famous paper “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” theirs is a story of the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of capitalist economy.
With their toilet situated at street level (and reached by ascending a few stairs), the Kims live a few steps down from the bottom, below toilet-level, in the sewer. If toilet culture is the bare minimum of culture, the Kims are situated beneath the threshold of civilization. During a severe storm, when sewage overflows their apartment, the toilet is the only seat in the house that is risen above the sewer. The Kims’ position inter urinas et faeces, amid urine and feces, is further exemplified by their kitchen window looking onto the alley (a dead-end street) where drunks often urinate. Smell is mentioned for the first time when Ki-taek, the father of the family, finds a stinkbug in his food. Soon after, when their street is being fumigated, Ki-taek insists they keep the windows open, welcoming the free pest-extermination. Though overtly intended to rid the family of various parasites inhabiting their dwellings and eating their food (parásitos literally means “a person who eats at the table of another”), it is obvious to the viewer that the Kims themselves are the stinkbugs fumigated. The dwellings, surroundings, and their own ways of being are an offense to the sensus decori, mapping out the sensorial micro-politics of exclusion.
The Kims do not belong to the working class proper. Rather, they are representatives of the lumpenproletariat. An essentially parasitical group, the declassed lumpenproletariat was conceived by Marx and Engels as an underclass devoid of (working-)class consciousness, and consisting mostly of petty criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes, but also, and increasingly so, of the unemployed. They are facing structural barriers to entering the workforce. In Fredric Jameson’s terms, the Kims are employed by capital to be unemployed, and hence can only scheme their way into employment. The Communist Manifesto defines the lumpenproletariat as the passive Verfaulung der untersten Schichten der alten Gesellschaft, variously translated as “the passive dung heap” or the “passively rotting (or decaying) mass.” The Kims lack any work ethic. Disillusioned by the system and the very idea of a shared involvement in it, they mirror its chaotic reproduction pushing them deeper and deeper into poverty. Permanently unemployable, they secure their employment by means of deceit, posing as someone they are not, shamelessly fabricating their credentials (the son, Ki-woo, poses as a university student; the daughter, Ki-jung, pretends to be an art therapist; Ki-taek is posing as an experienced driver; and his wife, Choong-sook, a housekeeper providing luxury services).
The passive dung heap of society, the Kims soon prove to be stigmatized and set apart by their Lumpengeruch, or social-scum smell. Though successfully infiltrating the Parks household, profitably posing as deodorized members of the working class, their true identity soon seeps through the fake facade. The first one to catch a whiff of the deception is Da-song, the Park family’s youngest, who remarks that the four new employees of the household all smell exactly the same. Concerned about their true identities being revealed, the Kims wash their clothes, contemplating each of them using different detergents. But their presence is not made more palatable by the washing. If they can’t shake the scent, it is because they are not wearing it. Ki-jung, the daughter, ponders on the social substance of the smell, saying the smell won’t leave them unless they leave this place. But will it? Or will it haunt them forever? Smell, Montaigne observes, “betrays the place I come from,” even if I had long since left the place.
The offensive smell cannot be washed off. It clings to their bodies, betraying the true essence of their class-being, inscribed into their sensibility. George Orwell’s account in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) oscillates between a critical rejection of the toxicity of the ideological narrative of the stinky poor, and the admission of the existence of the reality described by it. Instead of painting an idyllic picture of the working class, patronizing the poor, he resists the temptation of deodorizing them. In smell, the prophesizing of equality hits the barrier of inequality resisting all equalization. Orwell insists that all social differences between the ruling capitalist class and the ruled working class can be overcome (or, rather, disavowed). The eye and the ear can be fooled into thinking we are all in the same boat. Even the sense of (aesthetic) taste can easily be fooled by the establishing of working-class culture with its own set of aesthetic sensibilities coexisting proudly alongside ruling-class culture, their domains neatly separated and freed of any conflict. The sense of touch, too, entails a neat separation between what is rightfully yours and what is rightfully mine. Our senses of sight, hearing, taste, and touch all play a role in the disavowal, but not our sense of smell. Smell figures as the marker of class difference beyond politico-ideological deodorization.
The lower classes smell, Orwell notes. However, upon stressing the fact that the abhorrent smell of the poor is abhorrent to the poor themselves, he considers a smell difference explainable only by people belonging to another social class: “And even ‘lower-class’ people whom you knew to be quite clean—servants, for instance—were faintly unappetizing. The smell of their sweat, the very texture of their skins, were mysteriously different from yours.” Though careful not to cross the line, their “mysteriously different” smell unfailingly crosses the line. Referring to Ki-taek, Dong-ik, the Park family father, is unsure how to describe the smell. Talking to Yeon-kyo, his wife, he says: “That smell that wafts through the car, how to describe it?”—“An old man’s smell?”—“No no, it’s not that. What is it? Like an old radish? No. You know when you boil a rag? It smells like that. Anyway, even though he always seems about to cross the line, he never does cross it. That’s good. I’ll give him credit. But that smell crosses the line.”
Another key aspect of the lumpenproletariat, emphasized in The Communist Manifesto, is treated in the film, namely its readiness “to sell itself to reactionary intrigues.” Parasite introduces a split in the lumpenproletariat by presenting another character, Geun Se, the former housekeeper’s husband, who has been living in a nuclear bomb shelter under the Park house. The Parks are unaware either of his or the shelter’s existence. A parasite, Geun Se is undetected by his host. Himself a member of the lumpenproletariat, Geun Se first took refuge in the bunker four years ago to escape loan sharks. Unlike the Kims, Geun Se is a congenial, grateful parasite, singing praises to Mr. Park without the latter being aware of his existence. He embodies the historical meaning of “parasite,” signifying a bard praising the master in song or poetry, solidarizing with the class enemy. Embarrassed by his financial misfortunes, he blames only himself: “It’s all my fault. I started a cake shop—Taiwanese Castella—and it completely bankrupted us.” He claims to like living underground, adding, “I just feel comfortable here. It feels like I was born here.”
The electrical switches in the bunker control the lights above the flight of stairs leading up to the living room. Every day, Geun Se waits for Mr. Park to arrive home. Upon hearing his footsteps, he flicks on a series of lights one by one as Mr. Park is ascending the stairs, performing a welcome home ritual. Hiding in the bunker and holding the candle to Mr. Park, the first explanation he provides of his unusual ritual is economic (and only found in the film’s original screenplay): “We have to conserve energy. It all comes out of Mr. Park’s pocket.” At one point, he accompanies the ritual with an improvised song: “Returning after a day’s work,” he sings, “I love you so much, Mr. Park! Home from the office, Mr. Park is off duty now.” His practice is a politico-theologico-economic ritual, a classified liturgical acclamation, glorifying Mr. Park’s rule. Like the laudes acclamations—discussed by Ernst Kantorowitcz—subtending the rites of royal investiture, Geun Se’s ritual and song serve to invest Mr. Park’s rule with sublime legitimacy.
Geun Se’s liturgical fervor is juxtaposed to another reactionary practice: not giving a shit. For Ki-taek, hopelessness is the only truth worth proclaiming. Sharing his advice with his son, he reproduces the free-market economy’s indictment of planned economy: “Ki-woo, do you know what kind of plan never fails? No plan at all. If you make a plan, life never works out that way.” The depressing truth of his insight is, of course, that neither having nor not having a plan is up to us, and that resigning from (liturgical) labor does not absolve us from it, but rather employs us as officiants of idle worship (in Eric Santner’s sense of the term).
Like Plato’s cave-dwellers, Geun Se prefers remaining in the shadows, begging Ki-taek to let him stay. But the lumpenproletariat knows no solidarity and no class consciousness. At least not until the remarkable climax of the film. Ki-taek gags Geun Se, ties him up, and leaves him (and his wife, who is apparently dead) to rot in the bunker. The next day, during an impromptu birthday party, the blood-smeared Geun Se manages to get away, intent on hurting the Kims. In the crucial scene of the film, taking place in the garden, Geun Se is in a frenzy. The Kims and the Parks clearly see him as an impostor to be stopped. However, when Ki-taek observes Dong-ik’s expression of disgust at Geun Se’s odor, something is triggered in him, and he kills Dong-ik.
In Althusserian terms, Ki-taek—instead of being interpellated by the Subject, that is, by Donk-ik as the bearer of social authority—is interpellated by the abject (the smell, the stigma) undermining his recognition in the Subject. Though incentivized by Geun Se’s killing spree to form a provisional alliance with Dong-ik (an alliance that is ultimately but an extension of their existing social contract), the latter’s olfactory disgust reminds Ki-taek that there is no social relation. Against the backdrop of this truth, for one fatal moment, the two lumpenproletarians are untied together.
The Communist Manifesto describes capitalist reality as a perpetually expanding smellscape, an age of perpetual dissipation, a new world odor. Within the capitalist system of desolidification, all “fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.” In the midst of capitalist desolidification, its uninterrupted liquidation of all social conditions, the ephemeral smell-crumb abruptly, and provisionally, becomes something solid, a vehicle of an impossible solidarity. Ultimately, we can only hope to remove that classified smell by first grabbing on to it.