10.54103/2036-461X/19442
The essay analyses from an epistemological point of view the functions of an imaginary medium, the feelies, namely some stereoscopic, tactile, and especially olfactory movies imagined by Aldous Huxley in the futuristic dystopia Brave New World (1932). Its main goal is to comprehend the identity, functions, and objectives of yesterday’s and today’s multisensory media. In this perspective, the essay reconstructs the cultural-historical horizon which produced Huxley’s imaginary entertainment, considering the three polarities which constitute a media dispositive in the perspective of media epistemology, i.e. machinery, representation, and spectator. With regard to the mechanical function of the fictional dispositive, its ability to catch sensory spheres such as smell and touch reflects the contemporary debate on media specificity, a discussion in which Huxley himself participated with a famous 1929 article. In the same way, the fictional feely Three Weeks in a Helicopter appears as a parodic pastiche which bears the marks of various cinematic paradigms of the time: especially early “cinema of attractions”, as well as film genres which communicate directly to the spectator’s unconscious. Finally, focusing on the imaginary spectator’s experience, the essay reconnects feelies to the cultural history of olfaction, a repressed sense whose media conquest coincides with a precise form of colonization of human subjectivity.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Cinema of Attractions
Epistemology of the Feelies. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the Dream of Smell Media
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Giancarlo Grossi
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Strauven, Wanda, ed. 2006. The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Epistemology of the Feelies. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the Dream of Smell Media
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                                                                                       Epistemology of the Feelies.
                                                                                       Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
                                                                                       and the Dream of Smell Media
                                                                                       Giancarlo Grossi, University of Milan




                                                                                       The essay analyses from an epistemological point of view the functions of an imaginary                     Keywords
                                                                                       medium, the feelies, namely some stereoscopic, tactile, and especially olfactory movies
                                                                                                                                                                                            Imaginary Media
                                                                                       imagined by Aldous Huxley in the futuristic dystopia Brave New World (1932). Its main
                                                                                       goal is to comprehend the identity, functions, and objectives of yesterday’s and today’s             Multisensoriality
                                                                                       multisensory media. In this perspective, the essay reconstructs the cultural-historical      Cultural History of Smell
                                                                                       horizon which produced Huxley’s imaginary entertainment, considering the three                  Cinema of Attractions
                                                                                       polarities which constitute a media dispositive in the perspective of media epistemology,                         DOI
                                                                                       i.e. machinery, representation, and spectator. With regard to the mechanical function               https://doi.org/
                                                                                       of the fictional dispositive, its ability to catch sensory spheres such as smell and touch
                                                                                                                                                                                           10.54103/2036-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       reflects the contemporary debate on media specificity, a discussion in which Huxley
                                                                                       himself participated with a famous 1929 article. In the same way, the fictional feely
                                                                                                                                                                                               461X/19442
                                                                                       Three Weeks in a Helicopter appears as a parodic pastiche which bears the marks of
                                                                                       various cinematic paradigms of the time: especially early “cinema of attractions”, as
                                                                                       well as film genres which communicate directly to the spectator’s unconscious. Finally,
                                                                                       focusing on the imaginary spectator’s experience, the essay reconnects feelies to the
                                                                                       cultural history of olfaction, a repressed sense whose media conquest coincides with a
                                                                                       precise form of colonization of human subjectivity.




                                                                                       THE IMAGINARY MEDIA EPISTEME1
                                                                                         A fertile ground for interrogating the identity of a media device is that
                                                                                       constituted by that media which have never been realized or simply imagined.
                                                                                       By the identity of a medium, I do not mean any pre-existing or pre-fixed construct,
                                                                                       but rather the effect of an intersection of practices, technologies, institutions,
                                                                                       ideologies and experiential spaces that intertwine and take shape reciprocally
                                                                                       in a given historical framework. Eric Kluitenberg, in the preface to his Book of
                                                                                       Imaginary Media (Kluitenberg 2006, 7–25), emphasized not only that the identity
                                                                                       of each medium possesses components that are as real as imagined, but that
                                                                                       without one of these characteristics it could not function. More precisely, in
                                                                                       the appearance of a new medium, something analogous to what happens
                                                                                       in the formation of communities takes place: an imaginary subject needs to
                                                                                       take shape for individuals to identify with it and act accordingly. Mythologies
                                                                                       thus assume a decisive and productive role in assembling imaginary and real


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                               89
     components, whether simply dreamt or historically realized. Analysing the
     mythology that accompanies the emergence of a media identity thus means
     understanding what processes led to its technical and social configuration. In
     these mythical narratives, the imprint of the different knowledge and powers
     which characterized the historical-cultural horizon producing them remains
     alive. This is what, starting from a distinctly Foucauldian approach to media
     archaeology, is called episteme, or in a more general sense dispositive2 . In
     this vein, François Albera and Maria Tortajada, focusing on audiovisual media,
     have also considered the importance of the contribution that science fiction
     and fantasy narratives, from the 19th century to the present day, have had on
     the conceptualization of the cinematic dispositive, drawing inspiration from
     technologies that existed at the time as much as they were still being projected
     (Albera 2010; Albera and Tortajada 2015). Considering the para-cinematic
     devices imagined by Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Verne up to Barjavel, Albera and
     Tortajada emphasize two aspects in particular: firstly, how these devices were
     refractory to any media specificity, as they hybridized different technological
     and experiential possibilities––a bit like, one might add, mythological creatures
     created by the association of different animal species. This assemblage is a
     meaningful aspect of the emergence of a new media experience. One need only
     think of the advent of a multiform device such as cinema (in which the expressive
     possibilities of painting, photography, theatre, and music converge). Secondly,
     in complete continuity with Kluitenberg, Albera and Tortajada indicate how the
     imaginary devices which inhabit fictional literature do not merely predict and
     prefigure future ones, but actively contribute to their birth. It could be argued
     that media, when they first appear, are already welcomed within a shared social
     recognition, precisely because of the pre-existing framework of these fictional
     narratives.
        The investigation of imaginary media is not, however, a mere novelty of the
     more recent emergence of media-archaeological approaches in film theory. It
     was already circulating in theories of the 1950s. Edgar Morin, in his famous
     1956 essay The Cinema or Imaginary Man, dedicates a huge discussion to the
     “cinema of the future imagined by science fiction”, which coincides with the
     Bazinian myth of “total cinema, which catapults into the unfathomable future
     that which is in embryo in the very nucleus of the image” (Morin 2005, 41).
     According to French philosopher and sociologist, these possibilities express the
     anthropological goal of the cinematograph itself, which corresponds with the
     production of a double that is more real than the real itself, capable of surviving
     the transient character of time.
        In the present investigation, I will be interested in considering a specific
     function of certain imaginary media, which reveals as much the intrinsic vocation
     of cinema as they trace a borderline territory between the cinematic dispositive
     itself and the immersive media that preceded it (such as phantasmagoria)3 ,
     or with which it briefly coexisted (Morton Heilig’s Sensorama patent)4 and still
     coexists today (virtual and extended reality environments)5 . I speak of the
     fantasy of a cinema capable of colonizing not only the sensory domains of sight



90                                                   Grossi, Epistemology of the Feelies
and hearing, but also less mediated––and hard to mediate––sensory spheres
such as touch and, above all, smell. It is in fact Morin himself who specifies
how “the first wave of science fiction begins by conferring all the sensory
characteristics on projected images”. In the 1930s, there is especially one
fantasy that, according to Morin, most significantly represents the multisensory
character of “total cinema”: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), in which
“the singing, speaking, synthetic film, in colour, stereoscopic, scented” (Morin
2005, 42) constitutes one of the main attractions of the dystopian and futuristic
society described within the book (Huxley 2006). Huxley gives this dispositive
the name “feelies” in analogy to “talkies”, the term with which sound films were
referred to at their advent. Feelies also play a central role in the unfolding of
the plot, which is why it is possible to find in the novel a detailed description
of their functions, from the more technical to the more experiential aspects.
Consequently, by combining the traces of the various pieces of information left
by Huxley in the text, it becomes possible to reconstruct and interrogate the
medium in an accurate manner, almost as if it were a pre-cinematic device
that is now in disuse. Moreover, in Huxley’s narrative, the feelies appear fully
integrated with other processes of domination and programming of subjectivity
that distinguish the dystopian universe of Brave New World: such as hypnopædia,
the conditioning and automated teaching imparted during sleep, or soma, the
hallucinatory drug that allows future citizens to calm down by evading reality.
It then becomes necessary to ask why the idea of a cinema involving the entire
sensorium becomes as significant to identify a precise configuration of society
(massified) and the psyche (programmed) such as the one prefigured by Huxley.
   Starting from these considerations, I will attempt to apply an epistemological
investigation to the feelies, with the aim of understanding from the analysis
of an imaginary medium what components and functions characterize the
multisensory vocation of media, and, above all, the technological conquest of
spheres such as touch and smell. Consequently, I will search the feelies for
traces of both the technological and cultural trends that permeate the historical
horizon in which Huxley imagined them. In doing so, this investigation will
consider Huxley’s novel as an opaque object, an utterance whose meaning is
not so much to be searched in the author’s creative intention as in the historical
interweaving of institutions, discourses and technologies in which even a merely
imagined medium inevitably participates.



THE MULTISENSORY MACHINARY
  Starting from the complexity of information that can be identified in Brave
New World about the feelies, it becomes possible to isolate three areas for the
analysis of the imaginary medium. In an epistemological perspective such as
that outlined by Albera and Tortajada, every dispositive implies a reciprocal
relationship that is imposed between three constitutive elements: machinery,
representation, spectator (Albera and Tortajada 2010). Focusing on the first


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                    91
     aspect, we can analyse the material arrangement and technical functioning of
     feelies; on the second, their fictional and narrative content; on the third, the
     subjectivity they address together with the sensory, cognitive, and emotional
     experience they arouse.
       The technical functioning of the feelies emerge most clearly in one of the
     novel’s climactic scenes, in Chapter XI, when the beautiful fetus technician
     Lenina Crowne and John the Savage meet at the “screening” of “THREE
     WEEKS IN A HELICOPTER. AN ALL-SINGING, SYNTHETICAL TALKING,
     COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY. WITH SINCHRONYZED SCENT-ORGAN
     ACCOMPAINMENT” (Huxley 2006, 167). Already in the title, openly parodic
     with respect to any multisensory assemblage, it is possible to guess Huxley’s
     position within the debate of those years on the topic of media specificity. In
     an article that appeared in Vanity Fair in July 1929, “Silence is Golden”, Huxley
     had already described in caustic terms his first encounter with sound cinema,
     at the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris6 , “where the latest and most frightful
     creation-saving device for the production of standardized amusement had
     been installed” (Huxley 1929, 72). The film that was the subject of Huxley’s first
     disastrous contact with the talkies, whose account resembles more a tale of a
     misfortune than a film review, is precisely the first sound film in the history of
     cinema, The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland 1927), released only two years earlier.
     Huxley himself proudly claims the delay of his experience: “This is one of those
     cases where it is most decidedly better never than late, better never than early,
     better never than on the stroke of time’” (Huxley 1929, 72). If, however, one
     compares Huxley’s reasons with the positions expressed a few years later by
     media specificity theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim, one can see some essential
     differences. For the Gestalt psychologist and art theorist, the problematic
     nature of talkies concerns rigidly formal aspects, rooted in a precise aesthetic
     conception that distinguishes the expressive power of an art or medium on the
     basis of the sensory sphere it implies. As Arnheim states in an essay entitled,
     with clear reference to the distinction among the arts in Lessing’s 18th-century
     aesthetics, A New Laocoon (1938), “in their attempts to attract the audience, two
     media are fighting each other instead of capturing it by united effort” (Arnheim
     1957, 199). Instead, the expressive power of an art would consist precisely
     in its ability to communicate the perceptive complexity of the world through
     a single sensory channel. For Huxley, on the other hand, the problem of the
     multiplication of sensory impulses in the media corresponds rather with a
     process of cultural decadence, in which the blurring of any tension towards
     the ideal corresponds with the propagation of immediate and obtuse sensory
     pleasures. The problematic nature of talkies thus concerns not so much an
     aesthetic or expressive rule as the socio-economic configuration of the mass-
     entertainment, with the transformation of media narratives into “Taylorized
     work and mechanized amusement” (Huxley 1929, 94). This standardization
     brought about by the inclusion of sound in cinema is reflected mainly in the
     content than in the form of the movie. Especially, Huxley adopts an elitist point
     of view with respect to musical phenomena belonging to popular culture such as



92                                                  Grossi, Epistemology of the Feelies
jazz: “The jazz players were forced upon me; I regarded them with a fascinated
horror. It was the first time, I suddenly realized, that I had ever clearly seen a
jazz band. The spectacle was positively terrifying”; not to mention the disgust
provoked by Al Jolson’s performance of My Mammy, defined by Huxley as “the
most nauseatingly luscious, the most penetratingly vulgar mammy song that
it has ever been my lot to hear” (Huxley 1929, 94). The advent of talkies would
therefore represent nothing more than a further transformation of art into
pure sensation, increasingly far from any cognition and within the reach of the
standard spectator’s entertainment.
   With regard to the imaginary medium of feelies, the role of undermining media
specificity is instead parodically assumed by two culturally neglected senses
such as smell and touch, both of which are difficult to colonize by the media
regime precisely because they are characterized by immediate contact with the
object. From a technical point of view, the sense of smell is conveyed by a scent
organ that works like a musical instrument, emanating odors instead of sounds,
while the tactile sensations appear by pressing a metal button on the armrest
of the armchair. But while touch takes on a mimetic function, anchoring itself
to the objects represented and making them hyperreal, olfactory notes remain
as abstract and arbitrary as musical notes, which, according to a long-standing
aesthetic tradition, do not replicate the universe of objects but rather constitute
the expression of feelings and emotions7 . The analogy between music and
perfume is in fact explicitly emphasized by Huxley: the “projection” of Three
Weeks in a Helicopter is preceded by an olfactory concert, in which top notes,
heart notes and base notes tune in and follow each other as in a symphony:

         The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal
         Capriccio––rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary,
         basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the
         spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood,
         camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches
         of discord––a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig’s
         dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began.
         The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause;
         the lights went up. (Huxley 2006, 166–67)

  The music/smell analogy is not an invention of Huxley but appears already
well established in 19th century British culture. In particular, the chemist and
perfumer Septimus Piesse, active in London in the second half of the 19th century
and co-owner of the popular perfume house Piesse & Lubin, had already argued
in his The Art of Perfumery (1855) for the existence of an olfactory octave, and
even of semi-odors comparable to semitones8 .
  Scent thus appears capable both of producing an autonomous spectacle, like
a sound medium, and of integrating itself in relation to images. Even in this
second case, this does not occur in order to make the olfactory qualities of the
intradiegetic objects perceptible, but in the form of an extradiegetic “smelltrack”,
a background commentary that would make full sense in itself even without


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      93
     linking up with the visual content. In the scene of a kiss, for instance, while on
     a tactile level a fully realistic titillation on the lips corresponds, the scent organ
     only emanates pure musk (Huxley 2006, 168).
        The non-illusory character of scent within feelies, even in a science-fiction
     fantasy such as the one proposed by Huxley, says much about the resistance of
     smell to any process of mediatization. In the years prior to the release of Brave
     New World, the use of scent in the cinema took place in a few instances and
     without a specific purpose of synchronization with the images. An example of this
     use occurred in 1929 during the screening of Lilac Time (George Fitzmaurice,
     1928) when the manager of Boston’s Fenway Theatre added lilac perfume to
     the movie theatre’s ventilation system in accordance with the appearance of the
     film’s title on the screen (Spence 2020, 4). As Vinzenz Hediger and Alexandra
     Schneider note, “the function of these smells was to contribute to the general
     atmosphere of the presentation. The narrative articulation of smells, the
     representation and reproduction of diegetic smells, is a rather different affair”
     (Hediger and Schneider 2005, 246). An affair that began to concretize, albeit
     with little success, only years after the publication of Huxley’s novel with the
     application of various patents. Some instances are the “smellies”, introduced in
     1941 by a Detroit cinema; Hans Laube’s Smell-O-Vision, which accompanied the
     projection of Scent of Mystery (Jack Cardiff, 1960); and the famous Odorama,
     made by scratch and sniff cards, of Polyester (John Waters, 1981).
        Huxley’s scent organ remains closer to perfume itself, if considered as a
     medium capable of autonomously organizing a spectacularized experience. As
     a matter of fact, fragrances are everyday, atmospheric, and wearable objects
     which represent the most concrete attempt to join sensations and evoke images,
     producing a para-cinematic experience which is both sensory and mental9 .



     BODIES AND SKINS OF
     IMAGINARY NARRATIVES
       The second aspect which is fundamental to understanding the identity of the
     imaginary medium from an epistemological point of view concerns its imaginary
     content: as far as feelies are concerned, I refer to the aesthetic and narrative
     characteristics of Three Weeks in a Helicopter and of the other works which are
     only briefly but significantly mentioned within the novel.
       The first reference to Three Weeks in a Helicopter appears already in
     the second chapter, in a dialogue between the Hatchery and Conditioning
     Administrator Henry Foster and his Assistant Predestinator:

               "Going to the Feelies this evening, Henry?" enquired the Assistant
               Predestinator. “I hear the new one at the Alhambra is first-rate.
               There’s a love scene on a bearskin rug; they say it’s marvellous.
               Every hair of the bear reproduced. The most amazing tactual
               effects.” (Huxley 2006, 35)


94                                                     Grossi, Epistemology of the Feelies
  Already in this first exchange, it is evident how the attention aroused by the
feely does not so much concern the story being told, as it does the enchantment
aroused by the very operation of the dispositive. This one could be defined in
McLuhan’s terms as a superhot medium, characterized by an extreme definition
and complexity of the information transmitted to the sensorium. As Laura Frost
notes, “Huxley’s feelies reach backward to cinema’s music hall origins and
forward to the imagination of technologies such as virtual reality” (Frost 2006,
450). Their aim is not so much to tell a story, which, as we shall see, is partially
insubstantial, but to enchant and attract the spectator through the deployment
of the medium’s spectacular power. It is in this sense that, even though Huxley
was writing in the 1930s and in the book there is no lack of parodic references
to the narrative cinema that developed after The Birth of a Nation (David Wark
Griffith, 1915), the feelies mainly adhere to the “cinema of attractions” paradigm
coined by Tom Gunning to describe early movies (Gunning 1989) 10. It is no
coincidence that throughout Huxley’s novel a markedly traditionalist contrast is
continually played out between high art, naively identified with the Shakespeare
masterpieces loved and quoted by John the Savage, and the primitive emotions
aroused by the feelies, which strike an immediate and unreflective chord with
the human sensorium. As the Resident Controller of Western Europe Mustapha
Mond states in Chapter XVI in dialogue with John himself (this latter being
horrified by the media system of the new world): “You’re making flivvers out of
the absolute minimum of steel––works of art out of practically nothing but pure
sensation.” (Huxley 2006, 221). This pure sensation produced by the medium,
which excludes thought but is rooted directly in sensory and bodily experience,
is considered by Huxley to be on a par with the Marxian opium of the people that
allows for easier control of the masses:

         In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating
         nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumblepuppy) are
         deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of
         preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities
         of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is
         different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble
         one another in being most decidedly “not of this world.” Both are
         distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in
         Marx’s phrase, “the opium of the people” and so a threat to freedom.
         (Huxley 2001, 31)

  What this cinema of sensation/attraction aimed at propaganda consists of
becomes clearer when analysing the thin plot of Three Weeks in a Helicopter.
As Huxley himself notes, it “was extremely simple”. The feely protagonists
are “a gigantic negro and a golden-haired Beta-Plus female”, two individuals
categorized within lower castes within the social system of 632 AF (After
Ford) London in which the novel is set. The core of the plot consists of a
helicopter accident that causes the man to lose his conditioning and develop
a psychopathological monogamous passion for the blonde girl, to the point of
kidnapping and segregating her “for three weeks in a wildly antisocial tête-à-


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      95
     tête”. Monogamy, in the diegetic universe of Brave New World, in which the
     cohesion of society is guaranteed by the elimination of all biological and cultural
     restraints on erotic and sexual impulses (including paternity and maternity), is
     regarded as a dangerous antisocial perversion. The feely continues according
     to the classic Hollywood pattern of “here comes the cavalry!”: after a series
     of adventures and aerial acrobatics, the girl is rescued by “three handsome
     young Alphas”, while the black man is sent in an Adult-Re-Conditioning Centre
     to regain his wits and lose his deviant monogamous tendencies. In the happy
     ending, the blonde girl becomes the mistress of all the three rescuers (Huxley
     2006, 168–69).
       The plot’s inherent racism is based on the equation of blackness with a
     savagery parodically identified with traditional bourgeois morality. At the same
     time, it can only be partially justified by a satirical intent towards a future society
     organized by biologically conditioned castes. Indeed, traces of the exotic and
     colonial gaze current in Hollywood productions of the time seem to converge in
     this parody. As Laura Frost notes: “Huxley was not alone in associating cinema
     with racial otherness and blackness in particular” (Frost 2006, 458). Also,
     according to Frost, the same title of the feely is to be understood as a parody
     of the erotic novel Three Weeks by genre writer Elinor Glyn, adapted in 1914
     into a motion picture directed by Perry N. Verkoff. The novel is centered on an
     exotic love affair involving a British businessman and a mysterious Eastern
     European noblewoman. However, one should not forget the most obvious
     reference described in depth by Huxley in Silence is Golden, namely The Jazz
     Singer, and especially the controversial sequence in which Al Jolson sings My
     Mammy in blackface that so disgusted the British writer. It is no coincidence
     that the narrative genre of Three Weeks in a Helicopter assimilates, at the
     same time, the pornographic film––the bearskin love sequence with its tactile
     effects propagated on the viewer’s body––and the musical––where the songs
     are reduced to primitive, onomatopoeic verses: “‘Aaaah.” “Ooh-ah! Ooh-ah!”.
     An equally pertinent reference concerns the film whose innovations are at the
     origin of the classic Hollywood editing model, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The
     crosscutting introduced by Griffith’s movie, in fact, corresponds inextricably
     with the topic of the rescue: more precisely with the sequence in which Elsie,
     besieged by blacks, is released by the Ku Klux Klan. This sequence represents
     the apotheosis as much of the technical revolution of cinema as of the most
     obtuse and violent reactionary ideology of the US South.
       A further trace of cinematic colonial exoticism resurfaces in the final chapter,
     with the figure of Darwin Bonaparte, “the Feely Corporation’s most expert big
     game photographer” (Huxley 2006, 252–53). Already author of “Sperm Whale’s
     Love Life”, the documentary filmmaker and explorer will find in the escape from
     civilization of the Savage John, caught while he is whipping himself to resist the
     thought of Lenina, the occasion to film his new masterpiece, “Savage of Surrey”.
     The documentary also assumes a tragic importance in the epilogue of the
     novel since, marking the impossibility of escaping from the colonizing capture
     of the new world’s media system, it inevitably leads to John’s final suicide. In



96                                                     Grossi, Epistemology of the Feelies
Bonaparte’s film, it is not difficult to glimpse a reference to the exploratory
cinema of Robert Flaherty, and especially Nanook of the North (1922), which
pandered to the general public’s interest in the customs of exotic peoples
shown in exhibitions, wax museums, zoos.
   If it is clear that in Huxley one can hardly find a critical awareness of the
prevailing racism in the culture of his time––his disdain for jazz is exemplary––,
it is equally true that the sarcasm he directs at the cinema contemporary to him
inevitably ends up also affecting the racism that innervates its narratives. The
feelies described by Huxley are parodic pastiches of cinema as such; in them, it
is possible to find all those sensory and narrative elements (exemplary of both
cinema of attractions and first Hollywood genre movies) which play directly on
the spectator’s unconscious and shape his or her ideology. The media domain
of touch and smell thus appears to us to be closely linked to the process of
modelling the unconscious sensorium.



THE UNCONSCIOUS ENTERTAINMENT
  The spectatorial experience envisaged by the feelies is linked to the other
technologies of subjugation imagined by Huxley, such as soma and hypnopædic
education, specifically aimed at conditioning the unconscious. It is significant
that one of the novel’s main characters, Helmholtz Watson––whose first name
pays homage to the German psychophysiologist Hermann von Helmholtz––in
addition to being a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering and himself
an Emotional Engineer, “composed feely scenarios, and had the happiest knack
for slogans and hypnopædic rhymes” (Huxley 2006, 67). The engineering of
the unconscious, as we have seen, corresponds to the aims of a medium that
propagates pure sensations and emotions to the exclusion of the activation
of conscious thought. This coupling of technical and mental elements is also
reflected in the current mythology in the diegetic world of Brave New World,
in which Ford not only stands in for Christ (the years are counted from his
birth), but is fully identified with Freud as they were the same individual (“Our
Ford––or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself
whenever he spools of psychological matters [...]”, Huxley 2006, 29).
  In addition to the feelies as a public spectacle, Huxley’s novel also features
a domestic version of the device, less analysed in the critical literature. It is
described in Chapter XIV, when John rushes to the hospital to assist his dying
mother Linda. Each hospital room appears as a media environment, in which
the functions of technology intersect with the hallucinatory and dreamlike
power of the soma:

         Linda was lying in the last of the long row of beds, next to the
         wall. Propped up on pillows, she was watching the Semifinals of
         the South American Riemann-Surface Tennis Championship, which
         were being played in silent and diminished reproduction on the
         screen of the television box at the foot of the bed. [...] Linda looked


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              on, vaguely and uncomprehendingly smiling. Her pale, bloated face
              wore an expression of imbecile happiness. Every now and then her
              eyelids closed, and for a few seconds she seemed to be dozing.
              Then with a little start she would wake up again––wake up to
              the aquarium antics of the Tennis Champions, to the Super-Vox-
              Wurlitzeriana rendering of “Hug me till you drug me, honey,” to the
              warm draught of verbena that came blowing through the ventilator
              above her head––would wake up to these things, or rather to a
              dream of which these things, transformed and embellished by
              the soma in her blood, were the marvellous constituents, and
              smile once more her broken and discoloured smile of infantile
              contentment. (Huxley 2006, 200)

       Even the few moments of wakefulness are reabsorbed within the oneiric
     universe produced by the combination of different media (among which we may
     consider, in line with Walter Benjamin who studied hashish as a medium11, also
     the soma), as in the scene in which Linda finally realizes John’s presence at her
     bedside:

              Linda’s eyes fluttered open; she saw him, knew him––“John!”––but
              situated the real face, the real and violent hands, in an imaginary
              world––among the inward and private equivalents of patchouli
              and the Super-Wurlitzer, among the transfigured memories and
              the strangely transposed sensations that constituted the universe
              of her dream (Huxley, 2006, 205).

        The intersection between various media and sensory stimuli, besides acting
     directly on the unconscious and engineering its emotional content, also produces
     dreamscapes in which subjects are enraptured and alienated––averted, above
     all, from the most disturbing and tragic elements of reality such as dying.
        The fact that the media system imagined by Huxley again includes and captures
     the olfactory dimension is no coincidence. Indeed, smell can be considered an
     unconscious sense for several reasons. Firstly, because of its character as a
     culturally neglected sense: already at the beginning of the 20th century, Georg
     Simmel, in his Sociology of the Senses (1907), had emphasized how there are
     no independent and objective expressions to signify olfactory stimuli, since
     smell alone is not sufficient to constitute an object, but remains locked up in
     the subjective level, consisting of comparisons and analogies (smells like...)
     (Simmel 1997). Furthermore, again according to Simmel, smell produces a
     paradoxical social relationship: precisely because of its character of proximity,
     it can give rise to effects of repulsion and distancing.
        Secondly, smell is relegated to the unconscious background of human
     perception by virtue of its resistance to mediation and registration processes.
     As Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnot note in an extensive
     survey of the cultural history of smell, “nor can odours be recorded: there is no
     effective way of either capturing scents or storing them over time. In the realm
     of olfaction, we must make do with descriptions and recollections” (Classen,
     Howes, and Synnot 2002, 3).



98                                                  Grossi, Epistemology of the Feelies
  This link to memory is connected to the revolution introduced by psychoanalysis,
and especially to the conception of smell as a repressed sense, dumped into
unconsciousness by the development of human culture. Especially, in Civilization
and its Discontents (1930), Freud considers the sense of smell as repressed
and weakened by the process of civilization beginning with the acquisition of
upright stature. In Freud’s perspective, smell becomes an unconscious sense to
rediscover and mediatize through the analytical process: as a matter of fact, the
resurfacing of smell’s centrality in neuroses and fetishisms makes even more
urgent its integration with the conscious universe12 .
  These three meanings of the unconscious character of smell (culturally
neglected; neither recordable nor mediatable and therefore inextricably linked
to the dimension of recollection; repressed and psychopathological) all return
in Brave New World precisely in relation to the effects that feelies provoke
in the spectator’s sensorial and mental abysses. In Chapter XIII, following the
experience of Three Weeks in a Helicopter, Lenina finally manages to realize
a sexual approach with John, embracing and enveloping him with her tactile
and olfactory presence. This sensation, however, awakens in John the––for him
traumatic––reminiscence of the hyper-realistic feely:

         And suddenly her arms were round his neck; he felt her lips soft
         against his own. So deliciously soft, so warm and electric that
         inevitably he found himself thinking of the embraces in Three
         Weeks in a Helicopter. Ooh! ooh! the stereoscopic blonde and anh!
         the more-than-real black-amoor [sic., ed.] Horror, horror, horror ...
         he fired to disengage himself; but Lenina tightened her embrace
         (Huxley 2006, 192).

  The attempt to escape the sensory impact with the traumatic real (but culturally
and technologically hyper-mediated) is translated into the intellectualistic and
idealizing quotation from Shakespeare, which, however, continues to betray a
constant reference to smell: “‘Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to
sweeten my imagination’ [...] “O thou weed, who are so lovely fair and smell’st
so sweet that the sense aches at thee’” (Huxley 2006, 195). Although the smell,
a sense of memory, persists and haunts him even when contact fades: “But
her perfume still hung about him, his jacket was white with the powder that
had scented the velvety body” (Huxley 2006, 195–96). In his critical analysis of
Huxley’s novel, Theodor W. Adorno underlines how the figure of John, far from
embodying the romantic idea of the good savage, corresponds to “the type of
shy, aesthetic youth, tied to his mother and inhibited, who prefers to enjoy his
feeling through contemplation rather than expression and who finds satisfaction
in the lyrical transfiguration of the beloved” (Adorno 1967, 105). A configuration
of the human that for Adorno is, after all, just as standardized as the dystopian
future citizens imagined by Huxley: “This type, incidentally, is bred at Oxford
and Cambridge no less than are Epsilons in test tubes, and it belongs to the
sentimental standbys of the modern English novel” (Adorno 1967, 105). What is
most important, however, is that John’s unconscious, far from being natural, is



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      also colonized by the sensations experienced in the feelies. Smell, persistent in
      the feelies as in memory, is an integral part of this process of conquest.
        In conclusion, what do feelies tell us about the identity of yesterdays and
      todays media technologies? From the epistemological analysis of the imaginary
      dispositive, considered in its mechanical, representational, and experiential
      components, we can find various analogies with the contemporary processes
      which characterize the new media cultural horizon. Firstly, the feelies deal with
      a machine which absorbs its user by embracing all his or her senses; secondly,
      the feelies exhibit a narrative content whose main goal is more related to the
      production of “pure sensation” than to intellectual comprehension, reproducing
      a representational model which can be found in the “cinema of attraction”
      paradigm of early movies and vaudeville spectacles as well as in the ideological
      goals of classical Hollywood cinema entertainment; finally, exactly for the
      reasons reported before, the feelies communicate directly to the spectator’s
      unconscious and express its content in the form of a technological dream. All
      these processes pass through the conquest of the sensory fields which are
      more elusive to the process of recording and mediatization, and especially
      the sense of smell, historically and culturally considered as the unconscious
      sense par excellence. The analysis of an imaginary medium of the past then can
      function as a model to comprehend real media of today, especially immersive
      experiences such us virtual reality, whose vocation to absorb the user involving
      her or his whole sensorium can be thought of as the last technological attempt
      to colonize and exteriorize the deepest areas of human subjectivity.




100                                                  Grossi, Epistemology of the Feelies
Notes
 1
      This article was written in the framework of the research project “AN-ICON. An-Iconology: History,
Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images”. The project has received funding from the European
Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
(grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON), and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti”
at the University of Milan (Project “Department of Excellence 2023–2027” awarded by the Italian Ministry of
University and Research).
   2
     The difference between episteme and dispositive is clarified by Foucault himself: “Maintenant, ce que je
voudrais faire, c’est essayer de montrer que ce que j’appelle dispositif est un cas beaucoup plus général de
l'épistémè. Ou plutôt que l'épistémè, c’est un dispositif spécifiquement discursif, à la différence du dispositif
qui est, lui, discursif et non discursif, ses éléments étant beaucoup plus hétérogènes” (Foucault, 1977, 88).
   3
     For an epistemological survey of this dispositive, see Grespi and Violi 2019.
   4
     Presented, not without reason, as ‘the cinema of the future’: see Heilig 1955, 1992.
   5
     On the relationships between virtual reality and post-cinematic episteme, see Casetti and Pinotti 2020.
   6
     Not far from the Boulevard des Capucines where L’arrivée d’un train à la gare de La Ciotat by Auguste
and Louis Lumière was screened on 28 December 1895.
   7
     For a survey of the aesthetic debate concerning the meaning of music and its connection to expressiveness,
see Kivy 2002.
   8
      “Scents, like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain definite degrees. There is, as it
were, an octave of odours like an octave in music; certain odours coincide, like the keys of an instrument.
Such as almond, heliotrope, vanilla, and orange-blossoms blend together, each producing different degrees
of a nearly similar impression. Again, we have citron, lemon, orange-peel, and verbena, forming a higher
octave of smells, which blend in a similar manner. The metaphor is completed by what we are pleased to
call semi-odors, such as rose and rose geranium for the half note; petty grain, neroli, a black key, followed
by fleur d'orange. Then we have patchouli, sandal-wood, and vitivert [sic., ed.], and many others running into
each other”. See Piesse, 1867, 38–39.
   9
     On the mediality of the scent, see Perras and Wicky 2022.
   10
       For a complete survey on the relationship between early cinema and attraction see also Strauven 2006
and Gaudreault 2011.
   11
       See Benjamin 2006.
   12
       For more on the role of olfaction in Freud’s work and the subsequent history of psychoanalysis, see
LeGuerèr 2001. Hediger and Schneider also note how “as we all know, psychoanalysis and cinema were
invented at about the same time, a historical coincidence that has given rise to much theorising in the
field of film studies. The fact that the invention of cinema runs roughly parallel with the de-odorization of
public space and with the introduction of artificially produced fragrances has so far been given rather less
thought”, Hediger and Schneider, 2005, 245.




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