Byung-Chul Han posits that “narration lets time emit a scent.” He is writing of scent because he is writing of Proust, who poses the image of a ‘fragrant crystal of time’ in Time Regained.1 “In crystalline sealed vessels,” Proust writes, “each one of them filled with things of a colour, a scent, and a temperature that are absolutely different one from another,” this vase full of scents (un vase rempli de parfums) instills in us a feeling of duration. Sensations and memories return in a “crystal of time which is a duration, one which is outside of the past as well as the present,” writes Han.2 This is an extra-temporal experience (“nothing in it elapses or is subject to temporal disintegration”) but one that is not, however, timeless nor transcendent. Rather, it is an immanent experience of time. And this immanent experience, this duration, Han imagines, is what “releases the scent of time.”
∞
What is this conflation of scent and time? We know that scent is a powerful, immediate and enduring sense, flooding us via our most ancient neural circuits and olfactory bulbs. Because “the nose must process smells one-at-a-time, the ability to recall odors in sequence gave mammals the skills necessary in their nightly foraging for food.” 3 As opposed to the all-at-once sense of sight, scent became a mechanism of mapping for the mammalian cerebral cortex to remember the past; scent was the impetus for the invention of sequence. Scent gave humans an axis of time. Scent is also one of our most enduring senses. Han describes this endurance as “taste (le goût) and smell (l*’*odeur) surviv[ing] the demise of the personage and the decline of objects.”4 I think here of my father with Alzheimer’s, humming out loud as he ate strawberries without knowing his own name. Taste and scent are “islands of duration within the current of time that takes everything with it.”5
Artificial flowers do not possess a scent. No oils evaporate from their surfaces or waft into the air with a particular purpose. Their petroleum-based origins are synthetically molded and formed and even if they were to be set afire and their volatile organic compounds released, their scent would not resemble a biological flower’s redolence; their mimesis is entirely visual. Biological flowers release their scent both as defense mechanisms, and mechanisms to attract pollinators and seed dispersers. Floral scents emit VOCs as well; the scent of a rose alone contains over 400. They contain terpenoids, phenylpropanoids/ benzenoids, fatty acid derivatives, and amino acid derivatives. This in no way reduces their charm. Evolutionarily, we are drawn to them as an adaptation—we associate pleasant scents with potential food sources. What scent-less plastic flowers offer us is aesthetic verisimilitude, from a distance. So we make our trades: visual pleasure and presumed infinity in exchange for the processes of decay—the intoxicating scent of life seeking to extend life.
∞
We do know that eventually artificial plants will break down into carbon and hydrogen. And as they do so, over millennia, they will release all the other harmful additives inside of them, which are now also inside of us. Carbon and hydrogen are made from the decomposition and compression of ancient organic matter—fossil fuels are made from the compression of vegetal life. But we are in no way creating a cycle of decay and renewal. When we return to try to extract and to fuel and to dream the infinite dream all over again, what will we find? What will this “confused pile” yield? The dump, as philosopher Michael Marder describes it, is “fragmented, shredded, dismembered, disjointed, atomized, analyzed, but not decomposed…” 6 Slowness of decomposition is a hallmark of the dump, because dumps are compacted anaerobic environments without oxygen or sunlight that make biodegradation possible. But over the years rainwater seeps in and some degradation occurs, and this produces methane, which, if not captured, contributes to climate change, and leachate (liquid waste) which demands encapsulation in plastic liners.
But typically, decomposition is slow in a dump. Excavations of landfills have uncovered newspapers “still legible after 40 years, 25-.year-old heads of lettuce in near pristine condition, and decades of old packs of hot dogs ready for the grill.” 7 We may toss millions of bouquets of artificial flowers into the pile.
∞
Artificial flowers in 2026 are a billion-stem bouquet pollinated by our insistence on infinity as the base and basis of our lives. We are the inheritors of a Western orientation, a ‘theoretical attitude’ based on Greek mathematics, whereupon infinity “cannot be given, actual; it can only be ad infinitum. It is only aimed at; it is indeed the pure form of a telos.”8 This infinitizing attitude, this aim to have aims, always idealizing and infinitizing that which we value with a ‘natural attitude’ (flowers, for example) comes at a cost. A flower becomes a flower that can be reproduced ad infinitum, exactly the same: a unit. Heidegger warns us of this mathematical idea of linear infinity—the und so weiter—which dominates our cultural mode of existence. This linear infinity idealizes by imagining the same thing repeating ad infinitum, as a unit, rushing forward in time, relying on a hypothetical notion of self-sameness to carry it forth. This is uniquely congruent with a capitalist trajectory. The risk in this infinite calculation of equivalences is nihilism; Heidegger describes it as the “incurable disquietude” of the absence of finalities.9 Plastic flowers are physical manifestations of our “theoretical attitude” and of our refusal of finitude. They paradoxically embody both the promise of infinite duration and no duration at all, in that they bear no scent that time can release to us.10
Like Proust’s fragrant crystals of time, artificial flowers are trying to get us ‘outside of time’—but the effort here is to stop the passage of time and to be able to look at time suspended: artificial flowers’ mimesis of stamen and pistil offers us pure scopophilic (and vaguely pornographic) pleasure.11 Unlike the experience of immanence in Proust’s writings, his foxgloves and sweet violets, bell heather and cattleyas, whose fragrances hover, their intermittence and fragility intimating relations and moments—artificial flowers instead attempt to produce a timeless transcendence, a forever flower, infinite priapism. Their production and effects are based on its presumed infinity, and yet also, like all late-stage capitalist products, an infinite replaceability.
But artificial flowers are not infinite. They are not outside of time. They are made of petroleum products; they are synthetic and as such, many, if recycled, will cause more harm than if left to slowly leach out their chemicals in the ‘soil’ of a landfill. Like other products in a dump, they do not follow a natural lifespan. Their time scales are epochal. Marder writes: “They are made of stuff that refuses to be unmade and [the dump] add[s] on more of the same: polyethylene and depleted uranium, cryopreserved corpses and the ideals of immortality…” 12 Both in the shadow of climate change, and from beneath the stagnant mass of the dump—artificial flowers continue to hold out their most vibrant paradox and promise to us: we do not have to keep them alive. They persist without the need for care.
If beauty is owed to duration, as Han argues, then the question is worth posing: why do we not consider artificial flowers, whose lives extend over thousands of years, ultimately beautiful? We must again return to the temporal paradox they offer us: infinite duration (which we now understand as fallacy) versus no duration at all, in that they produce a time that is without scent. In artificial flowers, both scent and senescence are non-existent; artificial flowers are “the un-dead.”13
∞
In Deathbound Subjectivity, Alfonso Lingis elucidates Heidegger’s thought that authentic existence has “a structure, determination, and an internal unity, by which it holds together of itself.”14 Heidegger’s word—Eigentlichkeit—“is this production of time that is one’s own.” An authentic existence is an effort to hold one’s time, to create a time of one’s own that allows the bounds of finitude to give it shape and intention. When we remove death from the equation, and the cycles of decay and regeneration that biological life engenders, and when we remove “the mortality of authentic time, in opposition to the mathematical idea of infinite time”, we are launched, as Heidegger says, “not into the pursuit of the ideal but an interminable wandering in the dimension whence nothing comes and nothing is promised.”15
Han takes the thought of Heidegger’s ‘incurable disquietude’ and ‘interminable wandering’ into atomic time. He describes our age as one of points: atomized points of time that leave gaps and voids. As acceleration offers us seductive speed which appears to give us a purpose, a telos, Han protests that this movement “turns out to be a nervous restlessness which makes life whizz, so to speak; it hurtles from one possibility to the next.”16 This whizzing of time from point to point is pure purposiveness, an aim to have aims, and although this movement gives us purpose and hence perhaps comfort in that—it either trammels over time as if it were a track, or in Han’s metaphor, whizzes from point to point with no clear path. Echoing Proust, Han calls the age of haste a ‘cinematographic’ age, one that is to a large extent, shaped by the visual. Such an age accelerates the world into a “‘cinematographic film of…things.’ Time disintegrates into a mere sequence of moments.”17 Proust called point-like presences ‘incoherent.’ Han also rebels against point-time, our whizzing from boredom to accelerationism and back.
In the face of this wandering and whizzing, Han proposes a form; he suggests that it is narration that lets time emit a scent. He uses narration as a form which can hold together a temporal unity and slow time down, staving off the anxiety in relentless haste. I put forth that other forms of presence, even ones that may not employ narrative in a traditional sense, may still produce a time that holds together. Is this not the work that art takes unto itself, densifying time, holding it together?
Writing about the dump, Marder calls it a heap that “has no logos: it is without articulations in the double entendre of a vocal expression and spatial jointure at the hinges. Nothing can come out of it, not even compost.”18 Marder calls out the atemporality of this shredded heap: “the dump, for its part, is atemporal, untimely and untimed, despite its vast historical range, jutting peaks, and low-lying valleys. It is aporetic: there are no passages in it, no way through it, no breathable pores, no becoming, no transitioning…” 19 There is no narration in a dump; no logos:“[t]he dump wipes out narratives and events, stages and sequences.” 20 As Marder transitions to “intellectual heaps” (a kind of sensory dump of the mind), he highlights where Kant diverges from Platonic discernment and its separations, suggesting that instead “[t]he principle that could bind the sensory heap together is a synthetic rule of combination (Verbindung).” 21 In the face of shredded life, we attempt to bind or hold together. This binding and holding of time comes through synthesis. And art is, or can be, in practice, this active and affective synthesis par excellence—in ‘whatever form’—just as Proust’s writing of involuntary memories acts in narrative form. An artwork cannot hold everything, of course, as everything being interconnected “is lethal to imagination”22 (and in some ways resembles the dump). But against the contemporary whizzing of time, art is a means to hold time together, to give it duration, and, perhaps— in doing so, to let time emit its scent. Like Proust’s fragrant crystals of time, little packets inflated with the breath of the lives that surrounded him.
∞
Deleuze offers us another form of thinking time and cinema: instead of mere sequence—a complexification of time, in another crystal— “What we see through…the crystal is time, in its double movement of making presents pass, replacing one by the next while going towards the future, but also of preserving all the past, dropping it into an obscure depth.”23 In Deleuze’s crystal, time can move in many directions and at many speeds, uniting “an actual image with recollection-images, dream-images and world-images.” The crystal-image becomes the smallest circuit; as he explains: “[i]f we take this direction to its limit, we can say that the actual image itself has a virtual image which corresponds to it like a double or a reflection.” 24 For Deleuze, the crystal becomes the hardened “coalescence of the actual image and the virtual image, the image with two sides, actual and virtual at the same time.” 25 This crystalline fusing of past and present time, virtual and actual, whose power rests in both unification and refraction—this power is given to cinema in Deleuze via the ‘crystal-image.’
What would a crystal-image show us of artificial flowers 26? What time would it condense and refract? A monotony of past-presents with only microscopic changes; a future of dilatory photo-oxidation, thermal degradation, and physical fragmentation—scent-less, hardened to point time? But in its crystal-image, this actual would be fused with its virtual image—memories of flowers, reveries of inhaling the heavy scent of stock in a field or lilies at a funeral, infused with the scent of film stock, cellulose acetate, or nitrate, with developers, fixers, and gelatin emulsions carrying their vinegary, sweet-metallic odors backwards and forwards through time, via scent-less digital technologies, to us.
Notes:
1 Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VI: Time Regained. Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 1992. Modern Library, 1993 (Proust III 903)
2 Han, Byung-Chul. The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay On the Art of Lingering.
Translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2017.
3 Schlain, Leonard. Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light. William
Morrow & Co, 1991.
4 Han, Byung-Chul. The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering.
Translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2017.
5 Ibid.
6 Marder, Michael. Dump Philosophy: A Phenomenology of Devastation. Bloomsbury
Academic, London, New York, 2021.
7 https://highcountryconservation.org/ask-eartha-why-we-dont-want-our-trash-to-break-down-in-the-landfill/
8 Lingis, Alfonso. Deathbound Subjectivity. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989.
9 Schoen, Kim. “The Expansion of the Instant: Photography, Anxiety, Infinity,” X-TRA
Contemporary Art Quarterly, Summer 2014, Volume 16, Number 4.
10 Unless they are burned. It is also interesting to think about their scent as the scent of the dump—whereupon, due to decomposition and anaerobic conditions, the scent of non-
time is released, composed of hydrogen sulfide, dimethyl sulfide, mercaptans, and methane.
11 In his book “Dump Philosophy” Michael Marder describes the prioritization of vision in Western thought, in the “ocular relation [as] a prototype for Platonic ideas (eídō = “I see”) and for Aristotelian theōria, “divine vision.” Although in this instance we may say that it is vision without noēsis, without understanding.
12 Marder, Michael. Dump Philosophy: A Phenomenology of Devastation. Bloomsbury Academic, London, New York, 2021.
13 Marder, Michael. A Bouquet of Eternal Decay, in How To Digest An Eternity, Los Angeles, 2025.
14 Lingis, Alfonso. Deathbound Subjectivity. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989.
15 Ibid.
16 Han, Byung-Chul. The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay On the Art of Lingering.
Translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2017.
17 Ibid.
18 Marder, Michael. Dump Philosophy: A Phenomenology of Devastation. Bloomsbury Academic, London, New York, 2021.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Caleta. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, fifth printing, 1997. First published as Cinéma 2, L’Image-temps. Copyright © 1985 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 These simulacra have proliferated across the globe ina strong growth phase: predicted to be worth 2.1 billion dollars by 2030. Because the oil and gas industry predicts a shift away from fossil fuels, they are creating demand and amping up the production of petrochemical products to compensate. Demand for plastics—the most familiar group of petrochemical products—has now outpaced that of all other bulk materials (such as steel, aluminum or cement), and has nearly doubled since 2000. The growth in demand for petrochemical products means that petrochemicals are set to account for over a third of the growth in oil demand to 2030, and nearly half to 2050, ahead of trucks, aviation, and shipping.
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