[Reader-list] The Little Talked-About Pleasures of Smoking

[Rana Dasgupta]

A recent essay.  Gift economy, human/industrial time, smoking.

R


THE LITTLE TALKED-ABOUT PLEASURES OF SMOKING

Prospects for smokers are definitely getting worse.

In the UK, Alan Milburn has promised to put diagrams of tar-infested lungs
and choking hearts on cigarette packets, a spiteful gesture which will
almost certainly adversely affect the pleasures of smoking.  He’s one of a
number of health ministers who are currently conspiring in Brussels to stalk
poor, defenceless tobacco lovers all across the continent and turn them into
paranoid, hollow-eyed outcasts.  Mayor Bloomberg has banned smoking in
public places in New York City, and raised the cost of smokes so high that
many formerly valiant fumeurs are having to admit defeat – or (ignoble
fate!) slink away to the hazy ghettos of expat Manhattanite smokers in New
Jersey.  When the history of the clan is written, these will be the Dark
Ages.

Let's face it: opposing smoking makes good political sense.  To take a stand
against smoking is to take a stand against Death – for a third of the people
dying in the UK today would of course not die if there were no cigarettes –
and that can only be a popular political platform.  If your health service
happens to be falling apart at the seams it is also useful to be able to
share the blame with an army of anti-social addicts who asphyxiate
themselves and everyone around them into a range of disgusting and very
expensive diseases – and to get them to help you pay for the mess.
Moreover, this morality play is unusual in our complex society for having
very few ambiguities – large and irredeemably evil corporations are pitted
against innocent children – and at a time when people are so cynical of the
moral credentials of public figures, a politician would be a fool to turn
down the part of dragon slayer.

It is possibly as a result of such political exigencies that public
discussion about smoking is so narrow.  It is, we all know, an indisputable
evil of modern society: a conspiracy of the cigarette giants, who trick
people into their pharmacological trap with large-scale propaganda; and an
addiction of insufficiently informed people, who smoke and spend themselves
into early graves at great cost to society.  Such an evil can invite only
elimination, and if this is a complete description of its working then it is
clear what has to be done: close down the propaganda machine and wake the
people up from the deceptions into which they have been thrown by telling
them the true nature of their habit.  When the right cocktail of such
measures is hit upon it should be possible to enlighten every sector of the
population, and the epidemic should disappear in a puff of nicotine-free
smoke, leaving behind a clean society.

Actually, it hasn’t happened like that.  The number of smokers in the UK has
remained more or less constant for the last decade, hovering just under 30%.
Since this period has seen a significant rise in the prominence of health
warnings, particularly in schools and colleges, we might suspect that there
is a large core of people who will not be deterred from smoking by the
knowledge that their hearts might seize up or their lungs turn into a
useless tumorous mess.  There is of course a simple explanation for this:
any attempt to discredit or repress a sensual phenomenon in society gives
that phenomenon still greater libidinal charge, thereby creating its
clientele.  Attempts to eliminate smoking by telling people about its
dangers are thus inherently flawed, for while many will thereby be deterred
from their habit, others will be reinforced in it.  Much as government might
like it to be, the whole truth of human life is not a search for
cleanliness, health and rationality.

But perhaps it's also worth taking the whole phenomenon more seriously (as
well as light-heartedly!) and refusing to see smokers merely as brainless
victims, smoking because they are ravaged by addiction and do not know any
better.  Maybe smokerdom is a lifestyle choice that has a completely
separate logic from the familiar one touted by health ministers, a logic
that is active and self-conscious rather than passive and coerced, a logic
that inhabits a different space from that of health warnings and "Pop stars
say no!" campaigns.

Smoking presents at least two kinds of counterpoint to modern society that
guarantee, I think, that it will always find adherents.  This is the terrain
into which the discussion never seems to go.

The first has to do with the gift economy of the smoker community.  Though
the rising prices of cigarettes might still put an end to this, they are in
general subject to a completely different set of rules to pretty much any
other commodity.  We can easily imagine a banker approaching a truck driver
in a railway station for a cigarette, imagine the driver obliging with no
expectation of anything in return, imagine them talking together over the
microritual, before stubbing out and going their separate ways.  But it is
difficult to think of anything else that one of those two people could ask
the other for without inviting suspicion ("Would you mind terribly if I had
a few bites of your sandwich...?").  The community of smokers is one in
which cigarettes and lights are freely, even warmly, given ("Take one for
the road"), and in which perfect strangers are willing to share a moment of
bodily experience and a few words.

This is actually rather strange.  Our society might be a better one if such
bonhomie were not wasted on a practice so unnecessary to life as smoking,
and extended to more essential things such as money and food and lodging,
but in such areas most of us are strictly observant of the principle of
self-sufficiency.  The image of the traveller who arrives late at night in a
town and avails himself of the rules of hospitality to procure dinner and a
bed at some stranger's expense is only, to us, a fairytale – or perhaps an
exotic travel story from some endearingly backward foreign place.  As far as
such basics are concerned, other people's needs place us under no
obligation – or, at least, these obligations have been successfully
subcontracted to the state through taxation.  The smoking community,
however, is quick to take care of the needs of anybody who is caught
without, and cigarettes circulate between people freely and across social
lines.  Insofar as it is pleasurable to relate to other human beings in the
simplicity of being human, independently of any other qualification, insofar
as it is meaningful to congregate around rituals of sensuality, it is easy
to see why smokers might wish to retain their links to this social network,
since all other such networks seem to have been destroyed.

Of course, one obvious reason why it might have been possible to sustain
such rules among the smoking community is that a cigarette is a minimal
currency that can be given with almost no sacrifice of time or money, and
without any breach to the ramparts of personal space that are so important
to modern people.  In every sense, it costs little to give a cigarette, so
the gift economy of smoking can sit fairly comfortably alongside the much
more closed-handed system of the rest of life.  But there is another reason
why smoking can remain separate from such a system, and this is the second
point I want to make: the possibility that it offers of holding onto a
different kind of time.

When we discount all the millions of cigarettes that are smoked over a
laptop, all the ones smoked to cope with the pressure of tomorrow's
deadline, we are still left with millions more that are smoked in a sidestep
from the rush of time.  The timeline of contemporary lives is often
unforgiving, and many people smoke in order to create moments of reflection
and stasis: when somebody takes a break from reading to reflect on the
knowledge that has entered them, and to smoke a cigarette, which allows them
a physical sense of "taking in"; when a smoker comes out of an airport and
tries to ascertain her feelings in this new place with the aid of a ritual
that focuses her on inner sensations...  Smoking, like various kinds of
meditation, concentrates the mind on breathing and thus on a personal rhythm
of time, separate from the hurry of the world.

There are other ways of doing this, you might say.  But what is interesting
is that cigarettes have come to enjoy a certain institutional approval for
this "grounding" role that they play in people’s lives: for in these days of
smoke-free offices has the "cigarette break" not become a staple of
corporate culture?  It is difficult to imagine a group of people leaving the
office several times a day saying that they wanted to share a packet of
M&Ms, or do five minutes' yoga.  But cigarettes seem to be a legitimate
vehicle for people to retreat from the intensity of workplace time and
gather themselves up for a moment, to speak to colleagues as fellow human
beings rather than as bosses or subordinates – so much so that often these
little outings are accompanied by non-smokers who do not themselves have any
such legitimate way of creating mindspace outside the office.

Of course, once again, cigarettes can play this role partly because they
represent such a minimal interruption to everything else – infrequent
five-minute breaks that make people happier and possibly more productive,
and that can exist more or less invisibly within the otherwise ordered and
onward logic of the workplace.  But this is not to say that the oases of
personal time that they represent are insignificant within the economy of
individuals' days.

None of this is supposed to be a defence of cigarette smoking.  It's just an
illustration of how crude the logic of the Health Minister is in comparison
to the phenomenon it is supposed to manage.  This is one of the serious
problems we face today: the ubiquity of a language of management which fails
to capture most of the human dimensions of things, and relates only
obliquely to the way in which they are actually lived.  At the present
moment in time it's not difficult to see what extremes such a tendency can
take us to.

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Rana Dasgupta
www.ranadasgupta.com
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