Abstract
Geography has in the last two decades showed an increasing interest in smoking and while mainly within the purview of health geographies, some have also utilised Foucauldian concepts of ‘governmentality’ and Goffman’s notion of ‘stigma’ to study smoking’s spatial exclusion and purification of public spaces. More recently, cultural geographers have started to investigate the more embodied, sensory as well as affective elements of smoking. Notwithstanding recent developments, the temporalities of smoking have largely remained unaccounted for, while the more-than-human in smoking has received little sustained attention. This article aims to fill this gap and in doing so intervenes in this body of critical work by developing a framework that can account for the pharmacological and habitual affordances of smoking, without descending into the pathologisation of smoking bodies that has characterised a public health focus on the addictive qualities of nicotine. To develop this framework, the article brings theories of the more-than-human into dialogue with rhythmanalysis, in order to examine the messy human–nonhuman ties through which everyday rhythms of smoking are enacted, embodied and performed. By focusing on the spatio-temporal patterns of two nonhuman elements, nicotine and the cigarette, the aim is to dislodge the human body from the centre of analysis. This conceptual more-than-human rethinking of smoking offers a means to account for the agency and affects of nonhumans in relation to smoking, and addiction more broadly, without slipping back into deterministic, public health understandings of the body.
In the early nineties, the literary scholar Richard Klein began writing a book as a strategy to stop smoking in the hope that by the time he finished, he would have overcome the desire to light up.
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In charting these experiences, he wrote, The moment of taking a cigarette allows one to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience, a space and time of heightened attention that gives rise to a feeling of transcendence evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, cinder connecting hands, lungs, breath, and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives, however slightly, and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself.
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By the time Klein’s book was published, this romanticised view of smoking was not shared by the medical profession. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, carcinogens such as tar and carbon monoxide were isolated as the harmful components of cigarette smoke, while nicotine, although not directly unsafe, was construed as the main addictive substance. The consequence of this politico-epistemological shift was that dominant health discourses re-configured the smoker as passive and determined their agency locked within a Pavlovian condition of submissive yearning and satisfaction. By the end of the decade, as the medical historian Allan Brandt concluded, the cigarette itself had been transformed ‘from an object of pleasure, consumption, autonomy and attraction to a symbol of personal disregard for health, addiction and weakness’. 3 The smoker became identified as the quintessential polluter of space and squanderer of time.
Against this limiting and deterministic account of smoking-as-pathology, geographers and other scholars in the social sciences and humanities have, by means of phenomenology, critical discourse analysis and ethnography, offered more nuanced and sympathetic understandings as a riposte. Although productive and successful in dismantling reductionist public health narratives, these accounts tend to avoid engaging with pharmacology, that is, the particular workings, actions and effects of drugs. This article argues that developing a more-than-human understanding of smoking is important precisely because it is able to navigate between the two, by incorporating the pharmacology of nicotine without having to figure the smoker as passive and determined.
In doing so, I take a closer look at those parentheses Klein describes, this confluence of space and time, the meeting between human and nonhuman: the body, hand, lungs and the ash, smoke and fire. Concomitantly, I consider issues of agency navigating between the human and nonhuman without romanticisation or recrimination. This article, therefore, addresses the gap between public health discourses of smoking and some of its critics that variously (through concepts such as habit and embodiment) seek to problematise, if not re-claim entirely, agency on part of the smoker.
Although relatively new to the study of smoking I suggest that geography, and cultural geography specifically, with its strong tradition of attending to the spatio-temporal and the more-than-human, is uniquely placed to address these issues. Accordingly this article, which brings theories of the more-than-human into dialogue with rhythmanalysis, offers a framework to explicate the messy human–nonhuman ties through which everyday rhythms of smoking are enacted, embodied and performed. By focusing on the spatio-temporal patterns of two nonhuman elements, nicotine and the cigarette, the aim is to dislodge the human body, that is to say the smoker, from the centre of analysis. This conceptual more-than-human rethinking of smoking is developed by bringing together existing literature on smoking from sociology, geography, history and the biomedical sciences, while methodologically, this article draws on Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythmanalysis, which is employed as a form of attunement to account for and trace these more-than-human agencies.
This article is divided into three parts. The first provides a conceptual framework by outlining the more-than-human and its relation to rhythmanalysis. Like any other habit, smoking is performed through settled and regular repetition that takes shape as a distinct pattern of rhythms. In the second part, I situate the debate around smoking, agency and addiction within geography and beyond before, finally, discussing the socio-material rhythms of two nonhumans that are politically and epistemologically fundamental to smoking: nicotine and the tobacco cigarette. These two elements, I argue, offer potent routes into casting sightlines, if only partial, onto smoking as a more-than-human affair. In short, I suggest that accounting for the nonhuman does not necessarily reinforce the public health image of the smoker as a passive non-agent but instead offers the potential to expand our understanding of smoking agency. Put simply, I offer a provocation to think smoking differently.
A more-than-human rhythmanalysis
Across the social sciences and humanities in disciplines such as philosophy, sociology and animal studies, there has in recent decades been a move against the humanist tradition of anthropocentrism and its concomitant understandings of agency. Theories like post-humanism, actor-network-theory (ANT), assemblage theory and vitalism, while rooted in multiple and often jarring philosophical positions, share a commitment against human exceptionalism. Instead, they favour complex ‘networks’, ‘assemblages’, ‘hybrids’ and ‘cyborgs’ and concepts such as ‘thing-power’ or ‘entanglement’, wherein being becomes becoming or better yet becoming-with. 4
Geography’s own contribution to these debates is perhaps best represented by Sarah Whatmore’s work on hybrid geographies,
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and the resultant more-than-human ‘turn’ has in the last two decades achieved widespread purchase. It has prompted geographers to rethink and move beyond the ontological hygiene of humanism rooted in dualistic modes of thinking where a politics of purity imposes divisions between humans and nonhumans, subjects and objects, natures and cultures. Instead, by amplifying the intimate, sensible, and hectic bonds through which people and plants; devices and creatures; documents and elements take and hold their shape in relation to each other in the fabric-ations of everyday life’, the more-than-human emphasises the ‘messy heterogeneity of being-in-the world.
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Whatmore is not alone in calling for a ‘return’
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to these material entanglements, but reflects a longer tradition in cultural geography, which has of late witnessed a renewed and productively diverse debate on the importance of matter and materialism.
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The preference for Whatmore’s more-than-human over other approaches, and perhaps the more widely used, post-human is that in the very first demotic sense of the word, the more-than-human offers a strong semantic advantage in that it connotes clearly, a trans-historical aim not to forego the Anthropos completely but to pay closer attention to what exceeds it, the more-than, rather than what comes after, the post.
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According to Whatmore, more-than-human modes of enquiry thus neither presume that socio-material change is an exclusively human achievement nor exclude the ‘human’ from the stuff of fabrication … Such modes of enquiry attend closely to the rich array of senses, dispositions, capabilities and potentialities of all manner of social objects and forces assembled through, and involved in, the co-fabrication of socio-material worlds.
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It is then within cultural geography’s tradition of re-materialising space, time and the body that smoking is understood as an assemblage that comprises a messy alignment of technological, cultural and natural entities and materialities that extend beyond, but do not exclude, the human body. While rooted in, among others, Deleuzeguattarian biophilosophy, the more-than-human is not reducible to it and should be understood as a more overarching approach to thinking geography. 11 Notwithstanding, with assemblage thinking becoming more prevalent in the geographer’s toolkit, 12 it is crucial to recognise that the concept of assemblage, rooted in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘agencement’, 13 offers more than just describing a ‘collection of things’ but pulls together two distinct ideas: ‘the idea of a “layout” or a “coming together” of disparate elements, and the idea of “agency” or the capacity to produce an effect’. 14 Importantly, this means that agency is not synonymous with volition or intentionality, nor is it a property exclusive and innate to humans, but is rather a result of creative and symbiotic attachments between humans and nonhumans with their spatio-temporal patterns and environments. Agency is thus understood as distributed – it is a relational effect of a cluttered socio-material gathering – and it is this hodgepodge which gets things done, not subjects or objects in isolation.
Without any one defined set of techniques, studying the more-than-human can pose a challenge for methodologies that have traditionally placed the human at the centre of analysis. However, as Dowling et al. have commented, a range of conventional qualitative and more experimental methodological strategies have recently been deployed by geographers to enable ‘forms of noticing or paying attention’ which make the more-than-human knowable. 15
It is at this point that Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on rhythm and rhythmanalysis can provide one such strategy to trace more-than-human agencies, by accounting for the nuanced and complex ways through which everyday rhythms of smoking fold bodies, spaces, times, humans and nonhumans. Taking as its starting point, the dictum, ‘Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’, 16 one of Lefebvre’s main contributions was to demonstrate that everyday life is continuously assembled through a patchwork of different rhythmic intensities as the body comes into contact with wider and more abstract structures of production, consumption, transport and so on.
Although Lefebvre’s work on rhythmanalysis precedes the more-than-human tradition, a sense of this more-than-human excess can nonetheless be traced in his writings. As Spinney has commented, the recent re-materialisation of cultural geography and the importance it puts on the netting of human and nonhuman bodies lies at the core of Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis. 17 For Lefebvre, rhythm is not limited to the social or even the human as he often pays heed to myriad nonhuman rhythms, of ‘trees, flowers, birds and insects’, to the ‘the apparent immobility that contains one thousand and one movements’, 18 all of which come together to form a polyrhythmia with their surroundings. Certain natural forces only appear mute because they ‘slow in relation to our time, to our body, the measure of rhythms’. 19 The body is Lefebvre’s example par excellence of layered, relational polyrhythmia; the body is at once a ‘bundle’, ‘garland’, ‘bouquet’ of rhythms, 20 of ‘respiration … hunger and thirst etc.’, 21 of ‘the heart, the kidneys etc.’, 22 ‘each organ, each function, having its own’. 23 The body is also enmeshed in its environs, which ‘be they in nature or a social setting, are also bundles, bouquets, garlands of rhythms’. 24
In fact the body, acting as a sort of multi-sensory metronome, is Lefebvre’s main offering towards a specific methodology: ‘[the rhytmanalyst] thinks with his [sic] body not in the abstract, but in lived temporality’, 25 or, ‘to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it’. 26 And while Lefebvre asks us to complement this with ‘data from all the sciences: psychology, sociology, ethnology, biology; and even physics and mathematics’, urging us to recognise rhythmic representations ‘by their curves, phases, periods and recurrences’, 27 his own attempts at rhythmanalysis either, as ‘seen from the window’ of his apartment on the Rue Rambuteau, or the ‘attempt’ with Catherine Régulier on ‘Mediterranean Cities’ a few years earlier rest, for the most part, on impressionistic phenomenology. They might as such come across as somewhat ‘disappointing’ or ‘at odds’ with his otherwise detailed attention to the body and its sensory deployment. 28
Regardless, Ben Highmore suggests that the analytic potential of rhythmanalysis does not stem from a clearly defined set of methods, but is rooted in attunement – a proclivity or an ‘orientation towards the multiple rhythms of modernity; the various speeds of circulation, the different spacings of movement, and the varied directions of flows’. 29 Drawing on a series of photographs and social commentaries on everyday life in 19th-century London, Highmore demonstrates that this rhythmanalytical attunement need not rest solely on our own phenomenological experiences, or forms of direct ethnographic immersion. 30 Such an understanding helps resolve the potential tensions that might arise from Lefebvre’s epistemological emphasis on the rhythmanalyst’s body and the more-than-human push to go beyond it. Therefore, while the author of this article is a smoker, the methodological onus is not placed on my own body (at least not explicitly or directly), but pulls together literary and historic accounts of smoking, as well as sociological work and biomedical research to arrive at that least possible separation of, in Lefebvre’s terms, ‘the scientific from the poetic’. 31
This methodological indefinability, although potentially frustrating, has not discouraged scholars across the humanities and the social sciences, and there has been no shortage of attempts to do rhythmanalysis. Lefebvre’s openness to the nonhuman specifically has readily been recognised by social and cultural geographers, 32 and rhythmanalysis has already been employed to explore the ways by which rhythms of a ‘couch tour’, ‘horse riding’, ‘street performance’ and ‘tides’ to name a few. 33 These accounts weave together the social and material fabric of the world and fold bodies, spaces, humans, natures and technologies into messy and cacophonous more-than-human polyrhythmic assemblages. Employing a more-than-human rhythmanalysis to smoking thus seeks to reposition the literature on smoking away from the centrality of the human body and instead, smoke out the ‘masses’ that remain ‘missing’. 34
Yet it is not simply enough, as Toila-Kelly suggested, to describe or map out these material geographies, lest we lose ‘connection with the theoretical underpinnings, and indeed the political context’, ending up with what is, in short, a ‘surface geography’, a ‘collage of materials observed, not felt’, devoid of any ‘reflection, critique, engagement of evaluation’. 35 The intention is then not only to foreground smoking as more-than-human affair (because it always already is) but, rather, to flesh out the political and epistemological consequences of such a rethinking. Consequently, while there is a multitude of more-than-human elements, within and outwith the body that coalesce into the smoking assemblage such as lighters, holders, aesthetics, imagery and cultural politics, smells, sounds, desires, anxieties and so on (all of which could be said to have rhythmic materialities in their own right) rather than merely sketching out this multiplicity, this article instead hones in on two specific nonhuman components which present us with the most potent way of offering an alternative account of smoking: nicotine and the cigarette. Nicotine has since the 1990s held a central role in driving public health policy, at the same time reconfiguring the ontology of the smoker as disembodied, passive and ultimately out of control, while the cigarette has, since its introduction in the late 19th century, been instrumental in affecting the spacings and timings of smoking, and thus the material constitution of those who smoke.
In short, focusing on the rhythms of nicotine and the cigarette as physical objects suggests that ideas of embodiment and habit often fall short of accounting for the more-than-human nature of smoking, at the same time providing a way to enrol the pharmacological rhythms of nicotine without having to subscribe to dominant, medical discourses of addiction.
Out of place, out of time: the everyday rhythms of smoking
Smoking has generated an abundant literature outside the realm of biomedicine and public health studies. Apart from many social and cultural histories, 36 as well as literary and philosophical discussions, 37 scholars have critically engaged with the ways knowledge production about smoking gets translated into policy. 38 Others have also challenged dominant models of nicotine addiction, 39 while problematising the silence of tobacco control and harm reduction discourses on topics of pleasure. 40
Geography too has of late showed an increasing interest in smoking. While much of this has been within the purview of health and medical geographies and characterised by predominantly quantitative methods, 41 an emerging group have also utilised Foucauldian concepts of ‘governmentality’ or Goffman’s notion of ‘stigma’ to study smoking’s spatial exclusion as a process of purifying public spaces. 42 More recently, geographers such as Tan and Thompson, Pearce and Barnett have investigated the more embodied, sensory and affective elements of smoking, 43 but the more-than-human in smoking has received little sustained attention.
The latter is also true in disciplines beyond geography. Where nonhuman others, such as cigarettes, are considered, this is mostly done within the parameters of phenomenology as corporeal extensions of an unbounded human body
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or as material artefacts of an ontologically separate ‘environment’.
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Some attempts have been made to rematerialise smoking via ANT, such as Keane’s study of nicotine replacement therapies,
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or Thompson et al.’s work, which looked at social and secret smoking as nomadic identities that subvert binary understandings of smoker/non-smoker.
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Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, they conceptualise this occasional smoker as an ‘ephemeral assemblage’: By this we mean a particular set of materialities and conditions (temporality, space, person, cigarette) come together intermittently and often for only a relatively short time to produce a fleeting identity as a smoker, before disassembling again to produce a non-smoker. Yet the trace of the one always remains in the assembly or disassembling process; that is the non-smoker and the smoker is never fully erased even while the one or the other state is being enacted. This indeterminacy leaves open the possibility of a repetition.
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The authors further suggest that this nomadic smoker, having a fluid identity, challenges conventional models of addiction by emphasising the ability to resist the addictive components of tobacco. While this is certainly true, the focus on social/occasional rather than regular smoking means that this challenge appears to be rooted in habitual patterns of use rather than any ontological reconceptualisation. Thus the agency of nonhumans, in this case nicotine, which for the regular smoker to a great degree guaranties that ‘possibility of repetition’, remain under acknowledged. In other words, these accounts do not go far enough in investigating the ‘particular set of materialities’ that come to form the smoking assemblage, hence missing (or at least taking for granted) that nicotine continues to affect even when the cigarette is stubbed out. To elaborate on the role of the more-than-human in a more sustained sense, the first set of rhythms I examine are those of nicotine.
Smoking like a chimney: agency, habit and addiction
Any consideration of smoking, nicotine and agency inevitably brings forth a discussion of addiction. According to historian Virginia Berridge, what consolidated the public health discourse on smoking in the 1990s was the ‘rediscovery of addiction’, which replaced the more benign model of ‘involuntary smoking’ present a decade earlier, and importantly, placed the ‘lack of volition … on the part of the individual smoker’. 49 This model of addiction takes at its core pharmacological evidence that isolated nicotine as the main addictive substance in smoking. From the perspective of public health, even three decades on, smoking can only be understood within the parameters of addiction. As Dennis has commented, the consequence of this politico-epistemic reconfiguration is that both the anti-smoking lobby and the tobacco industry now construct the smoker as a Janus-faced figure, ‘the smoker to whom rational appeals can be put, and the mindless consumer that can be manipulated’. 50
This is important not only because it directs government policy but also because it has profound consequences in regard to the smoking body. While the stigmatising effects of this addiction model of nicotine have been well documented, 51 a more fundamental effect has to do with the ontology of the smoking body. This becomes most apparent in the imagery employed by the anti-smoking campaigns which perpetuate a view of the body as ‘an enclosed, diagarammable and discrete biological system’ insisting on a ‘bioethical agency that is enacted in the taking of responsibility for one’s own biological capital’ and which smokers are shown to carelessly relinquish, in turn rendering the smoker as irresponsible and unintelligent. 52
Within public health discourses agency is thus understood as a property of the (rational) mind to make decisions and act accordingly. Conversely, nicotine which is construed as the main addictive substance, removes this decision-making capacity leading to an image of a damaged subjectivity which is often further loaded with notions of immorality and frivolousness. As Kean argues, this dialectic lays at the core of dominant models of addiction: [T]he domain of the addicted, abject and unlivable bodies can be viewed as the necessary, constitutive outside of the domain of the clean, proper and healthy body. Addiction is therefore vital to the regulatory ideal of rational, autonomous subjectivity.
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Against this public health framework, rational choice theories and critical discourse analyses sought to problematise if not outright re-claim agency on part of the human subject; the first by arguing that the view of an out-of-control ‘junkie’ is a product of socio-cultural contexts in general, and specific discourses of addiction in particular,
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and the latter by insisting that the loss of self-control is in fact self-governed and paradoxically rational.
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Another body of work dealing with smoking specifically, and more sensitive to the complexities of agency, has also sought through phenomenology or deep ethnography and concepts such as practice, embodiment and habit, to break with this image of the smoker as passive and determined,
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pointing towards the abilities of smokers as creative agents to produce alternative responses that subvert dominant notions of health.
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The argument against the smoker’s passivity is that smoking is not entirely unthoughtful or irrational as some smokers often reflect on their practice. Conceptualising habit as a performative disposition to engage in action and sitting at the edge of volition and automatism, smoking is seen as a … concerted practice of the self, of mind, body, time and environment acting in assembly to condition a given routine situation as conducive to smoking. Embedded in daily routine, the habit may be unquestioned; yet this does not mean that individuals are unthinking.
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While there is no doubt that these approaches go some way in undoing deterministic models of addiction, there remains a desire to recuperate ‘consciousness’ or ‘reflection’ as a proxy for agency which, in these accounts, is never entirely lost. What’s more, although materials such as cigarettes, lighters and matches abound, they are not understood in terms of an ontologically relational coming together, as much as external artefacts that facilitate the practice. Similarly, while nicotine is a part of this ‘“social” practice’, 59 it appears to remain epistemologically separate from it.
A more-than-human account of smoking enables us to let go of this humanist understanding of agency and the concomitant active/passive dichotomy, in turn rendering questions about self-control as existential or moral concerns moot. This is where cultural geography’s own contribution to the debate on habit has much to offer, taking further its potential, as a ‘material force’, to subvert traditional ontological and epistemological binaries. This promise of collapsing the ‘transcendentally fixed’ separation of the individual and the environment reconfigures habit as a ‘mutually emergent system of processes of immanent becoming at once organic and inorganic, interior and exterior’. 60 While this article does not employ habit as part of its analytic toolset, opting instead for a more-than-human enunciation, the rethinking of habit by cultural geographers shares many of the same concerns. Therefore, given that the literature on smoking already operationalises habit in a specific way, my intention is not necessarily to redefine it, as much as offer an alternative understanding to it.
In reference to addiction specifically, this humanist induced anxiety is addressed by sociologist Darin Weinberg. Drawing on the works of inter alia Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars Bruno Latour and Annamarie Mol, Weinberg calls for a post-humanist reading of addiction which attempts to resolve the gap between controlled drug use and the loss of self-control, and which neither the biomedical nor the social sciences have managed to address appropriately. 61 This gap he argues, ‘stems from the overwhelming tendency to conceptualise human biology and human social life dichotomously as two, and only two, wholly discrete and independently integrated ontological domains’. 62 Broadly aligned with this approach, Denmant has, for example, employed ANT to study the agency of alcohol and ‘the relationship between substance and bodies’ in order to describe how subjectivities are formed, while Schüll, looking at addiction to interactive gambling technology, argued that addiction is a dynamic process of co-production between objects and subjects, greater than the sum of its parts. 63
Similarly, rhythmanalysis provides the means for tracing the cross-scale more-than-human modes through which particular everyday rhythms of smoking are enacted, embodied and performed, as well as accounting for how they interweave with other social, material and biological rhythms. Specifically, it offers a way of engaging with pharmacology without ceding ground to an epistemological politics that, as Keane notes, ‘treats drugs themselves as fixed and constant substances, fundamentally unchanged by the processes in which they are involved’. 64
Tracing the rhythms of nicotine addiction
Nicotine is part of a large family of amine-containing chemicals called alkaloids, most of which are produced by plants. It is a stimulant that has many effects on the rhythms of the human body, including the central nervous and cardiovascular systems, but here focus is placed on one pattern of rhythms specifically. That moment of taking a cigarette which Klein described as opening ‘a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience’ 65 is in fact pre-empted by another rhythm, namely the cyclical rhythms of nicotine blood levels in the body. According to the research collated by the Royal College of Physicians, nicotine blood levels typically rise during the morning, reaching a plateau in the early afternoon that continues until late evening, then during the night nicotine levels tend to decline to about one third of their daytime maximum. 66 When a smoker lights up, another rhythmic pattern of peaks and troughs corresponding to individual cigarettes is then superimposed on this circadian bodily rhythm (see Figure 1).
The ‘Tobacco Addiction Cycle’. 67
It is precisely through these diurnal rhythms of nicotine absorption that the alkaloid acting on the smoking body can be traced, animating the body’s desire to smoke and anticipating that ‘parenthesis’ Klein refers to. For the smoker, the recurrent, performative stabilisation of this nicotine cycle represents a state of eurhythmia, in as much as it points to a form of ‘metastable equilibrium’ 68 between the levels of nicotine already in the bloodstream and the almost certain, harmonising promise of future replenishment.
This process constitutes, in Lefebvre’s terms, a form of ‘dressage’; in this case, of the human by the nonhuman. Defined as a ‘bending’ by which the subject is broken in through a series of repetitions organised as ‘imperatives and gestures’, the aim is to train and condition the body to accede to particular rhythms. 69 In the case of nicotine, the goal of dressage is to calibrate bodily rhythm to establish a new form of smoking eurhythmia, which requires a particular set of gestures and practical as well as corporeal knowledge to maintain optimum nicotine blood levels and avoid triggering ‘withdrawal symptoms’.
Crucially, psychopharmacology does attribute ‘agency to drugs’ and recognises its ‘power … to make things happen’, 70 but can only do so within the epistemological parameters of addiction. In the case of smoking, this discourse of nicotine enslavement is, as Keane observes, particularly ironic since, contrary to other recreational drugs such as alcohol, heroin or cocaine, nicotine’s main advantage is its pharmacological compatibility with the requirements of everyday life, and far from intoxication, nicotine often increases mental capacities and concentration. 71 It is only when the smoker tries to quit that these bodily rhythms are disrupted in a state of arrhythmia, wherein ‘rhythms break apart, alter and bypass synchronisation’. 72 Described as withdrawal in pharmacological terms, for the smoker, this arrhythmia is experienced as irritability, inability to concentrate, restlessness and anxiety, weight gain, sleep disturbances, decreased heart rate and so on. 73 Incidentally, this is why health practitioners often advise smoking cessation following an illness, because colds, flus and other infections similarly disrupt both the corporeal and extracorporeal rhythms of smoking, which make it easier to re-inscribe a different pattern of rhythms that would establish a new, nicotine-free eurhythmia.
Rhythmanalysis offers a way of re-appropriating pharmacology without eschewing the wider rhythmic cacophony within which it emerges. It acknowledges that rhythm is always plural and multiple, enmeshed in its polyrhythmic surroundings, be it within the body (alongside desire, anxiety, memory or indeed other organs) or outwith (spatial, temporal, material or institutional arrangements), and avoids recourse to reductionist notions of enslavement and addiction. It provides an analysis that can attend to both the corporeal-chemical and the performative-habitual concurrently.
Furthermore, as Simpson comments in his rhythmanalysis of street performance, ‘[r]hythms are … not inside or outside the body, but folded through it’, 74 thus complicating issues of scale wherein references to micro/macro or inside/outside do not adequately reflect that polyrhythmia is a state of con-fusion, denoting that multiple rhythms are at once fused together and not always easily discernible. This means that while public health discourses position nicotine as the inception point of addictive behaviour, and while its critics emphasise the various everyday rituals that facilitate a performative disposition to smoking, there in fact seems to be no explicit point of origin per se and neither pattern necessarily takes precedence. Rather, it would be more accurate to speak of a polyrhythmic ensemble in which multiple social, cultural and biological rhythmic forces fuse together through the body without revealing any simple or linear relationships of causation. A more-than-human rhythmanalysis not only reaffirms a phenomenological view of the smoking body as being within, or of the world, it expands it even further, as a continuously cohering more-than-human entanglement in its own right or, in Simpson’s words, as always ‘choreographed into being’. 75 It does so by more forcefully fleshing out the affordances of nonhuman attachments, such as nicotine. Moreover, it has the potential to extend accounts of smoking and the smoking body, which stress its performative and habituated nature but do not engage analytically with this bodily ‘sub-layer’ of rhythms that are often subsumed within more encompassing notions of embodiment or habit while remaining ontologically separate.
A rethinking of smoking by means of a more-than-human rhythmanalysis opens up a more sensitive space where human biology and the habitual everyday can coexist both ontologically and epistemologically while making room for the presence of the nonhuman. As a result, alternative understandings of smoking can begin to emerge that are able to let go of the narratives of passivity and enslavement but are still robust enough to include nicotine’s chemical affordances, which are fundamental to maintaining the smoking assemblage. To explore these issues further, I now turn to another nonhuman, the tobacco cigarette.
Time for a smoke: the cigarette and the rhythms of modernity
In the public health discourse and within the tobacco industry, the cigarette is considered to be a storage container, a dispenser or a vehicle for nicotine, yet the materiality of the cigarette as a physical object is rarely considered. One definition of the cigarette from The Urban Dictionary defines it as ‘The amount of distance it takes to walk while smoking one cigarette’, another as ‘A unit of time. approximately 5 minutes’. 76 Although amusing, both these definitions also allude to the history of the cigarette as being emblematic of modernity 77 and the ever increasing acceleration of everyday life.
Historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch documents this process since the 17th century. A practice that started with the pipe, which demanded an arsenal of equipment and manipulations before it was ready to smoke was later replaced by the cigar that came fully prepared, finally culminating in the machine rolled cigarette by the end of the 19th century. Schivelbusch goes on to describe the cigarette as the ultimate stage in this process of space-time compression: The cigarette was light, short, and quick, in the physical as well as the temporal and pharmacological sense of the word. A ‘smoke’, as this new informal unit of time is called, is as different from the time it takes to smoke a cigar as the velocity of a mail coach is from that of an automobile. The twentieth-century cigarette that takes five to seven minutes to be thoroughly smoked is meant to give all the leisure and concentration smokers in the nineteenth century derived from cigars that took almost a half hour to smoke.
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Unlike the physicality of the pipe and cigar which represent early-modern temporalities, it is the very transience and finite materiality of the machine rolled, ready-made cigarette which has the agency to determine the length of that ‘parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience’, 79 thus meriting the description of ‘a unit of time’, a ‘smoke’ that structures the smoker’s quotidian rhythms. What’s more, the cigarette, thoroughly embedded into everyday life, becomes almost inextricable from other quotidian rituals and routines. For example, the first morning cigarette with a cup of coffee, the after-meal cigarette, the waiting-for-the-bus cigarette, the cigarette break at work, the last cigarette before bedtime and so on. At the least, the cigarette punctures all other everyday rituals or at the most, everyday life finds itself situated between two cigarettes. Until recently the cigarette, being a sort of supplementary accompaniment, went hand in hand with the prevailing rhythms of everyday life, but the new spatial restrictions on smoking in many countries, and in the United Kingdom following the 2006–2007 ban, now jar with the stop-start rhythms of the cigarette.
Drawing on the work of geographies of exclusion, 80 the spatial circumscription of smoking has already been examined by geographers and health scholars arguing that smoking represents a transgressive bodily practice that challenges moral and health ideologies and as such needs to be removed or marginalised. 81 The concomitant temporalities that followed this purification of public spaces have, however, largely been overlooked by geographers. The exclusion of smoking bodies from enclosed public (and often private) spaces has fleshed out the temporal incongruities of smoking within spaces of everyday life. Where the five odd minutes of stepping outside for a smoke every so often may not have a huge impact on one’s private routine, in the workplace this arrhythmia becomes more apparent. The spatio-temporal and pecuniary dissonance embodied by smoking is best exemplified by a recent study by the British Heart Foundation, that puts the costs of smoking breaks to British businesses at £8.4bn a year, meaning that employers bear £1815 ‘in lost productivity’ per smoking employee ‘who disappear[s] for 10 minutes four times a day’. 82 That monetisation of time is a phenomenon tantamount to the development of capitalism, as corroborated by Marx in the Grundrisse: ‘economy of time – to this all economy ultimately reduces itself’. 83 While previously the primacy of productivity and efficiency might have been couched within the language of health and a concern for workers’ well-being, neoliberalism makes these goals explicit, as the logic of capital seeps into and exploits private everyday life outside of the workplace. 84 The cigarette break thus constitutes a fundamental arrhythmic disturbance to the prevailing rhythms of capitalism whose logic, as Jacques Donzelot has commented, ‘knows only one motive: to increase profit and productivity’. 85 Unsurprisingly, according to Keane, the ‘smoker often appears as a squanderer of the precious and scarce resources of time’. 86
Having no utility in itself and now forcing the worker away from the site of value production, smoking jars with forms of power that demand, as Edensor notes, ‘rhythmic conformity and spatio-temporal consistency’ which through determining what ‘practices should take place at particular times’ inevitably leads to a pathologising of unproductive rhythms, bad habits, and inefficient bodies. 87 Awkwardly, as smoking cannot be considered as doing anything, but also neither is it exactly doing nothing, 88 it is rhythmically akin to the ‘procrastinating body’. 89 Examining digital rhythms of contemporary demand culture and life hacking, Tracey Potts repositions procrastination as a form of resistance that subverts dominant notions of productivity by introducing an ‘element of static into the communication circuitry, static which can be figured as a productive brake upon the strategic imaginary of information as continuous, unimpeded flow’. 90 By offering a brief moment of temporal and spatial detachment, the cigarette similarly provides a bit of static that interrupts the continuous flow of production. Furthermore, this temporal incongruity can also open up spaces of resistance in precarious workplaces, where the smoking break becomes an important site for conversations about union organising and action that might otherwise not be possible. 91
It is at the same time important to recognise that the cigarette’s rhythmic qualities are not only limited to the time it takes before the smoker stubs out their fag. They also adjust the multiple lifetime rhythms of the body, which under capitalism through medical discourses that equate health with efficiency become managed to ensure maximum productivity. 92 According to calculations published in the British Medical Journal, lighting up a cigarette does not only ‘squander’ 5 odd minutes of your daily routine, it also ‘reduces your life for 11 minutes’, time which can be put, the authors argue to ‘better uses’ such as a ‘telephone call to friend; brisk walk; or frantic [sex]’ for the equivalent of one cigarette, or watching a ‘long film; two football matches; a Eurostar journey from London to Paris, including a visit to the cafe’ for a pack of 20, or even a ‘Wagner opera’ for a whole carton. 93
The biotechnology of the tobacco cigarette, containing tar, carbon monoxide and other carcinogens, affects the longevity of smoking life and the development of lung cancer, emphysema and various heart diseases. These point towards the capacity of the cigarette to disrupt the eurhythmic qualities of what is seen as a disciplined, healthy body, 94 and instead provoke an arrhythmia of, in Lefebvre’s terms, literally ‘morbid’ and ‘fatal de-synchronisation’. 95 The cigarette has thus over time, and particularly in the last decade, become largely incongruent with other rhythms that structure the everyday: the workplace, the pub, the home, public transport and so on. Once the symbol of modernity, lighting up a cigarette is now more akin to what Michel de Certeau termed, a moment of ‘resistance’, in as much as it embodies a tenacious refusal to submit to the rhythms of ever accelerating modernisation and instead seeks to decelerate the circulation and flow of power. 96
Paying closer attention to the more-than-human in smoking helps expose the longer histories of capitalism and the ways forms of biopolitical control naturalise and enforce a distinction between productive and unproductive bodies, spaces and rhythms, wherein the latter are invariably seen as pathological. Moreover, the more-than-human also highlights the temporal effects of smoking’s ‘shrinking geographies’. 97
Up in smoke: the challenges of a more-than-human smoking body
This article has not only reaffirmed the limitations of contemporary health discourses which have rendered the smoker as passive and determined, but also sought to expand work in the social sciences and humanities by engaging analytically with pharmacology and the particular workings, affects and rhythms of nicotine. The challenge for more critical understandings of smoking is how to account for the agency and affordances of nonhumans without slipping back into public health understandings of smoking bodies as passive non-agents. 98
Cultural geography can make a strong contribution to this debate. A more-than-human rhythmanalysis provides one possible solution by accounting for the smoking assemblage beyond the smoking body as a series of messy human–nonhuman attachments, affordances and agencies. Such a re-thinking allows us to enrol these, often taken for granted, spatio-temporal patterns of nicotine into our analyses and thereby flatten the ontological and epistemological plane between biology and the habitual everyday. What’s more, by making visible the polyrhythmia of other nonhuman agencies still, like that of the tobacco cigarette, it becomes apparent that it is not only the intra-corporeal, chemical rhythms that affect smoking behaviour, but it is also the very materiality of the cigarette which configures the smoker’s rhythmic coming-together.
A more-than-human rhythmanalysis can thus help us ‘hear’ the noise of these polyrhythmic knots and ties that would otherwise remain mute. Two nonhuman rhythms have been traced to make this point but, as I have already pointed out, there are countless others, both within and beyond the body, that come to form the cacophonous polyrhythmia of smoking: rhythms of work, the home, the street and the pub; desire, memory and anxiety; as well as more abstract rhythms of law, capital, consumption and production. All these coalesce to weave together the social and material fabric of the smoking everyday. By dislodging the human body from the centre of analysis and focusing instead on the nonhuman rhythms of smoking, this article seeks neither to vindicate the smoker’s agency nor further determine their passivity, but rather to question the very notion of agency as a solely human property.
The question remains what the wider implications of a more-than-human approach are for smoking and the smoker’s subjectivity, as well as addiction more generally. First, rethinking agency as a distributed outcome of complex groupings, rather than an innate faculty of the human mind, troubles the humanistic ontology at the heart of public health discourses of addiction, which are otherwise rooted in an understanding of a body which loses control when confronted with a psychoactive substance. Equally, it calls for a greater appreciation of nonhuman forces and vibrant materialities that structure smoking rhythms and which are not always appreciated by social scientists seeking to push against, what is rightly perceived as, biomedical and psychopharmacological determinism.
In offering a more-than-human rhythmanalysis, this article hopes to contribute to wider attempts in cultural geography to re-materialise space, time and the body. In as much, it offers a more subtle and sympathetic reading of smoking that is attuned to and acknowledges both the smoking everyday and the affects and affordances of the nonhuman.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am immensely grateful to Isla Forsyth whose generosity, support and keen insight have been, and continue to be invaluable. A heartfelt thank you goes to Eva Giraud, Stephen Legg, James Mansell, Tracey Potts and Jake Hodder for their thoughtful comments and advice on earlier drafts of the paper. Finally, thanks to the three anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments, which have improved the paper considerably, and to the Centre for Critical Theory, University of Nottingham for covering the licencing fees for the image used in this paper.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is funded by Midlands3Cities AHRC Doctoral Studentship Award. Award Reference: 1804937.
