Four Milligrams of Phenomenology
49
inhalation and exhalation as pivotal. These read, owing to the purposes for
which they are used (in the one case, against the practice, and in die other, for
the practice), as oppositionary frames. Understood as part of the same process,
these frames are of course not at all oppositionary, nor must they necessarily
occur temporally distinctly: where is the point at which exhalation becomes
inhalation in the unreflected upon act of breathing? To argue that there would be
such a point divides the fundamentally circular and continual practice of breath
taking into component parts, which would make breathing and smoking highly
reflected-upon acts that would undermine each as a habitual practice. I use
frames of intercorporeality and dissolvability to explore smoking as a social
practice that uses intercorporeal means to function, as do all methods of human
sociality and communication.
Intercorporeality/Dissolvability
Smoke and the practice of smoking offer a sensual experience in which
the quality of dissolvability is paramount. There are many aspects of this
dissolvability, in terms of the character of the smoke itself, which renders the
practice of smoking olfactorialy, audibly, visibly, haptically and taste senseable. Cigarettes themselves are dissolvable; one may view the reduction of a
cigarette object to ashes. Cigarette smoke dissolves into the air into which it is
expelled. We know from the anti-smoking lobby that chemicals in cigarettes,
after a fashion, dissolve into the body of the smoker. We also know that
smoking itself is capable of beginning a kind of dissolving process from within
the body on the sense organs: smoking corrupts the seeing of the eye, the
smelling of the nose, the tasting of the mouth and tongue. It can also restrict
blood flow, especially to the hands, feet and genitals, which assigns it the
capacity to render less sensitive our haptic systems.
Smoke also dissolves other kinds of social and conversational
boundaries. Asking ‘have you a lighter?’ of a group of persons unknown to you
in the pub might lead any place. Becoming part of ‘the smokers’ at ‘smoko’35
brings a person into alignment, into space, into shared activity, with people who
may well have otherwise remained unknown to them. The phenomenon of ‘the
social smoker’ alters us to the fact that smoking, for some people, requires the
presence of others in order to be undertaken at all.
Smoking might also extend or continue intercorporeal relationships
between people, not only due to its capacity to weave through the air and
permeate the bodies of others, thusly connecting them to you, but owing also to
the capacity of smoke to act as a metaphor of corporeal intertwinement. This
metaphor is based on a sensual-corporeal logic of our experiences of smoke to
connect. The post-coital cigarette, for example, if both parties were to smoke,
might, in the curling, intermingling, and warm smoke, continue the warm,
curling intermingling so recently passed, even as each party departs to opposite
sides of the bed.