The
smoking communism
Mladen Dolar
for Dominique and Oxana
A group of people is
gathered outside one of those glamorous skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, at a
proper distance from the entry, which is duly manned by a security person
checking the measured distance with a keen eagle eye and with a serious mien
meaning business, a group composed mostly of employees from the offices
towering high over the street, but also some tourists and some odd homeless looking
persons. The purpose of this small gathering, comprising a dozen people or so,
is smoking. The group is heterogeneous, the employees are in a rather formal
attire, one can easily imagine them placed somewhere in the intricate workings
of financial capital, tourists wear some incongruous informal multicolored gear,
making a brief stop-over on their well planned route through the highlights of
the city, the homeless are wearing some baggy crumpled clothes, each group duly
corresponding to the cliché. We smoke in silence, standing relatively close to
each other, for the place seems to be cordoned off by invisible strings, no
doubt abiding by some rules issued by god knows what authority, but we look in
different directions, feeling vaguely ashamed or at least not at ease, for the
designated place is both located out of the official ways, keeping this
nuisance at bay, and at the same time on display, for it can’t be quite hidden in
this heavily frequented area and one feels like exhibited, the passers-by and
the people on the way to the grand entry casting suspicious side-way glances at
the new pariahs, not of approval. This is a haphazard congregation of strangers
gathered for five minutes, for the duration of a cigarette, flocked together to
a designated spot, having just one thing in common. Then someone says, out of
the blue: “First blacks and Jews, now us.” There is an immediate outburst of
laughter and merriment, the total strangers instantly becoming friends, for
these brief minutes, cigarettes are short-lived and so is our friendship, but
there is a surge of solidarity, a sudden human tie, and the brevity of the
precious moment reaches far beyond the gathering, beyond the schedule which soon
makes us disperse in all directions. It all evaporates in smoke, just as the
cigarettes, but the brief moment has a curious staying power and reaches beyond
the dictate of time, beyond the pressure of jobs, obligations, survival and
allotted social slots. And it is clear that by laughing together we have won a small
victory over the disapproving crowd that vastly outnumbers us and over the
carefully designed regulations that isolated us on this spot. The excluded and
the ashamed have turned the tables, at least for these moments, we are the
winners.
The remark is of
course made in the spirit of the smokers’ cheek, or rather their
tongue-in-cheek. It would be a bit much to put in line centuries of slavery and
pogroms with this new figure of outcasts and it would take quite a bit of
conceit to claim such ancestry. But smokers always tend to speak
tongue-in-cheek. There is a couple of blacks in the gathering and as it turns
out also a couple of Jews (and yes, you have guessed right, they belong to the
‘financial capital’ part of the group, one can doubt anything except for
clichés). The blacks and the Jews are particularly amused by the remark, the
Jewish person smilingly adding: “We haven’t yet reached the point of the
holocaust”. Some smokers can actually be blacks and Jews into the bargain, and
we all turned temporarily into honorary blacks and Jews. There is a sudden swopping
of life stories, one actually grimly stretching back to the holocaust, the
other to the pre-Martin Luther King days. An elderly black man, I suppose
belonging to the maintenance staff of the building, says, to the general
approval: “In all my life I have never been so oppressed as a black man as I am
now as a smoker.” And he has lived through the times before the civil rights
movement when at least in New York it wasn’t so bad to be black as it is now to
smoke, the one exclusion mirroring the other in their very discrepancy and in a
strange connivance. The homeless have some stories of police chasing them for
smoking in some perfectly legal places, the new handy excuse for harassment.
The rather wealthy looking Jews suddenly look at the homeless with new eyes, almost
in appreciation, with the incongruous specter of the common fate of exclusion
in the air, connecting for a brief moment its widely disparate ways. The
Spanish tourists tell of some tricks of guerilla tactics smokers employ in
Spain after the anti-smoking measures were introduced, although far less
serious than in the US – but the US are, as always, leading the way and we
agree that soon we will all be there, partaking in the promised land.
Smokers of the world,
unite. But we are already united. We have collectively managed an incredible
feat of traversing the social divisions, of conjuring the specters of history
and its antagonisms and laying them at rest, of finding some bits of solidarity
across boundaries, laughing together and having fun, complete strangers in just
a few minutes, standing off the main course in Manhattan, at the heart of the
world power, at the center of financial capital, an unlikely collectivity based
on smoke, and smoke alone. It became perfectly clear: smokers live in
communism. They create communism wherever they are, even a few minutes from
Wall Street. Smokers have started the Occupy Wall Street movement long before,
only nobody noticed. They don’t wait for a future classless society to appear,
they instantly make it happen. Smoking is an instant pleasure that requires
instant solutions, it can’t be relegated to some distant future. Two smokers
are already enough for a budding communist cell, when two or three smokers
congregate the (unholy) spirit of communism flashes in their midst. Smokers
form a party with a very simple membership token, everybody is welcome to join
in, and they gladly accept honorary non-smokers in their gathering. This is a
party that immediately starts to dissolve hierarchies at the stroke of the
lighter. Iskra, the spark, was
famously the title of Lenin’s political newspaper, and smokers take it
literally, the spark is all it takes. Lenin based its title on the line that
the spark is there to ignite a big future flame, but smokers thrive just on
sparks and very small present flames, their future may indeed be uncertain,
given their habit. This is communism without a future, for they will all die
young, afflicted by lung cancers and heart attacks, to say nothing of impotence
and wrinkled skin. They use weapons of mass destruction destroying their users,
who accept their fate with cheerful equanimity.
The smokers’ party
doesn’t have a program, except for what is immediately put into action. Their
deeds precede their words. But this is not to say that their community is based
just on pleasure and instant gratification, shying away from intellectual
demands, quite the contrary. There is nothing like smoking together to
instigate reflection, one is there sharing a break from the usual turmoil of
life, looking at it from a distance, reflecting on it, all kinds of programs
spring up in the space of few minutes, wild ideas circulate freely, just as the
smoke, one looks back and looks forward, excepted from the immediate pressures
and obligations, in a non-discriminatory community of friends and strangers
alike. Crazy stories and good jokes are generously shared along with the smoke.
One can suddenly hit upon a solution to a problem that one couldn’t find by a sustained
intellectual effort, precisely because this is a non-productive pause from the
requirements of production, and it takes more for the mind to work than effort.
Smoking is the time of serendipity, gratuitous and unexpected gifts. It is
essentially social, smoking alone never tastes the same (well, just as sex).
The more it aims at the bodily pleasure, the more it arouses and invigorates
the mind, it is a non-Christian activity par
excellence, constantly testifying against the division into body and
spirit. The craving of the body goes hand in hand and coincides with the
craving of the mind, the one enhancing the other. The smoking party doesn’t
start with a program in order to instigate action, but with an act in search of
a program, and the moment a few smokers gather programs start mushrooming. They
interpret and they change the world for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.
Being social smoking
is never socially neutral. Its social and historical connotations stretch in
all directions, some far away from the communist one. But under present
conditions of ban and the growing political anathema, against the backdrop of the
excessive campaign and ever new regulations that epitomize something like a
caricature of ‘biopolitics’ in its link with exclusion, smoking as a rule
emerges as a metaphor, it mirrors and refracts all other exclusions in a
miniature model, it traces a line of division which assembles and brings
together multiple dividing lines. Smokers state and represent. They represent e.
g. the cancer on the healthy social body, and enjoyment is increasingly treated
like a cancer on the prescribed normative bodily demeanor. There was always
something in enjoyment that reached ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, something
recalcitrant and indifferent to the aims of survival. Smoking promotes enjoyment
in the bosom of a pleasure-seeking society, against the backdrop of its
hedonistic injunctions. It pursues pleasure a bit too far, to the limits which
invoke the specter of the lethal, and what the society promoting health and
pleasure is allergic to is, in one word, enjoyment. Freud, another great
smoker, knew it well. So did Lacan, another smoker, who established a stark
opposition between pleasure and enjoyment.
Of course the smoking
communism dissolves just as quickly as it emerged – it all goes up in smoke. In
the first step, with the magic power of cigarette smoke “everything solid melts
into thin air”, following Marx’s (another smoker’s) line from the Manifesto, all social relations are
momentarily a bit dislocated and shaken, and then in the second step the
specter of communism that emerged in the process melts into thin air in its
turn. Leaving no traces, just as the smoke? There is of course the danger of
romanticizing the fleeting moment and extol its charms, the moment when
everything seems momentarily possible, although through a smoke-screen. Oh, the
passing beauty of the passing, the Sirens’ call of the instant sublime. There
is the firm intellectual impulse to resist any such penchant as well as to
resist the feel-good self-congratulatory move of turning something banal into
something deeply subversive, with the bunch of self-aggrandizing quick-and-easy
revolutionaries, dispensing with the need for discipline, pursuit and
organization. But perhaps one should also resist this impulse to resist and
allow for a moment of fancy.
Smokers, like
proletarians, have no country, but they instantly create liberated territories
wherever they appear. Smoking always represented liberty, a fickle freedom
against the chains of survival, it is an anti-survivalist stance. It states: I
am free in chains, while being chained to this habit that I can’t give up, but
these chains allow taking a bit of distance to the overwhelming other ones and
I am willing to pay the price. Smoking makes a statement, which can be read in
all kinds of ways, cynical, spontaneous, relaxed, neurotic, psychotic,
perverse, obsessive, compulsive, guilty pleasure, sinful, dandy, bon-vivant,
desperate, anti-stress, aggressive, arrogant, seductive, available, mark of
class, mark of lack of class, sociability, anti-social behavior … But against
all odds and in a wild fancy I would like this statement to read: communism has
a chance.
Superb
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