The New Social Pariahs

Mladen Dolar, "The Smoking Communism"

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 swap­ping 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.

In America, we can add 'Trumpers', gun owners, church goers, and working class whites to the "New Social Pariah category.