Becoming enwinded: A new materialist take on smoking pleasure

What might new materialist perspectives bring to our understanding of smoking pleasure? In this paper, I draw on this thinking to sketch out an alternative, non-unitary smoker who is at the mercy of the whims of the breeze − a yielding I will argue is key to smoking pleasure. With these intentions in mind, rather than thinking of what the biotechnology of cigarettes accomplishes in terms of the chemical delivery of pleasure, or adding to the multiply of social and cultural reasons anthropologists have tendered to account for it, I approach smoking pleasure in and through the medium of the smoky air. This approach permits examination of how nonhuman and human agents, like cigarettes, lungs, hands and other things form momentary and contingent relation in the air, as well as the role of the air itself in ‘enwinding’ the smoker. When smoking pleasure is explored from such a perspective, the smoker can be recast as part of a complex of relations that she does not fully control, rather than the agentic centre or principal arrayer of the nonhuman world. The pleasures of smoking, and the smoker herself, I argue, are emergent and come into being precisely in these relations: ‘the smoker’ originates, terminates, and is defined in and with elements, rather than being surely and certainly attached to a particular smoker subjectivity. Chief among the complex of things and elements that make the smoker and her pleasure is the air itself − and it is the air itself that is my primary informant in this paper.