Out of place, out of time: towards a more-than-human rhythmanalysis of smoking

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.