Curator's Notes
Well this was a weird one. Never thought I’d spend any part of my life picking up smoked cigarettes from Canal Street, but hey, who needs normal.
Cigarettes are an assemblage [of materials] in themselves. They contain, among other things, plastic [=microplastics), ammonia, butane, arsenic, lead, tar, formaldehyde, acetone, aceric acid, cadmium, and nicotine]. Which is fun, but the real party starts when you see the human who is smoking the cigarette as part of the assemblage.
In new Materialism the assemblage is any grouping of human and non-human elements, including objects and ideas. Assemblages are not static, they shift and change; things peel off, fall away, are used up etc. Humans move, non-humans move; the whole process is fluid and dynamic. Go one step further into this theory and you'll come across the idea that agency is therefore not limited to humans alone.
Instead agency is distributed across everything in the assemblage; the non human parts of our world have the power to influence human actions.
And so every part of the cigarette has a certain power. And so does the human smoking it. Butane is a flavour enhancer, aceric acid lowers smoke pH and makes it easier to inhale deeply, arsenic and cadmium are absorbed by the tabacco plants themselves from the soil, fertilisers, and pesticides. And of course, nicotine drives addiction and keeps company profits high.
All of this creates an experience in the human body as the cigarette is smoked and these materials are inhaled, a process that is enabled by air. Now air is also part of the assemblage.
Where does it stop? It’s all the assemblage. It always has been.
