the rhetorical allure of smoking

kafkaz responded to an earlier post about my Pavlovian-anticipated desire to own a particular lighter i'd seen in a film. she gave me the language i was looking for, language that might aid my search. she told me that what i'm looking for is a "single-action ignition lighter."

SINGLE-ACTION IGNITION!!! holy freakish associative logic! now, i want that lighter more than ever, and i was never even a big fan of Westerns (one exception: Jim Jarmusch's brilliant Dead Man). so maybe it's more of a James Bond supergadget desire. one of my early and most beloved film experiences was going to see a James Bond film -- The Spy Who Loved Me, i think it was -- in a theater in Gainesville, Florida with a group of friends i was just then getting to know, a group very different from the punk crowd i usually hung with; i went with a few "art people," and there, in that theater, you could smoke while watching films. so we watched Bond do a lot of cool stuff. we smoked and flirted and laughed at the elaborate lives we both resisted and desperately wanted to adopt. taking on lifestyles of the Bond variety, we realized, would happen only within whatever imaginative spaces we might conjure. and so since it would be interiority driving the possibility, smoking helped because even for a harcore smoker, THAT much smoke (a theaterfull) was getting us all a little high.

yes, this association works. understanding it, even in small part, makes it even more fun, not less; and here is the question regarding our ethical responsibilities when we (claim to) teach rhetoric. maybe this is the work of my RSA project. i want to talk about our ethical repsonsibilities, but i can't help hearing (already) articulations of the traditional route (a perspective that may catch a break at RSA, but a view that obtains, generally speaking, for many teachers of writing and rhetoric). that is, "we are beholden to sort out for our students what are acceptable forms of participation in a particular rhetorical scene," which means, i think, a rejection of human desire, however interpellated -- or *because* it's so "obviously" constructed (for us). and this means, i think, that we invite people to live as though trapped in tiny spaces where their "morality" is overdetermined in ways that promote "questionable" or "undesirable" (i.e., violent, sexist . . .) thought, behavior, and being. i keep thinking that the cathartic route is far more valuable; it is for me (and, then, it's waaaaay more fun). we'll see.