Deleuzian Japanese Smoking Areas

Territorialising isolated smokers

Nicotine lepes in Shibuya, Tokyo (Image via Wikimedia: CC BY 2.0 DEED)

Smoking is in my family. I was told growing up how my grandfather used to smoke 40 Craven A a day — a long since defunct cigarette brand — before the doctor told him to cut out the sticks and so for his latter years he was seldom seen without a pipe in his mouth. My other grandfather was much the same and my father picked up the habit as a 12-year-old lad imprisoned for a short time in boarding school and hasn’t looked back. My brother continued the tradition after much covert smoking as a teenager. I dabbled but could never bring myself to commit.

My brother often remarks, mostly (but I’m certain not entirely) facetiously, that the bias against smokers is the last acceptable form of social discrimination. And that’s in Ireland and Canada. In Japan, they’ve taken it to a whole new level. Since 2020 you can no longer smoke anywhere on the street.

In hotels, cafes and bars you'll often (but not always) find a smoking area and dotted throughout the streets of Tokyo there are little fenced-off areas randomly set aside — separating the general populace from the nicotine lepers.

Territorialisation

This isolation of the smokers got me thinking. It brought to mind Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of territorialisation (or more specifically of Manuel DeLanda’s writing on it (does anyone even read Deleuze anymore?)) Territorialisation is a function of holons (to use Arthur Koestler's term popular with the Integrals). A holon is a part/hole — it's part part, part self-sufficient whole. Hydrogen is a holon; so is the Sun and so are you. The cells in your body are holons and so are the mitochondria in those cells. I don’t think your heart is a holon (no offence) since hearts have never been self-sufficient wholes. The same goes for brains and bowels.

Deleuze’s (let’s just say Deleuze because it’s the most memetic name — sorry Felix and Manuel) philosophy of the holon contains two dynamics — territorialisation and coding. The code is the strict laws by which that whole plays out. Your code is written in your DNA; the Jewish code is written in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the code for the Hydrogen is baked into the chemical laws of the universe.

Territorialisation is a looser sort of function. It’s less like laws and more like density. Higher territorialisation means there’s more interaction among the parts. The internet turbocharged the territorialisation of our globalised society just as the telegraph and radio had done before it.

The leading theory of life’s origins aren’t that it came about miraculously from the primordial soup given enough time to spoil. Theoretical biologist (and MacArthur genius grant recipient) Stuart Kaufmann in his book At Home in the Universe argues that life emerged because of complexity; you had areas where the amino acid soup got REAL thick. It wasn’t spread across the oceans of the world where it would take a trillion years to increase in complexity.