Paradoxical consumer enjoyment : A cultural perspective on cigarette consumption

Sammanfattning: In a time when health is seen as an important personal achievement, it is difficult to understand why people consume cigarettes. The explanations for cigarette consumption tend to be one-sided and the most common explanation are addiction and compulsive personality. Consumer culture theory (CCT) has similarly ended up in a one-sided portrayal when studying consumption seen as destructive or marginalising. This thesis argues that this one-sided view is a result of how dominant discourses within CCT views pleasure. The strive to attain pleasurable experiences is often described as a motivation for consumption in CCT, however, pleasure lacks nuance and is mainly portrayed as constructive and socially accepted. That is, consumption of the seemingly irrational, destructive, or repulsive products in today's marketplace cannot be understood as motivated by pleasure as defined in CCT, as a result, much of the consumption that occurs in the marketplace is excluded from the literature.The thesis argues that the one-sided view on pleasure in CCT is the result of a lack of frameworks encompassing ambiguous experiences. To this end, the present thesis builds a framework based on psychoanalytically informed discourse theories’ view of jouissance, a form of paradoxical enjoyment, and apply it on the study of cigarette consumption. This thesis suggests to move away from pleasures when studying destructive and marginalising consumption and instead suggests paradoxical enjoyment as an alternative.This thesis concludes that paradoxical enjoyment, in the case of smoking, further breaks with the assumptions of rationality and constructiveness often present in CCT. Smokers, on the other hand, experience enjoyment because of the regulations and social stigma that surrounds smoking. The thesis moreover shows how enjoyment of smoking is expressed as a disruption of pain experienced in crisis caused by e.g., separation or death, because the pain from crisis is out screamed with the pain felt from smoking. In addition, enjoyment of smoking is felt through the moving back-and-forth between self-imposed limits and limitlessness. Lastly, the thesis found that smoking is an isolated enjoyment, preferred away from non-smokers as well as from other smokers, because of the repulsion smokers sense towards their own consumption.