Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 2006 | Page 46

42 Popular Culture Review sited position, or until it somehow escaped from beyond its corporeally imposed limits. Recognition of the intertwinement of body and world is implied in cigarette advertising discourse when it acknowledges that smoke mobilizes the person beyond the gravitational limits assigned the body in Galileo’s work and, indeed, in all western ontology of the body.5 However, the conditions surrounding this mobilization in the cigarette advertising discourse are such that the body remains an inert entity submitting to the laws of gravitation and movement, while the smoky products expelled by the body can offer an avenue of escape to sites located beyond the bounds of the sited body. The pro-smoking discourse pushes message largely through its specific attention to the human practice of exhalation of the breath. If the pro-smoking discourse proposes a dual propensity of the body to at once stand still and move out beyond itself, then the anti-smoking discourse proposes a strictly bounded and sited body that is thoroughly physically impacted by the world, but is not intertwined with it. Katz’s remarks about the exhalation phase of smoking stand in stark contrast to the almost exclusive focus on the inhalation component of the process that is lent to smoking practice by what I will loosely term ‘the anti-smoking lobby’ in Australia. The lobby to which I refer is constructed of a number of bodies that are administered by State and Commonwealth government departments. As well as offering sponsored programs such as the Quitline, which offers information and advice to people attempting to quit smoking, ‘the lobby’ runs television advertisements and presents Government Health Warnings on cigarette packages. Television advertisements and cigarette warning labels are given attention in this paper. On the one hand, the anti-smoking lobby in Australia, while providing a (determinist) explanation of the roots of smoking pleasure,6 focuses the greatest part of its attention on the inhalation phase of smoking in order to draw a kind of highly reflected upon ‘self-attention’ to the danger of the practice.7 This presented danger is related to the capacity of smoke to invade the body, via inbound breath. On the other hand, smoke, for Katz, achieves a pleasurable corporeal escape by visibly marking the outboundedness of breath, to sites unknown, perhaps even to the legendary ‘Flavor Country,’ or to the tropical islands of the Menthol group.8 Neither pro- nor anti-smoking discourse captures the embodied practice of smoking, at least according to the participants in this research. Instead, each discourse manages to reify temporal aspects of human embodiment: pain and inhalation, in the case of the anti-smoking lobby discourse, and pleasure and exhalation, in the case of pro-smoking discourse. These temporalities and reifications may have implications particularly for the success of the anti-smoking lobby, which is currently attempting to facilitate a decline in the numbers of adult smokers in Australia, which, overall, have not reflected an actual continual decline since the mid 1990s. Cigarette companies and anti-smoking lobbyists could hardly be expected to do much else besides po