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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