Four Milligrams of Phenomenology
43
people in the case of the latter. I do not seek to criticize these groups in terms of
the validity of the ideas they present about pleasure or danger.9 Rather, I
examine the discourse that revolves around exhalation and pleasure, in the case
of pro-smoking advertisements, and inhalation and pain, in the case of the anti
smoking lobby, and compare these with the ways in which a small group of
smokers understood their own entailments in the world as they engaged in
smoking practice. To explore these experiences of smoking I use a framework of
intercorporeality that is able to slip across the sharp distinctions made in proand anti-smoking discourse of outbound breathing, of internal and external
regions, of pleasure and danger. Attention to intercorporeality and
multisensuality are critical to understanding the complex modes of human
sociality entailed in smoking, and the variety of sensual ways of encountering
and experiencing smoke and smoking. As is the case in all methods of
communication, smoking, for the participants involved in this research,
constituted a social practice requiring intercorporeal and multisensual means to
function.
Participants in the research
I do not attempt to explore a wide range of smoking practices herein;
rather, I focus on the ways in which a small number of participants experienced
smoking as part of their everyday lives. All of the participants described
themselves as smoking between one-half and one pack per day. All had been
regular smokers for at least one year, and all considered themselves to be in
good health. These smokers did not feel that smoking or not smoking would
result in terrible pain, nor did they feel that smoking or not smoking would
result in euphoric experiences of pleasure.
‘Every cigarette is doing you damage’10: an invitation to the present body
State-sponsored anti-smoking television campaigns draw specific
attention to aspects of the smoking body, aspects that are inaccessible to the
smoker in the course of unreflected-upon smoking. These advertisements issue a
kind of invitation to what Langer has called ‘the present body.’11 Present bodies
invite reflection and allow a person to discover their own activity ‘in shaping the
world as it is discovered through our perception.’12 Specific present attention is
drawn to the smoking body in anti-smoking television advertising, in which
aspects of that body are brought into self-reflection via avenues of pain and
danger. The catch-cry ‘every cigarette is doing you damage,’ which occurs as a
voice-over in television advertising campaigns, provides instant orientation to
the themes of pain and danger, an orientation that is followed by an on-camera
exploration of the insides of the body, where the evidence of pain and danger is
to be found. In inviting reflexive attention to the body, the anti-smoking
advertisements reify and decontextualise a number of moments and aspects of
human embodiment, each of which I will discuss in turn.