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Popular Culture Review
The TV advertisements, of which there are several different versions,
run for around 30 seconds and are aired during primetime on commercial
television stations. Common to many is a focus on the inhalation phase of
smoking, which is treated as a distinctive phase, and is separated out from
exhalation. In the ads, the smoker draws smoke from the cigarette into the
mouth, then into the lungs (a process which, as viewers, we may follow on the
screen down into the smoker’s lungs, a process which the smoker and the
viewers of the smoker are usually entirely unable to view). Aspects of the
internal body—the lungs, for example—are shown to be subject to damage in
the ads; the lungs are shown filled up with smoke, and a voice-over describes
the damage to which they are subject. The ads typically begin with the lighting
up of the cigarette, the (hawing in of a single drag from it, and typically end at
the point of exhalation of that single drag. Inhalation is here presented as a
complete component of what, in habitual experience, is a cyclic and necessarily
ongoing respiratory entailment in the world. First, self-conscious attention is
drawn to that which we must routinely ignore if breathing is to continue in a
habitual, disattended manner. The anti-smoking ads offer up for our examination
a specific segment (inhalation) of a habitual action (breathing in and out) that is
necessarily cyclic. It is only when we pay specific reflexive attention to the
cycle of breath that we can experience breathing as a series of distinctive
inhalation and exhalation phases.13 Respiration is more habitually (and
necessarily) experienced as an ongoing intertwinement with the world, and, as
Katz notes, ‘we do not usually seek to find points in it that undermine its
ongoing circularity.’14 Finding points in its ongoing circularity and dwelling
upon them reifies a moment of a human just being in the world and is key to the
anti-smoking discourse which seeks to draw attention to the body as a bounded
physicality that is corporeally cut off from a variety of entailments in the world,
including those of breathing. This disentailment has been even more specifically
drawn out by the lobby in an advertisement in which the smoking person is
presented inside a jail constructed entirely of bars of smoke. Smoke here does a
very unsmoke-like thing: it stays in a sited place, as does inhaled smoke for the
duration of the anti-smoking advertisement. Smoke and breath are loath to be
located; they move and, as they do, they entail and occasion a variety of
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