Four Milligrams of Phenomenology
45
with her friends. The ad ends with her lament, ‘you should’ve been there, Dad.’
Again, in this ad, the themes of inhalation, pain, and corporeal containment are
primary. ‘Dad’ labors over inhalation, a direct result of the inhalation of
cigarette smoke in the first instance. He is, by means of the respirator machine,
corporeally cut off from his daughter, who cannot reach him over its bulk, and
he is cut off from establishing conversation with her. ‘Dad’ is also corporeally
constricted because he is bedridden, unable to establish intercorporeal
relationships in conversation, through touch, or outside at the cricket match. His
inhalation of smoke has incarcerated him in an invisible, smoky prison, given
form in the world of the hospital, and has cut him off from a variety of
intercorporeal engagements that constitute his usual modes of movement,
sociality, and communication.
Corporeal containment is also presented in anti-smoking
advertisements through the raising of awareness of the insides of the body. The
anti-smoking lobby is well aware of the fact that many smokers do not pay
attention to their lungs, and cannot in the course of everyday life be aware of the
condition of these organs. The Government Health Authority Warning on my
package of Peter Stuyvestant Lights informs me that I may not be aware of the
ways in which my lungs are being damaged as I smoke: ‘Lung cancer can grow
and spread before it is noticed.’15 To the end of awareness, lungs are filmed
inside the body, and warnings about the insides of ‘my body’ are posted in large
text on the front of my cigarette package. These aspects of the body are shown
to be wholly contained within the site of ‘my own body,’ increasing present
attention to them as wholly contained within me and separate from any external
world with which I might more habitually engage.
Many theoreticians, including Serres,16 Compton,17 Langer,18 and
Levy,19 have argued that pain occasions the self-reflexive attention that is
required to enact a separation between person and world, however fleeting and
incomplete that ‘separation’ is bound to be in a person who can never fully
achieve such a condition in life.20 Serres argues that drawing attention to an
intersection between a person and an aspect of the world results in experiences
of pain or suffering. The constriction of the body, the holding in of one’s breath,
Serres would argue, constitutes a restriction of the most basic of human joys:
that of habitual and necessary entailment. Even in a breath, as Serres would
remind us, bodily joy ensues when the body, as it always must, exceeds itself.21
Pain is a critical part of the invitation that the anti-smoking lobby issues to move
away from habitual intertwinement, to attend to a present condition of the body.
The parts of the body that are shown on anti-smoking advertisements are shown
through a lens of pain and damage. The anti-smoking lobby draws specific
attention not to immediately-experienced pain which ushers in reflexive
attention, but to the inevitability of pain as a result of smoking practice. For this,
we go inside the body, which is busily building up the resources that will result
in the inevitable pain, including the physical pain of smoking-related illnesses
and the emotional pain of guilt that occurs when one intertwined body; ‘Dad’s’