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Popular Culture Review
body for example, disentwines from the body of the family through illness and
death.
The anti-smoking discourse pivots on an axis of constrained
corporeality and intercorporeality, drawing attention to and reifying temporal
moments of human embodiment that demand reflexive attention. In breath, in
social engagement, in pain, the inextricable intertwinement with the world
continues; we remain unavoidably socially, respiratorily, corporeally, involved.
Selling smoking pleasure
Jack Katz recognizes that, for decades, photographers used the idea that
smoke marks the projection of self through the world, ‘to suggest the reach of
writer’s personalities.’22 Says Katz: ‘there is not any natural marking of the end
of one’s projection of self into the world through exhaling (a fact, I suspect, that
accounts for much of the attraction of smoking).’23 If, in other words, we visibly
mark our breath, in this case, with smoke, we are able to see before our eyes the
reach of ourselves extended out into the world. Katz here argues for a view of
smoking based on a notion of travel outbound from the body site. Put simply,
my smoke, endowed with the capacity for visually traceable travel via my
breath, can travel outbound, moving beyond the bounds of where I would have
to stay should I subscribe to that ontology in which body and world are
separated.
A great many advertisements for cigarettes have picked up and
extended the metaphor of escape that I am suggesting is based on a certain bodyworld ontology. I can, in some ci v&WGFR