Four Milligrams of Phenomenology
47
pro-smoking discourse: in Serres’s work, there can never be a situation where
the body somehow stays sited, while some of its aspects reach out beyond some
specific site in which the body is located. In his work, to see is to travel because
the sensing body is, through sight, unsited; it persists in the act of seeing that
which we have entailed in our sensing bodies. To see is to travel in pro-smoking
discourse because the visibility of smoke reveals to us the kind of outbound
travel that our smoky breaths might undertake that our sited bodies cannot; we
can have the destinations of our international travel, requiring a passport,
imagined for us by Peter Stuyvesant, or we can simply take a quick in-betweenwork break out in Flavor Country. Or, rather, our breath can; our bodies stay
put.
Taste is also important for accounting for smoking pleasure in pro
smoking advertisements, in at least two ways. Serres’s work is again useful here.
Serres refers to the Last Supper (among other banquets) in the ‘Tables’ section
of Les Cinq Sens, which deals with taste and smell.28 Two bodies, or, rather, two
sides of one body, emerge from the banquet. On the one hand is the body of the
Assumption, ‘the body raised up in language,’ which, as the result of linguistic
petrification, is reduced to the condition of statue, and is no longer able to taste
and smell.29 On the other hand, and set against this linguistic body, is the body
consumed at the Last Supper. This body circulates in the forms of bread and
wine, and is never fixed or held still, but is, as Connor notes, ‘a mobile
transubstantiation. ’30
Taste here is understood to be a sense that dissolves the object of taste:
that which is to be tasted must interact with the body and be dissolved by it in
order to be tasted at all, a process that corrupts the objective status of that which
is to be tasted: the tasty thing must become part of the body. That which is to be
seen may be viewed and still maintain its objective status: we need not have the
object of vision dissolved in order to see it. As Borthwick puts it, ‘a metaphysics
premised in sight’s subject-object split cannot include the object’s
dissolvability.’31
Our inbound breath takes the smoke down into our lungs, and we may
view it, as it emerges outbound for Flavor Country. But it is not just personal
breath that gives wind to smoke enabling it to travel at all; our bodies have
worked upon the smoke, tasted it in the mouth, absorbed its flavor. The smoke
that goes in is not the same as the smoke that comes out; tasting smoke makes
the smoke part of us, and makes us part of smoke. That is the first way in which
taste is important, and this taste is taste with a small ‘t.’ Taste with a capital ‘T’
is also important here. The use of terms such as ‘Flavor Country’ as part of
smoking advertising is included also as an aesthetic of taste, an aesthetic that
allows us to partake in taste from a distance (or, as Borthwick puts it, to
otherwise judge pleasure through a visual metaphorics).32 There are certainly
elements of capital ‘T’ taste involved in the purchasing of Dunhill or Benson
and Hedges cigarettes at the high end of the cigarette market, as opposed to
Holiday, the cheapest brand available in Australia.33