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dining rooms with people in the non-smoking section, but it also makes for
conversation between strangers (‘have you a lighter?’), and creates a common
body of ‘the smokers’ who spill out of public buildings together at smoko.
Smoke dissolves specific social barriers between persons, reveals ontological
barriers between objects and personal bodies to be reifications, maintains and
creates connections between distances, between genders, conversations, social
situations, places and between the senses as smoke is multisensually
experienced in a number of ways simultaneously, leading to synasthetic
descriptions of slaps. At least as much as it dissolves boundaries, it changes
orders and types of intercorporeal connections and relationships, works upon
and dissolves trust, the possibility of sex, and conversations. Rigid frames of
inhalation/invasion/pain
in
anti-smoking
discourse
and
exhalation/extension/pleasure in pro-smoking discourse based on vision in the
former case and vision/taste sets in the latter, and which both maintain a
separability of person and world, are insufficient to deal with the plumes of
smoky evidence I have presented here.
University of Adelaide
Simone Dennis
Notes
1 Ln the case of sex, see for example Carole S. Vance, ‘More Danger, More Pleasure: A
Decade after the Barnard Sexuality Conference’ in Carole S. Vance (ed.) Pleasure and
Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality London, Pandora Press, 1989, p. xvi-xxxix. In the
case of food and eating, see for example Carol Munter, ‘Fat and the Fantasy of
Perfection’ in Carole S. Vance (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality
London, Pandora Press, 1989, p. 225-241.
2 I speak in this paper only of smoking as it relates to cigarettes. It is evident from my
own ongoing research in smoking that other smoking practices and products entail and
occasion quite different experiences of smoking.
3 Moreton-Robinson reference.
4 Jack Katz, How Emotions Work Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1999, p. 340.
5 Galileo (in Casey, Feld, and Basso).
6 In both the pleasure and pain ‘accounts’ produced by the anti-smoking lobby, expert
knowledge of the smoking body, knowledge that is largely unavailable to smokers
themselves, is used as a basis for the lobby to disseminate information about smoking.
Access to this body positions the anti-smoking lobby etically and rationally in relation to
emically and irrationally located participants. In this sense, die anti-smoking lobby shares
a number of positions with determinist theoreticians. I would nominate Marvin Harris
(1977) as characteristic of the ‘determinist theoreticians’ that I am referring to in this
paper. Harris, who advocates for a variety of ecological determinism labeled ‘cultural
materialism,’ which seeks to explain any and all sociocultural phenomena to a root
condition of the environment, is typical of determinist theoreticians who seek to link
ostensibly ‘strange’ behaviour, or behaviour that seems ‘irrational’ to concrete
circumstances, to subjects who are shown to behave in line with the infrastructural
conditions made primary by the theorist. These positions are ones of expert knowledge of
the body unavailable to, in this instance, smokers, and a predilection for using this expert
knowledge to ‘rationally’ explain activities that might be called ‘irrational.’ The