Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 2006 | Page 58

54 Popular Culture Review 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