(Re)making smoking: Of packets and practice

Introduction

In this article, we purposefully step outside the debate about whether plain packaging is effective in achieving smoking cessation in favour of attending to how plain packet (and indeed other) legislation has changed smoking for those who continue to smoke in a society increasingly hostile to the practice. If restricted to exploring plain packaging as a response to smoking that has either worked or has not, we would be forced to agree with the premise that interventions into smoking somehow stand outside this gestalt. We argue instead that legislative interventions such as plain packaging are enfolded into and effectively rework smoking into something different than it was prior to the plain packaging intervention. Rather than following what seems to be the commonest template for exploring the effects of plain packaging in public health and social science research – that is, looking for evidence of effectiveness of packaging intervention (see, as a paradigmatic example, Wakefield et al., 2013) – we deploy sensory analytic tools to explore how they create smoking practice anew.

In this article, we closely examine the Australian government’s means of sensory engagement with the smoker. We show that the smoker is engaged using a Kantian understanding of vision that entwines seeing with knowing, an understanding that relies on the objective status of vision. This understanding assumes that material objects such as packets retain their integrity and stand at a distance from the viewer. Our interviews with smokers suggest something different: that packets are visually encountered in ways that bear their gruesome and graphic messages deep inside the body. We investigate how these penetrative sensory relations between ‘plain’ packets and bodies have changed what smoking is for those who continue to do it in the era of smokefree.

The study

Between October 2013 and March 2015, we carried out 70 interviews with mostly white men and women aged 17–70; around 60 percent were men and the remaining 40 percent were women. While smoking is increasingly an activity undertaken by those located on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder (see Frohlich et al., 2010) Australia is overwhelmingly a middle-class country and our interviewees were, correspondingly, mainly from that group. We are of course fully aware that the highest smoking prevalence is among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, especially those dwelling in remote and rural contexts, but our study did not access those smokers and therefore does not remark upon the responses they might have to the particularities of colour, material, shape, and so on of packets. We report here only the patterns that emerged in response to our questions to interviewees; we certainly do not suggest in what follows that universal responses to colour and other packet qualities are in the offing. Rather, we speak against this notion, which appears to be at the heart of the state’s faith in how material objects will impact smokers and their practice.

Our interviews with smokers lasted anything from a few minutes to an hour, depending on how much time participants were willing to spend talking with us. We accessed people smoking in urban and suburban public places and thus spoke only with those who persisted in smoking under conditions increasingly hostile to the practice.

‘Plain packaging’, which as Chapman and Freeman (2014) note is anything but plain, was the subject of a much larger four-country (US, UK, Canada and Australia) study in which we were both involved. Dennis was lead investigator of the Australian part of study, and Alexiou served as her research assistant. The data we use in this article was collected during that study, which was designed to source the opinions of smokers on cigarette packets. As its primary investigators have hitherto noted about it, the study did not have all the hallmarks of a typical ethnographic endeavour:

We did not have particular fieldsites we wedded ourselves to and revisited time and again; nor did we develop long-term relationships with participants in the study –interviews instead took the form of one-off encounters with people smoking in public in a variety of settings. However, the interviews we carried out are characterized by the key ethnographic intention to get at ‘thickness’ and ‘livedness’ as people engaged in the aspect of social life in which we were interested, and how they described it to us as they practiced it. (Bell et al., 2015:138)

A new ‘vision’ for the (plain) packet

In 2006, Australia introduced graphic warning labels for tobacco product packaging, featuring images of body parts bearing the effects of smoking. These images, including ‘Lung’, ‘Aorta’ and ‘Eye’, had already been in circulation across multimedia platforms since 1997, as part of the government’s National Tobacco Campaign (see Hill and Carroll, 2003). In ‘Lung’, a dissected lung oozes viscous brown fluid; in Aorta, we witness an aorta being squeezed out by a gloved hand to extrude the thick, white paste that has built up as a result of smoking. Along with images dubbed ‘Brain’ (featuring a bloody stroke in progress) and ‘Eye’, in which a blue eye awaiting surgery and held open by specula stares back from the packet, the introduction of images on packets marked the beginning of the end of the tobacco industry’s domination of the packet space. ¹

Even though the tobacco industry and tobacco control seek opposite responses from (potential and existing) consumers, they make the same foundational assumption: that packets have the capacity to elicit responses from (potential) consumers (see Bell et al., 2015). The Australian government’s process for re-appropriating the packet sets out very clearly how packets could be made to elicit a quit attempt from current smokers and to extinguish the desire to try smoking in potential smokers. To accomplish this goal, in 2011 the Australian Department of Health and Ageing commissioned Sydney-based market research firm GfK Blue Moon ‘to identify one plain packaging design (colour, font type, font size) that would minimize appeal and attractiveness, whilst maximizing perceived harm and the noticeability of the graphic health warnings’ (Parr et al., 2011: 6).

Numerous examinations preceding this study affirm that pack colour, text size and type, border thickness and size enhance the effectiveness of health warnings and perceptions of the harmfulness of the cigarette product contained inside (see, for example, Goldberg et al., 1999; Hammond et al., 2007, 2009; Mutti et al., 2011). The claims made in this body of research fall into two main categories. The first takes the form of experimental studies that test how respondents make links between the visual elements – graphic warnings, text, colour – and what they stand for – harm, danger, seriousness of warning. Such links are often made by recourse to ideas about instinct, such as recognizing that ‘danger’ colour combinations occurring in nature tend to include red. They are also made on grounds of metaphoric association, in which a respondent demonstrates understanding that a heavy border surrounding a health warning signals that the warning is to be taken with corresponding gravity. The quality of the association is judged by how long respondents’ gazes remain on packet elements. Linger long on the heavy border and the assumption is that respondents understood the gravity of the message (see, for example, Munafò et al., 2011).

The second takes the form of cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys with smokers, in which the impact of pack features is assessed using participants’ awareness of and reactions to pack features (e.g. Hammond et al., 2003, 2007, 2009). These have consistently found that image-based warnings have a greater impact on smokers than text-only warnings; that large warnings are more effective than small ones; that plain packaging is less appealing to smokers than branded packaging, and is related to judgements about the (reduced or diminished) quality and taste of the product contained within. Awareness of and reaction to pack features are tested by recourse to what respondents say about packets and what the features they noticed would prompt them to do in respect of their smoking.

Building on both these categories of research, the GfK Blue Moon study took ‘Dark Brown’, considered by its hundreds of participants as ‘unappealing’ in the initial stages of the study into subsequent stages of research, along with ‘Mustard’. Respondents participated largely online, and it was only when researchers noticed that ‘Dark Brown’ actually appeared as olive when viewed on a computer screen that ‘Olive Green’ became a contender for a plain pack colour. It became the frontrunner when the initially promising ‘Dark Brown’ was associated more than once with chocolate by the study participants and when ‘Mustard’ was frequently described by them as ‘Gold’. GfK Blue Moon declared ‘Dark Olive Green’ the best candidate for plain packaging, since it did not prompt any positive associations from study participants. ² Recommendations were also made on font, declaring Lucida Sans easier to read than Arial, thus posing less risk of obscuring the health warning. Decisions on size and layout of graphic warnings included enlarging picture messaging on the front of packs so as to deliver a ‘stop-and-think’ reaction; so doing, according to the research, would ‘best convey the seriousness of health risks, and thus [would be] the strongest “dissuader”’ (Parr et al., 2011: 171). Graphic warning labels now occupy 75 percent of the back and 90 percent of the front of the olive brown packs, which are devoid of all industry insignia.

Stop and think, see and know: Imagining the smoker

The government’s repurposed packet puts its ‘Stop and Think’ message to a smoker imagined in very particular terms. As Macnaughton et al. (2012) put it, the smoker is invariably imagined by governments in two forms: the ‘rational smoker’ and the ‘addict’. Rational smokers are the mis- or ill-informed consumers who, once disabused of their misunderstanding (delivered via the packet) makes a rational decision (to recognize smoking as dangerous and quit). They stop, think, and, ideally, do. ‘Pavlovian manipulation’, made using ‘danger’ colour combinations and other elements designed to appeal beyond the self-conscious mind, can be administered to the addict not yet capable of rational decision making (see Macnaughton et al., 2012: 455). These two versions of the smoker also coincide with Cochoy’s (2002) analysis of the agency of material packaging, as it is encountered by economists, on the one hand, and sociologists and cultural theorists, on the other. Cochoy observes that economists treat the package as a direct representation of those qualities of the product which are apt to engage the calculative intelligence of the rational actor, while sociologists and cultural theorists ‘detach signs from products, and identify them as instruments of manipulation’, which, perhaps, might best suit the addict (Pottage, 2013: 526).

Seeing is believing

As Bell et al. (2015) have pointed out, while multiple senses are involved in smokers’ relations with packets, vision is very obviously the primary sensory means utilized by the government to engage the smoker. This sensory mode is critical to the authoritative medical claims made on the packet because graphic images dramatically convey the effects of smoking that are usually unseeable, since they occur inside the body. As Gilbert (2008) observes, the facticity of these images must be authoritatively established in order for them to be effective – they must be ‘true’. We here invoke the term ‘facticity’ in the neo-Kantian sense which, it seems, is the sense in which the images are intended by the government; in this form, facticity is contrasted with ideality. Medical doctors were engaged to educate the advertising firm hired by the government to produce the graphic images about the effects of smoking on the interior of the body. The images were designed to portray ‘what really happens as a person smokes’, and to disrupt ideality, ‘how smoking might feel’, with facticity, ‘the grim reality of the practice’. The role of sight, inextricably linked here with the facts of smoking, is crucial to disrupting how smoking might feel as one smells or tastes smoke – smokers might derive pleasure from these subjective experiences of smoking but, when confronted with the sight of lungs damaged as a result of smoking, they might ‘stop and think’ about what is really going on. Later in our article, we will turn to a more Heideggerian version of facticity to consider how smokers themselves have encountered the gruesomely adorned ‘plain’ packets.

Here, we note that images presented as authoritative facts that must be seen to be believed rely heavily upon the Kantian distinction between persons and things, and between objective and subjective senses: distinctions based on object and bodily integrity. Light mediates between the object and the retina, and permits an object to be seen; the thing need not break down in order to be visually detected. In contrast, particles must loosen themselves from the object and come into contact with the olfactory apparatus in order for smell to be detected (Borthwick, 2000: 129). Smelly things and tasted things necessarily become part of the body in order to be sensed at all, while sighted and heard things normally retain their integrity and effectively stand outside the body. Their status outside bodies lends them their objective status since no ‘feelingful’ experience is necessary for their reality to be confirmed. Thus, the ‘eye witness’ is included in our legal apparatus in a way that olfactory witnesses are not. The visible elements of the cigarette packet similarly stand outside viewers, permitting their objective distance on smoking (if they are rational) or otherwise engaging their less calculative responses to danger, the solemn gravity of border thickness, and the repellent ugliness of olive brown.

We take issue with this stern division between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ senses, and particularly with this stultified, bounded version of vision, especially as it cannot capture how seen things might penetrate, invade, escape, extend or contract the body and its operations. Based on our interlocutors’ remarks about plain packaging, we advance quite a different version of vision. It permits us to demonstrate how state-designed cigarette packets influence, rather than simply respond to, smoking practice in the era of smokefree.

A new vision of vision: Seeing as visiting

As Connor (1998: 14) notes:

Screens are credited with active powers, the powers to attract the look, to petrify us into the act of looking. Watching the screen in the cinema, one in a sense merely receives the visual impressions that have been deposited on the screen by the projector. [But] it has not always been believed that the eye was passive in this way. (emphases added)

We regard packets as active screens, as having the potential to occur to the smoking body as interactive objects, not least because they ‘petrify us into the act of looking’. To get at their interactive potential, we now turn to how packets worked with and into bodies when they were in the hands of the tobacco industry. We are struck by the invitation that could once be made to smokers by cigarette companies: an invitation not just to look at images deposited on the packet by the company, but instead to visit with them – to go see them.

In traditional philosophy, the one who looks is assumed to be stationary, as he or she ‘sits down to look … a statue [is he or she]’ (Serres, 1998: 405). Serres suggests instead that seeing is less to do with passively looking at (or receiving) visible objects as it is about ‘visiting’ with them: The term ‘visit’ and the verb ‘to visit’ mean at first ‘seeing’; here is the notion of itinerary – the one who visits goes to see’ (p. 334, emphases added). Vision here is not a property of the body or what is done to an object, but is instead betwixt, conceived as interaction between them: vision ‘on the move’ (see also Abram, 1997; Connor, 1998: 6).

Katz (1999) makes a sympathetic observation in specific relation to smoking and vision: the more usually invisible exhalation phase of respiration with smoke, as one does when one exhales cigarette smoke, accounts for a great deal of the appeal of smoking. In Katz’s formulation, exhaled smoke visibly moves beyond the physical sitedness of bodies and reminds us of both our entailment in the air beyond us as well as the reach of our bodies beyond our skins. This move outbound through breath, in other words, makes visible one’s own personal reach in the world (p. 340).

If we join Katz’s observation about exhaled smoke extending the reach of the person, with Serres’ notion of vision visiting with, rather than passively receiving, that which is seen, we can make sensory logic of an overriding theme underpinning almost all cigarette packaging advertising.

An extraordinary proportion of cigarette packages utilized the metaphor of escaping somewhere else via smoke. Before legislation prohibited their issuance, invitations to a range of enticing destinations were everywhere on offer. Smokers used to be invited, in cigarette-speak, to ‘come to Marlboro Country’, take the ‘Road to Flavor’ with Raleigh, or ‘come up’ to the waterfalls of Kool. To smoke a Lark was to go up in a hot air balloon, according to that brand’s recurrent advertising imagery. One could travel back ‘Down Home’ with Winston, or ‘escape’ the crowd, with Old Gold. Arctic Lights offered the smoker easy passage to that cool terrain. One could visit the ‘Country Fresh’ alpine regions with Salem. In Australia, one could go on Holiday, or linger at Longbeach.

The fact that what is seen – smoke – is on the move – to, in cigarette advertising speak, Flavor Country – makes a readily apprehensible sense of the text on an old packet of Peter Stuyvesant Lights that Simone (a reluctantly former smoker) has fondly retained from before Australia’s plain packaging era:

Mild choice tobacco plus the Modern Filter make Peter Stuyvesant the International Passport to Smoking Pleasure!

Smoky breath goes places beyond us – places that require international passports, itineraries that might even permit us to escape to the tropical islands of the Menthol Group. Cigarette companies were shrewd to imagine appealing destinations to which the smoker could travel from the body via visibly exhaled smoke.

We interviewed smokers who decanted their plain-packaged cigarettes into alternative containers that also featured outbound travel. Maryanne, a 52-year-old smoker had chosen a tin featuring clouds drifting across a light blue sky. Maryanne explained that the tin had replaced a small cardboard box that had once contained note cards bearing the message ‘Bonjour Paris’ that hadn’t survived her handbag. Meanwhile, as she sought potential interviewees in the city one lunchtime, Helen met 17-year-old Grace who said she’d been smoking a 25-gram pouch of tobacco per week for ‘almost a year’. Grace withdrew a small Haig’s chocolate tin from her bag and started rolling her cigarette using the tobacco and papers stored within as she chatted with Helen. Haig’s iconic chocolate tins have often utilized travel as a theme, with a vintage release featuring passport stamps from Australian state capitals – Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. The tin, said Grace, kept her tobacco from spilling into her bag and allowed her to keep it in something much prettier than the pouches with their confronting graphics. Grace’s tin was part of Haig’s heritage collection, a series modelled on vintage suitcases.

We don’t want to make too much of the fact that some of our participants used decanters thematically similar to packages of old, but we do note that cloud-covered skies, the destination of Paris, and Grace’s suitcase tin echo the notion of travel that once dominated packets prior to 2012, when plain packaging legislation grounded those flights of fancy. Whatever the images our participants utilized as they transferred their cigarettes to containers more to their liking, they frequently chose alternatives that articulated the notion of escaping the confines set by public health messaging on packets which, as we suggest below, attempt to alert smokers to the physical confines of their bodies, particularly their insides.

Travelling to the interior

Travel away from the body might be phenomenologically possible partly in and through the visible outboundedness of breath and imagery sympathetic to the habitual propensity of the body to exceed its sitedness, as we have suggested above. The converse is equally true: that the marking off of an inbound breath from the broader habitual process of respiration, as occurs in anti-smoking health messaging, issues an invitation into the insides of the body. Here are enacted the active powers of the screen, ‘to petrify us in the act of looking’ that Connor (1998: 4) describes. The effect of gruesome graphics on packs and in advertising has been to connect ‘the thought, act, or sight of inhaling a cigarette’ with ‘the sticky walls of arteries, genetic damage to lung tissue, or the “rotting” that characterizes chronic lung disease’ (Hill and Caroll, 2003: ii9); to usher in a stark distinction between ‘present’ inhaling body and the habitually respirating body. Where the habitually respirating body draws breath in, ‘blissfully unaware of the danger’, as Hill and Carroll indicate, the present body reflects on the damage being done inside the smoking body.

The habitual body falls behind one’s self-conscious attention in the course of everyday living. Present bodies invite reflection and allow persons to discover their own activity ‘in shaping the world as it is discovered through our perception’ (Langer, 1989: 32; Merleau-Ponty, 1962[1945]). Very often, this discovery is made via perceptions of pain, as pain brings usually disattended interactions between the body and the world into self-conscious (or ‘present’) attention. Present attention is drawn to the smoking body in anti-smoking messages on packages, in which aspects of the innards of the body normally (and necessarily) are just left to get on with activities, like breathing, and are brought into self-reflection via avenues of imminent pain and danger.

Helen discovered how this invitation to the interior operates when she interviewed 65-year-old smoker John, who first tried smoking at age 12. John recalled cheekily ‘pinching cigarettes’ from his mother’s packet, never considering the consequences for his future health. Since he could buy his own cigarettes at age 16, he told Helen, he had smoked ‘25 cigarettes a day for the past 49 years’. John explained to Helen how the new graphically adorned packets had made him reflect on what was happening inside his body. Regarding his own pack, one with a picture of rotting lungs on it, John confided to Helen, ‘Worst thing was to take it up, best thing would be to give it up but I think there’s no chance of giving up now.’ There was ‘no point’; the rot had set in, and nothing would stop it now. John imagined his insides looked just like those on the packets he purchased each day; they were a kind of mirror reflecting his insides. John did not turn away from this reflection, which he took to be true; he looked with resigned acceptance into them, and kept on smoking.

Susan, a blue-eyed 40-year-old smoker who’d ‘been at it’ since her 20s, spoke with Simone at length about her feelings about the packets. Susan didn’t feel put off by the colour, explaining to Simone that ‘Pantone 448C [the plain packet colour] is almost exactly the colour of my favorite designer dress, actually.’ Nor did she feel fazed by the pack image known as ‘Tongue’, which shows a cancerous growth so large that the tongue lolls disconcertingly outside of the mouth, and even ‘Foot’, which shows the gangrenous extremity being prepared for amputation surgery. What really bothered Susan was the image known as ‘Eye’.

Conceiving of the (blue) ‘Eye’ packet as a mirror held up before her, Susan turned abruptly away from her reflection, her own blue eye staring back at her and being held open by specula. If this pack was given to her when she purchased cigarettes, Susan returned that pack to the store clerk with the request that it be exchanged for ‘any other one, any other one at all’. Capable of killing with mephitic inbound breath, Susan’s mirror packet contained the magical power to injure (her) through the (her own) eye. Like John, Susan had no intention of giving up smoking, but this lack of intention did not mean that the smokers were left unaffected by packet ‘mirrors’. Both were confronted by them – one resigned to the reflection, as ugly as it was; the other turned away, such was her repulsion.

As Connor notes, looking into any mirror can provoke a ‘dangerous moment of encounter between different worlds and states of mind’. Mirrors, he notes, can ‘feed you back yourself, joyously entire. But mirrors also testify to the possibility of breaking off this continuity.’ Joyous continuity is not a bad way of expressing what we have suggested above was the industry approach – a joyous continuity of the body with the world, outbound and moving. We have contrasted this with the ‘breaking off’ of body parts – lungs, eyes, hearts, feet, into compartmentalized units that bear inspection and take smokers inside themselves, contract their world, and constrain them inside their bodies. We suggest that the mirror is a more productive trope for thinking about what packets do under state control than imagining consumers as responsive to objective information that remains outside smokers as they rationally contemplate it. We note also that the inbound travel we have described does not necessarily mean that people will stop smoking; but it does mean that smoking is a changed practice. To bear out our claim of change, we turn again to facticity, and we here again rely upon our conceptualization of ‘vision on the move’.

Facticity, breathing and seeing your own lungs

In contrast with factuality, which refers to material and non-human conditions, Heidegger deployed the term facticity to describe the concrete situations and the cultural and historical contexts into which Dasein (‘being in the world’) finds itself thrown a priori. We may see facticity made manifest in one of Dasein’s existentialisms: its state of mind. As Bunnin and Yu (2004: 246) note of it, ‘Dasein exists not factually, but factically. Its facticity indicates that Dasein cannot transcend its concrete situations as a free-floating spirit, but must have its Being in the world.’ Such finitude as is here indicated does not determine freedom; it is rather the basis upon which free choices are made. Indeed, the concept of choice persists ‘precisely in discovering a person’s facticity and seeking to negate or surpass its limitations toward existing as an ideal self-determinating being’.

As Visker (2004) observes, smoking makes for an interesting case study of limitations and freedoms. Visker notes that Levinas takes the cigarette to be a worldly object of enjoyment, ‘one of those screens the world puts on offer to loosen the bond with oneself’. One might, as Visker says, utilize this capacity of the cigarette to ‘escape’, and especially to escape one of the elements of facticity, the boredom of being burdened by one’s own company. Smoking might keep one back from the formless void, the il y a, the meaningless monotony of breathing in and out, the brute facts of being alive. Smoking permits us to play with ‘just that rhythm (inhaling exhaling) that is absent from the il y a’ (p. 219).

Of course, when cigarette packets were in the hands of the tobacco industry, practising this respiratory rhythm permitted the easy journey to Flavor Country, the escape from the futility of progress in the capitalist state, or the monotony of the institution, or whatever the conditions of facticity might have been for the escapee. If, as we have suggested, this was a core part of the appeal of smoking, then there could hardly be a more lucrative situation for tobacco companies: like all worldly activities, smoking is not a successful liberation, but must be repeated at regular intervals to achieve a momentary escape. But now, in the era of smokefree, it is a dangerous thing to play around with the rhythm of respiration. One might yet travel to Flavor Country, but the journey might involve a most undesirable stopover, at Lung, or Brain or Eye.

‘I still enjoy smoking’, said 37-year-old Cameron, who worked in hairdressing and really enjoyed the cigarette break from her 9–5 job, which she wasn’t ‘all that passionate about’. On her feet all day in a low budget salon in the city’s only real shopping precinct, clients were ‘constant’, and the pay was ‘shit’. She told Simone:

Since those disgusting photos [of innards] came in, and they put them on packs, I worry. I’ve got two kids and I worry that I’ll drop dead. It’s changed my enjoyment level, for sure. And people judge you. Like I know I have to wash really thoroughly and chew gum to get rid of the smell, because you’re near people and they can smell it on you. Some judge you and are quite rude if the smell is too strong.

Linking vision and smell, as Cameron did in her remarks, provokes us to consider respiration, vision, smell and facticity as a bundle of conjoined elements that help draw out her changed experience of smoking. What happens when Cameron inhales in the era of smokefree? It is inhalation that bears the cancer inside the smoker’s body as television advertisements utilizing the graphic images have made clear; they each begin with the inhalation of smoke from the cigarette, describe the damage smoke does as it circulates, and end at the point of exhalation. At the point of exhalation, smoke becomes someone else’s problem – an increasingly dangerous and sinister problem. Indeed, ‘denormalization’, the term used by the Australian government to describe the purposeful change in the interpretation of smoking from ‘a widely practiced and socially acceptable behaviour to one which is increasingly typified as destructive, dirty, and anti-social’ (Scollo and Winstanley, 2012: np), has been accomplished largely via a focus on exhalation.

Three sorts of tobacco smoke are produced in the course of having a cigarette: mainstream smoke: the smoke directly inhaled into the smoker’s lungs through the burning cigarette; exhaled mainstream smoke: the smoke breathed out by the smoker from their lungs; and side-stream smoke: the smoke that drifts from the tip of the cigarette. Exhaled mainstream smoke and side-stream smoke can be described as ‘environmental tobacco smoke’, or ‘tobacco smoke pollution’, but they are not so called in any government production. ‘Secondhand smoke’ is the preferred government term (see Dennis, 2016: 113). Only this term captures the repulsive idea that the smoke a bystander breathes in has been used before (Brandt, 1998: 168). This secondhand smoke has, as part of denormalization, been cast as exceptionally dangerous for other bodies to inhale – even though in the outdoors the danger it presents is entirely dependent on wind direction and speed, density of smoke in the air, proximity of smokers to bystanders and duration spend in proximity (see Stafford et al., 2010).

The idea that smoke is dangerous to others in the outdoors is, as Bell (2014: 165) suggests, phenomenologically speaking carried largely by the invasive character of smell. She notes that:

The smell of smoke – like smoke itself – creates a material connection between the smoker and the bystander … Moreover, this connection is entirely involuntary … The smell of stale cigarette smoke] is marginal matter in Douglas’ sense of the term: in its refusal to respect boundaries, it is dangerous and polluting … [it] destroys the boundaries between what is ‘me’ and what is ‘not me’.

But we submit that a singular focus on olfaction is insufficient, for vision, too, is foundationally involved in this notion of boundary disrespect. The anti-smoking advertising graphic ‘Lung’ has communicated to everyone who sees a packet or watches television that the air expelled by a smoker has circulated around the foul matter of his or her rotting lungs. ‘No wonder smokers feel short of breath; their lungs are rotting’, proclaims the ad’s voice over, as the smoker exhales smoke into the camera (see Quitnow, 2012). The pack image of the rotting lung provides graphic evidence of the very source of the danger that would waft upon an outbound breath – the filthy source of illness that, in miasmatic thinking, becomes a traveller on the air and infects all who encounter it. It seems to matter little, in this post-Pasteurian view, that illness is not scientifically explicable by recourse to such notions. It didn’t stop an infuriated man from screaming at Rosie, one of Dennis’s interlocutors whom she was interviewing in a designated smoking area in Canberra. On encountering her exhaled smoke as he passed by, the man lambasted Rosie: ‘Hey, don’t blow that stinking shit on me! I don’t want your cancer. It’s a contagious disease, spread by selfish idiots like you’ (Dennis, 2016: 125).

Conclusion

The remarks and practices of smokers, and some non-smokers that we have detailed herein, indicate that the ‘intervention’ of the packet, and particularly its imagery, are not just responses to the health problem of smoking. Rather, packets appear to be constitutive of smoking in the era of smokefree legislation, and not simply through the sensory medium of vision, as may be assumed in public health imaginaries of how interventions ideally work. It wasn’t so long ago that fragrant cigarette smoke featured in romance novels, nor was it long ago that their authors were photographed for the back book jacket with cigarettes in hand, the smoke drifting easily from the lit end, just as easily suggesting the authors’ sophistication, their reach in the world (Katz, 1999). Not long ago the cinematic code for a sexual encounter was the entwinement of the lovers’ cigarette smoke as they lay in bed together. But those images have had their day; they are no longer elements of the facticity into which Dasein is thrown, a priori, and they were never just things we looked at – the book jacket image says as much about vision’s capacity to move, to ‘visit with’, as it does about the author’s influence, as does the entwinement of the smoke we see wafting away from the lovers.

The way we breathe in and out with cigarette smoke in the era of smokefree isn’t so much an outbound journey (to authorial fame, to a lover’s body, to Marlboro country) as it is a containment to the inner realms, a hideous journey to Lung and Eye and Brain facilitated by odiferous exhalations and inhalations to rotting sites we can see. The ‘we’ who see include those who look into packet mirrors and recoil in horror, or accept their fates, such as they might be – and who knows whether John will die from an illness of Lung, from Stroke, or perhaps it is Artery that will get him. When Susan bears smoke into her body, it’s not, she hopes, smoke that will travel to Eye, and so she chooses packs that don’t force her to look into her own. The ‘we’ who see include those who see cigarette packs not as mirrors but as windows into the bodies of others. The view of rot and gunk, they surmise, can yet be borne back to the outside, in and on a breath. The necessary, backgrounded act of respiration comes into view, and that changes everything.