ABSTRACT

This chapter shifts attention away from an explicit focus on how the smoker herself has been understood in favour of an analysis of the air itself. It looks specifically at how the air itself has been explicated by the state in and through the foregrounding and separation of the much more usually intertwined and habitually backgrounded actions, inhalation and exhalation. The chapter suggests that bringing the air itself to the fore has become central to the cultivation and mobilization of the smokefree atmosphere. Particular explications of the air itself are central to how its big ideals and its main goals are brought directly to bear on the individual body of the smoker. A breath drawn in via a cigarette is laced with over 4000 chemicals that are invisibly inhaled, rendering the inhaled air toxic, it explains. '4000 chemicals' begins with a smoker, in this case a young woman, lighting up a cigarette, and ends as she lets that breath go.