A Touching Analysis

Introduction

In this paper, I examine what an analytic of touch offers for theorizing the impact of thirdhand smoke. Drawing on currently circulating “scientific” claims about the danger of touching/being touched by objects permeated with thirdhand smoke and on online discussions about the exposure of infants to thirdhand smoke from smoking family members, I argue that touch permits insight unavailable to us in other analytically pursued sensory registers. It is smell that initially alerts people to the presence of thirdhand smoke and indicates that a bodily boundary has been crossed. But the fact that smoke can take a solid form by infiltrating things, like carpets, sofas, skin, and hair, and is claimed to render those things toxic to people who touch them, means that the relations of thirdhand smoke are haptic as well as odiferous. Smokers themselves absorb this toxic matter, and so they too have begun to be read as toxic bodies—not just bodies that give off odor, but bodies that could, if touched by, or themselves touch, other bodies, might cause harm. I pursue two registers of touch herein; the first is an extension of the invasive capacity of smell rendered as a variety of touch, and the second, following Erin Manning (2007), treats touch, in its first and foremost register, as “a sensation, a manner of incorporating the world, of embodying the actuality (and virtuality) of an other” (p. 57).

I make this analysis by recourse to a conceptualization of a quiet and easily overlooked conception of violence. I look at two examples of this violence. The first seems initially like maternal care made manifest in haptic form, as a mother frets over the dangers presented to her newborn from the bodies of an affinal family member who smokes and then wants to touch her baby. I examine how the smoker’s body is cast, in accordance with authoritative (scientific, medical) claims about thirdhand smoke, as a perpetrator of violence effected in and through his touch. Unregulated and unchecked, the smoker’s desire to reach out and touch, in this case his granddaughter, promises to visit upon her the toxic harm of smoking. Bodies always and already unfurl toward or away from one another and into space. When touch is deliberately violently intended, such as in a slap or a punch, the haptic patterns of family-making are much easier to notice, but when the star of this story, father-in-law (FIL), reaches out to touch his newborn granddaughter, uneasy negotiations have to occur about the otherwise wholly expected haptic relations he might be expected to conduct with the baby. But this is not a one-way violence. Second, I represent the uneasy negotiation of who can and cannot touch this newborn using the notion that the repertoire of bodily dispositions and habits that produce the institution of the family cannot be undone from the broader contexts of (societal) power to which they belong. Here, I track how the official dangerousness of thirdhand smoke is borne deep into the breast of the family, and how it arrays relations between family members and particularly how they are permitted to touch one another. I pay especial attention to how the smoker is resultantly himself potentially the victim of a quiet but thorough violent ejection from the family, effected through denial of touching relations with the members of the family. This expulsion is also menacingly present in the broader social world, as smokers are thrust out of public space—not only for the smoke they generate as they smoke but for the thirdhand smoke that stays on them after the fact of smoking, and might violently impact others, should they touch or be touched by the smoker.

What Is Thirdhand Smoke?

Thirdhand smoke is smoke that remains after the secondhand smoke has dissipated into the air. This smoke remains as an affixation to or lodgment in objects and persons with which smoke has come into contact. The Mayo clinic’s blog offers the most straightforward, nontechnical description, advising that thirdhand smoke is:

[r]esidual nicotine and other chemicals left on a variety of indoor surfaces by tobacco smoke. This residue is thought to react with common indoor pollutants to create a toxic mix. This toxic mix of thirdhand smoke contains cancer causing substances, posing a potential health hazard to nonsmokers who are exposed to it, especially children. Studies show that thirdhand smoke clings to hair, skin, clothes, furniture, drapes, walls, bedding, carpets, dust, vehicles and other surfaces, even long after smoking has stopped. Infants, children and nonsmoking adults may be at risk of tobacco related health problems when they inhale, ingest or touch substances containing thirdhand smoke … Thirdhand smoke residue builds up on surfaces over time and resists normal cleaning. Thirdhand smoke can’t be eliminated by airing out rooms, opening windows, using fans or air conditioners, or confining smoke to only certain areas of a home … The only way to protect nonsmokers from thirdhand smoke is to create a smokefree environment, whether that’s your private home or vehicle, or in public places, such as hotels and restaurants. (Mayo Clinic, 2014)

The danger purported to issue from contact with thirdhand smoke is sensorially apprehensible in two primary ways: olfactory and haptic. One can smell thirdhand smoke because it “off-gases” from within whichever object it has found lodgment—this is the foul, stale smell that emanates from the curtains, carpets, and other soft furnishings of hotels that at one time permitted smoking in their rooms. One can touch it because smoke encases and penetrates that which it encounters on its airy journeys and remains sited, lodged, in those objects.

Indeed, thirdhand smoke is a real stayer. In 2011, for instance, Matt et al. reported on how long thirdhand smoke might remain in the domestic home, concluding that it lingered well in excess of 2 months and that it would remain there long after its olfactory profile was no longer detectable. Even after being vacant for 2 months and being prepared for new residents, with new carpeting, fresh paint, and professional cleaning, thirdhand smoke contaminant remained, having been absorbed by the very matter of the house itself. There it lingered, presenting a danger to anyone who might unsuspectingly trail their hand along a wall or a benchtop, fling open the curtains, or sit on the sofa (see Matt et al., 2011).

Abject Sofas

I make especial mention of the sofa because it’s the star of a new video released as part of the University of California Television (UCTV) Prime Cuts series, which showcases research carried out at the University of California. The clip, which runs for just over 2½ minutes, features an innocuous looking sofa that, having absorbed tobacco smoke from a near located smoker, is now the source of deadly contaminating emissions. This smoke is absorbed by the sofa but will then “come back off of whatever it’s stuck to,” says researcher Suzyann Schick in the clip. Sited in the sofa, yet simultaneously outbound from it as off-gas, thus matter yet also air, thirdhand smoke is abjectness par excellence.

This sofa initially smells like stale smoke. But people should be aware that smell isn’t the only thing to worry about. It’s what you can touch, too, as Lara Gundel, the other researcher featured in the clip, explains:

Thirdhand smoke is what you smell when you go into a hotel room where people have been smoking, or what rubs off on your skin if you touch a wall, or if you visit somebody’s house and they’ve been smoking. So that means it’s not only there in the air, but it is coming out of the surfaces. (UCTV Prime Cuts, 2012, my emphasis)

In respect of the element of smell, a claim of harm is made—in the absence of any verifiable scientific evidence—on “the embodied dimension of thirdhand smoke that has been central to the concept’s success” (Bell, 2014, p. 165). Noting that the semiotic power of the smell of stale cigarette smoke is remarkably frequently referenced in media and public health reports on thirdhand smoke, Bell argues:

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 [which cannot be voided, but once in, stays in, the recipient body—see Le Guerer, 1990, p. 175] is marginal matter in Douglas’ sense of the term: in its refusal to respect boundaries, it is dangerous and polluting. In the language of Kristeva (1982), thirdhand smoke is abject: an in-between, ambiguous, composite substance—neither air nor matter—that destroys the boundaries between what is “me” and what is “not me.” (2014, p. 165)

Smell as Violent Touch

As Bell rightly suggests, thirdhand smoke is rendered dangerous on just the same grounds as is secondhand smoke—that is, valence is lent to claims of its dangerousness in and through the invasive capacity of odored smoke that has been inside one body and then expelled to be involuntarily taken in by another unwilling body. There is certainly an abundance of material to validate this (olfactory only) line of thinking. For instance, the capacity of smoke to stick to the smoker herself has earned her the title “mobile tobacco contamination package,” a moniker applied by psychologist and thirdhand tobacco researcher Georg Matt. In an article that appeared as “The Nose Knows: The Invisible Threat of Thirdhand Smoke,” Matt told the Huffington Post’s Lynn Peeples in 2011: ¹

I get lots of stories of people with asthma who move into environments that are full of thirdhand smoke and report increased problems, Matt said. This is more than just a nuisance like the smell of dirty socks, added Matt, who called smokers “mobile tobacco contamination packages.” (see Peeples, 2011)

As I hope I’ve made clear in the foregoing, there is much to support the notion that the thirdhand smoke menace is one made through the same sensory register as is secondhand smoke—that of olfaction which, I have suggested, might be considered not only in figurative or semiotic terms but as a physicality that reaches out to touch, and violently so. But, given that smokers are penetrated by smoke—that they materially embody it in their skin and their hair and that they cannot expunge thirdhand smoke by scrubbing it off—thirdhand smoke not only demands theorizing through smell—it demands it in and through an analysis founded in touch. This is because smokers are, in the present discussions of thirdhand smoke, dangerous to touch and dangerous when they touch you, or when you touch them. I want to turn now to touch as a “skin-sation,” which opens up a different register for exploring touch or, rather, denials of touch between bodies.

Familial Touch

Touch is particularly evident in familial relations, especially where relations with babies and children are involved. A great many websites across the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia have begun dispensing advice to new parents about regulating touch between the baby and the family members who smoke. Issuing from within the very breast of the family, the threat of contamination comes from those coated in a sheen of thirdhand matter acquired from smoking. This sheen that covers the smoker seeps from the shirt the smoker wears, from his hair, from the pores of his skin, onto the baby’s skin. It comes from the finger offered to the baby to suck, that recently held a cigarette. It comes from the hand that strokes the baby’s face, the arms in which the baby is held—all these contact points offer up the danger of nicotine transfer from smoker to baby. While this smoky cloak is at first olfactorily detected, the consequences of recognizing a smelly danger are attended in and through another sensory register—that of touch.

In Australia, the “What to Expect” website advises that smokers should remove the clothing that they smoked in, wash their hands and face, and rinse their mouth before being permitted to touch a baby (http://www.whattoexpect.com/forums/australian-parents/archives/third-handsmoke-141.html, accessed January 13, 2014). This advice is replicated on every parental advice website I visited (some 30 in all, across the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia). Interestingly, these sites include information about how to manage smokers who react badly to being cut off from establishing haptic relations with the new baby. One poster on the “What to Expect” site expressed trepidation about giving instructions to her FIL about face washing and clothes changing after a cigarette and before holding her newborn baby. Another poster quickly responded with,

Why on earth couldn’t you say something?? If some dirty smoker stuck their finger in my babies [sic] mouth, there [sic] life wouldn’t be worth living. Isn’t standing up for the health and well-being of your baby more important than upsetting your FIL [Father in Law]? (What to Expect.com, 2012) ²

Families, like other institutions, are premised upon bodily bases—that is, the family, broadly defined, is that of whole bodies living in fleshy proximity. Lyon and Barbalet (1994) argue that the family is best regarded as an institution that is formed as other institutions are, in and through the deployment of body parts relationally to the body parts of another being—the military and the factory floor in late capitalism also work on this premise. Emotion organizes the deployment of bodily movements in the familial context in particular and meaningful ways that meet and are met by parts of others—father’s lips to the foreheads of children, mothers’ nipples to babies’ mouths, hands reaching out to deliver a slap to the legs of a disobedient child, and an older sister pushing a younger brother down. Such partial deployments, while issuing from and to the wholeness of familial bodies, are distinguished in subtle, habitual ways from the wholeness of flesh, and together create and maintain patterns that yield and maintain the social body of the family. As Collins (1981, p. 988) suggests, the maintenance of social institutions is tethered to the “distinct engagements of aspects of bodily disposition with pertain to them,” in the case of the family, “[t]he most repetitive behaviours that make up family structure are the facts that …. the same men and women sleep in the same beds, that the children are kissed, spanked and fed”; they are touched, within, through, and according to particular registers that we recognize as familial (see Lyon & Barbalet, 1994, p. 56). These are touches that conform to corporeal expressivity, to the signs and codes that are immediately understood as the space and time a body should occupy in the family or, more properly, within a given family, which might do more spanking than stroking, or which might even stand at odds with how touch is to be made between bodies, something which is codified in and signified by our legal systems. But, as Lyon and Barbalet argue, touches between familial bodies are not only expressive of relations of a particular familial sort, they create families.

Recognize here the complex interplay of structure and bodily discipline (in a Foucauldian sense) that arrays bodily functions (like eating or slapping) with emotion (like the desire to nourish, like the anger and love that might impel a parent to slap a child), as significant in shaping these particular forms of bodily and partial deployment that make the family. Here, we cannot ignore the role of power and disciplinary structures within society in shaping and, in some cases, determining particular bodily dispositions and habits—like the unacceptability of FIL’s smoking, and how his body is dealt with resultant of his habit—particularly within the contemporary biopolitics of risk—and smoking certainly has been presented as among the highest of contemporary risks to health.

Indeed, smoking has been transformed from “a widely practised and socially acceptable behaviour to one which is increasingly typified as destructive, dirty, and anti-social” (Scollo & Winstanley, 2012). This infiltrates families—like FILs—as well as into things like smoke-free public place legislation that restricts smoking to public land—those interstitial spaces like footpaths, vacant lots, and the edges of roadways—and prohibits the practice in public space, where “the public” circulates. These disciplinary structures are highly consequential—in FIL’s family, FIL is excluded from the foundational practice of touching and being touched, and as Tan (2013) has noted, the elimination of smoking in public places has made for a rearraying of the public body and who might be thought to belong to it.

Certainly, it seems very clear that the specter of thirdhand smoke has the capacity to rearray the formative practice of touching between bodies in the family. The security of familial relations is threatened by the presence of thirdhand smoke, to the extent that the importance of the body and its dispositions in the routine creation and maintenance of family come to the fore. FIL’s body, even when it no longer emanates a stale smoke smell, does not lie beyond the conscious attention of his daughter-in-law; so concerned is she, and not only or even specifically with his odorousness, that she writes to a blog online, asking if his touch to his newborn grandchild is permissible or ought to otherwise be regarded as a kind of violence that she should act to prevent. FIL reaches out to touch the skin of his newborn grandchild, with freshly washed hands, a recently laundered shirt, and shampooed hair. But his hand might be yet restrained; for the invisible sheen of thirdhand smoke cannot be scrubbed away by shampoo, hand wash, and laundering. Prevented from doing the body work that creates and sustains the family, FIL is cast out from its operations. He may well not be allowed to touch.

It is not just that FIL’s body harbors the potential to harm his grandchild in the invisible violence of his ostensibly gently administered touch. It is also the case that his body is subject to the violence that ensues from familial others, a sort of violence that imposes the institutional will of the family directly onto FIL’s body. In Manning’s (2007) terms, this is the imposition of a kind of stability, which she remarks upon in respect of making and maintenance of the (national) body politic:

The body, seen as a potential site of a violence of touch, can be conceived of as an exfoliation in the sense Jose Gil gives the term. The body exfoliates by always already enfolding into the space it occupies (1988: ix). This is a state of violence insomuch as it is an infralanguage that speaks through and across the body, creating multiplicities and discontinuities both in my living, sensing body, and in yours, when I reach out toward you … When I touch you, what I cannot know is what infra(sensual) language our reciprocal touch will create. Nor can I predict how my touching you will provoke spaced times and timed spaces. Of course, I can never predict the body “itself” either (since there is no such thing as the body as always already whole), hence the state’s continual imposition of the “natural” body-politic to establish a normative vocabulary of the body to which we agree to conform. Without a stable body there can be no body politic, and without a body politic, bodies will not confirm, proclaims the state. (p. 57)

Touch and the Body Politic: Love, Trust, Community

In order to enact its ferocious damage as a kind of touch, thirdhand smoke needs wings—the air circulating in a room, the breeze blowing through the house, that bears the toxic residue of smoke past both into the present and into unsuspecting bodies in proximity to the sofa or to FIL. The specter of being touched by thirdhand smoke as it takes flight as off-gas draws on some very old notions indeed. Prior to Pasteur’s insights that showed that disease was the consequence of microorganisms, the air itself was endowed with such physical agency. Understood to bring with it a history of its recent wanderings, the air could bear illness on its wings. One could only hope that the air one breathed in had not, just priorly, circulated among the rotted and foul matter, for breathing in such air, which was characterized by its foul smell, resulted in illness. Here, we are permitted the view of the air and its relationship with the body that circulated prior to Pasteur’s paradigm-shifting discovery: Bodies were subject to an active air, and smell was not just an irritation, but instead illness in waiting. Smell was a physicality, something that could touch you if you happened to be in its path, just waiting for deposition into a body by way of the wind. Once deposited, odorous matter would grow into the maturity of illness. It seems there is little difference between these miasmatic conceptions of a smell so powerful that it would translate into physical illness and the phenomenon of thirdhand smoke.

A classically miasmatic construction, in which the air is understood to hold in suspension the emanations of the foul, thirdhand smoke is capable of inflicting physical danger and is capable of infecting all breathers by dint of its mode of travel: on the updrafts and downdrafts, the indiscriminate gusts and wafts of the air, even if you cannot smell it anymore. Gabriel notes that:

Miasma goes well beyond physical or even moral uncleanliness, indicating an affliction that is enduring and cannot be washed away [as is certainly the case with thirdhand smoke], although certain actions are taken to deal with it. It is a state of rottenness for which individuals may be responsible and are certainly held to be highly contagious. This individual who brings miasma infects everyone he/she touches.… Once unleashed, miasma is capable of afflicting everyone. (2008, np)

“Miasma,” continues Gabriel,

brings about a state of moral and spiritual decay, a corruption of all values and human relations of trust, love and community—people suspect their neighbours of being the cause, scapegoating and witch hunts are rife. Thus, a notable feature of miasma … is that the search for purification and expiation frequently helps spread the corruption. (2008)

A fail result might also mean a death sentence. On the ABC’s most recent episode of its popular show Save Your Life Tonight, host Cameron Daddo invited Rene Bittoun, whom he described as an “antismoking Evangelist,” onto the stage to test the carbon monoxide output of hapless 60-something year-old, pack-a-day smoking (let’s call him) “Dave.” Hot on the heels of a story about a man present in the audience who had just completed treatment for lung cancer which was “not his fault,” but had come to him instead from being in environments inhabited by smokers, Dave submitted to the test and returned a result of 15 parts per million (a high reading—a normal output is around four) and was told he was well on his way to 30, which would “be fatal.” Dave, off-gassing onto the innocent audience members even as he was interviewed, including the man who’d been afflicted with cancer because of people like Dave, was asked if he intended to quit, to which he gave the only answer possible under such circumstances: He nodded fervently. No love here.

Dr. Richard Graffis, executive vice president and chief medical officer at Indiana University Health and overseer of its transition to thirdhand smoke-free workplace, did not see the need for testing any of his workers as Weyco did. He noted that smokers would in any case be “self-incriminating” because of the odor that they would exude if they broke with policy and had a sneaky cigarette during work hours. “We have no hidden cameras, no Gestapo,” he told the Huffington Post (Peeples, 2011). He then indicated that no such visual surveillance techniques were needed in any case: “If they go outside and smoke, we’ll know.” No trust here, only a foul stench to identify the sources of danger.

As Gabriel also notes, miasma issues from the neighbor—from within. Matteoni’s work is again useful. She notes that during the mid-1600s,

Witchcraft became the greatest heresy because it implied the renunciation of God through a declared allegiance with Satan. But, as Norman Cohn has underlined in his work on the background of the witch-hunt, the main features of this emerging diabolical cult are not to be found far from Christianity itself. Christian literature was haunted by demons and by the dramatized representation of the Devil, which was depicted in animal or disquieting anthropomorphic form and connotated [sic] by a heavy smell, in contrast with the spiritual elements exalted by the Christian faith. Yet the devilish monstrosity, that during medieval times had been an attribute of the Jews, was now not only the materialisation of a dangerous otherness. It could be no more marginalized as the evidence of a different ethnic and religious group, but it could, instead, manifest itself in every individual belonging to the community, which became part of the satanic congregation. (2010, p. 35)

Welcome to the Hotel California

Contemporarily, the thirdhand menace might be similarly presented to us from within our own familiar territories, activities, and circulations. Could the cause of my illness be my smelly office mate? Perhaps it will be the vendor of the next home I’ll purchase, who smoked inside and infected the walls which now lie in wait to gently, invisibly, and constantly off-gas, even through the new paint. Perhaps, as one San Franciscan hotel (which shall remain here unnamed) feared, the source of illness could be the last paying guest allowed to smoke in its bar, its bedrooms, and its dining areas. Heading possible litigation off at the pass, it posted a sign in its lobby, declaring to present customers that patrons of the hotel were once permitted to smoke within its walls, and indubitably left invisible deposits on its surfaces. It is almost as if these past guests were still there; current patrons were warned that these invisible people who slept, ate, and milled about in their time had infected the place. No one could say who they were, but their legacy lay in wait in the rooms, the carpet, and the curtains. Their smoke never checked out of the hotel, which remained haunted by its continued presence. The abject cannot be banished entirely, even under such conditions of radical exclusion as smokefree. It might pop up in the curtains of your new apartment, in the carpet of a rental car, in the last hotel room you stayed in. The atmosphere of smokefree is new, but it is informed by some very old notions. The Roman poet Lucan wrote that witches’ breath poisoned “air that before was harmless” (see Lucan ([AD 65] 1896)—this seems perfectly applicable to modern conceptions of thirdhand smoke, especially if we consider an entry on the ASH website, discussing the dangerousness of thirdhand smoke: “Smokers’ breath can be harmful to health.” And witches? If the figure of the witch is taken to apply to one who is antagonistic to the social order, then smokers are witches in the era of smokefree. “Protect Your Family,” shrieks the ASH website. “Don’t become complacent!,” “Most Nonsmokers ARE Exposed!” ³

Untouchables

And we ARE exposed, aren’t we, thanks to the capacity of thirdhand smoke to stay sited on the smoker for a period of time unspecified. The smoker need not light up to present a danger, as she carries her own permanent atmosphere around with her regardless of whether she actually lights up, or not. What if she brushes up against you? Handles an object in a store before you do? Tries on a dress and then returns it to the rack, where its now toxified material lies in wait for your touch? Remember researcher Gundel’s words about that terrible sofa: thirdhand smoke: “rubs off on your skin if you touch [it] … So that means it’s not only there in the air, but it is coming out of the surfaces.” When those surfaces are skin and hair and clothes, the taxonomic distinction between “smoking” and “smokers” has collapsed—to the extent that “smoke-free places” might come to mean places free of smokers, not just smoke. Indeed, this has already begun to occur. The executive director of Action on Health and Smoking has pointed to the possibility that those with a family history of cancer may be entitled to smoke-free places—restaurants, workplaces, and any places they frequent. ⁴ In the case of secondhand smoke legislation, attempts are made to protect the quality of the public pool of air for all breathers—even though such legislation is brought unevenly to bear on the already socioeconomically marginalized; as Adey (2013) notes, the “air tells us about difference: in the testimony of pollutants and choking effluvium, an analysis of air reveals who belongs and who does not, who is deserving and who is not” (p. 291). But in the case of thirdhand smoke, particular smoker—not smoking—bodies, irrespective of whether they visibly or olfactorily expel smoke or not—will be the targets of expulsion, just as they currently are at Weyco. These people are untouchable.

Conclusion

An analysis based on touch is good for thinking the sort of violence implied in the harms claimed for thirdhand smoke, as touch itself is always, potentially, a sort of violence, whether the toucher reaches out to touch and is stung by the experience, or whether one who is touched suffers under the ferocious touch of another. The violence lurking, always, in experiences of touch is prefigured in the space of thirdhand smoke, crafting a politics of untouchability. Attending to relations between persons and thirdhand smoke in and through touch has important implications for registering the harms of thirdhand smoke in familial context, and in broader societal and legislative contexts, since thirdhand smoke reaches out from the smoker to touch the bodies among which it mingles, and smokers might reach out to touch YOU.

Of course, one needn’t be located nearby a poisonous sofa, or even indoors, to be in danger—“mobile contamination packages”—smokers are among us. Consider Jemma Wayne’s remarks in her 2014 article in the Huffington Post, “Why Smokers Must Be Shamed.” Wayne is talking therein about thirdhand smoke. She agrees that smoking has a certain appeal, but “what is less appealing is being branded a murderer.” While it’s true that Wayne is being intemperate and dramatic here (as is her right in an opinion piece), it does seem to be the case that her remarks about thirdhand smoke’s dangerousness resonate more broadly, as does her insinuation that thirdhand smoke’s capacity to murder is enabled by the smoker’s movements among “us” (see Wayne, 2014).

In her book Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty, Erin Manning sounds a note of warning about the construction of the other as a violent, threating entity, and the role of touch in both crafting and acting relationally to that other’s body. She notes that,

The positing of the other as adversary results in a tendency to construe violence as the intrusion of the other who must remain outside the bounds of my territory.… if we consider the body as congruent with the national body politic [and, here as congruent with the scientifically constructed smoker’s body] we might be led to believe that any intrusion into the body would be a violence in and of itself (even the touch of a virus [or, in the case at hand, the touch of a smoker]) … might we not be suspicious of a political body [or a scientifically constructed one, wholly congruous with the denormalisation of smoking in the West] that acts as such a stern guarantor of the limits of inclusion and exclusion? (2007, p. 59)

But now, on, again, very shaky scientific grounds, we might be almost ready to make another exclusion of marginal bodies from our public: the exclusion of untouchable thirdhand bodies. Circum- might again become -stance, the exclusionary parameters might again tighten, to the extent that smokers (not just those who smoke in public) may be unwelcome among us. It’s almost Biblical:

If a soul touch any unclean thing, whether it be a carcase of an unclean beast, or a carcase of unclean cattle, or the carcase of unclean creeping things, and if it be hidden from him, he shall be unclean, and guilty. (Leviticus 5:2)