Signs, things and packaging: Recovering the material agency of the cigarette packet

Abstract

In recent years, cigarette packets have become the site of considerable legislative attention, via initiatives to remove industry branding from tobacco products. These efforts are based on the premise that branded cigarette packaging acts as a ‘silent salesman’ for smoking. According to this perspective, the cigarette packet has a particular sort of agency, but one rooted in its communicative powers rather than its material qualities. In this article, I reconsider this view, based on an analysis of archives in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library produced by a search of the term ‘packet design’, and scholarship on containerization. Taking up the idea of containers as undertheorized forms of materiality, I argue that the cigarette packet is best conceptualized as a technology with powerful, albeit largely invisible, physical consequences on the circulation of cigarettes and the practice of smoking itself.