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      What My Fingers Knew

       The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh

      [M]y body is not only an object among all objects,…but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them. —MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY, Phenomenology of Perception

      What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced. —ROLAND BARTHES, The Pleasure of the Text

      Nearly every time I read a movie review in a newspaper or popular magazine, I am struck by the gap that exists between our actual experience of the cinema and the theory that we academic film scholars construct to explain it—or perhaps, more aptly, to explain it away. Take, for example, several descriptions in the popular press of Jane Campion's The Piano (1993): “What impresses most is the tactile force of the images. The salt air can almost be tasted, the wind's furious bite felt.”¹ The film is “[a]n unremittingly sensuous experience of music and fabric, of mud and flesh.”² “Poems will be written about the curves of the performers' buttocks as they're outlined by candlelight; about the atmosphere that surrounds the dropping away of each item of clothing; about the immediate tactile shock when flesh first touches flesh in close-up.”³ A completely different kind of film, Jan de Bont's Speed (1994), elicits the following: “Viscerally, it's a breath-taking trip.”⁴ It's “[a] classic summertime adrenaline rush.”⁵ “This white knuckle, edge-of-your-seat action opus is the real thing,”⁶ “[a] preposterously exciting thrill ride that takes itself seriously enough to produce gasps of tension and lightly enough so you giggle while grabbing the armrest.”⁷ “We feel wiped out with delirium and relief. The movie comes home in triumph and we go home in shreds.”⁸Reviewers of Paul Anderson's film adaptation of the kung-fu video game Mortal Kombat (1995) emphasize “a soundtrack of…primitive, head-bonking urgency”⁹ and endless scenes of “kick, sock, pow…to-the-death battles,”¹⁰in which “backs, wrists and necks are shattered with sickening cracking sounds.”¹¹ And, of John Lasseter's full-length computergraphically animated feature Toy Story (1995), another says:

      A Tyrannosaurus rex doll is so glossy and tactile you feel as if you could reach out and stroke its hard, shiny head…. When some toy soldiers spring to life, the waxy sheen of their green fatigues will strike Proustian chords of recognition in anyone who ever presided over a basement game of army…. [T]his movie…invites you to gaze upon the textures of the physical world with new eyes. What Bambi and Snow White did for nature, Toy Story, amazingly, does for plastic.¹²

      What have we, as contemporary media theorists, to do with such tactile, kinetic, redolent, resonant, and sometimes even taste-full descriptions of the film experience?

      I

      During earlier periods in the history of film theory there were various attempts to understand the meaningful relation between cinema and our sensate bodies. Peter Wollen notes that the great Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, fascinated by the Symbolist movement, spent the latter part of his career investigating the “synchronization of the senses” and that his “writings on synaesthesia are of great erudition and considerable interest, despite their fundamentally unscientific nature.”¹³ Gilles Deleuze writes that Eisenstein “continually reminds us that ‘intellectual cinema' has as correlate ‘sensory thought' or ‘emotional intelligence,' and is worthless without it.”¹⁴ And, in a wonderful essay using the trope of the somersault to address the relation between cinema and the body, Lesley Stern describes how, for Eisenstein, the moving body was “conceived and configured cinematically…not just [as] a matter of representation, but [as] a question of the circuit of sensory vibrations that links viewer and screen.”¹⁵ This early interest in the somatic effects of the cinema culminated, perhaps, on the one side, in the 1930s, with the empirical work done in the United States by the Payne Studies—several of which quantitatively measured the “galvanic responses” and blood pressure of film viewers.¹⁶ On the other, qualitative side, there was the phenomenologically inflected materialist work done in the 1930s and 1940s by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Benjamin, in his famous “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” speaks of cinematic intelligibility in terms of “tactile appropriation,” and elsewhere he speaks to the viewer's “mimetic faculty,” a sensuous and bodily form of perception.¹⁷ And Kracauer located the uniqueness of cinema in the medium's essential ability to stimulate us physiologically and sensually; thus he understands the spectator as a “corporeal-material being,” a “human being with skin and hair,” and he tells us: “The material elements that present themselves in films directly stimulate the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance.”18

      Until quite recently, however, contemporary film theory has generally ignored or elided both cinema's sensual address and the viewer's “corporeal material being.”¹⁹ Thus, if we read across the field, there is very little sustained work in English to be found on the carnal sensuality of the film experience and what—and how—it constitutes meaning. The few exceptions include Linda Williams's ongoing investigation of what she calls “body genres”;²⁰ Jonathan Crary's recognition, in Techniques of the Observer, of the “carnal density” of spectatorship that emerges with the new visual technologies of the nineteenth century;²¹ Steven Shaviro's Deleuzean emphasis, in The Cinematic Body, on the visceral event of film viewing;²² Laura Marks's works on “the skin of the film” and “touch” that focus on what she describes as “haptic visuality” in relation to bodies and images;²³ several essays by Elena del Rio that, from a phenomenological perspective,