Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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tactility.25 In general, however, most film theorists still seem either embarrassed or bemused by bodies that often act wantonly and crudely at the movies, involuntarily countering the fine-grained sensibilities, intellectual discriminations, and vocabulary of critical reflection. Indeed, as Williams suggests in relation to the “low” body genres of pornography, horror, and melodrama she privileges, a certain discomfort emerges when we experience an “apparent lack of proper esthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion.” She tells us: “We feel manipulated by these texts—an impression that the very colloquialisms of ‘tear jerker' and ‘fear jerker' express—and to which we could add pornography's even cruder sense as texts to which some people might be inclined to ‘jerk off.'” Bodily responses to such films are taken as an involuntary and self-evident reflexology, marking, as Williams notes, sexual arousal on “peter meters”; horror in screams, fainting, and even heart attacks; and sentiment in “one-, two-, or three handkerchiefs.”26
For the most part, then, carnal responses to the cinema have been regarded as too crude to invite extensive elaboration beyond aligning them—for their easy thrills, commercial impact, and cultural associations—with other more “kinetic” forms of amusement such as theme park rides or with Tom Gunning's once historically grounded but now catch-all designation, “cinema of attractions.”27 Thus, scholarly interest has been focused less on the capacity of films to physically arouse us to meaning than on what such sensory cinematic appeal reveals about the rise and fall of classical narrative, or the contemporary transmedia structure of the entertainment industry, or the desires of our culture for the distractions of immediate sensory immersion in an age of pervasive mediation.
Nonetheless, critical discussions often also suggest that films that appeal to our sensorium are the quintessence of cinema. For example, writing about Speed, Richard Dyer relates the Lumiere audiences' recoiling in terror from an approaching onscreen train to IMAX and Showscan, proposing that all cinema is, at base, a “cinema of sensation.”28 Indeed, he argues that the cinema's essence is to represent and fulfill our desire “for an underlying pattern of feeling, to do with freedom of movement, confidence in the body, engagement with the material world, that is coded as male (and straight and white, too) but to which all humans need access.”29 However, although Dyer acknowledges the importance of the spectator's direct bodily experience of cinema, he is at a loss to explain its very existence. He tells us: “The celebration of sensational movement, that we respond to in some still unclear sense ‘as if real,' for many people is the movies.”30 The dynamic structure that grounds our bodily response to cinema's visual (and aural) representations is not only articulated as a continuing mystery, but its eidetic “givenness” to experience is also destabilized by the phrase “as if real”—the phrase itself surrounded by a set of scare quotes that, questioning this questioning of givenness, further plunges us into a mise en abyme of experiential undecidability.
This “still unclear sense” of the sensational movement that, “as if real,” provokes a bodily response marks the confusion and discomfort we scholars have not only in confronting our sensual experience of the cinema but also in confronting our lack of ability to explain its somatism as anything more than “mere” physiological reflex or to admit its meaning as anything more than metaphorical description.31 Thus, the language used in the press to describe the sensuous and affective dimensions of the film experience has been written off as a popular version of that imprecise humanist criticism drummed out of film studies in the early 1970s with the advent of more “rigorous” and “objective” modes of description. Thus, sensual reference in descriptions of cinema has been generally regarded as rhetorical or poetic excess—sensuality located, then, always less on the side of the body than on the side of language. This view is tautological. As Shaviro points out, it subsumes sensation “within universal (linguistic or conceptual) forms only because it has deployed those forms in order to describe sensation in the first place.” This elision of the body “making sense” in its own right is grounded in “the idealist assumption that human experience is originally and fundamentally cognitive.” To hold such an idealist assumption, Shaviro goes on,
is to reduce the question of perception to a question of knowledge, and to equate sensation with the reflective consciousness of sensation. The Hegelian and structuralist equation suppresses the body. It ignores or abstracts away from the primordial forms of raw sensation: affect, excitation, stimulation and repression, pleasure and pain, shock and habit. It posits instead a disincarnate eye and ear whose data are immediately objectified in the form of self-conscious awareness or positive knowledge.32
In sum, even though there has been increasing interest in doing so, we have not yet come to grips with the carnal foundations of cinematic intelligibility, with the fact that to understand movies figurally, we first must make literal sense of them. This is not a tautology—particularly in a discipline that has worked long and hard to separate the sense and meaning of vision and specularity from a body that, in experience, lives vision always in cooperation and significant exchange with other sensorial means of access to the world, a body that makes meaning before it makes conscious, reflective thought. Thus, despite current academic fetishization of “the body,” most theorists still don't quite know what to do with their unruly responsive flesh and sensorium. Our sensations and responses pose an intolerable question to prevalent linguistic and psychoanalytic understandings of the cinema as grounded in conventional codes and cognitive patterning and grounded on absence, lack, and illusion. They also pose an intolerable challenge to the prevalent cultural assumption that the film image is constituted by a merely two-dimensional geometry.33 Positing cinematic vision as merely a mode of objective symbolic representation, and reductively abstracting—“disincarnating”—the spectator's subjective and full-bodied vision to posit it only as a “distance sense,” contemporary film theory has had major difficulties in comprehending how it is possible for human bodies to be, in fact, really “touched” and “moved” by the movies.
At worst, then, contemporary film theory has not taken bodily being at the movies very seriously—and, at best, it has generally not known how to respond to and describe how it is that movies “move” and “touch” us bodily. Instead, with some noted exceptions, film theory has attempted (somewhat defensively, I think) to put the ambiguous and unruly, subjectively sensuous, embodied experience of going to the movies back where it “properly”—that is, objectively—belongs: it locates the sensuous on the screen as the semiotic effects of cinematic representation and the semantic property of cinematic objects or off the screen in the spectator's phantasmatic psychic formations, cognitive processes, and basic physiological reflexes that do not pose major questions of meaning. Yet as film theorists we are not exempt from sensual being at the movies—nor, let us admit it, would we wish to be. As “lived bodies” (to use a phenomenological term that insists on “the” objective body as always also lived subjectively as “my” body, diacritically invested and active in making sense and meaning in and of the world), our vision is always already “fleshed out.” Even at the movies our vision and hearing are informed and given meaning by our other modes of sensory access to the world: our capacity not only to see and to hear but also to touch, to smell, to taste, and always to proprioceptively feel our weight, dimension, gravity, and movement in the world. In sum, the film experience is meaningful not to the side of our bodies but because of our bodies. Which is to say that movies provoke in us the “carnal thoughts” that ground and inform more conscious analysis.
Thus, we need to alter the binary and bifurcated structures of the film experience suggested by previous formulations and, instead, posit the film viewer's lived body as a carnal “third term” that grounds and mediates experience and language, subjective vision and objective image—both differentiating and unifying them in reversible (or chiasmatic) processes of perception and expression.34 Indeed, it is the lived body that provides both the site and genesis of the “third” or “obtuse” meaning that Roland Barthes suggests escapes language yet resides within it.35 Thrown into a meaningful lifeworld, the lived body is always already engaged in a commutation and transubstantiation of the cooperative meaning-making capacity of its senses (which are always acculturated and never lived as either discrete or raw)—a