Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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in Carnal Thoughts are not unruly. Indeed, whatever their specific subject matter and inflection, they share a single overarching theme and emerge from a single—albeit quite open—method.
The major theme of Carnal Thoughts is the embodied and radically material nature of human existence and thus the lived body's essential implication in making “meaning” out of bodily “sense.” Making conscious sense from our carnal senses is something we do whether we are watching a film, moving about in our daily lives and complex worlds, or even thinking abstractly about the enigmas of moving images, cultural formations, and the meanings and values that inform our existence. Thus, whether exploring how we are oriented spatially both off and on the screen or asking about what it means to say that movies “touch us,” whether considering the ways in which technology from pens to computers to prosthetic legs alter the shape of our bodies as well as our lives or the difference between the “visible” and “visual” in an image-saturated culture, or whether trying to think through the “reality” of certain screen images or the way in which our aesthetic and ethical senses merge and emerge “in the flesh,” all the essays in this volume are focused on the lived body. That is, their concern is not merely with the body as an abstracted object belonging always to someone else but also with what it means to be “embodied” and to live our animated and metamorphic existences as the concrete, extroverted, and spirited subjects we all objectively are. First and foremost, then, I hope the essays in Carnal Thoughts “flesh out” and contribute a descriptive gravity (if also an occasional levity) to the now extensive contemporary literature in the humanities focused objectively (but sometimes superficially) on “the body.” The focus here is on what it is to live one's body, not merely look at bodies—although vision, visuality, and visibility are as central to the subjective dimensions of embodied existence as they are to its objective dimensions. In sum, the essays in Carnal Thoughts foreground embodiment—that is, the lived body as, at once, both an objective subject and a subjective object: a sentient, sensual, and sensible ensemble of materialized capacities and agency that literally and figurally makes sense of, and to, both ourselves and others.
In concert with this overarching theme, Carnal Thoughts adopts a method and critical practice guided by existential phenomenology. As philosopher Don Ihde characterizes it, existential phenomenology “is a philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity.”1 Indeed, existential phenomenology is philosophically grounded on the carnal, fleshy, objective foundations of subjective consciousness as it engages and is transformed by and in the world. Thus phenomenological inquiry focuses on the phenomena of experience and their meaning as spatially and temporally embodied, lived, and valued by an objective subject—and, as such, always already qualified by the mutable specificities and constraints of history and culture. In this sense embodiment is never a priori to historical and cultural existence. Furthermore, counter to an ahistorical and acultural idealism, the phenomena of our experience cannot be reduced to fixed essences; rather, in existence they have provisional forms and structures and themes and thus are always open to new and other possibilities for both being and meaning. Thus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher whose focus on embodiment transformed transcendental (or constitutive) phenomenology into existential phenomenology, tells us that “the greatest lesson of the [phenomenological] reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction.”2 Instead of seeking essences, then, a phenomenological approach seeks, in a given case, the meaning of experience as it is embodied and lived in context—meaning and value emerging in the synthesis of the experience's subjective and objective aspects.3
Given both my choice of theme and method, as the essays in Carnal Thoughts accumulate in their descriptions and interpretations of embodied experience, it is my hope that their weight and occasional gravity demonstrate how the very nature of our embodied existence “in the flesh” lays the concrete foundations for a materialist—rather than idealist—understanding of aesthetics and ethics. That is, what I hope arises from the volume as a whole is an appreciation of how our own lived bodies provide the material premises that enable us, from the first, to sense and respond to the world and others—not only grounding the logical premises of aesthetics and ethics in “carnal thoughts” but also charging our conscious awareness with the energies and obligations that animate our “sensibility” and “responsibility.” This is a bottom-up emergence of aesthetic and ethical sense as it is written by carnal experience on—and as—our bodies rather than a top-down and idealist imposition on them. In this regard, although the essays that follow focus on particular (and sometimes personal) instances and experiences, these instances are used to open up (rather than close down) our understanding of our more general and always social entailments with others—and, indeed, to suggest the intimate and materially consequential bonds we have (whether we deny or embrace them) with all others and all things.
If the overarching aim of Carnal Thoughts is to contribute to a description of, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “the animation of the human body” and “the body as ‘the body of the spirit,'” this aim must be put into context. As noted, “the body” has been a major focal point for scholars in contemporary humanities and cultural studies. Nonetheless, more often than not, the body, however privileged, has been regarded primarily as an object among other objects—most often like a text and sometimes like a machine. Indeed, even in overt criticism of the ways in which the body has been objectified and commodified in our contemporary image-conscious and consumer culture, many scholars tend to try to redeem the body, as Thomas Csordas writes, “without much sense of bodiliness in their analyses.” Such a tendency, he continues, “carries the dual dangers of dissipating the force of using the body as a methodological starting point, and of objectifying bodies as things devoid of intentionality and intersubjectivity. It thus misses the opportunity to add sentience and sensibility to our notions of self and person, and to assert an added dimension of materiality to our notions of culture and history.”4 Thus, Csordas notes, contemporary scholars tend to “study the body and its transformations while still taking embodiment for granted,” but “this distinction between the body as either an empirical thing or analytic theme, and embodiment as the existential ground of culture and self is critical.”5 Hence the need to turn our attention from the body to embodiment.
Embodiment is a radically material condition of human being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in an irreducible ensemble. Thus we matter and we mean through processes and logics of sense-making that owe as much to our carnal existence as they do to our conscious thought. Furthermore (and responding to the occasional critique of phenomenology as aiming toward a too facile—and “happy”—adequation of consciousness and bodily being), the irreducibility of embodied consciousness does not mean that body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, are always synchronously entailed or equally valued in our intent or intentionality or that our body and consciousness—even at their most synchronous—are ever fully disclosed each to the other. Furthermore, they are not, in a given experience, necessarily equally valued—sometimes body and sometimes consciousness preoccupy us, and—as in the reversible but differently weighted senses of our existence as “objective subjects” and “subjective objects”—one may hold sway over the other. In sum, as Gary Madison writes: “The perceiving subject is itself defined dialectically as being neither (pure) consciousness nor (physical, in itself) body. Consciousness…is not a pure self-presence; the subject is present to and knows itself only through the mediation of the body, which is to say that this presence is always mediated, i.e., is indirect and incomplete.”6
Given that the irreducible ensemble that is the lived body is dialectical and, as Madison says, “never succeeds in coinciding with itself” and thus never achieves a fixed identity,7 all of the embodied experiences I describe in the essays to follow are not engaged with a naive sense of experience as “direct.” That is, however direct it may seem, our experience is not only always mediated by the lived bodies that we are, but our lived bodies (and our experience of them) is always also mediated and qualified by our engagements with other bodies and things. Thus, our experiences are mediated and qualified