Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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prereflectively grounds the more particular and reflective discriminations of a “higher order” semiology. Put another way, we could say that the lived body both provides and enacts a commutative reversibility between subjective feeling and objective knowledge, between the senses and their sense or conscious meaning. In this regard Shaviro is most eloquent:
There is no structuring lack, no primordial division, but a continuity between the physiological and affective responses of my own body and the appearances and disappearances, the mutations and perdurances, of the bodies and images on screen. The important distinction is not the hierarchical, binary one between bodies and images, or between the real and its representations. It is rather a question of discerning multiple and continually varying interactions among what can be defined indifferently as bodies and as images: degrees of stillness and motion, of action and passion, of clutter and emptiness, of light and lack…. The image cannot be opposed to the body, as representation is opposed to its unattainable referent. For a fugitive, supplemental materiality haunts the (allegedly) idealizing processes of mechanical reproduction…. The flesh is intrinsic to the cinematic apparatus, at once its subject, its substance, and its limit.36
II
At this point, given my rather lengthy critique of theoretical abstraction and its oversight of our bodily experience at the movies, I want to ground my previous discussion “in the flesh.” In my flesh, in fact—and its meaningful responsiveness to and comprehension of an actual film, The Piano. However intellectually problematic in terms of its sexual and colonial politics,37 Campion's film moved me deeply, stirring my bodily senses and my sense of my body. The film not only “filled me up” and often “suffocated” me with feelings that resonated in and constricted my chest and stomach, but it also “sensitized” the very surfaces of my skin—as well as its own—to touch. Throughout the film my whole being was intensely concentrated and, rapt as I was in the world onscreen, I was wrapped also in a body that was achingly aware of itself as a sensuous, sensitized, sensible material capacity.38 (In this context we might remember the reviewers who spoke of the “unremittingly sensuous experience of music and fabric, of mud and flesh” and “immediate tactile shock.”) In particular, I want to focus on my sensual and sense-making experience of The Piano's first two shots—for they, in fact, generated this essay. Although my body's attention was mobilized and concentrated throughout a film that never ceased to move or touch me carnally, emotionally, and consciously in the most complex ways, these first two shots significantly foregrounded for me the issue at hand (so to speak) of our sensual engagement not only with this film but, to varying degrees, with all others.39 Most particularly, these inaugural shots also foregrounded the ambiguity and ambivalence of vision's relation to touch as the latter has been evoked here in both its literal and figurative sense.
In visual and figural terms the very first shot we see in The Piano seems an unidentifiable image. Carol Jacobs gives us a precise description and gloss of both this shot and the one that follows it:
Long, uneven shafts of reddish-pink light fan out across the screen, unfocused like a failed and developed color negative of translucent vessels of blood…. Yet it is nearly no view at all—an almost blindness, with distance so minimal between eye and object that what we see is an unrecognizable blur…. The image we first see is from the other side, from Ada's perspective, her fingers, liquid fingers…. We see Ada's fingers pierced through with sunlight, apparently from her perspective, as we hear the voice of her mind, but then, immediately thereafter, we see them from the clear perspective of the onlookers that we are, as they become matter-of-fact-objects to the lens of the camera.40
As I watched The Piano's opening moments—in that first shot, before I even knew there was an Ada and before I saw her from my side of her vision (that is, before I watched her rather than her vision)—something seemingly extraordinary happened. Despite my “almost blindness,” the “unrecognizable blur,” and resistance of the image to my eyes, my fingers knew what I was lookingat—and this before the objective reverse shot that followed to put those fingers in their proper place (that is, to put them where they could be seen objectively rather than subjectively “looked through”). What I was seeing was, in fact, from the beginning, not an unrecognizable image, however blurred and indeterminate in my vision, however much my eyes could not “make it out.” From the first (although I didn't consciously know it until the second shot), my fingers comprehended that image, grasped it with a nearly imperceptible tingle of attention and anticipation and, offscreen, “felt themselves” as a potentiality in the subjective and fleshy situation figured onscreen. And this before I refigured my carnal comprehension into the conscious thought, “Ah, those are fingers I am looking at.” Indeed, at first, prior to this conscious recognition, I did not understand those fingers as “those” fingers—that is, at a distance from my own fingers and objective in their “thereness.” Rather, those fingers were first known sensually and sensibly as “these” fingers and were located ambiguously both offscreen and on—subjectively “here” as well as objectively “there,” “mine” as well as the image's. Thus, although it should have been a surprising revelation given my “almost blindness” to the first shot, the second and objective reverse shot of a woman peering at the world through her outspread fingers really came as no surprise at all. Instead, it seemed a pleasurable culmination and confirmation of what my fingers—and I, reflexively if not yet reflectively—already knew.
Although this experience of my body's prereflective but reflexive comprehension of the seen (and, hence, the scene) is in some respects extraordinary, it is also in most respects hardly exceptional. Indeed, I would argue that this prereflective bodily responsiveness to films is a commonplace. That is, we do not experience any movie only through our eyes. We see and comprehend and feel films with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium. Normatively, however, the easy givenness of things for us to see at the movies and vision's overarching mastery and comprehension of its objects and its historically hierarchical sway over our other senses tend to occlude our awareness of our body's other ways of taking up and making meaning of the world—and its representation. Thus, what is extraordinary about the opening shot of The Piano is that it offers (at least on first viewing) a relatively rare instance of narrative cinema in which the cultural hegemony of vision is overthrown,41 an instance in which my eyes did not “see” anything meaningful and experienced an almost blindness at the same time that my tactile sense of being in the world through my fingers grasped the image's sense in a way that my forestalled or baffled vision could not.42
Jacobs tells us that the initial image is “like a failed and developed color negative of translucent vessels of blood.” Nonetheless, one senses that her bodily reference is derived less from tactile foresight than from visual hindsight. For, in an otherwise admirable essay that focuses on the film's narrative and visual emphasis on touch, Jacobs objectifies the site of touch far too quickly—rushing to reduce vision to point of view, hurrying to consider tactility and fingers and hands in terms of their narrative symbolism.43 Thus, she tells us that Ada's fingers in that first shot (as well as throughout) are used symbolically to “render us illiterate” and “unable to read them.”44 Now, if vision were an isolated sense and not merely a discrete sense possessing its own structure, capacities, and limits, I suppose this might be true. But vision is not isolated from our other senses. Whatever its specific structure, capacities, and sensual discriminations, vision is only one modality of my lived body's access to the world and only one means of making the world of objects and others sensible—that is, meaningful—to me.45 Vision may be the sense most privileged in the culture and the cinema, with hearing a close second; nonetheless, I do not leave my capacity to touch or to smell or to taste at the door, nor, once in the theater, do I devote these senses only to my popcorn.
Thus I would argue that my experience of The Piano was a heightened instance of our common sensuous experience of the movies: the way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance and texture of images; to feel a visual atmosphere envelop us; to experience weight, suffocation, and the need for air; to take flight in kinetic exhilaration and freedom