Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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smell and taste are less called on than touch to inform our comprehension of the images we see, I still remember the “visual aroma” of my experience of Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger, 1946), the film itself named after a perfume, or the pork-noodle taste of portions of Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1986). (And why should we be surprised at this when the very power of advertising cologne and food rests heavily on transmodal cooperation and translation within and across the sensorium?) Furthermore, as I engaged these films, I did not “think” a translation of my sense of sight into smell or taste; rather I experienced it without a thought. Elena del Rio describes the phenomenological structure of this experience: “As the image becomes translated into a bodily response, body and image no longer function as discrete units, but as surfaces in contact, engaged in a constant activity of reciprocal re-alignment and inflection.”46
In this regard we might wish to think again about processes of identification in the film experience, relating them not to our secondary engagement with and recognition of either “subject positions” or characters but rather to our primary engagement (and the film's) with the sense and sensibility of materiality itself. We, ourselves, are subjective matter: our lived bodies sensually relate to “things” that “matter” on the screen and find them sensible in a primary, prepersonal, and global way that grounds those later secondary identifications that are more discrete and localized. Certainly, my experience of the opening subjective shot of The Piano provides evidence of this prepersonal and globally located bodily comprehension, but such ambient and carnal identification with material subjectivity also occurs when, for example, I “objectively” watch Baines—under the piano and Ada's skirts—reach out and touch Ada's flesh through a hole in her black woolen stocking.47 Looking at this objective image, like the reviewer cited earlier, I also felt an “immediate tactile shock when flesh first touches flesh in close-up.” Yet precisely whose flesh I felt was ambiguous and vague—and emergent from a phenomenological experience structured on ambivalence and diffusion. That is, I had a carnal interest and investment in being both “here” and “there,” in being able both to sense and to be sensible, to be both the subject and the object of tactile desire. At the moment when Baines touches Ada's skin through her stocking, suddenly my skin is both mine and not my own: that is, the “immediate tactile shock” opens me to the general erotic mattering and diffusion of my flesh, and I feel not only my “own” body but also Baines's body, Ada's body, and what I have elsewhere called the “film's body.”48 Thus, even confronted with an “objective” shot, my fingers know and understand the subjective meanings of this “seen” and this viewing situation, and they grasp textural and textual meaning everywhere—not only in the touching but also in the touched. Objectivity and subjectivity lose their presumed clarity. Which is to say, in this viewing situation (and to varying degrees in every viewing situation), “to situate subjectivity in the lived body jeopardizes dualistic metaphysics altogether. There remains no basis for preserving the mutual exclusivity of the categories subject and object, inner and outer, I and world.”49
Again, I want to emphasize that I am not speaking metaphorically of touching and being touched at and by the movies but “in some sense” quite literally of our capacity to feel the world we see and hear onscreen and of the cinema's capacity to “touch” and “move” us offscreen. As philosopher Elizabeth Grosz puts it: “Things solicit the flesh just as the flesh beckons to and as an object for things. Perception is the flesh's reversibility, the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own self-embrace.”50 Experiencing a movie, not ever merely “seeing” it, my lived body enacts this reversibility in perception and subverts the very notion of onscreen and offscreen as mutually exclusive sites or subject positions. Indeed, much of the “pleasure of the text” emerges from this carnal subversion of fixed subject positions, from the body as a “third” term that both exceeds and yet is within discrete representation; thus, as Barthes has shown us, “it would be wrong…to imagine a rigid distinction between the body inside and the body outside the text, because the subversive force of the body is partly in its capacity to function both figuratively and literally.”51 All the bodies in the film experience—those onscreen and offscreen (and possibly the screen itself)—are potentially subversive bodies. They have the capacity to function both figuratively and literally. They are pervasive and diffusely situated in the film experience. Yet these bodies are also materially circumscribed and can be specifically located, each arguably becoming the “grounding body” of sense and meaning since each exists in a dynamic figure-ground relation of reversibility with the others. Furthermore, these bodies also subvert their own fixity from within, commingling flesh and consciousness, reversing the human and technological sensorium, so that meaning, and where it is made, does not have a discrete origin in either spectators' bodies or cinematic representation but emerges in their conjunction.
We might name this subversive body in the film experience the cinesthetic subject—a neologism that derives not only from cinema but also from two scientific terms that designate particular structures and conditions of the human sensorium: synaesthesia and coenaesthesia. Both of these structures and conditions foreground the complexity and richness of the more general bodily experience that grounds our particular experience of cinema, and both also point to ways in which the cinema uses our dominant senses of vision and hearing to speak comprehensibly to our other senses.
In strict medical discourse, psychoneurologist Richard Cytowic notes that synaesthesia is defined as an “involuntary experience in which the stimulation of one sense cause[s] a perception in another.”52 Synaesthetes regularly, vividly, and automatically perceive sound as color or shapes as tastes. One woman explains, “I most often see sound as colors, with a certain sense of pressure on my skin.…I am seeing, but not with my eyes, if that makes sense,” and, as an example, she says that she experiences her husband's voice and laughter not metaphorically but literally as “a wonderful golden brown, with a flavor of crisp, buttery toast” (118). “Synaesthesia,” says Cytowic, “is the most immediate and direct kind of experience.…It is sensual and concrete, not some intellectualized concept pregnant with meaning. It emphasizes limbic processes [over higher cortical functions of the brain] which break through to consciousness. It's about feeling and being, something more immediate than analyzing what is happening and talking about it” (176). Nonetheless, this does not mean that synaesthetic experience as “more immediate than analysis” escapes culture—as evident in laughter perceived as the taste of “crisp, buttery toast.”
Clinical synaesthesia is uncommon in the general population although, to some degree, a less extreme experience of “cross-modal transfer” among our senses is common enough to have warranted the term's use and the condition's description in ordinary language. Artists have long been interested in synaesthesia (as were the Symbolists and Eisenstein); indeed, quite a number of them also have been synaesthetes (novelist Vladimir Nabokov is but one example). Furthermore, in common usage synaesthesia refers not only to an involuntary transfer of feeling among the senses but also to the volitional use of metaphors in which terms relating to one kind of sense impression are used to describe a sense impression of other kinds. This move from an involuntary and immediate exchange within the sensorium to a conscious and mediated exchange between the sensorium and language not only reminds us of the aforementioned “synaesthesia-loving Symbolist movement”53 but also points to a sensual economy of language dependent on the lived body as simultaneously the fundamental source of language, its primary sign producer, and its primary sign. Thus, in Metaphors We Live By linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson argue that figural language emerges and takes its meaning from our physical experience (however disciplined by culture),54and Cytowic, working with synaesthetes, concludes that “the coherence of metaphors…[is] rooted in concrete experience, which is what gives metaphors their meaning…. [M]etaphor is experiential and visceral” (206). This relation between the literal sensible body and metaphor as sensible figure is central to both our understanding of cinematic intelligibility and of the cinesthetic subject who is moved and touched by going to the movies—and it is an issue to which I will return.
The neologism of the