Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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III
Thus we are led back to the question of the specific nature of the relation between the body and cinematic representation, between the literal and the figural. For all my argument about the cross-modal communication of our senses and the synthetic quality of the lived body that comprehends both our sensorium and our capacity for language, it is phenomenologically—and logically—evident that I do not touch the cinema, nor does it touch me in precisely the same way in which I touch or am touched by others and things unmediated by cinema (or other perceptual technologies). However hard I may hold my breath or grasp my theater seat, I don't have precisely the same wild ride watching Speed that I would were I actually on that runaway bus. I also don't taste or smell or digest those luscious dishes in Like Water for Chocolate (or, for that matter, in my cookbook) in the same way I would if, unmediated by cinema, they were set on the table before me. Where, then, does this leave us at the movies? Or as theorists of the cinema? Are we condemned to speak of our sensual engagement of the cinema as confounding—our material responsiveness to films understood only, as Dyer puts it, “in some still unclear sense ‘as if real'”? And Dyer is not alone here: if we return to those popular reviews with which I began, his uncertainty and ambivalence are duplicated, albeit less reflectively. The Piano's “salt air can almost be tasted” one reviewer tells us—at the same time he speaks of “immediate tactile shock.” The reviewer of Toy Story says the plastic Tyrannosaurus rex “is so glossy and tactile you feel as if you could reach out and stroke its hard, shiny head”—at the same time he says that “the waxy sheen” of toy soldiers “strike[s] Proustian chords of recognition,” suggesting a sense memory less reflectively thought than reexperienced. This complex ambivalence and confusion about the literal and figural nature of our sensuous engagement with the cinema is wonderfully condensed in a review of Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994), which tells us, “The presentation of food on-screen is, in all senses of the word, delectable.”62 Here, not only is onscreen food “presented” rather than “represented,” but it is also experienced as “delectable” both literally in “all senses” and figurally in all senses of “the word.”
In The Rule of Metaphor philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes: “If there is a point in our experience where living expression states living existence, it is where our movement up the entropic slope of language encounters the movement by which we come back this side of the distinctions between actuality, action, production, motion” (309). Clearly, these ambivalent articulations of the sensual experience of the lived body in relation to cinematic representation mark just such a point. I want, therefore, to consider the ambivalence and confusion of our sense at the movies of having both a “real” (or literal) sensual experience and an “as-if-real” (or figural) sensual experience. I also want to argue that this ambivalence has a precise phenomenological structure that is grounded in the nonhierarchical reciprocity and figure-ground reversibility of “having sense” and “making sense”—meaning thus constituted as both a carnal matter and a conscious meaning that emerge simultaneously (if in various ratios) from the single system of flesh and consciousness that is the lived body. This is another way of saying that the body and language (whether film language or “natural” language) do not simply oppose or reflect each other. Rather, they more radically in-form each other in a fundamentally nonhierarchical and reversible relationship that, in certain circumstances, manifests itself as a vacillating, ambivalent, often ambiguously undifferentiated, and thus “unnameable” or “undecidable” experience.63
What, then, might it mean to understand what is meant by “all senses of the word”? Or to describe our sensual engagement in the cinema as “real” and “as if real” in the same breath—and, more often than not, in the same sentence? Or for me to use such “wordplay” in describing our literal bodies as “matter that means” and our figural representations as “meaning that matters”? Highlighted in these articulations—accomplished in and through language—is the very chiasmatic structure of reversibility that exists between but also subtends the body and consciousness and the body and representation. Whether perceived as an ambivalent vacillation between or an ambiguous conflation of the real and the as-if real or the lived body (matter that means) and representation (meaning as matter), this experience of the fundamental reversibility of body and language is deeply felt—and often articulated—in these unnameable and undecidable descriptions that nonetheless express quite clearly the ambiguous and ambivalent point at which “our movement up the entropic slope of language encounters the movement by which we come back this side of the distinctions between actuality, action, production, motion.” Thus, the wordplay at work in popular reviews, in Dyer's comments, and in my own phenomenological descriptions is quite precise and empirically based in the structure and sense of embodied experience itself. Indeed, it helps us not only to understand the enormous capacity of language to say what we mean but also to reveal the very structure of our meaningful experience.
The chiasmatic relation in which the subjective sense of embodied experience and the objective sense of representation are perceived as reversibly figure and ground and thus both commensurable and incommensurable may, in fact, be especially heightened and privileged by the medium of cinema. This is because the cinema uses “lived modes” of perceptual and sensory experience (seeing, movement, and hearing the most dominant) as “sign-vehicles” of representation.64 Using such lived modes, the cinema exists as an ambivalent and ambiguous sensual and perceptual structure. That is, the cinema simultaneously represents experience through dynamic presentation (the always verb-driven and ongoing present tense of sensory perception that, through technology, constitutes and enables the film for us and for itself)—and it also presents experience as representation (the post hoc fixity of already-perceived and now expressed images that stand as equivalent to noun forms). In this regard, although I have in this chapter emphasized the commensurability of body and representation because dominant theory has so long insisted on their incommensurability, I certainly do not deny the possibility of the latter—particularly in the film experience. Indeed, coming from an alternative perspective, Lesley Stern deals with this incommensurability by privileging the uncanny in—and of—cinema as an experience of disjuncture between the spectator's lived body and cinematic representation:
The cinema, while encouraging a certain bodily knowing, also, and in that very process, opens up the recognition of a peculiar kind of non-knowing, a sort of bodily aphasia, a gap which sometimes may register as a sense of dread in the pit of the stomach, or in a soaring, euphoric sensation…. Out of these tensions are generated a series of differences, gaps or discontinuities between knowing and feeling that sometimes sharpen into a sense of the uncanny. 65
Nonetheless, this sense of the uncanny is sufficiently occasional to be marked as a figure against the more necessary and continuous ground of our existence in which knowing and feeling are generally undifferentiated and generally lived as commensurable—this because we are incorporated Systemically as embodied and conscious subjects who both “have” and “make” sense simultaneously. Indeed, it is an undifferentiated experience of sense that grounds and conjoins body and language, feeling and knowledge—their coincidence so ordinary in our experience that their sudden divergence is marked as frustrating or uncanny or, in the extreme, pathological. Emphasizing this intimate conjunction of the lived body and representation, Alphonso Lingis tells us: “My body as the inner sphere where representations are perceptible…and my body as an image seen by rebound from the world, are inscribed the one in [the] other…. The density of the body is that of ‘pre-things,' not yet differentiated into reality and illusion…. [The body] is a precinct of signifiers.”66 And Ricoeur, emphasizing the intimate conjunction of representation and the lived body, tells us that language not only designates “its other” but also “itself”—and in so doing, it is not only referential but also radically reflective, bearing within itself “the knowledge of its being related to being.” Ricoeur continues: “This reflective language allows language to know that it is installed in being. The usual relationship between language and its referent is reversed: language becomes aware of itself in the self-articulation of the being which it is about. Far from locking language up inside itself, this reflective