Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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that constrain both the inner limits of our perception and the outer limits of our world. Indeed, as I hope the phenomenological investigations in Carnal Thoughts will demonstrate, direct experience is not so much direct as it is transparent—either because we are primarily intending toward the world and our projects and not toward our modes and processes of perception and expression or because we are historically and culturally habituated so that what is given to us in experience is taken for granted rather than taken up as a potentially open engagement with the world and others.
Thus, although phenomenology begins its descriptions with an experience as it seems directly given in what is called the “natural attitude” (better called the “naturalized attitude”), it then proceeds to “unpack” and make explicit the objective and subjective aspects and conditions that structure and qualify that experience as the kind of meaningful experience it is. Furthermore, although it may begin with a particular experience, its aim is to describe and explicate the general or possible structures and meanings that inform the experience and make it potentially resonant and inhabitable for others. That is, although in historical and cultural existence particular experiences may be lived idiosyncratically, they are also, and in most cases, lived both generally and conventionally—in the first instance, according to general conditions of embodied existence such as temporality, spatiality, intentionality, reflection, and reflexivity and, in the second instance, according to usually transparent and dominant cultural habits that are not so much determining as they are regulative. In sum, a phenomenological description and interpretation, on the one hand, attempts to adequate the objective and subjective aspects of a given embodied experience and, on the other, also seeks to acknowledge their historical and cultural asymmetries. This means attending not only to the content and form of embodied experience but also to its context. The proof of an adequate phenomenological description, then, is not whether or not the reader has actually had—or even is in sympathy with—the meaning and value of an experience as described—but whether or not the description is resonant and the experience's structure sufficiently comprehensible to a reader who might “possibly” inhabit it (even if in a differently inflected or valued way).
Given its emphasis on “thick description,” phenomenological inquiry is also often consciously attentive to and reflexive about its own use of language. Certainly, this is meant to achieve philosophical precision (sometimes I spend a very long time trying to choose just the right preposition because of the specific relational and spatial structure it articulates). However, this attentiveness to language is also aimed at really listening to and reanimating the rich but taken-for-granted expressions of vernacular language and of rediscovering the latter's intimate and extensive incorporation of experience. As Paul Ricoeur writes: “Ordinary language…appears to me…to be a kind of conservatory for expressions which have preserved the highest descriptive power as regards human experience, particularly in the realms of action and feelings. This appropriateness of some of the most refined distinctions attached to ordinary words provides all phenomenological analysis with linguistic guidelines.”8 Hence, in this volume, my tendency to draw not only from specialized philosophical or theoretical works but also from everyday speech, film reviews, advertisements, jokes, self-help manuals, and other popular sources written for and understood by a mass audience. These sources not only foreground the vitality of ordinary language but also suggest a certain common or general understanding of certain embodied experiences—and point to their broad resonance even as they never strike exactly the same chords in every body.
In regard to both language and experience it is my hope that the essays in Carnal Thoughts are relatively user friendly, as contrasted with my earlier—and (in my view) historically necessary polemic—The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Not only do I avail myself of an array of popular sources, but also many of the essays in the volume are grounded explicitly in representations of autobiographical and/or anecdotal experience (mine as well as others). Nonetheless, these representations of personal or “subjective” experience—and the bafflement they sometimes express—provide the beginning of inquiry rather than its end. Indeed, grounding broader social claims in autobiographical and anecdotal experience is not merely a fuzzy and subjective substitute for rigorous and objective analysis but purposefully provides the phenomenological—and embodied—premises for a more processual, expansive, and resonant materialist logic through which we, as subjects, can understand (and perhaps guide) what passes as our objective historical and cultural existence. Thus, as Rosi Braidotti writes, it is “particularly important not to confuse [the] process of subjectivity with individualism or particularity: subjectivity is a socially mediated process. Consequently, the emergence of new social subjects is always a collective enterprise, ‘external' to the self while it also mobilizes the self's in-depth structures.”9
Although many of my colleagues assume that both my interest in embodiment and my use of the autobiographical anecdote began with my experience of cancer surgeries, the amputation of my left leg about ten years ago, and my subsequent incorporation of the prosthetic leg that will make its presence known in several of the following essays, this is not the case. As a female in our culture and often brought up short by the inconsistent and often contradictory ways in which my material being was regarded and valued (or not), I have always found “being a body” not only strange but also relative. Hence my turn to existential phenomenology with its focus on embodiment and the structure of experience—and this long before the amputation and the novel bodily experiences that followed, which, given my curiosity, made my body (not “the” body) a very real (not virtual) laboratory for phenomenological inquiry. In such extreme circumstances I was able to reflect not merely on my pathological situation but also to use it—as phenomenologists often do—to reflect on the usually transparent and normative aspects of being embodied, learning as much during my recovery from my (supposedly) present leg as from my (supposedly) absent one. Even the words present and absent were up for interrogation—their taken-for-granted representations inadequate to my actual lived-body experience. In this regard (if in another context) Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt are apposite:
In the larger perspective of the cultural text, representations…cease to have a settled relationship of symbolic distance from matter and particularly from human bodies. The way bodies are understood to function, the difference between men and women, the nature of the passions, the experience of illness, the border line between life and death, are all closely bound up with particular cultural representations. The body functions as a kind of “spoiler,” always baffling or exceeding the ways in which it is represented.10
If, however, the body in general always baffles and “exceeds” its representation, then it is also the case—and this became very clear to me as I was recovering and trying to find the words to express the concrete particularity of my experience to myself as well as others—that “my body” (and “yours” insofar as I or you speak or write of it) can sometimes find symbolic expression adequate to—and even extending—its experience. Hence, I would suggest, the contemporary turn to autobiography and anecdote can serve not only as a spoiler but also, dare I say, an antidote to objective accounts of the body that don't tell us what we really want to know about our living of it.
Finally, to the bodily accounts themselves! Carnal Thoughts is divided into two sections: “Sensible Scenes” and “Responsible Visions.” Although all the essays in the volume deal with the lived body as it experiences technical and technological mediation of some kind (often but not always cinematic), these sections are inflected differently. The first focuses on the exploration of certain experiential scenes of representation and “conundrums” that become intelligible and find their provisional resolution not in abstraction but in the lived body's concrete and active “sense-ability.” Emphasis in this section is on how our carnal thoughts make sense and sensibility not only of the lived body's subjective sense perception but also of its objective representations. In “Breadcrumbs in the Forest: Three Meditations on Being Lost in Space,” I explore various forms of spatial perception and the embodied experience of being spatially disorientated to ask whether there are different shapes and temporalities of “being lost” that constitute different existential experiences and meanings—in our culture, particularly in relation to gender. “Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects”