Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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In these first two essays movies are not the focal point of inquiry although they do serve as illustration and reference and, I hope, are in turn illuminated by the larger worldly and fleshy context for which they have been mobilized. The next two essays move more particularly toward the screen, specifically dealing with cinema. “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh” attempts to understand the embodied structures that allow for more than a merely cognitive or rudimentary knee-jerk cinematic sensibility and attempts to demonstrate how cinematic intelligibility, meaning, and value emerge carnally through our senses. “The Expanded Gaze in Contracted Space: Happenstance, Hazard, and the Flesh of the World” explores the ambiguous and ambivalent nature of the cinematic gaze, not only as it has been theorized in philosophy but also as it has been specifically embodied and enworlded with others and things in the extraordinary materialist metaphysics articulated in the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski. The last two essays in the section explore the phenomenology of what has been called “the signifying scene”—particularly as this is mediated by the literal incorporation of various expressive and perceptual technologies that function not only as tools but also as spatially, temporally, and materially transformative. “Susie Scribbles”: On Technology, Technë, and Writing Incarnate” takes its title from an electronic “writing” doll bought at Toys R Us and looks at the physical activity and techniques of writing, as well as at writing instruments whose various materialities transform not only our consciousness of space and time but also the expressive sense and shape of our bodies. The last essay in the section, “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic ‘Presence,'” continues this exploration, turning particular attention to our embodied engagement with the perceptual technologies of photographic, cinematic, and electronic imaging and how they have significantly altered both our sense of the world and our sense of ourselves.
The second section, “Responsible Visions,” is also grounded in the lived body's sense-making capacities but is focused on those experiences and representations that tend to evoke our carnal “response-ability” and constitute the material foundations for ethical care and consciousness and, perhaps, responsible behavior. Again, the emphasis is on the concrete lessons taught us by our “carnal thought.” “Beating the Meat / Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of the Century Alive” is a critique of those who, in the contemporary critical moment, view the body solely as a text and thus gleefully “disabuse” it, disavowing the lived body's vulnerability to pain and wishing away—often through writing—the mortality that gives us gravity. “Is Any Body Home? Embodied Imagination and Visible Evictions” continues this exploration of the contemporary objectification of the body but, through consideration of three case studies, connects it to an ethically impoverished sense of vision whose accountancy is only in the visible. My cancer surgeries, amputation, and prosthetic leg make their inaugural appearance in these first two essays but are foregrounded in the third. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality” looks at the recent “sexiness” of the prosthetic as metaphor and attempts to responsibly—and materially—reembody and reground it in a phenomenological description of both the prosthetic's figural and literal use—not only by me but by other cultural critics and amputees. The next two essays are related, the one a further extension of the other. “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary” is interested both in what it means to “represent” death on the screen, particularly in documentary, and in how—and in what modalities—such representation also represents the “ethical gaze” of the filmmaker and “charges” an ethical response from the spectator. Indeed, the second and related essay is called “The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness” and, picking up where the previous one left off, focuses on this sense of the real in both documentary and fiction and the way it is constructed not only from extracinematic knowledge but also from a “carnal knowledge” that radically charges it with response-ability. The last essay in Carnal Thoughts culminates not only the volume but also, and in many ways, the book's emphasis on the way in which we cannot set ourselves apart from—or above—our materiality. “The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity” most explicitly demonstrates that we are both—and irreducibly—objective subjects and subjective objects and that it is only by virtue of our radical materiality that any transcendent sense we have of the beauty of things or obligation to others can emerge and flourish. In this regard Carnal Thoughts could be said to be demonstratively polemical. That is, by looking closely at what we material beings are and at how we sense and respond to the world and others (never directly, purely, or “nakedly”), I hope that our image-conscious and visible culture might reengage materialism at its most radical and come to recognize as precious both the grounded gravity and transcendent possibilities not only of our technologies and texts but also of our flesh.
In sum, it is my hope that the essays in Carnal Thoughts play some small part in making explicit the embodied premises that we implicitly live in a process of constant transformation and that they encourage a deeper and more expansive regard for the incredibly transcendent material that we are.
1. Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 21.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “What Is Phenomenology?” trans. John F. Banner, Cross Currents 6 (winter 1956): 64.
3. For those readers unfamiliar with the history, philosophy, and method of phenomenology (both transcendental and existential), see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1965). For elaboration of existential phenomenology in particular see David Carr, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Incarnate Consciousness,” in Existential Philosophers: Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty, ed. George Alfred SchraderJr. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 369-429. For a gloss on and demonstration of phenomenological method see Don Ihde, Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Paragon, 1979).
4. Thomas J. Csordas, introduction to Embodiment and Experience, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4 (emphasis added).
5. Ibid., 6.
6. Gary Brent Madison, “Did Merleau-Ponty Have a Theory of Perception?” in Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas Busch (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 94.
7. Gary Brent Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 25.
8. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 321-22.
9. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Malden, MA: Black-well/Polity Press, 2002), 7.
10. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 15.
PART ONE
Sensible Scenes
1
Breadcrumbs in the Forest
Three Meditations on Being Lost in Space
It was dark night when they woke up, and Hansel comforted his little sister. “Gretel,” he said, “just wait till the moon rises; then we'll see the breadcrumbs I strewed and they'll show us the way home.” When the moon rose, they started out, but they didn't find any breadcrumbs, because the thousands of birds that fly around in the forests and fields had eaten them all up. Hansel said to GretelI: “Don't worry, we'll find the way,” but they didn't find it.—”HANSEL AND GRETEL,” Grimms' Tales
What does it mean to be embodied in the multiple and shifting spaces of the world—not only the familiar spaces that seem of our own making and whose meanings we take up and live as “given” but also those spaces that seem to us strange or “foreign” in their shape and value?
When I was a child, I always thought north was the