ANIMAL BODIES AND EMBODIED VISUALITY This essay explores the relationship between touching and seeing through the lens of phenomenological experience, framed by the concepts of embodied visuality, haptic and optical images. It argues for the usefulness of the approach for thinking critically about human-animal relationships and the affective mediated experience of other subjectivities. With a focus on ‘touch’ it uses the 2017 Netflix film Okja to consider the sensual relationship between ‘subjective matter’ and the onscreen animal body. It discusses the different types of touch present in Okja and the processes of identification in terms of primary engagement with the sense and sensibility of materiality. Text and images by Claire Parkinson uring a scene in the film Okja (2017), connection. I was shocked that touching the the image of a human character dead puppy triggered a sense memory of Drunning his hand along the body of the chicken. Not live chickens but the fragmented titular super pig prompted me to recall an dead bodies of chickens that I, like so many other experience from earlier in my life. At around age working-class kids, habitually ate for dinner. thirteen, I was allowed to assist at the delivery of Looking at the puppy and experiencing the feel a litter of puppies. The mother of the litter was a of her cold soft body threw my previously rough collie – a ‘Lassie' type dog- who had been unquestioned certainty about socially prescribed running loose for more than two weeks on a categories of ‘pet’ and ‘food’ into complete playing field nearby our home. All attempts to disarray. While my visual sense confirmed their catch her had failed until finally, heavily pregnant species differences and despite the feel of cold she was cornered by a well-meaning member of damp fur instead of plucked uncooked skin, the the public and she ended up, as so many other touch of her body, the feel of plump fleshiness to homeless dogs and cats did, at our house. Within my fingers reaffirmed their similitude. I cried for thirty-six hours of arriving in our kitchen and that puppy who I understood as an individual being given a bed, some water and food, she being, but in the moment of ‘feeling’ her as ‘like began to pant heavily and shudder as her labour chicken’ was unable to relate the sensory started. I was kept at a distance at first only able experience to this chicken or that individual to observe quietly as she gave birth. One by one, chicken, only ‘chicken’. six puppies arrived but the weeks of being This phenomenological experience homeless and whatever other traumas had been stands out in my life as I felt it viscerally, the inflicted on the mother took a massive toll. Four sensory affective jolt was prior to the cognitive of the six puppies, despite resuscitation efforts, process of recognition. It was from that never took a breath. As an assistant to these experience that I began my transition to births and deaths, my job, unexpectedly, veganism. Later, I had to recalibrate my belief became to help to remove the bodies of the that when I held that puppy, that was the first dead puppies and wrap them in newspaper. time I had held a dead baby animal. Of course, I When I felt the first small body in my hands, I was realised, I had held and consumed the body parts immediately struck by a sense memory of many dead animals, the majority of whom, as 51 standardised animal-industrial practices dictate, made and its relationship to spectatorial would have been young when they were killed. identification has, in those traditions, been Okja, a Netflix original film directed by Bong inclined to grant privilege to the visual and the Joon-ho in which the main character is a CGI rational, the eye and the mind. The messiness of genetically modified ‘super pig’, reminded me of the body and our embodied encounters with that childhood experience. That memory film are at odds with the intellectual sensibilities prompts this essay in which I explore the of much film theory with its preference for relationship between touching and seeing critical distance, rigour, objectivity and disdain through the lens of phenomenological for the crudity of emotional or sensuous experience, framed by the concepts of excesses. With few exceptions, Sobchack writes, embodied visuality, haptic and optical images. ‘film theory has attempted … to put the Although the focus of such an approach within ambiguous and unruly, subjectively sensuous, film criticism has been on human embodiment, embodied experience of going to the movies in this essay I explore its usefulness for thinking back where it “properly” – that is, objectively – critically about human-animal relationships and belongs” (Sobchack 2004, 59). The sensuous, she the affective mediated experience of other argues, is located ‘on the screen as the semiotic subjectivities. With a focus on ‘touch’ I consider effects of cinematic representation … or off the the sensual relationship between ‘subjective screen in the spectator’s phantasmatic psychic matter’ and the onscreen animal body. I have formations, cognitive processes and basic written elsewhere on the ethical issues that are physiological reflexes that do not pose major raised when live animals are used for the questions of meaning’ (2004, 59-60). While purposes of entertainment media (see: Molloy there is no question that they are valuable, these 2011; Molloy 2012). For this reason, I focus on approaches do however struggle to take account Okja and the CGI super pig character to explore of what happens between the materiality of how the subject-object politics of human-animal bodies off-screen and the experience of ‘matter’ relationships are encoded in haptic and optical on screen. images. In this essay, I discuss the different types Phenomenological approaches, by way of touch present in Okja and the processes of of a contrast, can instead provide a framework that identification in terms of primary engagement pays attention to sense experience and embodied with ‘the sense and sensibility of materiality seeing. As Laura U. Marks proposes through her itself’ (Sobchack 2004, 65). theory of embodied visuality: ‘Film is not grasped solely by an intellectual act but by the complex Embodied visuality perception of the body as a whole. This view of perception implies an attitude towards the object, In Carnal Thoughts, Vivian Sobchack writes about in this case, a film, not as something that must be the embodied experience of film that, ‘we do not analyzed and deciphered in order to deliver forth experience any movie only through our eyes. We its meaning but as something that means in itself' see and comprehend and feel films with our (Marks 2000, 145). To acknowledge the bodiless entire bodily being, informed by the full history of our experience of the movies requires that we and carnal knowledge of our acculturated must recognize the multimodal sensory sensorium’ (Sobchack 2004, 63). When we watch capacities beyond seeing and hearing that are a film we shudder, our pulse increases, our skin active in the ‘lived body'. Smell, taste, touch, and tingles, we become aroused, we salivate, we feel proprioception, as well as vision and hearing, in the presence of audiovisual imagery. A film can make the film experience meaningful. The film act as a sensuous stimulus, an experience of viewer’s lived body, Sobchack argues, ‘both embodied vicarious sensation. As Sobchack provide and enacts a commutative reversibility observes, film viewing engages much more than between subjective feeling and objective our eyes yet theories of spectatorial identification knowledge, between the senses and their sense from the psychoanalytic and semiotic traditions of common meaning’ (2004, 61). Where our have focused on the visual aspects of the film bodies respond to a film without being experience. This tendency towards ocularcentrism translated first through thought, body and image in film theory has taken little account of the are in a reciprocal state, they are ‘surfaces in embodied subject and their multisensorial contact’; an experience that prompts Sobchack engagement. The question of how meaning is to argue that we must be attentive to our 52 ‘primary engagement … with the sense and depoliticise, dehistoricize or aestheticize animal sensibility of materiality itself’ (Sobchack 2004, experience and in doing so occlude their 65). ‘We are’ she contends ‘subjective matter: material realities and suffering. She argues our lived bodies sensually relate to “things” that instead for narratives that invite ‘simulative “matter” on the screen and find them sensible in empathy’ by ‘making evident the historical, a primary, prepersonal and global way […]’ cultural or political causes of, for instance, (2004, 65). suffering’ and stories that make the effort to The phenomenological experience is ‘contextualize the emotions of the animals’ and an engagement with material subjectivity but ‘highlight the solid, raw subjectivity of those also a diffused response that blurs the distance animals and offer ways for the audience to between image and viewer that some other better the situation’ (Aaltola 2018, 45). Empathy, traditions in film theory prefer to amplify. In however, is easily managed through popular Sobchack’s account at least, she is ‘able both to culture, the danger being that pleasurable sense and to be sensible, to be both the subject empathy is forgotten once the narrative is over. and the object of tactile desire’ and, she argues, Aaltola describes this as ‘bite-size' empathy, a all bodies in the film experience, both off screen means by which the viewer can edit what they and on screen may be part of this dynamic such wish to absorb: ‘It is this', Aaltola writes ‘that that ‘meaning, and where it is made does not enables moral and political passivity, for the type have a discrete origin in either spectators’ bodies of discomfort often required for one to truly or cinematic representation but emerges in their grasp the causes and intensities of others' conjunction’ (Sobchack 2004).