Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture Vivian Sobchack UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sobchak, Vivian Carol. Carnal thoughts : embodiment and moving image culture / Vivian Sobchak. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-24128-2(alk. paper).—ISBN 0-520-24129-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Philosophy. 2. Motion pictures—Psychologi- cal aspects. I. Title. PN1995.S544 2004 791.43'01'5—dc22 2004006180 Manufactured in the United States of America 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 987654 321 The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlo- rine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). For Steve Alpert—who insisted that I dance . Western philosophy has betrayed the body; it has actively participated in the great process of metaphorization that has abandoned the body; and it has denied the body. The living body, being at once “subject” and “object,” cannot tolerate such conceptual division, and consequently philosophical concepts fall into the category of the “signs of non-body.” henri lefebvre, The Production of Space Thought and sensibility take on a new dimension, in which every drop of sweat, every movement of muscle, every quick- drawn breath becomes the symbol of a story; and as my body reproduces the particular gait of that story, so does my mind embrace its meaning. claude lévi-strauss, Tristes Tropiques contents acknowledgments / xi introduction / 1 part i. sensible scenes 1. Breadcrumbs in the Forest: Three Meditations on Being Lost in Space / 13 2. Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects / 36 3. What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh / 53 4. The Expanded Gaze in Contracted Space: Happenstance, Hazard, and the Flesh of the World / 85 5. “Susie Scribbles”: On Technology, Technë, and Writing Incarnate / 109 6. The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic “Presence” / 135 part ii. responsible visions 7. Beating the Meat /Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of the Century Alive / 165 8. Is Any Body Home? Embodied Imagination and Visible Evictions / 179 9. A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality / 205 10. Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary / 226 11. The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness / 258 12. The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity / 286 index / 319 Carnal Thoughts acknowledgments Many people—both colleagues and students—have contributed to this vol- ume in countless stimulating conversations and in countless helpful ways. More particularly, I would like to extend my gratitude to all those extraordi- nary students in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles, who, over the years, have taken and contributed to my graduate seminars “Visual Perception” and “Film and the Other Arts: Theories of Spatiality”; their provocative conversation and insights inform many of the essays in this book. I am also extremely grateful that portions of this work were supported by research grants from the UCLA Faculty Senate Committee on Research and by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Most personally, however, I want to thank those colleagues and friends who, for many years now, have generously read, commented on, argued with, and inspired the pages to follow; for both their ongoing friend- ship and their enthusiastic interest I owe a great debt to Scott Bukatman, Elena del Río, Arild Fetveit, Kevin Fisher, Amelia Jones, Kathleen McHugh, Maja Manojlovic, Laura Marks, and Linda Williams. Five of the twelve essays in this book have been revised and expanded from earlier published English-language versions. In the order in which they appear in the present volume, these are “Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects,” in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, edited by Kathleen Woodward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 200–211; “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence,’” in Materialities of Communication, edited by Hans Ulrich Gum- brecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 83–106; “Beating the Meat / Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of this Century Alive,” in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Techno- logical Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (Lon- xi xii acknowledgments don: Sage, 1995), 205–14; “Is Any Body Home? Embodied Imagination and Visible Evictions,” in Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, edited by Hamid Naficy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 45–61; and “Inscribing Ethical Space: 10 Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9, no. 4 (fall 1984): 283–300. Introduction The object ...[is] to describe the animation of the human body, not in terms of the descent into it of pure consciousness or reflection, but as a metamorphosis of life, and the body as “the body of the spirit.” —maurice merleau-ponty, Themes from the Lec- tures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960 This is, perhaps, an “undisciplined” book, informed as it is by my multidis- ciplinary grounding and interests in film and media studies, cultural studies, and—an oddity in the United States—existential philosophy. Nonetheless, however undisciplined, the essays brought together in Carnal Thoughts are not unruly. Indeed, whatever their specific subject matter and inflection, they share a single overarching theme and emerge from a single—albeit quite open—method. The major theme of Carnal Thoughts is the embodied and radically mate- rial nature of human existence and thus the lived body’s essential implica- tion in making “meaning” out of bodily “sense.” Making conscious sense from our carnal senses is something we do whether we are watching a film, moving about in our daily lives and complex worlds, or even thinking abstractly about the enigmas of moving images, cultural formations, and the meanings and values that inform our existence. Thus, whether exploring how we are oriented spatially both off and on the screen or asking about what it means to say that movies “touch us,” whether considering the ways in which technology from pens to computers to prosthetic legs alter the shape of our bodies as well as our lives or the difference between the “visible” and “visual” in an image-saturated culture, or whether trying to think through the “real- ity” of certain screen images or the way in which our aesthetic and ethical senses merge and emerge “in the flesh,” all the essays in this volume are focused on the lived body. That is, their concern is not merely with the body as an abstracted object belonging always to someone else but also with what it means to be “embodied” and to live our animated and metamorphic exis- tences as the concrete, extroverted, and spirited subjects we all objectively are. First and foremost, then, I hope the essays in Carnal Thoughts “flesh out” and contribute a descriptive gravity (if also an occasional levity) to the now 1 2 introduction extensive contemporary literature in the humanities focused objectively (but sometimes superficially) on “the body.” The focus here is on what it is to live one’s body, not merely look at bodies—although vision, visuality, and visibility are as central to the subjective dimensions of embodied existence as they are to its objective dimensions. In sum, the essays in Carnal Thoughts foreground embodiment—that is, the lived body as, at once, both an objec- tive subject and a subjective object: a sentient, sensual, and sensible ensemble of materialized capacities and agency that literally and figurally makes sense of, and to, both ourselves and others. In concert with this overarching theme, Carnal Thoughts adopts a method and critical practice guided by existential phenomenology. As philosopher Don Ihde characterizes it, existential phenomenology “is a philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity.”1 Indeed, existential phe- nomenology is philosophically grounded on the carnal, fleshy, objective foundations of subjective consciousness as it engages and is transformed by and in the world. Thus phenomenological inquiry focuses on the phenom- ena of experience and their meaning as spatially and temporally embodied, lived, and valued by an objective subject—and, as such, always already qual- ified by the mutable specificities and constraints of history and culture. In this sense embodiment is never a priori to historical and cultural existence. Furthermore, counter to an ahistorical and acultural idealism, the phenom- ena of our experience cannot be reduced to fixed essences; rather, in exis- tence they have provisional forms and structures and themes and thus are always open to new and other possibilities for both being and meaning. Thus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher whose focus on embodiment transformed transcendental (or constitutive) phenomenology into existen- tial phenomenology, tells us that “the greatest lesson of the [phenomeno- logical] reduction is the impossibility of a complete