Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack

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      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—Psychological 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 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-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 LVI-STRAUSS, Tristes Tropiques

      CONTENTS

       ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

       INTRODUCTION

       PART I. SENSIBLE SCENES

       1. Breadcrumbs in the Forest: Three Meditations on Being Lost in Space

       2. Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects

       3. What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh

       4. The Expanded Gaze in Contracted Space: Happenstance, Hazard, and the Flesh of the World

       5. “Susie Scribbles”: On Technology, Technë, and Writing Incarnate

       6. The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic “Presence”

       PART II. RESPONSIBLE VISIONS

       7. Beating the Meat / Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of the Century Alive

       8. Is Any Body Home? Embodied Imagination and Visible Evictions

       9. A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality

       10. Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary

       11. The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness

       12. The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity

       INDEX

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Many people—both colleagues and students—have contributed to this volume in countless stimulating conversations and in countless helpful ways. More particularly, I would like to extend my gratitude to all those extraordinary 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 friendship and their enthusiastic interest I owe a great debt to Scott Bukatman, Elena del Rio, 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 Gumbrecht 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 Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London: 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 Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960

      This is, perhaps, an “undisciplined” book, informed as it is by my multidisciplinary grounding and interests in film