Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack

conscious, in that we both have and make sense, the literal and the figural inform each other—as they inform us. The “matter that means” and the “meaning that matters” emerge in a reciprocal and reversible figure-ground relation that is the lived body having a sense of the world and making sense in the word. Thus the (figural) phrase “in all senses of the word” resonates with ambiguity and, in its “knowledge of its being related to being,” it reflexively suggests its own reversal to the (literal) phrase “in all words of the senses”—and this without a loss of either reference or reflection, even as the focus and direction of the emphasis changes.

      Our embodied experience of the movies, then, is an experience of seeing, hearing, touching, moving, tasting, smelling in which our sense of the literal and the figural may sometimes vacillate, may sometimes be perceived in uncanny discontinuity, but most usually configures to make undifferentiated sense and meaning together—albeit in a quite specific way. Although watching The Piano, I cannot fully touch Ada's leg through her stocking, although the precise smells of fresh laundry and the warmth of the linens that I see in Pretty Baby (Louis Malle, 1978) remain in some way vague to me, although I cannot taste the exact flavors of the pork noodles I see in loving close-up in Tampopo, I still do have a partially fulfilled sensory experience of these things that make them both intelligible to and meaningful for me. Thus, even if the intentional objects of my experience at the movies are not wholly realized by me and are grasped in a sensual distribution that would be differently structured were I outside the theater, I nonetheless do have a real sensual experience that is not reducible either to the satisfaction of merely two of my senses or to sensual analogies and metaphors constructed only “after the fact” through the cognitive operations of conscious thought. The pressing question is, of course, what kind of “different” sensual fulfillment do we experience at the movies? That is, what is the structure of such fulfillment, and how does it occur so that, in fact, we experience films not merely as a reduction of our sensual being but also as an enhancement of it?

      First of all, in the theater (as elsewhere) my lived body sits in readiness as both a sensual and sense-making potentiality. Focused on the screen, my “postural schema” or intentional comportment takes its shape in mimetic sympathy with (or shrinking recoil from) what I see and hear.⁶⁷ If I am engaged by what I see, my intentionality streams toward the world onscreen, marking itself not merely in my conscious attention but always also in my bodily tension: the sometimes flagrant, sometimes subtle, but always dynamic investment, inclination, and arrangement of my material being. However, insofar as I cannot literally touch, smell, or taste the particular figure on the screen that solicits my sensual desire, my body's intentional trajectory, seeking a sensible object to fulfill this sensual solicitation, will reverse its direction to locate its partially frustrated sensual grasp on something more literally accessible. That more literally accessible sensual object is my own subjectively felt lived body. Thus, “on the rebound” from the screen—and without a reflective thought—I will reflexively turn toward my own carnal, sensual, and sensible being to touch myself touching, smell myself smelling, taste myself tasting, and, in sum, sense my own sensuality.⁶⁸

      Certainly, this feeling and the sense I have of sensing at the movies is in some ways reduced in comparison with direct sensual experience—this because of my only partially fulfilled sensual grasp of my cinematic object of desire. But just as certainly, in other ways, the sense I have of sensing when I watch a film is also enhanced in comparison with much direct sensual experience—this because my only partially fulfilled sensual grasp of the original cinematic object is completed not in the realization of that object but through my own body, where my sensual grasp is reflexively doubled since, in this rebound from the screen, I have become not only the toucher but also the touched. (This sensual enhancement in which the body reflexively reflects—without a thought—on its own sensuality emerges in the most intense of direct engagements in which we “feel ourselves feeling”: a fantastic dish or incredible glass of wine in which we reflectively taste ourselves tasting, great sex in which we lose ourselves in feeling ourselves feel.)

      In the film experience, because our consciousness is not directed toward our own bodies but toward the film's world, we are caught up without a thought (because our thoughts are “elsewhere”) in this vacillating and reversible sensual structure that both differentiates and connects the sense of my literal body to the sense of the figurative bodies and objects I see on the screen. Within this structure my experience of my sensorium becomes heightened and intensified at the same time that it is perceived as general and diffuse. That is, insofar as my lived body senses itself in the film experience, the particular sensible properties of the onscreen figural objects that sensually provoke me (the weight and slightly scratchy feel of a wool dress, the smoothness of a stone, the texture and resilience of another's skin) will be perceived in a somewhat vague and diffuse way. This diffusion of the film object's particular sensual properties, however, does not diminish the sensual intensity of my engagement with them since they are what solicit me and are where my intentional interest invests itself. That is, insofar as I am sensually solicited, provoked by, and consciously located in figural objects that are elsewhere (on the screen where my senses partially grasp them), I am not focused on my own body's sensual particularity either. On the rebound from my unfulfilled bodily intentions to feel fully the figures onscreen but still consciously intending toward them and sensing them partially, my sense of my own literal and particular incorporation will also be general and diffuse—even as it may be quite intense. (The form of “self-touching” I'm discussing here—a form that is consciously “other” directed—is thus different in structure from forms of conscious self-touching in which both one's body and one's consciousness are self-directed; in this latter kind of reflexivity the doubled intention and attention toward oneself often become so highly reflective that despite one's autoerotic goals, it can undo carnal pleasure.)⁶⁹In sum, my gesture of specifically intending toward the screen to rebound diffusely on myself ultimately “opens up” my body to a sensuality that is both literal and figural.

      Watching The Piano, for example, my skin's desire to touch streams toward the screen to rebound back on itself and then forward to the screen again and again. In the process my skin becomes literally and intensely sensitized to the texture and tactility I see figured on the screen, but it is neither the particularity of Ada's taffetas and woolens nor the particularity of the silk blouse I'm actually wearing that I feel on its surface. On the one hand (so much for figures of speech!), I cannot fully touch taffeta and wool in this scenario although I can cross-modally grasp their texture and weight diffusely. On the other hand, although I do have the capacity to fully—and literally—feel the specific texture and weight of the silk blouse I am wearing, my tactile desire is located elsewhere in the onscreen taffeta and wool, and so, intending elsewhere, I feel the specificity of the silk on my skin only partially and diffusely. What is more, in this unthought carnal movement of an ongoing streaming toward and turning back of tactile desire, my sense of touch—“rebounding” from its only partial fulfillment on and by the screen to its only partial fulfillment in and by my own body—is intensified. My skin becomes extremely, if generally, sensitized. Indeed, this reflexive and reflective exchange between and diffusion of my “sense” of touch in both the literal and the figural has opened me to all these fabrics and their textures—indeed, has made the literal touch of even a specific fabric on my skin an overwhelmingly general and intensely extensive mode of being.

      It bears emphasizing again that the bodily reflexivity I am foregrounding here is not consciously reflective. Indeed, in most sensual experiences at the movies the cinesthetic subject does not think his or her own literal body (or clothing) and is not, as a result, rudely thrust offscreen back into his or her seat in response to a perceived discontinuity with the figural bodies and textures onscreen. Rather, the cinesthetic subject feels his or her literal body as only one side of an irreducible and dynamic relational structure of reversibility and reciprocity that has as its other side the figural objects of bodily provocation on the screen. This relational structure can, of course, be refused or broken—and, indeed, it often is when the sensual experience becomes too intense or unpleasurable. However, leaving the theater because one has become literally sickened or covering one's eyes is hardly