Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack

to be incompatible with the…tension between metaphorical and literal meaning. On the other hand, once it is re-interpreted on the basis of “seeing as,” the theory of fusion is perfectly compatible with interaction and tension theory. “Seeing X as Y” encompasses “X is not Y.”…The borders of meaning are transgressed but not abolished…. “[S]eeing as” designates the non-verbal mediation of the metaphorical statement. With this acknowledgment, semantics finds its frontier; and, in so doing, it accomplishes its task…. If semantics meets its limit here, a phenomenology of imagination…could perhaps take over. (212-14)

      A phenomenology of the cinesthetic subject having and making sense of the movies reveals to us the chiasmatic function of the lived body as both carnal and conscious, sensible and sentient—and how it is we can apprehend the sense of the screen both figurally and literally. That is, the lived body transparently provides the primary chiasmatic premises that connect and unite the senses as both carnally and consciously meaningful and also allow for their secondary differentiated meanings, one carnal and the other conscious. Correlatively, a phenomenology of the expression of this lived “fusion” and differentiation in the film experience reveals to us—through the catachretic articulations of language—the reversible and vacillating structure of the lived body's both unified and differentiated experience of cinematic sense. Ambivalently subtending fusion and difference, ambivalent in its structure and seemingly ambiguous in meaning, catachresis not only points to the “gap” between the figures of language and literal lived-body experience but also reversibly, chiasmatically, “bridges” and “fills” it. As Ricoeur writes above, catachresis “designates the non-verbal mediation of the metaphorical statement.” In the film experience the nonverbal mediation of catachresis is achieved literally by the spectator's lived body in sensual relation to the film's sensible figuration. Indeed, as Ricoeur concludes: “Half thought, half experience, ‘seeing as' is the intuitive relationship that holds sense and image together.”⁷⁴

      In the film experience, on the side of the cinesthetic subject experiencing a given film sensually, this reciprocity and chiasmatic (con)fusion of the literal and figural occurs in the lived body both having sense and making sense; and, on the side of reflective sensual description, this reciprocity and catachretic (con) fusion of the literal and figural occurs in language—whether cinematic or linguistic. Thus, the film experience—on both sides of the screen—mobilizes, confuses, reflectively differentiates, yet experientially unites lived bodies and language, and foregrounds the reciprocity and reversibility of sensible matter and sensual meaning. Our fingers, our skin and nose and lips and tongue and stomach and all the other parts of us understand what we see in the film experience. As cinesthetic subjects, then, we possess an embodied intelligence that opens our eyes far beyond their discrete capacity for vision, opens the film far beyond its visible containment by the screen, and opens language to a reflective knowledge of its carnal origins and limits. This is what, without a thought, my fingers know at the movies.

      1. Godfrey Cheshire, “Film: Auteurist Elan,” review of The Piano, dir. Jane Campion, Raleigh (North Carolina) Spectator Magazine, Nov. 18, 1993.

      2. Bob Straus, “The Piano Strikes Emotional Chords,” review of The Piano, Los Angeles Daily News, Nov. 19, 1993.

      3. Stuart Klawans, “Films,” review of The Piano, Nation, Dec. 6, 1993, 704.

      4. Daniel Heman, “It's a Bumpy Ride, but This Film's Built for Speed,” review of Speed, dir. Jan de Bont, Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 10, 1994.

      5. Henry Sheehan, “Speed Thrills,” review of Speed, Orange Country Register, June 10, 1994.

      6. Joe Leydon, “Breakneck Speed,” review of Speed, Houston Post, June 10, 1994.

      7. David Ansen, “Popcorn Deluxe,” review of Speed, Newsweek, June 13, 1994, 53.

      8. Anthony Lane, “Faster, Faster,” review of Speed, New Yorker, June 13, 1994, 103.

      9. Stephen Hunter, “As Cosmic Battles Go, Kombat Is Merely Mortal,” review of Mortal Kombat, dir. Paul Anderson, Baltimore Sun, Aug. 19, 1995.

      10. Janet Weeks, “Is Faux Violence Less Violent?” review of Mortal Kombat, Los Angeles Daily News Aug. 19 1995.

      11. Stephanie Griest, “Mortal Kombat's Bloodless Coup,” review of Mortal Kombat, Washington Post, Aug. 28, 1995.

      12. Owen Gleiberman, “Plastic Fantastic,” review of Toy Story, dir. John Lasseter, Entertainment Weekly, Nov. 14, 1995, 74.

      13. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 57, 59.

      14. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 159.

      15. Lesley Stern, “I Think, Sebastian, Therefore…I Somersault: Film and the Uncanny,” Para*doxa 3, nos. 3-4 (1997): 361.

      16. For relevant research by the Payne Studies see W. W. Charters, Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary (New York: Macmillan, 1933). In a related context Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner,” in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London: Sage, 1995), writes that the Payne Studies “presumed that the body might give evidence of physiological symptoms caused by a kind of technological intervention into subjectivity—an intervention which is part and parcel of the cinematic experience” (180).