What My Fingers Knew:

The Cinesthetic Subject,

or Vision in the Flesh
by Vivian Sobchack

Professor Vivian Sobchack lectures in film studies in the School of

Theatre, Film and Television at UCLA. She has published widely in
the area of cinema studies, philosophy, critical theory and cultural
studies. Her books include The Address Of The Eye: A Phenomenol-
ogy Of Film Experience (Princeton University Press, 1992) and
Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1997).

[M]y body is not only an object among all objects, . . .but an

object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all
sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words with their
primordial significance through the way in which it receives
them.

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception

What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually

produced.

- Roland Barthes The Pleasure of the Text

Nearly every time I read a movie review in a newspaper or popular magazine, I am

struck once again by the gap that exists between our actual experience of the cin-
ema and the theory that we academic film scholars write to explain it--or, perhaps
more aptly, to explain it away. Take, for example, several descriptions in the popu-
lar press of Jane Campion's The Piano (1993): "What impresses most is the tactile
force of the images. The salt air can almost be tasted, the wind's furious bite felt"
(1); "An unremittingly sensuous experience of music and fabric, of mud and
flesh"(2); "Poems will be written about the curves of the performers' buttocks as
they're outlined by candlelight; about the atmosphere that surrounds the dropping
away of each item of clothing; about the immediate tactile shock when flesh first
touches flesh in close-up."(3) A completely different kind of film, Jan de Bont's
Speed (1994), elicits the following: "Viscerally, it's a breath-taking trip"(4); "A
classic summertime adrenaline rush"(5); "This white knuckle, edge-of-your-seat
action opus is the real thing"(6); "A preposterously exciting thrill ride that takes it-
self seriously enough to produce gasps of tension and lightly enough so you giggle
while grabbing the armrest"(7); "We feel wiped out with delirium and relief. The
movie comes home in triumph and we go home in shreds."(8) Reviewers of Paul
Anderson's film-adaptation of the kung-fu video game, Mortal Kombat (1995) em-
phasize "a soundtrack of. . .primitive, head-bonking urgency,"(9) and endless
scenes of "kick, sock, pow. . .to-the-death battles,"(10) in which "backs, wrists and
necks are shattered with sickening cracking sounds."(11) And, of John Lasseter's
full-length computergraphically- animated feature Toy Story (1995), another says:

A Tyrannosaurus rex doll is so glossy and tactile you feel as if you could reach out
and stroke its hard, shiny head. . . .When some toy soldiers spring to life, the waxy
sheen of their green fatigues will strike Proustian chords of recognition in anyone
who ever presided over a basement game of army. . . .[T]his movie. . .invites you
to gaze upon the textures of the physical world with new eyes. What Bambi and
Snow White did for nature, Toy Story, amazingly, does for plastic.(12)

What have we, as contemporary theorists, to do with such tactile, kinetic, redolent,
resonant, and sometimes even taste-full descriptions of the film experience?

I.

During earlier periods in the history of film theory, there had been various attempts
to understand the meaningful relation between cinema and our sensate bodies. Pe-
ter Wollen notes that the great Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein,
fascinated by the Symbolist movement, spent the latter part of his career investigat-
ing the "synchronization of the senses" and that his "writings on synaesthesia are of
great erudition and considerable interest, despite their fundamentally unscientific
nature."(13) Gilles Deleuze writes that Eisenstein "continually reminds us that 'in-
tellectual cinema' has as correlate 'sensory thought' or 'emotional intelligence', and
is worthless without it."(14) And, in a wonderful essay using the trope of the "som-
ersault" to address the relation between cinema and the body, Lesley Stern reminds
us how, for Eisenstein, the moving body was "conceived and configured cinemati-
cally. . .not just [as] a matter of representation, but [as] a question of the circuit of
sensory vibrations that links viewer and screen.(15) This early interest in the so-
matic effects of the cinema culminated, perhaps, on the one side, in the 1930s with
the empirical work done by the Payne Studies--several of which quantitatively
measured the "galvanic responses" and blood pressure of film viewers.(16) On the
other, more qualitative side, there was the phenomenological work done in the
1940s by Siegfried Kracauer, who saw the uniqueness of cinema in the medium's
essential ability to stimulate us physiologically and sensually, to address the specta-
tor as a "corporeal-material being," a "human being with skin and hair." Kracauer
writes: "The material elements that present themselves in films directly stimulate
the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physio-
logical substance."(17)

Contemporary film theory, however, has generally elided both cinema's sensual
address and our own "corporeal-material being" as film viewers until quite re-
cently.(18) Indeed, despite contemporary theory's major emphases on spectatorship
and film "reception," the spectator's identification with the cinema has been consti-
tuted almost exclusively as a specular and psychical process abstracted from the
body and mediated through language. Thus, if we read across the field there is very
little sustained work to be found on the carnality and sensuality of the film experi-
ence--and most of it is relatively recent. The few exceptions are Linda Williams's
on-going investigation of what she calls "body genres";(19) Jonathan Crary's rec-
ognition, in Techniques of the Observer, of the "carnal density" of spectatorship
that emerges with the new visual technologies of the nineteenth century;(20) Ste-
ven Shaviro's Deleuzean emphasis, in The Cinematic Body, on the visceral event of
film viewing;(21) Laura Marks's The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Em-
bodiment, and the Senses which focuses on what she describes as "haptic visual-
ity";(22) and several recent essays by Elena del Río that, from a phenomenological
perspective and in relation to bodies and images, attempt to undo "the rigid binary
demarcations of externality and internality."(23) In general, however, most film
theorists still seem either embarrassed or bemused by bodies that often act wan-
tonly and crudely at the movies, involuntarily countering the fine-grained sensibili-
ties and intellectual discriminations of critical reflection. Indeed, as Williams sug-
gests in relation to the "low" body genres of pornography, horror, and melodrama
she privileges, a certain discomfort emerges when we experience an "apparent lack
of proper esthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion."
She tells us: "We feel manipulated by these texts--an impression that the very col-
loquialisms of 'tear jerker' and 'fear jerker' express--and to which we could add
pornography's even cruder sense as texts to which some people might be inclined
to 'jerk off.'"(24) Bodily responses to such films seem to constitute a kind of invol-
untary and self-evident reflexology, marking, as Williams notes, sexual arousal on
"peter meters," horror in screams, fainting, and even heart attacks, and sentiment in
"one-, two-, or three handkerchiefs."(25)

For the most part, then, such carnal responses to the cinema have been regarded as
too crude to invite further elaboration. Furthermore, those kinds of films that pro-
voke them and thus collapse the "proper esthetic distance" between the spectator
and the screen are often quarantined (as is pornography); or conveniently sub-
sumed as "primitive" under Tom Gunning's once historically-grounded, but now
catch-all designation: "cinema of attractions"; or conflated, for their easy thrills as
well as their commercial impacts and cultural associations, with other "more ki-
netic" forms of amusement such as "theme park" rides.(26) Furthermore, scholarly
interest in such a "cinema of sensation" arises less from the ability of these films to
physically arouse us than from what they reveal about the rise and fall of classical
narrative, or the increasingly trans-media structure of the contemporary entertain-
ment industry, or the desires of our culture at a millennial moment of extreme Ben-
jaminian distraction.

Crude bodily responses to films and the crude films that provoke them are thus of-
ten seen as a sub-set--if not, indeed, a sub-class--of cinema. Paradoxically, how-
ever, critical discussions of these same films and their powerful physical effects
also often suggest that they are the quintessence of cinema. For example, writing
about Speed, Richard Dyer begins by invoking the Lumière audience recoiling in
terror at an approaching train and ends up invoking Imax and Showscan to speak of
all cinema as, at base, a "cinema of sensation."(27) In a compelling focus on the
engenderment and racialization of action movies, he suggests the cinema's essential
ability to represent and fulfill our desire "for an underlying pattern of feeling, to do
with freedom of movement, confidence in the body, engagement with the material
world, that is coded as male (and straight and white, too) but to which all humans
need access."(28) Nonetheless, while Dyer acknowledges the spectator's direct
bodily experience of cinema and persuasively explores that experience's cultural
dimensions, he is at a loss to explain its very existence. He tells us: "The celebra-
tion of sensational movement, that we respond to in some still unclear sense 'as if
real', for many people is the movies."(29) What Dyer gives with one hand, then, he
takes back with the other. The question of what grounds our bodily response to
cinema's visual (and aural) representations is not only articulated as a continuing
mystery, but its eidetic "givenness" to experience is also destabilized by the phrase
"as if real"--the phrase itself surrounded by a set of "scare quotes" that, questioning
this questioning of givenness, further plunges us into a mise en abîme of experien-
tial undecidability.

This "still unclear sense" of the something that provokes a response "as if real" re-
veals the confusion and discomfort we have confronting our sensual experience of
the cinema and our lack of ability to explain its somatism as anything more than
"mere" physiological reflex or to admit its meaning as anything more than meta-
phorical description.(30) The language of the body's sensibility used in the press to
describe the sensuous and affective dimensions of the film experience has been
"written off" as a popular version of that "soft core" and imprecise humanist criti-
cism drummed out of film studies in the 1970s with the advent of more "rigorous"
and "objective" modes of description. Thus, sensual reference in descriptions of
cinema (not only those of popular reviewers, but our own as well) has generally
been regarded as rhetorical or poetic "excess"--sensuality located, then, always less
on the side of the body than on the side of language. This view is tautological,
however. As Shaviro points out, it subsumes sensation "within universal (linguistic
or conceptual) forms only because it has deployed those forms in order to describe
sensation in the first place." This elision of the body "making sense" in its own
right is grounded in "the idealist assumption that human experience is originally
and fundamentally cognitive." To hold such an idealist assumption, Shaviro goes
on,

is to reduce the question of perception to a question of knowledge, and to equate

sensation with the reflective consciousness of sensation. The Hegelian and struc-
turalist equation suppresses the body. It ignores or abstracts away from the primor-
dial forms of raw sensation: affect, excitation, stimulation and repression, pleasure
and pain, shock and habit. It posits instead a disincarnate eye and ear whose data
are immediately objectified in the form of self-conscious awareness or positive
knowledge.(31)

In sum, even though it has shown increasing interest in doing so in the last few
years, contemporary film theory has not yet come to grips with the carnal founda-
tions of cinematic intelligibility, with the fact that to understand movies, to com-
prehend them, we must make sense of them first. This is not a tautology--
particularly in a discipline that has worked long and hard to separate the sense and
meaning of vision and specularity from a body that, in experience, lives vision al-
ways in cooperation and significant exchange with other sensorial means of access
to the world, a body that makes meaning before it makes conscious, reflective
thought. Thus, despite the relatively recent academic fetishization of "the body,"
theorists still don't quite know what to do with their unruly responsive flesh and
sensorium--particularly insofar as these pose an intolerable question to prevalent
linguistic and psychoanalytic understandings of the cinema as grounded in conven-
tional codes and cognitive coding and grounded on absence, lack, and illusion as
well as to the prevalent cultural assumption that the film image is constituted
through a merely two-dimensional geometry.(32) Positing cinematic vision as
merely a mode of objective symbolic representation, and reductively abstracting--
"disincarnating"--the spectator's subjective and full-bodied vision to posit it only as
a "distance sense," contemporary film theory has had major difficulties in compre-
hending how it is possible for human bodies to be, in fact, really "touched" and
"moved" by the movies. Both the signifier and the psyche are offered as the "medi-
ating" solution to what is perceived as merely a "language" problem. However,
rather than providing the mediating bridge between the image and its comprehen-
sion by the viewer's lived body, signifier and psyche just reproduce the binary split
between image and body and thus they still cannot account for the somatic intelli-
gibility of the film image or a somatic intelligence of the spectator's body that is
more than primitive reflex.

At worst, then, contemporary film theory has not taken bodily being at the movies
very seriously--and, at best, it has generally not known how to respond to and de-
scribe how it is that movies "move" and "touch" us bodily, how they provoke in us
"carnal thoughts" before they provoke us to conscious analysis. Instead, with some
noted exceptions, film theory has attempted (somewhat defensively, I think) to put
the ambiguous and unruly, subjectively sensuous, embodiedexperience of going to
the movies back where it "properly"--that is, objectively--belongs: that is, it has lo-
cated the sensuous on the screen as the semantic property of cinematic objects and
the semiotic effects of cinematic representation, or off the screen in the spectator's
fantasmatic psychic formations, cognitive processes, and basic sensory reflexes
(the latter "written off" as "crude" phenomena that don't pose major questions of
meaning.) And yet, as film theorists, we are not exempt from sensual being at the
movies--nor, let's admit it, would we wish to be. As "lived bodies" (to use a phe-
nomenological term that insists on "the" objective body as always also lived sub-
jectively as "my" body, diacritically invested and active in making sense and mean-
ing in and of the world), our vision is always already "fleshed out"--and even at the
movies it is "in-formed" and given meaning by our other sensory means of access
to the world: our capacity not only to hear, but also to touch, to smell, to taste, and
always to proprioceptively feel our dimension and movement in the world. In sum,
the film experience is meaningful not to the side of my body, but because of my
body.

Here, in an attempt not only to acknowledge but also to explicate the way in which
the cinema is somatically intelligible and, moreover, richly meaningful in this reg-
ister, I want to alter the binary structure suggested by previous formulations and,
instead, posit the film viewer's lived body as a carnal "third term" that chiasmati-
cally mediates vision and language, experience and image.(33) In existence, it is
the lived body that provides both the site and the semiosis of the "third" or "obtuse"
meaning that Roland Barthes suggests escapes language and is yet within it.(34)
Thrown into a meaningful life-world, the lived body is always already engaged in a
commutation and transubstantiation of the co-operative meaning-making capacity
of its senses (which are never lived as completely "discrete" or "raw") to the more
particular and reflective discriminations of a "higher order" semiotics. Put another
way, we could say that the lived body both provides and enacts a commutative re-
versibility between subjective feeling and objective knowledge, between the senses
and their sense. Although more influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
than by Barthes or Maurice Merleau-Ponty (whose semiotic phenomenology of
perception is central to what follows), Shaviro is again helpful--and eloquent--here.
He tells us:

There is no structuring lack, no primordial division, but a continuity between the

physiological and affective responses of my own body and the appearances and
disappearances, the mutations and perdurances, of the bodies and images on screen.
The important distinction is not the hierarchical, binary one between bodies and
images, or between the real and its representations. It is rather a question of dis-
cerning multiple and continually varying interactions among what can be defined
indifferently as bodies and as images: degrees of stillness and motion, of action and
passion, of clutter and emptiness, of light and lack. . . .The image cannot be op-
posed to the body, as representation is opposed to its unattainable referent. For a
fugitive, supplemental materiality haunts the (allegedly) idealizing processes of
mechanical reproduction. . . .The flesh is intrinsic to the cinematic apparatus, at
once its subject, its substance, and its limit.(35)

II.

At this point, and given my rather lengthy critique of theoretical abstraction and its
oversight of our bodily experience at the movies, I want to ground my previous
commentary "in the flesh." In my flesh, in fact--and its meaningful responsiveness
to The Piano. However intellectually problematic in terms of its sexual and colo-
nial politics,(36) Campion's film moved me deeply and touched me throughout,
stirring my bodily senses and my sense of my body. The film not only "filled me
up" and often "suffocated" me with feelings that resonated in and constricted my
chest and stomach, but it also "sensitized" the very surfaces of my skin--as well as
its own--to touch. Throughout The Piano, my whole being was intensely concen-
trated and, rapt as I was in what was there on the screen, I was also wrapped in a
body that, here, was achingly aware of itself as a sensuous, sensitized, sensible ma-
terial capacity.(37) (In this context, we might remember the reviewers quoted ear-
lier who speak of the "unremittingly sensuous experience of music and fabric, of
mud and flesh," "the tactile force of the images," and "immediate tactile shock.")

In particular, I want to examine my sensual and sense-making experience of The

Piano's inaugural two shots. Although my body's attention was mobilized and con-
centrated throughout a film that never ceased to move or touch me in the most
complex and various ways, these first two shots, at least to me, foreground the is-
sue "at hand" (so to speak) in our engagement not only with this film, but, to vary-
ing degree, with all others.(38) These inaugural shots also foreground the ambigu-
ity and ambivalence of touch as it has been evoked here as being and making
meaning in both its literal and figurative sense. Elaborated slowly and on a primar-
ily dark screen, the very first shot we see in The Piano seems--in visual and figural
terms--an "unidentifiable" image. Carol Jacobs describes and glosses both this shot
and the significant one that follows it with some precision:
Long, uneven shafts of reddish-pink light fan out across the screen, unfocused like
a failed and developed color negative of translucent vessels of blood. . . .Yet it is
nearly no view at all--an almost blindness, with distance so minimal between eye
and object that what we see is an unrecognizable blur. . . .The image we first see is
from the other side, from Ada's perspective, her fingers, liquid fingers. . . .We see
Ada's fingers pierced through with sunlight, apparently from her perspective, as we
hear the voice of her mind, but then, immediately thereafter, we see them from the
clear perspective of the onlookers that we are, as they become matter-of-fact-
objects to the lens of the camera.(39)

Now, as I watched The Piano's opening moments--in that first shot, before I knew
there was an Ada and before I saw her from my side of her vision (that is, before I
watched her rather than her vision)--something quite extraordinary (and yet also, I
would argue, quite common) happened. Despite my "almost blindness," the "un-
recognizable blur," the resistance of the image to my eyes, my fingers knew what I
was looking at--and this in advance of the objective "reverse" shot that followed
and put those fingers in their "proper" place (that is, where they could be objec-
tively seen rather than subjectively looked through). What I was seeing was, in
fact, from the beginning, not an unrecognizable image, however blurred and inde-
terminate in my vision, however much my eyes could not "make it out." From the
first (although I didn't "know" it until the second), my fingers comprehended that
image, grasped it with a nearly imperceptible tingle of attention and anticipation
and, off-screen, "felt themselves" as a potentiality in the subjective situation fig-
ured on-screen. And this before I re-cognized my carnal comprehension into the
conscious thought: "Ah, those are fingers I am looking at." Indeed, initially, prior
to this conscious recognition, those fingers were not understood as "those" fingers--
that is, at a distance from my own and objective in their "thereness." Rather, they
were first known sensually and sensibly as "these" fingers and were located am-
biguously both off-screen and on--subjectively "here" as well as objectively
"there," "mine" as well as the image's. Thus, it is not surprising--although it should
have been given my "almost blindness" to the first shot--that the second and objec-
tive "reverse" shot of a woman peering at the world through her outspread fingers
really came as no surprise. Instead, it provided a pleasurable culmination and con-
firmation of what my fingers--and I, reflexively if not yet reflectively informed by
them--already knew.

As I've suggested, while this experience of my body's prereflective but reflexive

comprehension of the seen (and, hence, the "scene") is in some respects extraordi-
nary, it is also in most respects hardly exceptional. Indeed, I would argue that this
prereflective--and much more than "knee-jerk"--bodily responsiveness to films is a
commonplace. The point to be stressed here is that we do not experience any movie
only with our eyes. We see and comprehend and feel films with our entire bodily
being, informed by the full history and knowledge of our sensorium. Normatively,
however, the "givenness" of things for us to see at the movies, the overarching
mastery and comprehension by our vision of its object, and vision's hierarchical
sway over our other senses all tend to occlude our awareness of our body's other
ways of taking up and making meaning of the world--and its representation. Thus,
what is extraordinary about the opening shot of The Piano is that it offers (at least
on first viewing) a relatively rare instance at the movies in which the cultural he-
gemony of vision is overthrown, an instance in which my eyes did not "see" any-
thing meaningful and experienced "an almost blindness" at the same time that my
tactile sense of being in the world through my fingers grasped the image's sense in
a way that my forestalled or "baffled" vision could not.(40)

In her precise description and through overt simile, Jacobs tells us that the initial
image is "like a failed and developed color negative of translucent vessels of
blood." Yet, one senses that her bodily reference is derived less from a reflection
on tactile foresight than it is from visual hindsight. For, in an otherwise admirable
essay that interrogates the hegemony of vision in relation to the film's narrative and
visual emphasis on touch, Jacobs objectifies and locates the site of touch far too
quickly--rushing to see the film as about "point of view," hurrying to consider tac-
tility and fingers and hands in terms of their narrative symbolism.(41) Thus, she
tells us at the end of her description that Ada's fingers in that first shot (as well as
throughout) are used symbolically to "render us illiterate," "unable to read
them."(42) Now, if vision were an isolate sense as well as a discrete sense (that is,
possessing its own structure, capacities, and limits), I suppose this would be true.
But vision is not isolated from our other senses. Whatever its particular capacities
and discriminations, vision is only one modality of my lived body's access to the
world and only one means of making the world of objects and others sensible--that
is, meaningful--to me. Vision may be the sense most privileged in the cinema, with
hearing a close second; nonetheless, I do not leave my capacity to touch or to smell
or to taste at the door, nor, once in the theater, do I devote these senses only to my
popcorn.

My experience of The Piano was thus a heightened instance of our common sensu-
ous experience of the movies: the way we are in some carnal modality able to
touch and be touched by the substance of images, to feel a visual atmosphere en-
velop us, to experience weight and suffocation and the need for air, to take flight in
kinetic exhilaration and freedom even as we are relatively bound to our seats, to be
knocked backwards by a sound, to sometimes even smell and taste the world we
see upon the screen. Although, perhaps, these latter senses are less called upon than
touch to inform our comprehension of the images we see, I still remember the per-
fumed redolence (or better, the "visual aroma") of my experience of Black Narcis-
sus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger, 1946),(43) or the pork-noodle taste
of portions of Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1986). (Indeed, the power of advertising rests
heavily on the presumption of such transmodal cooperation and translation within
and across the sensorium.) As I engaged these films, I did not "think" a translation
of my sense of sight into smell or taste; rather I experienced it without a thought.
Indeed, as Elena del Río describes this experience: "As the image becomes trans-
lated into a bodily response, body and image no longer function as discrete units,
but as surfaces in contact, engaged in a constant activity of reciprocal re-alignment
and inflection."(44)

In this somatic regard, if we are to think yet again about processes of "identifica-
tion" in the film experience, we might more deeply think them in relation to our
engagement with and recognition of neither characters nor "subject positions," but
rather of the sense and sensibility of materiality itself. Subjective matter as we our-
selves are, our lived bodies sensually relate to "things" on the screen and find them
sensible in a prepersonal and global way that grounds later identifications that are
more discrete and localized. Certainly, my experience of the opening "subjective"
shot of The Piano provides evidence of this prepersonal and globally-located bod-
ily comprehension, but this "ambient" and carnal identification with material sub-
jectivity also occurs when, for example, I "objectively" watch Baines--under the
piano and Ada's skirts--reach out and touch Ada's flesh through a hole in her black
woolen stocking.(45) Looking at this "objective" image, like the reviewer cited ear-
lier, I also felt an "immediate tactile shock when flesh first touches flesh in close-
up." Yet precisely whose flesh I felt is ambiguous--and that ambiguity or vagueness
emerges from a phenomenological experience structured on ambivalence and dif-
fusion, on an interest and investment in being both "here" and "there," in being
able both to sense and to be sensible, both the subject and the object of tactile de-
sire. At that moment when Baines touches Ada's skin through her stocking, sud-
denly my skin is both mine and not my own: the "immediate tactile shock" opens
me to the general erotic mattering of flesh and I am diffusely--ambivalently--
Baines's body, Ada's body, what I have elsewhere called the "film's body," and my
"own" body.(46) Thus, even confronted with an "objective" shot, my fingers know
and understand the meanings of this "seen" and this viewing situation and they are
everywhere--not only in the touching, but also in the touched. Objectivity and sub-
jectivity thus lose their presumed clarity. Here (and to varying degree in every
viewing situation), "to situate subjectivity in the lived body jeopardizes dualistic
metaphysics altogether. There remains no basis for preserving the mutual exclusiv-
ity of the categories subject and object, inner and outer, I and world."(47)

Again, I want to insist that I am not speaking metaphorically of touching and being
touched, but "in some sense" quite literally of our capacity to "feel" the world we
see and hear on-screen and of the cinema's capacity to "touch" and "move" us off-
screen. As philosopher Elizabeth Grosz puts it: "Things solicit the flesh just as the
flesh beckons to and as an object for things. Perception is the flesh's reversibility,
the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the
other in its own self-embrace."(48) Experiencing a movie, not ever merely "seeing"
it, my lived body enacts this reversibility in perception and subverts the very notion
of on-screen and off-screen as mutually exclusive sites or "subject positions." In-
deed, as Barthes has shown us, much of the "pleasure of the text" emerges from
this carnal subversion of fixed subject positions, from the body as a "third" term
that both exceeds and yet is within representation; thus "it would be wrong. . .to
imagine a rigid distinction between the body inside and the body outside the text,
because the subversive force of the body is partly in its capacity to function both
figuratively and literally."(49) All the bodies in the film experience--those on-
screen and off-screen (and possibly that of the screen itself)--are potentially sub-
versive bodies. They have the capacity to function both figuratively and literally.
They are pervasive and extensional, diffusely situated in the film experience. Yet
these bodies are also materially circumscribed and can be specifically located, each
arguably becoming the "grounding body" of sense and meaning since each exists in
a figure-ground reversibility with the others. Furthermore, these bodies also subvert
themselves from within and are intensional: commingling flesh and consciousness,
the human and technological sensorium, so that meaning and where it is made does
not have a discrete origin in either bodies or representation but emerges from both.

We might name this subversive body in the film experience the cinesthetic subject-
-a neologism which derives not only from cinema, but also from two scientific
terms, synaesthesia and coenaesthesia, that designate particular structures and con-
ditions of the human sensorium. Both of these structures and conditions foreground
the complexity and richness of the more general bodily experience that grounds our
particular experience of cinema and both, as well, point to ways in which the cin-
ema uses our dominant senses of vision and hearing to speak comprehensibly to
our other senses. Let us first consider synaesthesia. In strict medical discourse, it is
defined as an "involuntary experience in which the stimulation of one sense
cause[s] a perception in another."(50) Synaesthetes regularly, vividly, automati-
cally, and consciously perceive sound as color, or shapes as having a taste. One
woman explains, "I most often see sound as colors, with a certain sense of pressure
on my skin. . . .I am seeing, but not with my eyes, if that makes sense," and she
mentions that she experiences her husband's voice and laugh not metaphorically
but literally as "a wonderful golden brown, with a flavor of crisp, buttery
toast."(51) Psychoneurologist Richard Cytowic tells us: "Synaesthesia, is the most
immediate and direct kind of experience. . . .It is sensual and concrete, not some in-
tellectualized concept pregnant with meaning. It emphasizes limbic processes [over
higher cortical functions of the brain] which break through to consciousness. It's
about feeling and being, something more immediate than analyzing what is hap-
pening and talking about it."(52) Which, I might emphasize, does not mean that
synaesthetic experience as "more immediate than analysis" escapes culture--as evi-
denced in laughter perceived as the taste of "crisp, buttery toast."

An extreme psychoneurological condition, clinical synaesthesia is relatively un-

common in the general population yet, to some degree, a less extreme experience
of "cross-modal transfer" among our senses is common enough to have warranted
the term's use and the condition's description in ordinary language. Artists not only
have long been interested in synaesthesia (as were the Symbolists and Eisenstein)
but several also have been synaesthetes (the great Vladimir Nabokov is but one ex-
ample). Furthermore, in common usage, synaesthesia refers not only to one bodily
sense being involuntarily, if consciously, experienced in terms of another, but also
to the use of metaphors in which terms relating to one kind of sense-impression are
used to describe a sense-impression of other kinds. This move from an involuntary,
immediate, eidetic exchange within the sensorium to a conscious, mediated, con-
structed exchange between the sensorium and language not only reminds us of the
aforementioned "synaesthesia-loving Symbolist movement,"(53) but also points to
the ambiguity and ambivalence of a sensual economy of language in which the
lived body is variously and simultaneously the fundamental source of language, its
sign-producer, and its sign. Thus, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark
Johnson argue in their Metaphors We Live By that figural language emerges and
takes its meaning from our physical experience (however disciplined by cul-
ture),(54) and Cytowic, working with synaesthetes, concludes that "the coherence
of metaphors. . .[is] rooted in concrete experience, which is what gives metaphors
their meaning. . . .I mean that metaphor is experiential and visceral."(55) This re-
current issue of the relation between the literally sensible body and metaphor as
sensible figure is obviously central to both our understanding of cinematic intelli-
gibility and of the cinesthetic subject who is moved and touched by going to the
movies--and it is an issue to which I shall return.

The neologism of the film viewer as a "cinesthetic subject" also plays upon a sec-
ond and less well-known scientific term used to designate a bodily condition more
common than clinical synaesthesia: coenaesthesia. Neither pathological nor rare,
coenaesthesia names the perception of one's whole bodily state as the sum of its
somatic perceptions and refers to a certain pre-logical unity of the sensorium that
exists as the carnal foundation of that hierarchical arrangement of the senses
achieved through cultural immersion and practice. Thus, the term is used to de-
scribe the general sensual condition of the child at birth. In this regard, not yet fully
acculturated to a particularly disciplined organization of the sensorium, young
children have demonstrated a greater "horizontalization" of the senses and conse-
quently a greater capacity for cross-modal sensorial exchange than have adults.(56)
In sum, while synaesthesia refers to exchange and translation between and among
the senses, coenaesthesia refers to the way in which our equally available senses
have the capacity to become variously heightened and diminished, the power of
culture regulating their boundaries as it arranges them into a normative hierarchy.

There are those instances, however, when we do not have to be clinically-

diagnosed synaesthetes or very young children to challenge those boundaries and
transform those hierarchies. The undoing of abstract if regulatory borders and or-
ders among the senses can occur in a variety of situations. Elaine Scarry points to
our experience of our encounters with something extraordinarily beautiful and
writes:

A visual event may reproduce itself in the realm of touch (as when the seen face
incites an ache of longing in the hand). . . .This crisscrossing of the senses may
happen in any direction. Wittgenstein speaks not only about beautiful visual events
prompting motions in the hand but. . .about heard music that later prompts a
ghostly sub-anatomical event in his teeth and gums. So, too, an act of touch may
reproduce itself as an acoustical event or even an abstract idea, the way whenever
Augustine touches something smooth, he begins to think of music and God.(57)

In other instances, as nearly anyone who has survived the 1960s knows, involun-
tary cross-modal sensory exchange often becomes foregrounded in conscious expe-
rience through drug use. Merleau-Ponty notes in Phenomenology of Perception: "A
subject under mescalin finds a piece of iron, strikes the window-sill with it and ex-
claims: 'This is magic': the trees are growing greener. The barking of a dog is found
to attract light in an indescribable way, and is re-echoed in the right foot."(58) And,
in a critique of objectivist science that might be applied as well to contemporary
theoretical (mis)understanding of the film experience, he goes on to say: "Synaes-
thetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific
knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned
how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily
organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what are to see, hear and
feel."(59)

We could add that we are also unaware of synaesthetic perception because it is the
rule and thus we are so habituated to the constant cross-modal translations of our
sensory experience that such perceptions are transparent except in their most ex-
treme instances. Exemplary here for its everyday quality is a common experience
of those of us who like to cook--and eat--of tasting a recipe as we read it. This
commutative act between visual comprehension of abstract words and their carnal
meaning not only attests to a grounding synaesthesia that enables such translation
but also again demonstrates "the subversive force of the body. . .in its capacity to
function both figuratively and literally." My eyes read and comprehend the recipe
cognitively, but they are not abstracted from my body which can--albeit in a trans-
formed and somewhat diffused act of gustatorial sense-making--taste the meal.
Why, then, is it not entirely possible that we might partake even more intensely of
Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987)? And to what extent are we being quite literal
as well as figurative when we describe the meals in Like Water for Chocolate (Al-
fonso Arau, 1994) as "a feast for the eyes"? Here, Lisa Schwarzbaum, in a popular
review of Big Night (Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, 1996) makes some appo-
site discriminations about eating in the film experience. She writes: "The difference
between a movie that makes you admire food and one that makes you love food is
the difference between a dinner table posed like a still life in Martin Scorsese's The
Age of Innocence [1993] and a clove of garlic sliced so intently you can practically
inhale its ornery perfume in Scorsese's GoodFellas [1990]. One engages the eye
and the other arouses all five senses."(60)

In sum, the cinesthetic subject names the film viewer (and, for that matter, also the
filmmaker) who not only has a body but is a body and, through an embodied vision
in-formed by the knowledge of the other senses, "makes sense" of what it is to
"see" a movie--both "in the flesh" and as it "matters." Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty
tells us, the sensible-sentient lived body "is a ready-made system of equivalents
and transpositions from one sense to another. The senses translate each other with-
out any need of an interpreter, and they are mutually comprehensible without the
intervention of any idea."(61) Thus, the cinesthetic subject both touches and is
touched by the screen, able to commute seeing to touching and back again without
a thought and through sensual and cross-modal activity able to experience the
movie as both here and there rather than clearly locating the site of that cinematic
experience as "on-screen" or "off-screen." In sum, as a lived body, the cinesthetic
subject subverts the prevalent objectification of vision that would reduce our senso-
rial experience at the movies to an impoverished "cinematic sight" or posit ano-
rexic theories of identification that have no flesh on them, that cannot stomach "a
feast for the eyes."

In a particularly resonant passage, Merleau-Ponty elaborates on the intercommuni-

cation of the senses as they not only open us synoptically onto the structure of the
perceived thing but also as they reveal the simultaneity of sensory cooperation and
the carnal knowledge it provides:

One sees the hardness and brittleness of glass, and when, with a tinkling sound, it
breaks, this sound is conveyed by the visible glass. One sees the springiness of the
steel, the ductility of red-hot steel, the hardness of a plane blade, the softness of
shavings. The form of objects is not their geometrical shape: it stands in a certain
relation to their specific nature, and appeals to our other senses as well as sight.
The form of a fold in linen or cotton shows us the resilience or dryness of the fibre,
the coldness or warmth of the material. . . .In the jerk of the twig from which a bird
has just flown, we read its flexibility or elasticity. . . .One sees the weight of a
block of cast iron which sinks in the sand, the fluidity of water and the viscosity of
syrup.(62)
(Here, reading this passage, I recall in my own body the heavy feel of The Piano
when the crated and heavy piano is dragged across the beach, as Ada is struggling
to free herself underwater, or when her boots and skirt hem are sucked into the vis-
cous mud as she walks through the forest, the weight and volume of her layers of
wet skirts and petticoats a drag on my proprioception as well as my imagina-
tion.(63)) Continuing this description of sensual cross-modality, Merleau-Pontry
writes: "In the same way, I hear the hardness and unevenness of cobbles in the rat-
tle of a carriage, and we speak appropriately of a 'soft,' 'dull' or 'sharp' sound. . . .If,
then, taken as incomparable qualities, the 'data of the different senses' belong to so
many separate worlds, each one in its particular essence being a manner of modu-
lating the thing, they all communicate through their significant core"(64) That sig-
nificant core is, of course, the lived body: that synoptic field upon which experi-
ence is gathered and dispersed in a form of pre-logical meaning that nonetheless is
usually synthesized and thus "co-heres." "My body," the philosopher says, "is the
fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived
world, the general instrument of my 'comprehension.'"(65) Thus, while the senses
each provide discretely structured modes of access to the world, they are always al-
ready interactive and "transposable, at least within certain limits, onto each other's
domains"--and this because "they are the senses of one and the same subject, oper-
ating simultaneously in a single world."(66) We could say, then, that it is the lived
body (both a subject and object) that provides the (pre)logical premises, the
grounds, for the cinesthetic subject constituted at the movies as ambiguously lo-
cated both "here" off-screen and "there" on-screen as well as the premises or
grounds for various objective logics of cinematic vision and identification. Indeed,
it is to its grounding in the spectator that any theory of cinematic intelligibility
must return.

III.

Thus we are led back again to the question of the specific nature of the relation be-
tween the body and cinematic representation, between the literal and the figural,
between the "matter that means" and the "meaning that matters." For all my argu-
ment about the cross-modal communication of our senses and the synthetic quality
of the lived body which comprehends both our sensorium and language, it is phe-
nomenologically and logically evident that I do not "touch" the cinema nor does it
"touch" me in precisely the same way in which I touch or am touched by others
unmediated by cinema (or other perceptual technologies). However hard I may
hold my breath or grasp my theater seat, I don't have precisely the same roller-
coaster ride watching Speed that I would have if I were on that runaway bus or at
the amusement park. I also don't taste or smell or digest those luscious dishes in
Like Water for Chocolate (or, for that matter, in my cookbook) in the same way I
would if, unmediated by cinema, they were set on the table before me. Where,
then, does this leave us at the movies? Or as theorists of the cinema? Are we con-
demned to speak of our sensual engagement of the cinema as confounding--our
material responsiveness to films that matter understood only, as Dyer puts it, "in
some still unclear sense 'as if real'"? Dyer's "as if real" (particularly as he brackets
the phrase in quotation marks) not only begs the question, but keeps it undecidable.
And Dyer is not alone. If we return to those popular reviews that speak to our sen-
sual experience at the movies, his uncertainty and ambivalence are duplicated, al-
beit less reflectively. The Piano's "salt air can almost be tasted" one reviewer tells
us--at the same time he speaks of "immediate tactile shock." The reviewer of Toy
Story says the plastic Tyrannosaurus rex "is so glossy and tactile you feel as if you
could reach out and stroke its hard, shiny head"-- at the same time he says that "the
waxy sheen" of toy soldiers "strike Proustian chords of recognition," suggesting a
sense memory less reflectively thought than reexperienced. This ambivalence and
confusion about the literal and figural nature of our sensuous engagement with the
cinema is wonderfully condensed and exemplified in a review of Eat Drink Man
Woman (Ang Lee, 1994): "The presentation of food on-screen is, in all senses of
the word, delectable."(67) Here, not only is on-screen food "presented" rather than
"represented" but also it is experienced as delectable both literally in "all senses"
and figurally in all senses of "the word."

In The Rule of Metaphor, philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes: "If there is a point in
our experience where living expression states living existence, it is where our
movement up the entropic slope of language encounters the movement by which
we come back this side of the distinctions between actuality, action, production,
motion."(68) Clearly, these ambivalent articulations of the sensual experience of
the lived body in relation to cinematic representation mark just such a point. Thus,
at this point, I want to consider this ambivalence and confusion in the film experi-
ence between our sense of having a "real" sensual experience (the literal) and an
"as if real" sensual experience (the figural), and to argue that this ambivalence has
a precise phenomenological structure grounded in the non-hierarchical reciprocity
and chiasmatic reversibility of sense as, at once, a carnal matter and a conscious
meaning--both emerging simultaneously (if in various ratios) from that single sys-
tem of flesh and consciousness synthesized as the lived body. This is another way
of saying that the body and representation (cinematic representation, linguistic rep-
resentation, et. al.) do not simply--or only--oppose or reflect each other. Rather,
they more radically in-form each other in a fundamentally non-hierarchical and re-
versible relationship of commensurability and incommensurability that, in certain
circumstances, manifests itself as an oscillating, ambivalent, and often ambiguous
or "undecidable" experience.

What, then, might it mean to understand what is meant by "all senses of the word"?
Or to describe our sensual engagement in the cinema as "real" and "as if real" in
the same breath--and, more often than not, in the same sentence? Or for me to use
such "word play" in describing our literal bodies as "matter that means" and our
figural representations as "meaning that matters"? Highlighted in these articula-
tions--accomplished in and through language--is the very chiasmatic structure of
reversibility that exists between but also subtends the body and consciousness and
the body and representation. Whether perceived as an ambivalent oscillation be-
tween or an ambiguous conflation of the "real" and the "as if real" or the lived body
(matter that means) and representation (meaning as matter), this experience of the
fundamental reversibility of body and language is deeply felt--and often articulated
in these "undecidable" descriptions that nonetheless express quite clearly the am-
biguous and ambivalent point at which "our movement up the entropic slope of
language encounters the movement by which we come back this side of the distinc-
tions between actuality, action, production, motion." Thus, the "word play" at work
here in popular reviews, in Dyer's comments, and in my own phenomenological
descriptions is quite precise and empirically-based in the structure and sense of
embodied experience. Indeed, a phenomenological focus on the semantics and syn-
tactics of language parallel to our focus on the structures of embodied experience,
allow us to bring both together and, through foregrounding such "word play," to
understand the enormous capacity of language to not only say what we mean, but
also to reveal the very structure of our experience.

The chiasmatic relation in which the subjective "sense" of embodied experience

and the objective "sense" of representation are perceived as reversibly figure and
ground and thus both commensurable and incommensurable may, in fact, be espe-
cially heightened by the medium of cinema. This is because the cinema uses "lived
modes" of perceptual and sensory experience (seeing, movement, and hearing the
most dominant) as "sign-vehicles" of representation.(69) Using such "lived
modes," the cinema exists through ambivalence: it both represents experience
through dynamic presentation (the always verb-driven on-going present tense of
sensory perception that, through technology, constitutes and enables the film) and
presents experience as representation (the post-hoc fixity of already-perceived im-
ages that stand as equivalent to noun forms). Thus, although I have in this essay
emphasized the commensurability of body and representation because dominant
theory has so long insisted on their incommensurability, I do not deny either the
possibility or the experience of the latter--particularly in the film experience. In-
deed, Lesley Stern, in her wonderful "I Think, Sebastian, Therefore. . .I Somer-
sault: Film and the Uncanny," deals with this ambivalence from a perspective that
privileges incommensurability, and thus she describes "the uncanny" in--and of--
cinema as an experience of disjuncture that both the medium and certain of its fig-
urations generate between the lived body and consciousness and representation:

The cinema, while encouraging a certain bodily knowing, also, and in that very
process, opens up the recognition of a peculiar kind of non-knowing, a sort of bod-
ily aphasia, a gap which sometimes may register as a sense of dread in the pit of the
stomach, or in a soaring, euphoric sensation. . . .Out of these tensions are generated
a series of differences, gaps or discontinuities between knowing and feeling that
sometimes sharpen into a sense of the uncanny.(70)

Nonetheless, this sense of the uncanny is sufficiently occasional so as to be marked

as a figure against the more necessary and continuous ground of our existence in
which feeling and knowing are generally undifferentiated and generally lived as
commensurable--this because we are incorporated systemically as embodied and
conscious subjects who both have and make sense simultaneously. Thus it is an un-
differentiated experience of "sense" that grounds and conjoins body and language,
feeling and knowledge--their coincidence so ordinary in our experience that their
sudden divergence is marked as "uncanny" or, in the extreme, pathological. Em-
phasizing this conjunction of the lived body and representation, Alphonso Lingis
tells us: "My body as the inner sphere where representations are perceptible. . .and
my body as an image seen by rebound from the world, are inscribed the one in
other. . . .The density of the body is that of 'pre-things', not yet differentiated into
reality and illusion. . . . [The body] is a precinct of signifiers."(71) And, from the
other side of this reversibility and emphasizing language and representation as con-
joint with embodied being, Ricoeur argues that language not only designates "its
other" but also "itself"--and in so doing it is not only referential but also reflective,
radically bearing within itself "the knowledge of its being related to being." He tells
us: "This reflective language allows language to know that it is installed in being.
The usual relationship between language and its referent is reversed: language be-
comes aware of itself in the self-articulation of the being which it is about. Far
from locking language up inside itself, this reflective consciousness is the very
consciousness of its openness."(72) In that we are both embodied and conscious, in
that we both have and make sense, the literal and the figural in-form each other--as
they in-form us. The "matter that means" and the "meaning that matters" emerge in
a reciprocal and reversible structure that is the lived body having sense in the world
and making sense of the word. Thus the (figural) phrase "in all senses of the word"
resonates with ambiguity and 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 direction and focus 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 oscillate, may sometimes be perceived in uncanny discontinuity,
but most usually configure to make sense together--albeit in a quite specific way.
Although I cannot fully touch Ada's leg through her stocking or Stewart's sensitized
nude body on the screen of The Piano, 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 have a partially fulfilled sen-
sory 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
fully, wholly realized and are grasped in a sensual distribution that would be differ-
ently structured were I outside the theater, I nonetheless have a sensual experience
that is not reducible either to the satisfaction of merely two of my senses or to sen-
sual analogies and metaphors constructed only "after the fact" through the cogni-
tive 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 that, in fact, we experience films not merely as a reduction of our
sensual being but also an enhancement? 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.(73)
If I am engaged by what I see, my intentionality streams toward the world on-
screen, marking itself not merely in my conscious attention, but always also in my
bodily tension and comportment--that is, the sometimes flagrant, sometimes subtle,
but always dynamic arrangement of my material being. However, insofar as I can-
not literally touch, smell, or taste the particular figure on the screen that solicits my
sensual desire, my body's intentional arc, seeking a sensible object to fulfill this
sensual solicitation, will reverse its direction to locate its sensual grasp on some-
thing more literally accessible. That more literally accessible sensual object is my
own subjective lived body. Thus, "on the rebound" from the screen --and without a
reflective thought--I will reflexively and carnally turn toward my own carnal being
to touch myself touching, smell myself smelling, taste myself tasting, and, in sum,
sense my own sensuality.(74)Certainly, this feeling and the sense I have of sensing
is in some ways reduced in comparison with direct sensual experience--this be-
cause of my only partial sensual grasp of my original object of desire. But just as
certainly, in other ways, the sense I have of sensing is also enhanced in comparison
with much direct sensual experience--this because my partial sensual grasp of the
original object is completed in and through my own body where it is reflexively
"doubled" since I have become not only the toucher but also the touched. (This
sensual enhancement in which the body reflexively reflects upon its own sensual
experience without a thought emerges in the most intense of direct sensual en-
gagements in which we "feel ourselves feeling": a fantastic meal or incredible glass
of wine in which we reflectively taste ourselves tasting, great sex in which we lose
ourselves in feeling ourselves feel.)

Caught up without a thought (because our thoughts are "elsewhere") in this oscil-
lating and reversible sensual structure that both differentiates and connects the
sense of my literal body and the sense of the figurative bodies and objects I see on
the screen, my experience of my sensorium becomes heightened and intensified at
the same time that experience is perceived as diffuse. That is, insofar as, even with-
out a thought, my body senses itself in the film experience, the particular sensible
properties of the figural objects that sensually provoke me on the screen (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 their particular sensual properties, however, does not
diminish the sensual intensity of my engagement with them since they are what so-
licit me and are where my intentionality invests itself. Thus, insofar as I am sensu-
ally solicited, provoked by, and consciously located in figural objects that are else-
where (on the screen where my senses partially grasp them), I am not focused on
my own body's particularity either. "On the rebound" from my unfulfilled bodily
intentions to feel fully the figures on screen but still consciously intending toward
them and sensing them partially, my sense of my own literal and particular incor-
poration also will be diffuse and vague--even as it also may be quite intense. (The
form of "self-touching" I'm discussing here--a form that is consciously "other" di-
rected--is thus different in structure from forms of conscious self-touching in which
both one's body and one's consciousness are self-directed toward the same object;
in this latter kind of reflexivity, this doubled intention and attention toward oneself
often become so highly reflective that despite one's autoerotic goals, it can undo
carnal pleasure.(75))

Watching The Piano, for example, my skin's potentiality streams toward the screen
to rebound back on itself. It becomes literally and intensely sensitized to texture
and tactility, 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, while I have the capacity to fully --and literally--feel the texture
and weight of the silk of my blouse, my tactile intentions are located elsewhere in
the 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 move-
ment of an on-going streaming toward and turning back, my sense of touch--
"rebounding" from its partiality in relation to the screen to its completion in and by
my own body--is intensified. My skin becomes extremely sensitized. Indeed, this
reflexive and reflective exchange between and dispersion 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 over-
whelmingly general and intensely extensive mode of being.

It bears emphasizing again that the bodily reflexivity I am foregrounding here is

not necessarily 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 off-screen back into his or her seat in response to a
perceived discontinuity with the figural bodies and textures on-screen. 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 and broken--and, indeed, often is when the re-
flexive turn becomes too intense or unpleasurable. However, leaving the theater
because one has become literally sickened or covering one's eyes is hardly ever the
outcome of a thought. It is a reflexive, protective action that attests to the literal
body's reciprocal and reversible relation to the figures on the screen, to its sense of
actual investment in a "dense," albeit also diffuse, bodily experience that is carnally
as well as consciously meaningful--an experience, as Lingis notes, that is "not yet
differentiated into reality and illusion." I, for example, watching a climactic scene
in The Piano, could not bear to see--because I might too intensely feel it on both
my body and hers--Stewart chop off Ada's finger with an ax. And so, without a
thought to do so, I not only cringed but also covered my eyes with (again) fingers
that foresaw--in urgency rather than thought--the impending violation.

IV.

If, as I hope I've demonstrated here, the literal and the figural--the "matter that
means" and the "meaning that matters"--emerge in a reciprocal and reversible
structure of sense and representation grounded in the lived body, we must also con-
sider the figural side of the film experience whether we are speaking of film images
or the language of film reviewers. (Here we might recall Lingis's formulation: "My
body as the inner sphere where representations are perceptible. . .and my body as
an image seen by rebound from the world, are inscribed the one in other.") That is,
we need to return to the representational side of the irreducible correlation of body
and representation that constitutes "sense" to further understand how it is that lan-
guage and body pervade and in-form each other and how language and representa-
tion in the film experience share with the body a reversible and reflexive inten-
tional structure. Thus, having considered the "literal" and carnal aspects of the
"figural" phrase "in all senses of the word," we need also to consider the phrase's
reversal into the "figurality" of "literal" representation: that is, its transposition to
"in all words of the senses."

Throughout, I have insisted that the sensual language most people (and even a few
film theorists) use to describe their cinematic experience is neither necessarily nor
merely metaphoric. Furthermore, insofar as this sensual language bears some rela-
tion to metaphor, I've also pointed to the experiential and visceral bases of meta-
phor noted by Lakoff and Johnson and Cytowic. Here, however, I want to go fur-
ther and argue that "all words of the senses" used so often to describe the film ex-
perience are, to some degree, non-metaphoric in terms of what they claim--and
name. Traditional rhetoric describes metaphors as emerging from a hierarchical re-
lation between a primary and secondary context of language use. That is, a word is
understood as literal insofar as it is used in a normative (hence "naturalizing") con-
text and becomes understood as figural or metaphoric only when it is used in an
unusually extended sense and transferred beyond its normal context (indeed, the
word "metaphor" means "carried beyond").(76) If, however, we acknowledge that
is the lived body that provides a normative ground and context for experience and
that it operates, from the first, as a synaesthetic system in which the senses cooper-
ate and one sense is commutable to and understood as reciprocal and reversible
with the others, then we cannot argue that there is in the sensuality of the film ex-
perience the clear contextual hierarchy necessary to the structure and function of
metaphor. That is, once we understand that vision is in-formed by and informs our
other senses in a dynamic structure that is not necessarily or always sensually hier-
archical, it is no longer metaphorical to say that we "touch" a film or that we are
"touched" by it. "Touch" is no longer a metaphorical stretch in the film experience,
no longer "carried beyond" its normal context and its literal meaning. Indeed, we
could say that it is only in what phenomenologists call the "natural attitude" (ha-
bituated and thus naturalized) that our sensual descriptions of the movies "seem"
metaphorical. Our received knowledge is that film is primarily a "visual" medium;
ergo, its represented references and appeal to most of our other senses are under-
stood as figural rather than literal. By now, however, I hope that I have demon-
strated that such received knowledge is reductive and does not accurately describe
our actual sensory experience at the movies. Watching a film, all our senses are
mobilized, and often, depending upon the particular solicitations of the film, our
naturalized sensory hierarchy and habitual sensual economy are altered and rear-
ranged. In that experience, the literal and figural reciprocate and reverse them-
selves as "sense"--primary and secondary contexts confused, hierarchy and thus
metaphor undermined, if not completely undone.

In an important and highly relevant essay about the relationship between vision and
touch in Paul Cézanne's painting (about which Merleau-Ponty also wrote), art his-
torian Richard Shiff tells us: "To speak of reciprocity is to eliminate the possibility
of setting subjective (or deviant) metaphorical elements against objective (or nor-
mative) literal ones. Within the flux of reciprocity either everything becomes meta-
phorically figured or everything has the reality effect of the literal."(77) Evoking
previous discussion here of the nature of the "as if real" particularly as it seems to
be interrogated by the scare quotes that always accompany it, Shiff suggests that
within this flux of reciprocity "[o]ne could refer. . .to a figurative literalness"--a us-
age that "would eliminate the need for quotation marks, which do no more or less
than counter the normalizing of literality by adding a level of distance or figura-
tion." Shiff then asks: "What kind of representation or linguistic construction con-
flates the literal and figural in such a manner?"(78) The answer is not metaphor,
but catachresis, "sometimes called false and improper metaphor." Catachresis
"mediates and conflates the metaphoric and the literal" and is used "when no
proper, or literal, term is available."(79) Thus, borrowing a term from one context
to name something in another, we speak of the "arm" of a chair or the "head" of a
pin for want of anything else we might appropriately call it.(80) What is
also interesting in the context of the present discussion is that catachresis is differ-
entiated from "proper" metaphor insofar as it forces us to confront and name a
"gap" in our language, the "failure of proper words, and the need, the necessity to
supplement their deficiency and failure."(81) Thus, when we avail ourselves of
catachresis, are we not on Ricoeur's "entropic slope of language" and, insofar as the
catachretic term substitutes a body part (the "head" of a pin, the "arm" of a chair),
are we not at precisely the point where that "entropic slope of language encounters
the movement by which we come back this side of the distinction between actual-
ity, action, production, motion," that point "where living expression states living
existence"? This kind of "throwing up one's hands" and naming something insuffi-
ciently for want of a sufficient word involves "the forced extension of the meaning
of words" rather than linguistic play. In linguistic play, we voluntarily use one term
to substitute for another term that is literally sufficient so as to create a variety of
figural meanings. Thus, catachresis is not only differentiated from metaphor, but,
according to Ricoeur, it should also be excluded "from the field of figures."(82) In
this regard, he argues: "[C]atachresis is ultimately an extension of denomination
and, by virtue of that, a phenomenon of language. Metaphor, and above all, newly
invented metaphor, is a phenomenon of discourse."(83) Catachresis, then, is neither
metaphor nor figure. Rather, as Richard Shiff writes: "Catachresis accomplishes
precisely this: it applies a figurative sense as a literal one, while yet retaining the
look or feel of figurality."(84)

Just as the lived body in the film experience turns back reflexively on itself to
sense and make sense of the flesh on the screen (transforming what it senses
figurally into literal physicalized sense), so, too, do our linguistic descriptions of
that experience turn back on themselves reflexively to convey the sense of that ex-
perience as literally physicalized. For want of any more appropriate or sufficient
way to convey the meaning of and name the sensual experience of watching a film,
reviewers use the figural language of the senses literally--both as a way to "flesh
out" the image and to adequate reflective description with actual experience. And
yet, as Shiff points out, some sense of metaphor and figurality remains--and we are
caught up in a structure of sense-making that is experienced as both real and "as if"
real. Extremely relevant here, and echoing Dyer's "real" and "as if real" film expe-
rience, Ricoeur discusses the tension between metaphorical and literal meaning in
the context of Wittgenstein's distinction between "seeing" and "seeing as":

The "seeing as" is. . .half thought and half experience. . . ."seeing as" proffers the
missing link in the chain of explanation. "Seeing as" is the sensible aspect of poetic
language. . . .Now, a theory of fusion of sense and the sensible. . .appears to be in-
compatible 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. . . ."seeing as" desig-
nates the non-verbal mediation of the metaphorical statement. With this acknowl-
edgment, 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 .(85)

A phenomenology of the cinesthetic subject having and making sense of the mov-
ies reveals to us the chiasmatic function of the lived body--as both carnal and con-
scious, sensible and sentient--and how it is we can apprehend the sense of the
screen both figurally and literally. Correlatively, a a phenomenology of the expres-
sion of this lived "fusion" and differentiation in the film experience reveals to us--
in the catachretic articulations of language--the reversible and oscillating structure
of the lived body's chiasmatic experience of cinematic sense. To put it simply (if
densely): in the act of "making sense" of the movies, catachresis is to language as
the chiasmus is to the lived body. 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 ex-
perience but also reversibly, chiasmatically, "bridges" and "fills" it. As Ricoeur
suggests above, catachresis "designates the non-verbal mediation of the metaphori-
cal statement." Thus, Shiff writes of the relationship between vision and touch:
"The reciprocity or shifting produced by catachresis undermines any polarization
of subject and object, self and other, deviation and norm, touch and vision."(86)
Indeed, "touch and vision are caught in reciprocal figuration: it is touch that is fig-
uring vision, and vision that is figuring touch."(87)

In the film experience, 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. 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. Thus, the film expe-
rience--on both sides of the screen--mobilizes, differentiates, and yet 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 know what we see in the film experience. As
cinesthetic subjects, then, we possess an embodied intelligence that both 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 specific carnal origins and limits. This is what my fingers know at the movies.

Endnotes

(1) Godfrey Cheshire, "Film: Auteurist Elan," review of The

Piano, Raleigh (North Carolina) Spectator Magazine, 18 No-
vember 1993.

(2) Bob Straus, "The Piano strikes emotional chords," review of

The Piano, Los Angeles Daily News, 19 November 1993.

(3) Stuart Klawans, "Films," review of The Piano," The Nation,

257, no. 19 (6 December 1993), 704.
(4) Daniel Heman, "It's a bumpy ride, but this film's built for
Speed," review of Speed, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 10 June
1994.

(5) Henry Sheehan, "Speed Thrills," review of Speed, Orange

Country Register, 10 June 1994.

(6) Joe Leydon, "Breakneck Speed," review of Speed, Houston

Post, 10 June 1994.

(7) David Ansen, "Popcorn Deluxe," review of Speed, News-

week, 13 June 1994, 53.

(8) Anthony Lane, "Faster, Faster," review of Speed, The New

Yorker, 13 June 1994, 103.

(9) Stephen Hunter, "As cosmic battles go, Kombat is merely

mortal," review of Mortal Kombat, Baltimore Sun, 19 August
1995.

(10) Janet Weeks, "Is faux violence less violent?," review of

Mortal Kombat, Los Angeles Daily News, 19 August
1995.

(11) Stephanie Griest, "Mortal Kombat's Bloodless Coup," re-

view of Mortal Kombat, Washington Post, 28 August
1995.

(12) Owen Gleiberman, "Plastic Fantastic," review of Toy

Story, Entertainment Weekly, 14 November 1995, 74.

(13) Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 1969, 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 Somer-

sault: Film and the Uncanny," Para*doxa 3, no. 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 Cy-
berspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological
Embodiment, ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (Lon-
don: Sage Press, 1995), writes that the Payne Studies "pre-
sumed 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).

(17) Miriam Hansen, "'With Skin and Hair': Kracauer's Theory

of Film, Marseilles 1940," Crtiical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (1993),
458 (the translation is Hansen's). Hansen also goes on to note:
"Pointing to the example of 'archaic pornographic flicks,' Kra-
cauer comes close to describing the physical, tactile dimension
of film spectatorship in sexual terms (though not in terms of
gender); in striving for sensual, physiological stimulation, he
notes, such 'flicks' realize film's potential in general"
(458).

(18) Contemporary film theory as an academic designation

usually refers to the period beginning in the late 1960s and
early 1970s when semiotics, structuralism, and psychoanalysis
were regarded as methodological "antidotes" to a "soft" and
"unscientific" humanist film criticism and Marxist cultural cri-
tique and feminist theory as ideological "antidotes" to "bour-
geois" and "patriarchal" aestheticism. An extended critique of
the contemporary theoretical oversight (if not repression) of the
spectator's lived body as well as a discussion of the historical
and theoretical reasons for it can be found in my own The Ad-
dress of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

(19) See Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and

Excess," Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991), 2-13; "Cor-
porealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the 'Carnal
Density of Vision," in Fugitive Images: From Photography to
Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995), 3-41; and "The Visual and Carnal Pleasures of
Moving-Image Pornography: A Brief History" (unpublished
manuscript).

(20) Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1992).

(21) Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: The

University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
(22) Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cin-
ema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1999).

(23) Elena del Río, "The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Al-
legories of Technology in Atom Egoyan's Speaking Parts,"
camera obscura #37-38 (Summer 1996): 94-115.

(24) Williams, "Film Bodies," 5.

(25) Williams, "Film Bodies," 5.

(26) Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its

Spectator and the Avant-Garde," in Early Cinema: Space,
Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker
(London: BFI, 1990), 56-62. Gunning comments: "Clearly in
some sense recent spectacle cinema has reaffirmed its roots in
stimulus and carnival rides, in what might be called the Spiel-
berg-Lucas-Coppola cinema and effects" (61). It is worth not-
ing that this move from use of the term "cinema of attractions"
to designate a historically-specific mode--and moment--of film
production to its use as a more generic and trans-historical des-
ignation is seen as problematic. A thoughtful critique was of-
fered by Ben Brewster in "Periodization of the Early Cinema:
Some Problems," (paper presented at the annual meeting of the
Society for Cinema Studies, Dallas, TX, March 1996).

(27) Richard Dyer, "Action!," Sight and Sound, 4, no. 10 (Oc-

tober 1994), 7-10.

(28) Dyer, "Action!," 9.

(29) Dyer, "Action!," 8. (Emphasis mine.)

(30) Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary

studies of the creation of meaning in language, trans. Robert
Czerny, et. al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975),
discusses the status of the "as if" in relation to metaphor and
reference; see particularly 248-56. He finds inadequate both "an
interpretation that gives in to ontological naïveté in the evalua-
tion of metaphorical truth because it ignores the implicit 'is
not'" and its "inverse interpretation that, under the critical pres-
sure of the 'is not,' loses the 'is' by reducing it to the 'as if' of a
reflective judgment." As he says, the "legitimation of the con-
cept of metaphorical truth, which preserves the 'is not' with the
'is,' will proceed from the convergence of these two critiques"
(249; emphasis mine).
(31) Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 26-27.

(32) As Linda Williams, "The Visual and Carnal Pleasures of

Moving-Image Pornography," summarizes: "In psychoanalytic
film theory this opposition between an excessive and inarticu-
late body and sensation on the one hand and a mastering spirit
or thought on the other has been fundamental, giving rise to the
concept of an abstract 'visual pleasure' grounded in a voyeuris-
tic gaze whose pleasure presumes a distanced, decorporealized,
monocular eye mastering all it surveils but not physically im-
plicated in the objects of its vision" (n.p.). This "mastering"
gaze has meant the privileging of Renaissance perspective and
its Cartesian "carpentering" of the world as the explanatory
model for describing cinematic space. For more discussion of
this issue and alternative descriptive models, see my own
"Breadcrumbs in the Forest: Three Meditations on Being Lost
in Space" in this volume.

(33) Chiasm (sometimes chiasmus) is the term used by Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," trans. Carleton Dallery, in
The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1964), to indicate a "unique space
which separates and reunites, which sustains every cohesion"
(187). In general, it is used to name the ground of all presence
against which discrete figures of being emerge; as such, it is the
ground from which oppositions both emerge and fall away, in
which they become reversible. I am suggesting here that the
enworlded lived body functions as our own chiasmatic site in
the matter of meaning and the meaning of matter: that is, it sus-
tains discrete and oppositional figures (such as "language" and
"being") but also provides the synoptic ground for the suspen-
sion of both their discretion and their opposition. See also
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Intertwining--The Chiasm," in
The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alfonso
Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968),
130-55

(34) Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning," in Image-Music-

Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977),
52-68. Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience:
'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology," New German
Critique 40 (Winter 1987), writes of this connection of "third
meaning" and the lived body in relation to Walter Benjamin's
reflections on the "mimetic faculty." She writes: "For Benja-
min, the semiotic aspect of language encompasses both
Barthes's 'informational' and 'symbolic' levels of meaning. .
.while the mimetic aspect would correspond to the level of
physiognomic excess" (198).
(35) Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 255-56.

(36) For discussion of these politics, see, for example, Cynthia

Kaufman, "Colonialism, Purity, and Resistance in The Piano,"
Socialist Review 24, nos. 1-2 (1994), 251-55; Leonie Pihama,
"Are Films Dangerous? A Maori Woman's Perspective on The
Piano," Hecate 20, no. 2 (October 1994), 239-42; and Lynda
Dyson, "The return of the repressed? Whiteness, femininity and
colonialism in The Piano," Screen 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1995),
267-76.

(37) I am certainly not alone in responding this way. See, for

example, Sue Gillett's "Lips and fingers: Jane Campion's The
Piano," Screen 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1995), 277-87. Not only does
Gillett open and conclude her unusual essay using first person
voice to "inhabit" Ada's consciousness, but, as the critic, she
also tells us outright in a description I find resonant with my
own experience: "The Piano affected me very deeply. I was en-
tranced, moved, dazed. I held my breath. I was reluctant to re-
enter the everyday world after the film had finished. The Piano
shook, disturbed and inhabited me. I felt that my own dreams
had taken form, been revealed. . . .These were thick, heavy and
exhilarating feelings" (286).

(38) Certainly, some individual films like The Piano and those
films grouped by Williams as "body genres" foreground sen-
sual engagement in explicit image and sound content and narra-
tive focus as well as in a more backgrounded manner--that is,
not just in the content of their imagery or sound or narrative fo-
cus, but through the kinetic activity and sensory experience of
what I have, in The Address of the Eye, called the "film's body"
(see note 44). Other films may show us bodies in sensual en-
gagement, but do so in a non-sensual manner, thus distancing
us rather than soliciting a similar experience through the "atti-
tude" of their mediating vision. Nonetheless, I would maintain
that all films engage the sensemaking capacity of our bodies as
well as of our minds--albeit according to different ratios (or
"rationalities").

(39) Carol Jacobs, "Playing Jane Campion's Piano: Politically,"

Modern Language Notes 109, no. 5 (December 1994), 769-
70.

(40) The phrase "baffled vision" comes from Laura Marks,

"Haptic Visuality" (paper presented at the annual meeting of
the Society for Cinema Studies, Dallas, TX, March 1996).
(41) In this regard, I cannot resist citing a rather derisive com-
ment about Campion's next (and less critically successful) film,
The Portrait of a Lady (1996), that is explicit about the film-
maker's own symbolic "fixation" of what was once a dynamic
representation of touch. Entertainment Weekly, 7 February
1997, has a sidebar called "Fixation of the Week" with a subti-
tle, "Jane Campion's Hands-On Approach." The text reads:
"Starting with the title sequence, in which The Portrait of a
Lady" is emblazoned on a middle finger, the director gives us
60-odd shots of fingers. There's fly flicking, ivory tickling, skin
stroking, nose scratching, cigarette holding, and that all-too-
Piano moment when Nicole Kidman's Isabel Archer says, 'I
would have given my little finger.' Oh, Jane, please, not again!"
(53).

(42) Jacobs, "Playing Jane Campion's Piano: Politically,"

770.

(43) I owe the phrase "visual aroma" to Laura Marks's previ-

ously cited paper, "Haptic Visuality." It is telling, as well, that
the Black Narcissus of the film's title is the name of a per-
fume.

(44) del Río, "The Body as Foundation of the Screen,"

101.

(45) Although only discussed generally rather than elaborated

as a specific phenomenological structure of cinematic engage-
ment, Marks uses the term "ambient identification" in her
"Haptic Visuality" to suggest an identification with the image
that is not located in a single subject position or self-
displacements in narrative characters.

(46) The "film's body" is a term used very precisely in my The

Address of the Eye to designate the material existence of the
film as functionally embodied (and thus differentiated in exis-
tence from the filmmaker and spectator). The "film's body" is
not visible in the film except for its intentional agency and dia-
critical motion. It is not anthropomorphic, but it is also not re-
ducible to the cinematic apparatus (in the same way that we are
not reducible to our material physiognomy); it is discovered
and located only reflexively as a quasi-subjective and embod-
ied "eye" that has a discrete if ordinarily prepersonal and
anonymous existence.

(47) Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Es-
says in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990), 161.
(48) Elizabeth Grosz, "Merleau-Pontry and Irigaray in the
Flesh," Thesis Eleven (Special Issue: "Sense and Sensuousness:
Merleau-Ponty) No. 36 (1993), 46.

(49) Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1991), 190 (emphasis mine). In a discussion
of Barthes's multiple uses of the multiple bodies of texts, char-
acters, and readers, Moriarty draws this "gloss" from readings
of both S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text.

(50) Richard E. Cytowic, M.D. The Man Who Tasted Shapes: A

Bizarre Medical Mystery Offers Revolutionary Insights into
Emotions, Reasoning, and Consciousness (New York: Warner
Books, 1993), 52. For more recent works on synaesthesia, see
John E. Harrison and Simon Baron, eds., Synaesthesia: Classic
and Contemporary Readings (Cambridge: Blackwell Publish-
ers, 1997), and Kevin T. Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Sy-
naesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

(51) Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, 118.

(52) Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, 176. (Emphasis

mine.)

(53) Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New

York: Vintage Books, 1990), 291.

(54) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

(55) Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, 206.

(56) See Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, 95-96. See
also Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, 289.

(57) Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1999), 4.

(58) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,

trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962),
229.

(59) Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 229.

(60) Lisa Schwarzbaum, "Four-Star Feast," review of Big
Night, Entertainment Weekly, 20 September 1996, 49-50.

(61) Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 235.

(62) Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 229-

30.

(63) For discussion of the way in which clothing (and touch)

functions textually and symbolically in The Piano, see Stella
Bruzzi', "Tempestuous petticoats: costume and desire in The
Piano," Screen 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1995), 257-66.

(64) Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 230.

(65) Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 235.

(66) Grosz, "Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh," 56, n.

14. (Emphasis mine.)

(67) Leonard Maltin, review of Eat Drink Man Woman, Cine-

mania 96 (Microsoft Corporation, 1992-95).

(68) Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 309.

(69) Umberto Eco uses the term sign-vehicle as distinguished

from sign-content or meaning. This term seems to me more
useful than the term signifier in reminding us of the active and
various material nature of the "stuff" through which content and
meaning are actively conveyed See Umberto Eco, A Theory of
Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976): 52-
54.

(70) Stern, "I Think, Sebastian, Therefore. . .I Somersault: Film

and the Uncanny," 356-57.

(71) Alphonso Lingis, "Bodies that Touch Us," Thesis Eleven

(Special Issue: "Sense and Sensuousness: Merleau-Ponty) 36
(1993), 162.

(72) Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 304. (Second instance of

emphasis mine.)

(73) On relevant issues of mimesis, see Shaviro, The Cinematic

Body, 52-53; and Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A
Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Taussig, in particular, understands mimesis as a corporeal ac-
tivity that does not require the translation of conscious thought
to be enacted or understood. On this carnal empathy in relation
to bodies and objects on screen, see also Williams, "Film Bod-
ies."

(74) See Maurice-Merleau Ponty, "The Philosopher and His

Shadow," in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 166. Although he is dis-
cussing a more consciously reflexive experience of our lived
body's capacity to sensually sense itself than our experience at
the movies, the philosopher is still helpful to our understanding
of the way in which our sensual engagement can be "turned
back" on itself to both intensify sensual awareness--and, also,
to diffuse its specific content (I point related to our sense of the
film experience to which I will shortly return):

There is a relation of my body to itself which

makes it the vinculum of the self and things.
When my right hand touches my left, I am aware
of it as a "physical thing." But at the same mo-
ment, if I wish, an extraordinary event takes
place: here is my left hand as well starting to
perceive my right. . . .Thus I touch myself
touching; my body accomplishes "a sort of re-
flection." In it, through it, there is not just the
unidirectional relationship of the one who per-
ceives to what he perceives. The relationship is
reversed, the touched hand becomes the touch-
ing hand, and I am obliged to say that the sense
of touch is here diffused into the body--that
body is a "perceiving thing," a "subject-
object."

(75) Here we might think of states in which reflexively sensing

ourselves cry, we stop; how it is nearly impossible to tickle
oneself; how self-consciousness about our laughing results in it
becoming forced. It also helps us understand how sexual desire
is other-directed during masturbation and needs an object that
is not only oneself so as to avoid a reflexivity that is so doubled
as to cause conscious reflection on sexual desire itself.

(76) Hubert G. Alexander, The Language and Logic of Phi-

losophy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1967), 92.

(77) Richard Shiff, "Cézanne's physicality: the politics of

touch," in The Language of Art History, ed. Salim Kemal and
Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
150. (Emphasis mine.)

(78) Shiff, "Cézanne's physicality," 158.

(79) Shiff, "Cézanne's physicality," 150.

(80) J. David Sapir, "The Anatomy of Metaphor," in The Social

Use of Metaphor: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric, ed.
J. David Sapir and J. Christopher Crocker (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), elaborates:

There is a great variety of expressions often

used as examples of metaphor that are neverthe-
less hardly ever felt as tropes. One common set
uses body parts to represent the parts of material
objects: "leg of a table,'" "head of a pin," "eye of
a needle,"'"foot of a mountain," etc. Their repre-
sentation is that of a replacement metaphor; thus
for the "head of a pin" we have pin as the topic
and head as the discontinuous term. Unlike a
true metaphor, however, it lacks the continuous
term, although one might be provided by cir-
cumlocution: "spherical or blunt circular and
protruding end of a pin," where the supplied
phrase is simply an enumeration of the common
features linking X with head. In most discourses
the lack of a continuous term impedes us from
sensing the juxtaposition of separate domains
essential to a metaphor. We cannot easily an-
swer the question "if it is not the head (of a pin),
then what is it?" With a true metaphor we can. .
..William Empson prefers to call these expres-
sions "transfers" and Max Black, along with
most rhetoricians, considers them as types of
catachresis which Black defines as "the use of a
word in some new sense in order to remedy a
gap in the vocabulary" (8).

(81) Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 63.

(82) Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 53.

(83) Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 180.

(84) Shiff, "Cézanne's physicality," 158.

(85) Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 212-14.

(86) Shiff, "Cézanne's physicality," 150.

(87) Shiff, "Cézanne's physicality," 158.