Carnal Thoughts. Vivian SobchackЧитать онлайн книгу.
in a dense, albeit also diffuse, experience that is carnally as well as consciously meaningful—an experience, as Lingis notes, that is “not yet differentiated into reality and illusion.” Watching The Piano, for example, because I might feel it too intensely on both my body and hers (both bodies, to a degree, “mine”), I could not literally bear to see Stewart figurally chop off Ada's finger with an ax. I therefore not only cringed in my seat but also covered my eyes with fingers that again foresaw—in urgency rather than thought—the impending violation.
IV
Let us 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 the other.” Both body and language or figure pervade and inform each other in a reversible and reflexive intentional structure. Thus, having considered the literal and carnal aspects of the figural phrase “in all senses of the word” (figural because we “know” words don't really have senses), we need also to consider the figural and representational aspects of the phrase in the literality of its reversal to “in all words of the senses” (literal because we “know” words do, indeed, describe the senses).
Indeed, my argument here has emphasized that the sensual language most people (and even a few film theorists) use to describe their cinematic experience is not necessarily or solely metaphoric—hence my earlier mention of Lakoff and Johnson and Cytowic on the corporeal bases of metaphor.70 Here, however, I want to go further and suggest that “all words of the senses” used so often to describe the film experience are not metaphoric. First of all, traditional rhetoric describes metaphors as emerging from a hierarchical relation between a primary and secondary context of language use: a word is understood as literal insofar as it is used in a normatively habituated context. The same word 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”).71 If, however, we acknowledge that it 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 cooperate and one sense is commutable to and understood as reciprocal and reversible with the others, then we cannot argue that—in the undifferentiated sensuality of the film experience—there exists the clear contextual hierarchy necessary to the structure and function of metaphor. That is, once we understand that vision is informed by and informs our other senses in a dynamic structure that is not necessarily or always sensually hierarchical, 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 afterthought that our sensual descriptions of the movies seem metaphorical. Our received knowledge tells us that film is primarily a visual and aural medium; it thus “naturally” follows that its appeal to those senses other than sight and hearing are understood as figural rather than literal. By now, however, I hope to have shown that such habituated knowledge is reductive and does not accurately describe our actual sensory experience at the movies. When we watch a film, all our senses are mobilized, and often, depending on the particular solicitations of a given film or filmic moment, our naturalized sensory hierarchy and habitual sensual economy are altered and rearranged. In that experience the literal and figural reciprocate and reverse themselves as “sense”—primary and secondary contexts confused, hierarchy and thus the grounds of metaphor undermined if not completely undone.
Writing about the relationship between vision and touch in painting, art historian Richard Shiff tells us: “To speak of reciprocity is to eliminate the possibility of setting subjective (or deviant) metaphorical elements against objective (or normative) literal ones. Within the flux of reciprocity either everything becomes metaphorically figured or everything has the reality effect of the literal. ”72 Evoking previous discussion here of the nature of the “as if real,” particularly as its “not realness” is challenged by the scare quotes that always surround it, Shiff suggests that within this flux of reciprocity “[o]ne could refer…to a figurative literalness”—a usage 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 figuration.” Shiff then asks, “What kind of representation or linguistic construction conflates the literal and figural in such a manner?” (158). The answer is not metaphor but catachresis, “sometimes called false and improper metaphor.” Catachresis, Shiff tells us, “mediates and conflates the metaphoric and the literal” and is used “when no proper, or literal, term is available” (150). 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.73 Catachresis is differentiated from proper metaphor insofar as it forces us to confront and name a gap in language or, as Ricoeur puts it, the “failure of proper words, and the need, the necessity to supplement their deficiency and failure” (63). Thus, when we avail ourselves of catachresis, we are on Ricoeur's “entropic slope of language”—seeking some adequate linguistic expression of a real experience. Furthermore, insofar as the catachretic term substitutes a body part (the “head” of a pin, the “arm” of a chair), we are emphatically at the point where our movement up the “entropic slope of language encounters the movement by which we come back this side of the distinction between actuality, action, production, motion,” that point “where living expression states living existence.” This kind of (dare I say) “throwing up one's hands” and naming something inadequately for want of a sufficient word involves “the forced extension of the meaning of words” rather than the linguistic play that is metaphor. In linguistic play we voluntarily use one term to substitute for another to create a variety of figural meanings. Thus, for Ricoeur, because its use is not voluntary, catachresis is not only a false metaphor but also should be excluded “from the field of figures” (53). Indeed, Ricoeur sees catachresis as “ultimately an extension of denomination” and thus “a phenomenon of language” rather than—as is metaphor—a phenomenon of “discourse” (180). Catachresis, then, functions neither as metaphor nor as figure. Rather, as Shiff writes, “Catachresis accomplishes precisely this: it applies a figurative sense as a literal one, while yet retaining the look or feel of figurality” (158). This is also precisely what cinema accomplishes through its modes of representation—and it is also precisely how the spectator's lived body reciprocates so as to make matter meaningful and meaning matter. Thus, as Shiff tells us, “The reciprocity or shifting produced by catachresis undermines any polarization of subject and object, self and other, deviation and norm, touch and vision” (150). Indeed, “touch and vision are caught in reciprocal figuration: it is touch that is figuring vision, and vision that is figuring touch” (158).
Reciprocating the figurally literal representations of bodies and worldly things in the cinema, the spectator's lived body in the film experience engages in a form of sensual catachresis. That is, it fills in the gap in its sensual grasp of the figural world onscreen by turning back on itself to reciprocally (albeit not sufficiently) “flesh it out” into literal physicalized sense. It is this same reciprocal relationship between the figural and literal that emerges also in our linguistic descriptions of the film experience. That is, trying to describe this complex reciprocity of body and representation, our phrases turn back on themselves to convey the figural sense of that experience as literally physicalized. For want of any more appropriate or sufficient way to name and convey the structure and meaning of the sensual experience of watching a film, reviewers reflexively turn back on language and apply its sensual figurations literally—both as a way to “flesh out” the image and as a way to adequate reflective description with the sense of actual cinematic experience. It is not particularly strange, then, that in both our film experience and our linguistic attempts to describe it, some ambivalent sense of metaphor and figurality remains—and we are caught up in a catachretic structure of sense-making that, because of its only partial sensual fulfillments but enhanced and intensified reciprocities in filling its own insufficiency, is experienced and described as both real and “as if” real.
Ricoeur discusses this tension between metaphorical and literal meaning