Abstract
This chapter is dedicated to the concept of embodiment as well as to the status of spectatorship and of the spectator’s body after the phenomenological turn in film theory, seen both as an attempt to break free from the normativity and the disembodiment of the apparatus and as a more bodily form of film epistemology. The chapter establishes embodiment as an element of indeterminacy in film experience rather than as a determinate site of inscription of contingency, discursivity or ideology. This indeterminacy is contrasted with the body as an object of disciplinary regulation in the central part of the chapter and, in its conclusion, the tensions between embodiment and the heteronomy of subjectivity are discussed through an examination of the trope of teleportation in David Cronenberg’s film The Fly.
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Notes
- 1.
“The Phenomenological Turn in Film Studies,” Queen Mary University of London, 23 May 2013.
- 2.
On this last opposition, see Jacques Rancière , Dissensus : On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 137.
- 3.
Richard Rushton, “Deleuzian Spectatorship ,” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 46.
- 4.
See Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 162–163. Incidentally, Marks’s work can, among other things, also be taken as a coherent development of the Debordian critique of the spectacle, which, for him, entailed a substitution of touch by sight. Also see Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 2005), 18–19.
- 5.
“Without an act of viewing and a subject who knows itself reflexively as the locus and origin of viewing as an act, there could no film and no film experience .” Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 54. Sobchack also returns to the Metzian trope of turning back toward the spectator as a form of self-reflexive apprehension: “A description of the film experience as an experience of signification and communication calls for a reflexive turn away from the film as’object’ and toward the act of viewing and its existential implication of a body-subject: the viewer.” Ibid., 51.
- 6.
Marks, The Skin of the Film, 138.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Jan Campbell, Film and Cinema Spectatorship : Melodrama and Mimesis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 53.
- 9.
Marks, The Skin of the Film, 131.
- 10.
Dominique Chateau, “A Philosophical Approach to Film Form,” in Subjectivity: Filmic Representation and the Spectator ’s Experience , ed. Dominique Chateau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 165.
- 11.
Ibid., 163.
- 12.
See Jenny Chamarette, “Embodied Worlds and Situated Bodies: Feminism, Phenomenology, Film Theory ,” Signs 40, no. 2 (2015): 289.
- 13.
James Penney, “The Failure of Spectatorship ,” Communication Theory 17 (2007): 57–58.
- 14.
Judith Butler , Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 11.
- 15.
Judith Butler , Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), ix.
- 16.
Ibid., 34.
- 17.
Ibid., 66.
- 18.
Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou , Dispossession : The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 14.
- 19.
“La réduction phénoménologique a été une façon radicale de suspendre l’approche naturel du monde posé comme objet—la lutte radicale contre l’abstraction que l’objet résume.” Emmanuel Levinas, En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: J. Vrin, 1994), 122. Translation mine.
- 20.
Ibid., 114.
- 21.
Ibid., 122.
- 22.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Le Visible et l’Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 305.
- 23.
Ibid., 312.
- 24.
Thomas J. Csordas (ed.), Embodiment and Experience : The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi.
- 25.
To be sure, apparatus theory already realized that the boundary between the spectator ’s embodied fantasy and the discourses and ideological structures that regulate film experience was a permeable one. It was precisely upon this presupposition that the idea of the spectator ’s passivity and the ideological nature of cinematic perception were elaborated in the first place. The contingency and heteronomy of the spectator ’s encounter with film, however, were then subjected to a further turn that reduced the theoretical dimension of film experience only to that of meta-language and meta-politics.
- 26.
Marks, The Skin of the Film, 131.
- 27.
Slavoj Žižek , “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses,” Lacan.com (2006), http://www.lacan.com/zizfour.htm, accessed 14 July 2018.
- 28.
Slavoj Žižek , “Homo Sacer as the Object of the Discourse of the University,” Lacan.com (2003), http://www.lacan.com/hsacer.htm, accessed 14 July 2018.
- 29.
“Ce qui est propre aux sociétés modernes, ce n’est pas qu’elles aient voué le sexe à rester dans l’ombre, c’est qu’elles se soient vouées à en parler toujours, en le faisant valoir comme le secret.” Michel Foucault , Histoire de la Sexualité: La Volonté de Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 42.
- 30.
Rancière defines partage du sensible as a system of perceptible features that manifest at once the existence of a common space, the partitions into which it is articulated, and how bodies and subjects are assigned to them; this distribution determines in turn the ways in which what is common can be shared and who actually takes part in the sharing. See Jacques Rancière , The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 12. In Dissensus , Rancière further notes that the expression implies a tension between a shared common and its distribution. Jacques Rancière , Dissensus : On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 36.
- 31.
Jacques Rancière , Le Destin des Images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), 128.
- 32.
See Jennifer Friedlander , Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship , Subversion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 9–10, 63.
- 33.
Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 91.
- 34.
Marks , The Skin of the Film, 144.
- 35.
Leo Bersani , Is the Rectum a Grave? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 70.
- 36.
Marks, The Skin of the Film, 213.
- 37.
See Merleau-Ponty , Le Visible et l’Invisible, 304.
- 38.
See Marks, The Skin of the Film, xii.
- 39.
Ibid., 63 and following.
- 40.
If the relation between theory and practice functions as an exchange, then theory develops most fruitfully where it is initially found and already present elaborated in and by films themselves.” Ibid., 13.
- 41.
On the contrary, for Beugnet, “a cinema of the senses always hovers at the edge of pleasure and abjection—between the appeal of a sensuous perception and exploration of the reality portrayed, and the close encounter with the abject, that is, the immersion in the anxiety of the self when individuality dissolves into the undifferentiated and formless .” Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 32.
- 42.
Butler, Gender Trouble, 123.
- 43.
Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation , 8.
- 44.
Ibid., 61.
- 45.
Ibid., 88.
- 46.
David Cronenberg, The Fly (20th Century Fox, 1987), 35Â mm. I am referring in particular to the pre-2005 theatrical release.
- 47.
J. R. Minkel, “Beam Me Up Scotty?: Q&A About Quantum Teleportation with H. Jeff Kimble,” Scientific American, 14 February 2004, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-teleporting-is-nothing-like-star-trek/, accessed 14 July 2018.
- 48.
Joel N. Shurkin, “Quantum Teleportation in Space Explored as Message Encryption Solution,” Scientific American, 15 March 2013, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-teleportation-in-space-explored-as-message-encryption-solution/, accessed 14 July 2018.
- 49.
Minkel, “Beam Me Up Scotty?”
- 50.
See Slavoj Žižek , The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7.
- 51.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 144.
- 52.
David Prior, Fear of The Flesh: The Making of The Fly (20th Century Fox, 2005), Video.
- 53.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2.
- 54.
We can read this as an unintended reference to the anecdote according to which, since Aristotle had said that flies have four legs, everybody was compelled to affirm that against all evidence. “The affirmation by the wise Aristotle that the common domestic fly has four legs, an arithmetical reduction that subsequent authors continued to repeat for centuries thereafter, when even children knew from their cruel experiments that the fly has six legs, for since the time of Aristotle, they have been pulling them off and voluptuously counting one, two, three, four, five, six, but these very same children, when they grew up and came to read the Greek sage, said amongst themselves, The fly has four legs, such is the influence of learned authority, to such an extent is truth undermined by certain lessons we are always being taught.” José Saramago, The Story of the Siege of Lisbon (New York: Harcourt, 1996), 44.
- 55.
The center to be deconstructed is the very supplement that threatens the body: the voice that grounds self-identity is in itself an alien parasite. See Žižek , Indivisible Remainder, 100.
- 56.
Slavoj Žižek , The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2008), 64.
- 57.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 42. Also see Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unconscious Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 22.
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Comanducci, C. (2018). The Indeterminacy of Embodiment. In: Spectatorship and Film Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_6
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