Tortured Spectators: Massacred and Mucosal

Abstract

In his work on cinema, Felix Guattari critiques the operations of control which dam desire and through repressive processes of signification slaughter the potentialities of the flesh, what he calls a massacre of the body. Mechanisms of state, family and capitalism atrophy the pleasures found in images and limit our openness to the becomings cinema elicits. From a Spinozan perspective, we can read spectatorship as both liberatory and ethical to the extent that we are open to the affects of the image and affect it through our constitution and expression of its meanings. This openness requires rethinking signification, beginning with significations of the image and our spectatorial bodies and selves. When the scaffold that demands distance from the image is dismantled, bodies and images coalesce into a single metamorphic plane of desire and cinematic experience as event. From a feminist perspective we can use Luce Irigaray’s concept of mucous to think the shift from scaffold to inflection. Mucosal spectatorship theorises the image and spectator as viscous and transforming connective and fluid tissue, both more and less than dialectic configuration.