Sensation machine: Film, phenomenology and the training of the senses

Abstract

This paper aims to extend recent work in feminist phenomenological film theory by contextualizing its turn to the tactile within the longer history of the philosophy of the senses and their training. Following the work of Vivian Sobchack, a recent generation of feminist film theorists have drawn on phenomenological understandings of embodiment to argue that while film criticism has focused, almost exclusively, on the visible, intelligible qualities of cinema, our experience of cinema is shaped by our bodily sensations. As Sobchack (2004, 63) argues, ‘we do not see any movie only through our eyes’; rather, we ‘feel films with our whole bodily being’. This turn from the dominant sense of sight to that of touch represents a shift in critical perspective, too, as this paper will show. Whereas sight is examined for its privileged relation to knowledge, and thus understood as highly cultivated, touch is often celebrated for its potential as a site of resistance. Unlike sight, touch is often evoked as a spontaneous reaction that destabilizes assumptions about the way we make sense. This paper aims to contribute to this recent work in feminist film theory, by demonstrating that touch, too, is part of the long history of the training of the senses – in which cinema itself plays a substantial role. Rather than a critique of the relationship between sight and touch, I argue, this work represents the continuation and reconfiguration of a long history in which sight and touch have been privileged amongst the senses and conceptualized interdependently.

Notes

 1. The Vision Machine begins with an account of the development of new visual technologies in the mid-nineteenth century, which produced corollary transformations in perception, and concludes with a speculation on the apparently imminent emergence of artificial vision and the automation of perception. The ‘vision machine’ here would be ‘a machine that would be capable not only of recognising the contours of shapes, but also of completely interpreting the visual field’ (Virilio 1994, 59).

 2. Martine Beugnet's Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (2007) examines the recent generation of French directors whose work explores these aspects of cinema, including Philippe Grandrieux, Catherine Breillat, and Thierry Jousse.

 3. Key texts in this field include Laura Mark's Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002), Martine Beugnet's Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (2007), Patricia MacCormack's Cinesexuality (2008), and Jennifer Barker's The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (2009).

 4. As Marks (2002, 29) reiterates in her subsequent study Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, our sensory responses to cinema are the product of ‘a complex amalgam of perceptive and expressive parts – including technical, stylistic, and thematic elements – coming together to present a specific and tactile mode of being in the world’.

 5. The privileging of the visual amongst the senses has recently been the subject of a more widespread philosophical critique, as Martin Jay notes in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1994). A more recent critical and historical reconsideration of the visual can be found in Jacques Rancière's The Future of the Image (2007) and The Emancipated Spectator (2010).

 6. Daston and Galison's (2007) magisterial study of the emergence of scientific objectivity in the mid-nineteenth century provides a detailed account of this cultural transformation, and its subsequent effects. Daston and Galison argue that the development of new technologies for the mechanical production of images revolutionalized scientific practice in the late-nineteenth century, moving this from a reliance on the trained judgement and discernment of the scientist to a new reliance on mechanically-generated data sets examined using statistically-derived formula.

 7. Susan Stryker (2001) has written insightfully about these texts, and demonstrated their importance for queer subjects of the mid-twentieth century, in Queer Pulp. Stryker's central concern is to show that while pulp fiction texts of this period did represent the lives and communities of queer subjects in the disapproving, pathologizing language of dominant medical, psychoanalytic, or juridical discourses of the time, they also provided a space for potential queer self-representation and self-identification. Precisely because they were well-known to treat sleazy and marginal topics, and because they were cheap and mass produced enough to circulate widely, these texts provided an available space for queer representation that allowed for multiple points of identification and non-dominant forms of interpretation. The means by which they did this, and the means by which they found their audiences, was through the development of a distinctive visual aesthetic in their cover art. This queer pulp aesthetic, like that developed by Meyer, remains instantly and widely recognizable.

 8. Elizabeth Harvey (2002) recovers this history in the introduction to her edited collection, Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture. Harvey argues that, despite the widespread perception amongst contemporary philosophers and theorists that ours is a ‘resolutely ocularcentric culture’, touch in fact has an equally long history in which it has vied for position as privileged amongst the senses: ‘Recurrent in the history of Western culture’, she contends, ‘is this sometimes submerged but nevertheless enduring idea that tactility is the “root” of the other senses and, further, that touch is somehow synonymous with life itself’ (5).

 9. For Crary (1990, 124), while the contemporary period has remained fascinated with tangibility, this is ‘a tangibility that has been transformed into a purely visual experience’. Deleuze (2003, 146) makes a similar but more cautious point in his study of Bacon, arguing that ‘the more the hand is… subordinated, the more vision develops an “ideal” optical space and tends to capture its forms through an optical code. But this optical space, at least in the beginning, still hold references to the manual with which it is thus interconnected… This loose subordination of the hand to the eye can give way, in turn, to the true insubordination of the hand’.

10. See also Vila (1998) and Barker-Benfield (1992).