Snippets of a Body Conference
bellow are the beginnings of a paper for the Body Conference later this month… this is the work in progress of a phenomenologically confused horror fan, there are blood and guts everywhere.
Key words: Fragment, phenomenology, sensation, cinema, body, wounds, violence.
Abstract
The fragment constitutes the modern body but it is detached and limiting to an objectification. While phenomenology speaks of a body that is and of the world, always sensing and experiencing it; a sensation that extends to the experience of the moving image. This paper posits a resolution of the two seemingly disparate theories by exploring the phenomenal expression and experience of the wounded body. It is only when the body is broken apart that the fragment meets the phenomenal and our cinesthetic visual experience embraces its bits. The spilt, spiting and erupting body image produces some sensation beyond the abject, evoking the fragmental iconography of the body image that belongs to Linda Williams’ ‘body criticism’ to produce a ‘phantom tactile’ of the experience eluding to a deep physical relation. By looking at violent representational bodies in film, from the perceptually real to the absurd grotesque, this exploration will exhibit how we may be touched and even imagine to touch the bodies of the fragmented in a cinematically correspondent sense.
Phenomenology commands an enworlded experience for physical sensation, while cinesthesia stretches the phenomenological through the screen and into unreachable disabled sensory experience. The former demands the wholeness of presence for sensation whilst the latter begins to accommodate a fractal sensorium, but neither can account for a sensitive communication in fragments. For …. The fragment constitutes a condition of modernity that imbedded in identity and psyche is communicated through its epochical artefacts. I contend that this fragmented fascination persists in contemporary arts and discourses, having evolved from a crisis of mind and body to a pastiche of the collage facilitated by technologies, that this trend for fragmenting extends to the physical representations and within the cinematic is exploited as its generational horror. The fragmented body, the body that falls apart, that breaks away, that melts or disjoints, is not only symptomatic of a prevailing politic of the flesh but in its screened and representational form postulates the potential for the marriage of the phenomenal and the fragmental, as the abjectionable broken body is able to provoke sense that the totalizing powers of phenomenology would ordinarily deny.
Phenomenology
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Sensation purports a sensational reversibility, in which to see is to been seen by others, to touch is to be able to be touched, etc. though this is ontological and principle as appose to anthropomorphic and interpersonal, it suggests a wholeness of the sensory system in the perceptual order. To be in the world requires a body and to be that body is to belong to the world. The flesh is the compulsory precommunicative form in which both subject and object develop through mutual interactions. Though this phenomenology acknowledges its contradictions and explores metaphors in the problematic relations and transitions in touch and being touched, there is a completeness demanded from the physical. In this phenomenology there is little room for sensory incapacity.
In her unpublished paper What my Fingers Knew, Vivian Sobchack refers to a carnal intelligibility of cinema that addresses contentious issues of carnal evocation in the viewing experience, much owed to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. For Sobchack meaning in the viewing experience is couched in the flesh, she states:
As ‘lived bodies’… our vision is always already fleshed out – and even at the movies it is ‘in-formed’ and given meaning by our sensory mean of access to the world; our capacity not only to hear, but also to touch, to smell to taste, and always to propreoceptively 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. (Sobchack)
This discourse contends to dispense with notions of primitivism and crudality in physical responses by locating it directly in the flesh, the flesh that is always learning and knowing in the world and that fleshy knowing that is carried into the cinematic experience, and this is its reversibility. In this essay she persists with the notion of ‘cinesthesia’ which goes in some way toward affording disabled sense in the phenomenological as she discusses the cinematic mechanics in The Piano that emulate the visually impaired sense of the main protagonist, producing a sensual experience based in sensory fracture.
Fragmented
The Fragment, as representation, is both literal and metaphoric in the Modernist fascination. It figures the broken, disordered body that testifies to a time of civil unrest often manipulating bodies of authority whilst other forms epitomize the Cartesian dualism and fragmented themes of identity that plagued the modern subject. Linda Nichlin announces this striking cultural correlation in her fragment analysis as a social, psychological and metaphysical fragmentation that embodies the modern experience as; ‘a loss of wholeness, a shattering of connection, a destruction or disintegration of permanent value that is so universally felt in the nineteenth century as to be often identified with modernity itself.’ (pg 24).
The fragment also refers to the objectification of the body through diagramming, much owed to the express of medicine in the enlightenment period. That which is corporeally concealed is accessible only through the medical diagrams that mapped its form and the nominal titles attributed to respective bits in objectivity. There is no sensation to the words or charts of the body, ‘one can never know the slumpy, trickily, runny thing itself, only our disembodied words and metaphors for it (lance Olsen).
Such specific themes and politics certainly belong to modernity, yet we see this fragmented aesthetic persist particularly in Contemporary Horror cinema. The fragment as trope of modernity is determined by a socio-political climate and it shares this impetus with Horror as a form, as the genre meme’s out to produce narratives and depictions that gravitate toward whatever group, type or condition is subject of fear or to persecution at a given time. As a symptom of circumstance both are metaphor and belong to prevalent paranoia’s and politic. Yet there is a suggestive materiality in the dimensionality of film that may salvage the fragmented body image from its melancholic state as by looking specifically at the lo-tech effects of the splatter genre and the tactility of its gore sensation may be applied to its fragments.
Robert Rodriguez’s recent pastiche of ‘Grindhouse’ traditions, Planet Terror, frolics in its own guts and gore. A festival of carnage, it sees limbs decapitated, flesh tear, mucus strewn, bile trickle, pustules pop, faces melt, cavities open and meat explode all in an orgy of infection that populates contemporary horror. Deviating from the hyper real effects of much contemporary cinema, Planet Terror presents a nostalgically prosthetic bloodbath, the materiality of which registers in the photography. This is the privilege, a complicated one, of the indexical image. The tactility of the materials captured on film are recognizable as worldly substance though the gore and its materiality bare only a representational relationship to the guts and internal matter that they denote. The sensational correspondence that occurs in the viewing experience relies conversely on our ability to perceive beyond the actual. Steven Prince discusses the perceptual regimes of the post-photographic image in True Lies and Perceptual Realism positing that in a medium that increasingly utilizes illusions of computer generated imagery that emulate the physics and textures of the real world, it is increasingly difficult to determine the ontology of the image. Furthermore it is entirely possible to create plausible fictional objects and beings that without real referent are perceptible. Referring to the processes of practice and reception in the design if non-existent dinosaurs in Jurassic Park he states:
“Spectatorship builds correspondences between selected features of the cinematic display and viewers real world visual and social experience. These include iconic and noniconic visual and social cues which are structured into cinematic images in ways that facilitate comprehension and invite interpretation and evaluation by the viewers based on the salience of represented cues or patterned deviation from them”. (Prince:32)
It is in this same way that sensational viewing may occur in the violent fragments of physical horror. The medical practices of mapping the body segregate it from its materiality and deprived it of its flesh, yet familiarize us, through the visual, with an objective knowing of our own inaccessible interior. This disembodied acquaintance fragments the subject of its inquiry but supplies resonant palpability to the intangibility of the interior, of which one may only ever be liminally aware. These medical proofs serve as the pro-filmic referent for the sensational experience that the cinematic body yields.
The comprehension of such bloody landscape calls for a deeply carnal identification. The fleshy scraps of Planet Terror’s zombie bodies and victims populating the frame have, unto themselves, a tactile integrity, enough to engage the senses. Vivian Sobchack’s cinematic phenomenology posits a corporal dialectic in which ‘the lived body both provides and enacts a commutative reversibility between subjective feeling and objective knowledge, between the senses and their sense’ (Sobchack). Constructing a dialogue in which the body may respond physically to the imagined flesh of an image through taughtological experience and more primitive visceral impulse. So the broken bits of the body present no interpretive challenge to such a mutually informed sensorium. The agency of the organic will be stimulated by the bits and pieces of physical evidence provided by the interior if only on a liminal level, allowing through sense the sense making of the impossible interior. Furthermore, for Philip Brophy this phenomenology extends beyond the fleshy material. His discourse motions to a body that can respond to ‘non-physical’ experiences. Conceiving of “how we might use our bodies to understand, how we might identify body shapes, surfaces, forms presences as indicators of physicality of a ‘phantom-tactile’ relation to the world” (Brophy).
Whilst Planet Terror is about the body breaking out john Carpenter’s The Thing, is more about the body breaking away. In The Thing, we see the literal fragment as segregated limbs achieve a mutated autonomy. This separation is accepted and perceived as gestalt. As a head slips away from its body and undergoes metamorphosis becoming arachnid and crawling around, an abdomen splits and grows jaws before closing over the limbs that fell into it; these bodies have not only come apart but significantly altered their functionality. Developing recognizable but contextually foreign traits, one is able to reach a perceptual closer. Oppositionally the comprehension of the broken body is reliant on a cognitive close in the gaps of physical forms that defy body logic.
