and object, inner and outer, I and world.”49
Again, I want to emphasize that I am not speaking metaphorically of touching and being touched at and by the movies but “in some sense” quite literally of our capacity to feel the world we see and hear onscreen and of the cinema's capacity to “touch” and “move” us offscreen. As philosopher Elizabeth Grosz puts it: “Things solicit the flesh just as the flesh beckons to and as an object for things. Perception is the flesh's reversibility, the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own self-embrace.”50 Experiencing a movie, not ever merely “seeing” it, my lived body enacts this reversibility in perception and subverts the very notion of onscreen and offscreen as mutually exclusive sites or subject positions. Indeed, much of the “pleasure of the text” emerges from this carnal subversion of fixed subject positions, from the body as a “third” term that both exceeds and yet is within discrete representation; thus, as Barthes has shown us, “it would be wrong…to imagine a rigid distinction between the body inside and the body outside the text, because the subversive force of the body is partly in its capacity to function both figuratively and literally.”51 All the bodies in the film experience—those onscreen and offscreen (and possibly the screen itself)—are potentially subversive bodies. They have the capacity to function both figuratively and literally. They are pervasive and diffusely situated in the film experience. Yet these bodies are also materially circumscribed and can be specifically located, each arguably becoming the “grounding body” of sense and meaning since each exists in a dynamic figure-ground relation of reversibility with the others. Furthermore, these bodies also subvert their own fixity from within, commingling flesh and consciousness, reversing the human and technological sensorium, so that meaning, and where it is made, does not have a discrete origin in either spectators' bodies or cinematic representation but emerges in their conjunction.
We might name this subversive body in the film experience the cinesthetic subject—a neologism that derives not only from cinema but also from two scientific terms that designate particular structures and conditions of the human sensorium: synaesthesia and coenaesthesia. Both of these structures and conditions foreground the complexity and richness of the more general bodily experience that grounds our particular experience of cinema, and both also point to ways in which the cinema uses our dominant senses of vision and hearing to speak comprehensibly to our other senses.
In strict medical discourse, psychoneurologist Richard Cytowic notes that synaesthesia is defined as an “involuntary experience in which the stimulation of one sense cause[s] a perception in another.”52 Synaesthetes regularly, vividly, and automatically perceive sound as color or shapes as tastes. One woman explains, “I most often see sound as colors, with a certain sense of pressure on my skin.…I am seeing, but not with my eyes, if that makes sense,” and, as an example, she says that she experiences her husband's voice and laughter not metaphorically but literally as “a wonderful golden brown, with a flavor of crisp, buttery toast” (118). “Synaesthesia,” says Cytowic, “is the most immediate and direct kind of experience.…It is sensual and concrete, not some intellectualized concept pregnant with meaning. It emphasizes limbic processes [over higher cortical functions of the brain] which break through to consciousness. It's about feeling and being, something more immediate than analyzing what is happening and talking about it” (176). Nonetheless, this does not mean that synaesthetic experience as “more immediate than analysis” escapes culture—as evident in laughter perceived as the taste of “crisp, buttery toast.”
Clinical synaesthesia is uncommon in the general population although, to some degree, a less extreme experience of “cross-modal transfer” among our senses is common enough to have warranted the term's use and the condition's description in ordinary language. Artists have long been interested in synaesthesia (as were the Symbolists and Eisenstein); indeed, quite a number of them also have been synaesthetes (novelist Vladimir Nabokov is but one example). Furthermore, in common usage synaesthesia refers not only to an involuntary transfer of feeling among the senses but also to the volitional use of metaphors in which terms relating to one kind of sense impression are used to describe a sense impression of other kinds. This move from an involuntary and immediate exchange within the sensorium to a conscious and mediated exchange between the sensorium and language not only reminds us of the aforementioned “synaesthesia-loving Symbolist movement”53 but also points to a sensual economy of language dependent on the lived body as simultaneously the fundamental source of language, its primary sign producer, and its primary sign. Thus, in Metaphors We Live By linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson argue that figural language emerges and takes its meaning from our physical experience (however disciplined by culture),54and Cytowic, working with synaesthetes, concludes that “the coherence of metaphors…[is] rooted in concrete experience, which is what gives metaphors their meaning…. [M]etaphor is experiential and visceral” (206). This relation between the literal sensible body and metaphor as sensible figure is central to both our understanding of cinematic intelligibility and of the cinesthetic subject who is moved and touched by going to the movies—and it is an issue to which I will return.
The neologism of the film viewer as a “cinesthetic subject” also draws on another scientific term used to designate a bodily condition: coenaesthesia. Neither pathological nor rare, coenaesthesia names the potential and perception of one's whole sensorial being. Thus, the term is used to describe the general and open sensual condition of the child at birth. The term also refers to a certain prelogical and nonhierarchical unity of the sensorium that exists as the carnal foundation for the later hierarchical arrangement of the senses achieved through cultural immersion and practice. In this regard, Cytowic notes, it has been demonstrated that young children—not yet fully acculturated to a particularly disciplined organization of the sensorium—experience a greater “horizontalization” of the senses and consequently a greater capacity for cross-modal sensorial exchange than do adults (95-96).55 In sum, whereas synaesthesia refers to the exchange and translation between and among the senses, coenaesthesia refers to the way in which equally available senses become variously heightened and diminished, the power of history and culture regulating their boundaries as it arranges them into a normative hierarchy.
There are those instances, however, when we do not have to be clinically diagnosed synaesthetes or very young children to challenge those boundaries and transform those hierarchies. The undoing of regulatory borders and orders among the senses can occur in a variety of situations. For example, Elaine Scarry, pointing to our encounters with something extraordinarily beautiful, writes:
A visual event may reproduce itself in the realm of touch (as when the seen face incites an ache of longing in the hand)…. This crisscrossing of the senses may happen in any direction. Wittgenstein speaks not only about beautiful visual events prompting motions in the hand but…about heard music that later prompts a ghostly sub-anatomical event in his teeth and gums. So, too, an act of touch may reproduce itself as an acoustical event or even an abstract idea, the way whenever Augustine touches something smooth, he begins to think of music and God.56
In other instances involuntary cross-modal sensory exchange often becomes foregrounded in conscious experience through perception-altering substances such as drugs. As Merleau-Ponty notes in Phenomenology of Perception, “A subject under mescalin finds a piece of iron, strikes the window-sill with it and exclaims: ‘This is magic': the trees are growing greener. The barking of a dog is found to attract light in an indescribable way, and is re-echoed in the right foot” (229).
In a critique of objectivist science that well might be applied to objectivist reductions of the film experience, the philosopher goes on to say: “Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what are to see, hear and feel” (229). We could add that we are also unaware
