and confusion of our sense at the movies of having both a “real” (or literal) sensual experience and an “as-if-real” (or figural) sensual experience. I also want to argue that this ambivalence has a precise phenomenological structure that is grounded in the nonhierarchical reciprocity and figure-ground reversibility of “having sense” and “making sense”—meaning thus constituted as both a carnal matter and a conscious meaning that emerge simultaneously (if in various ratios) from the single system of flesh and consciousness that is the lived body. This is another way of saying that the body and language (whether film language or “natural” language) do not simply oppose or reflect each other. Rather, they more radically in-form each other in a fundamentally nonhierarchical and reversible relationship that, in certain circumstances, manifests itself as a vacillating, ambivalent, often ambiguously undifferentiated, and thus “unnameable” or “undecidable” experience.63
What, then, might it mean to understand what is meant by “all senses of the word”? Or to describe our sensual engagement in the cinema as “real” and “as if real” in the same breath—and, more often than not, in the same sentence? Or for me to use such “wordplay” in describing our literal bodies as “matter that means” and our figural representations as “meaning that matters”? Highlighted in these articulations—accomplished in and through language—is the very chiasmatic structure of reversibility that exists between but also subtends the body and consciousness and the body and representation. Whether perceived as an ambivalent vacillation between or an ambiguous conflation of the real and the as-if real or the lived body (matter that means) and representation (meaning as matter), this experience of the fundamental reversibility of body and language is deeply felt—and often articulated—in these unnameable and undecidable descriptions that nonetheless express quite clearly the ambiguous and ambivalent point at which “our movement up the entropic slope of language encounters the movement by which we come back this side of the distinctions between actuality, action, production, motion.” Thus, the wordplay at work in popular reviews, in Dyer's comments, and in my own phenomenological descriptions is quite precise and empirically based in the structure and sense of embodied experience itself. Indeed, it helps us not only to understand the enormous capacity of language to say what we mean but also to reveal the very structure of our meaningful experience.
The chiasmatic relation in which the subjective sense of embodied experience and the objective sense of representation are perceived as reversibly figure and ground and thus both commensurable and incommensurable may, in fact, be especially heightened and privileged by the medium of cinema. This is because the cinema uses “lived modes” of perceptual and sensory experience (seeing, movement, and hearing the most dominant) as “sign-vehicles” of representation.64 Using such lived modes, the cinema exists as an ambivalent and ambiguous sensual and perceptual structure. That is, the cinema simultaneously represents experience through dynamic presentation (the always verb-driven and ongoing present tense of sensory perception that, through technology, constitutes and enables the film for us and for itself)—and it also presents experience as representation (the post hoc fixity of already-perceived and now expressed images that stand as equivalent to noun forms). In this regard, although I have in this chapter emphasized the commensurability of body and representation because dominant theory has so long insisted on their incommensurability, I certainly do not deny the possibility of the latter—particularly in the film experience. Indeed, coming from an alternative perspective, Lesley Stern deals with this incommensurability by privileging the uncanny in—and of—cinema as an experience of disjuncture between the spectator's lived body and cinematic representation:
The cinema, while encouraging a certain bodily knowing, also, and in that very process, opens up the recognition of a peculiar kind of non-knowing, a sort of bodily aphasia, a gap which sometimes may register as a sense of dread in the pit of the stomach, or in a soaring, euphoric sensation…. Out of these tensions are generated a series of differences, gaps or discontinuities between knowing and feeling that sometimes sharpen into a sense of the uncanny. 65
Nonetheless, this sense of the uncanny is sufficiently occasional to be marked as a figure against the more necessary and continuous ground of our existence in which knowing and feeling are generally undifferentiated and generally lived as commensurable—this because we are incorporated Systemically as embodied and conscious subjects who both “have” and “make” sense simultaneously. Indeed, it is an undifferentiated experience of sense that grounds and conjoins body and language, feeling and knowledge—their coincidence so ordinary in our experience that their sudden divergence is marked as frustrating or uncanny or, in the extreme, pathological. Emphasizing this intimate conjunction of the lived body and representation, Alphonso Lingis tells us: “My body as the inner sphere where representations are perceptible…and my body as an image seen by rebound from the world, are inscribed the one in [the] other…. The density of the body is that of ‘pre-things,' not yet differentiated into reality and illusion…. [The body] is a precinct of signifiers.”66 And Ricoeur, emphasizing the intimate conjunction of representation and the lived body, tells us that language not only designates “its other” but also “itself”—and in so doing, it is not only referential but also radically reflective, bearing within itself “the knowledge of its being related to being.” Ricoeur continues: “This reflective language allows language to know that it is installed in being. The usual relationship between language and its referent is reversed: language becomes aware of itself in the self-articulation of the being which it is about. Far from locking language up inside itself, this reflective consciousness is the very consciousness of its openness” (304). In that we are both embodied and conscious, in that we both have and make sense, the literal and the figural inform each other—as they inform us. The “matter that means” and the “meaning that matters” emerge in a reciprocal and reversible figure-ground relation that is the lived body having a sense of the world and making sense in the word. Thus the (figural) phrase “in all senses of the word” resonates with ambiguity and, in its “knowledge of its being related to being,” it reflexively suggests its own reversal to the (literal) phrase “in all words of the senses”—and this without a loss of either reference or reflection, even as the focus and direction of the emphasis changes.
Our embodied experience of the movies, then, is an experience of seeing, hearing, touching, moving, tasting, smelling in which our sense of the literal and the figural may sometimes vacillate, may sometimes be perceived in uncanny discontinuity, but most usually configures to make undifferentiated sense and meaning together—albeit in a quite specific way. Although watching The Piano, I cannot fully touch Ada's leg through her stocking, although the precise smells of fresh laundry and the warmth of the linens that I see in Pretty Baby (Louis Malle, 1978) remain in some way vague to me, although I cannot taste the exact flavors of the pork noodles I see in loving close-up in Tampopo, I still do have a partially fulfilled sensory experience of these things that make them both intelligible to and meaningful for me. Thus, even if the intentional objects of my experience at the movies are not wholly realized by me and are grasped in a sensual distribution that would be differently structured were I outside the theater, I nonetheless do have a real sensual experience that is not reducible either to the satisfaction of merely two of my senses or to sensual analogies and metaphors constructed only “after the fact” through the cognitive operations of conscious thought. The pressing question is, of course, what kind of “different” sensual fulfillment do we experience at the movies? That is, what is the structure of such fulfillment, and how does it occur so that, in fact, we experience films not merely as a reduction of our sensual being but also as an enhancement of it?
First of all, in the theater (as elsewhere) my lived body sits in readiness as both a sensual and sense-making potentiality. Focused on the screen, my “postural schema” or intentional comportment takes its shape in mimetic sympathy with (or shrinking recoil from) what I see and hear.67 If I am engaged by what I see, my intentionality streams toward the world onscreen, marking itself not merely in my conscious attention but always also in my bodily tension: the sometimes
