informs our other senses in a dynamic structure that is not necessarily or always sensually hierarchical, it is no longer metaphorical to say that we “touch” a film or that we are “touched” by it. Touch is no longer a metaphorical stretch in the film experience, no longer carried beyond its normal context and its literal meaning. Indeed, we could say that it is only in afterthought that our sensual descriptions of the movies seem metaphorical. Our received knowledge tells us that film is primarily a visual and aural medium; it thus “naturally” follows that its appeal to those senses other than sight and hearing are understood as figural rather than literal. By now, however, I hope to have shown that such habituated knowledge is reductive and does not accurately describe our actual sensory experience at the movies. When we watch a film, all our senses are mobilized, and often, depending on the particular solicitations of a given film or filmic moment, our naturalized sensory hierarchy and habitual sensual economy are altered and rearranged. In that experience the literal and figural reciprocate and reverse themselves as “sense”—primary and secondary contexts confused, hierarchy and thus the grounds of metaphor undermined if not completely undone.
Writing about the relationship between vision and touch in painting, art historian Richard Shiff tells us: “To speak of reciprocity is to eliminate the possibility of setting subjective (or deviant) metaphorical elements against objective (or normative) literal ones. Within the flux of reciprocity either everything becomes metaphorically figured or everything has the reality effect of the literal. ”72 Evoking previous discussion here of the nature of the “as if real,” particularly as its “not realness” is challenged by the scare quotes that always surround it, Shiff suggests that within this flux of reciprocity “[o]ne could refer…to a figurative literalness”—a usage that “would eliminate the need for quotation marks, which do no more or less than counter the normalizing of literality by adding a level of distance or figuration.” Shiff then asks, “What kind of representation or linguistic construction conflates the literal and figural in such a manner?” (158). The answer is not metaphor but catachresis, “sometimes called false and improper metaphor.” Catachresis, Shiff tells us, “mediates and conflates the metaphoric and the literal” and is used “when no proper, or literal, term is available” (150). Thus, borrowing a term from one context to name something in another, we speak of the “arm” of a chair or the “head” of a pin for want of anything else we might appropriately call it.73 Catachresis is differentiated from proper metaphor insofar as it forces us to confront and name a gap in language or, as Ricoeur puts it, the “failure of proper words, and the need, the necessity to supplement their deficiency and failure” (63). Thus, when we avail ourselves of catachresis, we are on Ricoeur's “entropic slope of language”—seeking some adequate linguistic expression of a real experience. Furthermore, insofar as the catachretic term substitutes a body part (the “head” of a pin, the “arm” of a chair), we are emphatically at the point where our movement up the “entropic slope of language encounters the movement by which we come back this side of the distinction between actuality, action, production, motion,” that point “where living expression states living existence.” This kind of (dare I say) “throwing up one's hands” and naming something inadequately for want of a sufficient word involves “the forced extension of the meaning of words” rather than the linguistic play that is metaphor. In linguistic play we voluntarily use one term to substitute for another to create a variety of figural meanings. Thus, for Ricoeur, because its use is not voluntary, catachresis is not only a false metaphor but also should be excluded “from the field of figures” (53). Indeed, Ricoeur sees catachresis as “ultimately an extension of denomination” and thus “a phenomenon of language” rather than—as is metaphor—a phenomenon of “discourse” (180). Catachresis, then, functions neither as metaphor nor as figure. Rather, as Shiff writes, “Catachresis accomplishes precisely this: it applies a figurative sense as a literal one, while yet retaining the look or feel of figurality” (158). This is also precisely what cinema accomplishes through its modes of representation—and it is also precisely how the spectator's lived body reciprocates so as to make matter meaningful and meaning matter. Thus, as Shiff tells us, “The reciprocity or shifting produced by catachresis undermines any polarization of subject and object, self and other, deviation and norm, touch and vision” (150). Indeed, “touch and vision are caught in reciprocal figuration: it is touch that is figuring vision, and vision that is figuring touch” (158).
Reciprocating the figurally literal representations of bodies and worldly things in the cinema, the spectator's lived body in the film experience engages in a form of sensual catachresis. That is, it fills in the gap in its sensual grasp of the figural world onscreen by turning back on itself to reciprocally (albeit not sufficiently) “flesh it out” into literal physicalized sense. It is this same reciprocal relationship between the figural and literal that emerges also in our linguistic descriptions of the film experience. That is, trying to describe this complex reciprocity of body and representation, our phrases turn back on themselves to convey the figural sense of that experience as literally physicalized. For want of any more appropriate or sufficient way to name and convey the structure and meaning of the sensual experience of watching a film, reviewers reflexively turn back on language and apply its sensual figurations literally—both as a way to “flesh out” the image and as a way to adequate reflective description with the sense of actual cinematic experience. It is not particularly strange, then, that in both our film experience and our linguistic attempts to describe it, some ambivalent sense of metaphor and figurality remains—and we are caught up in a catachretic structure of sense-making that, because of its only partial sensual fulfillments but enhanced and intensified reciprocities in filling its own insufficiency, is experienced and described as both real and “as if” real.
Ricoeur discusses this tension between metaphorical and literal meaning in relation to Wittgenstein's distinction between “seeing” and “seeing as,” a formulation that parallels Dyer's “real” and “as if real”:
The “seeing as” is…half thought and half experience…. “[S]eeing as” proffers the missing link in the chain of explanation. “Seeing as” is the sensible aspect of poetic language…. Now, a theory of fusion of sense and the sensible…appears to be incompatible with the…tension between metaphorical and literal meaning. On the other hand, once it is re-interpreted on the basis of “seeing as,” the theory of fusion is perfectly compatible with interaction and tension theory. “Seeing X as Y” encompasses “X is not Y.”…The borders of meaning are transgressed but not abolished…. “[S]eeing as” designates the non-verbal mediation of the metaphorical statement. With this acknowledgment, semantics finds its frontier; and, in so doing, it accomplishes its task…. If semantics meets its limit here, a phenomenology of imagination…could perhaps take over. (212-14)
A phenomenology of the cinesthetic subject having and making sense of the movies reveals to us the chiasmatic function of the lived body as both carnal and conscious, sensible and sentient—and how it is we can apprehend the sense of the screen both figurally and literally. That is, the lived body transparently provides the primary chiasmatic premises that connect and unite the senses as both carnally and consciously meaningful and also allow for their secondary differentiated meanings, one carnal and the other conscious. Correlatively, a phenomenology of the expression of this lived “fusion” and differentiation in the film experience reveals to us—through the catachretic articulations of language—the reversible and vacillating structure of the lived body's both unified and differentiated experience of cinematic sense. Ambivalently subtending fusion and difference, ambivalent in its structure and seemingly ambiguous in meaning, catachresis not only points to the “gap” between the figures of language and literal lived-body experience but also reversibly, chiasmatically, “bridges” and “fills” it. As Ricoeur writes above, catachresis “designates the non-verbal mediation of the metaphorical statement.” In the film experience the nonverbal mediation of catachresis is achieved literally by the spectator's lived body in sensual relation to the film's sensible figuration. Indeed, as Ricoeur concludes: “Half thought, half experience, ‘seeing as' is the intuitive relationship that holds sense and image together.”74
