Carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture
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Carolyn Pedwell doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400326
Carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture Sobchack, V.; University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles; 2004, ISBN 0-520-24129-0 d15.95 (pbk)
Vivian Sobchack describes this engagingly written collection of essays that traverse the fields of film studies, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, literary studies, and feminist theory as ‘an ‘undisciplined’ book’ (Sobchack, 2004: 1). It is, nevertheless, a characteristically detailed and rigorously argued piece of work that is closely preoccupied with theorizing, and attending to, the corporeal experience of being in the world. This is explored in relation to a diverse range of objects that includes films, television and print media, as well as children’s toys and automata, celebrity culture and political protest. Informing all of these essays to a varying extent is Sobchack’s own experience of becoming a ‘techno-body’, and her introduction to ‘the assorted dimensions of prosthetic pleasure’ after her left leg was surgically amputated as treatment for cancer (p. 168). This foregrounding of the experience of her own ‘lived body’ is consistent with the analytical methods of phenomenological enquiry, the philosophical discipline around which Sobchack orients much of her work. However, it also allows Sobchack to approach questions of embodiment and representations of the body with a certain authority and a politicized investment. As she suggests in the essay, ‘A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor and Materiality’, she is particularly ‘well equipped’ to address the theoretical fetishism of the prosthetic metaphor and the way in which this metaphorical figure often serves to reproduce ‘a naturalized sense of the body’s previous and privileged ‘wholeness’’, rather than being effectively deployed to challenge unreflective ideas of corporeal unity (p. 210). Elsewhere, in an essay on recent cyber-theory, ‘Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to get out of the Century Alive’, her critique of ‘the delusional liberatory rhetoric of technophiles’ (p. 173) is written from the position of one who is ‘technologically enabled in the most intimate way’, but who is, ‘nonetheless, not a cyborg. Unlike Baudrillard, 136
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I have not forgotten the limitations and finitude and naked capacities of my flesh – nor, more important, do I desire to disavow or escape them’ (p. 172). Although far from being a technophobe, Sobchack argues that a critical emphasis upon the ‘lived body’ is crucial in order to provide an ethical grounding for questions of the intersection of technology and flesh, and so she concludes by wishing Jean Baudrillard ‘a little pain – maybe a lot – to bring him to his senses’, returning him to his body (p. 178). Different ethical questions are addressed in two essays that concentrate upon documentary genres. In the first of these, Sobchack discusses documentary film and television in relation to their particular capacity to represent death and violence. The essay out
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