Through a Deleuzean reading, we have been gradually approaching the way in which the moving image can be seen to constitute a very different experiential potential as compared to, for example, textual or photographic representation. We have also seen how experiencing the moving image can be seen as ontologically different due to the inherent nature of mostly non-linguistic emergence and the movement itself that is what constitutes the medium. One could say that the moving image has a specific agentic quality of its own, for it does not wait for the audiences’ discretion, as it comes to
grasp attention in so much as eyes are kept open and hands from muffling the aural projections ears are so keen to collect (certainly a reciprocal experience is of ‘acceptance’ as well), or:
“It is this capacity, this power, and not the simple logical possibility, that cinema claims to give us in communicating the shock. It is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement-image, you can’t escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you” (Deleuze 1989: 156)
Now, having briefly considered various ways in which the moving image can be conceptually typologized into relational expressive elements, we need to further construct the experiential qualities of the moving image itself. It is therefore appropriate to continue our investigation into what constitutes such a ‘grasping’ or ‘forceful’ experience when the moving image engages the viewer, or as Kozinets and Belk (2006) note, “Videographies can provide audiences with a vicarious sense of experience that deepens understanding and fosters empathy” (p. 340; see also Belk 1998). In further considering the workings of such an experience, we can be informed by scholars from the fields of cinema theory and communications studies who draw diversely from phenomenology, semiotics, linguistics and even brain research, as their underpinnings – and, in doing, often come to adopt forms of Deleuzean thinking. Specifically, the works of Laura Marks (2000), Jennifer Barker (2009) and Torben Grodal (2009), among others, have amounted to extremely interesting and useful accounts of how the moving image relates to the viewer, specifically from the perspective of how the moving image becomes embodied in the act of experiencing it. It must be also noted that such considerations were not an sich unfamiliar to Deleuze, for “‘Give me a body then’ […] It is through the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought” (Deleuze 1989: 189). However, while starting from the ontology of the subconscious, it was specifically the realm of creative thought, where Deleuze chose to direct most of his attention. And it may be remembered here that he constructed the subconscious intensities of sense as always being neutral (see 2.4.1), as it is conscious thought that assigns qualitative differences in their unfolding as events, for:
“there is nothing remarkable or exceptional in life, that the oddest adventures are easily explained, and everything is made up of ordinary things. It is just that we have to admit that, because the linkages of the terms is the series are naturally weak, they are constantly upset and do not appear in order […] It is men who upset the regularity of series, the continuity of the universe” (Deleuze 1989: 15)
But what about these emergent bodies then – the body of the viewer and the
‘body’ of the moving image itself? This question has, as we will later see, profound implications for the consideration of differences between the moving image and the textual expressions, and also, the uneasy nature of
‘representation’ with a relational epistemology in the production and
expression of academic vidoegraphies in CCT research. For the aforementioned authors, who have come to emphasize these questions, the point of departure is to move beyond the modernist view of the viewing experience, as limited to the passively receptive or merely cognitive, towards experiential relations that become embodied through all senses. Following these scholars drawing from various disciplines, the moving image becomes a question of 1) a reciprocal experience, 2) the screen as a ‘skin’, a surface experienced as a haptic, tactile and visceral experience, and 4) the experience as a mimetic and action-inducing exchange.
The experience thus becomes something that does not wait for the viewers attention but grasps it in its own right, as “we meaningfully (and feeling fully) move across and through immediate and mediated attentional spaces […]
Contrary to myth, video is not a passive medium; we do act and move in using the technology and in response to its images and sounds” (Lemke 2007: 40).
For Deleuze, the primary focus was on the infinite relations in the creative processes of the mind, whereas the authors here take the question of the feeling body head on. Yet, this is by no means a work of re-establishing the Cartesian dualism – rather it simply denotes different emphases on the emergence of the body and mind in their spatiotemporal becoming, or as Marks (2000), who uses a Deleuzean foundation to draw from theories of embodied spectatorship, phenomenology and feminist criticism, puts it:
“Deleuze's characterization of time-image cinema describes avant-garde works that, in their suspicion of representation, force the viewer to draw upon his or her subjective resources in order to complete the image” (p. 42).
Therefore, “If one understands film viewing as an exchange between two bodies – that of the viewer and that of the film – then the characterization of the film viewer as passive, vicarious, or projective must be replaced with a model of a viewer who participates in the production of the cinematic experience” (p. 149-150). And thus, this analysis takes the form of operating between two poles, the mind and the bodies (both the one of the viewer and the one of the moving image), but one where both are also inseparably intertwined in an emergent relationship.
Marks (2000) expands her perspective in her construction of mimetic embodiment of the cinematographic experience. For her, mimesis can be described as an indexical relationship, where a story becomes “sensuously remade in the body of the listener” (p. 138), and, contra text, the very physicality of the moving image has the potential to bring about a heightened and more bodily mimetic experience. Importantly, the underpinning of the concept can be seen to be anti-modernist (or nonpositivistic), as it denotes “a form of yielding to one’s environment, rather than dominating it, and thus offers a radical alternative to the controlling distance from the environment so well served by vision” (p. 140). Thus the moving image becomes evermore
a body of agency in its machinic autonomous movement, and the viewer’s experiential embodiment becomes a holistic anti-Cartesian undertaking, involving the subconscious, reflex-like bodily alignments as well as memories.
In order for such mimesis to make sense, the surface of the moving image also needs conceptualization as something more profound than a two dimensional screen of electronic flashing light. Indeed, the idea of an
‘objective’ form of distanced speciation must be overcome by allocating the audiovisual moving image a ‘body’ of its own, where the:
“cinematographic encounter takes place not only between my body and the film’s body, but my sensorium and the film’s sensorium. We bring our own personal and cultural organization of the senses to cinema, and cinema brings a particular organization of the senses to us, the filmmaker’s own sensorium refracted through the […] apparatus” (p. 153)
This embodiment becomes ‘forced’ upon the viewer by the means of “haptic visuality” (p. 162) that can become related by various types of aesthetical dispositions of the moving image (see 2.7.3) via its autonomy, and enters a reciprocal relationship that invokes memories of touch and affect.
In addition, drawing primarily from the phenomenological works of Merleau-Ponty on perception and cinematography, Barker (2009; see also Joy and Sherry 2003) further constructs the film as a profoundly embodied tactile experience, as “Love, desire, loss, nostalgia, and joy are perceived and expressed in fundamentally tactile ways, not only by characters but also, and even more profoundly, by the film and viewer” (p. 1). Thus the experience of perceiving the moving image becomes elevated from classical notions, in to a reciprocal event where the tactile experience between the viewer and the moving image takes precedence as textures, spatial orientations, comportments, rhythms and vitality. These emerge as shared qualities due to the nature of cinema as a multi-sensory medium involving seeing, hearing as well as physical and reflective movement. The tactile embodiment is also, to a degree, precognitive and emergent, shaped and enabled through intimate
“engagement with and orientation toward others (things, bodies, objects, subjects) in the world” (p. 22). This emerges as a connection between our own bodies as viewers, and the body of the moving image in a complex relationship that is marked as often by tension as by alignment, by repulsion as often as by attraction.
Adopting views from both Jennifer Deger, who termed the participatory viewing experience as a “transformative space of betweenness” (Deger 2007, cited in Barker 2009: 12), and Anne Rutherford, who conceived the viewing experience as a “movement or displacement of self” where the experience “is not conceived as a physical movement across a physical space: no empirical measurement can discern it” (Rutherford 2002, cited in Barker 2009: 13), the point here is to combine both the spatiotemporal body and the cognitive mind in nonreductive emerging relations. Similar notions can also be found in
Ranciére (2009), whose work on audiences focuses on theatre, where the relationship is equally active and reciprocal, and the distance between the viewer and the performance is the nature of all communicative acts. For him, contemplation about the nature of the distance presents a type of paradox, as
“is it not precisely the desire to abolish the distance that creates it” (p. 12).
The viewing experience thus becomes a dislocated and emergent state of being, where ”We are embedded in a constantly mutual experience with the film, so that the cinematic experience is the experience of being both ‘in’ our bodies and ‘in’ the liminal space created by that contact” (p. 19). As we have seen, following these philosophical positions, there is always the ‘third’ in experiencing the moving image, a subliminal nonreductive space constructed between the viewer and the racing surface of audiovisual imagery, or as Cubitt (1991) notes addressing video directly:
“The homologue to this in the video apparatus is the constant becoming of the viewer, addressed in the fading as a becoming. In the dialectic of identity, as the on-screen image fades, it enables the viewer to become” (p. 143)
Such positions resonate both with the aforementioned nonempiricality of Rutherford and with a Deleuzean philosophy of infinite relations and constant becoming in nonlinear temporality, and continues the present work of constructing a distinction between the reading of textual accounts and video experiencing. And accordingly, it lays further groundwork for constructing an epistemology of spatiotemporality (through practice theory and non-representational theory [see 2.9.1 and 2.9.2]), and providing a foundation for the level of analysis at which video can be assessed in a holistic context of videographic research in CCT.