To Have Done With the Perspective

of the (Biological) Body: Gaspar Noes

Enter the Void, Somatic Film Theory
and the Biocinematic Imaginary1
Greg Hainge

Since the advent of the classical model of cinema and, indeed,

arguably before this time and after it also, cinema has enjoyed what we
might term a triangulated existence. This is to say that there are in the
cinema, it would seem, a trio of factors to consider from the analytic
point of view. There is the film in itself as a construct, the film as a
diegetic universe in which the characters within that space act in
a pseudo-autonomous manner, divorced from any interference coming
from beyond the fourth wall, and, lastly, there is the spectator who lies
in that space beyond and who, most theories would have it (except
perhaps for formalist approaches), is vital for an understanding
of precisely how cinema works. Indeed, many different film theories
have been concerned not so much with the formal construction of
film as a technological medium nor with in-depth studies of the plot
machinations or internal psychology of protagonists within the diegetic
universe, but, rather, with the way in which the spectator is enfolded
into the cinematic text as a necessary part of its ontology. The most
extreme example of this can perhaps be found in the cinematic theory
of suture, itself the result of a reading of Lacan by Jacques-Alain Miller
(19778) which was subsequently imported into film theory. Devised
as a means to broach the seemingly impassable divide between film
and spectator created by montage in prior modes of psychoanalytic
film analysis which argued that the spectators primary locus of
Somatechnics 2.2 (2012): 305324
DOI: 10.3366/soma.2012.0063
# Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/soma

Somatechnics
identification was with the point of view of the look of the camera and
not with the look of the characters within the films diegetic universe,
suture describes the means by which the spectator is enfolded or
sutured into the filmic text as the element which is able to broach the
breaks created by montage, stitching together the logic of a shot
reverse-shot sequence, for instance, through an implicit understanding
of the logic of continuity editing. In this scenario, of course, the
spectator is not so much a concrete individual as a subject position that
may or may not be filled by a spectator in the empirical deployment of
the filmic text. Nonetheless, this phantasmic spectator occupies a
privileged position in the triangular relation outlined and not only in
psychoanalytic theories of the cinema, for this has arguably been the
case for the vast majority of all film theory, whether psychoanalytic,
cognitive or somatic.
In this paper, I will examine the ways in which this relationship
between spectator and screen has been figured in a body of recent
scholarship on the cinema that both corporealises the cinematic event
by focusing on the body of the spectator and the body of the film
whilst, simultaneously, decorporealising it by seeing in the relation
between spectator and screen the means to produce a new kind of
properly cinematic thought, a new form of philosophy that can only be
born out of this relation. To conceptualise film in this way is to think of
it as an event in the Deleuzean sense of the term. As Foucault explains,
after Deleuze:
An event is neither substance, nor accident, nor quality, nor process;
events are not corporeal. And yet, an event is certainly not immaterial; it
takes effect, becomes effect, always on the level of materiality. . . . Let us
say that the philosophy of event should advance in the direction, at first
sight paradoxical, of an incorporeal materialism.2 (1982: 231)

Whilst I do not wish to suggest that this in and of itself is a

wrong-footed move, quite the contrary, I will nonetheless suggest
that the way in which this relationship is put into operation in both
the somatic film scholarship of critics such as Sobchack and Shaviro
and, secondarily, in Deleuzes own work on the cinema can be
somewhat problematic (albeit it for very different, almost diametrically
opposed, reasons). Having suggested why this is so, I will propose,
through a reading of Gaspar Noes film Enter the Void (2009), that
the pitfalls of an incorporeal materialist theory of film might be
avoided if we reconfigure the kind of body that arises in the inbetween of spectator and screen as an anatomical as opposed to
biological body.

306

Gaspar Noes Enter the Void

1. Soma, Sobchack, Shaviro

According to Vivian Sobchack, Until quite recently [. . .] contemporary film theory has generally ignored or elided both cinemas
sensual address and the viewers corporeal-material being (2004:
556).3 For Sobchack, the prevalent linguistic and psychoanalytic
understandings of the cinema as grounded in conventional codes and
cognitive patterning and grounded on absence, lack, and illusion
(2004: 59) are simply insufficient when charged with the responsibility
of making sense of the cinematic event because we are embodied,
corporeal beings. For Sobchack, then, the spectator occupies a
privileged position not because of the work of synthesis or intellectual
decoding through which the films distinct elements are able to
coalesce into a whole, but, rather, because a film is only ever made
sense of through the multiple senses of an embodied self (2004:
59). For Sobchack, it is not only important but vital that film
scholars take account of their embodied selves in their reactions
to films because, for her, the film experience is meaningful not to
the side of our bodies but because of our bodies (2004: 60; emphasis
in original). Leading by example, she therefore exhorts cinema
critics to:
alter the binary and bifurcated structures of the film experience
suggested by previous formulations and, instead, posit the film viewers
lived body as a carnal third term that grounds and mediates
experience and language, subjective vision and objective imageboth
differentiating and unifying them in reversible (or chiasmatic) processes
of perception and expression (2004: 60).

In order to explore these chiasmic processes,4 in her article

What My Fingers Knew (in 2004), Sobchack reflects on her somatic
experience watching The Piano, and particularly its opening shots.
Countering Carol Jacobs comments on the films opening shot
which describes it as an almost entirely abstract and therefore
undecipherable image, nearly no view at all an almost blindness,
with distance so minimal between eye and object that what we see is
an unrecognizable blur (Jacobs 1994: 76970), Sobchack suggests
that the scene is in fact not meaningful only if restricted to a visual
regime, for somatically she understood what she was looking at. She
writes:
Despite my almost blindness, the unrecognizable blur, and resistance
of the image to my eyes, my fingers knew what I was looking at and this

307

Somatechnics
before the objective reverse shot that followed to put those fingers in their
proper place [. . .]. What I was seeing was, in fact, from the beginning, not
an unrecognizable image, however blurred and indeterminate in my
vision, however much my eyes could not make it out. (2004: 63;
emphasis in original)

Rejecting the linguistic, psychoanalytic and particularly ocularcentric

bias of most film criticism, Sobchacks critical methodology takes us
away from the normative hierarchy and strict division of the senses that
has accreted over time both universally (through technological
conditioning) and individually (as the coenaesthetic infant learns to
adopt these socialised patterns), and it is thus unsurprising that she
invokes the concept of synaesthesia to account for the operations
that she attempts to describe (2004: 679). More than this, however,
the chiasmic processes that she finds to exist between spectator
and screen lead her to posit the cinematic spectator not only
as synaesthetic, but as a 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 (2004: 67). Confusing more than merely
the relationship between the various senses or even the embodied
senses relation to the mind, the cinesthetic subject is intended to
confound the strict delimitation of the body on screen and the body of
the spectator. Sobchack writes:
in most sensual experiences at the movies the cinesthetic subject does
not think his or her own literal body (or clothing) and is not, as a result,
rudely thrust offscreen back into his or her seat in response to a
perceived discontinuity with the figural bodies and textures onscreen.
Rather, the cinesthetic subject feels his or her literal body as only
one side of an irreducible and dynamic relational structure of reversibility
and reciprocity that has as its other side the figural objects of bodily
provocation on the screen. (2004: 79; emphasis in original)

As becomes clear from the descriptions of her own viewing

experience of Campions Piano, however, the dynamism of the
relational structure posited here and that produces what is termed a
cinesthetic subject does not in fact radically reformulate either term
in this binary pair, does not in fact do away with the dichotomy
in operation. Indeed, on numerous occasions Sobchacks experience is
described as a kind of shuttling back and forth between her own
embodied self and the embodied figures she sees on the screen,
her reaction to or reading of the screen moving across a scale

308

Gaspar Noes Enter the Void

with soma at one end and consciousness at the other and
producing, correspondingly, either literal or figural responses to it.
As she states:
If I am engaged by what I see, my intentionality streams towards the
world onscreen, marking itself not merely in my conscious attention but
always also in the bodily tension [. . .]. However, insofar as I cannot
literally touch, smell, or taste the particular figure on the screen that
solicits my sensual desire, my bodys intentional trajectory, seeking a
sensible object to fulfil this sensual solicitation, will reverse its direction to
locate its partially frustrated sensual grasp on something more literally
accessible. That more literally accessible sensual object is my own
subjectively felt lived body. (2004: 76; emphasis in original; see also 78)

The result of this, as Sobchack goes on to suggest, is that on the

rebound from the screen [. . .] I will reflexively turn toward my own
carnal, sensual, and sensible being to touch myself touching, smell
myself smelling, taste myself tasting, and, in sum, sense my own
sensuality (2004: 767). Given her articles emphasis up until this
point on synaesthetic perception, what strikes me as surprising in
this statement is the resolutely non cross-modal nature of these
formulations, touch producing touch, smell producing smell and taste
producing taste. Similarly, even though her embodied self has effected
a move towards the screen, this seems to produce ultimately only a
greater sense of the spectators own subjectively felt lived body (Sobchack
2004: 76). Whilst the self posited here can then absolutely not
be postulated to be but a brain in a vat and is necessarily embodied,
the posture adopted is ultimately still Cartesian since the object
perceived serves only to shore up the integrity of the subject, albeit an
embodied and fully sensate subject.
None of this is intended as a dismissal of Sobchacks existential
phenomenological experience whilst watching Campions film, nor
ultimately as a rejection of all of the philosophical insights that her
reading might bring. It is to suggest, however, that the cinesthetic
subject that she describes in the phenomenological scene of
spectatorship is not nearly as chiasmic as we are led to believe. A
potentially more chiasmic entity can be found in Steven Shaviros
The Cinematic Body in which he goes so far as to suggest that:
The cinematic apparatus is a new mode of embodiment; it is a
technology for containing and controlling bodies, but also for
affirming, perpetuating, and multiplying them, by grasping them in
the terrible, uncanny immediacy of their images. The cinematic body is

309

Somatechnics
then neither phenomenologically given nor fantasmatically constructed.
It stands at the limits of both of these categories, and it undoes them.
This body is a necessary condition and support of the cinematic process:
it makes that process possible, but also continually interrupts it, unlacing
its sutures and swallowing up its meanings. (1993: 2567)

For Shaviro, film is resolutely anti-dialectical and he suggests that

it brings me compulsively, convulsively face to face with an Otherness
that I can neither incorporate nor expel. It stimulates and affects my own
body, even as it abolishes the distances between my own and other
bodies. Boundaries and outlines dissolve; representation gives way to
a violently affective, more-than-immediate, and nonconceptualizable
contact. (1993: 25960)

As with Sobchacks approach, then, Shaviro wishes to inject his

critical sensibility with something of the naivety of the pleasurable
and/or visceral viewing experience that the cinema can produce in the
body because, for him, semiotic and psychoanalytic film theory
is largely a phobic construct [. . . in which i]mages are kept at a
distance, isolated like dangerous germs (1993: 16). This is a mistaken
tendency for Shaviro since for him the cinema is an event and thus
fundamentally an expression of an incorporeal materialism. As he
explains: Images themselves are immaterial, but the effect is all the
more physical and corporeal. They are continually being imprinted
upon the retina (1993: 51). Like Sobchack also, Shaviro seeks to
understand the ways in which the cinematic spectators subjectivity is
captivated and distracted, made more fluid and indeterminate, in
the process of sympathetic participation, how The viewer is transfixed
and transmogrified in consequence of the infectious, visceral
contact of images (1993: 53). For Shaviro this takes place through a
specific kind of engagement with a specific kind of film that elicits
a reconfigured (and Deleuze-inflected) masochistic relationship
between film and spectator. As he provocatively writes against
the prevailing schools of thought: All this suggests the need for a
new approach to the dynamics of film viewing: one that is masochistic,
mimetic, tactile, and corporeal, in contrast to the reigning
psychoanalytic paradigms emphasis on sadism and separation
(1993: 56). By his own admission, however, and on multiple counts,
his reaction in front of his own chosen objects of desire is extremely
personal and idiosyncratic (1993: viii). As he writes towards the
end of his book, I have deliberately sought to make my choices as
heterogeneous, as singular and idiosyncratic, as possible (1993: 266).

310

Gaspar Noes Enter the Void

Shaviro defends his methodology in making such choices
brilliantly, claiming firstly that eclecticism is the best way for
postmodern theory to avoid the old philosophical traps of universal
legislation and of dialectical subsumption and totalization (1993:
266). And so, he continues:
rather than move hierarchically from the specific to the general,
from epiphenomena to underlying structures, from individual
symptoms to the social totality, I have pursued the paralogical strategy
recommended by Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) and already practiced
implicitly by the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations (1968). I have
endeavoured to jump directly, and discontinuously, between the singular
and the paradigmatic. I have shunned generality, and have instead
universalized exceptions, counterexamples, and extreme cases. Writing
thus becomes a monstrous hybrid of empirical description and
simulacral fabulation. Theory as pataphysics [sic], rather than as
dialectics or as metaphysics. (1993: 267)

As wonderful as this methodological justification is, the danger of such

an approach is that it can lead once again to a pseudo-Cartesian
posture. This is of course not Shaviros intent, for his manifesto is an
exhortation for new kinds of cyborg subjectivity in which the human is
conjugated with technological networks. Indeed, he calls for:
a new politics and aesthetics of culture, a new kinetics and economics of
power and resistance, of pleasure and pain, one oriented toward the
multiple perceptions, affects, and subjectivity effects intrinsic to cyborgs
and simulacra, to our deorganicized, hyper-sexualized, technologized
bodies. (1993: 265)

To my mind, many of Shaviros descriptions of his responses to the

films he turns his attention to do in fact approach this ideal and thus
come closer to the kind of chiasmic relation that Sobchack seeks.
However, the extremely personal and idiosyncratic nature of those
responses ground his analyses firmly within a specific subjective locus
and makes of them the symptom of a subjective state or viewing
practice that he talks of in quasi-pathological terms as a similarity
disorder (1993: 255). In both Sobchack and Shaviro, then, we find
a potential mismatch between their stated desired outcomes and
their works results that comes from what we might call a bodily
recalcitrance, which is to say that the particularities of the embodied
self in their work seem to resist the hybrid forms or chiasmic processes
towards which the work is directed. And whilst this disjunction may
simply be the result of a methodology which wishes to extract from

311

Somatechnics
a singular subjective experience a quasi-universal principle or entity, it
nonetheless remains true that the kind of body constructed is ill-suited
to the ends to which it is directed.

2. Brain, Screen, Deleuze, Bergson, Hansen

Some might argue that in order to bypass the bodily recalcitrance
found in studies such as Sobchacks that are founded in large part on
Merleau-Pontys philosophy, one needs only to return to his work The
Visible and the Invisible (1968) and understand the emphasis that he
places on the coterminous nature of flesh and its dehiscence (1968:
146). This, however, is not the approach that will be taken here since
the fact remains that many approaches that have used Merleau-Ponty
have not allowed the unitary subject to be opened up as much as this
concept demands and this perhaps because, as Evans and Lawlor
suggest, the unfinished nature of this work means that this text itself at
times posits a greater sense of unity than it suggests at other moments
(2000: 11). The approach to be adopted here then will be explicitly
Deleuzean, for whilst Deleuzes philosophy is the basis upon which
Shaviros own philosophical conjectures are founded, bodily and/or
subjective recalcitrance are resolutely not something that one finds in
his two-volume Cinema project (1986; 1989).
Through the two volumes of this work as well as elsewhere, Deleuze
argues that the cinema produces a new kind of thought that is only
possible within the filmic text itself. It is then not the case any longer that
the spectator as an intentional subject is required for the ontological
deployment of the cinematic object, because the film itself is capable of
thought, producing its own form of philosophy as opposed to merely
providing thought in an agent external to it. As Deleuze puts it in a
phrase that has now become infamous, the brain is the screen (2000:
366). Consistent with the approaches adopted by Shaviro and Sobchack,
this move that Deleuze makes is in part an attempt, as Elsaesser
and Hagener point out, to overcome a split that is constitutive of
phenomenology the split between subject and object, between
consciousness and its content (2010: 158). Indeed, for Deleuze, being
itself is constituted by a series of images that together form the plane of
immanence of existence and which constantly act upon and react to each
other. The human brain, for Deleuze, is then but one among many
images on this plane with the capability of introducing a kind of hiatus
in the field of images, a synaptic caesura that perceives (prehends) the
world from a particular point of view (Lambert and Flaxman 2005: 115).
Rather than force us back into the subject, this correlation of the

312

Gaspar Noes Enter the Void

operations of the brain and a cinematic mode of thinking makes of the
brain merely a form in itself that corresponds to no external view; it is
no mere organ but the totality of all relations, including those that have
not yet been actualised (Sinnerbrink 2008: 92). This, then, is a decidedly
non-anthropomorphic and non-Cartesian view of consciousness (to
use a term that Deleuze himself would reject), and one into which certain
cinematic texts allow us a glimpse precisely because of the nature of this
technological medium; the cinema, in other words, opens up to us a
point of view on the world that is not conditioned by our habitualised,
Cartesian, unitary perspective and sensory-motor schema.
Far from exhibiting what I have termed bodily or subjective
recalcitrance, Deleuzes theory of the cinema at times seems to almost
entirely eradicate the embodied viewing subject from the cinematic
event. Indeed, one might even suggest that it is sometimes difficult to
see precisely how Deleuzes philosophy of film tells us anything about
the cinema and the spectators position in a cinematic assemblage and
that, in the final analysis, somewhat counterintuitively, Deleuzes books
on cinema are not about film at all but, rather, that they constitute only
a specific image on the philosophical plane that he spent his entire
career articulating.5 This would be a perfectly defensible position to
adopt; however, there are many critics apart from Shaviro for whom
these books are used as a means to enlighten film or screen studies.
This is the case for Mark Hansen who, in his book New Philosophy for
New Media (2006) highlights the problem that the lack of embodiment
in Deleuzes analysis of the cinema poses for a philosophy of new
media. As Hansen writes, Deleuzes neo-Bergsonist account of the
cinema carries out the progressive disembodying of the center of
indetermination (2006: 6), a concept that comes from Bergson which,
as Hansen points out, places a crucial emphasis [. . .] on the body
(2006: 3). Claiming that the time-image that arises in the second
volume of Deleuzes work can be understood as a realization of the
cinemas capacity to instance the universal flux of images, or more
exactly, to divorce perception entirely from (human) embodiment
(Hansen 2006: 6), Deleuzes approach, according to Hansen, renders
cinema homologous with the universal flux of images as such which,
in turn, effectively imposes a purely formal understanding of
cinematic framing and thus suspends the crucial function accorded
the living body on Bergsons account (2006: 7). Hansens solution to
this problem is then to redeem Bergsons embodied understanding
of the centre of indetermination as the theoretical basis for our
exploration of new media art from Deleuzes transformative
appropriation (2006: 7).

313

Somatechnics
The crux of the problem with Deleuzes theories for Hansen lies
in the formers insistence that the sensorimotor basis of the human
body is but a passive correlate of linkages between images (Hansen
2006: 7). However, what becomes clear throughout Hansens study
is that the insufficiency of this conception of the (dis)embodied
sensorimotor schema arises primarily because of the different kinds of
texts that he is dealing with, because, this is to say, Deleuze is writing
about the cinema whilst Hansen is interested in new media. As Hansen
writes:
the body that surfaces in the wake of the digital revolution the very
body that forms the object of contemporary neuroscience has scant
little in common with the associational sensorimotor body of Deleuzes
Cinema 1. (2006: 7)

It is for this reason, then, that Hansen needs to reconfigure Deleuzes

work and return more faithfully to Bergson, rather than because of any
inherent failing in Deleuzes work itself. If the body is not so passive in
Hansens analysis, it is precisely because it is often in movement and
thus the sensorimotor schema brought into play is necessarily engaged
in different ways. As Hansen writes, motion functions as the concrete
trigger of affection as an active modality of bodily action (2006: 7).
The dynamic relation of the body of the spectator in space and time
found in much new media art, however, is very different to the
situation of the cinematic spectator in whom are produced the kinds of
(near) immobile bodily sensations described by Sobchack and Shaviro.
As the latter says, pointing to the relatively high coefficient of
corporeal passivity that cinematic spectatorship induces:
I laugh and cry, I shudder and scream, I get tense or pissed off or bored,
I restlessly glance at my watch and at the person next to me, or I sink into
a state of near-catatonic absorption. But in any case, I do not actively
interpret or seek to control; I just sit back and blissfully consume.
I passively enjoy or endure certain rhythms of duration: the passage of
time, with its play of retention and anticipation, and with its relentless
accumulation, transformation, and destruction of sounds and images.
There is no structuring lack, no primordial division, but a continuity
between the physiological and affective responses of my own body and
the appearances and disappearances, the mutations and perdurances, of
the bodies and images on screen. (Shaviro 1993: 2556)

I have already suggested that Shaviro is not entirely successful in

carrying through the implications of statements such as this for his own
viewing subjectivity and do not need to dwell further on this now.

314

Gaspar Noes Enter the Void

Let us remember, however, that his approach is explicitly Deleuzean,
and the question going begging at this point is whether Deleuzes
philosophy is in fact able to usefully inform a somatic analysis of the
cinema as an event, even if it is problematic in some respects in
relation to new media.
What is certain is that Deleuzes approach should be able to
provide a means to further a somatic understanding of the cinema,
since his project, like those of Sobchack and Shaviro, springs in part
from a desire to approach film studies from a different angle. Indeed,
just as Shaviro writes against the phobic nature of semiotic and
psychoanalytic film theory (1993: 16) and Sobchack against the
prevalent linguistic and psychoanalytic understandings of the
cinema (2004: 59), so Deleuze says:
The brain is unity. The brain is the screen. I dont believe that linguistics
and psychoanalysis offer a great deal to the cinema. On the contrary, the
biology of the brain molecular biology does. (2000: 366)

In spite of Hansens reminder that recent work in neuroscience has

enabled the term embodiment to be apprehended in such a way that
it is inseparable from the cognitive activity of the brain (2006: 3),
however, we must wonder whether such an uber-cerebral version of
embodiment can actually serve the requirements of approaches such as
those of Sobchack and Shaviro which seem to bring into the fray a
more corporeal and fully sensate form of embodiment. To put this
another way, is the kind of body posited in Deleuzes Cinema project
one which would be able to follow through on the promises of much
somatic film theory?
A knee-jerk reaction to this question might suggest that the answer
to this question is absolutely not. Indeed, if we look at some of the
passages in Deleuzes work dealing with the body, the entity figured
seems to be very different from the kind of messy, corporeal, sensual and
tremulous flesh of Shaviro and Sobchack. For Deleuze, faced with a world
where IMAGE = MOVEMENT, there is no moving body which is
distinct from executed movement (1986: 58). This means, then, that,
My body is an image, hence a set of actions and reactions. My eye, my
brain, are images, parts of my body. [. . .] And can I even, at this level,
speak of ego, of eye, of brain and of body? Only for simple convenience;
for nothing can yet be identified in this way. It is rather a gaseous state.
(Deleuze 1986: 58)

We are then but one set of images in an infinite set of images which
constitutes a plane of immanence to existence and in which there can

315

Somatechnics
be no privileged or prior term, only relations (Deleuze 1986: 59).
Given that no term is prior, however, that the world can no longer be
said to exist only through the modalities of human perception, either
cognitive or somatic, the question arises as to how the mechanism of
perception can be brought into play at all. As Deleuze explains:
But how is it possible to speak of images in themselves which are not for
anyone and are not addressed to anyone? How is it possible to speak of
an Appearing, since there is not even an eye? It is possible for at least two
reasons. The first is in order to distinguish them from things conceived
of as bodies. Indeed, our perception and our language distinguish bodies
(nouns), qualities (adjectives) and actions (verbs). But actions, in
precisely this sense, have already replaced movement with the idea of a
provisional place towards which it is directed or that of a result that it
secures. Quality has replaced movement with the idea of a state which
persists whilst waiting for another to replace it. Body has replaced
movement with the idea of a subject which would carry it out or of an
object which would submit to it, of a vehicle which would carry it. We will
see that such images are formed in the universe (action-images, affectionimages, perception-images). But they depend on new conditions and
certainly cannot appear for the moment. For the moment we only have
movements, which are called images in order to distinguish them from
everything that they have not yet become. However, this negative reason
is not sufficient. The positive reason is that the plane of immanence is
entirely made up of Light. The set of movements, of actions and
reactions is light which diffuses, which is propagated without resistance
and without loss. The identity of the image and movement stems from
the identity of matter and light. (1986: 5960)

Or, as he puts it more succinctly: In the movement-image there

are not yet bodies or rigid lines, but only lines or figures of light
(1986: 60).
Whilst it is perhaps relatively easy to understand how these
kinds of formulations can lead to the work of a critic like Spencer Shaw
(2008) who wishes to postulate the existence of something he terms
film consciousness, and whilst they are undoubtedly a paradigmatic
example of what we have seen Foucault refer to as an incorporeal
materialism, it is perhaps harder to see how they might advance a more
explicitly corporeal film theory. In the final section of this paper,
however, I want to suggest, through an analysis of Gaspar Noes Enter
the Void, that Deleuzes formulations can indeed usefully inform
a somatic film theory if we reconfigure not Deleuzes own theory, a`
la Hansen, but, rather, the way we think about the cinematic body,
moving from a biological understanding of it to an anatomical one.

316

Gaspar Noes Enter the Void

3. Enter the Void

It is in part, no doubt, because of cinemas reliance on or desire to
connect with the spectator who is so fundamental to an understanding
of what cinema is, that cinematic texts have so consistently figured
various kinds of portals or reflective surfaces that directly bring into the
fray a relational gesture that invites the viewer in or excludes her
and thereby signals her presence in the same motion. In relation to
mirrors, for instance, Elsaesser and Hagener note that, there are few
films without a mirror-shot drawing our attention to a pivotal moment
in the plot or in the development of the protagonist (2010: 76). For
them, the mirror does not only play the role of psychological beacon,
however; rather, the function of the mirror oscillates between an
ontological and a psychological one (2010: 76) since the reflective as
opposed to transparent surface of the mirror is itself a marker of
heightened reflexivity as it absorbs the lack of groundedness of the
cinematic image and turns it into a double reflection (2010: 75). This
may be so when we consider the architecture of a classic mirror shot
such as the uber famous example from Taxi Driver that Elsaesser and
Hagener cite, since we see a doubled up image of Travis Bickle. It is so,
however, only in regards to the diegetic space of the film, for our point
of view as spectator, even if this sequence communicates an insight to
us, is to the side of this shot such that we are not directly implicated by
it but, rather, posited as the privileged and necessarily a priori point
through which the architecture of the cinematic text is able to cohere
and communicate its meaning.
Contrast this, then, with the mirror shot from Enter the Void, a shot
in which the fourth wall is broken and we are interpolated directly by
the gaze of the main protagonist. There is here also a doubling, but it is
not a simple doubling of the protagonist on screen who is seen twice in
the diegetic space of the film, it is rather a doubling that conflates two
positions of the triangulated schema into one, a doubling which
cannot be denied since we are looking into a mirror, but in which we
do not see the doubled up image because, of course, we are looking at
the mirror image from the first-person point of view of the protagonist,
our vision subject even to his blinks. If Taxi Driver tells us, through the
doubled image, about a troubling personality split in Travis Bickle that
is becoming more and more apparent as the film progresses, this
mirror shot addresses, quite differently, the split between film and
spectator by obliterating entirely the distance between the two,
reducing the triangulated model to only two of its terms and, in a
sense, obliterating the spectator entirely. Indeed, in this shot, not only

317

Somatechnics
do we as spectator cease to exist since we adopt the position of another
and are explicitly shown our own (non)reflection to prove the point,
we are also unable, as spectator, to maintain a cognitive distance
between ourselves and the filmic object before us since while we know
that logically we should, given the configuration of this shot, be able to
see a camera and thus elide the threat of this uncanny scenario
through sublimation and the apprehension of this as just a film, as
artifice, there is no camera here. In a very real sense, then, the distance
between the two terms in the cinematic assemblage, film and spectator,
is reduced to nothing and we become nothing more than an image.
Even before this point, however, and for a time after it also, the
distance between spectator and on-screen protagonist is obliterated as
the spectator is forced to inhabit the point of view of the on-screen
protagonist, the whole first section of the film being shot from the
hyper-subjective first person perspective that is created by camera
movements determined by the movement of the protagonist within the
diegetic space of the film. What is more, not only are we privy to his
sober consciousness of the world, in a long sequence at the start of
the film we share also the hallucinations he experiences after smoking
a pipe of DMT. Right from the very start of the film, then, we are
transported out of our own bodies into the body of an other, a
strangely uncanny experience since we feel subjected to the full force
of the events taking place on-screen, yet unable to control them,
much like a passenger on a boat in rough seas whose bodily
movements are primarily determined by forces over which he or she
has no control.
But it is not only the spectator in this film who undergoes a
transformation that involves the eradication of her corporeal self, for
the main protagonist in the film through whose eyes we see the world
in this first section of the film, Oscar, is similarly transfigured. Shortly
after the drug-induced hallucination sequence Oscar is shot, enabling
him to undergo the same out of body experience that we have
already lived, such that he and we, the spectators, who still share his
perspective, are released from the embodied constraints of mortal
flesh, shadowing Oscar from just behind him or taking on a totally
free-floating perspective in both space and time throughout the rest
of the film. Whilst many commentators see in the film only an attempt
to render in filmic form an astral projection and other events
extrapolated from a reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead which
figures at the start of the diegesis, the film has a far more interesting
point to make about cinematic space and perspective. Indeed, from
this point on the filmic perspective adopted is one which no longer

318

Gaspar Noes Enter the Void

obeys the exigencies of Euclidean space-time nor the sacrosanct
distinction between matter and non-matter, all times cohabiting a
single space as the lines between present and past are erased, the
cameras perspective seeming to float freely above the scenes and
cityscapes it witnesses, passing through walls and bodies in such a way
as to render the distinction between inside and outside, matter
occupying space and space itself, utterly redundant just as the
Euclidean parallel geometry of a classic mirror shot that would
maintain as separate the spectator and film is bent into a nonEuclidean elliptic form as those two trajectories meet and become
indiscernible from each other.
There are in Enter the Void many shots that reconfigure the
relationship between camera perspective and material space in such a
way that matter loses all of its recalcitrance, to become utterly porous,
thus enabling the camera to enter into a fully symbiotic relationship
with it. Indeed, the perspective that the camera takes on in these
scenes is very far removed from what we are used to seeing in the
cinema and far closer to the flythrough effect of virtual endoscopies
such as those available via the navigation of the Visible Human
Projects reanimated and reassembled micro-sliced corpses. (And it
should not be forgotten of course that Enter the Void actually borrows
from the visual vocabulary of medical imaging, not only for the DMT
hallucination sequence that seems intended to figure in visual form
the actual neural operations of the brain, but also in sequences when
the camera passes into the interior of human bodies.) As Waldby writes
of this technique:
The virtual endoscopic flythrough view [. . .] operates as if its presence
has no effect on the terrain through which it moves, and as if it itself has
no dimension. It is a perfectly disembodied and frictionless point of view
which can travel at any speed, unlike conventional endoscopy whose view
is demonstrably enmeshed in a particular set of instrumental dimensions
and bodily recalcitrance. The virtual endoscope acts as if the anatomical
terrain is completely open to aerial traversals, in fact as if it invites such
traversals. It presents a dry, smooth-surfaced and completely hollowed
lumen space, free of the cloying strictures and ambiguity of the
conventional endoscope. The interior surface of the lumen is fully
available to simulated vision, appearing as perspectival surface with an
infinitely converging depth of field, unlike the non-perspectival, cloachal
space of the conventional endoscope. The flythrough view conveys a
strong sense of the body interior as extended vacuum traversed by clearly
demarcated and solid structures, a space which lends itself to the plotting
of flight paths and heroic aerial traversals. (2000: 1034)

319

Somatechnics
The virtual endoscopy is then a reimagining of the body in
the interests of the image, it is a reanimation of flesh which bypasses
the recalcitrance and restricted perspectives that come with messy
corporeality. Similarly, what I would like to suggest in regards to
the possibility of the body entering into the kinds of exscriptive
relationships that are the desired outcome of the work of somatic film
critics such as Shaviro and Sobchack, is that this kind of fusional space
may be much more possible if we think of the body as an anatomical as
opposed to biological entity. For the anatomical body is similarly
one that is able to write or perform a new kind of knowledge outside
of itself and yet from within its interiority, a body that displays none
of the active recalcitrance and resistance to an opening up to the
outside of the biological body.
To think of the body in this anatomical manner would be to think
of it as does the discipline of Medicine. As Catherine Waldby writes:
Medicine has an absolute concern to maintain the integrity of the human
as distinct and superior species-being, yet this concern is premised on its
detailed recognition of the distinctions absolute failure. At the cellular
and molecular level the organic integrity of the human is already
dissipated, a provisional concatenation of cell lines permanently open to
other kinds of bacterial and viral life, and to posthumous disaggregation.
(2000: 39)

Whilst medicine wishes then to preserve the integrity of the human

organism, in the very act of attempted preservation, biomedicine in
fact ends up in a very significant way doing precisely the opposite and
erasing entirely the distinction between organism and biosphere,
thereby pointing to the disaggregation and dissipation (or dehiscence,
to return to a term used earlier) of the organism. As Waldby continues:
Biomedicine concerns itself with precisely this openness, human bodies
as entropic and wayward matter. It tracks the ways in which human flesh
lends itself to the agendas of disease, becomes animated by carcinogenic
vigour or used for viral and bacterial replication, made an agent in
contagion, or is simply subject to formal dissipation, the tendency of
matter to disorganisation through time. To draw on Dagognets (1988)
phrase, it addresses the body in its capacity as blind bricoleur, as a logic of
possible combinations which lead off in any number of directions as
mutation or disease. Such openness leads the body eventually to its own
disappearance, its absorption into vegetal matter through and after
death. In other words medicine addresses itself to the failure of distinctions
between human and non-human life, the endless ways in which the human
in the term human body is redundant, a failure of conceptual

320

Gaspar Noes Enter the Void

prophylaxis against this bodys immersion in and indebtedness to the
non-teleological, indifferent flux of the natural world. (2000: 39)6

I hardly need to point out the similarity of the relationships

described here and the anti-dialectical somatic film theory of Sobchack
and Shaviro already examined and which similarly seeks (albeit not
entirely successfully) to understand the ways in which, within the
phenomenological viewing scenario, the human body is materially
conjugated with the body of the film in order to produce a cinematic
body. And if we think back to Enter the Voids mirror shot and
its extreme subjective perspective, it can be suggested that there is
something very similar going on in this film too, for the position of the
spectator is simultaneously intensified and concomitantly erased. In
other words, as is the case with the anatomo-clinical method, in Noes
Enter the Void, knowledge of the body (or mind) of the spectator only
comes through an encounter with the death of that very same subject.
Once that subject has been killed and the distance between subject and
object reduced to nothing, the spectator is able to enter into a
new form of relationality with the film and to experience it from a
disembodied perspective which is not to say that the experience of the film
for the spectator is not an embodied experience but, rather, that her experience of
the film at the level of embodiment is determined by the sensory-motor schema
of the film as opposed to vice versa. This is to say that the body of
the spectator is passive, as though dead and reanimated in the relation
with the screen a phenomenon that is put into effect from the very
start of the film whose opening credits pummel the spectator into
submission via a massive multisensory overload, her eyes assaulted by a
machine-gun-fire succession of strobing psychedelic typefaces
accompanied by the pulse of a booming hardcore industrial techno
soundtrack, the only response possible being the kind of full body
semi-involuntary rhythmic throbbing normally experienced at raves.
And this is precisely how I felt after a projection of this film when
I emerged from the cinema and returned to the outside world with
sea legs and had to sit down until such time as the earth stopped
moving. This sensation comes about, of course, because of the highly
immersive and mobile nature of the cinematography which collapses
striated space and places the spectator at the point from which the
trajectories forming cinematic space are drawn, our own corporeality
and position in space being elided and co-opted by and for the
spectacle taking place on screen. Having been killed, twice, once
figuratively and then literally from within the body of Oscar, we are
rendered immaterial and enfolded into the materiality of the image

321

Somatechnics
becoming, in effect, nothing but an attribute of the cinema whose
incorporeal material ontology is nothing other than light, sound and
movement. That this operation is taking place is perhaps suggested in
a coded manner in the films final scenes where we float above
a number of sex scenes in which sexual desire is explicitly figured as
light emanating from bodies and again, I need hardly point out the
striking resonance here with Deleuzes comments on the movementimage in which there are not yet bodies or rigid lines, but only lines or
figures of light (1986: 60). And this is a principle that governs not only
the human bodies in the film, of course, but its architectural forms
also, for every shot of the film, and in particular the sections shot
in Tokyo, is digitally reanimated (a term I use very deliberately of
course because of its dual meanings) and refigured as a luminous
spectacle.7
Rather than a cinematic body, then, what Enter the Void ultimately
gestures towards is something that we might term a biocinematic
imaginary, for it is a space in which the distance between the embodied
self of the spectator (both corporeal and cognitive) and the cinema is
reduced to nothing. This is not to say, of course, that the spectator and
film merely enter into a closer zone of proximity. What this means is
that they enter into what Deleuze would term a becoming such that
each is transformed in the relation instigated in the assemblage
that arises from the conjugation of each of these terms together in an
event. As in the Visible Human Project, then, and the biomedical
imaginary more broadly as well as in the phenomenological experience
of spectatorship, it is paradoxically by admitting the disaggregation of
the body into the fray that we are able more fully to understand that
body. The body that is able to enter into these kinds of relations called
for in somatic film theory however needs to be figured not as a
biological body, but an anatomical body that does not display a high
coefficient of recalcitrant materiality and subjectivity. It is this kind of
body that is able to operate like Dagognets blind bricoleur and
become nothing but a logic of possible combinations which lead off in
any number of directions (Waldby 2000: 39), a body which is but an
image on a plane of immanence that contracts a potentially infinite
number of connections between images into actuality through the
synaptic caesura of perception. A body such as this can be understood
not according to the illusory and atemporal essence with which
the body is often imbued in film theory but, rather, as a complex
negotiation of technologies and positionalities reanimated in a new
synthetic form. Indeed, just as Waldby writes of the Visible Human
Project that it lends an iconography to the idea of the human as

322

Gaspar Noes Enter the Void

synthetic, not a self-origin but rather the product of inestimable
and incremental techno-bio-social processes (2000: 162), so I would
suggest that Enter the Void does nothing different in relation to the
cinematic spectator who similarly is reanimated as a synthetic product
of techno-bio-cultural and cinematic processes.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Elizabeth Stephens for the original impetus to write this
paper and the peer reviewers used by the journal for their generous comments and
suggestions.
2. It should be noted that Steven Shaviro explicitly signposts this conception of the
event as the guiding principle behind his work The Cinematic Body that will be
discussed herein (1993: 24).
3. The recent exceptions to this rule that Sobchack cites are the work of Linda
Williams (1991), Jonathan Crary (1992), Steven Shaviro (1993), Laura Marks
(1999) and Jennifer Barker (2009) a list to which could be added the work of
scholars such as Tarja Laine (2006), Martine Beugnet (2007), Elena del Ro (2008)
and Jane Stadler (2008).
4. Chiasmic as opposed to chiasmatic is the term preferred by Alphonso Lingis in
his translation of Merleau-Pontys The Visible and the Invisible (1968), whence this
term originates in the usage employed by Sobchack.
5. I am grateful to Jason Cullen for this insight and the many conversations on this
topic that I have enjoyed with him.
6. This, of course, is entirely unsurprising because it follows the logic traced by
Foucault in relation to the first science of man through the anatomo-clinical
method which is obviously dependent on a direct confrontation with death as are
all subsequent technological advances in anatomical knowledge such as the Visible
Human Project, which is Waldbys particular concern.
7. In the case of Tokyo, I would suggest that this digital enhancement actually
intensifies the latent mode of Tokyo until its substance is entirely transformed.

References
Barker, Jennifer (2009), The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Beugnet, Martine (2007), Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Crary, Jonathan (1992), Techniques of the Observer, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Dagognet, Francois (1988), La Matresse du vivant, Paris: Hachette.
del Ro, Elena (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles [1983](1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles [1985])(1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles [1986](2000), The brain is the screen: an interview with Gilles
Deleuze, in Gregory Flaxman, The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of the
Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

323

Somatechnics
Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener (2010), Film Theory: An Introduction Through the
Senses, New York: Routledge.
Evans, Fred and Leonard Lawlor (2000), The value of flesh: Merleau-Pontys
philosophy and the modernism/postmodernism Debate, in Chiasms: MerleauPontys Notion of Flesh, ed. Evans and Lawlor, New York: State University of New
York Press.
Flaxman, Gregory (1986), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of the Cinema,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, Michel (1982), The discourse on language, trans. R. Sawyer, in The
Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon, pp. 21537.
Hansen, Mark B. (2006), New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jacobs, Carol (1994), Playing Jane Campions Piano: politically, Modern Language Notes,
109:5, pp. 75785.
Laine, Tarja (2006), Cinema as second skin, New Review of Film and Television Studies,
4:2, pp. 93106.
Lambert, Gregg and Gregory Flaxman (2005), Ten propositions on the brain, Pli:
The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 16, pp. 11428.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois [1979](1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Marks, Laura (1999), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice [1964] (1968), The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort,
trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Miller, Jacques-Alain (19778), Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier), Screen,
18:4, pp. 2434.
Shaviro, Steven (1993), The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Shaw, Spencer (2008), Film Consciousness: From Phenomenology to Deleuze, Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Sinnerbrink, Robert (2008), Time, affect and the brain: Deleuzes cinematic
aesthetics, Film-Philosophy 12:1, pp. 8596. Available online: < http://www.filmphilosophy.com/2008v12n1/sinnerbrink.pdf >
Sobchack, Vivian (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stadler, Jane (2008), Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics.
New York: Continuum.
Waldby, Catherine (2000), The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman
Medicine, New York and London: Routledge.
Williams, Linda (1991), Film bodies: gender, genre, and excess, Film Quarterly, 44:4,
pp. 213.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig [1953](1968), Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe,
New York: Macmillan.

324