Intimate beyond words: reconsidering the cinematic subject in light of neuroscience

2012-01-18In the past three decades, there has been a considerable amount of work done in the humanities attempting to acknowledge the results of science and revise some radical tenets of 60s and 70s critical theory, struggling to find a new balance between the methods and worldviews held in the humanities disciplines and the recent findings of brain and body sciences. An increased interest in the role and functioning of emotions, feeling and affect has emerged in domains as diverse as political theory, linguistics, history and the study of cinema, literature and other arts. Connected to new findings in neuroscience and a revolutionary way of conceptualizing those findings, this affective turn could be the paradigm shift capable of bridging the apparent precipice separating humanities and hard sciences. ❧ In my dissertation, I am narrowing down the two regna to specifically film theory and the neuroscience of emotion, trying to assess the consequences that the latest findings of the latter might have on the formulation of the former. The very nature of film theory as a field of critical analysis and interpretation led to an increased privileging of the discursive quality of cinema, and - following the dominant paradigms of semiotics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, cultural studies and poststructuralism - film has been regarded more and more as a text, and spectatorship as a discursive operation. ❧ As a practitioner, spectator and scholar of cinema it is my conviction that while both the film and the person are indeed constituted as an intersection of discourses, they also have the ability to break through the system of discursive practices and disintegrate it, as well as to generate it in a new configuration. I found a theoretical basis for thinking of cinema in this way in the phenomenological insights of Roland Barthes' writing about the punctum and in Vivian Sobchack's critique of psychoanalytically inflected semiotics. ❧ The neuroscientific research on emotion and particularly the model of the self proposed by Antonio Damasio seem to validate the intuitions of phenomenologists and offer a notion of the subject that is not exclusively constructed by discourses, but rather molded and permanently redrafted through the interaction between the brain-body and the world. The first chapter of this dissertation is dedicated to explaining this model of the self offered by neuroscience, and to examining the role that emotion and feeling have in the constitution of the self, with its increased layers of sophistication of which the discursive components (language, higher cognition, narrative) are just the tip of the iceberg. ❧ The second chapter looks at the consequences of re-inserting the emotional, experiential self back into the system of discursive practices. The relationship between discourse and experience in the continuous formation of the self is not easy to pin down; they are not completely separate, as discourse results in the generation of emotion and vice versa, and emotional experience is not immune to the power of discourse. ❧ The private emotional experience introduces an unknown, since it can be wildly different and essentially unquantifiable from person to person (which may explain why it has been repressed, being perceived as uncontrollable and hence monstrous). It is the possible crack in the grand narrative through which various totalizing social constructivist projects can slip away, the discomfort that can lead a person to reject the most coherent, effective discursive construction and spring into action against it. It is also the potential locus where manipulation can be applied to extraordinary effects that defy rational explanation. ❧ It follows that we have to recognize the potential of the individual and the private, which cannot be approximated, rounded up to the next integer or treated wholesale. Cinema spectatorship, for example, becomes a much more private affair, and it becomes clear that responses that we can count on as filmmakers or that we can unequivocally theorize as scholars are only those of a rather superficial nature. In the third chapter I will examine some of the film theories that proposed various ways of understanding what cinema does to its viewers. I will focus on theories of editing because editing is arguably the most overtly discursive practice in filmmaking and it is also a possible argument for the specificity of cinema. Looking closely at some theoretical frameworks that tried to elucidate the power of cinema and prescribe possible ways of handling or resisting that power, I will argue that they always assumed the existence of a non-discursive component in the interaction between film and spectator, even if most of these theoretical models attempted to suppress it, minimize it, explain it away or otherwise control it. ❧ In the fourth chapter I am examining three cinematic texts belonging to the same environment - auteur Romanian cinema from the 2000s - and argue that they are exemplary for a fresh move to reconsider the individual experience as the nexus of political, ideological and existential processes. Embracing the long-take, continuous-time realism aesthetic, these films question the power of discourse both through their content and through their form, looking for a new equilibrium between the tools of cinema and its function