TOUCH: SENSUOUS THEORY AND MULTISENSORY MEDIA

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Fall 2003 by Barlow, Melinda

TOUCH: SENSUOUS THEORY AND MULTISENSORY MEDIA Laura U. Marks Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 259 pp.

In academic discourse, a new way of thinking expressed in a unique style of writing is a rare and beautiful thing. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, a collection of essays by scholar, curator, and critic Laura U. Marks, achieves this elusive fusion of scholarly erudition and lyrical expression as it traces her "intellectual, erotic, and spiritual journey" through the complex artistic and theoretical terrain of the last ten years. Written before, during and after her first book, The Skin of the Film, the essays gathered together in Touch draw upon a wide range of ideas: Walter Benjamin's concept of aura, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of "haptic visuality," and Charles Sanders Peirce's understanding of the indexical sign. Marks uses them with elegance and precision to illuminate an equally wide range of texts, from experimental films and videos, to interactive software designed to trigger olfactory memories, to the author's own dreams.

What distinguishes Marks' approach throughout is the originality of her synthesis, the fluidity of her writing, and the unabashed love of each critical object, which exudes from virtually every page. Her essays are about works that solicit her "uncool, nose-against-the-glass enthusiasm." Rather than "bringing objects in line with ready-made principles," she tries to form multiple points of contact with them.

For anyone schooled in the dense theoretical mix of structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, feminism, and post-colonial theory that dominated North American graduate programs in the 1980s and '90s, such statements fly boldly in the face of one's training, as bringing objects in line with ready-made principles was exactly what such programs once taught (and arguably still teach) students to do. A product of this training herself, Marks notes in her introduction that the series of essays presented here reflects her own wrestling with, and I would add ultimate relinquishing of, the theories of Lacanian subjectivity and film spectatorship that have attained hegemony in the academy over the last twenty years. Touch, however, is by no means an "anti-theoretical" book; it simply embraces a theory that has been less popular in film and media studies, that of phenomenology, and throughout her book's pages Marks makes this theory her own.

Indebted to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and elaborated for the field of film scholarship by Vivian Sobchack in The Address of the Eye, a phenomenological approach to moving image media understands the act of viewing as a form of sensuous contact rather than a disembodied process of mastery through physical distance. In contrast to the decentered subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis, phenomenology proposes a subject that does have a center, which is continually transformed by its encounters with the world.

This embodied subject, material and inescapably mortal, identifies with other material "bodies," like those of film and video, and responds to appeals made by these embodied media to all five senses-sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. How this synaesthetic conversion occurs, and how our "intercorporeal relationship" with moving image media evolves, hinges on the notion of the haptic, the focus of Marks' book.

Marks builds her argument with care over the course of thirteen essays, starting with "Video Haptics and Erotics." Here we learn the various scholarly applications of the term haptic. Used by Alois Riegl in the late 1920s to distinguish between the tactility of ancient Egyptian art and the figurative tendencies of Roman art (the former he calls haptic, the latter, optical), the concept of haptic space has reappeared recently in writings by Deleuze and Guattari (for whom it describes a "smooth space" that must be navigated at close range, like an expanse of snow or sand); Noel Burch and Antonia Lant (each of whom use it to explain the visual contrast between flatness and depth in early and experimental cinemas) ; and Bill Nichols and Jane Gaines in the context of documentary theory. These last two claim that the visceral intimacy of certain documentaries engenders a haptic relationship in which the viewer mimetically embodies the experience of the film's subjects, at once acknowledging their physicality and essential unknowability.

From this complex etymology, Marks extrapolates a working definition: when our eyes move across a richly textured surface, occasionally pausing but not really focusing, making us wonder what we are actually seeing, they are functioning like organs of touch. Video, with its low contrast ratio, capacity for electronic and digital manipulation, and susceptibility to decay, is an ideal haptic medium, its graininess a lure for the roving gaze Marks describes.

Film, however, may also invite a haptic look by speeding up or slowing down imagery, enlarging grain, or deliberately enhancing already deteriorating nitrate. Pixelvision tapes by Sadie Benning, narrative features by Atom Egoyan, and experimental films by Mike Hoolboom, Phil Solomon, and Peggy Ahwesh, among others, create haptic sensations by utilizing such techniques-alternately drawing us into a disorienting closeness and allowing us to master barely perceptible imagery. This perpetual oscillation is the stuff of desire, for true eroticism lies in the constant back-and-forth between control and relinquishing, the "robust flow" between haptic and optical modes of seeing. Good haptic criticism thus requires finely tuned erotic faculties.