Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ this observed desire to escape as waiting for a spasm. This set of descriptions is extremely evocative; Deleuze captures the motion and emotion of the work, yet it is unclear what this tells us about sensation. While he writes that Bacon may have been trying to approximate abjection or horror, Deleuze condenses this into a scream, which “is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth. All the pressures of the body.”⁵⁷ We might describe pressure as the operative sensation in this piece, then. While pressure might be an unintuitive sensation to ascribe to abjection or horror, the logic of sensation is not that which lies on the surface but that impersonal flow which provides the unity for the whole assemblage. Later in the text, Deleuze analogizes this process of finding the logic of sensation with finding its rhythm. Rhythm is “diastole-systole: the world that seizes me by closing in around me, the self that opens to the world and opens the world itself.”⁵⁸ This analogy is useful because it illustrates that sensation is something internal to the assemblage that articulates a particular essence, as well as emphasizing that sensation is also something that opens onto others through numerous affective and structural connections. If the rhythm of the piece is pressure, it is something that is articulated through the combination of colors, lines, movement, and so on of the painting, but it is also something that the viewer can identify and connect with his or her concept of pressure. Through this process of connection on the level of sensation, we can start to unpack why abjection and horror—Bacon’s stated goals—manifest as pressure. This, in turn, allows us to probe the ways we might connect this sensation of pressure to various experiences of these affects.

      This simultaneous internality and externality of sensation is what gives it its analytic charge. Through this dimension we can articulate how sensation is connected to politics, bodies, and feelings. It is these linkages in particular that enliven our understanding of the corporeal and its analytic possibilities. By theorizing sensation we acquire a way to understand structures at a level beyond the discursive. We gain access to how these act upon bodies. Though each body reacts differently, we can read a structure as a form with multiple incarnations and many different affects. All of this is achieved without having to appeal to identity; this is about opening paths to difference.

      There is, however, another dimension to using sensation as an analytic tool: namely, the fact that deciphering the structure of sensation requires a particular mode of reading that emphasizes the connections between reader and text/object/assemblage. Deleuze puts forward the methodology of intensive reading as putting the text into conversation with the rest of the reader’s world: “This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things . . . is reading with love.”⁵⁹ This invocation of the readers’ world not only introduces contingency and multiplicity but also invites us to examine the fleshiness, or experiential dimension, of the text. Deleuze is not concerned with the meaning of the text or the individual reader. He argues that a book “transmits something that resists coding: flows, revolutionary active lines of flight, lines of absolute decoding rather than any intellectual culture.”⁶⁰ Deleuze foregrounds contingency and experience as they relate to the body (and state) of the reader. This allows him to be attentive to the flesh while not reifying any connection between experience and identity.

      While empathetic reading is centrally concerned with deciphering the structures of sensation that subtend various objects/assemblages/texts, it does so by being attentive to the sensations aroused in the reader. While Deleuze’s practice of intensive reading is attentive to readerly sensation, it is not actually invested in the corporeality of the reader. Here is where we part ways; empathetic reading relies on fostering a connection between the corporeality of the reader and the structures of sensation. This emphasis on readerly corporeality allows the objects/assemblages/ texts to be grouped by structure of sensation, thereby allowing for promiscuous and queer groupings and underscoring the work of empathy.

      Bringing readerly flesh into the production of textual affect brings to mind other work within queer theory on embodied reading. I place Carolyn Dinshaw’s queer “touch across time” and Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography alongside empathetic reading. Dinshaw emphasizes the production of history via “a relation across time that has an affective or an erotic component,” with political and present consequences for this touching: “What importance do social, cultural, economic, and political constraints and hierarchies have if we speak so blithely of ‘reenactment,’ ‘citation,’ ‘living with’ a figure from the past?”⁶¹ Freeman’s vision of erotohistoriography makes more explicit the ways that history can serve the present; she argues that affective temporal relations may produce “reparative criticism” that “insist[s] that various queer social practices, especially those involving enjoyable bodily sensations, produce forms of time consciousness—even historical consciousness—that can intervene into the material damage done in the name of development, civilization, and so on.”⁶² While both Freeman and Dinshaw underscore the importance of the corporeal links that are forged between the reader, text, and in many cases, the past and present, empathetic reading offers a twist on that methodology by making explicit the consequences of taking writerly flesh into account through the juxtaposition of disciplines and histories and empathy.

      I argue, therefore, that in addition to forging a relationship with the text, the reader forges a relationship with the writer of the text and his or her subject position. Further, these sensational connections between reader, text, and writer are forged through empathy and identification. In its least vexed form, empathy asks the reader to imagine his or her body in the place of another. Even as I write this I acknowledge that this logic of substitution, the literal replacement of one body for another, can be dangerous, both because it threatens to obliterate the other and because it risks “naturalizing the condition of pained embodiment.”⁶³ Though empathy can be a problematic term, I use it to speak about the way that feeling through another can be a space of multiplicity rather than erasure or imperialism.⁶⁴ In this I am drawing on Elin Diamond’s analysis of identification, or what she terms the slide from “I” to “we.”⁶⁵ In articulating the political possibilities for identification, Diamond cites Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’s description of reading as a form of identification: “One never reads except by identification. But what kind? When I say identification, I do not say loss of self. I become, I inhabit. I enter. Inhabiting someone at that moment I can feel myself traversed by that person’s initiatives and actions.”⁶⁶ While Cixous recalls Deleuze’s analysis of reading as a process of becoming, she emphasizes the transformation (and augmentation) of self rather than its unmaking. This distinction is critical because it highlights how empathy can work. By preserving the integrity of the self, Cixous draws attention to the way that identification can be a form of inhabitation and multiplicity. Neither self nor other is destroyed, but a lacuna of sensations and feelings binds this hybrid of reader-text-writer. Just as Diamond posits the potential for a politics of identification, “a politics that dismantles the phenomenological universals of transcendent subjects and objects; that places identity in an unstable and contingent relation to identification; and that works close to the nerves dividing and connecting the psychic and the social,” I argue that a critical employment of empathy can produce similar effects.⁶⁷ Allowing this multiplicity into the empathetic equation shifts the focus away from understanding the other as unified and transparently available to us and invites us to experience affinities on a corporeal level with others through sensation. This dimension of multiplicity is a space where difference can become apparent while still registering the structures of sensation that undergird the text. Empathetic reading, therefore, allows us to grapple with the position of the other while maintaining a sense of the impersonal flows that bind things together.

      Masochism’s Sensations and Histories

      In writing the histories of masochism that form the bulk of Sensational Flesh, then, I aim to attend to questions of flesh and sensation. Practically, this has meant paying attention to particular bounded histories in order to see how they might СКАЧАТЬ