Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
between being a symptom of abjection and objectification and a territory ripe for reclamation. Despite its resonance with objectification and the negation of subjectivity, flesh has become an important political space. To ignore flesh is to ignore how bodies have been made to speak of difference.
The difficulty in taking on flesh, however, stems from the fear that objectification reifies identity and essentializes subjects in particular ways. We see this ambivalence at work in feminist rhetoric that posits the body as “that which has been belied, distorted, and imagined by a masculine representational logic” while simultaneously seeking to redeem a feminine version of the flesh.52 This cycle of abjection and resurrection does nothing to move us beyond the impasse of identity categories. The question, then, is how to think about flesh outside of identity while retaining its purchase on theorizing difference. In what follows, I propose moving to sensation as an analytic because it allows us to think about flesh, not as something static and essential, but as something that changes, something that is in motion. In this way differences become a matter of relationships rather than fixed essences unto themselves. The focus on sensation to articulate difference leads us back to masochism and toward empathetic reading.
Through synthesizing various iterations of masochism, empathetic reading allows us to read the affective and sensational currents that run through texts. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s practice of intensive reading, empathetic reading foregrounds both the corporeality of reading and the “impersonal flows,” the affects and sensations that texts produce. This set of practices brings attention to the ways that sensation shapes representation and allows me to weave together different tapestries of masochism from different voices grouped by sensational affinity, that is to say grouped by the sensations that they arouse in the reader rather than by historical, disciplinary, or identitarian relationships. Following Claire Colebrook, this is a methodology that asks, “What are the forces of potentiality hidden in our experienced encounters?”53
Empathetic Reading and Embodied Knowledge
Empathetic reading is a reading practice, a critical hermeneutic, and the methodology that I use throughout the book. As a reading practice, empathetic reading highlights corporeality and the flesh. Some of this work is done by unpacking the historical structures in which each actor is embedded, but more generally it calls attention to the nonidentitarian circuits of embodied knowledge production. In this way I am taking up Elizabeth Freeman’s call to “theorize S/M, to historicize its theoreticians, and, most urgently, to theorize its historicisms.”54 By taking the writer into account, I seek to make the flesh more visible within the process of knowledge production. In this regard, history of science and feminist theory has been useful. History of science has provided many ways to understand knowledge production as corporeal, oftentimes enlarging our concept of what counts as knowledge and who is a knowledge producer.55 History of science’s particular emphasis on the materiality of practice has allowed me to focus on the sensations that are woven into knowledge transmission, giving weight, for example, to the smell of a whip and the texture of a corset. Feminist and queer scholarship also has a rich tradition of thinking critically about knowledge production and access to knowledge. This work emphasizes the importance of thinking through class, race, gender presentation, and sexuality (among other variables) as coproductive of identities. Feminist and queer theory allows us to think about the fact that different bodies have different types of relationships to power and experience its effects differently. This, then, highlights the importance of understanding experience as complex and multiple. By bringing these related but divergent methodologies together, I hope to emphasize the place of contingency and embodiment at the heart of knowledge production. Affect, sensation, experience, and multiplicity are the key terms that I seek to emphasize in thinking about reading.
Further, as a reading practice, empathetic reading illuminates how subjectivity and power act in concert with embodied experience. These insights allow us to see masochism as a relational, contingent term that describes a plethora of relationships. What comes to the fore through this practice of reading is a series of unexpected sensational affinities. Theorists and practitioners speak to each other in multiple and unexpected ways. Empathetic reading also functions as a critical hermeneutic and methodology in that it highlights how we can discern the structure of sensation in various texts/performances and it works to give those sensations meaning, which in turn allows us to read difference in a sensational mode.
As a marker of difference, sensation reveals something of the underlying structure that binds assemblages together. Gilles Deleuze provides an example of the relationship between assemblages and sensation. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, he describes Bacon’s 1978 painting Figure at a Washbasin, which portrays a figure clinging to the sides of a washbasin with his head down. The figure looks as though he is about to jump into the basin, but the rest of canvas—which looks to be the interior of a bathroom—is remarkably static. In his description of the painting, Deleuze writes that “the body-figure exerts an intense motionless effort upon itself in order to escape down the blackness of the drain.”56 Further, he describes 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