Kubrick’s audible bodies: unseen subjectivities in 2001 and The Shining
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James Batcho
Abstract
Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility (hearing/listening), affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship (the frame) and instead enter the reality of the film’s immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach (1) the microphone from its adherence to space, (2) the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Special section on Peirce and Consciousness; Guest Editor: Donna E. West
- Peirce’s vocation for consciousness: an evolutionary account
- The element of surprise in Peirce’s double consciousness paradigm
- Peirce’s legacy for contemporary consciousness studies, the emergence of consciousness from qualia, and its evanescence in habits
- Consciousness and mind in Peirce: distinctions and complementarities
- On the bottomless lake of firstness: conjectures on the synthetic power of consciousness
- Toward a Peircean logic of meditation
- Regular Articles
- Semiotic analysis of symbolic logic using tagmemic theory: with implications for analytic philosophy
- A. J. Greimas in the world: travels, translations, transmissions
- Analyse sémiotique de l’index de livre : Étude de la construction complexe et unique d’un paratexte
- Kubrick’s audible bodies: unseen subjectivities in 2001 and The Shining
- An experimental study on the effect of emotion lines in comics
- What do hashtags afford in digital fashion communication? An exploratory study on Gucci-related hashtags on Twitter and Instagram
- Surviving a natural disaster as a semiotic reformation of the self and worldview
- Hotspots for textual dynamics: cultural semiotic approach to digital archives
- Book Review
- Review of Conspiracy theories as a form of phatic communication
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Special section on Peirce and Consciousness; Guest Editor: Donna E. West
- Peirce’s vocation for consciousness: an evolutionary account
- The element of surprise in Peirce’s double consciousness paradigm
- Peirce’s legacy for contemporary consciousness studies, the emergence of consciousness from qualia, and its evanescence in habits
- Consciousness and mind in Peirce: distinctions and complementarities
- On the bottomless lake of firstness: conjectures on the synthetic power of consciousness
- Toward a Peircean logic of meditation
- Regular Articles
- Semiotic analysis of symbolic logic using tagmemic theory: with implications for analytic philosophy
- A. J. Greimas in the world: travels, translations, transmissions
- Analyse sémiotique de l’index de livre : Étude de la construction complexe et unique d’un paratexte
- Kubrick’s audible bodies: unseen subjectivities in 2001 and The Shining
- An experimental study on the effect of emotion lines in comics
- What do hashtags afford in digital fashion communication? An exploratory study on Gucci-related hashtags on Twitter and Instagram
- Surviving a natural disaster as a semiotic reformation of the self and worldview
- Hotspots for textual dynamics: cultural semiotic approach to digital archives
- Book Review
- Review of Conspiracy theories as a form of phatic communication
