Vivian Sobchack

American film theorist; author of The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992) and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004). Professor emerita at UCLA. On this wiki she matters as the phenomenological film theorist closest to Carbone's concerns — she is one of the two sponsors of Carbone's IUF candidacy — and as the source of the "film experience" framing Carbone extends to the "screen experience" of the arche-screen.

Key Points

  • "Film experience" (Address of the Eye): Sobchack adapts Mikel Dufrenne's quasi-subject (from his 1953 Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience) to film. The film is "not merely as a visible object but also as a viewing subject" — at the level of lived experience. Cinema is thus a perceptual-affective encounter between two quasi-subjects (spectator and film), not a subject regarding an object.
  • Three metaphors of cinema: "three metaphors have dominated film theory's descriptions of cinema: the picture frame, the window, and the mirror" (Address of the Eye, quoted Carbone ch. 5 p. 89). Sobchack historicizes and subordinates all three to the lived-body approach.
  • "Our lifeworld is the world of screens": against Husserl's claim that the Lebenswelt is an invariant. Carbone uses this to argue that the Kantian transcendental aesthetic's a priori spatiotemporal forms are historically retrojected, not invariant.
  • Play and display: Sobchack's formulation for electronic (and by extension digital) media's invitation — in contrast to Deleuze's cinematic "little time in the pure state." The new screens invite presence and display, not immersion in a mythical past.
  • "Electronic body": for Sobchack, the spatiotemporality of today's screens "cannot be inhabited by any body that is not also an electronic body." Carbone draws the consequence: the screens' seduction requires the human body to be reduced to its own mere surface — an "impossible demand" in Žižek's sense.

Principal Relevance to This Wiki

  1. Sobchack's film-experience phenomenology provides Carbone with the "quasi-subject" framework he generalizes to the arche-screen as such (ch. 5 "The Arche-Screen as a 'Quasi-Subject,'" pp. 81–91).
  2. Her three-metaphors schema (frame/window/mirror) is what Carbone's arche-screen is not — neither frame nor window nor (strictly) mirror, but a fourth apparatus with its own logic.
  3. Her "electronic body" formulation grounds Carbone's ch. 6 argument about the "impossible demand" of today's screens.

Principal Works

  • The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992).
  • Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004).
  • Multiple essays on screen phenomenology, electronic media, and the body in cinema.

Connections

Open Questions

  • Does Carbone's generalization from "film experience" (Sobchack) to "screen experience" (Carbone) preserve what Sobchack distinctively contributed (the phenomenological rigor of the lived-body approach), or does it dilute it?
  • How does Sobchack's phenomenology of cinema relate to the earlier phenomenological film criticism (Astruc, Ayfre, Amédée Ayfre) that Bazin influenced? The lineage is continuous but the vocabulary is not.

Sources

  • carbone-2019-philosophy-screens — ch. 5 (especially pp. 82–91), ch. 6 (on the "electronic body" and play-and-display). Carbone draws systematically on The Address of the Eye and later essays. Sobchack is also listed in the Acknowledgments as an IUF sponsor.