Page 97 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

82 Lotte Hoek

only on threat of being labeled wanton, has been well documented
(Bhattacharya 1998; Raju 2000). The stigma attached to cinema actresses
relies in part on their explicit flaunting of the norms of female bodily com-
portment in public, exposed to the gaze of many unknown others. As
Walter Benjamin has suggested, the mass audience wants to get hold of
things at increasingly closer range (1999[1936], 217). Benjamin sees in the
cinema a technology capable of delivering this proximity as in cinema “the
distracting element of which is . . . primarily tactile” (231). The cinema puts
the audience literally in touch with what is presented to it on screen. Jenny
and Shima were aware that their image was accessible for a rather intimate
connection with unknown spectators “out there.” This is evinced from
their strategies for hiding from this public, which for both involved a with-
drawal from that audience. Each had devised a strategy for remaining at a
distance from the imagined audience “out there.” Although Shima’s in-
laws would not allow her to act, they had no problem with letting her work
within the national studio complex in Dhaka, popularly imagined to be a
place of moral depravity. It was from the “public” that Shima needed to
remain distant. Similarly, when among her public, in public, Jenny was
completely unrecognizable to them, reconfigured by her transformation
into a visual-moral sign. Hiding in the studio or dressed unrecognizably,
with another’s voice to match, Shima and Jenny withdrew from the dis-
comforting visceral confrontation with the mass audience.
Shima and Jenny thus knew what the study of visual culture has of late
acknowledged: namely that there is a dense physical relation between an
image or object and its beholder (Meyer, this volume). Michael Taussig
relies on Benjamin to suggest as much in his Mimesis and Alterity: A partic-
ular History of the Senses (1993).

To get hold of something by way of its likeness. Here is what is crucial in the
resurgence of the mimetic faculty, namely the two layered notion of mime-
sis that is involved—a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, con-
nection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived. . . . On
this line of reasoning, contact and copy merge to become virtually identi-
cal, different moments of the one process of sensing; seeing something and

hearing something is to be in contact with that something. (21)

In terms of the cinema, it can be argued that the spectator thus stands in a
visceral, “palpable” connection to the figure on screen. Similarly, for
Roland Barthes, not only the grain of the voice is visceral, evincing sinew
and tissue, but he also remarked on the physical connection between the
listener and the person to whom the voice belongs. “I am determined to
listen to my relation to the body of someone who is singing or playing