Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

the experience of weightlessness in space, confirming that
disruption in 2001 is always an experience of the future.
This thrusts us, or at least our bodies into what Michelson
calls in a typically precise phrase, a ‘genetic epistemology’
(1969 59). 78
Many of the most memorable sequences of the film –
the rotation of the space hostess, the slow graceful flight of
the spaceships, Frank Poole’s body spinning away from the
Discovery, the various space-walks – are famous for their
remarkable presentation of a new body, a weightless body
that emerges ‘beneath’ the narrative as it were, and takes
its place as the corporeal counterbalance to the Spirit of
Gravity of HAL. As important as these remarkable shots of
the floating body are the sounds of the astronauts breathing
that can be heard during the Jupiter mission. These pointof-view
sounds serve to place us directly within a cinematic
body. This identification is entirely corporeal, fixed as
it is through a shared breath, a shared living function
occurring apart from the narrative, but acting as its motor
force. This breathing, like the monolith itself, is an exterior
inside the unfolding drama, its condition of possibility
that remains unthought. Unthought but intimately felt.
This breathing, weightless body operates what Michelson
calls a ‘restructuring of the real’, by focussing us upon
‘the corporeal a-prioris that compose our sensory motor
apparatus’ (1969 60). This allows what is, for Michelson, the
films fundamental element to emerge, its corpo-reflexivity:
‘The intensified and progressively intimate consciousness
of one’s physicality’ that ‘provides the intimation of that
physicality as the ground of consciousness’ (1969 61). 79
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