SENSE
TECHNICS
BODY
MIKA ELO & MIIKA LUOTO eds.
SENSE
TECHNICS
BODY
MIKA ELO & MIIKA LUOTO eds.
ART THEORETICAL WRITINGS FROM THE ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS 12
SENSE
TECHNICS
BODY
MIKA ELO & MIIKA LUOTO eds.
Table of Contents
Figures of Touch
Sense, Technics, Body
7
Preface
Mika Elo & Miika Luoto
13
Body-Theatre
Jean-Luc Nancy
33
Light Touches: A Media Aesthetic Mapping of Touch
Mika Elo
59
Fingerbombing, or ‘Touching is Good’:
The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch
David Parisi
91
Approaching the Untouchable:
From Husserl to Merleau-Ponty
Miika Luoto
121
A Little Distance, Please
– On the Relationship Between Mediality and Touch
Maiju Loukola
153
Scenography: Touches and Encounters
Laura Gröndahl
181
Pressings
Harri Laakso
Publisher
The Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki
Editors
Mika Elo & Miika Luoto
Visual concept
BOND Creative Agency
Graphic Design
Marjo Malin
Printing and binding
Tallinna Raamatutrükikoja OÜ, 2018
Art theoretical writings from the Academy of Fine Arts (12)
ISBN 978-952-7131-45-9 (printed)
ISBN 978-952-7131-46-6 (pdf)
213
© Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki and the authors
310
Dimensions of Touch
Sami Santanen
Contributors
Preface
MIKA ELO AND MIIKA LUOTO
“Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an
inquirer, I do not know.”1 This phrase of Saint Augustine’s concerning time is it to describe touch as well. Touch, not unlike time, is
something seemingly self-evident but hard to put into words, something most familiar and yet strange. As the texts of the present volume show, each approach to touch is one way to engage with such
a challenging diiculty.
We could approach touch as a sense among others. However,
when we encounter the peculiarities of touch, we must admit that
it is a sense unlike all the others. Lacking an organ of its own and
being spread out over the whole body, touch is intimately connected to one’s feeling of life or corporeal existence. As we perceive, in
the act of touch, the tactual properties of the object, we are at once
bodily engaged with it and exposed to it. Touch is, then, a way of
1
Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, chapter xiv.
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MIKA ELO AND MIIKA LUOTO
PREFACE
estimating the sense of a presence, that is, a way of sensing the
very sense of a contact. We may say, generally, that to be in tactual
contact means to defend oneself against the threats of the world
as well as to enjoy its blessings.
From here follows a major diiculty: the delimitation of the phenomena of touch is anything but obvious. Clearly, we are tactually
sensitive to various objective qualities (e.g., smoothness, sharpness,
weight, heat) as we are also, in the presence of such qualities, sensitive to our respective subjective states (sliding, being stung, having
to withstand pressure, being burned). However, since the sensitivity
of touch is relative to a mode of behaviour (e.g., grasping, fondling,
hitting, kissing), the tactual contact with the object immediately
takes part in a more general, socially shared signiicance (efectivity, sensuality, aggressiveness, eroticism). Finally, through touch
we enter the world of bodies that come close to us by remaining in
distance, that show themselves to us from out of their own, hidden
depth. The contact between bodies, bordering on something untouchable, brings with it the requirement of sensitivity to what is
proper and appropriate: the demand of tact. Hence, with the possibility of enjoyment and sufering, of respect and harassment, the
bodily existence’s vulnerability and strength becomes the inevitable context for questions about touch.
This complex ield of phenomena gives rise to questions with
decisive methodical implications. How should we approach the
relation between the physical and the psychical dimensions of
touch? How should we consider the contact at issue in touch with
respect to immediacy and mediacy? And how should we think
about the materiality of touch in relation to language or some
other kind of ideational distance? The challenge of the topic, as
well as its promise, lies in the fact that the phenomena of touch
are located at intermediary points between the mind and the
body, the close and the distant, the surface and the depth, the
one and the other.
Further challenges follow when we enter the hidden dynamics
of touch: to touch means to be touched by what one touches. In the
very act of touching, something happens to me, so that I ind myself as dependent on another body, another quality, another locality.
The bodily subject of touch is a “self” not by relating to itself, but
by sensing itself sensing; that is, it opens to itself by being exposed
to what is foreign to it. Here, touch proves to constitute a kind of a
prototype of experience, so that its signiicance extends far beyond
the limits of one sense modality. Regardless of how one studies the
structural dynamics of touch, it certainly calls for a re-consideration of the basic relations between the subject and the object, the
self and the other, activity and passivity.
The phenomena of touch and, more generally, of the sensible
experience at large, can be addressed in terms of the pathic (from
the Greek pathos: sensitivity, afectability, sufering). As pathic, the
experience of touch is neither subjective nor objective; it is an event
that surpasses my activities as it befalls on me, but only insofar as I
contribute to it by my response. In its surprise character, the pathic moment of touch comes too early for us to be ready for it, and
our response comes too late to reach the experience at its peak.
Therefore, a touching gesture – be it physical, ideational or social –
never coincides with itself. It inds its manner only amid pressing
matters. Designating far more than just a dependency on sensibility, the pathic refers to what according to Bernhard Waldenfels
constitutes the structure of experience, namely, the susceptibility
to ruptures conditioning the very horizon of our abilities.
The question of the pathic moment runs through the texts of
the present volume, which take us to diferent dimensions of touch.
Some of the texts venture out to the obscure borderlands of the
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MIKA ELO AND MIIKA LUOTO
phenomenal world where knowledge-oriented approaches encounter their limits. Some of them dissect speciic issues, while others
address something we could call generative patterns, or, as the title of this volume suggests, “igures of touch”.2
Introductions of academic books often try to give an overview
of their contents. Here, such an attempt feels irrelevant, since the
present volume consists of a very selective and non-systematic collection of texts approaching the peculiar ensemble of the difering senses of touch. Let us however note one key element, a kind
of background igure of the volume, which easily slips unnoticed
through one’s ingers. It is the question of addressing that plays a
central role in Jean-Luc Nancy’s text. As his “Body-Theatre” suggests, touching can only take place on the risky stage of life. There
is no touch without a turning toward the world of the others, and
this implies bodies that in some way address one another, that is,
that are exposed to one another at their limits. Most importantly,
such addressing is not reducible to mere consciousness, not even
to capacities attributed to individual bodies. It is something that
takes place in-between. In similar vein, this compilation of texts
lives of punctual interferences rather than topical convergence.
Its polyphonic outcome is an interference pattern, a multifaceted complication of the senses of touch – senses in plural, in all the
senses of the word “sense”.
Mika Elo and Miika Luoto
2
“Figures of Touch” was the title of a research project funded by the Academy of
Finland (2009–2012, project number 127847). This volume is a late fruit of that
project.
Body-Theatre
JEAN-LUC NANCY1
Each time I come into the world, that is to say every day, the curtain
of my eyelids is lifted on something that cannot be called a spectacle, for I am already caught by it, mixed into it, carried along it by
all the forces of my body which moves forward towards this world,
incorporates its space, its directions, its resistances, its openings,
and moves within this perception; my body is only the viewpoint
from which this perceiving, which is also an action, can be organized.
Like all points, the viewpoint is without dimensions. And we know
that it is the blind spot around which are disposed all the perspectives, relations, the close and the distant. It is the obscure vanishing point which stays back of myself, but “back” in the sense of “at
the back of the room”, at a backside that I could represent to myself as being a point, or so to say a non-space situated just behind
the space which develops as my head, my skull, my back, that is, as
everything this side of myself from where my perceiving and acting body knows itself to be carried and projected.
1
The text is originally a lecture delivered by Jean-Luc Nancy in French, with a consecutive English interpretation by Susanna Lindberg, on 14.4.2010 at the KiasmaTheatre, Helsinki.
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BODY-THEATRE
From this point, then, no spectacle is possible, only engagement
and mix-up with the world, attractions and repulsions, crossings
and obstructions, captures and losses, seizures and relinquishments. Being in the world is the very contrary of being in front of
a spectacle. It is being within, not in front. Besides, what we, even
outside the philosophic circles, are used to calling “being-in-theworld”, is the translation of the German in der Welt sein, by which
Heidegger tries to signify an in which is precisely not an in of inclusion – of a subject in a pre-existing world – but an in of belonging together of the two in the mode of what he calls “thrownness”,
Geworfensein. In it, we should hear at the same time the gesture of
throwing and projecting into the very fall that makes us “ind ourselves here”, and the sketch, Entwurf, the projection of a possible
gesture and bearing of existing – for existence itself is nothing else
than the unceasing putting into play of one’s own sketches.
I make this small detour via Heidegger only in order to mark
that when one insists most strongly on the priority of the “beingin” – of being insofar as it is abandoned, thrown, destined, mobilized
in its being by the very fact of being – one is as little concerned as
possible by the phenomena of representation: representation requires a “subject” to which it could happen, although in regard to
the existent itself the subject can only be perfectly secondary, derived and limited (for instance the subject of knowledge, the subject
of a conception or a vision). Insofar as it is a question of separating
as irmly as possible the order of existence from the orders of knowing, representing, iguring and also of measuring and evaluating, in
order to bring them all back to the condition of existing – the point
is not to deny them but to show their ultimate condition – it is necessary to take heed of something that has irrevocably started: in
our age, the “subject” has become "unmoored" like Rimbaud’s peninsulas, its moorings untied it has broken away from its “ancient
parapets”, and it has been thrown and projected towards another
moment of its very singular destiny, the ininite destination of which
we – we and the world – are.
On the other hand, the sending without reserve or return does
not prevent us from noting that this description of existing lacks
something. Nothing prevents us from pointing out this lack; on the
contrary, we are very precisely and insistently driven to do that. We
can put it very simply: existence also wants to put itself on stage.
This is a part of its project, of its projection or of its thrownness.
This is a part of its being-in-the-world.
No doubt, Heidegger does not ignore this – it would be too easy
to attribute such short-sightedness to him. Nevertheless, he never
thematises the necessity of staging as such. No doubt it is implied
in the attention he gives to art in general and to poetry in particular, but this attention never touches theatre. This was underlined
by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who in this very point wanted to take
his distance from Heidegger within his proximity to him. He noted
particularly that theatre did not play any role in Heidegger’s relections on Hölderlin, while it is self-evident that theatre was very important for the translator of Sophocles and the author of the tragedy The Death of Empedocles.
I will not pursue this line of questioning any further; they belong to Lacoue-Labarthe. They remain his. But they give me an indication: the existent wants to put itself on stage, and this will (desire, drive, as you like) belongs to existence itself. Later, if we can,
we will try to justify the second proposition. For the time being, we
will examine the irst one.
Let us go back to the scene of my coming into the world. Each
time it happens, that is to say every day, my eyelids do not open
only onto the non-spectacle of the perceived, experienced, acted
world. At the same time, they also open onto the obscurity that I
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BODY-THEATRE
irst called a blind spot at the back of myself or behind myself: they
do not open in this way for me, for my look, but for the possible look
of another, of a multitude of others. It is a possible and, no doubt,
indisputable look, because even in my deepest solitude I belong to
this multitude of others. I belong to it at least as the one who knows
that it is not possible for me to see the thing that comes out when
the small double curtain rises: my own look. In this way, I am like
a spectator who has not been able to get a place in the theatre and
who nevertheless knows what s/he misses: inside the closed space,
the back leaning against the obscurity of the rest of the city, the curtain rises on a scene, in other words, in the proper space of a coming to presence. Never mind how many characters, how intense a
lighting, what kind of a scenery: the only thing that matters is the
coming to presence and representation in this sense, that is to say
an intensiication of presence.
When this other is not myself but another self, him-or-herself
leaning against the same obscurity within him-or-herself – knowing that s/he is bound to the same impossibility of seeing him/herself and of knowing whether s/he is “same”, except by the vanishing point of his/her blind spot – when such another sees and hears
me, s/he knows that s/he is looking at a spectacle. Not at what is
called the “spectacle of the world”, which normally denotes a kind
of a panorama of perception spread out before a subject and which,
when analysed, belongs to his/her own being in the world, but really at a spectacle in the theatrical sense of the word: s/he sees how
a presence puts itself on stage and presents itself to him/her. S/he
receives, rather than perceives, the intensiication of this presence,
in other words, its staging.
It is not necessary to refer to the most laden sense of these
words – “spectacle”, “staging” – nor to think about all the possible
ways of assuming diferent roles, of showing of and boasting, of ex-
hibiting oneself and appearing to advantage, of ostentation and posing. It is enough to experience very simply and very discreetly that
the so-called “subject” is coming to presence – that is to say, once
more, to “representation”, according to the intensive and actually
originary sense of the word. And in this sense, a subject is a body.
***
Should we specify? The subject, albeit thrown into the world and
engaged with it, is still not a presence. It can be other than a subject of knowledge, but it is still an immaterial point, a viewpoint
or a point in which acts, conducts and thoughts are being decided, divided and joined. In this sense, the “da” of Heidegger’s
Dasein, the “there” of existing, remains ambiguous: no doubt, it is
openness and spatiality, in the sense of ex-position according to
which it ex-ists, but simultaneously it is also, and notwithstanding Heidegger’s own aspiration, punctual and somehow held back
within the subjectivity of its “each time mine” (Jemeinigkeit). In this
case, “subjectivity” does not mean the relativity and the interiority of a point of view, but only and irst – and once again notwithstanding Heidegger’s own efort of putting it – the immateriality
of “my” position, which is punctual, the summit of the angle or of
the articulation of a decision of existence. In a word, it is not a body.
It does not reach its own body.
Therefore, it is not any more theatrical than the subjects of representation in the ordinary sense of the word (i.e. the representation
of an idea, an image, or a signiication) or the subjects of knowledge,
action, judgment, or the subjects of relation and afect.
In reality, as long as one thinks in terms of the “subject”, one
thinks, whether one likes it or not, in terms of an intangible substance – even when this substance really becomes a subject, as
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BODY-THEATRE
Hegel wanted it, that is to say a relation to self in which the self alienates and extraneates itself in view of returning back onto itself.
With Hegel, we do not really deal with theatre, and maybe we never
deal with it in philosophy (except maybe with Aristotle, but that is
another story, and I will not start it here). We remain on the contrary always more or less within the intangible coniguration of a
point of projection (which is also a projection of a self) connected
to signiications, which are by deinition intangible.
In this sense, the one is all there is; by the way, this is also why
the question of the other imposes itself in such a complex manner
when one asks how a subject can recognize another subject or how
an ego can relate to an alter ego. The problem is that when we start
from the one it becomes impossible to reach the other. Heidegger
knows it, when he objects to all the other ways of introducing the
other except through the originarily given Mitdasein, a being-therewith or a being-with-another-there. But this “with” – to which I
grant the greatest importance, and which is the form of common
that the modernity no doubt inds most diicult to think – this “with”
still risks being nothing but a simple side by side of subjects. I am
also far from denying the importance of contiguity, co-presence
and common appearing or compearance. Nor do I deny the other
dimension, which is somehow orthogonal in the sense that it consists in facing the other, and which refers to the tradition of “I and
you” (Buber) and of “the face of the other” (Lévinas).
What matters here belongs to another order, which is so to say
anterior and exterior to all forms of common appearing, whether side by side or face to face. What matters is the very condition
of there being presence at all. Of course, the presence is in the
world – but the world is nothing but a disposition of presences, to
the extent that “disposition” has both the topological sense of simple spacing and the dynamic sense of coming and withdrawing, ar-
riving and departing; for presence never consists in the simple position, in a situation with given coordinates, but in the exposition,
in the presentation, in coming, approaching and moving away. The
word “presence” is constructed on the “pre” of proximity and not
on the “pre” of anteriority. The present is neither before nor in front
but near. Therefore, it is temporal as well as spatial: neither before
nor after, but near, coming close, and the spatiality of “nearness” is
a temporal spatiality of coming and approaching.
***
This is where we encounter the order of the body and theatre. The
body is what comes, approaches on a scene – and theatre is what
gives the place for the approach of a body.
This is what happens when I come to the world – every day,
each time. “I” do not come as the eternally intangible punctuality of a subject of enunciation, nor of any subject whatsoever. We
could even say: “I” never come. The I remains situated in the absolute anteriority of its punctuality. On the other hand, its eyes open
as well as its mouth and ears, and its body extends itself, diverts
itself, disposes itself. Of course, we could say that “I” comes out of
the mouth, out of “its” mouth, and this is absolutely true. But what
of the other comes, approaches, touches us is the mouth, the voice,
and in the same way the other’s eyes approach us, their look and
their way of staring and viewing come closer.
This is like Creation according to Artaud – him of course, how
could we avoid being in his company? According to at least one of
his trajectories, Artaud deduces (if I can say so) the theatre from
the Creation (with a capital C). I will not stop here to examine the
alchemical symbolism that precedes this consideration but I simply
note the following: he irst states that theatre forms the Double “not
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BODY-THEATRE
of this immediate everyday reality which has been slowly truncated to a mere lifeless copy”2 but rather of “another, archetypal and
dangerous reality [which is] not human but inhuman”.
He then discovers that this other reality is precisely the reality of the Creation, insofar as it makes its work in two phases. The
irst one is the act of “one general – unconlicting – Will”. It is followed by the second one, “the time of obstacles and the Double, of
matter and dulling of ideas [épaississement de l'idée; lit. “thickening
of the idea”; trans.].”
Clearly these two phases are logical rather than chronological.
There is the moment of unity without conlict, which is inally just
the “idea”, or let us say the principle and the decision of the existence of the world, and there is the moment of efectivity, which
comes less like another stage and more like the real opening of
the world – of the “Cosmos in turmoil”, as the text speciies. The
Cosmos is traversed by conlicts. This means that reality is full of
conlicts, and a careful reading of the text would show that it is so
precisely because of the matter, that is to say of the “dulling of ideas”, which can also be understood as “the expression of light, rarity and intransmutability in a solid, impenetrable manner”. This is
the material gold of the alchemical transformation, which is itself
the symbol of the spiritual gold.
But – and this is the essential point – it is a necessary symbol. I
will not study the reasons of this necessity, because my aim is not
to penetrate Artaud’s logic. I simply pose with him that there is a
material opacity and dullness which is indispensable for the presentation of the stakes of the Creation or of the Cosmos – as crea-
tion and cosmos – insofar as the conlict belongs to that which is at
stake there. The cosmical (elsewhere he says metaphysical) conlict
needs to be presented as a “drama”. Why does it have to be presented? Because by itself it is or it makes the demand of presentation.
A body is not simply a particular concretion, local accumulation,
dulling or thickening: Artaud is manifestly speaking about a thickening that also implies the distinction and the multiplicity of bodies.
The idea may seem to be one; the reality, of which it is the idea, can
only be plural. (I venture to think that this is precisely what Artaud
formulates intuitively when he is speaking about the two phases of
the creation.) A body is what comes, what approaches on a scene –
and theatre is what gives the place for such an approach. In truth,
the idea of cosmos is the idea of plurality, and there is no creation
that would not be irst distinction, separation, spacing.
But spacing itself is not an inert interval. It is exposition. To put
it crudely, the void between bodies is not a negative thickness – and
nor are the other forms of spacing and immateriality. Here I refer to
the Stoic theory of the incorporeals: according to the Stoics, there
are four incorporeals, namely the void, the time, the place and the
lekton (the sayable or the expressible). The spacing that I am speaking about is a combination of the void and the place; the void permits the distinction of places, and time is nothing else but the spacing of sense, the extension by which it stretches towards itself (or if
you prefer, by which the signiier stretches towards the signiied).
This is how the bodies are essentially and not accidentally exposed. Dis-position is the nature of their position in being, and the
dis- implies the ex-: the bodies are disposed partes extra partes, as
in Descartes’ deinition of extension. Once again, exteriority is not
simply a lack of interiority or of self-presence: it is the very condition of the co-presence of bodies, or of their common appearing,
which is simply the rule and the efect of creation.
2
Antonin Artaud: “Le théâtre alchimique”, Le théâtre et son double, in Œuvres,
Gallimard – Quarto 2004, 532. Trans. Victor Corti: Antonin Artaud, Collected
Works, volume four, The Theatre and its Double, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, 34.
The following quotations are from pp. 532–534, trans. 35–36.
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BODY-THEATRE
If I dared, I would say that theatre has already started in the
interstellar spaces or in the ininitesimal spacings of particles, because what Artaud calls drama has already started there, irst of all
as action – the act of accomplishment responding to an expectation
(service, cult, responsibility). The expectation is in fact already the
expectation of a sense: of “the sayable” of the common appearing
of things that is called “cosmos”.
But it is enough that I say that the speaking body comes among
bodies as the manifestation of this expectation. And that this time,
with the speaking body, theatre is already given or sketched.
Such a body presents itself by opening itself: this is called “the
senses”. At the same time as the senses receive sensorial information, they also emit it, if I can say so. One again, the eye sees, but
it looks, too. While looking, it exposes, it projects in front of itself
something of its own way of seeing and of being seen, but also of its
knowledge of not being able to see itself seeing. All of this is given
with a look of its eyes in which, as Proust says, “lesh becomes mirror and, more than any other part of the body, gives us the illusion
of letting us approach the soul”.
Overall, Proust’s phrase is strange, for even though it is possible
that I see myself in the eyes of another, this optical mirror function
does not justify the phrase. The phrase rather says that in the eyes
of another I see myself looking and consequently being looked at –
always following the same fundamental extra-version which makes
it impossible for me to see myself seeing, and which for that very
reason exposes me absolutely.
But “the other parts of the body”, as Proust puts it, also present
us with approaches of the soul. My hands, my legs, my throat, my
postures, my bearing, my gestures, my expressions, my airs, the
timber of my voice, the whole pragmatics of the body, as one might
call it, without exception everything on the surface of my skin and
of what I can cover or decorate it with, all this exposes, announces,
declares, addresses something: ways of coming near or going away,
forces of attraction and repulsion, tensions for taking or leaving, for
swallowing or rejecting.
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine writes: “This is how my skin becomes
its own theatre”, and he continues: “This explains why the actor or
the simple speaker is moved by pulsations, the original signiication
of which is unknown to him or her”.3
In all its ways of opening and closing, of placing and displacing
itself, of disposing and imposing itself, and of leeing, the body engages a drama which is not at all “personal” or “subjective” but each
time a singular dramatization of its singular detachment among
other bodies – as it is projected with them in the cosmos.
Afects (love, hate, power, betrayal, rivalry…) are secondary here,
or rather they are merely modulations and transcriptions of the
great primordial tension between bodies: how they are pressed
against one another, how they reject one another, how they catch
and free one another. That is, how they relate to one another:
not “through” the incorporeal that distinguishes them, but as the
incorporeal itself. Place, time, sense and void (by “void” we can understand the absence of bodies that are dead or not yet born) are
the matter and the force of relation. (It goes without saying that I
do not distinguish here between the relation between bodies and
the relation of each body to itself: each relation passes through another, this is the logic of common appearing and (re)presentation).
What we name stage is the place in which the proper time of a
presentation (of bodies: this complement could be elided) emerges in the form of thrusts of sense between the voids of the bodies’
fortuitous existences; it is a place in which fortuitousness itself be-
3
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine: Soleil arachnide, Paris, Gallimard 2009, 120.
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comes the necessity of a drama and in which the void acquires the
consistency of a gathering of sense.
We know that in the beginning, skéné was a light makeshift shelter in which one could retire to sleep, drink, or have a party with
friends, for instance on a boat. It was a place of intimacy, which later meant the obscure background of the theatre, the reverse side of
the scene: the actors will present themselves in front of this place,
on the proskènion, on which they enter through one of the doors put
on the scenery. (I will not stop to discuss the word “obscene”, the
etymology of which has been discussed too much to permit anything else than foreseeable resonances. Nevertheless, it is a fact that
independently of semantics every exposition tends to obscenity.)
In front of the intimate shelter, which somehow falls outside of
space, into the blind spot, opens the space in which one is supposed
to step forward, in which the body pushes itself before itself – for
its entire presence is here, in this outside of oneself which is not
detached from an “inside” but which evokes it only as an impossibility, as a void outside of space, time and sense. This is how a “self”
becomes: a character, a role, a mask, a way or an air, an exhibition,
a presentation – in other words, a singular variation of the dehiscence and distinction by which there is a body, a presence.
In the poem entitled the “Theatre of Cruelty”, Artaud writes:
There where there is metaphysics,
mysticism,
irreducible dialectics,
I hear the huge
colon of my
hunger writhe
and under the impulses of its somber life
I dictate to my hands
BODY-THEATRE
their dance,
to my feet 4
“My hunger” is my appetite, my desire, my drive; it triggers
the impulsions of the intimate, internal “dismal life” which transmits the rhythm, the pace, the whole “dance” that responds to the
deep – “metaphysical, mystical” – beat or to the “twist” that responds in its turn to nothing else – “irreducible dialectics” – than
to the very birth to the world, to the creation in its dulling, coagulation, condensation, distinction.
This is not the place to stop to examine the fact that this dance
is not only physical but also belongs to the text, to the theatrical
speech and particularly to the exchange of words, and this determines the ownmost features of theatrical literature. What matters
is that in theatre, text is bodily, is a body. By the way, therefore it
is possible to say that in theatre “something really happens”, as
Claudel makes of one of his characters (an actress) say: “It’s worth
your while to go to the theatre to see something happen. You hear
me! Something that really happens! That begins and ends!”5
What “really happens”, what begins and ends, is something
that never happens to the subject, for whom birth and death, provenance and light are interruptions. Instead, it happens to the
bodies which indeed arrive, come to detach and singularize themselves, and then disappear in the totality or in the nothingness.
What arrives and goes away in this way – but this going-away is
also an arrival – is a presence. That is to say a sense. One could
say: a “subject” is a frantic aiming at a sense, a “body” is a sense
4
5
Antonin Artaud: Œuvres, p. 1662. Trans. Watchiends & Rack Screams. Works from
the Final Period of Antonin Artaud, ed. and trans. Clayton Eshleman with Bernard
Bador, Exact Change 2004, 321.
Claudel, L’Echange, Paris, Mercure de France 1964, 166.
25
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JEAN-LUC NANCY
in action. In the action of passing, between creation and discreation [décréation].
Such a passage presents itself by presenting its arrival and
departure, by presenting the beginning and the end of a sense.
Consequently, such a sense cannot accomplish a signiication, but
it is the sense of passage, of the act of passing. It is the sense of
the entire duration of a presence, sense as this duration articulated by the rising and the falling of the curtain, that is to say of the
non-thickness of the truth that falls on the sense.
What we therefore ignore, the appearing-disappearing, arrives
there, in the space-time of the place in which sense is announced
between bodies – for sense can only happen “between” one and the
other, it can only be felt from one to the other. This space-time is
what we call “scene”, it is the proskènion on which bodies advance
to present what each body does as a body: it presents itself in its
appearing and disappearing, it presents the action – the “drama” –
of the sharing of sense.
There is beginning and end - the stage itself opens and closes –
and this is the proper time of this (re)presentation. It is not the time
of succession but of passage, of the quick distension of an instant
that has been withdrawn from the course of time (this is how one
can see in the classical rule of three unities something less formal
than it would seem).
Jean Magnan puts the following words in the mouth of a character marked out as a “creature of the theatre”:
Here, between three walls,
without a mirror that would make me believe
in a fourth one,
BODY-THEATRE
Fictional time. Personal time. A sensible mixture
of the two. Fifty per cent Arabica.
Theatre time. At the purest state.
Insomniac.
And sugar-free.6
Like in Proust, from whom the expression has been borrowed,
the “pure time” is the time of the (re)presentation, that is to say of
the presentation in truth. Time removed from the course of time,
insomnia in the night that surrounds the theatre and into which the
actors, the scene and the spectator fall together with the curtain.
Bodies address words in the precise – and instantaneouslike – duration of this time. Actors exchange words to address to us,
spectators, precisely the fact that it is a matter of addresses here.
It cannot be anything else. Heiner Müller writes: “What is not addressed cannot be put on stage”.7
Addressed speech is bodily speech. It is not so much a matter
of signiication, but of voice, and with the voice – or silence – of the
gesture, the posture and the bearing of the body. Speaking bodies
make a bodily speech. This is how they present themselves for what
they are: presences whose spacings open tensions – Artaud calls
them “conlicts” – the play of which conducts the drama.
The play: here, the word means at the same time the articulation,
the joining of the addresses, and the fact that they are interpreted.
The double sense of play corresponds to the duality actually put
6
time. The time. The time.
7
Jean Magnan: Un peu de temps à l’état pur, Philippe Macasdar Editeur, Génève
198 , 71.
Heiner Müller: “Adieu à la pièce dialectique”, Hamlet-machine, trans. Jean
Jourdheuil et Heinz Schwarzinger, Minuit, Paris 1985, 67.
27
28
JEAN-LUC NANCY
BODY-THEATRE
in play: the presence must be presented because it is not simply
given: it gives itself. In other words, it is not if it does not enter the
intensity – tension, intention – of the address. There is no neutral
presence that could be intensiied here and there. Presence wants
intensity – a body is an intensity.
Representation in the theatrical sense of the word and in the –
historically irst – sense of a putting to presence is an intensive play
of presence. My body is straight away a theatre because its very
presence is double – it is outside or in front, I am inside or behind
(actually nowhere). Each presence doubles itself to present itself,
and theatre is as ancient and no doubt practically as common as
the speaking body.
Whether one says it with Artaud and his Double, with LacoueLabarthe and his “originary mimesis”, or with François Regnauld
airming in a Lacanian way that “the Theatre presents the discourse of the Other”8, theatre is the duplication of presences as a
putting in presence of presents, or as a presentation of their being
present. The body itself is already a presentation: indeed, a body
does not consist simply of a “being” – whatever one wants to say
by this word – but it articulates this being as an appearing or indexes it to a being-there which implies a compresence – distance,
proximity, interaction – with other bodies. Theatricality proceeds
from a declaration of existence – and existence itself is being that
is declared, presented and not kept in itself. It is being that signals
itself; it gives itself to be felt not only in a simple perception but as
a thickness and as a tension.
Therefore, Hamlet can say: “the players cannot keep counsel
[secret]; they’ll tell all” (act 3, scene 2). The particular sense this
sentence has in the theatrical plot of the Prince of Denmark can
only enhance its general import. Theatre is the suspension of the
secret – provided the secret concerns being-in-itself or belongs to
a soul that has retired into an intimacy. On the contrary, the in-itself itself or the intimacy as such come out and expose themselves.
Nothing less than the “world as theatre” that we know so well since
Calderon and Shakespeare and that our tradition in fact repeats
ever since Plato’s Cavern, but the “world as theatre” as truth, quite
like and because the body turns out to be the truth of the soul: it
is truth pushing itself onto the scene, or more exactly truth that
makes a scene.
Having come to this point, it is not possible to avoid going back
to something that underlies and supports theatre in all its forms:
that is, something like a cult.
Brecht said that tragedy was born when it left the cult to underline the decisive nature of this “departure”.9 But this is also how
he shut his eyes to something that every departure takes with it. A
cult is not simply a ritual in the sense of formalism and observance.
First of all, it is a behaviour that has been adapted to an encounter
with something like a mystery, a secret, a reserved part that the
cult makes it possible to approach (in the cult, it approaches us and
we approach it). It is the coming to presence of something that otherwise remains withdrawn.
8
François Regnauld: Petite éthique pour le comédien, les Conférences du Perroquet
n° 34, Paris, mars 1992.
9
Florence Dupont insists on the origin of the Latin comedy in cult – in the rituals of
the ludi. According to her, this comedy follows a genuine ritual, which is celebrated by putting into play – in all senses of the expression – the circumstances and
the codes of the seriousness of the ordinary life. From her point of view, Aristotle
is the one who, by breaking entirely loose from the Dionysian ritual, obliges himself to put the theatre under the spell of muthos, that is to say of the story that
plays the function of theatre by mimesis and catharsis (see Aristote ou le vampire
du théâtre occidental, Flammarion 2007). I will not enter into this debate: I only
note that mimesis and catharsis undoubtedly represent transformations and extensions of the ritual celebration in Aristotle, too, but without him knowing it.
29
30
JEAN-LUC NANCY
BODY-THEATRE
A cult is always organized around the expectation that something arrives, something happens, something takes place and
comes from the background of an essential non-appearing. This is
called “sacriice”: sanctifying, making sacred. A theatrical body is
a body that sanctiies its own presence – that is to say, if you like
it, its soul, or also its creation, its cosmic inscription, its glory, its
delight, its sufering, its failure, in a word, its common appearing
as a sign among signs.
Every cult has a theatrical side, even though theatre becomes
what it is only when it leaves all cults (including its own cult and
cults, that it incessantly fabricates). What still belongs to cult in
theatre and what in a very precise sense is sacriiced in it (or ludiied, to refer once again to roman comedy) is the speaking body – a
speech become body, not the story but the address, the signals of
bodies and therefore also the gestures and everything that is physical, or physiological, energetic, dynamic – “biomechanical”, to play
with a word of Meyerhold – these make the scene.
Therefore, one should not say that the cult precedes and engenders the theatre, but that the body-theatre precedes all cults
and all theatres. Theatricality is neither artistic nor religious – although art and religion proceed from it. It is the condition of the
body, and the body is the condition of the world, which is the space
of the common appearing of bodies, of their attractions and repulsions. Yves Lorelle writes at the beginning of his study on the body
and the stage: “Every culture has given to itself the spectacle of the
highest summits of the mastery over the moving body”10. One must
pay attention to the fact that a “culture” is precisely a possibility of
putting together and of forming a mode of spectacle, in other words,
of presenting and signifying this: as soon as there is a world, there
are bodies who encounter one another, who move away, attract and
reject one another, who show themselves to one another while at
the same time showing behind and around themselves the incorporeal night of their origin.
10
Yves Lorelle: Le corps, les rites et la scène des origines au XXème siècle, Les Éditions
de l’Amandier, Paris 2003, p. 19.
English translation by Susanna Lindberg with Miika Luoto
31
Light Touches:
A Media Aesthetic
Mapping of Touch
MIKA ELO
It is often helpful to start an academic essay with some comments
on the title. Unpacking the key terms that appear in the title is an
economical way of preparing the ground for a discourse that necessarily takes place within a limited frame. This kind of gesture is
very much needed here as well.
My title consists of two parts that both, more or less, say the
same – albeit in diferent modes. Whereas the irst part “Light
Touches” is rather elliptic, the second part “A Media Aesthetic
Mapping of Touch” fulills the standard form of an academic subtitle by ofering additional information concerning the focus and
approach. Together they suggest that the topic of this essay will
be “touch”, and that the topic will be touched upon “lightly” in
terms of a “mapping” which has “media aesthetic” motivations.
I would claim, however, that the double structure of my title says
also something else. A certain tension, or a fundamental complication, that a discourse on touching needs to deal with is inscribed in
it. “A mapping” is simply not enough on its own, since “touch” as a
34
MIKA ELO
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
peculiar topic challenges – or should I say contaminates – the discourse to such a degree that the approach becomes part of the issue. A discourse that in any pertinent sense is touching upon “touch”
becomes also touched by its topic.1 The expression “pertinent sense”
marks here the challenge of developing a discourse in an area where
the criteria for making distinctions between the proper and metaphorical senses of touch are anything but clear. In a pertinent discourse on touch, the “what” and the “how” become entangled, even
inseparable. All kinds of exploration, assorting, dissecting, demarcating, deining – and mapping – presuppose contact or, at the very
least, anticipation of a limit, which always means taking risks; trying, testing and contesting the limits of control as well. The “mapping” that I attempt here consists of “light touches” in this sense.
But there is still another twist: “Light” can also be understood
as the subject – or perhaps more aptly: agent – of touch. Insofar
as the phrase “A Media Aesthetic Mapping of Touch” speciies the
chosen theoretical view on the topic – the point of view of the essay – it efectively performs a visual logic that in accordance with
a long history of “hegemony of vision”2 in Western thinking tends
to format the discourse on touch. In short, the title hints at the fact
that my discourse on touch, insofar as it is a “mapping” that aims
at outlining the topic entitled “touch”, is itself necessarily touched
by light, invested with visual forces that tend to organize the discourse into a visually motivated knowledge production.
In order to gain new knowledge, a researcher has to make use
of some kind of tactics when sorting out whatever is under scruti-
ny. Usually we speak of this in terms of a method or an approach
and focus on assessing its viability. It is worth noting, hovewer, that
the medium of research consists of culturally determined variables
that change over time. A discourse on touching touched by light becomes a meeting place of at least two divergent logics (in shorthand
I call them “visual” and “tactile”), and as such, it touches upon the
cultural status of the difering modalities of sense and the roles of
sense modalities in a knowledge-oriented discursive setting.
It is here that the “media aesthetic” motivations of my essay
come into picture. In my use of the term “media aesthetics” I attach myself to the heterogeneous tradition that combines media
theoretical questions with theories of perception and embodied experience. Its key questions revolve around the rise of new modes
of representation, perceptual habits and bodily techniques enabled or enhanced by new technical apparatuses, such as photography and ilm, and more recently a whole array of electronic and
digital media. Media aesthetics studies, from a variety of perspectives, the framing conditions of our seemingly natural sense perception against the backdrop of all these “media”. How to relate
our sense experience to the technological processes that signiicantly contribute to our sense of reality? How does touch igure in
these processes?
Walter Benjamin’s remarks concerning the historicity of
the “medium of perception”3 and Marshall McLuhan’s “sense ratio hypothesis”4 still function as key points of reference in contem-
3
1
2
This is one of the key issues in Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy,
trans. Christine Irizarry, California, Stanford University Press, 2005 [2000].
See e.g. David Michael Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1993; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes – The Denigration
of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1993.
4
”Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical
periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception
is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature
but by history.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings vol. 3, ed. Michael W. Jennings
et al., various tranlators, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, 104.
Cf. David Parisi in this volume.
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MIKA ELO
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
porary media aesthetic discussions, especially with regard to the
contexts of media theoretical research and sensory anthropology.
As W.J.T. Mitchell notes, media aesthetic discussions often show a
rather conservative tendency to return to questions of remediation
of older media forms in the midst of rapidly changing new media
landscape.5 Here, the basic conceptual settings – such as Roland
Barthes’ image / music / text or Friedrich Kittler’s gramophone /
ilm / typewriter – build, in one way or another, on demarcation of
sense modalities, echoing the classical division of the “media” of
drama in Aristotle (melos, opsis, lexis).6
In recent media aesthetic discussions, increasing attention has
been paid to the questions of environmental mediations instead of
the senses and their mediation. Transcendental subjectivity that
for a long time igured as the key philosophical point of reference
and, in phenomenologies of corporeality, as one of the main targets of criticism, has lost its key role as the discussions have shifted their focus to questions of relationality, non-human actors and
environmentality. A proponent of this shift, Eric Hörl announces
an “emergence of a general ecology” and highlights multiple cybernetic processes that lead to bypassing the subject of perception
and urge us to focuse on relational and technical aspects of being
in the world.7 Questions of touch, however, introduce in this setting
a new angle and open up alternative paths for reconceptualizing
mediality with regard to environmental and relational issues with-
out cutting the discourse of from questions of sense experience. A
closer look at the senses of touch is needed – and an appropriate
touch to the topic.
SENSES OF TOUCH
First, a gesture of general mapping: In Western culture, touch as
a sense modality has been both over- and undervalued. Beside vision – considered the noblest of senses – touch has been regarded
as vague, vulgar, drive-related, and thus even impure. Partly due
to these very same – potentially subversive – qualities touch has
been invested with various emancipatory expectations. At the same
time, it has been seen both as the basis of sense certainty and rather normative support to the theoretical gaze. This ambivalence implies that the sense of touch – or more precisely: the sense of it – is
over-determined.8 It is no wonder, then, that over the past few decades lively debates concerning the cultural implications of touch as
a sense modality have emerged in many areas of research.9
Touch interconnects existential, aesthetic, cognitive and practical aspects of reality in an inconspicuous but intensive way, traversing both bodily and discoursive practices.10 Accordingly, the range
of contexts where touching igures, in one way or another, is over-
8
9
5
6
7
W.J.T. Mitchell, ”Media Aesthetics”, Thinking Media Aesthetics. Media Studies,
Film Studies and the Arts, ed. Liv Hausken, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2013,
23.
Ibid.
Eric Hörl, ”A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and
General Ecology,” trans. James Burton et al., The Whole Earth. California and
the Disappearance of the Outside, eds. Diedrich Diedrichsen and Anselm Francke,
Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013, 121–130.
10
Bernhard Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung. Phänomenologie, Psychoanalyse,
Phänomenotechnik, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2002, 64.
See for example Laura Marks Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002; Constance Classen (ed.), The
Book of Touch, New York and Oxford, Berg Publishers, 2005; Mark Paterson, The
Senses of Touch. Haptics, Afects and Technologies, New York and Oxford, Berg
Publishers, 2007, David P. Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics
from Electricity to Computing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [forthcoming 2018].
Cf. Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, passim; Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call
and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport, New York, Fordham University Press,
2004 [1992]; Classen, Book of Touch, 2005.
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MIKA ELO
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
whelming: perception, interface design, consumer culture, sexuality, the arts, social relations, war, religion, spirituality, and so on. I
will adress only a few.
Touch and its cultural meanings have often been associated with
the skin. An interface between the own and the foreign, skin constitutes a sensitive realm open to various interpretations.11 One of the
nineteenth-century pioneers of physiology, Ernst Heinrich Weber,
determined and mapped the sensitivity of human tactile system
and thus laid the foundation for neuro-physiological harnessing
of touch.12 Ashley Montagu’s pioneering experiments on chimpanzees in the 1970s demonstrated that the tactile sense plays a crucial
role in the early psychophysiological development of mammals.13 In
the 1980s, Didier Anzieu added a new layer to these discussions by
analysing various patterns of skin-related mental imagery that are
momentous for the formation of the ego. He argued that the skin
is a coordinative and cohesive factor behind the whole system of
the senses, one that organizes the human experiential horizon in
its entirety, including the structures of space, time and language.14
During the past few decades, the cultural strata of the skin, such as
clothing, make-up, and tattoos, have aroused great interest.15 The
digital media technologies of our times, on their part, invite us to
consider something like “techno skin”, or the technological consti-
tution of the contacting surfaces that deine our bodily being.16 Skin
is not only a physiological site, it is also an existential structure.
The sense of touch as a topic clearly hints at the fact that “sense”
is one of those fateful words, where language as the historically layered resource of thinking comes to the fore. Sense involves signiication and sensing, but it is not reducible to the domain of meanings
or clear-cut sense modalities, not even to causal relations.17 Sense
has a peculiar role in verbal discourse: it doesn’t exist outside the
proposition that expresses it, but, at the same time, it doesn’t merge
with its expression since discourse needs to touch upon something
beyond itself in order to make sense.18 Sense – in all senses of the
word “sense” – plays a multifaceted role in a discourse without being fully captured in its operations. Outlining the sense of touch as
a topic presupposes something like sense for touch in the arrangement of the outlining gestures. On the level of discourse, touch is
distributed, in an ambiguous way, across the divide of the supposedly proper and metaphorical senses of “touch”.
16
11
12
13
14
15
See e.g. Claudia Benthien, Skin. The Cultural Border of Self and the World, New
York, Columbia University Press, 2002; Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, London,
Reaktion Books, 2004; Dave Boothroyd, “Touch, Time and Technics: Levinas and
the Ethics of Haptic Communications.” Theory, Culture and Society 26 (2–3), 2009,
330–345.
Cf. Parisi in this volume.
See e.g. Classen, The Book of Touch, 46–47.
Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Naomi Segal, London, Karnac, 2016 [1995].
Cf. Benthien, Skin; Classen, The Book of Touch.
17
18
Since recently biotechnologies enable the development of artiicial skin by means
of which prostheses and robots can “feel” touch, https://www.seeker.com/artiicial-skin-ofers-robots-amputees-sense-of-touch-discovery-news-1767180961.html
[accessed 4 June 2017].
See for example Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas,
Mark Lester and Charles J. Stivale, London, Bloomsbury, 2015 [1969]; Jacques
Derrida, Limited Inc., Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1988 [1972];
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press,
1997 [1993]; Sens en tout sens. Autour des travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. Francis
Guibal and Jean-Clet Martin, Paris, Éditions Galilée, 2004.
Deleuze notes, with reference to Stoic philosophy, that sense “is an incorporeal
complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition”. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 19.
39
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MIKA ELO
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
The diiculties encountered when trying to deine the sense
of touch were highlighted already in Aristotle’s De Anima.19 He
noted that the objects of touch are many, and that touch has no
clearly deinable organ. Touch is in many ways more complex and
comprehensive than the other sensory forms. It is indispensable
to all animals and belongs inseparably to the living body without,
however, being the faculty of any particular body part – not even
the skin. In short, it is diicult to deine touch as a sense modality,
since it is not, in any simple way, an organ-related mode of sensing.
What can be felt as touch are not only certain sensuous qualities;
we are in touch with anything and everything that can be felt and
sensed by the body. Following Bernhard Waldenfels, we can say
that touch is a prototype of sense experience per se.20 Light touches the eye, heartbeat touches the palpating inger, sound waves
touch the eardrum...
Even if these examples hint at the ways in which physical contact is part of all forms of perception, it would be too simplistic
to reduce touching to some kind of prototypical tactility of sense
experience. From an experiential perspective touch involves also
mental and social, sometimes even spiritual processes. Instead of
speaking of the sense of touch, it seems more appropriate to speak
in plural of senses of touch.21 In another vocabulary one could also speak of feeling and being afected.22 Still another angle is introduced through the vocabulary of faculties, abilities and skills,
especially in the arts where the skills and capabilities are pushed
to their limits.23
In a strict sense, touching always takes place at a limit. The
igure of limit could even be considered the common denominator
of the ensemble of senses of touch that is at stake in this essay. It
is important to note, however, that the limit in this sense is not a
physical border. “The limit” names the ultimate point of vulnerability that forces and allows a touching gesture to get into touch with
itself, to ind its measure and proper mode, its tact. It is more of a
demand than a categorical delimitation. This demand is enjoyably
and painfully present in all modes of aiming at pertinence, here in
the space of lined-up words as well as in any kind of intercourse
with pressing matters. This demanding structure is not entirely relexive, since touching is always also transitive, as Jean-Luc Nancy’s
paradoxical formulation “to self-touch you” (se toucher toi) presses.24
Touching involves a gap; it goes across a distance without any
guarantee of a securing return. Tact is thus not a matter of volitional attentiveness or artfulness. It is heterotrophic sensitivity, that is,
a response to the untouchable encountered in touching. Another
name for this sensibility towards something that lies beyond ones
own cababilities is passibility.25 This pathic moment of touching
shows that tact is over-determined and is thus not reducible to a
skill. Already before it can turn into a social matter between two
or more parties, it is answering to a singular otherness. In other
words, tact is not to be understood as psychophysical discretion,
19
20
21
22
Aristotle, De Anima, trans. J. A. Smith, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross,
vol. III, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1931. See also Mika Elo, “Digital inger.
Beyond phenomenological igures of touch”, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture vol.
4, 2012, DOI: 10.3402/jac.v4i0.14982.
Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 71.
Cf. Paterson, The Senses of Touch, 1–5.
Cf. Mika Elo, “Formatting the Senses of Touch”, Transformations 22, 2012. http://
www.transformationsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Elo_Trans22.pdf
23
24
25
Cf. Mika Elo, “Notes on media sensitivity in artistic research”, Exposition of
Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia, eds. Michael Schwab and Henk
Borgdorf, Leiden, Leiden University Press, 2014, 25–38.
Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, 34, passim.
See for example the thematic issue “Pathos / Passibilität”, Internationales
Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie Band 3, eds. Jörg Sternagel and Michael Mayer,
Berlin, de Gruyter, 2017.
41
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MIKA ELO
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
but as a name for taking it upon oneself to “touch without touching,
without touching too much, where touching is already too much”,
as Derrida puts it.26
The “law of tact”27 that applies to touch in its all dimensions is
revealing of the fact that touch is always in danger of turning into either an appropriating grip, which aims at overcoming the unbridgeable diference between the touching and the touched, or
into simple avoidance of contact, which means leaving the diferences encountered as they are. The twist of this law lies in the fact
that tactful contact never is quite in phase with itself: a distance
is inherent in even the most intimate of contacts. Tact is exposure
to this diference.
For Kant, touch is, on the one hand, a sense of diferentiation vital
to our physical relation with external objects. On the other hand,
as feeling, it is a sense by means of which we partake of things
afectively.30
Another breaking point can be found in the extensive philosophical debate concerning the relations between touch and vision, which
is known as “Molyneux’s problem”. The problem, formulated by
the Irish philosopher William Molyneux, is the following: if a man
born blind regains his sight, is he able to recognize, by means of visual
perception only, objects he has learned to know through mere touch?31
Behind this problem concerning the connection between visual
and tactile perception lies the mind-body dualism characteristic of
René Descartes’ thought, and the ambivalent interplay of the mind
and the body in their “lived union” articulated in it.32 The problem
concerns the tensional relation between what we might call “mind’s
eye” and “comprehensive grasp” and its conceptual implications. On
the basis of what do we think of the so-called contact between the
sensing and the sensed and between the diferent modes of sensing? Descartes’ contemporary, Nicolas Malebranche and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, who further developed Malebranche’s ideas in the
phenomenological context, have both seen in the tension at the core
of the Cartesian dualism an incentive to analysing the relation of
the mind and the body precisely as a question of touch.33
Third breaking point that I would like to touch upon here can
be found in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical thinking. In Freud’s
view, namely, it is touch, or, “palpating impetus”, that structurally
AMBIGUOUS DEMARCATIONS
In order to gain further insight into the various senses of touch –
and into the ambiguity of demarcations between proper and metaphorical senses of “touch” – we must search in familiar analyses of
sensibility for breaking points of the conventional schematization
of touch as a species of the genus sensation.28 Cathryn Vasseleu
has highlighted one this kind of breaking point in Immanuel Kant’s
Anthropology. The ambivalent position that Berührung (referring
both to tactility and afectivity) takes there with regard to the distinction between the so-called objective and subjective senses is
symptomatic of the diiculties of subsuming touch under the category of sense modality, a clear-cut domain of sensory experience.29
26
27
28
29
Derrida, On Touching, 67.
Ibid., passim.
Edith Wyschogrod, “Doing Before Hearing: On the Primacy of Touch”, Textes
pour Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. François Laruelle, Paris, Éditions Jean-Michel Place,
1980, 193.
Cathryn Vasseleu, “Touch, Digital Communication and the Ticklish”, Angelaki 4.2,
1999, 155.
30
31
32
33
Ibid.
Janet Levin, ”Molyneux’s Problem and the Individuation of Perceptual Concepts,”
Philosophical Studies 139, 2008, 1–28. DOI 10.1007/s11098-007-9072-5.
Juho Hotanen, ”Merleau-Ponty ja Malebranchen subjekti”, Kosketuksen iguureja,
ed. Mika Elo, Helsinki, Tutkijaliitto, 2014, 24–43.
Ibid.
43
44
MIKA ELO
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
links together bodily being, perception and thinking, and thus forms
an essential feature of what he called “extensionality” (Ausdehnung)
of the psyche.34
The multifaceted theme of psychic extensionality can be illuminated with help of a note of Freud’s published posthumously:
“Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it”.35 Even though the
processes of knowledge formation and cognition always involve
fumbling and feeling about, psychic touch is not reducible to a matter of knowledge and consciousness, tastender Vorstoß is not reducible to a rudiment of theory formation supported by visuality. Freud’s remark hints at the fact that psychic events take their
place in a space the extensionality (Ausdehnung) of which escapes
physical dimensionality and the cognitive framework grounded on
it. What makes things even more complex is that the extensionality of the psyche is not the inner psychological horizon of conscious
afects, either. Rather, the psyche is articulated as a feeling of the
tension between these dimensions, and the sorting out of their relations takes place through a complex machinery of defence mechnisms and processes of rationalization.36
tion as if they were unavoidable steps in it. As Hans Blumenberg
notes, light-related metaphors function as “absolute metaphors”
in Western knowledge-oriented discourse.37 This means that their
igurality has become naturalized to such degree that it goes unnoticed; they have become, well, “transparent”.
If I would allow the visual logic to take the lead, I would introduce here a clear-cut demarcation between visual metaphorics and
igures of touch. This would probably lead me to reairming the
kind of igures that Derrida calls ”haptocentric”, that is, conceptual tropes that present the sense of touch as the ultimate guarantee
of tangible reality and its visual mastery.38 Typical substrate for
this kind of igures is the human hand. Derrida highlights this in
many ways in On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. He even structures
his discussion in a critical relation to the igure of the hand in ive
Tangents: “ive, like the ive ingers of one hand, like the ive senses”.39 Based on this haptocentric setting I could focus on some tangible examples of tactile iguration. But if I stick to the setting unfolded in the previous pages where touch is presented as something
that subsists also beyond the tangible world, I need to take another path and consider whether and how touch might igure in a discourse also beyond igures – insofar as “igure” refers to something
that has a clear shape, to something that can be mastered visually
– like the hand or a pointing inger.
In order to track the efects of touch in the discourse beyond
igures we need to redirect our attention to questions of rhythm,
punctuation and intensity. Here, the igures of touch are not only
shapeless, they are also weightless. Or, more precisely, they are
FIGURES OF TOUCH
Further breaking points can be traced in the metaphoric patterns
of languages. An alert reader has already paid attention to the
ways in which visual metaphors tend to slide into my argumenta34
35
36
Sigmund Freud, “Negation”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIX, ed. James Strachey, trans. James Strachey et
al., 238. (As the English rendering of tastender Vorstoß by “tentative advance”
here misses the tactile connotations of the original, I have used the moreliteral
“palpating impetus”)
Freud, “Findings, Ideas, Problems”, in The Standard Edition, vol. XXIII, 300; Cf.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand, New York, Fordham University
Press, 2008 [2006], 21.
Cf. Elo, “Formatting the Senses of Touch”.
37
38
39
Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, Frankfurt am Main,
Suhrkamp, 1999, 10–12.
Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, passim.
Derrida, On Touching, 182.
45
46
MIKA ELO
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
weightless in themselves like the fulcrum between the scales. They
gain weight and become concrete only in a particular relation. This
complicates the question as to where to draw the dividing line between the metaphorical and proper senses of touch – and whether
this line can be drawn at all.
In order to counterbalance the tendency in international discussions to tracing concepts back to their Greek and Latin roots,
I will make a detour to the Finnish language and to the semantic
network of a couple of words that play a local but crucial role in the
conceptual arrangement of senses of touch. I am not making this
detour in order to establish more solid conceptual proof. Instead, I
want to highlight the fact that language is a rich and multi-layered
archive of displaced similarities and connections that contribute
to the sense-order we tend to take for granted.40
The irst word I would like to single out as a point of contact
with the ways in which senses of touch operate in the Finnish language is the verb tuntea. It aptly collates the meanings of ‘‘feeling’’
and ‘‘knowing’’. It suggests that when you know, you also feel, and
when you feel, knowing is already implied. The weight of this word
in any particular idiom demonstrates how obscure the boundaries
between the bodily and mental aspects of touch are from the viewpoint of embodied experience. The Finnish expression tuntea nahoissaan (literally: “to feel in one’s skins”), for example, expresses
a concrete state of knowing by bodily experience. Touch, feeling,
and recognition are entangled, and their ensemble implicates a sentience that can be articulated both as cognitive apprehension and
afective tone. Especially evocative is also the Finnish version of the
classical imperative “know thyself” (gnothi seauton), tunne itsesi.
The second word that contributes to the conceptual arrangement
of the senses of touch is the Finnish verb tarttua (‘‘to grasp’’, ‘‘to
catch’’, ‘‘to apprehend’’, ‘‘to seize’’). It points towards the multiple
intertwined aspects of touch in a slightly diferent way. The word
refers both to grabbing or holding irmly and to being exposed to
the possibility of contamination. A hand, dirt, disease, laughter and
various fancies may be caught and catching in diferent ways. The
semantic network of this word suggests that every contact, whether mental or bodily, is potentially contagious.
The question whether these entanglements are just metaphoric,
or do they have something more concrete, or “proper”, about them,
brings me to the third word I want to ponder here: the Finnish
word for “concrete”, “palpable” or “tangible”, kouriintuntuva, which
literally means “what makes itself felt/known to the hands”. It
hints at the fact that not only the physical contact of the appropriating hand but also the heterotrophic feel are involved in what
we normally conceive as “concrete contact”. Physical contact is
suggestive in its seeming immediacy, and it obviously serves linking comprehensive grasp and minds eye, as for example when we
conirm the correctness of a visual impression by palpating the
object seen. What is less obvious is the fact that the experiential
fullness established through such coordination of the hand and the
eye always ultimately relies on alterity. The physical and mental
contact never fully coincide. In experiential terms, every concrete
contact has two sides: the self that feels and something felt. The
latter, as precisely this something that is felt, always escapes the
control of the self. It is close by, but at the same time it remains
at a distance, it remains something other, something that cannot
be fully appropriated. With touch, thinking faces the paradoxical
challenge of concreteness: What is most tangible is the foreignness
at the heart of the familiar.
40
I am referring here to the mimetic dimension of language that plays an important role in Benjamin’s philosophy of language. See for example “On the Mimetic
Faculty”, Selected Writings vol. 2/2, 722.
47
48
MIKA ELO
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
The verbal entanglements that I highlighted through the selection of these three Finnish words hint at the ways in which the
theme of touch interlinks the physical, biological, psychophysical,
social, mental and afective dimensions of contact. Their operative
logic – linking, connecting, intertwining – relects the intimate connection between afective and tactile aspects of touch and the vulnerability of embodied existence. Here we encounter the fact that
besides the historical lines of conceptual iliation and discursive
tropism, sheer moments of juxtaposition, idiomatic dispositions,
and horizontal relations contribute to sense – in every sense of the
word “sense”. We all know how this logic of contiguity is enacted in
jokes and in word games that reveal how words constitute a “cavernous network” with hidden interconnections.41
Whereas sight upholds metaphors of light that outline the phenomenal world cognitively, thus creating the basis for a uniform
discourse on truth, touch tends to complicate metaphoric patterns
and even decompose them. While metaphors of light produce continuity and uniformity, that is, homeostasis, the efects of touch represent furthermore a diastasis (dia–‘‘separate’’, stasis–‘‘localisation’’)
of language.42 Here, we are literally dealing with a spatiotemporal
dislocation of the processes of signiication in the structures, ac-
cents and rhythms of language.43 On a linguistic level, at stake is the
unstable relation between the supposedly proper and metaphoric
senses of touch. In existential or experiential terms, this relects
the intimate connection between afective and tactile aspects of
touch and the vulnerability of embodied existence.
Against this background, touch appears as a sense of being in
the world, of being exposed. This is to say that touch exceeds the
tactile world – and not only metaphorically. “Touch” as the topic
I am touching upon, is more than the sense of touch, more than a
sense modality; more than “a species of the genus sensation”.44 This
implies that theoretical attempts at upholding a clear-cut distinction between an “immediate” and a “deep” touch is insuicient.45 It
is true that touch is not only a matter of contacting surfaces, it also
has, at the same time, afective depth, touch is inevitably ambivalent, since exactly the same kind of physical contact can strike one
in diferent ways depending on the situation. As Edith Wyschogrod
remarks, the ordinary language reveals that “to be touched” is to be
moved in the whole of one’s being.46 Coming into touch, or being in
touch – actually, I am tempted to say even “being touch” – involves
an exposure. With the word “exposure” we encounter again the double bind between vision and touch: whatever is exposed in terms
of touch, is exposed to light as well, insofar as it is recognized in its
appearance, that is, insofar as it becomes phenomenal.
43
41
42
Walter Benjamin, “Denkbilder”, Gesammelte Schfriften IV/1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
and Hermann Schweppenhäuser in cooperation with Theodor W. Adorno and
Gershom Scholem, Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 1991, 432. With regard to
the mimetic dimension of language that is at stake here, one of the key texts is
Werner Hamacher’s ”The Word Wolke – If It Is One”, Benjamin’s Ground – New
Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele, Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1988.
Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 78.
44
45
46
Here we encounter processes that Julia Kristeva famously has termed signiiance. See e.g. Julia Kirsteva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature
and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora and Alice Jardine, Oxford,
Blackwell, 1980 [1969].
Wyschogrod, “Doing Before Hearing”, 193.
Cf. Paterson, The Senses of Touch, 1–14. I see the deinite article in the title of
Paterson’s book as a symptom of a theoretical inclination for clear-cut deinitions
that sets the tone to Paterson’s approach.
Wyschogrod, 199.
49
50
MIKA ELO
THE PATHIC MOMENT OF TOUCH
If I was asked to highlight one point of major importance in the series of “light touches” that I am presenting here on the peculiar topic
of “touch”, I would point with my inger at – if you allow me to use this
igure of a gesture that is absolutely impotent in this case – I would
point with my inger at the pathic dimension of touch. This theme
iguring in many ways in the phenomenological tradition – most
prominently in the thinking of Erwin Strauss, Henri Maldiney, JeanLuc Nancy and Bernhard Waldenfels – takes us to the obscure borderlands of the phenomenal world and beyond the domain of visually structured representations.47
The term “pathic” is derived from the Greek pathos, which refers to sensitivity, sentience, afectability, and sufering. As is well
known, this kind of sensibility functions as a protective mechanism
and in this way serves the life processes. It is also well known that
pathos is a necessary aspect to every theoretical engagement with
a subject matter not yet known. Transformation in and through
contact is one of the basic concerns of hermeneutics, for example.48
But there is still another concrete, though usually ignored, signiication to pathos: exposure to something excessive and unexpected that may leave painful marks, wounds even. Accordingly, the
pathic aspect of touch is a matter not only of active sentience, but
also, and more generally, of susceptibility to ruptures in the horizon
of abilities. As Bernhard Waldenfels has shown in Bruchlinien der
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
Erfahrung in great detail, such ruptures characterize the structure
of experience at large.49
The fractured horizon of pathic experience pre-exists all psychological and social settings of tactile and afective behaviour. In this
terrain touch appears as a “sense for foreigness” (Fremdheitssinn
as Waldenfels puts it – Derrida’s related term is “tact”)50. Touch
is “sense for foreigness” in two senses: Firstly, insofar as touching is
an ability, it is an ability to touch something foreign, something other.
It is impossible to touch the same. We do not feel the same, we feel
only diferences – or, in the extreme case, the lack of them. Secondly,
insofar as the pathic moment of touching marks the rupture of all
forms of being able, it implies that touching relies on a foreign element, which necessarily remains beyond reach, untouchable, not as
“the untouchable” in general but as something that a singular touch
encounters at – or as – its own limit. The pathic moment cannot
be pointed at, it needs to be felt. In discourse, this implies engagement in presentation.
The igure of rupture, the “fracture-lines” (Bruchlinien), in
Waldenfelds’ delicate attempt of describing the pathic reality of
experience hints at the extreme diiculties of overcoming the
deep-rooted conceptual setting where continuities, coherences
and abilities are privileged, whereas interruptions, gaps and inabilities are denigrated. In this setting, the pathic tends to be the underdog. As Dieter Kliche suggests, we can historically speak even
of pathologization of pathos.51 He shows how the origins of modern
49
50
51
47
48
Cf. Sami Santanen in this volume.
Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode – Grundzüge einer philosophischen
Hermeneutik. Gesammlete Werke, Band 1, Tübingen, J.C.B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck),
1990 [1960].
Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 71.
Ibid., 64.
Dieter Kliche “Ästhetische Pathologie: Ein Kapitel aus der Begrifsgeschichte der
Ästhetik”, Archiv der Begrifsgeschichte Band 42, Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag,
2001, 197–229. See also Kathrin Busch, “Ästhetiken radikalisieter Passivität”,
Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie Band 3, eds. Jörg Sternagel and
Michael Mayer, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2017, 52–54.
51
52
MIKA ELO
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
aesthetics is marked by a shift from Baroque rhetorics that combines the knowledge of the passions with ethics and medicine to
a separation of aesthetics from anthropology that involves a devaluation of the concept “pathological”. In Kliche’s diagnosis, the
philosophical skepticism towards afectivity gaining a systematical
shape in the critical philosophy of Kant marked the point where
pathos was subordinated to active mental capacities. This shift in
conceptual framing – not Kant’s philosophy as such – contributed
to the fact that pathos came to be seen as something pathological,
morbid, a lesser capacity of the senses that belongs to the concerns
of anthropology rather than those of aesthetics.52 This shift led to
a difusion of the concept of aesthetics; and it seems to be haunting the discourse on touching as well. In philosophical debates, the
hierachization of abilities implied in the pathologization of pathos
has been contested in many ways. Various gestures of rehabilitating pathos can be discerned in the writings of Nietzsche, Artaud,
Blanchot, Deleuze and Agamben, and others.53 All these gestures,
in their peculiar ways, address the ways in which the pathic is constitutive of experience at large. In knowledge-oriented discoursive
settings, however, the pathic moment tends to become subordinated to knowledge production.
What can be gained from this schematic account of the multiple
senses of touch with regard to contemporary media technologies
that in one way or another involve touching?
I would like to end this essay by outlining some media aesthetic
implications of my take on the topic “touch” culminating in highlighting the pathic dimension of touching.
Firstly, we need to take into account the fact that the enabling
limits of human experience are constantly being displaced – both
on individual and phylogenetic levels – through the very movement
of experience. This movement requires and presupposes sensitivity
to the boundaries between the proper and the improper, between
the familiar and the foreign. On this elemental level, new media
technologies do not introduce any radical break into the structure
of experience, but they can function as catalysts of transformation.
Secondly, in these sensitive areas – at the enabling limits of
human experience – we are invited to think in terms of immunity,
contamination and responsibility, which should make us aware of
the high relevance of the overdetermined theme of touch in this
context. Insofar as media technologies touch upon these boundaries and contribute to shifting them by introducing new practices, new conceptualizations, and new sensibilities, they have efects
on our existential integrity. New media do not only introduce new
social mediations in our lives, they also reshape our subjectivity.
This means that the goings-on of the media technological operations that touch upon the enabling limits of experience become an
ethical question in terms of “production of ethical subjectivity”.54
Touch as the “sense for foreigness” prototypical of pathic experience plays here a crucial role.
We live in a world where the imperative of making present constitutes one of the key issues of contemporary media technologies.
One could even speak of a media technological megatrend, that is,
the aspiration to eliminate the efect of spatial-temporal distances,
to bring things right to our ingertips “in real time”. In this sense,
the mainstream of media technology of our times consists of techniques of making present. Within this megatrend, touch is under-
52
53
54
TOUCH AND MEDIA
Kliche “Ästhetische Pathologie”, 201.
Busch, “Ästhetiken radikalisieter Passivität”, 51–62.
Boothroyd, “Touch, Time and Technics”, 333.
53
54
MIKA ELO
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
stood from a point of view that Derrida calls “haptocentric”: the
sense of touch is seen as the guarantee of tangible reality and the
ultimate support for optical intuitionism.55 The haptocentric ideal is
a seamless co-operation between vision and touch, and a clear-cut
distinction between the diferent senses of touch.56 This is attempted
at through representational harnessing of the sense of touch. With
Cathryn Vasseleu we could also speak of formalization of touch that
involves a reduction of the ambiguity of touching through technical
and conceptual processes that aim at separating the afective and
tactile dimensions of touch from each other in order to make them
manageable and programmable within digital systems.57
Modern neurophysiological research has, in this vein, chopped
the sense of touch into neurophysiological subsystems determined by diferent receptors (temperature, movement, pain, balance, etc.).58 However, the diiculties of deining touch are also appearing in neurophysiology: eforts to locate the subsystems as
clearly deined representations in the cortex that would be comparable with the centres of sight and hearing, have so far failed.59
From a neuroscientiic point of view, the senses of touch seem to be
embedded in a distributed network of brain regions.60
Today, “haptocentric” rhetoric is used to prop up the idea
of fullness of presence. Media operations are designed and programmed so as to enhance this fullness. Analysing the pathic moment of touch ofers us an occasion to as well as matter for a critical investigation of the various formatting processes active in the
background of the megatrend of making present. It helps us trace
the ways in which conceptual, sensuous, discursive, afective and
technological formats are intertwined in interface technologies.61
Against this background, contemporary touchscreen technologies,
for example, appear as sites where not only the multiple aspects
and ambivalent tendencies of touch but also the enabling limits of
experience at large are negotiated – on the level of our ingertips.
As soon as touch is articulated as a technological application
ield, as soon as it is harnessed62 and formalized63, the approach
to it is by deinition haptocentric, since the very idea of applying
knowledge of touch is based on and motivated by representations
of touch (as a sense modality). Interface design is typically motivated by operative structures that can best be described in terms of a
feedback that airms sensory and mental recognition and forms in
55
56
57
58
59
Cf. Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, passim.
On the critique of “haptocentrism” put forward by Derrida, see Elo “Digital
Finger”, 2012.
According to Vasseleu, this leads to priorization of tactility over afectivity.
Cathryn Vasseleu, “Touch, Digital Communication and the Ticklish”, passim. In
other words: tactility is programmed to serve afectivity, which in turn is formatted by tactile mediations. Cf. Elo “Formatting”
See e.g. Matthew Ratclife, ‘Touch and Situatedness’, International Journal of
Philosophical Studies 16, no.3, 2007, 299–322; Peter W. Ross, ‘Common sense
about qualities and senses’, Philosophical Studies 138, 2008, 299–316; Thomas A.
Stofregen and Benoit G. Bardy, ‘On speciication of the senses’, Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 24, 2001, 195–261.
Waldenfels makes this observation in 2002. Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung,
69.
60
61
62
63
Cf. Sjoerd J. H. Ebisch et al., ”Diferential Involvement of Somatosensory and
Interoceptive Cortices during the Observation of Afective Touch”, Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 23, Issue 7, 2011, 1808–1822.
Elo, “Formatting the Senses of Touch”, 2012.
Cf. David P. Parisi, “Tactile Modernity: On the Rationalization of Touch in the
Nineteenth Century”, Literature and Media in the Nineteenth Century: Image,
Sound, and Touch, eds. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley, Farnham, Ashgate,
2011, 189–213.
Cf. Vasseleu, “Touch, Digital Communication and the Ticklish”, passim.
55
56
MIKA ELO
its functionality a circle that feeds the sense of selfpower.64 Within
this haptocentric mainstream, the pathic moment of touch and the
ethical dimensions of feedback remain in a dead angle. As noted
already above, the ethical implications of ‘‘sensory enhancement’’
are not restricted to the level of practices and attitudes (in other
words, the mediations of an ethical relationship), at stake are also
the mechanisms of the constitution of an ethical subject.65
To sum up, the harnessing of touch can be seen as an efect of
the intricate interplay between technological, sensuous, discursive
and afective aspects of formatting. Insofar as the implicit or explicit aim is to functionalize touch and to integrate it into a system of
digital mediations, these processes of formatting tend to represent
touch as a sense that works in synchrony with vision and ofers a
support for optical intuitionism. They enhance the role of touch as
the guarantee of sensory certainty.
The logic of main stream interface design in digital culture is
that of multiple targeting: it singles out functional gestures; builds
up selected patterns of social behaviour; prioritises certain ways of
making contact and staying in contact. Functionality of active touch
and tactility is privileged. Haptocentric processes of formatting
contribute to upholding the image of tangibility as the epitome of
touching as well as the conception of the sense of touch as the guarantee of sensory certainty. All kinds of dysfunctionalities tend to be
excluded as something pathological, as not belonging to a “healthy”
communication, which in light of the casual imperative “let’s keep
in touch” appears as a strange deferral of any kind of pathic event.
64
65
Robert Pfaller has highlighted the constitutive role of this kind of circuit in
contemporary Western culture at large in Die Illusionen der anderen, Über das
Lustprinzip in der Kultur, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2002.
Boothroyd, “Touch, Time and Technics”, 333–335.
LIGHT TOUCHES: A MEDIA AESTHETIC MAPPING OF TOUCH
COLON
I began this essay by relecting on its title. Even if I discussed various aspects of it in great detail, one element remained untouched:
the colon separating and connecting the two parts of the title. Now,
when focused on, this punctuation mark suddenly gains signiicant
weight. It gives the impression of being the point around which
most of the articulations of the whole essay are organized. It appears as the fulcrum of the essay. But “colon”, being also the name
of the main part of the large intestine passing from the caecum to
the rectum, also hints at the limits of the organic whole of the essay. It hints at the ways in which, at the limits of writing, the sense
is “exscribed”, as Nancy might put it.66 The moment of pertinence
marked by the colon makes a point that cannot be a full stop.
66
Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy: “Exscription”, trans. Katherine Lydon, Yale French Studies,
No. 78, 1990, 63–65.
57
Fingerbombing, or
‘Touching is Good’:
The Cultural Construction
of Technologized Touch1
DAVID PARISI
A compromise between engineers and salespeople regulates how poor the
sound from a TV set can be, how fuzzy movie images can be, or how much
a beloved voice on the telephone can be iltered. Our sense perceptions are
the dependent variable of this compromise.
--Friedrich Kittler,
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
1
Originally published as “Fingerbombing, or ‘Touching is Good: The Cultural
Construction of Technologized Touch” in Senses and Society vol. 3, no. 3 (2008),
307-327. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com.
FINGERBOMBING, OR ‘TOUCHING IS GOOD’:
60
DAVID PARISI
THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGIZED TOUCH
INTRODUCTION
technologies, as Jonathan Sterne’s recent work on the development
of the Mp3 compression ilter demonstrates.4 In the processes of
marketing perceptual technologies, consumer expectations are set
through the framing of their initial and intended uses, as marketers attempt to impart a set of preferred meanings for their new machines. This latter process also involves a reframing, recollection,
and renegotiation of older communication technologies, as they
are displaced and complemented by emerging interfaces. For example, Marshall McLuhan’s “reach out and touch someone” slogan
for AT&T’s decade-long campaign to encourage long-distance telephone calls linked the telephony to touch, mobilizing a longstanding relationship between touch and emotion. This chapter examines touch’s discursive production in the process of marketing the
Nintendo Dual Screen (DS) portable gaming system, showing how
the ad campaign for the DS allows it to be cast as a technology that
reconigures touch, despite the lack of any tactile feedback components in the system.5 Throughout my analysis, I treat representations of interface technology in the DS ads, rather the device’s subsequent use; though this approach may constrain the scope of my
conclusions, it has the advantage of isolating and bringing to light
marketers’ imagined uses for the new interface.
Recent studies in the history of perception contextualize the development of our contemporary perceptual models by showing the
speciic cultural moments from which they emerged.2 These studies view perception not as a physiological given, but rather as a
learned behavior–as technique rather than biology. It has become
common practice in these studies to point to Karl Marx’s claim
in “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” that “the
forming of the ive senses is a labor of all of history down to the
present,”3 which suggests that the ive-sense model of perception
is itself ideological, providing a framework for the way we bring
our bodies into contact with the world around us. In short, what
is meant by “seeing,” “hearing,” “tasting,” “smelling,” and “touching” changes over time and across cultures. What follows springboards of from these studies, working under the assumption that
perceptual technologies themselves do not recondition practices
of perceiving, but rather, the discursive construction and framing
of these technologies reshapes the habits involved in the perceptual act. Friedrich Kittler, in his suggestion that sense perception
is a “dependent variable” in a vital compromise between engineers
and marketers, directs us to the converging point of two separate
processes, highlighting the human actors involved in the construction of sensory experience. In the engineering process, assumptions about the way we use our senses may be written into media
2
3
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, CA, 1999; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought, University of California Press, Berkeley,
1993; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990; Jonathan Sterne, The Audible
Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Duke University Press, Durham,
2003; David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social
Theory, Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 2003
Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, R. Tucker, ed., Norton, New York, 1972, 89.
4
5
Jonathan Sterne, ‘Recalibrating the Sound of Music: Perceptual Coding and the
Making of the MP3,’ New York University Music Department Colloquium Series,
February 2, 2006.
Nintendo later released a “Rumble Pack” peripheral device for the DS. Using the
same name the accessory it irst used to add force feedback to its Nintendo 64
gaming system in 1997, the DS’s Rumble Pack provides very rudimentary force
feedback, with onscreen events generating tactile sensations in the user’s hands
via a spinning motor.
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our technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms.
That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these
extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is a
servomechanism of his canoe, a cowboy of his horse or the executive
of his clock.7
MEDIA AS BODILY HABIT
My suggestion is that cultural ecology has a reasonably stable base
in the human sensorium, and that any extension of the sensorium
by technological dilation has quite an appreciable efect in setting
up new ratios or proportions among the senses.6
To briely revisit McLuhan’s sense ratio hypothesis, the significance of media as “extensions of man” does not lie in their ability
to extend the sense organs into the external world, but rather, in
the reconiguration of the sensorium brought about by this technological conditioning of bodily habits. It is the reforming of the perceptual act accomplished by technological extension that is significant, instead of the material extension itself. However, in positing
a theory of sense ratios, McLuhan reinforced and perpetuated the
separation of the senses that he claimed began with their “outering”
in language. Though McLuhan identiied a liberatory power in electronic media’s potential to restore balance to the senses—to undo
the fragmentation of the senses initiated by communication technologies—that project remains uninished. To better understand
the processes involved in the traumatic fragmenting of perceptual
acts, it is necessary to consider the interface between the body and
the technology that extends it:
To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the
printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the “closure” or displacement of perception that follows automatically […] By continuously embracing
The three examples McLuhan provides here are signiicant for
the way that they illustrate his orientation to technology not as
a disembodied thing, but rather, as a set of usage techniques imprinted on tool users through their repeated interaction with a given technology. Accordingly, we can think of communication technology as informing and shaping what French sociologist Marcel
Mauss understood as “techniques of the body,” techniques which
are largely inherited from culture and learned through repeated
body motion, involving not just cerebral but also muscular memory:
The body is man’s irst and most natural instrument […] The constant adaptation to a physical, mechanical or chemical aim (e.g.
when we drink) is pursued in a series of assembled actions, and assembled for the individual not by himself alone but by all his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies in it.8
Such an understanding collapses the divide between psychology and physiology—between nature and—culture and directs us
to consider the way discourse prescribes practice. A synthesis of
McLuhan and Mauss can recast McLuhan’s sense ratios as discur-
7
6
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press, Toronto,
1962, 35.
8
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1994 [1964], 46.
Marcel Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body,’ Economy and Society vol. 2, no. 1, 1973,
75–76.
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sively informed bodily practices of perceptual use, learned through
participation in a system of cultural education. When considering
the history of the senses, and the perpetual technological reconditioning of the senses, it is therefore important to be attentive to
new discursive models of perception generated in the cultural deployment of technology. In what follows, I will explore the model of
touch being advanced in the advertisements for Nintendo’s Dual
Screen (DS) portable gaming system, comparing it to previous models of touch advanced in psychophysics and psychology.9
Through all of this, I will attempt to avoid asserting a “naturalized”
model of perception or a mythologized “pre-technological” sensorium (such as that of the “tribal man” valorized in McLuhan’s theories),
recognizing that, as tool users, humans have a long history of extending their perceptual systems. In the inal years of the twentieth century, this treatment of the senses as markers of cultural change that
exist within rather than outside history gained increased traction,
with anthropologists initially focusing their attention on the various
ways that non-Western cultures organize and classify the senses.10
More recent work in the ield of sensory anthropology has turned this
lens on the Western sensorium itself, uncovering the nuanced trajectories of what were once thought to be static modes of perception.11
9
10
11
The research here was carried out before the US release of Nintendo’s DS Lite, a
smaller version of the original system that was released in June of 2006. The ads
for the DS Lite don’t use the “touching is good” theme that is discussed in this
paper, instead opting to call attention to some design revisions made in response
to problems with the original system.
See David Howes, The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the
Anthropology of the Senses, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991; Nadia C.
Seremetakis, ed., The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in
Modernity, Westview, Boulder, CO, 1994.
Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses From Antiquity to Cyberspace, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 2005; D. Howes, 2003; David Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: The
Sensual Culture Reader, Berg, New York, 2004. Speciic to touch, see Constance
Classen, ed., The Book of Touch Berg, New York, 2005.
THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGIZED TOUCH
WHAT IS THE DS?
The DS was developed by Japan’s Nintendo Entertainment
Corporation and hit the shelves of US stores on November 21,
2004, just in time for the annual post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas US shopping ritual known as Black Friday. Two weeks later it was released in Japan and, subsequently, in Australia, Korea
and China and throughout Europe, with the DS meeting or exceeding the sales expectations for each region. The system has
been extremely popular thus far, selling in excess of 13 million
units globally as of January 2006.12 The DS interface is a compelling object of study due to the way it is marketed as a signiicant
break from traditional video game interfaces. Of course, marketing technological commodities based on their purported novelty is typical in an economic system that depends on the production of need through strategies of planned obsolescence, involving
the addition of new features that render last year’s models inadequate. Even giving in to the logic of technological evolution,
these additional features often serve no functional purpose other than to produce obsolescence, what the Critical Art Ensemble
terms “technologies of uselessness.”13 Even taking this charge into
consideration, Nintendo’s decision to market the DS on its mode of
interface signaled a shift in the way game consoles were marketed, and preigured Nintendo’s wildly successful choice to eschew
12
13
See Rob Fahey, ‘Nintendo Europe Reports 3.5m DS Sales; Worldwide Sales Top
13m,’ Gamesindustry.biz, 2006.
The print and TV ads cited in this paper are all available online from Nintendo.
com at http://www.nintendo.com/newsarticle?articleid=62c5e8ca-165e-4259-a
391-844b3ca8cdab&page=newsmain.
Critical Art Ensemble, ‘The Technology of Uselessness’ CTheory, July 9, 1994,
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=59.
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high-deinition graphics in favor of a novel interfacing scheme with
its Wii console in 2006.14
Before unpacking the marketing campaign, let me irst detail
the components of the interface that Nintendo claims set the DS
apart from other hand-held video game devices (see Figure 1). First
and most signiicant for our concerns, the DS has two screens.
Other game systems, portable and platform-based, had previously
divided the single screen up into frames. The DS features two distinct physical screens, providing twice the screen area of previous
Nintendo portable systems. Second, the lower screen is touch-sensitive and functions as an input device, similar to more familiar
handheld computer screens such as those found in Personal Data
Assistants, which Heidi Cooley has described as “Mobile Screenic
Devices.”15 Since the DS’s release, touch screens in mobile devices have grown increasingly popular, notably with the iPhone and
iTouch in 2007. Third, the DS houses a microphone that allows
voice commands, transforming the player’s mouth into a game input device. Finally, the DS has wireless capability that enables
players to interact with one another using the game device. In late
2005, Nintendo launched a WiFi network for the DS across North
and South America, Europe and Asia. Since the launch, Nintendo
boasts that over 1 million players have logged on to the network.16
Selling the DS involved producing ads that would call attention to
these features. On October 25, 2004, a month ahead of the DS’s US
release, Nintendo began airing minimalist and sexually charged if-
teen-second trailers in over 6,000 movie theaters, and during television shows targeted toward an older demographic than Nintendo
had traditionally taken as its core audience, buying airtime during Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The OC, Family Guy, and South
Park. They also launched a print ad campaign in “guy” magazines
such as Maxim, Blender, and Stuf. Nintendo launched www.touchingisgood.com as a guerilla marketing site for the DS, using the
website as the main portal for a contest where they sent out mannequin hands to fans across the country, encouraging them to
make movies using the hand around the theme “touching is good.”
Touchingisgood.com received higher traic than the console’s oicial site at www.nintendo.com/channel.ds. The campaign, produced
by Chicago marketing irm Leo Burnett USA, cost Nintendo over
$40 million and signaled a signiicant shift in its recent strategy of
being the most conservative and youth-oriented of the three major
console manufacturers.17
In the following pages, I detail and analyze the ads with the
aim of showing how they worked in concert to accomplish three
related ends: (1) a retraining of the body to learn novel interface habits, (2) explicitly identifying and satisfying a sensory deficiency symptomatic of late modern Western society,
and (3) an implicit refashioning of the category of touch so that it
meets the conditions of Nintendo’s new touchscreen interfacing
technology in particular, and modern media systems more generally.
17
14
15
16
For an analysis, see David Parisi, ‘Game Interfaces as Bodily Techniques,’ in
Handbook of Research on Efective Electronic Gaming in Education, IGI Publishing,
New York, 2009.
Heidi Rae Cooley, ‘It’s All About the Fit: The Hand, the Mobile Screenic Device
and Tactile Vision,’ Journal of Visual Culture vol. 3, no. 2, 2004, 133–55.
WIRED.com Staff, ‘Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection Hits One Million Players,’
WIRED, March 8, 2006, https://www.wired.com/2006/03/nintendo_wii_c/.
As Nintendo’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate
Communications explained: “The campaign for Nintendo DS marks a diferent,
bolder approach for Nintendo[…]We think such a radically diferent and creative device like Nintendo DS deserves the backing of an equally innovative and
provocative marketing campaign.” Nintendo, “Nintendo Launches Massive
Media Blitz for Debut of Nintendo DS: “Touching is Good” Campaign Features
Provocative Spots,” October 25, 2004 http://www.nintendo.com/newsarticle?articleid=62c5e8ca-165e-4259-a391-844b3ca8cdab&page=newsmain (accessed March
15, 2006).
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The Nintendo DS Portable Gaming System
The three aforementioned TV ads are seductively simple. Each
of them opens with a liquid blue wire, fading into a rainbow test-pattern that dissolves into a static-dotted black screen with one unnaturally blue rectangle positioned in the center. A second blue rectangle unfolds above the irst. Then a crackling noise, followed by a
whispering female voice imploring: “Touch the bottom rectangle . . .
please. Go ahead, touch it.” The DS materializes around the rectangles and the voice continues: “you might like it.” In the second trailer, the voice coos again: “See the bottom rectangle? Draw or write
something in it. Don’t worry, this isn’t a test or anything . . . it’s just
good practice” (my emphasis). In the third trailer, the sexual overtones ooze: “Touch the screen. Someone . . . somewhere . . . wants to
play with you.” The DS boasts WiFi capabilities, meaning that it uses
wireless communication to interact with other consoles. Nintendo
promises to allow distanced touch through a screen. “Someone,
somewhere” indicates the possibility of using the DS as an intimate
space of interpersonal contact, recalling McLuhan’s framing of the
telephone as a technology that allows emotional contact. The screen
THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGIZED TOUCH
in these ads ceases to be visual, becoming instead the promise of
tactile contact, no longer a window for the eye but for the hand
as well.18 The DS purports to allow the possibility of manipulating
a remote body, but also, the promise of being remotely manipulated by another body, becoming the touching object and the touched
object. The screen is sexualized, not as a scopophilic interface that
allows pleasure through remote viewing, but rather as an interface
that allows for pleasurable mutual manipulation. Although the DS
contains no feedback mechanism to simulate tactile contact between remote subjects, the ads conjure the fantasy of a networked,
computer-mediated touching in order to create a desire for the
interface-as-commodity.
FAMILIARIZING THE INTERFACE
These commercials, beyond signaling Nintendo’s aforementioned
shift in marketing away from its normal target youth demographic
18
I am putting aside a discussion of optical tactility, which suggests that the eye
can become an organ of touch. The model of optical tactility only emerges with
the technological augmentation and fetishization of the eye. In acquiring its new
range of powers technology also enabled the eye to function as a hand. For Walter
Benjamin, writing shortly after the advent of cinema, ilm became a means of
opening up the skin of reality, allowing the hand to feel around “like a surgeon”
beneath its surface, a means of shattering the spectrality of the commodity form
through optical-tactile contact. Touching the spectral commodity reveals its nonexistence, as we are able only to touch its component parts. Walter Benjamin,
Illuminations: Essays and Relections, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, New
York, 1969, 233. For further exploration of Benjamin’s theories on tactility, see
Michael Taussig “Tactility and Distraction” in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular
History of the Senses, Routledge, New York, 1993; Mark Hansen, Embodying
Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor,
2000. Laura Marks goes so far as to separate cinematic visuality into “haptic”
and “optical,” where haptic visuality is activated by intensely blurred or textured
images. See The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses,
Durham: Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2000; Touch: Sensuous Theory and
Multisensory Media, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002.
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THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGIZED TOUCH
toward an older and more “hip” audience,19 also function as an attempt to simultaneously mystify and familiarize the new touchscreen
interface. They signal a deliberate efort to train the user to the
touch screen, to construct it as a space of sexual contact, to seduce
the viewer into ingering a feminized screen. They ask the user to engage in a new behavior – touching the normally unresponsive screen
on the “bottom rectangle,” the space corresponding with the DS’s
touch screen, establishing a direct link between bodily action with
the inger collapsing on to the eye. It is not my argument here that
Nintendo succeeds in or even expects to succeed in the task of retraining perception simply by showing viewers a series of ifteen-second commercials. Rather, the short and ambiguous teasers were designed to pique the viewer’s interest in touch, and to highlight both
the deiciencies of the television screen and the promises of the DS.
The ads asked the viewer to become physically interactive with the
glass screen, but then immediately reminded them that such an interaction is useless: the inger can’t penetrate the glass to touch/manipulate the image behind it. The Dual Screen becomes a promise of
bodily engagement – of penetration – lagged as being absent from
the screens of cinema and television. Where much of the writing on
new media has focused rather myopically on vision—on what happens on the screen—the DS asks us to learn a new habit of inter-
facing in which the body occupies a central role.20 The interactive
screen promises a new relationship between the hand and the eye,
one in which they achieve synergistic mastery over the image.21 We
might generously read this as evidence of McLuhan’s claim that the
rise of electronic media will rebalance a cultural sensorium that has,
since the rise of typography, emphasized a detached form of linear
seeing against other perceptual conigurations. But does the DS accomplish such a rebalancing? The DS ads position it as a device that
allows interpersonal touch – intersubjective contact – mediated by
the sensing, eroticized screen. No longer a space of pure visuality,
the DS ads teach us to reconsider our relationship to the screen, not
to treat it as something touch contaminates but rather as a surface
meant to be fondled, poked and caressed. Touch is introduced into
the image; the inger (functioning as an icon for touch) is pressed
into a space normally reserved for the eye, but in the process touch
as a category of experience is fundamentally transformed as our expectations for the experience of touch are recalibrated to it the capacities of its technological extension. Rather than disrupting the
logic of the image, touch is brought under the control of a visual logic by pretending that touch’s technological reintegration under the
eye’s mastery is suicient to reproduce it.
20
19
Before the release of the DS, Nintendo marketed its systems primarily to children. For the most part, it stayed away from the late-teen and adult gamer market. Compared to Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s X-Box, Nintendo opted for a
lower price point on its systems and games, cartoonish graphics over photorealistic ones, fantastical themes and storylines instead of more mature ones. Consider
the signature games, PlayStation’s notoriously controversial Grand Theft Auto,
X-Box’s grim irst-person shooter Halo in comparison with Nintendo’s Mario franchise, in which players control a range of lovable characters such as the ItalianAmerican stereotype brothers Mario and Luigi and anthropomorphized fungi.
To further illustrate this shift, consider the placement of print ads for the DS in
aforementioned “guy” magazines.
21
For examples of interfacing being reduced to a purely visual/cognitive process
see Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon &
Schuster, New York, 1995 and Lev Manovich The Language of New Media, MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001.
Of course, touch screens have a history that predates their use in video games.
The irst touch sensors for computer screens were originally developed between
1971 and 1974. See Mary Bellis, ‘Touch Screen,’ TheInventors.org, http://theinventors.org/library/inventors/bltouch.htm. Additionally, touch screens that provide
haptic or force feedback are currently in development and have been deployed
in a very limited scope. See Shigeaki Maruyama and Ivan Poupyrev, ‘Tactile
Interfaces for Small Touch Screens,’ Proceedings of the 16th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, November 2–5, 2003, 217–220.
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THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGIZED TOUCH
TOUCHLUST: THE POVERTY OF TOUCH IN MODERN MEDIA
The print and internet ads tell a diferent, though related, part of
the story. Here, we see touch explicitly framed as repressed mode
of knowing, now liberated by the DS. The following text appears on
the main page of touchingisgood.com:
Touching is . . . thrilling, exciting, fun, weird, interesting. Sometimes
a bit taboo. It’s how we connect – with each other, the stuf around us
and now, our games. Here, we celebrate the most under appreciated
of your ive senses. We make contact. We get in touch with touching.
Because with the Nintendo DS, touching is good.
Touch as underappreciated, as taboo, as weird and thrilling, mobilizes a narrative of marginalization—a bodily practice that is culturally repressed. By claiming to “make contact” and “get in touch
with touch,” the ad implies that in the culture of late modernity,
which has often been hailed or demonized as a culture of the image, we are out of touch with our sense of touch. Touch has become
an alienated form of experience, one that exists only in the imagination of a pretechnological past. A prominent print ad for the DS
employs a similar positioning, showing black ingerprints chaotically scattered across the page as the backdrop for the ad’s copy (see
Figure 2). The ingerprint itself contains two layers of meaning; in
the irst, it stands for a technology of identiication and surveillance,
but the second, implied by their disordered littering, recalls childhood ieldtrips to the police station, ingerprinting for fun, a playful
encounter with the state’s identiication apparatus. Fingerprints
are touch made visible, the materialization of an evidentiary and
contaminating touch. The text laid over the ingerprints begins by
conjuring a tactile childhood, before quickly moving to a concept
of touch as mastery:
Touching is Good ad
Touching is not good. Or so we’re told. Please do not touch…yourself, your nose, wet paint, that zit, grandma’s best china. You name it,
you can’t touch it. We think that’s wrong. Why shouldn’t you touch
what you want? What if you could touch the games you play? What
if you could make something jump or shoot or run just by touching
it? Let’s face it, touching the game means controlling the game. And
when we say control, we mean precision control. One right touch
and you’re master of the universe. One wrong touch and you’re
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DAVID PARISI
toast. Forget everything you’ve ever been told and repeat after us.
Touching is good. Touching is good.22
I will revisit some of these themes later in the essay. For now, I
want to continue to press on Nintendo’s construction of touch as a
culturally regulated practice. The initial list provided in the ad presents a litany of restricted surfaces, sensations deemed contaminating to either the touching subject or the touched object. Since the
publication of humanist anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s Touching:
The Human Signiicance of the Skin in 1971, literature on the psychology of touch has levied a similar charge at Western culture. Montagu
highlights the importance of touch in reaching several stages of psychological maturity, but because it is not understood as a central to
cognition, he claims that this vital sense is not given the attention
it warrants.23 In “Touch as a Communicative Sense,” Carl Sherrick
claims that the rise of modernity, what McLuhan understood as
the rise of print logic, entailed the banishing of touch to the realm
of the “non-intellectual,” conined to the domain of emotion and no
longer allowed to make truth claims.24 This denigration of touch has
a history that stretches back to the Greeks and recurs in medieval
Christian theology, but I will not retrace it here.25 One hundred and
thirty years after the phonograph recorded sound and one hundred
years after cinema replicated the eye, the technological extension
22
23
24
25
Nintendo.com, “Nintendo Launches Massive Media Blitz.” Emphasis original.
Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Signiicance of the Skin, Perennial Library,
New York, 1971.
Carl Sherrick, ‘Touch as a Communicative Sense: Introduction,’ Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, vol. 77, no. 1, 1984, pp. 218–19.
For an expanded discussion, see A. Synott, ‘Tomb, Temple Machine and Self:
The Social Construction of the Body,’ The British Journal of Sociology vol. 43, no. 1,
1992, 79–110; Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, Barrie
& Jenkins, London, 1978; Jay, Downcast Eyes, 1993; and Crary, Techniques of the
Observer, 1990.
THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGIZED TOUCH
of touch remains a nascent project. But the fact that we have such
an explosion of interest in tactile technologies can itself be read as
symptomatic of a kind of cultural reality deiciency; the culture industry consistently falls short in its attempts to deliver a “data of
experience” capable of substituting for experience in its nonmediated form.26 As technologies of visualization are shown to be incapable of satisfying the demand for novelty and reality that emerge
in response to the passage of the whole world “through the ilter of
the culture industry”—as increased polygon counts and photorealistic graphics are shown to be incapable of bringing reality into our
hungry grasp—technologized tactility provides us with a renewed
faith in our power to lay hold of reality through its technological
reproduction. Once marginalized by Enlightenment paradigms of
knowledge,27 touch is given new life by the quest to reproduce reality
in commodity form. With its tactile components absent, the image
remains an unfaithful copy, revealed to our senses as a shatterable
illusion. To produce a more faithful copy, technology must ill touch’s
empty and dormant sensory channels, attempting to satisfy this reality-lust through the addition of quantitatively more information.
These ads explicitly reframe the DS as a technology capable of
satisfying our lust to touch, using a discursive repositioning of interfaces to restore the auratic components to reality that its mechanical reproduction stripped away. In short, Nintendo’s claim
that “we want to be touched” appears particularly valid when considered against a mass-mediated landscape that has produced desire through its consistent neglect of tactility. By replacing touch
26
27
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming, Continuum, New York, 1997 [1947], 124.
Günter Getzinger, ‘Technology and the Loss of the Tactile,’ in A. Bammé, G.
Getzinger and B. Wieser, eds., Yearbook 2002 of the Institute for Advanced Studies
on Science, Technology & Society, Proil, S., München, 2002, 228–229.
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rather than replicating it, the tactility produced to meet this desire
is doomed from the start to be another technique passed through
the culture industry’s ilter, one that promises contact with an alienated reality, while only serving to further distance us from it.
Considered from another perspective, the debate over touch
can be framed as a debate over the priority of the senses in the
epistemological order. In short, this discussion is linked to the paradigm of vision as the path to knowledge that emerged during the
Enlightenment. Prior to this period, many of the debates over ways
of knowing were linked to the composition of the perceiving subject. The very nature of the senses was in question. The relations
between seeing and hearing, and between touch and vision, were
in the process of gaining articulation in eighteenth-century British
empiricism. Arguments for the priority of experiential knowledge,
a posteriori, were embraced, while a priori knowledge, gained
through the use of reason, was abandoned. But if experience produced knowledge, then what sort of sensate experience provided
the ground for truth claims? What experiences would be given credence and what would be disregarded, marginalized, or rendered
irrelevant? The emergence of techniques for transcribing and mechanically producing a form of sensory experience that could serve
as the ground for truth claims worked to elevate vision’s status as
the master sense, with image-making practices such as photographic proiling quickly deployed in service of institutional observation.28
During the eighteenth century, the relationship between touch and
vision had been a central concern in debates about sensory episte-
mology, as vision’s grounding in the tactile materiality of the body
frequently raised questions about the mutual translatability of the
two perceptual modes. However, by the end of nineteenth century,
the conlict between these two senses was, in Jonathan Crary’s narrative, resolved by the image-making technique of the stereoscope,
which yielded “a tangibility [...] transformed into a purely visual experience.”29 New technologies of perception, then, participated in a
rearranging of sensory hierarchies, closely tied to changes in the organization of consumption, governance, and knowledge-production.
Curiously, the Nintendo campaign calls attention to the shift
from abstract to embodied knowledge, in a video that plays automatically upon loading touchingisgood.com. As the video begins,
a sampled authoritarian voice lectures on the transition from rationalism to empiricism, explaining how “a priori knowledge was
staunchly disavowed in favor of sight, smell, hearing, taste and
of course, touch.” The voice fractures, a record scratches, and
the voice resumes, eerily declaring that “we want to be touched.”
Nintendo identiies the rise to dominance of sensory experience,
recalling and mythologizing a moment in cultural history where
tactile knowledge was valorized and celebrated. The text above the
video, referenced above, dubs touch the most “under appreciated of
our senses,” with the DS providing a means of ameliorating touch’s
neglect by allowing us to “get in touch with touch.”
Nintendo’s clear attempt to activate a nostalgia for the purportedly-lost and marginalized sense of touch warrants further attention. This two-stage strategy, of irst arguing that touch has
an inherent but currently unrecognized value, and second, recalling a past in where this value was widely acknowledged and celebrated, summons apast where the sensorium existed in a perfect
28
See especially John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies
and Histories, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1993; Jay,
Downcast Eyes; Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical
Perception (1st American edn.), Pantheon Books New York, 1973.
29
Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 124.
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state, only undone by a process of modernization. Here we can draw
on Nadia Seremetakis’s discussion of nostalgia in her description
of “the Breast of Aphrodite,” a breed of peach from her childhood
lost with the increasingly transnational low of goods in the EEC.
Seremetakis raises the issue of sensation and memory, of the senses as the storehouse of a material yet subjective history. Changes in
the common-sense experience of a community “occur microscopically through everyday accretion; so that which shifts the material culture of perception is itself imperceptible and only reappears
after the fact in fairy tales, myths, and memories that hover at the
margins of speech.”30 The global low of goods evidenced in the loss
of Aphrodite’s Breast is, for Seremetakis, the lived sensory experience of macropolitical dynamics. Narratives of loss and nostalgia are the result of bodily interfaces with an increasingly structured material culture, and point to the inability of new commodities
to replicate the sensory experience of the old. Loss is experienced
through absence, through the inability of an object to trigger the
expected sensory experience. Memory, for Seremetakis, acts as
a “meta-sense’” that involuntarily bridges the senses, bonding them
while leaving their individuated contents undisturbed. In being involuntary, sense experience and memory are encompassed “by a
trans-individual and somatic landscape.”31 Modernity, for the senses, entails their detachment from each other, their externalization,
and, perhaps most importantly, their transformation into pathways
for proit extraction. The modern world—the individual process
of moving from childhood to adulthood alluded to in the DS print
ads—robs us of our contact with this mode of knowing.32 The narrative of sensory conlict, which played out in the eighteenth century as vision ‘denigrated’ the other senses and resonated in counterEnlightnment diatribes, now reemerges in Nintendo’s propaganda
for the DS.33
RECONSTITUTING THE TOUCHING SUBJECT
Here, we arrive at the third aim of “touching is good”: an implicit
reframing of what touch is and what it means to touch. The assertion that “touching is good” tacitly distinguishes between the active process of touching and the passive process of being touched,
between touch as something that the subject does to an object and
touch as something done to the subject. This bifurcation of touch recalls two diferent tactile modalities posited by psychophysics. The
irst model, that of passive touch, developed out of Ernst Heinrich
Weber’s (1795–1878) nineteenth-century experiments in which he
attempted to determine the sensitivity of the subject’s tactile system as diferent objects passed over diferent regions of his or her
skin.34 Weber’s research produced a model where the active touching object stimulated sensations in the skin of the passive touched
subject. These sensations were transmitted directly to the brain,
32
33
34
30
31
Nadia C. Seremetakis, “The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the
Transitory,” in Seremetakis, ed., The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as
Material Culture in Modernity, Westview, Boulder, CO, 1994, 3.
Ibid., 9.
For a detailed discussion on the cultural forgetting of touch, see Mark Paterson,
“The Forgetting of Touch: Re-membering Geometry with Eyes and Hands.”
Angelaki, vol. 30, no. 3, 2005, 115–32. Paterson argues that since the Enlightenment
touch has been written out of practices of measurement, and tries to reintroduce an embodied measuring based on bodily movement, proportion, and haptic spatiality.
Jay, Downcast Eyes, 404.
It is important to note that Weber did very explicitly discuss the beneits of active touch. However, he focused primarily on the articulation of “sensory circles,”
using passive touch to keep the body inert and thus claiming that his experiments would yield repeatable results. Ernst Heinrich Weber, E. H. Weber on The
Sense of Touch, trans. H. Ross and D. Murray, Academic Press for Experimental
Psychology Society, New York, 1978, 29–30.
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but they were received diferently depending on the sensitivity of
the area stimulated and the intensity of the stimuli. By varying the
intensity of the stimuli and soliciting his subjects’ experience of
them, Weber aimed to uncover the smallest change needed to produce in the subject a “just-noticeable diference” as the unit of tactile experience. David Katz, a phenomenologist who studied under
Edmund Husserl, argued against Weber’s passive model, demonstrating, also through lab experiment, that touch worked best not
when the subject was passive, but rather, when the subject actively pressed against and manipulated objects.35 Whereas Weber had
considered the skin’s whole surface as the organ of touch, Katz
argued that the sense of touch could be conined to the hands because of their unique ability to recognize objects through active
manipulation. Whereas Weber claimed that touch could be fooled
because of the skin’s varying capacities for sensation, and theorized the idea of the “tactile illusion,” Katz claimed that the active
hand was diicult to deceive. Psychophysics thus leaves us with
two models of touch: the passive model, in which an active object
rubbed against a passive subject, and the active model, where the
active subject moves over a passive object. It is important to note
that both Weber and Katz were very deliberate in their attempts
to isolate the information received through touch from information received through the other sense organs. This involved, for
Katz, either testing on subjects who were already deicient in one
of their senses, such as the blind, or artiicially limiting input from
the other senses by using blindfolds or stuing the subject’s ears
with wax. The signiicance of this component of the experiments
is that it involves a sensory separation, detachment, and isolation
like that which is accomplished by the technological extension of
the other senses (for example, in the detachment of the eye from
the body accomplished by photography). This rationalization of
the perceptual process had already been used to understand and
perfect techniques of seeing, but had not yet been applied to the
more intricate process of touch.
The DS ads seem to be advancing a model of active touch. The
subject implied by ‘touching is good’ is one who must be acting on
the world rather than being acted on by it. But upon closer examination, we can see that Nintendo’s model does not it with either of
these. Katz’s model of active touch assumes a bidirectional low of
information, where the hand takes in information as it moves over
an object. Instead, with the DS, we see touch framed as a means of
control, as a method of manipulation where the low of information
is unidirectional and the sensations provided by textured, multifarious objects are reduced to the uniformity of a glass screen. The
hand functions only as a sender and not as a receiver of information. Recalling the DS print ad quoted above, “touching the game
means controlling the game . . . one right touch and you’re master of the universe;” touch becomes a means of mastery and control, achieved through body rhythms (that is, routine movements
of the stylus or inger across the glass screen, or a precise tapping
sequence required to navigate through the game), but not through
the exchange of sensations with the touched object that was so important for both Weber and Katz. The promise to touch the game’s
world is never fulilled – the inger never reaches through the screen
to touch what is on the other side. Rather, the narrative of control—
where the interface enables mastery over the gaming experience—
deines what we might understand, following Alex Galloway’s for-
35
David Katz, The World of Touch, trans. Lester E. Krueger, L. Erlbaum, Hillsdale,
NJ, 1989.
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DAVID PARISI
mulation of “gamic action,” as the paradigm of gamic touch.36 The
hand manipulates without feeling. Instead of putting us “in touch”
with the world, where touch involves a process of mutual exchange
between perceiver and perceived, the DS advances a model of touch
absent of feeling, one in which the perceiver is only a manipulator
and a controller. The technologically extended hand takes on the
same characteristics of the technologically extended eye; it is abstracted from the body and rationalized. It becomes an instrument
of manipulation rather than an organ of perception. It is through
this process of explicitly telling us what touch is that Nintendo attempts to redeine the practice of touching. Though I have only
sketched out two countervailing models, many more remain. Touch
as a category of experience (the social history of touching) has a
complex history that has only recently been explored.37 I choose to
contextualize Nintendo’s model through Weber and Katz because
they are taken to be central igures in the creation of the modern
science of touch, a science that has informed the design of contemporary touch-based interfaces. Other models may link the discourse
in the DS ads to diferent histories of touch, revealing gendered or
racial constructions of practices of touching. For my immediate
purposes, it is suicient to link the construction of technologized
36
37
Galloway argues that there is a discontinuity between the styles of visual presentation used in ilm and those used in video games. As Galloway points out,
the irst-person camera, so dominant a perspective in video games that it has
spawned its own genre, is rarely used is ilm. A. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on
Algorithmic Culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2006.
For example, in Elisabeth D. Harvey, ed., Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern
Culture, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia; Jacques Derrida, On
Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry. Stanford University Press,
Stanford, CA, 2005; Paterson, “The Forgetting of Touch”, 2005; Marks, The Skin
of the Film, 2000; Marks, Touch, 2002; Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft:
The Practiced Digital Hand, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1996; Cathryn Vasseleu,
Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty,
Routledge, New York, 1998.
THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGIZED TOUCH
touch back to the process of scientiically rendering the physiological mechanisms involved in the touching experience.
THE FINGERBOMBER
All this culminates in a very provocative ad that I will refer to
as “Fingerbombing” (see Figure 3). Fingerbombing is a print ad
that ran in scores of video game magazines and comic books for
the military strategy game Advanced Wars: Dual Strike. The ad features a camoulaged hand with the index inger extending across
the page, resembling a B-52 bomber. A series of small bombs falls
from the inger, and the words “touching is good” appear in small
white text next to the image. One of several similarly-styled print
ads for DS games (others include Need for Speed 2, Super Mario 64,
and Pokemon Dash) that merge the outstretched index inger with
the gameworld, Fingerbombing is the most jarring and captivating
of the campaign for its overt linkage of militarized touching—touch
as distanced, detached, and destructive—to the vaguely-deined
concept of “the good” discussed above. In the context of the present political situation, where the US military explicitly uses video
games for recruitment and training purposes, this ad, even if it does
so playfully, summons the long relationship between war, technology, and perception.38 Again, my goal here is to show how the discursive positioning of interfaces by marketers aims to acclimate their
users to new perceptual conigurations. Projecting militarized imagery onto the hand and inger advances a model of touch as domination, continuing Nintendo’s equation of touch with mastery. I
38
America’s Army has rightly attracted a signiicant amount of attention from academics. But it is not so much anomalous as it is emblematic of a trend towards
more accurate depictions of military experience that serve to acclimate gamers
to battleield conditions. Other examples include Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon series
and urban combat simulation Full Spectrum Warrior.
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am not attempting to mobilize a humanistic or naturalistic model
of touch against the one presented by Fingerbombing, but rather,
trying to highlight the distinctive features underpinning the model
of touch put forth by the advertisement. Touch, in this image, is the
ability to manipulate from a distance; the interface here functions
to insulate the gamer from danger while still allowing remote action, even if that action is only a crude form of destructive touching.
Paul Virilio’s claim that “the history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing ields of perception”39 directs us to consider the ways in which mastering new techniques of representing
and rendering of the enemy’s perceptual landscape preigures the
domination of that sensory environment. Virilio continues, “war
consists not so much in scoring territorial, economic or other material victories as in appropriating the ‘immateriality’ of perceptual
ields.”40 The perceptual ield that Virilio tracks in War and Cinema
is treated as a primarily visual one (with some exceptions, notably the tactic of using screeching planes to disrupt ground troops).
“Fingerbombing” directs our attention to both (1) the role of touch
as an instrument for dominating the perceptual ield, and (2) the
shielding of the tactile ield as a necessary precondition for this
domination. Though the eye and its instruments survey the ield,
mastery over that ield requires a tactile intervention, mediated
in this instance by a series of what we can only assume are “dumb
bombs.” The act of bombing accomplished through the manipulation of the instrument panel folds into the image of the iconic inger. By touching, the inger destroys. But despite the claim made by
the copy, the inger never touches; its pointed gesture implies that
it is about to touch the edge of the frame, a space we may assume
represents the lat frame of the DS’s touch screen. The only touch
39
40
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Verso, London, 1989, 7.
Ibid.
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represented in the ad is a distanced and detached touch mediated
by the ingerbombs. This leads us to another prestigious absence in
the frame: just as in distanced warfare the enemy is missing from
the pilot’s tactile ield, the ground presumably laid to waste by the
ingerbombs is not contained within the ad’s visual ield. The shielding of touch is represented by the shielding of vision.
This militarization brings with it a form of anesthetization consistent with that accomplished by the military technology represented in the ad. The woman painted on the ‘nose’ of the inger
serves as a marker of the ingerbomber’s sensory isolation. As
Virilio notes, whereas in 1914 pilots’ sensory systems were almost
fully exposed to the wind, noises of the aircraft and battleield (we
can imagine this exposure impacted senses of smell and taste as
well, though Virilio neglects to consider these), the technique of
controlling the immediate perceptual ield of bomber developed by
the end of World War II was not without complications:
body was shielded within an artiicial environment. Any information allowed to penetrate this bubble was thoroughly controlled
and instrumentalized, aimed at domination rather than copenetration; even the seemingly innocuous cartoon igure on the nose
of the plane served to strategically humanize the harsh and foreign environment that loomed dangerously outside the windows of
this controlled space. Recalling McLuhan’s claims in Understanding
Media, technologically extended senses become numb as a survival
tactic in response to the electronic environment, an environment
where awareness has become total, instantaneous, and—most
signiicantly—beyond the subject’s control.42
What McLuhan terms “autoamputation” occurs in response to
this chaotic environment; technology anesthetizes the senses by
shielding them from further stimulus, refusing their perfect extension. A militarized tactility shields the touching subject from feeling the touched object; electriication here does not involve total
but rather a strategically incomplete sensory awareness designed
to allow manipulation without fear of an uncontrolled and unregulated tactility contaminating the sanitized tactile ield. ‘Touching is
good,’ but only insofar as it is a touch that eliminates the possibility
of reciprocal exchange and provides the technological framework
for distanced manipulation.
the pressurized cockpits of US Superfortress bombers had become
artiicial synthesizers that shut out the world of the senses to a quite
extraordinary degree. However, the efects of technological isolation
were so severe and long-lasting that Strategic Air Command decided to lighten the dangerous passage of its armadas over Europe by
painting brightly colored cartoon heroes or giant pin-ups with evocative names on top of the camoulage.41
Much like the pressurized cockpit, the DS interface acts as a
form of sensory armor that normalizes, regulates, and ilters out
feeling to allow detached, careful and precise manipulation. To manage the harsh and impossible sensory stresses of aerial combat, the
CONCLUSION
The Dual Screen ads illustrate the process through which our ideas about the senses are formed. By asserting a model of touch that
is simultaneously new and nostalgic, they show how technologies
of perception re-form our senses both by our material interactions
42
41
Ibid., 24.
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 46–47.
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with them, but also through the discursive frameworks that stage
these material interactions. In mobilizing touch as the paradigmatic mode of interfacing, Nintendo brings modern gaming technology into dialogue with centuries-old debates about the primacy of
perceptual modes in producing reliable and veriiable information.
At the same time, this romanticized notion of touch described in
the ads becomes possible only through the embracing of modern
interface practices. Nintendo promises to liberate and restore the
touching subject, but only if the subject submits to the radical altering of touch that occurs in the process of technologizing it. The
subject that emerges can touch but is unable to feel; the technologically extended inger has no nerve endings, and everything becomes
glass. The hand that Nintendo promises to liberate in its narrative
of sensory conlict becomes, rather, the further servant of the eye:
the hand that once gripped the textured joystick, along with the
ingers that previously moved across the contours of buttons, now
register no diference. On a broader scale, this line of inquiry orients us to the bodily practices of interfacing that accompany new
information technologies. Ludwig Pfeifer, in “From the Materiality
of Communication to an Anthropology of Media,” traces the neglected history of materiality in Media Studies, pointing to several false
starts that foregrounded the emerging attentiveness to materiality
in contemporary approaches to media.43 Reading Pfeifer alongside
Kittler’s assertion that our sense perceptions are ‘dependent variables’ in a compromise between marketers and engineers, we should
attend to the way design processes encode assumptions about users’ perceptual limits and capacities into the materiality of digital
interfaces. Finally, we must consider the role interface technologies play in setting the parameters of sensory experience with the
external world—in coniguring the sense ratios that shape our experience with reality. From what I’ve presented here, it is obvious
that technology alone does not determine the sense ratios of mediated experience. Rather, the extent to which we treat a particular
sense modality as active or dormant is shaped, at least in part, by
the discursive framing of interfacing practices. Through this orientation to media interfaces as forces that govern the constitution of
perceptual experience, we can confront the complex relationship
between technology, the senses, and ideology.
43
Ludvig Pfeifer, “From the Materiality of Communication to an Anthropology
of Media,” in New Media Conference: New Media are Cultural Techniques, ed. XX,
Bergen, Norway, 2004.
89
Approaching the
Untouchable:
From Husserl to
Merleau-Ponty
MIIKA LUOTO
Touch is a delicate matter, a matter of delicacy itself. What does
its delicacy consist of? As we know, the sense of touch allows us to
perceive objects as smooth or rough, as warm or cold, as light or
heavy. However, touch is constituted by something that is not simply of perceptual order: to touch objects and grasp their properties, we must feel the way we are ourselves touched by the same
objects. The sensitivity of touch regarding objects is dependent on
our complex sensitivity of our own bodies. I ind an object sticky or
slippery as I feel how it resists or permits my movements, I grasp
it as irm or unstable as I feel how it sustains or gives in to my posture, and I discover its sharpness or dullness as I carefully test its
power to hurt my skin. Furthermore, the tactile sensitivity seems
to exceed all “sensations”, “qualities” and “objects” as it concerns
an immediate feeling of life or of corporeal existence. In the act of
touching, I contact something as enjoyable or repulsive, as beneicial or adverse, as vital or fatal. Hence, to touch means to estimate:
92
MIIKA LUOTO
APPROACHING THE UNTOUCHABLE: FROM HUSSERL TO MERLEAU-PONTY
is the new shoe properly supportive, is the sunshine too hot, is the
embrace appropriate? As we can see, the question about the delicacy of touch refers us to a dynamic, in which tactual perception
joins the sensitivity for being afected, and in which the touching of
something or somebody means at once the estimation of the very
mode of contact.
To touch is to approach. Touching an object, we learn to know
about its physical nature as well as about practical ways of handling
it. However, even if it is aimed at knowledge, the tactual approach is
itself conditioned by a not-knowing manifest in palping and probing.
Here again, the tactual approach remains dependent on the way the
act of touching allows the object to touch us, that is, to approach us.
And even if touching often becomes self-evident routine or mere
grasping, like when handling a familiar tool, it is precisely the feeling about… intrinsic to touching that keeps up the sensitivity of the
tactual approach. This essential aspect of all touching is perhaps
most purely present in caress, where we approach the other by
being wholly exposed to him or her, where we contact the other’s
skin in a way that opens to an unfathomable depth. But is not the
aspect of feeling about and of being exposed to what remains other than me also present in greatest tactual mastery? Let us think
about skills like surgery or archery, where the irm hand trained
through long practice at once gathers the sensorimotor sensitivity of the whole body. Here again, it is the estimative nature of tactual approach by which we allow something to be there for us. As
we know, one can immediately feel if a wine glass is unwieldy when
one grasps it and brings it to one’s lips, and an experienced sailor
can easily feel if the yacht is in balance by simply taking the wheel
and feeling its light pressure.
Touching is, of course, sensing, and touch is called a sense: the
sense of touch. At the same time, what we encounter in touch, is
sense as sensible meaning. At stake in touching, in the sensible contact with something or somebody, is the very sense of that contact.
Whether I am curiously exploring a strange material with my ingers, getting a friendly prod on my shoulder, or becoming aware of
the strengthening of the wind on my face, each time the sensible
contact makes me feel a sense. As touching is always of a kind and
of a quality, such a sense is never wholly reducible to a signiication
or determinable meaning. In touching, there is always an aspect I
do not know, because it is an aspect that, by making me feel a sense,
evokes my capacity to estimate and so calls for further palping and
probing. The way another’s words, a moving incident, or an art work
may touch us, are familiar examples of the situation, where we are
forced or even obliged to sense the very sense of the contact. As
we can see, the problematic of touch is by itself extended beyond
the conines of a sense.
Touching is also extended beyond the tangible presence. In
touching, the touched is never simply there. It is close as distinct,
so that the one touching and the thing touched are together as separate. As my ingers palpate the surface of a rock, the very feeling
of its rocky character is present in the way it secludes itself from
my grasp; and as my ingers caress the skin of the other, she is
there precisely as the other with whom I will never be the same.
It seems that in touch we contact something that withdraws from
contact within the contact. Could it be, then, that the delicacy of
touch is conditioned by the possibility of feeling a presence which
is never simply present but, rather, a coming into presence marked
by a depth? Would the delicacy of touch, then, be a sensitivity speciic to a distance within proximity, or to an interval or a gap? This
may sound paradoxical, since we are accustomed to conceiving of
touch as physical contact. However, perhaps there is, within touch,
something like the untouchable.
93
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MIIKA LUOTO
APPROACHING THE UNTOUCHABLE: FROM HUSSERL TO MERLEAU-PONTY
We can ind such an idea of the untouchable within touch in
contemporary philosophy, especially in currents of thought inluenced by phenomenology. One of the irst to develop such an idea
was Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He relected on the sense of the sense
of touch, in the wake of Edmund Husserl, throughout his work, but
proposed his perhaps most far-reaching developments on the topic
in his late philosophy. In fact, the untouchable remains, as a rather
undeveloped notion, one of the last of his most thought-provoking
words. In the following, I will try to present some of the main ideas
along the route that leads from Husserl’s analysis of touch in the
context of transcendental phenomenology to Merleau-Ponty’s relection on it in the context of an ontology of the lesh.
for the fact that the consciousness of things making up the objective reality in space and time cannot be thought without the constitutive function of the body. In their perspectival appearing, in
their movements and in their capacity to afect, all things refer to
a body, which is not simply a physical thing among others. In its
unity, which Husserl calls “psychical”, the body is not situated in
space in the same way as a physical thing. Instead of appearing like
a physical body (Körper: in the English translation “body”), that is,
according to “adumbrations” and a “sensuous schema”, the psychical body (Leib, in the English translation “Body”) is there as
the “zero-point” (Null-Punkt) of all orientation.2 All appearing
points back to this absolute “here” and sets itself within an orientation system with its elementary oppositions between here and
there, up and down, right and left etc. “Provisionally”, Husserl says,
we can describe the site of the body by saying that “I have all things
over and against me; they are all ‘there’ – with the exception of one
and only one, namely the Body, which is always ‘here’”.3 Hence, my
body is given to me as my body without an external perspective. In
distinction to other things, in relation to which I can change my position and so vary the appearance in which they are given to me, I
cannot distance myself from my body, and therefore the possibility
to vary its appearances is limited. I can immediately see many of
my body parts only from certain angles, and some of them not at all.
My body remains, from the point of view of intuitive givenness, “a
remarkably imperfectly constituted thing”.4
To account for the remarkable constitution of the lived body,
that is, for the immediate experience of this body as mine, Husserl
starts his phenomenological analysis of touch, in §36 of the Ideas
DOUBLE-APPREHENSION, DOUBLE-CONSTITUTION
Touch becomes a major issue for Husserl in his analysis of the constitution of the lived body. The sense of touch plays a most decisive role in §§ 36–40 of the Book II of the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, where Husserl
attempts to show how my body is originarily given to me, and only
given to me, through the sense of touch. “The Body as such can be
constituted originarily only in tactuality and in everything that is
localized with the sensations of touch: for example, warmth, coldness, pain, etc.”1.
The context of this analysis is the clariication of the dimension of the body within the constitution of reality, which is as such
a remarkable ield of phenomena. Here, Husserl tries to account
1
Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Husserliana Band IV, Nijhof, Haag 1952, 150. / Ideas
Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second
Book, Collected Works, Volume III, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer,
Kluwer, Dordrecht 1989, 158.
2
3
4
Ibid. 158 / 166.
Ibid. 159 / 166.
Ibid. 159 / 167.
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APPROACHING THE UNTOUCHABLE: FROM HUSSERL TO MERLEAU-PONTY
II, from the double contact between two hands touching each
other: “Touching my left hand, I have touch appearances, that is
to say, I do not just sense, but I perceive and have appearances of
a soft, smooth hand, with such a form.”5 In tactual perception, the
thing touched (in this case, my left hand) is apprehended as an object with such and such properties. However, I can tactually perceive my left hand with its properties only if I move my right hand
along its surface with varying speed and press it with varying force
and so become sensitive to touch-sensations, which remain relative
to the movement of the hand. Hence, it is the sensation complex
belonging to the touching right hand that in fact brings about the
tactual perception of the object, the touched left hand. “The indicational sensations of movement and the representational sensations
of touch, which are Objectiied as features of the thing, ‘left hand’,
belong in fact to my right hand.”6
Similar touch-sensations, which however do not serve the objectifying function of perception, are in turn noticed in my touched
left hand: it has “in it” non-objectifying sensations, which make
me aware of being touched at those places. “But when I touch the
left hand I also ind in it, too, a series of touch-sensations, which
are ‘localized’ in it, though these are not constitutive of properties
(such as roughness or smoothness of the hand, this physical thing)”.7
The touch sensations we experience “in” our bodies, those which
Husserl also calls “touch-efects”, and which must be distinguished
from sensations interpreted as properties of the object (“indicational or presentational” sensations), he terms with the neologism
Empindnisse or “sensings”.
My left hand is, then, constituted at once as an objective thing with
sensible properties, and as an animate part of my body with the
capacity to sense. How should we conceive of their relation? “If I
speak of the physical thing, “left hand”, then I am abstracting from
these sensations (a ball of lead has nothing like them and likewise
for every “merely” physical thing, every thing that is not my Body).
If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer, but instead it becomes Body, it senses.”8 To grasp the hand basically as an objective thing independent of touch sensations would
be to abstract from its phenomenal givenness; and to add the touch
sensations subsequently to the physical thing “left hand”, so as to
make it richer in predicates, would not succeed in apprehending the
hand as what it is, namely, my hand as both sensing and sensed. My
left hand is given to me originarily as both touching and touched.
It is through this “double constitution” that it irst becomes my
own, lived body. According to Husserl, the double constitution of
the body is only possible through the sense of touch, because only
in touch do we ind the “double apprehension” (Doppelaufassung),
in which “the same touch-sensation is apprehended as a feature
of the ‘external’ Object [als Merkmal des ‘äusseren Objekts’] and is
apprehended as a sensation of the Body as Object [als Empindung
des Leib-Objekts]”.9
In fact, the double-apprehension is at work in all touching, not
only when I touch myself. When I tactually perceive an object as
cold (a real property), I have in my inger the sensation of cold. The
latter is not a perception, as it does not provide me the objective
state of my hand as a physical thing. Rather, it is a localized sensation, through which the hand is given to me as something “more
5
6
7
Ibid. 144 / 152.
Ibid. 144–5 / 152.
Ibid. 145 / 152.
8
9
Ibid.
Ibid. 147 / 155.
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than a material thing”10, namely, as my own hand. In distinction to
real properties belonging to physical things, the sensations belong
to me and constitute, in their co-appearing with the physical properties, my own body. The tactual perception of an object is then
necessarily bound to the self-feeling of the perceiving, lived body,
occurring with the sensation of being touched. It is a body which
feels itself, that is, a body as subject. Hence, tactually perceiving an
object, I tactually sense myself as the one who perceives.
It is characteristic of touch that it is the same sensation which
functions both as “indicational” or “representational” with respect
to the touched object, and as a “touch-efect” of the object within
the perceiving body. The same sensation, then, is apprehended as
the perception of the object, and, “with a diferent direction of attention”, as a localized sensation within the animated body. During
tactual perception I can, at any moment, change the direction of my
attention to the part of my body touching the object and ind on it
parallel sensations: the coldness of the object is connected to the
feeling of cold in my ingertips, the solidity of the table is related
to the irm pressure it exercises on my thigh, the weight of the object is linked to the sensation of bodily tension, and the delicacy of
the edge of the paperweight associates with the kinaesthetic feeling of my hand’s movements. Hence, in touching a material thing I
never experience merely a relation between an external, material
body and my own body, but also an occurrence speciic to my animated, sensing body.
Let us summarize: According to Husserl’s analysis in the §36 of
the Ideas II, the signiicance of the sense of touch for the constitution of the lived body is due its nature as double-apprehension and
correlative double-constitution. The sensation-complex of touch is
necessarily apprehensible in two diferent ways, that is, as touching
and being touched, and is necessarily connected to the simultaneous constitution of two objectivities, that is, a physical body and an
animated body or “soul” (Seele).
10
Ibid. 150 / 157.
THE SOUL IN A SPREAD-OUT BODY
Husserl introduces the example of the two hands touching each
other, in fact, to emphasize a striking difference between touch
and vision (and, in addition, hearing). “Double apprehension”, in
which the same sensation is apprehended both as a perception of
an external object and as a localized sensation in the lived body, as
well “double sensation”, in which two body parts each have the double apprehension of a perceived object and a sentient body – so that
the same thing is sensed both as a touching body and as a touched
object – belong exclusively to touch.
According to Husserl, we cannot ind anything similar in other senses, especially not in vision. In distinction to, for example, a
touching hand, the eye does not appear visually in the act of seeing. Even though the eye can be watched in the act of seeing with
the help of a mirror, it is not the eye as seeing except indirectly.
“I see something, of which I judge indirectly, by way of ‘empathy
[Einfühlung]’, that it is to be identical with my eye as a thing (the
one constituted by touch, for example) in the same way that I see
the eye of an other.”11 And in distinction to having touch-sensations
in the touching hand, the visual sensation of colour does not appear
as a localized sensation in the eye. Even though the eye can become
a ield of localized sensations, this happens only in relation to touch
(being touched or experienced kinetically), due to which it is experienced as a (tangible) part of the body. Most importantly, vision
11
Ibid. 148 / 155.
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lacks the kind of sensible relexivity, of touching-touched, found
in the sense of touch: “What I call the seen Body is not something
seeing which is seen, the way my Body as touched Body is something touching which is touched”.12 Therefore, Husserl claims, we
cannot really speak about vision as a modality of touch, so as if the
eye would, in glancing its object, be in touch with it.
Hence, the role of touch and the role of vision are, in the constitution of the body and the external things, very diferent. Without
the sense of touch, we would not have a body at all: by simply seeing
our body parts, even if we moved them, we would not experience
them as belonging to our own bodies. “A subject whose only sense
was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing Body; in
the play of kinesthetic motivations (which he could not apprehend
Bodily) this subject would have appearances of things”.13 The experience of the body part as one’s own is based on the double sensation peculiar to touch.
We can now ask, regarding this stage of Husserl’s analysis, what
is the sense of having a body, and what is the sense of its being
mine? The bodily occurrences at issue in touching are not properties of the body as a physical thing, and yet they are properties of
the body as an animated thing; these occurrences speciic to my
lived body arise “when [wenn] the body is touched, pressed, stung,
etc., and they arise where [da…wo] it is touched and at the time
when [wann] it is touched”.14 Hence, the question of touch brings
with itself the questions of spatiality, temporality and causality; this
is in fact most challenging, because they must now be addressed in
relation to the diference between the physical and the non-physical, that is, “psychic”, in the lived body. The psychic, even though
Husserl calls it a “stratum” (Schicht), is not something added to a
pre-existing body, but something that has a body as intimately lived
and felt as one’s own. “The psychic subject has a material thing as
his Body [Leib] because it is animated, i.e. because he has psychic
lived experiences [Erlebnisse] which, in the sense of the apperception of the human, are one with the Body in a singularly intimate
way”.15 As we can see, Husserl does not accept the Cartesian distinction between res extensa and res cogitans. Instead, he attempts
to show how the psychic belongs to material reality: “It is in connection with the material that the psychic is given to us”.16
The psychic – or the soul – is always connected to a body; this
body, however, is not simply a physical body characterized by spatial extension (Ausdehnung), but a lived body also characterized by
another kind of “spatiality”, namely “spreading out” (Ausbreitung)
and "spreading into" (Hinbreitung). In the same way that the
tactually sensed real properties belong to the touched object in
space, while the touch-sensations (localized sensings) belong to
me, so the real properties of my body belong to it as a physical,
extended thing (Körper), while the localized sensings constitute
my body (Leib) as spread-out in a non-physical way, and so belong
to the “soul”. Even though living beings are, as necessarily material entities, extended in space, they are, taken as unities, not
material realities: “according to what is psychic, they are, however, not material, and, consequently, taken also as concrete totalities,
they are not material realities in the proper sense”.17 In distinction to material realities, which are divisible, humans and animals are indivisible unities; at once, however, they are characterized by the “spreading out” peculiar to localized sensing, where
12
13
14
Ibid.
Ibid. 151 / 158
Ibid. 146 / 154.
15
16
17
Ibid. 121 / 129.
Ibid. 91 / 97.
Ibid. 29 / 36.
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“localization” means, tentatively, that the sensations are diferentiated regarding their place in the body and are recognized as belonging phenomenally to it. As a spreading-out, the localization of
sensings seems to give me the experience not only of the part of
my body where I am touched, but its very unity as my own. Hence,
to be a psychical entity and to have a body means, for Husserl, to
be one soul constituted by a spread-out body.
Now what is, regarding such a spread-out unity, the sense
of “being my own”? Husserl himself addresses the question in the
Supplement VI of the Ideas II, when he asks about the presence of
the ego (Ich), the non-ego (Nichtich), and the “foreign to me” (ichfremd). Here he seems to refer in passing to a serious and diicult problematic, something like one’s own strangeness to oneself,
when he writes: “Even my Body (Leib) is over against me – as body
(Körper) but not as Body (Leib).”18 After that he characterizes the
lived body (but only insofar it is also a physical body) as “an Object
foreign to me” (ichfremdes Objekt). The topic is left rather undeveloped by Husserl, but it points toward the unsettling question,
whether the constitution of one’s own body is conditioned by an
alterity.
This topic has been addressed in detail by Jacques Derrida in
his great book, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. During a critical
discussion of Husserl’s analysis of touch that attempts to clarify
the possibility of a pure auto-afection in touching and of the concomitant immediate experience of one’s own body, Derrida tries to
show that such a possibility and such an experience are constitutively haunted by an alterity and a hetero-afection.19 According to
his reading, the “principle of principles” of phenomenology, which
in its optically determined intuitionism at once calls for the immediate fulness of touch, encounters the strongest resistance, in the
analysis of touch, with the questions of space, localization and extension.20 Notwithstanding Husserl’s eforts to sharply distinguish
between the physical and psychic, the “spreading out” of the localized sensations, which is decisive for the immediacy and directness
of the touching-touched-relation, necessarily implies an exteriority of the extended, physical body. It is “necessary that the space
of the material thing – like a diference, like the heterogeneity of
the spacing – slip between the touching and the touched, since the
two neither must nor can coincide if indeed there is to be a double
apprehension”.21 The double apprehension constitutive of touch
would not be possible without an exteriority, an outside foreign to
both touching and the touched. “This detour by way of the foreign
outside […] allows us to speak of a ‘double’ apprehension (otherwise there would be one thing only: only some touching and only
some touched)”.22 Instead of a pure auto-afection, touching is in
fact characterized by spacing. The hierarchy between touch and vision, as developed by Husserl, cannot be sustained in its purity. It
becomes necessary, then, to reconsider the relations between the
senses as well as their own identity. At the same time, the constitution of the body as my own body requires the passage through the
strange outside as well as through the other.
Let us again summarize: For Husserl, the lived body implies
something other than the physical body, but this other than physical is inseparable from the physical. Being irreducible to physical
determinations, the psychic or the soul exceeds the physical body,
and yet is nothing external to it. In its capacity to touch, the soul
18
19
Ibid. 317 / 329.
On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, Stanford U.P., Stanford
2005, 179.
20
21
22
Ibid. 173.
Ibid. 175.
Ibid.
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is what is in excess of the tangible body within the tangible body.
Here, Husserl’s analysis of touch seems to approach its limits as it
addresses the constitutive role of touch with the help of the distinction between the physical body (Körper) and the lived body (Leib),
determined by the correlative distinction between the extended
space and the internal spreading-out. Governed by the oppositions
between an inside and an outside, between the ego and the other
and between immediacy and mediacy, Husserl’s analysis of touch
seems to stop before the questions about divergence, alterity and
distance.
Now, let us turn to Merleau-Ponty, who tirelessly worked on the
possibilities of phenomenology at the very limits of phenomenology. For him, the question of touch presents us precisely the issues
of divergence in coincidence, of alterity in identity, and of distance
in proximity.
in a wholly new thinking, which addresses the work of the previous philosopher as “made of certain articulations between things
said”.24 According to Merleau-Ponty, there is in the dialogue of philosophers a middle-ground, on which it is in principle impossible to
decide at a given moment, what comes from the philosopher who
speaks and what from the philosopher one speaks about. To think
is not to possess the thoughts – perhaps it is, rather, to be touched
by them and to allow them touch.
In Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy, touch seems to grant resources – at once intra-phenomenological and pointing toward
another kind of thought – that help him to disengage from the
consciousness-world structure (which according to himself still
governed his previous philosophy) and lead him to develop an ontology of the sensible world. In the posthumously published The Visible
and the Invisible (which in its fragmentary character witnesses a
work-in-progress, not a closed work) he declares that he wants to
submit the previous results of his Phenomenology of Perception to
an ontological re-elaboration in order to clarify the very sense of
the sensible world and to further study it as the soil of all ideality.
Here, touch proves to be not merely one sense among others: rather,
it reveals an ontological structure – variously designated as “intertwining”, “chiasm” or “reversibility” – constitutive of the presence
of the world. Merleau-Ponty approaches what he calls the “brute
being” or the “wild essence”, that is, the presence of the world as
it is originarily given to us in “perceptual faith”, with the help of
a new conceptuality, which always remains closely related to the
phenomenon of touch. Even if his philosophical inquiries seem to
grant a signiicant privilege to vision (as can be already marked in
his titles, The Visible and the Invisible and The Eye and the Mind),
THE SENSE OF INCARNATION
In Merleau-Ponty’s late work, we can ind the topic of touch reappearing with a decisive philosophical signiicance. In a remarkable
way, he both follows Husserl’s analyses into the most peculiar aspects of touch, and at once transforms their results into something
very diferent. In this way the topic of touch is disengaged from a
phenomenology of consciousness and addressed within an “ontology of the lesh” that it itself helps to develop. Regarding the topic
of touch, Merleau-Ponty enters a dialogue with Husserl in which
he, here as elsewhere, attempts to address “an unthought-of element in his works, which is wholly his and yet opens out on something else”.23 Instead of repeating what Husserl had already said,
the assumed “faithfulness” of such a reading of Husserl consist
23
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes, Gallimard, Paris 1967, 202 / Signs, trans. Richard
C. McCleary, Northwestern U.P., Evanston 1998, 160.
24
Ibid.
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the ontological re-elaboration of vision as “vision in act”, as well as
the development of the idea of “the lesh”, conceived of as the visibility of the world, is decisively indebted to relections on touch.25
Let us come briely back to Husserl’s analysis of the two touching hands. Now when my right hand touches the left hand, I have at
once two sensations, each of which may be apprehended in two different ways, so that touching becomes the touched, and the touched
becomes touching. We cannot say, as Husserl points out, that we
irst perceive the left hand as a physical object, to which localized
sensations are then added as new properties. On the contrary, the
left hand is given originarily as both touching and touched, so that
the distinction between the sensed, physical body and the sensing,
animated body is in fact an abstraction. Now when the hand “becomes Body [Leib]”,26 as Husserls says, a physical body is not simply
endowed with sensibility, so that it would become conscious of itself
as both object and subject; rather, the distinction between subject
and object is blurred. Since sensibility takes place as the body, which
is tactually sentient only insofar it is tangible, it does not make
sense to conceive of sensibility as a faculty of the mind. Instead,
tactual sensibility is incarnation, the becoming-body of touch. The
touching hand and the touched hand are not two separate dimensions; instead, each of them is the reverse of the other. For MerleauPonty, the incarnation of a sense is precisely this exteriority within interiority: the sensing hand, for example, as touching-touched.
Hence, my body is my body only insofar as it is incarnated sensibility, while, correlatively, the very nature of sensibility lies in its
incarnation. Furthermore, if sensibility necessarily has its body,
then it is not so much that “I” tactually sense “my” body, but that I
am given to myself as an “I” in the form of a tangible body.
When he returns to Husserl’s analyses of touch in his last writings, Merleau-Ponty is in fact not addressing merely the constitution of the body-subject; what is at stake for him there is, rather, the
very sense of our incarnation, taken as the sole condition of our access to the world, to the others and to ourselves. He inds in touch
a “sort of relexion”, by which the body exceeds itself, within itself,
toward things: it is “a relation of my body to itself which makes it
the vinculum of the self and the things.27 The phrase “sort of relexion”, used by Merleau-Ponty in quotation marks, refers to the
French translation of Husserl’s Cartesian meditations. Although the
phrase is lacking in the posthumously published German version
of the text because of Husserl’s own omission of it, the very idea
can still be found there. During a phenomenological analysis of the
transcendental ego, puriied from the objective world and the others, Husserl writes: “As perceptively active, I experience (or can experience) all of Nature, including my own animate organism, which
therefore in the process is relexively related to itself.”28 According
to Husserl, this is possible (as already stated in the Ideas II) because of the immediate relection inherent to the sense of touch,
which allows me to experience my body simultaneously as a tangible object of nature and as an animate body functioning as the organ of touch: “That becomes possible because I ‘can’ perceive one
hand ‘by means of’ the other, an eye by means of the hand, and so
forth – a procedure in which the functioning organ must become
25
26
For an admirable presentation of Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy, including the
question of touch, see Françoise Dastur, “Monde, chair, vision”, Chair et langage, Encre Marine, Le Versanne 2001. / “World, Flesh, Vision”, in Fred Evans
and Leonard Lawlor (eds.), Chiasms, trans. Theodore A. Toadvine Jr., State
University of New York Press, Albany 2000.
Husserl, Ideen II, 145 / 152.
27
28
Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 166 / 210.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, Meiner, Hamburg 1995, 128. /
Cartesian Mediations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns,
Nijhof, The Haag 1982, 97.
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an Object and the Object a functioning organ.”29 Hence, already in
Husserl the relexivity accomplished by the touching-tangible body
is related to a kind of “reversibility”.
For Merleau-Ponty, however, relexion and the idea of reversibility become something very diferent, especially as he restores,
against Husserl’s strict rejection, a certain parallelism of touching
and seeing. Once the turning of touching into the touched hand and
of the touched into touching is generalized to cover all sensibility
and, moreover, extended to the relation of the body to the world
and to itself, it becomes, as the “reversibility” of the sensing into the
sensed and of the sensed into sensing, a veritable ontological principle. Most importantly, such a reversibility shows for Merleau-Ponty
that the subject-object-distinction is blurred not only in my body
(as one could have read from Husserl), but also between my body
and the world. Namely, if the reversibility is without coincidence or
fusion, that is, if touching is never exactly the touched and seeing
never exactly the seen, so the vinculum of the self and the world
is marked by a divergence, an écart, which is constitutive of the
body’s openness toward the world. The “interiority”, sketched by
the reversibility of the sensing-sensed body, is from the start conditioned by an exteriority and, therefore, essentially an open one: it is
the very “openness” of the bodily ex-sistence, its “being-to” (être-à).
Extended to all sensibility, reversibility constitutes an ontological structure, for which one cannot account in terms of consciousness. Just like touching takes place according to the way the hand
palpates the thing and so enters, as itself tangible, the world of
tangible things, so vision takes place amid the visual world and according to the movements of the itself visible body. Therefore, it is
not merely a metaphor when Merleau-Ponty writes that the “look
[…] envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things”.30 According to
him, we can ind in seeing the same kind of ontological kinship between the sensing and the sensed that we can feel in the tactile
palpation, “of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant”.31 In this way, Merleau-Ponty calls us to relect on vision
in terms of touch in order to reveal that the condition of vision, like
the one of touch, lies in the incarnation of sensibility.
29
Ibid.
PALPATION IN DEPTH
What the sensing-sensed body reveals, is, in fact, an originary structure of the world. The reversibility of consciousness and its object
in my body – of the touching and the touched, of the seeing and the
visible – refers to the mode of being of the world Merleau-Ponty
calls “lesh” (chair). Although the word chair was, irst, a translation of the German Leib, designating the lived body in distinction to
the physical body, in Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy it is extended
to a basic notion of his ontology. It is neither matter, nor substance,
nor spirit, but more like an “element”, for which there is, according to Merleau-Ponty, no name in the previous history of philosophy.32 Flesh designates the mode of being of the world for the incarnate existence. As the diferential ield of all sensible appearing,
the world includes the body, and so it exceeds all consciousness and
any meaning given to it by the latter; and yet, since the world is not
constituted as an objectivity but remains a correlate of the bodily
life, it also exceeds pure facticity and so presents sense.
30
31
32
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, Paris: Gallimard 1964, 175. /
The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press 1968, 133.
Ibid.
Ibid. 193 / 147; 183 / 137.
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As a veritable philosophical problematic, the lesh implies all the
major questions of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology: the questions about
the relation between the body and the world (addressed especially
in terms of the “chiasm” or “intertwining”) and between the sensible and the sense (addressed especially in terms of the visible and
the invisible), as well as about the nature of the aforementioned
correlation (addressed as one between being and “interrogation”).
Let us however notice that Merleau-Ponty gives a priority to vision as he develops the notion of lesh as the visibility of the world.
Therefore, we must attend to the relation between touch and vision,
as well as to the relation between the various sense modalities within the whole of the sensible.
As Merleau-Ponty’s relection on touch shows, touching occurs
only as immersed in the body: there is touch only as incarnation of
sensibility. Now, the incarnation of touch corresponds to the mode
of presence of the tactual object, which is there not clearly laid out
in extension but, rather, in an obscure (even if delicate) presence,
close as distinct. What presents itself in touch, as the tactile world,
is a dimension which is not presentable by itself. In touching, then,
we are exposed to a depth. To remain open, this obscure dimension
of the tangible world must remain crystallized in the body, in the
touching-touched.33
Vision, in contrast, seems to occur only as the surpassing of the
body: there is vision only as a sensibility which tends to forget its incarnated condition. This corresponds to the mode of presence of the
visible, which seems to be there in pure exteriority, present in front
of us as spread out in extension. Depth, now immediately crossed
by the act of seeing, tends to become reduced to a third dimension
along height and width. These basic traits of vision pave the way
for the interpretation of seeing as an activity of thought, as well as
for the interpretation of the visible world as the objective world.
In the theory of vision proposed by Descartes in his Dioptrics,
seeing is an “action by contact”, in which light particles touch the
seeing eye. Seeing is therefore an action like those of the blind,
who “see with their hands” as they touch things with a cane.34 Here,
touch stands for the immediate and direct physical contact, which
tends to remain hidden in visual perception. Although Husserl’s
phenomenological approach to the sense of touch is irreducible to
Descartes’s mechanistic model, also for him the sense of touch may
play such a decisive role because it is understood as an immediate
and direct contact. For Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, touch does not
refer basically to physical contact and is not marked by the values
of immediacy and directness. Instead, touch leads us to a very different dynamic, in which we ind a relation of distance and proximity within contact, and a relation of tangible and intangible within
touching itself.
According to Merleau-Ponty, the ontological re-elaboration of
the perceived world must proceed by way of a re-elaboration of seeing, because the world is essentially a world of vision: “one would
not make a world out of scents or sounds”. It is vision alone which
gives me the “presence of what is not me, of what is simply and
fully”.35 To account for the ontological sense of the visible world,
we must break with those interpretations of seeing that make of
34
33
Renaud Barbaras, De l’être du phénomène, Millon, Grenoble 2001, 229. / The
Being of the Phenomenon, trans. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, Indiana U.P.,
Bloomington, 2004, 199.
35
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit, Gallimard, Paris 1964, 24–25. / “Eye and
Mind”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty Reader, eds. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor,
orig. trans. Carleton Dallery, Northwestern U.P., Evanston 2007, 360.
Ibid., 49 / 375.
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it a “thought of seeing” (pensée de voir), a seeing detached from
the bodily activity in which it takes place and from the “there is”
(il y a) – the primordial presence of the world – it contains. Instead,
we must engage with what Merleau-Ponty calls the “enigma of vision”, which concerns “vision in act” (vision en acte) behind the
thought of vision familiar to the tradition of philosophy.36 The vision
in act, of which we have an idea only in its bodily exercise, is not an
intentional relation between consciousness and its object but, rather, a relation of reversibility conirmed by touch.
Here, the study of touch accomplishes a kind of reduction of
vision that shows the necessary inscription of all sensing in the
sensed. To break with the thought of seeing and to liberate vision
in act, we must learn to see in visual distance a proximity, in other
words, to rediscover the tactile under the visual: we must learn to
know, “within the vision itself, a sort of palpation of the things”.37
Like touching, which only takes place in a tangible body, vision also
only takes place in a visible body amid other visible bodies, which
it encounters laterally, not frontally. I can see only on the basis of
an ontological “kinship” between the visible object and my visible
body, which implies that, in the act of seeing, vision and movement
condition each other. “All my changes of place igure in principle
in an area of my landscape; they are carried over onto the map
of the visible. Everything I see is in principle within my reach, at
least within the reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map
of the ‘I can.’ Each of the two maps is complete. The visible world
and the world of my motor projects are both total parts of the
same Being.” 38 Here, seeing is originally not my own capacity: as
I see things from amid things, their visible presence is like a crys-
tallization in my body of a general visibility of things, which takes
place relative to the movements of my visible body. Hence, my act
of seeing is the reverse side of a deeper event, according to which
things become visible.
Now the “things” of the visible world are principally not pure
things, “identical to themselves and wholly positive”, as they seem
to be given across the distance in vision. Rather, their presence also is one of distance in proximity, as experienced in touch. Because
of the inscription of our bodies in the sensible world, and the correlative appearing of the things of the world in relation to our own
bodies, the presence of the visible things is determined by an unsurpassable depth. Therefore, our relation to them is never one of
transparency, but always one of ambiguity. Furthermore, since the
sensible presence of all things expresses at once their inscription
in the texture of the world, their appearing always takes place according to a singular form or style Merleau-Ponty calls “dimension”.
Now we can see the importance of touch for the explication of
the lesh, of the visibility of the world. Vision must not be understood in the way it presents itself to us, namely, as an act which
surpasses our bodily condition to enter pure exteriority, and which
may then be subsequently interpreted in terms of the spectacle it
has unfolded before our minds. Instead, it is necessary to understand the “thickness” of our bodily existence as our very access to
the depth of the world, that is, to understand vision as a “palpation
in thickness”. “We should have to return to this idea of proximity
through distance, of intuition as auscultation or palpation in thickness, […] a view of self […] which calls ‘coincidence’ in question.”39
So, the study of touch leads, in Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy,
toward the ideas of thickness and of depth within contact. As it is
36
37
38
Ibid. 34 / 366.
Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, 115 / 83.
Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit, 12–13 / 354.
39
Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, 170 / 128.
113
114
MIIKA LUOTO
APPROACHING THE UNTOUCHABLE: FROM HUSSERL TO MERLEAU-PONTY
constitutive of all presence, this depth cannot be surmounted. It is
a distance in proximity, an originary spacing.
there is”.42 Hence, the bodily self-relation – touching-touched – is
a self-diference opening it to the tangible world: the divergence of
the reversibility corresponds to the unfolding of an exteriority in
the advent of sensibility.
The divergent reversibility can, according to Merleau-Ponty, be
generalized to all senses as well as to their relations to each other. Rejecting a “crude” delimitation of the senses,43 according to
which they difer in their respective ways of gathering information,
Merleau-Ponty develops a notion of senses, in which each sense
only exists as the diference of the sensibles in its domain, and sensibility itself only exists as the diference between senses.44 Every
sensible is in accord with every other only through its divergent
reversibility. Even though I cannot see some of my body parts, like
the back of my head or the seeing eye, while touch is spread out
over my whole body, it is the “same thick relection that makes me
touch myself touching and [makes] the same in me be seen and seer: I do not even see myself seeing, but by encroachment I complete
my visible body, I prolong my being-seen beyond my being-visible
for myself.”45 Because all senses are determined by divergent reversibility, or in other words, because there is an “overhanging that
exists within each sense and makes of it ‘eine Art der Relexion’”,46
the diferent sense-registers are not closed into themselves but are
openings to the world.
Merleau-Ponty call us to conceive of the sensible as an “initiation” into the world: each sensible exceeds itself, within itself, and
so gives rise to a sensible universality constitutive of a “dimen-
THE UNTOUCHABLE
As we have seen, the body touches by remaining tangible in touch,
so that there is no consciousness of touching beyond this body. At
the same time, the body remains passive in its tactual activity, exposed to being-touched in its own tangibility. Tactual sensing, then,
takes place on an ontological level preceding the subject: it is an
advent of sensibility.40 Most importantly, the two hands continually changing their roles as touching and touched do not, in fact,
represent even in passing the two aspects of activity and passivity, of consciousness and object. Instead, their reversibility is such
that they are joined by what separates them: the two “halves” of the
touching-touched are not superimposable. There is, at the heart
of touching, a divergence constitutive of it. “[I]t is a reversibility
always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things,
but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization”.41 The touching hand, then, never grasps the
other as touching, but only as touched, that is, as its own reverse
side. Far from being a failure, the impossibility of coincidence between touching and the touched is what prevents their fusion and
so opens the body to the world. Just because touching and the
touched are never exactly superimposable, the bodily relexion
is essentially an openness to the “there is” of the world, to its ungraspable depth: “the essential is the relected in ofset (reléchi en
bougé), where the touching is always on the verge of apprehending itself as tangible, misses its grasp, and completes it only in a
40
41
Barbaras, De l’être du phénomène, 283 / 245.
Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, 194 / 147.
42
43
44
45
46
Ibid. 311 / 260.
Ibid. 176 / 133.
Barbaras, De l’être du phènoméne, 230 / 199.
Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, 256 / 202.
Ibid. 309 / 256.
115
116
MIIKA LUOTO
APPROACHING THE UNTOUCHABLE: FROM HUSSERL TO MERLEAU-PONTY
sion”. Hence a yellow, for example, “at the same time gives itself as
a certain being and as a dimension, the expression of every possible
being”.47 As a sensible whole, which “suddenly opens unlimited dimensions”, it becomes a “total part”, which is “absolutely incommunicable” for other senses and yet structurally open to all
other “total parts” of all other senses. As we can discern from experience, the movements of my tangible body, including the movements of my seeing eyes, are inscribed in the visible space, while
every vision takes place in some corner of the tactile space. “There
is double and crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and of
the tangible in the visible; the two maps are complete, and yet they
do not merge into one. The two parts are total parts and yet are
not superposable.”48 Due to the encroachment of each sensible part,
which “transgresses the frontiers of the others” upon the depth
of the world, “the present does not stop at the limits of the visible
(behind my back) […] Perception is not irst a perception of things,
but a perception of elements (water, air . . .) of rays of the world, of
things which are dimensions, which are worlds”.49 Hence, before
opening us to what we perceive, perception in fact opens us to that
with which or according to which we perceive.
Here, “perception” and the “sensible” do no more designate
the relation between the incarnate subject and its world, but the
presence of the world itself, which is given by an encroachment
between parts and the whole, between a singular and a universal.
Here, we cannot keep up the distinction (except by way of abstraction) between sensing, the subject of which is the body, and the
appearing of the sensed, the agent of which is the world. In other
words, we cannot really distinguish between the way sensing be-
comes body (sensibility as incarnation) and the way the world appears (phenomenon). It is a question of the one and same event, of
a “dehiscence” which gives birth simultaneously to the sensed sensible and the sensing sensible. In this event, the sensing-sensed body
marks a divergence in the power of appearing. It opens a distance
between the phenomenon (a singular mode of appearing) and the
world that appears in the phenomenon (the depth of the “there is”
something), which, as distance, at once joins them together.
Let us return to touch, the analysis of which has oriented all
Merleau-Ponty’s insights discussed above. We must admit that the
place where the tactual phenomenon is joined with the depth of the
world by the divergent reversibility of the body can neither be found
in the body, nor in consciousness. Rather, their junction lies in what
Merleau-Ponty calls the “untouchable”. At the verge of his uninished work, he writes that it is the untouchable “of the other which
I will never touch. But what I will never touch, he does not touch
either, no privilege of oneself over the other here”.50 What matters
here is not merely something factually inaccessible to touch, but
something in principle untouchable implied in the reversible relation of touching-touched. It is a negativity within touch, MerleauPonty says, that is not an absent positivity, but “a true negative, i.e.
an Unverborgenheit of the Verborgenheit, an Urpräsentation of the
Nichturpräsentierbar, an original of the elsewhere, a Selbst that is
an Other, a Hollow”.51
With this dense description, Merleau-Ponty situates the untouchable in the core of the structural dynamic of the sensible world.
Everything sensible is an original presentation of what cannot be
presented, since being always manifests itself “without becoming
47
48
49
Ibid. 271 / 218.
Ibid. 177 / 134.
Ibid. 271 / 218.
50
51
Ibid. 308 / 254.
Ibid.
117
118
MIIKA LUOTO
APPROACHING THE UNTOUCHABLE: FROM HUSSERL TO MERLEAU-PONTY
positivity, without ceasing to be ambiguous and transcendent”.52
The sensible is already there like the other, who is close to me in
his or her body as irreducible distant, without the possibility of an
originary presentation as Husserl says, or is being un-concealed
only in relation to a concealment, as Heidegger says. To be a sensing-sensed self means, then, to be also other to oneself, to be determined by an unsurpassable foreignness. As body, one shares this
foreignness with other bodies in an “intercorporeity” which, according to Merleau-Ponty, precedes all consciousness of intersubjectivity.53 At the same time, in distinction to the absolute here which for
Husserl characterizes the spatiality of one’s own body, to be a body
means, for Merleau-Ponty, to be always already somewhat elsewhere
and never exactly present to oneself, that is, to be “there” rather
than “here”. The body is the place of dislocation, of deviation, of
divergence. “There is coincidence with the self only as divergence
from the self, self-presence only as self-absence”.54 And in distinction to the “localized sensings” that for Husserl open the interior
spatiality of the lived body, the body is, for Merleau-Ponty, marked
by a hollow, the place of the originary spacing of the sensible world.
Hence, the untouchable belongs no more to the other than to myself,
no more to consciousness (of touching) than to the body (touched);
rather, it is the true negative as the divergence or the gap at the
core of the event of phenomenalization, where a tangible is given
for touch and, simultaneously, touching is opened to the world.
The untouchable, then, is not the opposite of the tangible or of
touching but, rather, its very condition. It is the point at which I
can never be present, but at which I am taken by the imminence of
touching. It is a point I can never reach, because through it I will
always only ind myself, belatedly, as being already touched and, reversibly, as being already engaged in touching. The untouchable is,
very concretely and yet ungraspably, the distance within contact
that keeps it up as contact, the withdrawal from coincidence that
calls us to touch – delicately, with tact.
52
53
54
Ibid. 267 / 214.
Ibid. 185 / 140 ; cf. Barbaras, De l’être du phènoméne 283f / 244f.
Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, 246 / 192.
119
A Little Distance, Please
– On the Relationship
Between Mediality and
Touch1
MAIJU LOUKOLA
Questions concerning the relationship between media and the stage
have become central in contemporary scenography. Through new
media-technological possibilities, the practice of scenography has
grown increasingly tightly bound to issues of perception and presence. In this essay, I sketch a framework of the relationships between the stage, mediality, and touch and their signiicance with
regard to the study of scenography. I argue for approaching the
intermedial stage with hightened sensitivity towards its medial
setting in relation to bodily experience. My main points of reference are Aristotle’s relection on the senses and Maurice MerleauPonty’s ontology of vision and visibility. This opens up a path to considering scenography and its media-technological conditions from
a phenomenological point of view.2
1
2
An earlier version of this essay was published in Kosketuksen iguureja, ed. Mika
Elo, Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2014, 44–71.
The argument presented in this essay is developed more in detail in my dissertation: Maiju Loukola, Vähän väliä. Näyttämön mediaalisuus ja kosketuksen arkkitehtuuri, Helsinki: Aalto ARTS Books, 2014 [Anywhere near. Media scenographies
and the architectures of touch].
A LITTLE DISTANCE, PLEASE
122
MAIJU LOUKOLA
Central themes that arise here are sensory sensitivity and the
reciprocity of sensing, which involves the eye’s, the mind’s, and the
body’s ways of touching and being touched. It is a matter of interplay between perception and the perceived. With help of this
starting point, scenography comes to recognise the uniied efect
of seeing and corporality, which is, in a certain sense, experienced
as excess within the sphere of the perceived – this is the sensory
aspect of the architecture of touch. Gaze and touch become overlapping and parallel forms of perception. On this premise, the difference between the live and of mediatised forms of stage presence
delicately intertwine instead of building a coarse opposition.
One of the objectives of this essay is to outline the central concepts of my research concerning mediality on stage, and more speciically, video projections in a scenic context. I re-consider experiential structures produced by the optical tactics of scenography
and the virtuality of the medial stage from the perspective of touch.
This is done through transforming questions of visuality into questions of (the world’s) visibility. This leads me to studying the screen
as a multifaceted issue intimately related with video projections.
This forms the key anchoring point on the media technological side
of the structure I call architecture of touch. The shift from vision to
visibility involves detailed analysis of the virtual dimension included in performability, and at the same time an attempt to grasp the
conditions of stage as a place not located in certain physical space
and time. This kind of endeavours were at the core of the artistic
parts of my dissertation, where I developed ways of articulating the
spatio-visual aspects of the medial stage from experiential point of
view, while also mapping virtual structures of presentability.3
3
Ibid.
– ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEDIALITY AND TOUCH
MEDIA AND MEDIALITY
Media are often thought as being various technical instruments, particularly instruments of communication and information technology.
In this essay, I examine mediality as a structure located between sign,
trace, and technological device.4 In this conceptualisation, media are
not conceived as technical instruments alone, but rather when examining them one must take into consideration their role as instances of distance and mediation. Media are linked both to processes of
signiication and perception. Mediality should, then, be thought of as
a structure bound to the body – and, as I will attempt to clarify, also in relation to that ”in-between” (metaxy), which Aristotle links to
the mediation of the sense of touch and sensations.5 The media-theoretical discussion for which Aristotle laid the groundwork must not
stop at inding the interval, that is, the idea that a prerequisite for
perception is some in-between, through which and through the mediation of which sense experience becomes possible. An approach of
this sort is indicated by Aristotle’s famous example of an ant on the
vault of the sky, which he borrowed from Democritus.6 As Samuel
4
5
6
Mika Elo, Valokuvan medium, Helsinki, Tutkijaliitto, 2005, 37, 22–39; Jay David
Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: understanding new media, Cambridge
Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1999, 65.
Aristotle, On the soul, II, 419a, trans., introduction and notes Hugh LawsonTancred, London, Penguin Books, 1968.
”[...] If what has colour is placed in immediate contact with the eye, it cannot be
seen. Colour sets in movement not the sense organ but what is transparent, e.g.
the air, and that, extending continuously from the object to the organ, sets the
latter in movement. Democritus misrepresents the facts when he expresses the
opinion that if the interspace were empty, one could distinctly see an ant on the
vault of the sky; that is an impossibility. Seeing is due to an afection or change
of what has the perceptive faculty, and it cannot be afected by the seen colour itself; it remains that it must be afected by what comes between. Hence it is indispensable that there be something in between – if there were nothing, so far from
seeing with greater distinctness, we should see nothing at all.” (Aristotle, On the
soul, II, 419a).
123
A LITTLE DISTANCE, PLEASE
124
MAIJU LOUKOLA
– ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEDIALITY AND TOUCH
Weber has noted, we should also think of media in terms of a difference that unites.7 With regard to theatre and scenography, this
is an essential observation.
In Benjamin’s -abilities, Weber presents a multifaceted analysis of mediality as “-ability structure” related to language. One of
the key terms appearing in this framework, which is particularly
fruitful from the perspective of my research, is the Benjaminian impartability of language (Mitteilbarkeit).8 The suix appearing in the
word, -ability (in German -barkeit), reveals Benjamin’s typical way of
virtualising his concepts. It is a thematics through which virtuality
should be considered by relying on a dynamic in which the (virtual) dimension of ability is conceived as transformation, as becoming something else. According to Weber, the dimension of virtual
ability articulated in Benjamin’s thinking is not, however, deined
by what it lacks or what it is not yet. Instead, virtuality – and, analogously, performability – can be understood in the sense of “radical
alteration”.9 It is not, then, a matter of realisation or actualisation.10
From this radical alteration, the medium forms into a simultaneity of space, time, and movement, and as a separation that binds
but by means of transmission, transformation, and hence does not
result in producing deinite meanings. It is a continuous re-positioning, which also poses the question of in relationship to what does
this alteration take place. On the basis of the conceptions of the relationship between the actual and the virtual, stage as a medium can
be thought of as a structure deined by the principle of distinctness
and alteration. Consequently, the conception of the stage as a comprehensive ield of meanings, one bounded within its own frames,
is called into question. Virtuality as the reality of the structure of
the stage makes manifest the potential to understand the stage as
a transformative space characterised by continuous movement in
terms of meaning formation.
As I will argue, both touch and mediality would appear, down
to the level of their structure, to be marked by a certain tension of
uniting diference between simultaneously efective intimacy and
distance. This tension tunes the medial stage, and it also tunes the
stage as a medium.
7
8
9
10
Samuel Weber, ”The Virtuality of the Media”, Sites: The Journal of TwentiethCentury/Contemporary French Studies revue d’études français, 2000, 4:2, 301;
Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, Harvard
University Press, 2008, 111.
Ibid., 38–45, 117. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, Cambridge,
Harvard University Press, 1996, 63–64.
Weber, ”The Virtuality of the Media”, 306. According to Weber’s interpretation, Deleuze, another thinker of virtuality who is here otherwise very close
to Benjamin, formulates ”structure as the reality of the virtual”, whereas for
Benjamin the setup is the opposite: the virtual expresses ”the reality of the structure” (Ibid., 305–312).
On the relationships between the potential, real, actual, and virtual, see Gilles
Deleuze, Diference and Repetition, London, The Athlone Press, 1994 [1968], 211;
Weber, ”The Virtuality of the Media”, 298–301.
THE BOND BETWEEN SENSING AND THE SENSED
We often think of touch in terms of proximity and immediate contact, in which case it is conceived as a sense that supports sight.
In terms of my questions regarding the mediality of the stage, it is
worthwhile examining touch in light of Merleau-Ponty’s ontological relections on sense experience and his way of questioning the
conceptions based on perceptual faith, based on which we seem to
have direct access to things themselves. According to John Sallis,
one of Merleau-Ponty’s central premises is that the body forms a
relecting screen between perceiving and the perceived.11 This does
not mean that ”thickness of lesh” would deny the access to things.
On the contrary, it means that the body is the only means, or medi11
John Sallis, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
Duquesne University Press, 2003, 76.
125
A LITTLE DISTANCE, PLEASE
126
MAIJU LOUKOLA
– ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEDIALITY AND TOUCH
um, of this contact, which, consequently, involves mediation. The
body is a mediator enabling perception. Sallis notes that this mediating instance between perceiving and the perceived constitutes
a key question to Merleau-Ponty.12
Due to its distinguishing and self-distinguishing nature, the
body seems to contain something foreign to itself.13 It is inherently marked by otherness.14 However, instead of being a matter of a
mirror-like frontal relection, the self-relation unfolds as reciprocal intertwining of the seer and the visible. The relexivity of the
body’s relationship to itself inherently entails a certain interruption, a fracture. The relection dips out of the reach of relection
and is, thus, grasped by its own unrelectability. As perceiving and
perceived, the body always as if turns its back on itself: relection
becomes a blind spot in bodily consciousness.15 Hence visibility always contains its opposite, invisibility, which I will be examining
from the perspectives of the screen and performability.
Because the sensing is always also simultaneously the sensed,
perception is not deined dualistically as a distinction between internal and external experience. It forms from premises of the lived,
moving body’s situation- and place-speciicity, and this being the
case, only certain side of things ever becomes in the sensible at one
time. As a person moves in space, her body, ”the stage director of
(her) perception” that is bound to the world, moves along within it.16
Touch entails certain in-betweenness – and is thus characterised by a certain element of withdrawal from immediacy. This has,
however, for the most part remained unrecognised, as since its earliest days Western philosophy has mainly been focused on ”sensing in general”, the model of which has been vision.17 In terms of
my research, it is interesting that Merleau-Ponty does not posit
vision and touch in opposition to each other. Rather, he attempts
to demonstrate the connections between them by addressing the
complex and chiasmatic relationship of the subject and the object.18
The key terms here are chiasm, reversibility, and lesh.
Chiasm refers to the way in which the sensing and the sensible
are constructed in an inverse relationship to each other, without,
however, merging into each other.19 Relying on the principle of reversibility (reversibilité) that characterises touch, the touching and
the touched are not the same thing, even though they are related
to each other through a reciprocal relationship.20 The principle of
reversibility expresses a linking between things that do not return
to a cause-efect relationship. The asymmetry of reversibility is illustrated by Merleau-Ponty in terms of a glove, both sides of which
one recognises as belonging to the same glove, even if one can see
only either the interior or the exterior at a time; seeing the other
12
13
14
15
Ibid.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes, ed.
Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, Northwestern University Press,
1997 [1964], 141, 246, 263–265; Jaana Parviainen, Meduusan liike. Mobiiliajan tiedonmuodostuksen ilosoiaa, Helsinki, Gaudeamus, 2006, 145.
The other is not (the) ”he/she” (deined by me) but more ”the other me”. The conception of the other as seeing and visible forms in a tension between interior and
exterior, connectedness and separation, or closeness and distance. For MerleauPonty, however, the reciprocity of experience is more an opportunity for transition and change than an unsurpassable threshold or conlict that requires resolution. (Juho Hotanen, Lihan laskos. Merleau-Pontyn luonnos uudesta ontologiasta,
Helsinki, Tutkijaliitto, 113–115.)
Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 135–136; Sallis, Phenomenology and the
Return to Beginnings, 87–88; Hotanen, Lihan laskos, 84, 109–111.
16
17
18
19
20
Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 8.
Weber, ”A Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s ’Task of the Translator’”,
in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, eds. Sandra Bermann and
Michael Wood, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005, 67.
Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light. Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and
Merleau-Ponty, London and New York, Routledge, 1998, 23. Merleau-Ponty, The
Visible and the Invisible, 130–155, 259.
Ibid., 134.
Ibid., 263.
127
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128
MAIJU LOUKOLA
– ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEDIALITY AND TOUCH
(side) returns the other to me, says Merleau-Ponty.21 However, similarly as a right-handed glove alters to it the left hand when turned
inside out, the reverse sides of perception do not return to each other. For its part, the concept of lesh (chair) manifests for MerleauPonty the constitution of touch and seeing in terms of their divergence and unity. At the same time as the lesh shows us something,
its density prevents us from seeing it completely bare.22 This embodies the relationship between the invisible inherent in visibility
and the absence inherent in presence; the ”carnal mirror” shows
us the separation in unity and the invisible in the visible.23
As chiasmatic, inverse, and corporeal, touch is not immediate, even though it often appears to be. The example provided by
Aristotle of the apparent immediacy of touch is incisive: with touch,
“we are afected not by but along with the medium; it is as if a man
were struck through his shield”.24 Aristotle also points out that, unlike with the other senses, touch has no speciic organ, rather it is in
a certain sense “carnal”, a walking of boundaries between one’s self
and the foreign in the midst of the sensible.25 As Juho Hotanen notes,
there is a connection between Aristotle’s and Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of “lesh” – with the diference that, for the latter, the lesh
is never a matter of simple mediation or in-betweenness, but a
structure for existence or a principle of presence. To Merleau-Ponty,
the lesh is a ”prototype for Being”.26
In the light of this, touch appears as non-appropriating contact
in which the touching and the touched are in a relationship with
each other but do not fuse into each other; an indispensable tension exists between them. This tension expresses the reversibility
and chiasmatic nature of touch. In such contact, the distance between parties and the parties’ own unique characteristics are preserved, and it is not a question of a symmetrical encounter. This
kind of structure of distant closeness is illuminative in pondering
on the relationship between mediality and touch. A corresponding
tension of in-betweenness is, as well known, also one of theatre’s
key deining traits.
The conception of the body as a fundamental (and uniting) separation between the perceiving and the perceived frames touch as
a contact that withdraws in the last instance, as a sensation that
is caught at its own limit to process it over again. This reveals the
heterotrophy of bodily existence, which we can, following MerleauPonty, call intercorporeality.27 Further, it is erotic by nature, as it
is about an attempt to unite with another body or other bodies –
and at the same time with the (most familiar, most inherent, and
most intimate) foreign folded within one’s own body. This attempt
is driven by desire and it is manifested in various gestures towards
the other or others – movements, touches, looks.28 In everyday contexts, gestures mostly express modes of behaviour without referring
to anything beyond the immediate situation. One can for example
open the door for someone with a considerate gesture. On the stage,
however, the gestures contain aspiration more clearly distinct from
themselves; they become something more than just an aspect of an
intentional act. On stage, gestures and touch are framed and highlighted in their foreignness.
21
22
23
24
25
26
Ibid.
Hotanen, Lihan laskos, 84.
Ibid., 83–84, 149.
Aristotle, On the soul, II, 423b.
Ibid.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, Oxon and New York,
Routledge 2012 [1945], 179.
27
28
Sallis, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings, 96; Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception, 412. It is always also a matter of the self-relationship and auto-afection.
Sallis, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings, 96.
129
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130
MAIJU LOUKOLA
Merleau-Ponty’s and Aristotle’s analyses of touch share the notion that touch is always marked by a certain foreignness. For both,
touch is a question of a two-directional relationship whose parties
approach a boundary that separates them. This demarcation is a
prerequisite for the contact to take place, without it being a matter of merging into one. A connection to the medial stage can be
understood this way; it appears as a space or perhaps more like
a situation in which sensing does not take place only through the
mediation of some in-between, but always with it and in relationship to it. Following Aristotle and Merleau-Ponty, we can approach
the mediality of the stage from a perspective that emphasises the
primacy of bodily mediation, that is, sensibility and perception, in
which the sensing and the sensed overlap in an inter-afective relationship. The laws of direct causal relationships do not describe this
with suicient precision. As I will propose, this opens up a path for
examining the mediality of the stage in the light of performability
that is inherent to theatrical performing and virtuality.
If the in-between involved in the relationship between the sensing and the sensed is seen as a reciprocal separation and unity that
simultaneously afects the internal and the external, then in what
ways can this betweenness that underpins the architecture of touch
be considered in terms of intermediality?
Mediality and intermediality lead us to think about the issue
of betweenness more broadly than it appears as related to electronic media. The range of application of the notion of media has
broadened into a ield opening up in aesthetic, political, bodily,
sense-related, and information technological directions. Questions
of mediality involve interpretive, experience-based, and instrumental-material levels. In this multifaceted ield, it is fruitful to consider
the situation- and context-speciic ways in which the connections
mentioned are respectively articulated, and how they make sense.
– ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEDIALITY AND TOUCH
LIVING SENSIBILITY
Theatre has always been an art of magical transformations and diverse sleights of hand. ”High-tech theatre” that makes use of computer technology, multimedia, and video as well as sound, light and
image technologies can be seen as an apparatus that, with its pops
and rattles, represents an updated, contemporary version in the
chain of modern technical forms of media.29 Relections on the role
and efects of electronic media and in relation to the stage’s ”living”
elements often situate the ”medial” in a category secondary to the
living. According to Philip Auslander, several theories of performance are still marked by such prejudice, in which ”live” and ”mediatised” are placed in a hierarchical relationship.30 Focusing on
questions of intermediality highlights novel fusions and forms of
interaction whose consideration requires a new type of sensitivity,
a new sensibility. The particular quality of experience that arises in
arts that combine various forms of media demands sensitive, media-sensitive examination, as Henk Oosterling suggests.31
The relationship between the living and the lifeless can be
thought of in terms of technological extension, a prosthesis that
surpasses the limitations of the body. Starting from the periscope
29
30
31
High-tech theatre is here used as a general term to refer to the usage of various
forms of (electronic) media in the performing arts. Lehmann distinguishes from
four diferent modes of the use of media in theatre: 1) occasional use (media employment), 2) media as source of inspiration for theatre and its aesthetics or form,
3) media as constitutive for certain forms of theatre, and 4) installation-like meeting points of theatre and media. Alongside with the term ”media theatre” it is
used as an umbrella concept referring to the very heterogenic ield of performing arts, which covers both ”radical performing arts” as well as the performance
practices of ”traditional theatres”. See Lehmann Postdramatic Theatre, trans.
Karen Jürs-Munby, Oxon and New York, Routledge [1999], 167–168.
Philip Auslander, Liveness. Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Oxon and New
York, Routledge, 2008, 43–63, 55.
Henk Oosterling, ”Sens(a)ble Intermediality and Interesse. Towards an Ontology
of the In-Between.”, in Intermédialités, Vol. 1, 2003, 30.
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and the radio transmitter, the perception technologies that have
facilitated distant closeness in various forms have been seen as
prosthetic “new media”.32
At its most concrete, the prosthetic nature of technology comes
forth when technological appendages are added to the body or when
implants are embedded in it. The interventions of Stelarc’s cybernetic body and Orlan’s critical plastic surgery took, at the turn of
the 1980s, discussions of the relationship between the body and
technology in the arts to a new level33. At the seam between the
body and the prosthesis, the interior and exterior are not deined as
simply ”own” or ”foreign”. Anyone with an artiicial leg recognises
the experience of the phantom limb and the blurring of the body’s
boundaries. This illuminates in an interesting way the problematics of the juncture between the body and a device. The thematics
of prosthesis can be compared to touch and mediality, which are
marked by the obscurity of the boundaries between interior and
exterior, although in a diferent way.
Touch between a lifeless and a living being construes on a different basis than touch between two living parties, when the sensing and the sensed, the touching and the touched are living entities.
Prosthetic relations call this division into question in a very concrete
way: a prosthesis is not a lifeless instrument of the living. It is important to pay attention to this in the discussions on supplementing and
extending, especially when the technicality of technologies is examined as chains of cause-efect relationships where technologies appear as nothing more than technical instruments, means to an end.
Against this background it is clear that instead of setting up
“live” and “mediatised” stage situations in opposition to each other one should pay attention to the ways in which senses and media
arrange themselves in relation to each other. Media sensitivity demands the considering of sensory diferences in a heterogeneous
setting.
For Aristotle, who ofers here a good starting point, sensing is
exploration of the boundary between the own and the foreign and,
as such, receptiveness to inluences that are formed through sensory diferences. For instance, the sensation of heat emerges only
when the touching and the touched are of diferent temperatures.34
Sense, then, can be conceptualized as a certain kind of in-between,
in the sphere of which distinguishing between characteristics that
diverge from one another becomes possible.35 Sensing takes place
through diferences: only those elements that exceed the parities
between the inluencer and the inluenced are perceived.
Following Merleau-Ponty, every attempt to localize a sensation
at the boundary of that particular sensation makes that place (the
boundary as a place) disappear.36 The non- placability of touch can
also be illustrated through the example of one’s hands touching
each other: when two hands come into contact with each other, the
touch seems to hit the ingertips of the hand oriented to touch the
other hand. As I touch my left hand with my right, the right hand
feels itself both touching and being touched by the left hand. This
reciprocity keeps the experience of touch at a distance from itself; it is impossible to pinpoint which hand is touching and which
is touched. A certain gap or distance at the core of contact is the
precondition of touch.
32
33
See for example Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man,
London and New York, Routledge, 1992 [1964].
Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, afects and technologies, Oxford and
New York, Berg, 2007, 114–117; Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 140.
34
35
36
Aristotle, On the soul, II, 424a.
Ibid., 423a.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 147–150, 215.
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This implies that the body as sensing and sensed involves mediality in and of itself. This is the reason why, I consider it relevant
to focus on the indirect, non-hierarchical, heterotrophic, reciprocal, in short, medial interplay that characterises both the “live” and
“mediatised” rather than stressing the diferences between them. In
terms of the optical tactics of scenography, consideration of sensuous diferences has led me to think about the imaginality of image
from a perspective in which mediality is comparable to touch precisely in terms of the prerequisite of the in-between. A projected,
mediatised image challenges the viewer to participate in an event
the parties of which are both the viewer and the image.
the present moment.40 Temporality or historicity is to be understood here as a relation between universal and particular, where
each present moment appears as power to return to the past – as
a continuously transforming event that contains both singular and
repetitive dimension.41
This ambiguous relationship can be framed in an interesting
way also in terms of rhythm. Medium opens a certain double-exposure of time and space, which on the one hand becomes recognisable as a continuous returning or being returned to, and on the
other hand as fundamentally unclosed and incomplete structure.42
The structure of the medium does not thus solely take shape as the
creation of something new, but more as a future that will always
already have taken place – and thus as if an already-past future.43
The key challenge appears to be in considering virtuality involved
in translation – its touch free of appropriative aims – instead of
seeing it as an operation striving towards appropriation and mastery. Benjamin’s theory of translation suggests that the temporal
and spatial multifacetedness of the medial structure liberates the
virtual from its oft-presumed forced marriage with its expected actualisation. Even in its virtual state, virtuality is efective in reality.
STAGE AS THE SITE OF PERFORMANCE
When discussing ‘translatability’ as one of Benjamin’s virtualised
concepts, Weber demonstrates that the connection between mediality and touch can also be approached through Benjamin’s theory
of translation.37 In this context it becomes clear that their connection is not a matter of transporting of meanings from one domain
of articulation into another. It is a double-exposed event that entails
both the singular speciicity of articulation and language as such.38
Here translation compares to touch, free of appropriative aims.39 In
light of Benjamin’s theory of translation, medium appears as a temporal and historical structure; it appears as a relationship of something that has already occurred to something that is expressed at
37
38
39
Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, 84–93. Weber’s central points of reference here
are Benjamin’s essay ”Task of the Translator” and his reserch on the German
Baroque tragic drama.
Cf. Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities, 38.
Ibid., 84–88 and Weber, ”A Touch of Translation”, 72–74.
40
41
42
43
Weber points out that the German past perfect tense, i.e. in (something/someone)
”is arrived” or ”is occurred”, captures much more clearly the core behind the dialectical nature of mediation. Namely, the dynamic of the medium also clariies
what something is not; ”medium” and ”mediation” do not ”mediate” only outside of things (themselves) or between them, but also always as included in them.
This dismantles the conception that the distance would be framed as a sense
of ”nothing”, empty or void, or as in and of itself. See for example Weber,
Benjamin’s -abilities, 34–37.
Weber, ”A Touch of Translation”, 73.
Cf. Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, 88–89.
Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, London and New York, Verso,
2009, 45–46; Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities, 37 and ”A Touch of Translation”, 72.
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It would appear, then, that a medium consists structurally of
at least the following factors: (1) in-betweenness; it is an interval,
a mediation, and a mediator, (2) diference that unites, and (3) the
bond between the already past and the present moment (and the
future). Understanding the medium as a combination of these factors difers from the accustomed way of viewing it primarily as a
message or message-carrier, in other words as a structure of mediation that allows change and as something that is tensed between
two poles, such as the relationship between sending and receiving.44
The non-communicative aspects of mediality turn our attention to
the power of a medium to bring fore that which is not realised in
the sphere of sense perception, but which as an ability and efect
continues to still inluence it. Instead of the realm of meanings, the
process of becoming meaningful (that remains shadowed by meanings) is foregrounded as the central question.45
From the premises of media sensitivity the stage can be framed
as a medium in which attention is drawn to how the performance
forms as movement, situation, and relationships of efect, while
what is performed remains in the background. How, then, does this
”how” form; how is it seen and felt?
of intermediality.47 Technological advances have afected our way
of understanding corporality, perception and prensentability, both
in terms of metaphors and framing conditions of sense experience.
With regard to contemporary ubiquitous media, we can say that
seeing has been in many ways separated from the body.48 Perceived
reality is not limited to the sphere of the senses, and at the same
time vision has become in a new way aware of itself.49 We can think
that, through the era of technical reproducibility, perceiving is already cinematic and seeing essentially takes the form of staging.50
Hans-Thies Lehmann notes that in ”post-dramatic theatre” theatre’s real law of motion – the inner logic of all theatricality, “performability” – is articulated in the body, unlike in ”dramatic theatre”,
where the law of motion was “destiny” in terms of the story’s and
plot’s movement.51 Lehmann’s description of a shift from the stage
serving the plot to bodily stages frames the body in clear terms as
the common denominator of the contemporary performing arts
and ine arts in their theatrical modes. Body is the point of refer-
TRANSLUCENT VISIBILITY
The shift to the sphere of digital recording, information transfer,
and global communication that took place at the turn of the millennium has been compared to the expansion of the conception of the
performing arts that took place in the early 1960s.46 With regard to
scenographic work, this transformation constitutes a shift to an age
44
45
46
Weber, ”The Virtuality of the media”, 302.
Weber, ”A Touch of Translation”, 75.
Johannes Birringer, ”Contemporary Technology/Performance”, in Theatre
Journal, Vol. 51:4, 1999, 366.
47
48
49
50
51
There have been extensive discussions regarding the visual arts and the post-medium condition. See for example Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: art
in the age of the post-medium condition, London, Thames & Hudson, 2000.
Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 16, 169–170. Terms describing this also include
”cyborg vision” (Lev Manovich, ”Visual Technologies as Cognitive Prostheses:
A Short Story of the Externalization of Mind”, in The Prosthetic Impulse. From
a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne
Morra, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, The MIT Press, 2006, 203–219)
and ”telescopic vision” (Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology, Minnesota, Minnesota
University Press, 2002).
Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 171–172.
It would be worthwhile here to consider the relationship of the mediality of
contemporary theatre to early monitor-centred video art, experimental and
structuralist-materialist film and conceptions of so-called artists’ cinema.
Pinpointing these backdrops would be illuminating in terms of interventions
of performing arts that are intermedial, body-centred, and often appearing
as “new-experimental”.
Ibid., 173.
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ence that structures the interrelations of these art forms. It is nevertheless worth keeping in mind that the body and corporeality appear equally as given emancipatory assumptions as vision, whose
position of the dominance the so-called “bodily turn” has striven
to question. If the reciprocality of experience – and its asymmetry – are not recognised, then in articulations of corporeality, for
instance in terms of touch, we easily fall into the same, one-sided,
totalising “centrism” (from opticentrism to haptocentrism) that
was originally challenged as being insuicient.52
Discussions aimed at dismantling the predominance of the
visual order have a long history. According to Jonathan Crary, the
tendency to equate “perception” with “vision” indicating the predominance of the visual order began to weaken at the end of the
19th century.53 Visuality began to be comprehended as a tension between the viewer and the world that (media)technologies, for their
part, also sustain and reproduce. Questions concerning the structuring of the experience of space, time, and place in today’s visual
and perfoming arts spring from this basis. In the era of electronic
media, our sensory experience is always already bound to an (electronically) ampliied, channelled, prosthetic, simulated, and stimulated medial structure.
I process these issues myself via artistic means. I tend to think
of the stage as a medium that supports seeing; as a special type of
optics, as a form of visibility that shows the multifacetedness and
multisensoriness of the structure of vision and addresses the invisible in the visible. In short: the stage shows performativity as
performability. Visibility opens up as a visual order that does not
touch the surface alone, but also passes through the facades, making visible the gaze, seeing, and being seen.
The visibility of the stage and projected images produced by
electronic media is continuous becoming, repetition, and eternal
return. In terms of experientiality of the imaginal relections and
video projections, the questions of whether and how the electronic images touch return to the showing visibility of the stage, to performability. Whenever I process performance video projections and
installations or experiment with video projections, it is clear to me
that the visibility of the projection is to be thought of concretely in
relation to the relecting surface and other particularities of the situation. Visibility demands some sort of relective surface, a screen.
I rarely use a movie screen, projection plastic, or other “proper”
screen54 made to serve frontal viewing position in an optimal way. I
prefer to evaluate various visibilities and various ways of projecting
so that the screen is light-permeable, moving, gapped, obscure, or
formed of various levels in terms of depth – either constructed for
the purpose at hand or found. Various three-dimensional installation solutions can also work as screens.55 It is also perfectly possible
to project into the air and allow a dust cloud, debris, or a living creature that happens to pass by to form a more or less random screen.
I personally ind most interesting installation-like performance
situations as well as settings where the performance place or space
52
53
On critique of haptocentrism, see Mika Elo Digital Finger, Journal of Aesthetics &
Culture, Vol. 4, 2012, DOI: 10.3402/jac.v4i0.14982
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture,
Cambridge Massachusetts and London, The MIT Press, 1999, 11–14.
54
55
I use the word ’screen’ in contrast to the cinematic tradition that reiterates conceptions of image as a window to the world (Cf. Anne Friedberg The Virtual
Window. From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, The
MIT Press, 2009, 4–5). Even more so relevant here is the genalogy of contemporary installation art. Cf. Tamara Trodd, Screen/Space. The projected image in
contemporary art, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011; Catherine
Fowler, ”Into the Light: re-considering of-frame and of-screen space in gallery
ilms”, in Trodd, 2011.
Cf. Marjatta Oja, Three-Dimensional Projection: Situation Sculpture Between the
Artist and the Viewer, Helsinki, The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, 2011.
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is in some way unusual.56 It can be found, happened upon, temporary, momentary, or even accidentally or intentionally vanishing. Based on perspective, it can contribute to or disturb normative, organised everyday activity. Even though so-called black box
theatre might strike a practitioner of contemporary theatre the
same way white cube does an artist in the ine arts context. Every
space – including a black box and a white cube – is unique and demands some sort of takeover, or formation of a relationship of settling in. In this sense, every performance is site-speciic.
Visibility demands some sort of place for showing. This implies
that visibility becomes a material and theoretical question in relation to the screen. As mentioned above, many kinds of installation elements can function as screens. But what is the operation
a screen enables? The screen does not form solely as a one-sided, two-dimensional, lat surface, a window to the world. Rather, it
structures relationships between frame and framing, foreground
and background, visible and invisible as well as of-screen-thematisations formulated in the spirit of trompe l’oeil paintings.57 The connection of the visible to theatricality and the stage is comparable to
the question of the (world’s) visibility, which conceals as it reveals.58
The site of visibility also becomes problematised. Photography is
considered one of the key mechanisms for deining the locus of
visibility. A photograph cuts into the world, interrupts it, produces distance and enables image-projecting on paper or screen.59 An
opaque screen stages visibility of the world and problematises the
relation between the interior and exterior of the viewer and the image. The screen would, then, appear to be marked by the fact that
at the same time as it shows the gaze, seeing and being seen, it also
conceals something of their collusion.
One interesting perspective on the analysis of this structure
is ofered by Jacques Lacan, who understands the screen (écran)
as a dynamics of not only visibility, but also of mediation, in other
words, in terms of regulation of visibility; it formats various ways of
seeing and being seen, distinguishing and appearing.60 For Lacan,
the screen is opaque.61 It is not a window-like opening that opens
up a view to the world; rather as it reveals, it also conceals, veils.
In the terminology of my research, this means that the cover/screen
in a certain way takes the role of a virtual stage of performability.
The body is another such concealing screen. It is marked precisely by the ambiguity of the body’s boundary. Merleau-Ponty’s idea
of the bond between touch and vision as a chiasmatic structure,
which Lacan relies on, frames visibility of the world as an intimate
relationship between the viewer’s body and the world. The notion
of the viewer’s and the world’s separateness here becomes problematised in a way that challenges us to think what I have previously addressed in terms of a distance that unites. When the contact between the viewer and the world is described in terms of a
56
57
58
Installation-ness is not in and of itself a matter of the comprehensiveness or immersiveness of the set’s or peformance situation’s ”stagability”. In relation to
a ”traditional” stage work, the matter can be framed from the perspective of the
performance event’s corporality. In installion-like performances, the spectator
can often move freely in the performance space and participate through his or
her actions in shaping the performance situation. In the context of the visual arts,
this sort of installation-ness has already long been more of a rule than an exception; the question of performativity remains, however, often in the background in
the exhibition context. Cf., ibid.
Fowler, ”Into the Light”, 306.
Cf. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, New York and London,
Routledge, 1996, 131–134.
59
60
61
Joanna Lowry, ”Projecting Symptoms”, in Trodd 2011, 93.
Janne Seppänen, The Power of the Gaze: an introduction to visual literacy, trans.
Aijaleena Ahonen and Kris Clarke, New York, Peter Lang, 2006, 79–80; Silverman,
The Threshold of the Visible World, 131–135.
Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan
Sheridan, New York, Norton [1973], 96.
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measurable distance, it is conceived as building on the oppositon
internal/external. It becomes an extensive otherness that stresses
diference and at the same time the connection between the parties is marked by detachment. If the emphasis is put instead on the
connection and the ambiguity of the mutual boundary is acknowledged, then the nature inherent to vision and touch is noted as an
intense otherness and distant closeness. The boundary between vision and touch is a blind spot – or a stain, a screen, as understood
in the sense of cover/screen.62 The visibility of the gaze is opaque,
perhaps even ”corporeal”.
atre, visual arts, and cinema in which lived, moving corporeal imaginality is one of the central premises. I conceive the ”post-” forms
of theatre and moving image -related arts that have been conceptualised in terms of ”post-dramatic theatre” and ”post-cinematic
(condition)”, as the backdrop of my projects combining video projection and live performance.63
As has already become apparent, the genealogy of the hybrid
forms of contemporary installation, media, and video art have inluenced the formation of these conceptions. Aside with the ”cinematically conceptualised world”64, my work builds on process-centredness, open-endedness, and exploration. Devising65 and viewpoints66
are examples of processual methods and open code approaches applied by many practitioners of contemporary theatre. I have used
these process-centred techniques in my artistic work, and found
them beneicial at certain phases of processes. They serve as struc-
THE SCREEN, BODY, AND PROCESS
The stage is a medium of continuous alteration and separation; it
is a medium of a unifying diference. The continuousness of this
difering carries with it the question as to in relation to what the
diference or change should be measured. Does the human body
constitute its ultimate measure? In performing arts, where the multisensory body is a central topic, the question of the corporality of
visuality and perception is not unambiguous. In contemporary theatre, scenography, scenography training, and research, confrontation with the hegemony of a space-abstractism consistent with
Euclidian geometry is still an issue. Theatrical practices reveal different approaches to the human body as a spatial entity. It can be
treated as a physical unit in space or as the basis for embodied understanding of space.
My own research participates in this confrontation by focusing
on the experientiality of the projected image. As argued above, this
move makes questions of mediality of the body unavoidable. My
study is positioned against the background of “post-“ forms of the62
Ibid., 96; Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 134; Pia Sivenius, ”Silmän
kääntö”, Tiedotustutkimus 20:3, 1997, 49, 54–55.
63
64
65
66
For instance Jean-Christophe Royoux frames contemporary forms of installation
art in the terms of post-cinematic medium (Andrew Uroskie, ”Windows in the
White Cube”, in Trodd, 2011, 146).
Ibid., 146.
According to Tim Etchells, devising is a process that refuses to know where it is
headed. Any given element of a performance component can act as the starting
point of the process, and no single element should rise to become overly dominant too early in the process. (Tim Etchells, Certain fragments: Contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment, Abingdon, Oxon and New York, Routledge,
2008, 17).
Originally developed as an improvisational technique for dance, viewpoints is the
active recomposition of the language of theatre or a performance in relation to
nine fundamental conceptions of space and time. Of these, the spatial ones are
spatial relationship, shape, gesture, architecture, and topography. Those related
to time are, on the other hand, tempo or rhythm, duration, kinesthetic response,
and repetition. The grammar of the performance situation is additionally examined in terms of ”dynamics” and ”ield”. It also involves the languages inherent
to one genre being turned in relation to the others, in the style of ”What is the
rhythm of a given movement?” or ”How can I stage a close-up or a tracking shot?”.
See Anne Bogart & Tina Landau, The Viewpoints book: a practical guide to viewpoints and composition, New York, Theatre Communication Group, 2005.
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tural, process-framing tools, and as such support the processual
mode parallel to both artistic work and to the somewhat obstinate
materiality of media technological apparatuses that I operate with.
Both the process itself and the apparatuses used act partially under control and as expected, yet entail a great deal of untamed elements and unexpected outcomes, as if own will, which is rewarding
in trialling the interplay between diferent kinds of materialities in
media theatre context.
The thematics of visibility and the concealing screen, central
to my research, helps in conceiving the ways in which a video-projected image can be understood in terms of bodily perception and
material thinking. An illuminating point of reference here is ofered
by Freud’s theory of “screen memories”.67
According to Freud, screen memories contain elements of real
memories, but they are always shaped by fantasies, repression, and
transference. Freud speaks of how memories are always both covering veils and relective surfaces – screens – on which the past is
relected, blended with the present.68 A screen memory is a matter
of both concealing and projecting. As Janne Seppänen proposes, on
the one hand, the screen can be understood as a relective surface
that functions like a unidirectional relecting surface and returns
the gaze, and on the other hand, as a covering structure. When the
screen is located between the viewer and the projector, it becomes
a semi-transparent ilm and makes formation of a projected image
possible. At the same time, it can cover the image or part of it. In
this instance, the screen prevents us from being blinded by the excessive light while allowing the formation of the projected image.69
A screen memory works according to the same principle. It both
conceals the unconscious from the glare and allows some sort of
image to form in the sphere of consciousness, which opens up a
connection to Lacan’s écran. The theme of Freud’s screen memory
brings with it the entire dynamics of the unconscious (slips, repressions and condensations) to Lacan’s conception of gaze.70
These thematisations of screen and visibility have helped me
to conceive video-projected images from the perspective of bodily
perception and material thinking in a way characteristic to my own
working method: I have simpliied already almost-empty images to
be even sparer, at times into barely perceptible, and made way for
random glimpses of lights and shadows, and the viewer to complete
as he or she wishes. In the end, the invisible that is concealed by a
barely perceptible stain best shows each viewer his or own view. I
wish to keep a possibility for those views open.
67
68
69
Sigmund Freud, Screen Memories. Standard Edition, 3, London, The Hogarth
Press, 1950.
Cf. Seppänen, The Power of the Gaze, 78.
Ibid., 79.
A SCATTERED IMAGINALITY OF THE BODY
The reality perceivable on a medial stage is not limited to the sphere
of the senses, as a result of which vision becomes in a new way
aware of looking at itself. According to Lehmann, media theatre
should be thought from this perspective as also an aesthetic and
an ethical issue that culminates in the question of responsibility.71
Because simple perception-based presence is no longer a suicient
category, Lehmann speaks of ”the “broken thread between personal experience and perception”.72 From Lehmann’s perspective, simple perception-based presence does not difer much from information processing if we do not heed the disjointedness inherent to it,
in which dimensions of desire, responsibility, and duty entwine. The
70
71
72
Ibid.
Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 184–185.
Ibid., 186.
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question of whether the perception apparatus is like an information
machine appears nevertheless problematic in the sense that perception is always already a relationship that entails a certain in-between. The formulation used by Lehmann, ”mere sense perception”,
would appear to refer to the pre-phenomenological conceptions that,
from his perspective, inluence in the background and naive perception-theory-based conceptions of the necessity of perception – that
is, precisely to those conceptions that for instance Merleau-Ponty
in his works consistently attempts to demonstrate are insuicient.
Where – in Heiner Müller’s words – theatre is dependent
on ”the presence of the person who has the potential to die”73, the
technologies of perception, for their part, strive to make time,
place, and distances fade. Lehmann’s interpretation is that the
electronic images are un-ixed to time and place and thus ahistorical and without fate. Lehmann conceives the ontological position
of the images of media theatre by and large in terms of the relationship between the living character (the performer) and the electronic image. He considers this relationship crucial speciically in
terms of the performer’s corporality. For Lehmann, theatre-bodies form “images” that are objects of the theatrical gaze: they are
there ”in the ‘between-the-body’ of live performance”.74 This oracle-like theatre igure is charged with the entirety of ”theatre’s real
law of motion” – the virtual dimension of performativity, which in
theatre is always in a state of arrival. In Lehmann’s interpretation,
the living igure on the stage represents an image of the impossibility of presenting death on the stage. And because the media images only show what they are able to show, they have no room for
the lack inherent to the theatrical gaze and the wish to see what
cannot be seen. According to Lehmann, the question of performability returns to the ”perspective of the ‘gods’” articulated through
ancient tragedy.75 The theatrical gaze does not simply accept, but
demands this lack and the perspective unattainable for the mortal human. In this view, the video-projected image is understood
as bodiless and perspectiveless. In Lehmann’s view, the electronic image represents information and communication technologies’
”mathematization that is in principle limitless”; it is an ”euphemism of information” and a manifestation of a ”lack of lack”. In this
perspective, the video image or video projection does not contain
the virtual dimension of performability.76
73
74
Alexander Kluge, ”Whoever Smokes Looks Cold-Blooded. It’s a mistake to think
that the dead are dead”. An interview with Heiner Müller. https://kluge.library.
cornell.edu/conversations/mueller/ilm/121/transcript (Accessed 19.1.2017)
Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 170–171.
THE UNDIVIDED SPECTACLE OF VISIBILITY
The emphasis of my relections on the visibility and performability of the media image diverges from Lehmann’s interpretation
in the sense that I view video projections only partially from the
perspective of the performer’s corporality. It is useful to compare
and measure the relationship and forms of dialogicality between
a living performer and an ”electronic performer”. And yet I still
feel that Lehmann’s interpretation is overly bound to the previously discussed hierarchical positioning of “live” and “mediatised”.
On the other hand, the hierarchical positioning reveals the illusion of directness and direct contact often associated with “live”,
which was raised in the discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of touch.
The oracle-like nature of the theatrical gaze could also be conceptualised on the basis of Lacan’s sardine can anecdote: In the
same way as a tin can shimmering in the waves unexpectedly pricks
75
76
Ibid., 172–173.
Ibid., 170–172, 174.
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A LITTLE DISTANCE, PLEASE
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MAIJU LOUKOLA
– ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEDIALITY AND TOUCH
its viewer as part of the view, the theatrical gaze reveals not only
the viewer’s participation in the spectacles, but also the undeniable contingency of this participation.77 This anecdote illustrates the
chiasmatic nature of seeing and the visible and suggests that visibility forms a screen, a ield of sight, within world’s visibility and
visual order.
My relections are oriented towards video projection’s experientiality, on the one hand in terms of the non-igurativeness and
non-narrativeness of image, and, on the other, through the visibility
produced through various spatial screens. Performers do not have
that central role in my imagistic premises. Non-presentational imaginality has ofered me meaningful ways to experiment with spatial visibility and the cover/screen, touch and vision, as well as to
explore performability and virtuality.
Lehmann’s postulations regarding lack, and lack of desire, in
relation to the electronic image are interesting. His way of negotiating the blurred boundaries between virtual and real in media theatrical context is timely, even if I ind the hierarchical relationship
that it implies between ”media theatre” and the corporality and
performativity of ”live” problematic. Lehmann’s concentration on
the shift in focus from the body remains unexamined in conjunction
with interpretations of the relationship between the media image
and corporality. For Lehmann, a video-projected image is a ready,
complete, closed image. Setting up the living, the potentially dying
and the already ”dead image lacking (the constitutive) lack” in opposition to each other challenges us to consider performability in
light of translatability and virtuality.
The performance forms as an active ield in which the performer,
the spectator and every one participating in it co-creates the performance as an event. When the experientiality of video projection
is viewed from the perspective of performability, then the roles of
space and time – and thus also those of transformation, movement,
and event-ness – are linked to a dynamics between the virtual and
the actual in which the coordinates of place and time are on the
move along with the perceiver. The place and experience of the image do not form solely in relation to the here and now, just as time
does not form as pure present moment. The present moment has
a reputation of being an unruly paradox – the always already-past
future. In the threshold of a theatrical stage, we already know to
expect a diferent kind of frame of experience, crystallised in Buster
Keaton’s famous revolving door scene that lings its viewer onto a
virtual orbit of time and place.
As I noted earlier, in formulating the structure of the scene, we
can lean on Benjamin’s idea of language as a medium that is not
merely an instrument, but which also has the ability to participate
itself in the event of articulation. Scenographer’s language is not
only a bearer of meanings and an instrument of communication; it
is communicative both in relationship to itself as well as to all other languages, both verbal and non-verbal. The theatrical medium
(and theatricality) cannot be reduced to an instrument in the formation of self-suicient ields of signiication.
77
According to the anecdote a isherman was asking Lacan: ”You can see that (sardine can)? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!” Lacan returned to this jab that
disturbed him in his lectures on the gaze and seeing (Seppänen, The Power of the
Gaze, 73).
IN CONCLUSION
Since the 1960s, the visual arts have systematically questioned the
autonomy of the artwork and authorship, as well as renegotiated
the connections between new and existing genres and movements
and their inluences on each other. In ”Sculpture in the Expanded
Field” Rosalind Krauss highlighted the ways in which changes in
149
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150
MAIJU LOUKOLA
– ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEDIALITY AND TOUCH
arts have taken place in terms of structural re-framing.78 This is
also interesting with regard to the recent changes in the ield of
scenography. Building on Krauss’ analysis, we can think that the
conventions of scenography, until recent decades burdened with
the tradition of dramatic theatre, have shifted towards practices
of ”expanded scenography” by and large in relation to what it has
not (traditionally) been. The premises that have traditionally been
attached to scenography (for instance, drama-text-centredness,
non-processual approach, bond to spaces speciically built for theatre) and performative activities opposite to these now rise to a
central role: related ields, like performance art, installation art, environmental art, architecture, and new kinds of performative and
media environments are examples of ields that scenography has
been obliged to redeine itself in relationship to. When discussing
the ”breakthrough” in scenography or any other specialised ield
in the arts, this sort of distinguishing and transformation of mediums is worth keeping in mind.
I have addressed a set of interconnected aspects regarding the
mediality of stage; at stake is the combined efect of the interpretive, experiential, and instrumental-material levels, the translatability of verbal and bodily elements, and intermediality. None of these
levels afects separately from the others, they always exist in relation to the others. Mediality frames the foundation of a theatrical
performance as an active, transformative, and nonlinear series of
events and situations. When mediality of the stage is examined as a
structure bound to the bodily perception of sign, trace and technical device, as I have proposed, we come to encounter with a sum of
mediations linked to both theatrical performability and perception.
On this basis, theatricality can be examined as situation-speciic
structure that challenges ixed conceptions of truths, institutions
and interpretations. On this basis, theatricality is comparable to
conceptions of the stage as a place of bringing forth, of an inter-playground of visibility/invisibility, and as a space and dynamic of continuous, multifaceted navigation and heterotrophic intensity. The
mediality of the stage, the mediality of media, intermediality, and
media speciicity should all be understood rather as situations than
interpretations. It is, however, important to note that it is by no
means an accomplished structure. When visibility is hampered, the
senses tend to sharpen. The condition of the medial stage can be
conceived as a medium of always-in-arrival, which is approaching
it as visibility and performability.
78
Rosalind Krauss, ”Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, in October, Vol. 18, 1979, 38.
151
Scenography:
Touches and Encounters1
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
In general terms, a theatrical performance is always a matter of
touches. Actors and spectators encounter each other, and the drama touches its every participant. Theatre makers emphasize the
importance of communality almost without exception, which is in
no way surprising, since both the making and reception of theatre
are collective experiences. A performance becomes meaningful for
its participants not only because of the story told and the emotions,
thoughts and cathartic climaxes involved there – after all, we could
have a much easier access to all these things through other media. We gather to theatres because we want to feel the presence of
actors and other spectators, and share together the experience of
being touched. Yet we know that the sense of unison is an illusion:
there are as many diferent receptions as there are individual participants having their own reactions, associations and interpretations.
1
This essay was irst published in Finnish in Kosketuksen iguureja, ed. Mika Elo,
Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2014.
154
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
My special ield is scenography, which in the traditional sense
means the visual and spatial setting of a theatre play. In contemporary discussions connected to the much-debated postmodern and
post-dramatic turns in theatre, scenography has predominantly
been understood as a generation of multisensory bodily experiences
and interactions in space.2 In the following, I will take a historicizing approach to the recent development scenography as an artistic occupation. This means that I do not focus on particular scenic
designs or performances but rather on the modes of practical encountering embedded in the working processes: we come into encountering with other artistic components of the performance, with
fellow theatre makers, audiences and also with the materiality of
theatrical spaces. Besides theatre-historical literature I base this
essay on my previous research and my own experiences as scenographer and educator of the ield.
As a tentative conclusion of my survey I suggest that the importance of encountering and touch has increasingly come to the fore
in every aspect of scenography. They are generally regarded as positive phenomena associated with aspirations for togetherness, mutual understanding, and even fusion. Here I do not, however, intend
to celebrate the joys of such joint creativity (even though the rare
moments of such an experience are more than welcome). Rather,
I will consider how communality, sharing, and the encountering
of foreign elements can be understood through the idea of pathic
touch.3 Simply put it means that you never actually meet the otherness in its true being but only encounter your incapability to touch
it. This experience is, however, the precondition for ethical interaction and communication with people who are diferent from us.
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
A SHORT HISTORY OF SCENOGRAPHY AS AN OCCUPATION
Historically, the modern comprehension of scenography can be
dated back to the romantic-realistic theatre of the 19th century.4
The naturalist drama of the 1880s addressed the stage space a
new, signiicant function as a representation of the protagonists’
material living conditions, which showed for instance in the detailed set-descriptions written by the playwrights. Instead of offering visual pleasure or pointing simply to the place and time of
the play-events, the naturalistic scenery was supposed to give information of the social environment and personal past of the protagonists. It thus became an inherent part of a particular drama,
a visual tool for ofering relevant information and suggesting subtexts to written scenes.5
As usual, the production practices lagged behind the artistic
aspirations and intentions. Until the early decades of the 1900s,
theatre companies usually owned a set of so called type-coulisses
representing typiied basic sceneries that could be recycled in performances year after year. The set painters worked independently
from singular productions, because same backdrops were used in
diferent plays. The mise-en-scène was conceived of as an instrument for embodying the written drama-text, not as an original
artwork as itself. The scenes were staged according to conventional patterns and the set painter knew how the space would be
used. S/he did not have to worry about the actors suddenly wanting to enter the stage through a painted landscape or climb on a
rock made of papier-mâché. The acting took mainly place on the
4
2
3
Philip Butterworth and Joslin McKinney, The Cambridge Introduction to
Scenography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 3.
See also Santanen in the present volume.
5
See also Hans Öjmyr, Kungliga teaterns scenograi under 1800-talet, Eidos nr. 5.
Skrifter från Konstvetenskapliga institutionen vid Stockholms universitet, 2002.
See for example Laura Gröndahl, Experiences in Theatrical Spaces. Five
Scenographies of Miss Julie in Finnish Theatre 1970-1999, Helsinki, The University
of Industrial Arts, 2004, 51–74.
155
156
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
forestage, because it was the only place that could be suiciently
lit by oil-lamps and candles. The actors were separated from the
visual scenery, which could be developed into perfection as illusory machinery, within the established guidelines of visual stage
conventions, of course. In other words, the painter could concentrate on his/her own work as craftsmen “dedicated to good work
for its own sake”, borrowing Richard Sennett’s comprehension of
the craftsmanship.6
When the set was understood as an integral part of the show
in modern theatre, there emerged a tension between the “goodness” of a set measured by the internal values of the scenographic
crafmanship, and the requirements of modern drama and performance. This tension has labelled all discussions on scenography as
art throughout the 20th century, and it still lurks behind the postdramatic strategies of the new millennium.
It was a technical innovation that inally changed the spatial
and visual order of the performance practices: electric lighting
was adapted to theatres since 1879 and increased the luminosity
on stage drastically. It enabled actors to move freely on the stage.
The bright lighting destroyed the illusory efects of lat backdrops
and they were soon replaced by three-dimensional, functional elements. Now the actors could use the setting as a part of their action:
they could grasp the props, slam the doors or climb on the rocks.
Modern theatre theorists wrote in unison that the designer should
not be a painter but an architect, who should be involved with the
dramatic action and anticipates the use of the space. When electric
light sources could be regulated and controlled from the switchboard since the 1930s, the visual scenery could be used as a dramaturgical tool that told the story also in time, or as Scott Palmer puts
it: “The movement of light through a performance was becoming
considered in the same terms as a musical score.”7
All these renewals made scenography into an elementary component of the performance, both as a visual extension of the drama,
and as a constitutive component of the mise-en-scene deining the
spatial limits and possibilities of acting. The professional identity of
a scenographer turned from a craftsman to an artist, who worked
not only with paintbrushes but also with his/her mind and intellect. Then again, s/he also became more dependent on the holistic
composition of the particular performance. From now on, scenographers have had to co-operate closely with the director and increasingly with other members of the production team.
The question of artistic collaboration cannot be discussed
without the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk , which can be translated to English as a complete or total work of art. Although Richard
Wagner presented the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk already in 1851, it
has labeled all discussions of theatre ever since. Basically it means
that the diferent components of a theatre performance are taken
as artistic languages on their own terms. This liberated the visual
and auditory aspects of stage from the subordination to written
drama. Now the performance was seen as a synthesis of all art
forms, and this harmonic whole became the new imperative for the
scenographer. In other words, the “tyranny” of the verbal text was
replaced by the monolithic unity of the composition of all aspects
of the performance. This whole was orchestrated and mastered by
the director, who became the most prominent artist of modern theatre in the 20th century.
On the one hand, this development granted a new, higher status
and creative freedom for the scenographer as an artist responsible
6
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, London, Penguin Books, 2008, 20.
7
Scott Palmer, Light, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 206.
157
158
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
made the actor stand on one foot. There she stood, wearing the hat
and speaking lines she could not understand, when the scenographer told that he had already last summer envisioned a ield of tree
stumps in the scene. And there were a damned lot of the stumps!
Then came the sound designer, who made some incredible stuf blast
in the background, and inally the lighting designer Leinonen added a giddy blue backlight on top of all that. Then in the evening we
were sitting in [restaurant] Natalia and going: Goddamn, how come
it’s not working.9
for the visual language of the performance. On the other hand, it has
often been noted that the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk has totalitarian
tendencies, because there is the desire to integrate all individual
agents to the service of a utopian collective goal. On the practical
level, the scenographer was now regarded as an independent artist, but s/he was supposed to somehow synchronize his/her process
with the director. It goes without saying that this caused problems,
as Peter Brook described symptomatically:
I have worked with joy with many marvellous designers, but have at
times been caught in strange traps – as when the designer reaches a
compelling solution too fast, so that I found myself having to accept
or refuse shapes before I had sensed what shapes seemed to be immanent in the text. [...] The best designer evolves step by step with
the director, going back, changing, scrapping, as a conception of the
whole gradually takes form.8
Consequently, scenographers, and in their wake costume and
lighting designers, have refused to accept a subordinated position.
They have required for artistic autonomy and democratic teamwork where everybody’s ideas would be equally considered. For
them, the visual design should not only serve the needs of the performance but also be received as an artistic act that can produce
its own reality. As the creative team has grown, this has become
problematic, too. The lighting designer Simo Leinonen described
the situation in 1993 lively:
During the irst decades of the 2000s, scenographic design has
increasingly happened through teamwork, conversations and joint
exercises instead of individual ideation at one’s private desk. The
modes of collaboration have become the most vital issue in the scenographic occupation, which shows very clearly in the education
of the ield.10 In her doctoral thesis published in 2006, scenographer Liisa Ikonen ended up searching for possibilities of free and
unconstrained collective interaction. What turned out to be of importance here was not the emphasizing of one’s own subjective artistic identity, but the dialogical character of the process and the
capacity for encountering the other, the ability to let the other come
forth in its own being.
The research work that had begun as a pursuit of the individual artist’s independence and freedom came, in the end, to a surprising result. New scenography did not, after all, mean placing my own art
to the fore. Rather, it meant a unity in which the diferentiation be-
The costume designer wanted a brimmed hat. Then came the dramaturge and revised the text. After that came the choreographer, and
9
10
8
Peter Brook, The Empty Space, London, Penguin Books, 2008 [1968], 113–114.
Liisa Ikonen, ”Visuaalisuuden pelko”, Teatteri 8/1993.
Laura Gröndahl, ”Stage Design at the Crossroad of Different Operational
Cultures. Mapping the History of Scenography Education in Finland”, Nordic
Theatre Studies Vol. 27/2, 2015.
159
160
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
tween subject and object, the own and the common, as well as scenography and performance vanished.11
By dialogue, Ikonen refers not only to the mutual exchange of
views between team members. It is also a matter of dialogue with
the developing work that cannot be known in advance. The setting
is produced by coming into encountering with others, who for their
part meet the designer and his/her work. In the suggested working
method, the inal performance emerges out of the series of encountering: it is something new that has not existed but comes into being as a consequence of the process. This means that scenography
is in a constant state of transformation with new, unpredictable
possibilities opening up, and the artistic product itself remains ultimately foreign to even those who have produced it.
Although the interest in collective working methods has increased, this kind of utopia has not come true in institutional theatres. Yet, the attitude has had a huge impact on the ways in which
the artistic constitution of scenography has been comprehended
in the new millennium. The relationship between form and content
was now reversed compared to the established working methods,
where the team should start from conceptual ideas existing ‘a priori’
to practical rehearsals. The contemporary theatre makers rather
want to let unpredictable things happen and generate diferent materials to experiment with. There emerge new ideas that are developed further with no ixed vision about future outcomes. It is the
collective process itself that should lead the work, and it should be
controlled and mastered as little as possible. This gives room for
something unexpected, uncalculated, strange to appear, but it can
11
Liisa Ikonen, Dialogista skenograiaa. Vaihtoehtoisen työprosessin fenomenologista
tulkintaa, Helsinki, The University of Industrial Arts, 2006, 29.
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
also be seen as a display of new-liberalist systemic thinking, ruled
by free markets and survival of the ittest.12
Something similar has happened in the suggested strategies for
audience reception. Since the staging was no more based on previously given contents, the spectators were invited to develop their
own ways of perceiving and making sense of the performance. This
moved the focus from the closed world of drama-iction to the process of semiosis and the instability and ambiguity of all meanings.
Erika Fischer-Lichte writes about a performative turn that has taken
place in performance strategies already since the 1960s.13 Basically it
means that theatre was understood as a two-way relation between
audiences and performances instead of dramatic narratives or decodable sign-systems. The conventional division to performers and
audiences; authors and receivers; viewers and the viewed was reorganized or even broken. The spectator was not only conceived as
an active receiver who creatively interprets the texts. S/he became
actually responsible for the performance experience in a new way.
In practice, audiences were increasingly involved to the happening
mentally or straightforward physically. For example, they have been
invited to choose their viewpoint, move freely in the space, interact
with performers or participate in the course of event. This again is a
two-edged sword, inviting audiences to think independently and celebrating their heterogeneity, but also giving room for conservative consumerism, where everybody can just pick up what pleases him/her.
12
13
See for example Janne Tapper, ”Jon McKenzien esityksen teorian tulkinnasta:
käsitteet pölytys, immanenssi ja hyve”, in Esitystutkimus, ed. Annette Arlander,
Helena Erkkilä, Taina Riikonen, Helena Saarikoski, Helsinki, Partuuna, 2015, 169–
203; Janne Tapper, Jouko Turkan Teatterikorkeakoulun kauden yhteiskunnallinen
kontekstuaalisuus vuosina 1982–85, Helsinki, University of Helsinki, 2012; Jon
McKenzie, Perform – or Else. From Discipline to Performance, London and New
York, Routledge, 2001.
Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, London and New
York, Routledge, 2008, 20–22.
161
162
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
DESIGNING AND THINKING OF SPACES
‘simple locations’.15 Michel Foucault has argued that space became
subordinated to time and was treated as dead, ixed, immobile and
non-dialectical.16 Edward W. Soja has claimed that in modern geography space was considered either as a simple container for, or
as a mere outcome of historical events, but not as a dynamic, active agent having an efect on what was going on inside of it. Up
to the 1970’s, positivist geography had contented itself with the
classiication and description of measurable data, cutting itself
of from humanistic social sciences and history.17
How about theatre spaces? Today most stages in our theatre
buildings are black, neutral boxes, looking everywhere the same.
They are supposed to serve as a screen on which contents can be
projected as freely as possible: the lack of a proper character should
allow maximal lexibility for any artiicial ambience. The established
design practices take the exiting stage space as a passive platform
on which the creative scenographic design happens. Traditionally,
the designer starts not by experiencing the physical space or experimenting with action on stage, but by imagining the performance by
means of scale models, various sketching techniques and nowadays
increasingly with 3D computer modeling programs. The creative
design-process is separated from the bodily event on the material
stage, which comes into being only afterwards as an implementation of the planned ideas.
One of the most famous theoreticians of modern scenography,
Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) aspired for a universal stage that could
host any singular performance; it would, in other words, function
The modern scenographer’s primary instrument is space. It would
thus seem logical that the scenographer’s working methods can be
related to diferent ways, in which the essence of space has theoretically been conceived. According to Edward S. Casey, there are
basically two philosophical approaches that date back to Plato and
Aristotle. To Plato, space (khora) was a passive receptacle; a matrix of appearance, on which all things manifest themselves, but
which has no qualities of its own. As an idealist, Plato put primacy
on the geometrical shapes that are projected onto earthly matter
from the transcendental world of ideas. Aristotle, in turn, was an
empiricist: for him the world could be known through perception.
He stressed the materiality of the place (topos), which he compared
to a vessel that can actively sculpt its contents. In other words, in
his view place itself had inherent power.
Casey remarks that the polemic between Platonic “geometrism” and Aristotelian “physicalism” runs through the history of Western philosophy and still afects our everyday notions
on space.14 Simply put, theoretical notions on space have historically developed from the medieval hierarchy of places, where
everything belonged to its proper position, to the mathematically
mastered universe of modern natural sciences. This can be seen
as a move from Aristotelian to Platonic order, and according to
Casey, the ‘power of the place’ was largely forgotten in modern
thinking. The Newtonian and Galilean space was neutral and homogeneous: it had no absolute zero-point from which the order
and directions could be derived. It was based on calculable relations between moving objects, and places had signiicance only as
15
16
17
14
Ibid.
Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place – A Philosophical History, Berkeley, University
of California Press, 1998, 142.
Michel Foucault, ”Of Other Spaces”, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Architecture /
Mouvement/ Continuité, October, 1984 [1967].
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies – The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social
Theory, London and New York, Verso, 1989, 35–38.
163
164
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
like a Platonic receptacle in which the events could take place. The
architect Walter Gropius developed a model for Total Theatre
(1926), where the stage and auditorium could be spatially modiied
into any position as if the space would have no ixed form of its own.
The theatre historian Christopher Baugh has very accurately noted
that the “leitmotif” of modern scenography is the metaphor of stage
as machine, “a physical construction that theatrically locates and
enables the public act of performance”.18 Like any machine, this kind
of scenography serves some purpose beyond its own existence, but
it is also constitutive of the production process and its outcome. The
power of scenography is thus embedded in its instrumentality in a
similar way as any technology that is falsely presumed as neutral.
In the ield of visual and spatial design, the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk was most prominently developed by the Bauhaus Design
School operative in Weimar Republic 1919–33. The artists there
considered the building (das Bau) as the “ultimate goal of all art”,
and the unity was to be achieved by combining arts, craftsmanship
and modern technologies into a new synthesis.19 The harmony was
based on a belief in a uniting spiritual essence beyond the perceivable materiality of diferent artforms.20 In other words, all artists
were supposed to “discover” material forms that correspond to
same ideas, but it was also vital that they understood the character of their own artistic languages as immanent sense perception.
Oskar Schlemmer, who led the experimental theatre of Bauhaus
1923–29, developed the idea of scenic machine by creating a visual
stage with dancing abstract igures. He claimed that the stage could
be diferentiated to three dimensions that obeyed diferent laws according to the inherently essential nature of their material. Firstly,
there was the oral or sound stage of a literary or musical event, represented by the author; secondly, the play stage of a physical-mimetic
event embodied by the actor; and thirdly the visual stage of an optical event created by the designer, who was the builder of form and
colour.21 In a theatre performance, one of these dimensions always
takes the lead placing the others into its service.22 Schlemmer, however, developed a bit mystical idea of Man as Dancer (Tänzermensch),
who was able to exceed the diferentiation and follow “his sense of
himself as well as his sense of embracing space”.23 Although many
commentators have speciied Schlemmer as an essentialist, Melissa
Trimingham argues that he in fact worked as “a practical philosopher” in Husserlian terms, and anticipated postmodern tendencies
in scenography by examining the tension between the transcendental
and ‘real’.24 In my understanding, the Man as Dancer can sense both
his body and the space through his movement, and this binds the two
aspects together in one bodily experience. This resonates strongly
with the phenomenological view on spatiality, which Casey regards
as a distant descendant of the Aristotelian power of the place.25
According to Casey, it was already Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
who breathed new life into the discussion on actively functioning
place. Although Kant regarded space as an a priori given condition
21
18
19
20
Christopher Baugh, Theatre, Performance and Technology, New York, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005, 46.
Manifesto of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919.
Elaine S. Hochman, Bauhaus – Crucible of Modernism, New York, Fromm
International, 1997; Bauhaus, ed. Jeanne Fiedler and Peter Feierabend, Cologne,
Könemann, 2012; Vassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, ReadaClassic.
com, 2010 [1911].
22
23
24
25
Oscar Schlemmer, ”Man and Art Figure”, in The Theater of the Bauhaus, ed.
Walter Gropius and Arthur S. Wensinger, Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan
University Press, 1961, 19–20.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 25.
Melissa Trimingham, The Theatre of the Bauhaus – The Modern and Postmodern
Stage of Oskar Schlemmer, New York, Routledge, 2011, 46.
Ibid., 57.
165
166
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
for perception, he noted the importance of the lived corporeality in spatial experiences. The directions found in space are based
on the structure of the human body. We perceive things as being
left or right, front or back, up or down, in relation to our sensing
body. Here the possibility opens up to understand space and place
through a sensing body that takes an active part in processes of
perception. We perceive and conceive the surrounding world by
encountering it with our bodies. To quote Casey, place originates
in this “being-with”: “Just as we are always with a body, so, being
bodily, we are always within a place as well.”26
Referring to Casey’s historiography further, Edmund Husserl
(1859–1938) continued on this path and regarded the participation
of the lived body as the basis of the spatiality escaping geometric
structures and measurements. For him, the moving body was a permanent zero-point in space, which could be exempliied by walking
through a landscape: the lived body moves to new places while the
walker is the center of his/her changing experience. Since this bodily “here” is in constant motion, the place around it is all the time
formed anew.27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) considered the
way in which we inhabit the spatial world as fundamental for our
mode of being. When we enter a place, we do not merely adapt to
the given space: the place opens up as an indeinite horizon of possible actions.28 Casey crystallizes Merleau-Ponty’s idea: “the lived
body is itself a place. [It] constitutes place, brings it into being.”29 The
kinesthetic, proprioceptive experience is, however, not reducible
to the subject’s internal structure but is born in contact with the
given world that exists outside the subject.30 We constitute spaces
when we come into encountering with something outside ourselves.
This notion can be traced in contemporary scenographic strategies,
where the space comes into existence as the outcome of unpredictable mental and physical interaction, not as a given pre-condition
for a representative theatre play.
THE PERFORMANCE
At a irst glance, the idea of a “Platonic” neutral stage was most
clearly put in words by Peter Brook, who gave his famous book the
title Empty Space (1968). Following his footsteps, one of the most
prominent Finnish theatre directors of the 1970s, Ralf Långbacka,
wrote: “In an ideal world the theatre as a building would disappear
and the only thing left would be I or we the audience and the performance.”31 However, this is not yet the whole story. As we know,
Brook made many of his most celebrated performances in very
speciic sites, and Långbacka went on claiming that the space disappears most easily outside institutional theatre buildings.32 Like
many other theatre makers he wanted to abandon the neutral, lexible stages and go to diferent “found spaces”33 such as factories or
deserted villas. But how could these spaces disappear in the spectators’ experience? Do they not have an exceptionally strong character, which is almost impossible to ignore? How could you not pay
attention to their special atmosphere, the feel of the air, smell, and
30
31
26
27
28
29
Casey, The Fate of Place, 1998, 214.
Ibid., 226–228.
Ibid., 232.
Ibid., 235.
32
33
Ibid., 234.
Ralf Långbacka, “Not a question of theatre buildings”, in Theatre in Space, FONDI
the Yearbook of Finnish Theatremuseum 3., trans. Tony Melville, Helsinki,
Theatre Museum, 1988, 80.
Ibid.
Found space means any non-theatrical building or site that is used in performance.
It has not been constructed for theatrical purposes, but ’found’ by the artists in
the world.
167
168
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
acoustics – things that tend be forgotten in a familiar theatre building because are familiar features of a conventional playhouse, taken as granted.
When a performance is staged in a “found space”, the audiences
have to perceive and interpret the place diferently from its normal
purposes and connotations. They must somehow cancel their everyday mode of making sense of the environment and allow it to appear
on new terms. This is a special state of mind, where we are on the
threshold between two ways of seeing the stage: the actual place,
and the imaginary one that emerges through the performance event.
There is the sense of the material place, but it is contested by mental projections; phantasies, associations and new meanings induced
by the performance. Occasionally, the physical place “gives up”, and
turns into another space beyond the immanent appearances. Yet,
this can happen only for short moments because we cannot help
sensing and perceiving the actual environment. This kind of a stage
cannot be explained as purely Aristotelian, nor Platonic, but rather as an oscillation between two modes of experience: the limiting
power of the material environment and the freedom of imagination
and reasoning. Due to this liminality, no meanings are ixed, which
makes it possible to address any new meanings to the perception.
In other words, anything can represent anything. This is the emptiness of the found spaces that actually are packed with sense stimuli
and ready-made cultural meanings. This is also the magic of modern theatre, as Bert O. States has put it:
The magic that Artaud and Grotowski talk about is that of transformation or alchemy; it is not only that the eye can be tricked into
seeing almost any object as something else, but that an object that
does not represent something in advance becomes a blank check, an
open presence; it becomes the source of something not yet here, a
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
thing without history, or rather a thing whose history is about to
be revised.34
States notes that this kind of theatre solicits for “the willing suspension of our self-isolation”; in other words, it becomes an almost
spiritual ritual that celebrates the death of the old language and
the birth of a new one, created the in the presence of the participatory community.35 Modernist theatre is very much labelled by the
desire for this kind of togetherness based on a sharable metaphoric language, the semantics and syntax of which are constructed in
the here-and-now, before live audiences. By erasing the historical
ballast of previous convention and existing cultural sign-systems,
such performances try to start from the beginning, clean the table
and create an empty stage.36 The scenography of this kind of theatre is a matter of interaction between the participants and the
performance, not by concrete architectural structures. Therefore
it moves the focus of scenography to the situatedness and relationality of the event itself.
THE SPECTATOR IN SPACE
The scenography always positions the performer and the spectator in relation to each other. On the one hand, this means the very
concrete spatial structuring of the performance event. On the other hand, it is a question of situating the spectator in a certain mental and physical position as a perceiving and interpreting subject.
A good example is the traditional focal point perspective, where
34
35
36
Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1987, 113.
Ibid., 113–114.
See for example Davis Wiles, The Short History of Western Performance Space,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 240–266.
169
170
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
the illusion only works when it is viewed from the exact right angle. It is a practical issue of seeing the painting correctly, but also a mental position indicating, how the perceptual and conceptualizing apparatus of the spectator is supposed to work. The focal
point perspective creates not only a picture of the world but also of
the viewer itself, because it is based on a geometric model imitating human three-dimensional sight. In other words, when we see a
correct perspectival display, we also perceive ourselves as subjects
that are capable of seeing the world according to then given model.
Despite of the credible illusion, the perspective technique has some
limitations: it works only, when one looks at scenery with one eye or
takes a suicient distance to it. It also ignores the dynamic character of vision as a sequence of fragmentary eye-movements and presents the spatial experience as a closed, stabile whole. This means
that the seeing subject is situated outside the world represented
and s/he is stripped from some aspects of his/her sight: the stereoscopic vision created by two eyes that constantly wander around
in the ield of vision.
Two-dimensional pictures generate thus spaces not only by representing an illusory depth, but also by creating a spatial relationship between the viewer and the image in the moment of viewing.
This can be applied to all rhetorical acts.37 Hans-Thies Lehmann
equates perspective with the narrative of a drama, because it makes
the totality possible by situating the spectator outside of the perceived world and the act of representation is separate from the object of representation.38 Maaike Bleeker uses the concept of focali-
zation to describe the relationship between the viewing subject and
the object viewed within a particular construction that invites the
spectator to take up a certain position.39 The focalization is not restricted to realistic or illusory modes: it implies any attitude the audience is hoped to take in its approach to the work of art. According
to Bleeker, the act of positioning passes unnoticed when the way of
seeing it proposes coincides with the spectator’s presuppositions,
wishes, and desires. She notes that the attraction of realistic theatre
is largely based on the feeling of the sign and its signiication merging together, of not being able to tell the actor from the character.40
Various postmodern strategies for their part aim at deconstructing diferent concealed ways of directing the audience’s experience.
Instead of ofering a ixed and comprehensible position for the viewer, the performance rather hampers the attempts of decoding and
interpreting it according to any coherent frame. This is supposed
to make the spectator aware of the act of focalization itself, and
consequently also his/her own unconscious desires, needs, and expectations. Disturbance becomes content, confusion turns into an
artistic experience.
According to Lehmann, the confusion is political, because it focuses the attention to the strategies of representation instead of the
ictive story represented, but Bleeker makes there an important addition. According to her, the removal of a totalizing frame in fact
is another framework, which allures to grant the spectator a more
direct access to the things as they are in themselves:
- - the efect of the multiplication of frames would appear (at least in
some respects) to equal the absence of frames. This turns Lehmann’s
37
38
On the concept of rhetorics in theatre and drama, see William B. Worthen,
Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1992.
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Draaman jälkeinen teatteri, trans. Riitta Virkkunen,
Helsinki, Like, 2009 [1999], 144.
39
40
Maaike Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre – The Locus of Looking, New York,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 27–28.
Ibid., 84.
171
172
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
account of perception on the post-dramatic stage into a paradox: the
multiplication of frames manifests itself in the increased perceptibility of the thing itself. This paradox becomes no less paradoxical – yet
somewhat less confusing – when understood as the efect or indicator of perspective at work, rather than as the efect of deconstruction
or the absence of perspective. It is the paradox that is perspective.41
Bleeker, in other words, reminds us that we are always situated in some position and relation to the perceived world. The only
thing we can do is to be aware of the very act of positioning and understand that is constructed and can be altered. Nevertheless, this
awareness is actually another frame that only expands the view to
the next meta-level. In short, we never get rid of a perspectival position; it can only be deconstructed and we can be moved to another place of viewing. Yet, the desire for a ixed point of perception
seems to persist: a point where one could experience a satisfactory
harmony between one’s mind and the encountering with something
else; a point, from which could overcome the gap that makes us distinct from the world and from the collectively shared experience of
it. But all attempts to fulill this desire are bound to end in frustration because the distinction between the viewer and the viewed only
reappears somewhere else. I suggest that through this notion, the
postmodern performances have somehow internalized the theatrical
event: we do not experience the drama as a representation of something else; we encounter in it our own mental processes of perceiving things and making sense of them. Does this mean that theatre
becomes an individual, solitary experience like reading a book or
watching a movie on the coach? That would in fact be the climax of
the development starting from the 18th century bourgeois theatre.
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
ON ENCOUNTERS AND TOUCHES IN SCENOGRAPHY
It is characteristic of any artistic experience that it is felt to be at
the same time deeply personal and collectively shareable or even
universal. We can ind this insight in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, according to which the ontology of art is based on repeatable experiential structures.42 He compares these structures
to theatre performances, where the same play comes into being
night after night. The word play (Spiel) is here not restricted to
theatre: we can talk about children’s plays or about playing football. The word refers to any game that always has the same basic
structure but exists only when being played out in particular situations. Similarly, the reception and interpretation of art are structured processes that construct the work into being time and time
again as personal experiences. Although these experiences are always deined according to the mental horizons of individual players, the artwork itself is reducible neither to the particular cases of
its being played, nor to subjective receivers. It only comes into being in the repetition of its incident structure independent of singular subjects. I think that in theatre we become especially aware of
this hermeneutic dimension of the performance: I do not only have
an artistic experience of my own; I also sense that my experience
is a link in the chain of parallel and successive experiences of the
same play-structure. I come into encountering with my own, subjective experience of the performance, but also with its diference
to all other experiences that are implicitly present there.
According to Gadamer, a successful work of art also transforms
its spectator.43 When looking at a painting, for example, my own
mental horizon sets the limits to my interpretation, and some of
42
41
Ibid., 44.
43
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. William Glen-Doepel, London,
Sheed and Ward, 1975 [1960], 99–108.
Ibid., 115–118.
173
174
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
the painting’s possibilities always exceed my understanding. If I
learn to know the unfamiliar, it expands my understanding, or horizon as Gadamer puts it, and the foreign inds its place within my
renewed mind. I can breathe a sigh of relief: the alien has been
tamed, it has become familiar to me and my mind has grown. But
sometimes there retains something forever unfamiliar, unexplainable, disturbing; something that does not settle even within the expanded horizon. It provokes me since it makes me aware of the limits of my own mental capability. This has to do with the aesthetic
concept of sublime, as the word’s Latin root sublimis (literally: “up
to the limit”) suggests. When striving to exceed my own comprehension, I become conscious of the limits of my imagination and understanding. This is why I think good art haunts the spectator, because it can never be exhaustively interpreted or explained: there
evolves an uncanny experience of strangeness that touches us from
inside. The alien has invaded my mind but does not unfold to me,
and the only thing I can examine is the very experience of coming
to the unbridgeable boundary between the other and myself. In this
sense, illnesses and certain spiritual experiences can be understood
in terms of being exposed to otherness; to something foreign that
invades one’s own body.44 I see something similar in a deep-going
aesthetic experience, as well in making as in receiving works of art.
Something arises in me, something that remains foreign, strange,
and uncontrollable; it is like an alien inside me. It is probably no coincidence Antonin Artaud compared theatre to the plague.45
In this indelible sense of strangeness lies also the core of the
pathic moment of touch. The term pathic is derived from the Greek
word pathos, meaning, among other things, sensitivity, sentience,
afectability, and sufering. The pathic moment of touch refers to
sensitivity towards the existence of an untouchable, forever strange
dimension involved in touch, a dimension to which the one who
touches is exposed. It is a matter of handling with something diferent and alien without losing the respect to its otherness. Even in the
closest contacts there always remains an alien element: something
that withdraws from the reach of touch.46 In fact, it is just this absolute untouchability, the uncompleted contact that touches us in
every encounter. We touch something outside ourselves precisely
through our inability to truly touch it. This does not mean that we
should refrain from a close encountering and let the other be. I can
experience my inability only when I make serious eforts to touch,
when I push myself to the ultimate limit between the other and me.
In order to feel the pathic touch I have to try hard and fail in my attempts to touch. What I actually experience there is the boundary
that separates me from the other.
A pathic attitude towards scenography could mean accepting
this strangeness involved in every encounter, the untouchability of
the touched, as the basis of teamwork. This should not come down
to a general chaos, everyone allowed to pursue their own ideas
with no consideration for others. Rather, it means willingness to
welcome phenomena that cannot immediately be understood and
appropriated by habitual means. It implies a certain slowness of
progression that permits of noticing unfamiliar elements breaking into one’s own horizon, and encountering them, being exposed
to them. It is a matter, too, of letting the other remain strange, of
not trying, through some unifying gesture, to adapt the other to
oneself. And vice versa, it is as important to protect one’s own untouchability. On the level of everyday practice, this might mean
44
45
See also Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Intrus, Paris, Éditions Galilée, 2000.
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. Victor Conti, London, John
Calder, 1981 [1964], 20–22.
46
On the pathic dimension of touch, see Santanen in the present volume.
175
176
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
that working together is not necessarily always great fun. Artistic
work might take such a strange direction that it leaves one altogether in the position of an outsider. The unfamiliar element may
really appear hostile and frightening. One of the most important
practical insights is to renounce of the false idealization of communality, the expectation of everyone coming together in a shared
Eldorado. Acting together is necessary, and fundamental to human
existence, but extremely diicult and painful as well. Instead of a
utopian goal, perhaps it should be taken as a problem we have to
learn to live with. Yet, this does not mean that we should give up
the attempts of reaching a communion, of touching the untouchable, because the pathic moment takes place exactly in the necessary failure of these attempts.
In my view, human selfhood is always constituted in relation to
the other – whether we are talking about disconcerting phenomena, social roles, mirror neurons, or Levinasian ethics. We cannot
construct the comprehension of our own selves without being in
contact with something outside of us. Then again, such a touch
can only take place in an encounter between the other and I. Thus,
touch is both constitutive of our subjective existence, and born out
of our own actions. This is why we cannot rid of the necessity of togetherness and encountering others.
The encountering with other people is also an existential precondition of our social life as human beings. My sense of self can
be constituted only when I am in contact with something outside
me. The moment of pathic touch is therefore an instance where
we actually come together: every borderline has the dual capacity
of both dissociating and uniting things, as Hannah Arendt writes:
To live together in the world means essentially that a world of
things is between those who have it common, as a table is located
SCENOGRAPHY: TOUCHES AND ENCOUNTERS
between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between,
relates and separates men at the same time. The public realm, as
the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak.47
What brings us together in the public realm is not so much a
happy consensus but rather the threat of a conlict. The reason why
we approach each other is the need to solve our dissonances and
disagreements, to handle with our diferences. As Arendt puts: “to
be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided
through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.”48
This makes the idea of pathic touch so important in contemporary
world: it constitutes an encountering that recognizes the existence
of the otherness and the need to respect its ultimate strangeness.
This sensitivity is a precondition of ethical policies and public discussions. Arendt does not speak much of art but it is possible to
think of theatre as a metaphoric display of the discussions in public realm. The stage is like the common table, around which we can
gather in order to display and encounter our diferences. This also
constitutes the political dimension of theatre, which according of
Denis Guenoun follows from the audience’s awareness of its own
presence.49 Thinking this way, I can apply to scenography what the
geographer and social scientist Doreen Massey writes about space
generally as “the condition of both the existence of diference and
the meeting-up of the diferent”.50
47
48
49
50
Hannah Arendt, Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998
[1958], 52.
Ibid., 26.
Denis Guénoun, ”Sanojen näyttely”, in Näyttämän ilosoia 13–56, trans. Kaisa
Sivenius, Esa Kirkkopelto and Riina Maukola, Helsinki, Like, 2007.
Doreen Massey, For Space, London, SAGE, 2005, 180.
177
178
LAURA GRÖNDAHL
[...] space is the dimension of the social. Space is constituted by our simultaneous existence and the relations between us. It does not, however, represent some kind of achieved holism that would allow of no
gaps. I would rather describe space as ‘the simultaneity of our stories written thus far’. We produce space in our practices and interactive relations. This means that space is the object of continuous
production. As a dimension of plurality, space thus raises the question of how are we (humans and non- humans) going to live together.51
Translation Kaisa Sivenius
51
Doreen Massey, Samanaikainen tila, ed. Mikko Lehtonen, Pekka Rantanen and
Jarno Valkonen, trans. Janne Rovio, Tampere, Vastapaino, 2008, 15. (The citation is from the preface written for a compilation of Massey’s texts published in
Finnish – transl. note.)
Pressings
HARRI LAAKSO
In art, things often are out of place and sometimes not what they
seem. Art creates worlds from this out-of-placeness and this seeming. But how does artistic research thrive in such created spaces?
What forces act on artistic agency, matter and knowledge, what
pressures are exerted on language, what imaginary and tropological igures emerge?
This essay takes as its departure points Pierre Huyghe’s two
site-speciic works Untilled (2012) and Roof Garden Commission
(2015) and Maurice Blanchot’s texts, especially his novella The One
Who Was Standing Apart From Me (1953). These works are here not
so much as illustrations or examples of artistic research as they
are relective surfaces for another thought and a way of pacing. I
do not want to “solve”, interpret or analyse them, frankly not even
to understand them. Their coexistence here is partly coincidental
and intuitive. I encountered them and they touched me at an op-
182
HARRI LAAKSO
PRESSINGS
portune time, and act here as reference points for – and in place
of – something else.1
I’m also writing myself away from these works. I’m writing about
them, alongside them and in a inal manoeuver losing touch with
them, trying to ind solace in a position apart from them and from
my writing self. I notice that I might be suggesting, in efect, that
artistic research is riddled with an innate inability to touch.
at large” are obscured, and that the artworks test their own limits
and those of our world.
The name of Huyghe’s work was Untilled, which many visitors
quickly read as “Untitled” – a slip which undoubtedly speaks of
the parergonal forces of expectation in our confrontation with the
art world. The word refers to land, which is not prepared and cultivated for crops, a sort of wasteland, land that is not tilled. As
such “Untilled” echoes the possibility of some anonymous reserve
that is in waiting and still only remotely attached to culture and
language. The park itself is “human nature” and the compost area within it a shrine of decay, somewhere at the border of life and
death, or order and the formless, an incessant trade of entropy and
negentropy. Things disintegrate, reassemble, are taken apart and
ind new places as building blocks of cells, or in the work of our
thoughts. “The set of operations that occurs between [the diferent
elements] has no script. There are antagonisms, associations, hospitality and hostility, corruption, separation and degeneration or collapse with no encounters.”3 What becomes met is a condition with
all the vibrant rhythms and metamorphoses, something like a system in all its instability, without a script and with no choreography.
In the short catalogue text Huyghe describes the work as follows:
”The place is enclosed. Elements and spaces from diferent times
in history lie next to each other with no chronological order or sign
of origin. What is present are either physical adaptations of ictional and factual documents or existing things. In the compost of the
Karlsaue park, artifacts, inanimate elements, and living organisms...
plants, animals, humans, bacteria are left without culture.”4
AREA
Untilled (2012) was the name of the artwork, or place, which Pierre
Huyghe had built on the composting area of Kassel’s Karlsaue Park.
There on the small clearing in the woods one would confront a number of things, including piles of sand, dirt, asphalt, concrete tiles,
anthills, an uprooted oak (which was originally planted for Joseph
Beuys’s project in 19822), psychotropic plants and a female statue,
whose head was obscured by an active beehive. In addition a man
walked a dog around the site (with puppies, I am told, although I
did not see any) like an automaton, day after day. The artwork was
part of the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition (work number 83 in the
exhibition) and it placed the diferent elements at the forest clearing – the living, non-living and dead things alike, their interrelations,
tensions and stings – onto the landscape of contemporary art. As
such that was not unusual, as it has become more than customary
that the borders between artistic meaning making and “the world
1
2
Parts of this text were published earlier in Finnish as “Pistoja” in Kosketuksen
iguureja, ed. Mika Elo, Helsinki, Tutkijaliitto. Other sections of this text were
part of a performative “In absentia –lecture”, written by me and presented by
Crystal Bennes at the KuvA Research Days 2016, University of the Arts Helsinki,
on 9th December 2015.
The oaks were part of Joseph Beuys’s project, which started in 1982 and which
included planting 7000 trees in Kassel.
3
4
Pierre Huyghe, dOCUMENTA. Das Begleitbuch/The Guidebook. Katalog 3/3,
Ostildern, Hatje Cantz, 2012, 262.
Ibid. Italics mine.
183
184
HARRI LAAKSO
PRESSINGS
185
186
HARRI LAAKSO
I’m letting this area composed by Huyghe, simultaneously active
and dormant, where mental images (igures and igments of imagination)5 and materials touch each other, also be the fertile ground and
metaphor for discussing two central issues of artistic research, namely agency and materiality, and the connection between them. These
concepts are central because artistic research explores, before anything else, how artworks, presentations and images themselves perform research gestures, separate from any intentions of their maker.6
And because the status of an artwork as agency is still unclear, also the
aims of artistic research often become obscured: Does artistic research
open a pathway to another kind of knowledge after all or instead to the
other of knowledge? Perhaps artistic research literally does not know?
Maybe artistic research should not be viewed in relation to, say
the natural sciences or humanities, but as imaginary activity – not
because it does not yet exist, or because it is only always yet to come,
permanently not yet, but because it is basically the activity and interplay of mental and material images. Diferent kinds of tensions,
research operations and gestures are formed between these two dimensions. They do not as such become the objects of research, but
attest to things that happen (i.e. which are events), thereby opening new avenues for agency – where agency becomes deined as a
capability or a force (pressure) that acts on an existing situation.
This loads the material and the artefacts that make up artworks
with new potency, while at the same time inviting one to reassess
the nature of artistic agency and to approach theoretical thinking
itself also as a material operation.
5
6
“Figment” and ”igure” have the same etymology. Latin igura ‘shape, igure,
form’; related to ingere ‘to form, to contrive’.
In Finnish artistic research is sometimes – in my view misleadingly – called “tekijälähtöinen tutkimus” (“author-based research”) that would imply something
opposite to what I’m proposing here.
PRESSINGS
DECLARATION
Artistic research “in general” does not exist. Any act of artistic research necessarily includes some sort of explicit or implicit declaration of one’s stance on art – on its function, place and nature for
that individual researcher. Sometimes, most often I imagine, this
will go unnoticed, either because it is taken for granted that there
exists a general consensus on what we mean by art, or for precisely the opposite reason: because there can never exist any consensus or adequate deinition the whole enterprise can seem futile.
For my own purposes, however, I ind this most necessary and also pedagogically sound and even prefer to call it an active ‘declaration’ – rather like one declares that one holds certain cards in a
card game. This is because what follows is wholly dependent on
this declaration.
If, in the beginning, I mentioned that artistic research does not
know, it is because, for me, any art that I am curious or passionate
about does not know, does not exhibit those ideals that we place for
knowledge, of an organized, stable, and coherent economy of meaning. Saying this I am fully aware of the non-conceptually based or
embodied ‘forms’ of knowledge or skill, and do not doubt their existence or value, only their pertinence in this case. For me art is
about something else.
I take my lead from the French thinker Maurice Blanchot (19072003). In his view an artwork is not an “accomplishment” or a production as such, a work of bringing to light, but has an imaginary
centre that opens in what he calls “unworking” (désoeuvrement),
somewhere beyond being grasped by knowledge and naming.
For Blanchot literary language was not about communicating
and interpreting messages, but is about being suspended in this
annihilating disappearance of language, at a distance from things.
For a true language to begin it is necessary for this nothingness to
187
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PRESSINGS
have been felt, to endure the double absence of the thing and of the
idea. Literature does not seek to name things, to grasp them by the
use of language, but desires them prior to that naming.
”For the work is the very decision which dismisses him [the
writer], cuts him of, makes of him a survivor, without work. He
becomes the inert idler upon whom art does not depend.”7 The
writer belongs to what precedes the work, to its indecisiveness, as
Blanchot writes, ”to the shadow of events, not their reality, to the
image, not the object, to what allows words themselves to become
images, appearances – not signs, values, the power of truth”.8
At the same time the work remains ”illegible, a secret”.9 This is
also the task for artistic research, to keep grasping towards what
cannot be grasped, to encounter the unknown as unknown, where
the unknown will not be revealed, but indicated.
This is the only possible relation to the work, not a proper relation at all.
is a question for artistic research – if one is determined to open up
the eroded space, the world where the event of the artwork takes
place and listens to its own voice. This search takes us to a place
where the work points to a igure radically outside and preceding itself, to its own precondition, towards the direction Michel Foucault
saw Samuel Beckett leading us with his sentence: “What matter
who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking.”10
To tackle this task and to try to elucidate some suggestions
concerning agency and implication, I will take recourse to Maurice
Blanchot’s novella The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me from
1953. To call it a ‘novella’ is perhaps already a misapprehension because this feat of writing resists literary classiication as much as
it resists interpreting what actually happens in the text, what are
the events that occur. The novella, then, is a irst person narrative
of someone in an apartment doing very little, except thinking: he’s
sitting at a desk, looking out the window, becoming thirsty and
getting a glass of water, and writing (possibly writing, because the
unresolved question “is someone writing at this very moment” becomes the most disturbing question of them all). The narrator sees
a igure outside the window, or in the house, and converses and negotiates with someone, is encouraged by someone (or perhaps that
someone is himself). Yet it is ultimately debatable whether any of
the seemingly trivial actions happen at all. Everything is veiled in
a cloud of uncertainty, and it seems that the more trivial the task
(like getting a glass of water) the more impotent the narrator becomes in completing it.
APARTMENT
The feeling of being out of place or being apart can begin close to
our very body at any unsuspecting instant. It can be accompanied
by the feeling of something existing – human or not, alive or not –
somewhere imminently close to us, and making an appearance only at a select moment.
The suggestion (or allusion?) here is not only that artworks too
sometimes create the space and conditions for the appearance of
such new voices, operating in close proximity, but that the investigation of those elusive voices and of how they could be approached
7
8
9
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln, London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1982 [1955], 24.
Ibid.
Ibid., 23.
10
Michel Foucault quoting Beckett in “What is An Author?” [1969], trans. Donald
Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Itacha,
Cornell University Press, 1977, 115. The quote is from Samuel Beckett, Texts for
Nothing, trans. Beckett. London: Carder & Boyars, 1974, 16.
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One can think of the text having an almost physical presence. In
fact the translator of Blanchot, Lydia Davis, has written of her experience in the following way:
“The experience of translating the essays was one of the most
diicult I ever had, in translating. As though the experience were in
fact, a piece of iction by Blanchot, the meaning of a diicult phrase
or sentence would often become a physical entity that eluded me,
my brain becoming both the pursuer and the arena in which the pursuit took place. Understanding became an intensely physical act.”11
Moreover, Blanchot’s text seems to resist not only interpretation but summary as well. Even if one is able to follow the argument
from word to word and from sentence to sentence, it seems not to
amount to a comprehensible whole. A short (but unsatisfactory)
summary of the narrative, Davis writes, could be: “In a house in
the southern part of some country, a man goes from room to room
being asked the question ‘Are you writing now?’ by another character who may or may not exist.” In her view Blanchot’s novella’s
diiculty rests in the way in which “paradox, and impossibility, are
incorporated as perfectly natural elements of the action”, and in
how it hinders any attempt to identify the actors and types of action (concrete or possible), and to separate out concrete actors from
abstract ones, and from permutations of both.12
An excerpt from Blanchot’s actual text might illuminate the nature of these actions:
“A little later, I found myself back on the bed. Nothing was different: I still saw the table, it extended from one window to the oth-
er, from west to east, as far as I could tell. What struck me, what I
tried to bring out of my musings, was why, in this little room, the
impression of life was so strong, a radiant life, not of another age,
but of the present moment, and mine – I knew it with a clear, joyful
knowledge – and yet that clarity was extraordinarily empty, that
summer light gave the greatest feeling of distress and coldness.
This is open space, I said to myself, the vast country: here I work.
The idea that I lived here – that I worked here – meant, it is true,
that at this moment I was only here as an image, the relection of
a solitary instant sliding through the immobility of time. A cold
thought I could not break down, that pushed me back, threw me
back against the wall, just as “here” changed into “far from here,”
but that distance immediately became the radiance of the day, the
soaring and the happiness of all of space burning, consuming itself
to the transparency of a single point. What a vision! But, alas, only
a vision. Yet I felt myself powerfully connected to that instant and
in some sense under its domination, because of this my master, in
the impression that here a sovereign event was taking place and
that to live consisted for me in being eternally here and at the same
time in revolving only around here, in an incessant voyage, without
discovery, obedient to myself and equal to sovereignty.”13
What becomes enacted – I am tempted to say – is the space
of writing: the writing I creating the voices and igures who exert their presence, but as image and at a distance. Are they the
voices of characters and already those of the readers, echoing
through the text? Or does the text spiral towards a mysterious origin of language itself, somewhere beyond its task as transmission
of meanings?
11
12
http://yaleunion.org/lydia-davis/ (Accessed 2.2.2017).
Lydia Davis describes these combinations at length. There are, for example, such
concrete actors as the narrator, but also abstract ones, like the igure who is possibly invented by the narrator. Sometimes abstract qualities like desire or immobility perform as actors. And sometimes the actions are only possible (“I think I
moved”), etc.
13
Maurice Blanchot, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, in The Station
Hill Blanchot Reader. Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha, trans. Lydia
Davis, Barrytown, Station Hill Press, 1999 [1953], 285.
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One more passage from Blanchot:
“To say that I understand these words would not be to explain
to myself the dangerous peculiarity of my relations with them. Do
I understand them? I do not understand them, properly speaking,
and they too who partake of the depth of concealment remain without understanding. But they don’t need that understanding in order
to be uttered, they do not speak, they are not interior, they are, on
the contrary, without intimacy, being altogether outside, and what
they designate engages me in this “outside” of all speech, apparently more secret and more interior than the speech of the innermost
heart, but, here, the outside is empty, the secret is without depth,
what is repeated is the emptiness of repetition, it doesn’t speak and
yet it has always been said already. I couldn’t compare them to an
echo, or rather, in this place, the echo repeated in advance: it was
prophetic in the absence of time.”14
Is the secret companion, who is alluded to in the name of the
novella and in these fragments, then, not an interlocutor at all but
the limit of language itself, as Foucault has asserted? Foucault
writes: “That limit, however, is in no way positive; it is instead the
deep into which language is forever disappearing only to return
identical to itself, the echo of a diferent discourse that says the
same thing, of the same discourse saying something else”.15 This
companion is anonymous, and stays close to the writing I, but at
the same time at an immeasurable distance, separated. “That is
why he who says I must continually approach him in order inally to meet the companion who does not accompany him and who
forms no bond with him that is positive enough to be manifested by
being untied.” They are not bound – the I and the companion – but
linked by the continuous questioning, creating a neutral space for
language, a “placeless place that is outside all speech and writing”.16
The apartment is the space of writing, and the voices are companions and proxies for something hidden, for what language is in
its being rather than in its meaning. In another vocabulary we could
call this an ecology of writing, because what is described are the
relationships evolving between the diferent ‘organisms’ (the living
things) inhabiting the text, their ecosystem.
But I use the word ‘apartment’ here also to reactivate the word’s
more ancient etymological sense of “a separated place” (from appartere), even to propose a neologism: ‘Apartment’ understood as
a noun for the feeling of being separated from something, similar to
‘detachment’, and yet still remaining also a part (of).“His not being
here evoked a sense of apartment,” one could say. The transformation
in meaning from a concrete state of things to this feeling – within
the realm of the same word – is the trope that lures me on. For me it
is also evocative of the (pre)condition and space of artistic research.
14
15
Ibid., 321–322.
Michel Foucault, ”Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside”, trans.
Brian Massumi in Foucault / Blanchot, New York, Zone Books, 1987, 51–52.
IMAGINARY ACTORS
The artwork seems split to things accessible and things hidden – as
does the igure of the author.17 Who then speaks when we are engaged in artistic research (if it can be said that “we” are engaged
in it). What happens when we try to de-activate artist as we know
her and try to activate the artwork, paying attention to the full potential of its agencies and hidden parts?
16
17
Ibid.
Jacques Derrida writes of “two paintings in painting”. The Truth in Painting,
trans. Geof Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago, Chicago University Press,
1987 [1978], 155–156. Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari write of two authors
of a work, of which one is inscribed in the work, only encountered there. Federico
Ferrari, Jean-Luc Nancy, Iconographie de l’auteur, Paris, Galilée, 2005, 2–9. See also Harri Laakso, ”Valokuvan työmaa”, Tiede & Edistys, 2/06, 161–173.
193
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HARRI LAAKSO
PRESSINGS
Let us consider again the work by Pierre Huyghe. I’m drawn to
its hidden logic of disarray, and to the insistent feeling that something is happening without my knowing, something imaginary.
Looking closely at the sketch provided by Huyghe and printed
in the catalogue one notices that it is not only a geographical map,
but points to ictional resources beyond the present material ones,
its “site-speciicity” extends beyond the physical place, to the domain of language and iction.
In the bottom right corner one inds the text “Humana Vitalium”
and Locus Solus 1914. The reference is to French poet and novelist
Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus (Solitary Place), which is an
odd story of a scientist inventor, who invites a group of colleagues
to the park at his country estate. At that park the group witnesses one oddity after another. These include a hairless cat, a dancing
girl in a diamond illed with water, the preserved head of Danton – a
leading igure in the French Revolution – and a number of tableau
vivants inside a huge glass gage, acted by dead people who have
been resurrected using the scientist Martial Canterel’s serum invention, the humana vitalium. The substance, when injected, causes
the corpse to continually live the most important day of its past life.
Michel Foucault, in his book on Raymond Roussel18 mentions
that Roussel is “the artist that disappears behind his work; he is
hidden by the ready-made, by the “found” conventions of language
that he uses to create his work.”19 Foucault refers here to the principles by which Roussel wrote some of his works, including Locus
Solus, using homonymic relations. With these rules the story extends from one word to another word that sounds similar, thereby
always basing itself to the “already said”, even if the word is taken
away from its ordinary setting and readopted into an absurd situation. This Foucault viewed as a kind of perversion of what happens in theater, where the “already spoken language” establishes
a sense of “verisimilitude for what is seen on stage. The familiar
language placed in the mouths of the actors makes the viewer forget the arbitrariness of the situation”.20 Roussel thus did quite the
opposite when building from everyday sentences most absurd and
unlikely situations.
Huyghe also seems fond of such homonymic puns, apparent
for example, in the title of his work Untilled, as I mentioned before,
where the title silently activates the name “Untitled” and with it a
layer of the “already said” in contemporary art. And some of the
individual curiosities of Huyghe’s composting site appear to have
found their form as if by similar invisible rules. (For example: We
can consider the statue with the “beehive head” as evoking the
domed beehive-hairstyle, which was popular in the 1960’s).
The second dated reference in the catalogue – “Morel 1940” – refers to a similar story, to the book The Invention of Morel by Adolpho
Bioy Casares. In this book a fugitive runs of to an island, where he
sees a group of people, all oddly unresponsive, performing similar
actions, day after day. Among these human-like igures is a woman named Faustine, with whom the fugitive falls in love. Faustine,
however, remains cold and unresponsive, despite his eforts (which,
incidentally, include making “a small garden for her down by the
rocks, enlisting nature’s help to gain her conidence”). It then turns
out that she and the rest of the group are mere images, projected
by the device that the scientist Morel had invented. Morel had recorded a week of their life and played it back over and over. The
rays of the device were lethal, but as projections they were given
18
19
Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, The World of Raymond Roussel, trans.
Charles Ruas, London, New York, Continuum, 1986 [1963].
Ibid., 177.
20
Ibid., 180.
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196
HARRI LAAKSO
PRESSINGS
eternal life. Since an amorous relationship with an image is obviously doomed to be one-sided, and gives little hope for the fugitive,
he decides to “put himself in the picture”, by re-photographing the
entire week with Morel’s device, this time placing himself afectionately alongside Faustine, united in the image with such precision
that a casual observer would not suspect that he was not part of
the original scene.
Similar was also my unease at Huyghe’s work, unaware what is
part of the “original” scene, and am I inside it with the man walking the dog (and possibly others I don’t even know about), or am I
outside. Perhaps the ictional allusions also serve to illustrate – and
simultaneously obfuscate in a suitable way – what the igure of the
author could be. Huyghe’s Untilled is an area of parallel presents
and of repetitions. Encountering it is like entering into the workings
of a machine, into an image, a igment. The temporal dimensions of
this image are open; it is an open event, between story and history. In this respect the work is a continuation of Huyghe’s long-term
project, the Association of Freed Time, which is a way of looking into the possibility of new temporalities. Hyughe writes: “The open
present is open to any and all incidences that might occur”21. His
interest in historical temporality has been traced to Foucault’s The
Archaeology of Knowledge, where the “old” methodologies available
for historians (those of linkage and causal succession of diferent
eras) are juxtaposed by the “new” methodologies, where gaps, ellipses, interruptions, series and lived duration overtake.22
Images and igments traverse through time, and settle themselves as if in a repository, charging a place, site or situation with
force and power. At the same time as Amelia Barikin writes of
Huyghe’s work, “the open present is characterized by an aesthetic of the incomplete. It is most at home in uninished structures or
construction sites. It is not reconcilable with a single, ixed image,
and it cannot be substituted for a caption. Like an organism, the
open present requires context to survive.” 23
21
22
Amelia Barikin, Parallel Presents. The Art of Pierre Huyghe, Cambridge, The MIT
Press, 2012, 3.
Ibid.
OPERATIONS AND MATERIALITY
To me such temporalities are those of the photographic image in
particular.24 Looking at the composting site, its construction materials (stored there for future usage) and the plants, both uprooted and planted, I can easily say “This will be and this has been”, like
Barthes famously said in front of the photograph of Lewis Payne,
the assassin soon to be executed – noting that that was the temporal feature in all photographs.25 Huyghe’s work then, has a very photographic time. (One might notice that there too, in that anterior
future of the photograph the stake for the image was death like in
Locus Solus and The Invention of Morel.)
Construction sites and photographs (looking at photographs)
have a clandestine relation. Construction sites demonstrate, at the
same time, the exacting ideals supported by invisible plans and
the various unpredictable forms of their execution. Photographs
too seem to survey a construction, that of sight itself, constantly at
work in the act of seeking, anchoring and letting go. I would even
say that photographs themselves are construction sites.26 In each
23
24
25
26
Ibid.
The photographic is here understood similarly to Rosalind Krauss in its event nature, where something is photographic when it adheres to photographic operations (i.e. trace, metonymy, framing, exposure, indexicality...). See e.g. Rosalind
Krauss, ”Notes on the Index: Part 2” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and
Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1985, 210–219.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Relections On Photography, trans. Richard
Howard, New York, Hill and Wang, 1981 [1980], 96.
See also Laakso, ”Valokuvan työmaa”.
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PRESSINGS
individual photograph one can feel the tearing weight of time, a
passing of two diferent times, and two diferent times passing us.
A photograph can prolong the life of its subject: In a picture a deceased relative continues “living on” as if “on stage” the life that in
the real world has already passed. And on the other hand, a photograph freezes on its “stage” a moment, steals a moment that outside the “photographic stage” continues uninterrupted.27
A ruin is the inverse of a construction site, and one can see ruins
as images in the same way as tools become images, when no longer
in use and veiled by their utilitarian function.
In the book Athens, Still Remains Jacques Derrida writes of
Jean-François Bonhomme’s photographs, taken to a large degree
in the ruins of Athens, that they open up “categories or ‘genres of
being’” or “things” (mineral, vegetal, divine, animal, human, technical, relection, relection of relection.)28 It is not only about what
one can see in the photographs – the remains of ancient walls, a singular plant rising from the ruins, statues of gods, the look of a traveler or a salesman, a technical instrument. When photographed the
ruins make visible the nature of photographic operations: framings,
relections, traces, out of focus, arrests, under- and over-exposures.
At the ruins time slows down and so does looking. Photographs
force something on us, “something about the world’s own deadness, its inert resistance to whatever it is we may hope or want.”29
Even if photographs “promise the world” they only give objects in
which “wrecked reminders of the world are lodged.”30
The compost area that Huyghe had manipulated (simultaneously a construction site and a ruin) is photographic in its operations
and gestures, and also full of life. More than that, Huyghe’s site is
also a clearing, even if it is untilled at the moment. And such clearings are the places where culture begins, where culture takes place.
In his book Forests. The Shadow of Civilization Robert Harrison,
re-reading Giambattista Vico’s story on “the giants” in his magnum
opus The New Science (1725) notes how the forest clearing was necessary for the institutions of humanity, with everything it enables;
for example to be used as a meeting place or burial site (where
the dead bodies would produce humus for the other humans). But
above all the clearing provides a direct connection to the sky, to
the heavens above. Because what would one see without the forest
clearing? “Thunder rolls, lightning lashes, the giants raise their
eyes and become aware of the sky. But what did the giants see when
they raised their eyes? What does one see vertically or laterally in
a dense forest? The mute closure of foliage. […] They had to “picture the sky to themselves” in the aspect of a huge animated body:
a body not seen but imagined as there beyond the treetops”.31
As a counterpart to this celestial connection Huyghe’s artwork also works the ground. In his study called “The Formation of Vegetable
Mould through the Actions of Worms with Observation on their
Habits” (1881) Charles Darwin watched common English worms for
hours on end, watched them making topsoil or “vegetable mould”,
by continually bringing to the surface a reined layer of mold. But
he ends his study, not with a conclusion or observation about biology or agrology, but about history. He writes: “Worms have played a
more important part in the history of the world than most persons
27
28
29
30
Thierry de Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot. The Photograph as Paradox”,
in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins, New York and London, Routledge, 2007,
110.
Jacques Derrida Athens, Still Remains, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael
Naas, New York, Fordhan University Press, 2010 [1996], 35–49.
James Elkins, What Photography Is, New York and London, Routledge, 2011, xi–xii.
Ibid., 22.
31
Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests. The Shadow of Civilization, Chicago, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1993, 4. (Vico, New Science, §377).
199
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HARRI LAAKSO
would at irst assume.”32 Why is this so? This is of course because
they have made the earth hospitable to humans, in terms of making
the ground fertile for agriculture, and thereby for the rituals and
plans of human history. But more than that worms are responsible
for preserving those human made artifacts not liable for decay for
an indeinitely long time, by burying the artifact beneath their castings. “Archeologists ought to be grateful to worms”, Darwin says.33
In Darwin’s view worms inaugurate human culture, not because they
intend to, or because any divine intention is running through them.
And yet they do, and Darwin calls them “small agencies” (of course
one of many e.g. bacterial, human, chemical etc.), which have the
big accumulated efect. So, the worms have participated in a heterogeneous process where agency has no single locus.
This idea of non-human and material agencies has recently
gained new currency. Many of the theoretical insights are traceable to the work of Bruno Latour, who speaks of “actants” in place of
actors. An ‘actant’ is a source of action, has eicacy and an ability
to do things and alter the cause of events. While here the project
is to give also the materiality of artworks and images a new vitality
and a new sort of “respect”, the quest is actually one of tremendous
political and social import. Following Jane Bennett, for example,
one can think that seeing material as intrinsically inanimate could
impede the emergence of more ecological and sustainable modes
of production and thinking and keeps us enclosed in a view of the
world where active human subjects are confronted with passive, inanimate objects and their actions are governed by laws of nature.34
32
33
34
Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms
with Observation on their Habits, London, John Murray, 1881, 305. Quoted in Jane
Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Durhan and London, Duke
University Press, 2010, 95–100.
Darwin, 308.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, vii-xi, 94–95.
PRESSINGS
GRAVITY
The second site-speciic work by Pierre Huyghe that I want to address, a more recent one, takes us again close to the sky and elucidates similar tensions further. Like many of his other works the
Roof Garden Commission (2015), which he had also named, early in
the process as Rite Passage, can also be describe as an installation
in which various objects and things, both living and non-living, interact with and brush against a culturally charged location and the
activities that take palace there.
This time that location was the roof garden of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, where many museumgoers like to
go to see the spectacular view of Central Park East. The main elements of the installation included: an aquarium complete with a
large loating rock and live tadpole shrimp and lampreys, another
large rock with four drilled holes (presumably used in transporting the stone to its place) lying on the paving, and a number of displaced paving stones, exposing the illing beneath. These ‘existents’
were complemented by several ‘actions’ that took place: the liquid
in the tank periodically become opaque in a mysterious way, then
just as unexpectedly becoming transparent again, water seemed
to trickle from the tank, weeds sprouted from the dirt under the
exposed paving.
The majestic view of the skyscrapers and the park, as well as the
insistent knowledge that one is literally standing above the many
loors of the museum, illed with artworks and cultural artefacts
added to the experience. One also become conscious of the movement of the other museum visitors on the roof, who had interrupted their stroll in the museum’s halls and were now dividing their
attention between the cityscape and the artwork.
Huyghe’s work was an installation becoming a constellation: elements were seeking and activating relations with each other and
201
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HARRI LAAKSO
PRESSINGS
203
204
HARRI LAAKSO
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beyond, to the surrounding site and environment as well as backwards and forwards in time. The work created horizons of expectation: waiting, for example, for the tank to become opaque again.
One was also guided to look far back in time. The species living in
the tank were ones that have presumably remained practically the
same for millions of years, untouched by evolution. The fragile and
leeting existence of the actual live creatures in the aquarium was
juxtaposed with the longevity of the species they represented. In
a sense the artwork fascinated in the moment, with the elements
that were placed on display, while simultaneously inviting to look
away in space and time.
The artwork inspired a number of “keys” to assist in negotiating
the relation between the elements of the experience (placed there
or pre-existing), to assist in deciphering its laws of contiguity. One
was tempted to think about gravity: the loating rock was aligned
with the tall buildings reaching for the skies and juxtaposed with
one’s own weight pulling down towards the galleries below. One
was invited to think about plasticity: as the large boulder was made
of the same material from which the paving stones were sculpted,
the stones that now had come loose, had been reinvented as material. Some things are capable of adapting to change and have the
ability to receive form and to give form, while on the other side of
that plasticity there exists the capacity for annihilation.35 Thirdly,
the artwork ushered us towards an idea of inclusion: we, as the beholders, become implicated as the artwork seeped into our world,
our leisurely time, everything we though was ours to have. This area of sharing was coupled with an awareness of visibility, of seeing
and of not seeing: there were transformations from transparent
to opaque, and we came face to face with the artwork at a place of
prominence, placed on display and in front of a natural view, overlooking the city, under the skies. And lastly we were confronted with
a vague idea of mortality: the limit of our species was indicated to
us as the artwork charted a geological and paleontological timeline,
and placed us inside a clock with no escape. The work placed us in
the world; not its own world, not the art world, but the world from
which we had been apart.
35
Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain, New York, Fordham
University Press, 2008 [2004], 5. See Malabou’s deinitions on ‘plasticity’.
ADDRESS
The artworks I have addressed, working (and ‘unworking’) at their
own limits, undoubtedly create efects concerning agency and implication, but more than that, self-relectively, they seem to raise
our awareness about the mode of address: Can we introduce these
things as ‘objects of study’ – studying what the afore mentioned
artworks bring to our attention – or should we move towards ‘performing them’, becoming somehow taken over by them? What is the
mode of my address – am I addressing them in the sense of writing about them, or am I writing to them as much as I am writing to
you now. Echoing Blanchot’s text “Am I reading and writing? Am I
reading and writing at this very moment?”
Agency entails the idea of a force, thing or person that acts to
create a particular efect. When we speak of agency we often take
it at face value that agency is something to be coveted, granted that
we are simultaneously aware of the power of such (non human)
agents (like microbes or chemicals) that can be harmful to us in
many ways. However, in the arts (and where art intersects with politics) the spectre of the Author is still so vividly in our minds that
agency often becomes synonymous with empowerment, with letting
us hear the voices previously unheard. Even after “the death of the
author”, which seemed to liberate us from approaching an artwork
through the identity of the maker of that artwork, we hold dear the
205
206
HARRI LAAKSO
PRESSINGS
fact that artworks take place in the world, where it matters whose
historical context and political views, whose voice is being represented. We are tempted to denounce the author’s authority – when
it suits us – only to restore it at the next instant.
To be sure the points of reference that I have described, involve
diferent positions for their human ‘authors’, even if those positions
are obscured in them. The well known absence of Maurice Blanchot,
the man, from public life – which gives us the freedom not to use
the man’s life as a reference point – can help direct more than the
usual amount of attention to the text and language itself. And although Pierre Huyghe is a prominent and visible contemporary
artist, many of the events taking place in the artwork are beyond
the scope of his control, when the diferent elements of the work
play out their roles, sometimes in active opposition to each other,
or exert their force as a mere presence of matter.
It could be said that these cues, inscribed both within the works
themselves and in the circumstances of their making, point to (and
indexically gesture at) the limits of authorial control – the ‘authorial’ here referring not only to particular live persons, but to the
possibility of any ixed centre of interpretation. Instead, we are invited to listen to the artwork itself more closely. And this is a key
question for artistic research: to imagine and to put on stage the
voice – or the agency, if you prefer – of the artwork itself.
This proposition is at the same time necessary and highly problematic. It necessitates that we look at the material of the artworks
(the language, the objects and constellations) in their being instead
of in their meaning,– and look at how their material is informed,
without at the same time reducing their “life” to matter. It means
that we are provisionally encouraged to take a position that could
be essentially described as vitalist, accepting that there exists
some principle that animates matter, which exists in a relation-
ship with matter, but is not itself material in nature.36 This means
accepting – perhaps against our own better judgment and reasoning – a sort of entelechy that generates and “arranges”the life of
an artwork from within. (Aside: Entelechy, which is a term originally coined by Aristotle, refers here to the non-mechanical – and
non-psychical – agent responsible for the phenomena of life. It is
something impersonal that animates and arranges living bodies
without a precise plan, something that distinguishes me from my
corpse and a live being from a machine.37 And I realize that all
this only makes sense if we accept that artworks are closer to living beings than to mechanical machines. Another detour would be
to approach the force of materiality as an exposure to the power
of the other (Derrida), or of the “outside” (Blanchot) or to treat it
as an apparatus (dispositivo) which is “literally anything that has
in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, interpret,
model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings”.38)
But here I’m drawn especially to the vitalist approach as it is actually not very far from the way in which Pierre Huyghe describes
his works as rituals “made out of the rhythmics of autoemergences,
events with variations, accelerations” or as “organism, generating
itself in a continuous, ever-changing transformation.”39 Huyghe’s
36
37
38
39
Jane Bennett, “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism”, in New
Materialisms. Ontology, Agency and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost,
Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010, 48.
Bennett, 51 Bennett quotes Dries, “who borrows his term of art entelechy from
Aristotle, retaining its sense of a self-moving and self-altering power but rejecting
its peculiarly Aristotelian teleology”.
Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Stanford, California,
Stanford University Press, 2009, 14.
Interview of Huyghe in Roof Garden Commission. Pierre Huyghe (catalogue),
Ian Alteveer, Meredith Brown, Sheena Wagstaf, New York, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2015, 33.
207
208
HARRI LAAKSO
PRESSINGS
work admittedly also evokes a sense of equality and a lack of categorization for its elements, something that radiates to the realisation of a more general ecology “in the broadest sense of the word;
[the] diferent states of life all around us”.40 But these descriptions
are not yet the speech of the artwork itself, but once again, words
of someone else speaking in its place.
Now that I have got this far I become more and more conscious
of something that I realize I had known all along in secret, but had
dismissed: When yearning for the speech of the artwork I had only wanted to give it agency, forgetting Blanchot’s words that I myself quoted earlier, professing that I do not understand the words,
that “they don’t need that understanding in order to be uttered,
they do not speak, they are not interior, they are, on the contrary, without intimacy, […] ‘outside’ of all speech”. I would therefore
have to let go of my search for agency in any positive sense, accept
to be dismissed, to be apart from and succumb to the passivity of
the work, its inertia.
Yet this double bind immediately draws me back to agency, to research agency, as the “force that creates efects”. This is because I
am aware that whatever else happens I am nevertheless somehow
implicated in the event of these works, they orient me in a certain
way. In these works I am taken to meet the clandestine companions
that the works address – be it language itself, or a general ecology
where all is connected.
If the question of authority led us away from the author’s control
towards how the works themselves animate the elements involved,
then the question of implication is all about how the works animate
me, about how I am being taken into – or reimaged into – the im-
age of the world that they have created.41 The works implicate me
by making me face the things I cannot escape. They introduce a
speculative art: An art, which is not truly representative (of a situation), or prescriptive (of the one truth), nothing to understand or
interpret, but speculative of a certain potential.
There is a sense of emancipation in this “letting things run their
course”. What I here have called the viewers’, or audience’s, or beholders’ implication is not, in my view anything similar to the active
position that is sometimes ofered in so called interactive works of
art. Because the works I have talked about don’t really ofer active
positions. Instead they ask to commit without knowing. They ofer
positions of shared passivity – but of a passivity that is not opposed
to activity, but is something radical enough to be passive towards
the whole active/passive distinction.
ENVOI
These thoughts have been an attempt to touch on some issues of
artistic research, and to be touched by them. I have written about
how (and if) works of art might have agency of their own, and about
how they might implicate me. I have written about artworks. I have
tried to introduce, summarise and describe them even against all
the resistance that they – in their diferent ways – put up against
such eforts. I have tried to be hospitable to that resistance and also to those obscurities that invite no clariication. Then I have tried
to write alongside the works, manoeuvring in the spaces that they
create, and necessarily feeling at the same time detached, encountering a state of “apartment”.
41
40
Ibid.
I am reminded of the story Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, and how in
that story the fugitive is rephotographed into the world that is already an image
(‘photographes’ by Morel’s devilish machine).
209
210
HARRI LAAKSO
PRESSINGS
But this text itself is not without form and void. The words I
have written have animated me, and have implicated you in my
speculation, trapping you within this event.
I feel that I have encountered an insurmountable but necessary
distance, where language has adopted features of parables. And the
parable, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes “does not go from the image to
sense”, but from a igure or image to a seeing, that already pre-exists it – the parable only showing “to those who have already seen”
and thus having no illustrative, mimetic or pedagogical function.42
This text has not been about trying to ind truths or methods
for artistic research but rather to investigate the possibility to partake in an “equal and empty” (and impossible?) position, where no
one has privilege (artists and researches included, especially them,
us). To me such a position could be a fecund one: senses, relections
and stagings would produce friction against truths, representations and tropes. (It is evident that this leaves little room for arts’
introspective aims.)
All the images, igures, literary references, lightning lashes, exposed skies and gravities are here piled as if in a compost, as remnants from some unknown system. Writing happens between imaginary layers of thinking and matter.
Maybe this even has to do with a more general feeling about
the world we inhabit and where invisible and distant things have
become forcefully present. Not only the alive and non-living things
around and within us, but our whole imaginary culture, which also
remains a culture of touch in various ways, of being in touch; where
traveling and being away have created new needs for overcoming
distance (with technology for example), our technologies of yearn-
ing. All this “touching” has become more and more imaginary – in
all its metaphorical dimensions, in all the areas where images no
longer are anything to be seen, anything visual. Maybe our world
is becoming a huge touch screen, where the virtual is no longer anything remote, where distance is something we can touch.
But here I have limited my approach to considering if such
thoughts could be more present when we, in the name of artistic
research, approach and puncture the domain of artworks, or admire their space, or eclipse their suns. This here, nothing more, has
been my pressing concern.
42
Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere. On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clif,
Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas, New York, Fordham University Press, 2008,
6–9.
211
Dimensions of Touch1
S A M I S A N TA N E N
Der Mensch ist ein Wesen der Ferne!
The human being is a creature of distance!
Martin Heidegger
Who would not have a feeling for touch? Nonetheless, there are aspects to touch that can be perplexing. We only need to awake to
the familiar prohibition Do not touch me! and suddenly we have to
think things through anew. For at the same time as it forbids touching, the prohibition in fact hits us and moves us, that is, touches
us. Otherwise it would hardly have any efect. It could be thought,
as Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, that the prohibition does this by hitting a sore point in touch: the demand of tact, which is a matter of
maintaining distance in the contact, as against the temptation of
1
A Finnish version of the present essay, “Kosketuksen ulottuvuuksia” (Dimensions
of Touch), was published in 2014 in Mika Elo (ed.), Kosketuksen iguureja, Helsinki:
Tutkijaliitto 2014. I have slightly modiied and revised the text.
214
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
immediacy or fusion.2 Moreover, this sensitive point of touch, difference in the very core of contact, may keep on troubling us. As
we can see from the prohibition, the demand of tact comes from
the other, and is not necessarily agreeable. As such, it gives us a
feel of the heterogeneity of touch. This paradoxical aspect of touch,
which remains obscure if contact is seen solely from the point of
view of one’s own intentions, merits attention. Touch is an extensible and tensional concept. In the following, I shall try to trace out
its protean heterogeneity.
The prohibition of touch prompts us to consider whether the
metaphorical use of the word “touch” can, in fact, be so clearly differentiated from its literal, or so called primary meaning. It is often
thought that touch proper is the immediate, physical touch, whereas
in mental, social or spiritual contexts touch can be spoken of chiely
in the metaphorical sense. Mark Paterson, for one, diferentiates the
literal and more obvious touch represented by immediate cutaneous
contact from the more afective and metaphorical forms of “deep”
touch.3 But how could tact or discretion remain merely metaphorical?4 Is not the prohibition of touch supposed to touch, precisely?
And what about the touch of a work of art that unexpectedly moves
us?5 In these cases touch is something concrete and real, though not
in the conventional sense of tangible or physical. The “deep” touch
that interests Paterson does not have to be reduced to a metaphor,
to the opposite of “literal” touch: when it comes to touch, the literal
and metaphorical usages may become intertwined.6 As I see it, this
has to do with the abovementioned heterogeneity.
The matter is no mere detail. To say that the present text will be
touching upon touch may suggest that the word touch is used rhetorically, as a substitute for “treating” or “examining”.7 However, here
we should note Bernhard Waldenfels’s remark: a Berührungspunkt,
a point of contact with something, is not equivalent to a Standpunkt,
a standpoint, or a Gesichtspunkt, a viewpoint.8 Of course, matters
such as this are often put aside; considering touch, however, the
remark is quite in order. For it could be thought that a point of contact – as distinct from a standpoint, which serves the analysis by
providing it with a perspective – amounts to the possibility of exposition, indeed exposure to the foreign, the heterogenic (other).
This means that touch is, to borrow Waldenfels’s expression, overde5
6
2
3
4
Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere. Essai sur la levée du corps, Paris: Bayard 2003,
25–26 / Noli me tangere. On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, PascaleAnne Brault, and Michael Naas, New York: Fordham University Press 2008,
13. Below, the irst page numbers refer to the original, the latter to the English
translation.
Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch. Haptics, Afects and Technologies, Oxford and
New York: Berg 2007, 6–7.
See Bernhard Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp 2002, 92.
7
8
Here we could also consider a sudden idea that inflames or troubles one.
According to Waldenfels, the German word Einfall nicely sheds light on a remark
of Nietzsche’s on how ideas come when they ind it convenient, not when I want
them to (see Eliane Escoubas & Bernhard Waldenfels (eds.), Phénoménologie
française et phénoménologie allemande, Paris: L’Harmattan 2000, 206). Besides a
sudden idea or fancy, the word Einfall also means thought.
See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe & Jean-LucNancy, “Scène”, Nouvelle Revue
de Psychanalyse, Vol. XLVI (1992), 85–86. See also Jacques Derrida, Le toucher,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée 2000, 303 / On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans.
Christine Irizarry, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2005, 268. Derrida refers
to Aristotle, according to whom it is diicult to say, “if touch is not one sense but
more than one” (Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. Joe Sachs, Santa Fe: Green Lion
Press 2001, 422b). He points this out while examining Nancy’s language, the tactile character of which covers various registers.
“Touching upon” can of course be understood as a cursory or tentative approach
that does not lead to a deeper analysis. This is not what I mean here.
Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 17, n. 3.
215
216
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
termined.9 The risks inherent to this kind of contact have been admirably summarized by Jean-Louis Chrétien. According to him, there
is no touch without letting oneself be touched by what one touches,
in other words without experiencing one’s own tangibility in touching.10 Viewed in this light, touch seems to denote susceptibility to
contact, that is, consent, even an inclination to feel the other and
be felt by the other.11 Indeed, the sense of touch has been called the
sense of consent12 (to contact), as reciprocity of this kind is peculiar
to it.13 Be that as it may, Chrétien draws attention to the dissymmetry of the contact in question: by no means does the touched have
to respond in the same way as it is touched. Let us consider, say, a
tainting touch. Understandably such a possibility makes one cautious, as if one had become sensitive to touch, that is, sensitive to
the possibility of contact or of being within the reach of something –
and in this way touched by one’s own tangibility. Is it not the case
that sometimes the mere thought of contact is enough to touch us?
Let us just consider the opening words of Elias Canetti’s Crowds
and Power: “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch
of the unknown.”14 We notice that heterogeneity brings with it an
ambivalence that can afect the way one conducts oneself in a particular situation.
Thus, it turns out that touch cuts both ways. This being the case,
closer diferentiations come in handy. We ind support in Aristotle,
to whom touch is a faculty of discrimination that also has a protective function. “[T]ouch is of the tangible and the intangible.”15
Paradoxically, touch protects from the noxious, or the intangible,
the better the more sensitive it becomes by way of exposition.16
Jacques Derrida has impressively shown how the paradoxical
logic of touch infects the thinking of touch itself, including even
its language.17 From Aristotle on, attempts to examine touch have
run into aporias. The history of the thinking of touch is burdened
by various fundamental obscurities, the inscriptions of which can
be found already in On the Soul.18 Faced with these obscurities one
has no choice but to resort to groping about, as Derrida puts it.
He stresses nonetheless that even in these obscure borderlands,
thinking should – in touching upon or investigating its theme, the
sense of touch (le sens du toucher) – be as pertinent as possible.19 The
thinking of touch cannot be wholly diferentiated from the manner
it touches upon its topic, as it must proceed without all-round solu-
9
10
11
12
13
See ibid., 64, also 92.
Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse, Paris: Minuit 1992, 103–104 / The Call
and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport, New York: Fordham University
Press 2004, 85–86. See also Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 312 / 276; JeanLuc Nancy, Les Muses, Paris Galilée 1994, 35 / The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf,
Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996, 17; and Renaud Barbaras, De l’être du
phénomène, Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon 2001, 283.
I am referring to Jean-Luc Nancy (see La Déclosion, Paris: Galilée 2005, 187 /
Dis-Enclosure. The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel
Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press 2008,
127).
Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 276 / 246. Here Derrida summarizes
Chrétien’s thoughts (see Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse, 145 / 123), but adds, citing Nancy, that consent may also be exasperated (Derrida, ibid., 314–315 / 278;
see Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, Paris: Éditions Métailié 2000, 36 / Corpus, trans.
Richard A. Rand, New York: Fordham University Press 2008, 39).
See Eugène Minkowski, Vers une cosmologie, Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages 1999,
179–185. It has been suggested that such reciprocity does not necessarily apply
to the other senses, such as sight or hearing (Rémi Brague, Aristote et la question
du monde, Paris: Cerf 2009, 370; Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse, 103 / 85). Derrida
mentions Husserl in this context (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 312 / 276).
14
15
16
17
18
19
Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch 1980, 9
/ Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, New York: The Noonday Press 1991, 15.
Aristotle, On the Soul, 424a. According to Aristotle, touch is a necessary and fundamental sense to any living being (see 435b).
Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse, 117–118, 121–122 / 97–98, 101–102.
See Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy.
See e.g. Aristotle, On the Soul, Book II, the beginning of Chapter Eleven.
See Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 157–158, 303-304 / 135–136, 268-269.
Metalanguage, however, is of no avail here (see ibid., 339 / 303).
217
218
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
tions and by weighing things case by case. The demand to touch pertinently upon the theme is connected to the overdetermined character of the point of contact. This kind of thinking implies exposure.20
Derrida’s idea is, in my view, that understanding the nature of touch
requires a feel of what is being touched upon (i.e., treated). That is
to say, questioning the sense of touch paradoxically requires that
we let ourselves be touched by it at the very moment – if not in advance – we touch it, or ask about its meaning. In other words, there
has to be touch – one has to touch and be touched. Otherwise the
inquiry would lack weight and remain in the grip of discourse, detached and hardly efective.21
I have hinted at the heterogenic, foreign moment touch entails
as exposition. This moment permits discerning in touch a pathic
dimension which usually, or at least in the ield of knowledge, remains of secondary importance. Derived from the Greek pathos,
the pathic is a matter of contact in the sense of “being-afected-by
(something or someone)”, Getrofensein-durch, as Waldenfels puts
it.22 Contact is here structurally asymmetrical, as it has its origin
in the other, that is, the foreign – or the alien, to use the word pre-
ferred by Waldenfels – preceding my sphere: I have been struck by
something that afects, troubles or disturbs, moves, wounds, hurts
or even overwhelms me. According to Henri Maldiney, this is precisely what the pathic is about: to experience, to undergo.23 The
pathic signiies exposure to something unpredictable, which exceeds or falls short of its possibilities, insofar as possibilities belong structurally to the sphere of the predictable. Waldenfels terms
such a singular event Widerfahrnis. The German word can be translated as af-fect with a hyphen to suggest that something is done to
us (uns an-getan wird) – something we do not ourselves initiate.
Widerfahrnis, af-fect, thus denotes an event that afects the subject counter to its own expectations, intentions, and experiential
possibilities.24 Indeed, in Waldenfels’s view experience should be
conceived of on the basis of such af-fects of alien origin, or “ruptures in experience”. Regarding the present topic, it is signiicant
that for him touch constitutes the prototype of pathic experience.25
Below I shall take a closer look at the structure of this experience,
so as to avoid the identiication of the pathic with simple passivity
as opposed to activity or intentionality.
Waldenfels compares the pathic experience to what Roland
Barthes calls punctum, or the prick (of a photograph). Punctum
20
21
22
See ibid., 312 / 276.
Derrida himself states that touch has to be touched upon in a manner that is at
once moving and moved (see Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 312 / 276). Heidegger
says something similar concerning philosophy itself. According to him, questions
such as “what is it that we call ‘philosophizing’?” require that the questioner him/
herself be touched (berührt) or gripped (ergrifen) by such questions. Otherwise
the questioning remains theoretical and detached (see Martin Heidegger, Die
Grundbegrife der Metaphysik, Gesamtausgabe Band 29/30, Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann 2004, 85–87 / The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,
trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press 1995, 56–57).
Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 21. See also Erwin Straus, Vom Sinn der
Sinne, Berlin/Göttingen/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag 1956, 394 / The Primary
World of Senses. A Vindication of Sensory Experience, trans. Jacob Needleman,
London: The Free Press of Glencoe 1963, 370.
23
24
25
Henri Maldiney, Penser l’homme et la folie, Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon 2007,
386. Here and below, I refer to the pagination of the irst edition (1991).
Bernhard Waldenfels, Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp 2012, 73 / Phenomenology of the Alien. Basic Concepts, trans.
Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler. Evanston: Northwestern University Press
2011, 46; see also Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 60–63. The hyphenated form af-fect
is intended to stress the fact that what is at stake here is something diferent
from afects degraded to private states of feeling (Bernhard Waldenfels, The
Question of the Other, The Tang Chun-I Lecture for 2004, Albany: State University
of New York Press 2007, 45). The usual translation for the verb widerfahren is “to
befall”, “to happen” (to something or someone).
Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 93.
219
220
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
designates a strange element in the photograph, one that disturbs
studium, or taste for photography and a detailed reading guided
by cultural interest and liking.26 The pathic character of punctum
is revealed when it breaks or punctuates the studium organized by
the spectator’s sovereign consciousness and search for meaning:
“This time it is not I who seek it out [as happens in studium – S. S.],
it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an
arrow, and pierces me.”27 The question then arises, if the punctum
thus bears upon me in the sense that piercing me, it also takes possession of me. And perhaps we could say more generally, following
Edith Wyschogrod, that when something touches me, it singles me
out in this singular fashion.28 In any case, the prick that troubles
Barthes is a surplus within the ield of the photograph constituted
discursively by the studium.29 It thus ofers an example of the excess
of the pathic in relation to the quest for meaning – the existence of
such a pathic surplus being one of Waldenfels’s basic points as well.30
In addition to the words ‘feel’ and ‘feeling’, we may listen for
the pathic aspects of touch in ‘sensibility’, ‘sentience’, ‘sentiment’,
and ‘sensitivity’. Then we have, of course, the word family of ‘afect’
and ‘afectivity’.31 The vocabulary evoking pathic aspects extends
further to being ‘moved’, even to being ‘inluenced by contagion’.
Moreover, having the sense of to ‘bear upon’ or to ‘concern’ (cf. the
German angehen), the verb to ‘touch’ constitutes another variety of
pathic vocabulary, in which we can discern a tinge of responsibility.
We could easily ind other examples, but focusing for the moment
on sensibility, we note that it can be invested with the pathic to such
an extent that it becomes receptivity to what hardly makes itself
sensed at all.32 Here sensibility borders on insensibility. Finally, I
would like to point out that there is a special term for pathic sensibility, passibility, which, together with its derivatives, plays a central
role not only in Nancy’s but also in Maldiney’s work.33
Let us note, however, that sensitivity may also turn into a (pathological) hypersensitivity. We can ind an example in Freud: when
he discusses, in the “Rat Man” case history, the patient’s complexive sensitiveness, he points out how mere speeches the patient
had heard had, with serious consequences, “jarred upon”, unsanft
berühren,34 “certain hyperaesthetic spots in his unconscious”.35
32
33
26
27
28
29
30
31
See Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 110.
Roland Barthes, La chambre Claire, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil 1980, 48–49 / Camera
Lucida. Relections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard. London: Fontana
Paperbacks 1984, 26.
Edith Wyschogrod crystallizes the idea as follows: “To be touched is to be singled out.” See “Doing before Hearing”, in François Laruelle (ed.), Textes pour
Emmanuel Lévinas, Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place 1980, 199.
See Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press 2001, 74.
Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 54–55.
See Rudolf Bernet, “The Other in Myself”, in Simon Critchley and Peter Dews
(eds.), Deconstructive Subjectivities, Albany: State University of New York Press
1996, 180–181. According to Bernet, afectivity, as a capability to touch, implies an
experience in which something befalls the subject that is beyond its control.
34
35
See Jean-Luc Nancy, La naissance des seins, Valence: École Régionale des BeauxArts 1996, 57 / “The Birth of Breasts”, Corpus II. Writings on Sexuality, trans.
Anne O’Byrne, New York: Fordham University Press 2013, 59.
See e.g. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Sens du monde, Paris: Galilée 1993, 196 / The Sense
of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press 1997, 128–129; Maldiney, Penser l’homme et la folie, 361–425.
Maldiney develops a notion of transpassibility, that is, openness towards that
which is nothing, rien. Let it be noted that the pathic dimension stands out in
both authors’ work. Maldiney speaks explicitly of the pathic, whereas Nancy prefers words such as afectability and exposition.
The German word berühren means “to touch”.
Sigmund Freud, “Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose”, Gesammelte
Werke VII, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch 1999, 430 / “Notes upon a
Case of Obsessional Neurosis”, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 10 (1909), translated from the German under the
general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted
by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-analysis 1981, 210 (my emphasis).
221
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Another example can be found in Nietzsche. With a cultural diagnostic in view, The Anti-Christ presents the idea of a particular
“physiological habitus” deined by a pathological over-sensitiveness
of the sense of touch. In this condition, the sense of touch “recoils
from all contact”. In its most extreme form, this habitus amounts
to an “instinct of hatred for reality”, which, in Nietzsche’s view, constitutes the “physiological reality” of Christianity. The instinct of
hatred is manifested by an aversion to everything solid, everything
articulated, to every institution, and by a light from the sphere of
the concepts of space and time towards an internal, “true” world
found in the Christian religion of love, in the bliss of the heart.36
One could of course note that Christianity is a religion of touch,
precisely, as Derrida has emphasized.37 But the Christianization
of touch takes place through the Christian virtue of love, which is
exactly what Nietzsche is commenting on.38 Finite touch is transcended in the spiritual contact with the ininite.39 Touch attains
its truth in a divine and ininite touch, in the Word, which needs
no mediation to touch the soul. Chrétien refers to a mystic who,
through his ecstatic body, shows what it is to be touched by “the
merciful hand of the Father”.40 The whole body radiates in ecstasy,
opening up to the excess of the Word that ininitely transcends it.
In other words, the senses ind their sense (le sens des sens) in the
manifestation of a spirit that exceeds them.41 The presence of the
divine is authentic immediacy and plenitude. It should be kept in
mind that the pathic is not about such limitlessness – it is not “of
the order of the ininite”, to borrow Derrida’s crystallization of this
kind of spiritual contact.42
One who has signiicantly contributed to the idea of the pathicity of touch is Erwin Straus. He has introduced a phenomenology of
aisthēsis43, in which the atomistic terms of the empiricist tradition of
sense psychology, such as ‘sense perception’, ‘sense stimulus’, and
‘sense data’, are superseded by the verb-like ‘sensing’ (Empinden).
On this basis, sensing is not only given the character of an event
but also provided with a communicative dimension. Straus distinguishes between a “gnostic” and a “pathic” moment in sensing, the
36
37
Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, Kritische Studienausgabe Band 6. München:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag / Walter de Gruyter Verlag 1999, 200–201 /
“The Anti-Christ”, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other
Writings, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005,
27. Conceived of in Freud’s terms, the instinct of hatred would seem like reaction
formation triggered by the pathic dimension of touch. (Derrida might speak of
autoimmunity, see Foi et savoir, Paris: Seuil 2001.) For “the instinct of hatred for
reality” is, in Nietzsche’s words, “the consequence of an extreme over-sensitivity
and capacity for sufering that does not want to be ‘touched’ at all because it feels
every contact too acutely.” This causes an “instinctive exclusion of […] all hostility,
all boundaries and distances in feelings”, that is, it results in a life of love, which
constitutes the sole reality of Christianity.
Derrida’s reading of the Bible (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 117–120 / 100–103)
shows how Jesus both touches and is physically touchable. One can touch Jesus
to be healed, to be saved or to attain immunity, thanks to the power emanating
from him. But salvation depends on faith, of which the (physical) touching testiies. To this it could be added, as Calabrò remarks, that Jesus risen from the
dead is corporeally untouchable, even though he is tangible. Mary Magdalene experiences this during the Easter morning scene known for Jesus’s words of prohibition, Noli me tangere, Touch me not. Then again, with the Words of Institution,
“this is my body”, bread and wine – the body of Christ – are presented to be eaten and drunk, that is, ofered to the human touch. Here Calabrò leans on Nancy’s
analyses (Daniela Calabrò, Dis-piegamenti, Milano: Mimesis Edizioni 2006, 67; see
also Nancy, Noli me tangere, and Corpus, 7–9 / 3–7).
38
39
40
41
42
43
In this context, Chrétien refers to Saint Bonaventure, who establishes a correspondence between the (theologal) virtue of love and spiritual touch (L’appel et la
réponse, 152 / 129).
See Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse, 151–154 / 128–131, and Derrida’s comments (Le
toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 277–293, esp. 285 / 247–262, esp. 254).
The mystic in question is Saint John of the Cross.
Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse, 101 / 83.
This is how Derrida describes the immediate and metaphysical plenitude of the
spiritual touch (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 284 / 253).
Maldiney, Regard, parole, espace, Œuvres philosophiques, Paris: Cerf 2012, 188.
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DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
respective weight of which varies depending on sense modality.44
The gnostic, or cognitive, moment of sensing refers to the properties of what is given in sense perception (the object), to what it is, in
other words, to what is representable. The pathic moment, on the
other hand, is a matter of sensibility to the phenomenon, of its unpredictable way of being given.45 The former moment emphasizes the
sensed in sensing: representational object orientation then gains in
importance with the consequence that, say, seeing and the seer may
be overshadowed by the seen. But too bright a light hurts the eyes
and, in this disagreeable way, helps the pathic moment make itself
known again. Naturally, such rigid alternatives do not do justice to
the manifold aspects of the pathic. According to Maldiney, what is
called sensibility (sensibilité) to colours, shapes, or sounds is constituted by the pathic moment through and through; and this holds
true for the order of phenomena, to phenomenality, on a more general phenomenological level as well.46 Waldenfels, however, warns
against separating the gnostic and pathic moments from each other
altogether. Indeed, the moments are interwoven, and particularly
so in touch, which thus constitutes their juncture.47
Straus’s doctrine of the senses has the merit of showing that the
pathic constitutes a particular mode of communication. Sensibility
to colours, sounds, and shapes stressed by Maldiney amounts to
precisely this kind of pathic communication with phenomena in
sensing. Thus, we ind in Straus a pathic version of the sense of
the senses, as Maldiney puts it: openness to the world at the level
of aisthēsis.48 In sensing, the one who senses experiences “himself
and the world, himself in the world, himself with the world”.49 Thus
what is at stake in sensing is a process of mutual becoming and intertwining of the self and the world.
After these introductory remarks, I shall address some nodal
points in the philosophical literature on touch. Thus, I will try to outline in more detail the pathic dimension of touch in its diferent registers. The sections do not constitute a seamless whole, but rather
overlap in the resulting composition. This is because diferent contexts allow us to see diferent aspects of touch: the terminology, for
instance, is context-bound. Some light cross swell and swirls may be
expected, but I hope that overall a passage will emerge, even if not a
straightforward one. I want to emphasize that the following survey
is not intended to be all-encompassing, as I mostly rely on certain
resources found within the ields of phenomenology and deconstruction. The psychoanalytic tradition, for instance, would surely have
something to say about touch, about the desire and fear of touch,
48
44
45
46
47
Erwin Straus, Psychologie der menschlichen Welt, Berlin/Göttingen/Heidelberg:
Springer Verlag 1960, 150–151; see also Vom Sinn der Sinne, 391–403 / 368–379.
The sensibility in question is not a matter of sensory information.
See Henri Maldiney, Regard parole espace, 189–190.
Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 65. Waldenfels also draws attention to a
practical moment in addition to the gnostic and pathic ones; in its own particular
way, the sense of touch unites all of these aspects in itself (Bernhard Waldenfels,
Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2010, 21).
49
Henri Maldiney, “Chair et verbe dans la philosophie de M.P.”, in Anna-Teresa
Tymieniecka (ed.) Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Le psychique et le corporel, Paris: Aubier
1988, 64 / “Flesh and Verb in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty”, in Fred Evans
and Leonard Lawlor (eds.) Chiasms. Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, Albany:
State University of New York Press 2000, 59; see also Regard, parole, espace, 190.
Maldiney emphasizes the diference between Straus’s pathic (i.e., aesthetic) communication and Hegel’s notion of art, in which communication is, according to
him, based on representation, and art understood as representation (see Regard,
parole, espace, 175–200, and 323–399).
Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne, 372 / 351.
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and about the pathic dimension as well, at least in relation to imitation, object-cathexis, prohibition, association, and transference.50
easy to reach an understanding about the latter.52 The reduction
appears all the more crude if we consider caressing touch, for instance, in which there is an intimate, singular dimension to the
hand.53 Be that as it may, touch plays an important role in Kant’s
doctrine of the senses. According to him, touch is the only immediate sense of external perception, and therefore it is also our most
reliable guide. Such palpating sense of touch exempliies exploratory touch, in the epistemic sense of the word, which Derrida calls
“theoretical” – “touching in order to know” – and which has, according to him, held a privileged position in the philosophy of touch.54
However, Kant qualiies his notion of touch in an important way
with respect to the present discussion. He states that even though
the tactile sense of the human hand is cognitively relevant, it nonetheless lags far behind the sense of sight in this regard. The reason
for this is not only the fact that touch is conined to the status of a
proximal sense, but, and above all, the purity characteristic of vision. According to Kant, sight is the noblest of the senses, because
in its case the sense organ feels the least afected by sense impressions.55 The advantage of sight is the translucency of its sense organ.
(Subjective) sentiments have little chance of muddling its objective
purpose, “mere seeing”, which at its purest is a matter of a direct
I
I shall begin with the hand, for it ofers a possibility to outline
the shift of emphasis from the gnostic to the pathic moment of
touch. “The hand” has, of course, had such a tight hold on the thinking of touch throughout history, that it has even been termed the
synecdoche of touch.51 Here “the hand” shall, however, igure only
to the extent it helps pursue the abovementioned shift of emphasis. Let us take as a starting point Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the
sense of touch in his Anthropology, as it exempliies, in its pragmatic orientation, the cognitive approach to touch.
Kant is interested in the unparalleled ability of the ingertips of the human hand to give an idea of the shape (Gestalt) of a
solid body by touching all the sides of its surface. Kant’s interest
in shape, i.e. form, is explained by his basic philosophical idea that
the form-giving (in intuition) levers the object within the reach of
objective knowledge and recognition. Touch is then reduced to
an “outer” sense of touch, but it also remains rather coarse, insofar as the feeling of anything else besides the shape of the
object – the softness, smoothness, warmth, or other material qualities of the surface, not to mention pleasure or subjective
sentiments – is irrelevant. Unlike in the case of shape, it is not so
50
51
See e.g. Sigmund Freud, “Hemmung, Symptom, Angst”, Gesammelte Werke XIV.
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch 1999, esp. 152 / “Inhibitions, Symptoms
and Anxiety”, The Standard Edition, Volume 20 (1925–1926), 121–122; Totem und
Tabu, Gesammelte Werke IX, 35–46, 105 / Totem and Taboo, The Standard Edition,
Volume 13 (1913–1914), 26–35, 85.
Paterson, The Senses of Touch, 6. On the privileged position of the hand in the
thinking of touch, see Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Derrida mentions
Aristotle and Nancy as exceptions to this general orientation.
52
53
54
55
Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, Werkausgabe, ed.
Wilhelm Weischedel, Band XII, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1987, B 47–48 /
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor, The Hague:
Martinus Nijhof 1974, 33–34. We note that here Kant reserves the possibility of
being communicated for the strictly objective (or, in Straus’s terms, gnostic) moment of sensation. However, in the Critique of Judgment Kant develops the communicative dimension of feeling (the feeling of the beautiful / the sublime), or the
pathic moment.
See Luce Irigaray, Éthique de la diférence sexuelle, Paris: Minuit 1984, 180 / An
Ethics of Sexual Diference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, London: The
Athlone Press 1993, 193.
Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 91 / 76.
Kant, Anthropologie, B 50 / 35.
227
228
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
or immediate representation of the given object seen. It is not diicult to igure out that the reduction of touch to its cognitive aspect
inds its noble paragon in pure seeing – or, to put it more exactly,
and more transcendentally, in pure intuition, reine Anschauung.56
It is worth mentioning that the notion – fundamentally reducible
to ideal terms – of a pure (and immediate) intuition has been especially inluential in the philosophy of consciousness represented
by Kant. Within this tradition, its inluence on both the analysis of
seeing and the interpretation of knowledge has been prominent.
Kant’s analysis of touch with its reservations gives a good picture of the traditional organization or determination of sensuousness in the order of knowledge. According to Martin Heidegger, seeing as described above has served as its model.57 As an alternative,
Emmanuel Levinas suggests an interpretation of the sensuous in
terms of touch: one would “see and hear as one touches”.58 Luce
Irigaray thinks along the same lines, noting that the tangible is primary and remains the ground available for all the other senses.59
How to think about touch, then? Can it be – perhaps in the twilight
zones of sight60 – not appropriating,61 something other than the explorative feeling about, or palpating, in the sense described above,
which, according to Levinas, its in with identifying and thematizing discourse?62
We can approach the question by extending our discussion on
the hand with Kant’s help. With the hand, we come upon handedness and, together with it, some critical aspects related to space.
These aspects are relevant to touch; Claude Romano, for one, considers touch a sense of space.63 However, it is important to note
that the pathic requires, among other things, a reconsideration of
58
56
57
Here the word “intuition” must be understood according to its Latin root: intueri,
to look at (attentively). The German word Anschauung, with which Kant translates the Latin intuitus, is also related to looking (schauen). “Pure intuition” belongs to the Kantian terminology of the transcendental aesthetic, and refers to
the ideal, a priori form of sense perception.
Kant uses the term Anschauung in the empirical context as well, and with regard
to all the senses. This is signiicant regarding the present discussion. (An outer)
sensation of touch, for example, is for Kant an empirische Anschauung, an empirical intuition.
The important thing to notice is that what is common to pure and empirical
Anschauung is the immediate presence of what is given in the Anschauung. It can
thus be connected to the “theoretical approach” of representational thought.
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1979, 171 / Being and Time,
trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany: State University of New York Press 1996, 160
(see also 363, n. 1 / 332, n. 22); Françoise Dastur, “Monde, chair, vision”, Chair
et langage, Le Versanne: Encre Marine 2001, 97 / “World, Flesh, Vision”, in
Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (eds.), Chiasms, trans. Theodore A. Toadvine
Jr. Albany: State University of New York Press 2000, 40. See also Emmanuel
Levinas, Totalité et Inini, Essai sur l’extériorité, The Hague/Boston/Lancaster:
Martinus Nijhof 1984, 162 / Totality and Ininity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans.
Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1995, 188.
59
60
61
62
63
Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, Dordrecht/Boston/
London: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1988, 94, n. 1 / Otherwise than Being or
Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press
2004, 75, n. 9. See also “Langage et proximité”, En découvrant l’existence avec
Husserl et Heidegger, Paris: Vrin 2006, 228 / “Language and Proximity”, Collected
Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhof 1987,
118. Here and below, I refer to the pagination of the second edition of En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (1967).
Irigaray, Éthique de la différence sexuelle, 152–153, 154 / 162, 164.
Here I want to bring up the Parisian piece of graiti that so inspired Derrida:
“When our eyes touch, is it day or is it night?” See Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc
Nancy, 11–13 / 1–3.
The hand that grasps serves as a model for appropriating touch. Samuel Weber
has drawn attention to the relation of the hand and the ingers. In its grasping
role, the hand relies on the ingers, which are thus left a performing function, subordinated to the intention “embodied” in the hand. Here the inger constitutes
an integral part of the hand. But the inger can also engage in a contact of another kind, in which it escapes the control of the grasping hand. (Samuel Weber,
Theatricality as Medium, New York: Fordham University Press 2004, 50.)
Levinas, “Langage et proximité”, 227–228 / 118.
Claude Romano, “L’unité de l’espace et la phénoménologie”, Les Cahiers
Philosophiques de Strasbourg 1/1994, 128.
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space, as I will try to show below by discussing the issue in diferent
contexts. The normal, representational notion of space favours the
cognitive moment of touch. We must, in contrast, make room for its
pathic dimension, and here a detour through handedness may be
helpful. At the same time, it directs the analysis of touch towards
a more ontological and bodily approach.
We can ind in Kant’s work a couple of passages where he scrutinizes handedness,64 and the diference between right and left manifested in it. Kant states, among other things, that handedness is
based on a feeling, ein Gefühl, of a “diference within my own subject”.65 According to him, the phenomenon can be called more generally incongruence, that is, “inner diference”.66 What is more, in
the early Kant we can ind the idea that this subjective feeling is
corporeal.67 Edward S. Casey picks up the idea to demonstrate that
handedness means orienting oneself on the basis of the bodily incongruence.68 Kant did not return to this bodily aspect in his lat-
er work, but thanks to Casey we can nonetheless see – and this is
relevant regarding what follows – how his idea of incongruence
hints at a spatiality that difers from the abstract, isotropic, homogeneous, and measurable space of the natural sciences. Of course,
Kant’s conception of space (and time) proper is to be found in the
transcendental aesthetic presented in the Critique of Pure Reason,
in which there is no mention of corporeality – Kant does speak of
handedness, though, but only in terms of representation that come
down to the philosophy of consciousness. In the transcendental aesthetic, space (as well as time) is subjectiied. Space is deined as an
a priori form of sense perception organizing the external world, as a
kind of framework that allows the phenomena of the sensible world
to be perceptible, representable, and in this way inally objectively
experienceable for the “I”-subject.69 In Kant’s work this transcendental organization is connected to Euclidean geometry, the space
of which is extensional, homogenous, and measurable.
What happens to incongruence in this order? In this three-dimensional space, the inner diference revealed by the “feeling” of
handedness is explicated as an outer, representational diference.
Even though the right and the left hand are mirror images of each
other, uniform in size and shape, they still cannot, according to Kant,
be reduced to each other. For as he says, “one hand’s glove cannot
be used on the other”.70 But what if one turns the glove inside out?
Or, if the gesture seems a trivial, there is another, more subversive
option. Let us think about poetry, and more speciically the famous
64
65
66
67
68
Handedness is usually understood to refer to a functional dissymmetry, to the
fact that one of the hands (the right one, for example) is stronger or more adroit
than the other. Here, however, I use the term handedness to refer to the diference between right and left.
Immanuel Kant, “Was heißt: sich im Denken orienteren”, Werkausgabe, ed.
Wilhelm Weischedel, Band V, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1997, A 307–
308 / “What is orientation in thinking?”, Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, 238.
Immanuel Kant, “Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden
im Raume”, Werkausgabe Band II, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp 1977, 998–999 / “Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the
Diferentiation of Directions in Space”, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans.
David Walford and Ralf Meerbote, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992,
370–371.
Ibid., 997 / 369. Kant speaks of a distinct sensation of diference, of how the right
and the left side feel diferent, which shows that the two halves of the human body
are diferent enough, their considerable external similarity notwithstanding.
See Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History, Berkeley:
University of California Press 1998, 203–210.
69
70
This a priori form of sense perception amounts to the abovementioned pure intuition, reine Anschauung.
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, Werkausgabe
Band V, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1977, A 58
/ Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward
as Science with Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Gary
Hatield, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004, 38.
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irst lines of Anna Akhmatova’s “The Song of the Last Meeting”:
Then helplessly my breast grew cold, / But my steps were light. / I
pulled the glove for my left hand / Onto my right.71 In these lines, the
elegance of the glove does not take one single step towards the realistic order Kant is imposing on common sense. The representational diference mentioned above, together with its clear-cut order,
is now shaken by the encroachment performed by the (left hand’s)
glove. Perhaps this topsy-turvy glove gesture will lead us to approach handedness otherwise than within the strict framework of
the Euclidean notion of space. Indeed, it has been noted that representational diference, to which Kant reduces handedness, originates in fact in a more primary, pre-extensional space,72 or, as has
also been suggested, in an intensive and heterogeneous space.73 The
trivial-seeming idea of turning the glove inside out, which came
up above as a comment on Kant, now merits attention. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty picks up the idea and links it with far-reaching ontological considerations, in which touch plays a central role.
er.74 Merleau-Ponty focuses his attention on this reversibility, because
it can be developed into a more general principle of experience;75 in
this regard, the glove proves to be a weighty example.76 The fold, the
turning point at the tip of the inger, constitutes an axis the function
of which is to hold together the two sides that difer in character. The
sides are asymmetrical, with the result that their reversibility takes
a certain, chiasmatic form. It is worth noting that it is the concept
of chiasm, precisely, that prevents viewing inside and outside as detached or even separable. The sides turn about one another, but, due
to being diferent in nature, are not exchangeable with each other.77
On a more general note, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that in a chiasmatic relation the sides even encroach upon one another,78 an idea
that surely opens the conception of space towards something more
primary. The Euclidean notion of space has its reverse side.
The idea of reversibility entails a phenomenology of touch.
Merleau-Ponty links the reversing of the glove to Edmund Husserl’s
observation that a certain double sensation is characteristic of
II
What interests Merleau-Ponty in the gesture of turning the glove inside out is the fold between the right and the wrong side, which he
inds at the tip of the inger of the glove, at the turning point. The
inverted inger of the glove indicates that the right and wrong sides,
inside and outside, are reversible, although not reducible to each oth-
74
75
76
77
71
72
73
Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems, Volume I, trans. Judith Hemscheyer,
Somerville: Zephyr Press 1990.
Gérard Lebrun, Kant et la in de la métaphysique, Paris: Le Livre de Poche 2003,
141–142.
Gilles Deleuze, Diférence et repetition, Paris: PUF 1989, 298 / Diference and
Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: The Athlone Press 1994, 231.
78
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, Paris: Gallimard 1964, 317 /
The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press 1968, 263–264.
See Maldiney, “Chair et verbe dans la philosophie de M.P.”, 66 / 60.
See Antje Kapust, Berührung ohne Berührung, München: Wilhelm Fink 1999, 359.
Kapust, ibid., 95. As for the sides difering in character, it is noteworthy that
Merleau-Ponty connects reversibility with a notion of “total part” (see Maldiney,
“Chair et verbe dans la philosophie de M.P.”, 65–66 / 60). The incongruence between the right and the left side found in Kant functions as a stepping-stone for
Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts, but he radicalizes the idea, making the sides into total
parts (Le visible et l’invisible, 270 / 216–217).
In this context, Merleau-Ponty refers to Kant’s concept of “real opposition” (Le
visible et l’invisible, 314 / 261).
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touch.79 A double sensation occurs when, for instance, the hands
touch each other: each hand both touches and is touched at the
same time. In other words, both hands prove to be touching as well
as touched. Husserl describes the situation as follows. If I touch
my left hand with my right, my right hand receives sensations
(Empindungen) from the hand it touches, and along with them perceives, say, a soft, smooth hand of such and such a shape. These “representations” or qualities constituted on the basis of the sensations
the right hand receives when touching the left are objectiied as features of the left hand, the “external object”.80 The result is that the
left hand is tactually constituted as a physical thing determined by
particular properties. But at the same time, in the left hand there
arise sensings (Empindnisse) caused by the touch of the right hand,
and localized in it corresponding to this touch. Husserl’s point is that
these “sensings” render the hand bodily (leiblich), or a (lived) body
(Leib), as distinguished from the hand as a physical body (Körper),
with its abovementioned properties, to which the sensings do not
belong. Thanks to these sensings, my left, physical hand is animated
so that it becomes bodily and is able to sense my right hand.
But the same thing also happens with the right, touching hand.
The relation between the touching and the touched is not unidirectional,81 not even in the simpler situation in which what is touched
is, instead of the (left) hand, an inanimate object. Indeed, the
touch-sensation serves a double function.82 When above we scrutinized the sensation the right hand receives from the left one, it
was in view of the properties of the left hand, or the “external object”. “With a ‘diferent direction of attention’”, as Husserl puts it,
the same sensation (of, say, smoothness) is localized to be experienced in the interior of the right hand as a touch-efect of the left
hand and as a sensing (of smoothness).83 The hand touched becomes touching, and the touching hand, in its turn, touched; the
hands change roles. The relationship is reversed.84 And the other
way round again. Françoise Dastur pinpoints Merleau-Pontys’s notion of reversibility here.85 It pays of, then, to consider the relation
between the touching and the touched from the point of view of the
axis activity–passivity, as well.
We note that Husserl excludes the contact of adjacent objects
from his analysis of touch. An inanimate thing lacks sensing – it
lacks the bodily (leiblich) dimension. This dimension proved to be
crucial as Husserl distinguished sensings from the properties of
the physical hand. He calls sensings “efect-properties” pertaining
to the (lived) body (Leib), which provides them with an interesting
pathic tone. The (lived) body constituted by them lies at the centre
of Husserl’s notion of the body, because it is qualiied by a self-rela-
79
80
81
See Merleau-Ponty, ibid., 317 / 263–264. On the term “double sensation”, see
Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Husserliana Band IV, Haag: Martinus Nijhof 1952,
147–148 / Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, Second Book, Collected Works, Volume III, trans. Richard Rojcewicz
and André Schuwer, Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers
1989, 155. Below abbreviated as Ideen II.
Here the external object is proiled more richly than in Kant’s analysis of the “outer sense of touch”, which conined itself to the shape of the object.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes, Paris: Gallimard 1967, 210 / Signs, trans.
Richard C. McCleary, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1998, 166.
82
83
84
85
Dastur stresses this aspect in Husserl’s analysis; “Monde, chair, vision”, 95 / 39.
According to Husserl, when the hands touch each other, we have two sensations
(a double sensation), because each hand has a sensation, and both sensations can,
moreover, be experienced in two diferent ways (see Husserl, Ideen II, 146–147 /
153–155).
Ibid. It should be noted that the sensings in the right and left hands do not
coincide.
Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 210 / 166.
Dastur, “Monde, chair, vision”, 95, n. 4.
235
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SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
tion.86 What the sensings – their localizations – reveal is precisely
this self-relation. This diferentiates the body experientially from
other things, whether inanimate or animate (i.e., physical). The
body is singled out amongst them as own and lived, that is to say,
as an experiential basis, which cannot be examined detachedly.
Here the notion of the body and its status undergoes a transformation. The phenomenological body is not composed of a thing
and something extra, namely sensings: to the contrary, the bodily
dimension constitutes the condition of the customary “naturalistic”, objectifying way of understanding a thing, such as a material
body or a physical object. In fact, when considered from the point
of view of corporeality (Leiblichkeit), the double sensation is a matter of the body’s twofold tactual constitution. The body is, from the
very irst, tactually constituted both as a physical thing, or a material body (Körper), and as one’s own and lived body (Leib).87 Above,
it was the hand that constituted the “turning point”88 and border
zone between these aspects, but the idea of the double sensation
can be extended to cover other parts of the body as well.89 The twofold constitution can be termed the self-doubling or self-diferentiation of the body.90
Chrétien’s conception of the reciprocity characteristic of touch
was introduced above. Husserl now nuances it in an important way.
What interests him in touch is its self-relation. True, the idea of a
self-relation inherent in sensing can be found in Aristotle already,
for according to him a sense not only senses, but at the same time
senses itself sensing.91 Husserl emphasizes this moment of self-relation, and sees in it “a sort of ’relection’”, as he puts it.92 However,
he reserves the double sensation for touch only, as distinguished
from sight and hearing, for according to him the latter lack the bodily localization of sensings characteristic of the double sensation.93
Touch thus gains a privileged position among the senses, for it
86
87
88
See Bernhard Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
2000, 36.
Husserl, Ideen II, 145 / 153.
The term ‘turning point’ (Umschlagspunkt) (Ideen II, 160, 161 / 168, 169) implicates the idea of a change of direction (Bernhard Waldenfels, Ortsverschiebungen,
Zeitverschiebungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2009, 228). Cf. Husserl’s expression “with a ‘diferent direction of attention’”, above.
89
90
91
92
93
Husserl but mentions this in the present context (Ideen II, 147 / 155). His judging
it unnecessary to examine the matter in detail inversely reminds us of the hand’s
status as the synecdoche of touch. Derrida is puzzled by Husserl’s focusing on the
hand (and ingers). Where are, say, the lips, or the tongue pressing against the palate, lips, or other parts of the body, and what about feet, toes, eyelids, and so on?
He refers to Irigaray, who has, in many of her works, discussed the feminine touch
of the lips. (Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 188 and n. 1 / 163–164 and n. 5.)
In An Ethics of Sexual Diference, Irigaray interestingly discusses the touch of the
hands pressed together. According to her, such a touch constitutes a very particular gesture, because the hands touch one another without taking hold of each other, adjoined “palms together, ingers outstretched”. The gesture “evokes, doubles,
the touching of the lips silently applied upon one another”. (Irigaray, Éthique de la
diférence sexuelle, 151 / 161; see also Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light, London
and New York: Routledge 1998, 66.)
See Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst, 250–251.
Aristotle, On the Soul, 425b; see also On Sleep and Sleeplessness, The Works of
Aristotle, Volume III, trans. J. I. Beare and G. R. T. Ross, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
455a.
The expression “une espèce de ‘rélexion’” (translated here as “a sort of ‘relection’”) appears in the § 44 of the French edition of Cartesian Meditations, where it
refers to “my own body” that is “relexively related to itself”.
Husserl, Ideen II, 147–149 / 155–157; Dastur, “Monde, chair, vision”, 96 / 39.
237
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DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
is tactually, and tactually only, that the body can originally be
constituted.94
According to Derrida and Didier Franck, Husserl emphasizes
the self-relation of touch at the expense of its heterogeneous, exterior moment.95 The latter is of course involved, as expressions like
double sensation implicate, but only in an efaced form. According
to Derrida, Husserl focuses in the double sensation on the aspect
of auto-afection, that is, on the fact that when touching my own
hand, I feel both the touching and the touched hand immediately, “from the inside”.96 The result is that the sensings gain in importance. A sensing is not some state of the physical hand, or the
material thing, but, as Husserl says, the hand itself.97 Moreover, according to Husserl the sensings pertain to the soul, which might
seem strange, as above they were considered to belong to the (lived)
body.98 Here touch and its self-relation are, according to Derrida,
viewed in the light of “ego-phenomenological relection” – it is worth
noting, though, that this is not the same thing as the “sort of ‘relection’” mentioned above.99 In Derrida’s view Husserl’s emphasis on
auto-afection is due altogether to the “coincidence of the double
sensation”. He notes that in Husserl’s description the sensations
coincide, both on the part of the touching and on the part of the
touched. According to him, in Husserl touch becomes an experience of intuitive plenitude and direct immediacy.100
The coincidence of the double sensation in Husserl’s thought
is, however, a debated issue. In Waldenfels’s view, for instance,
the touching and the touched do not simply coincide in Husserl.
Coincidence is impossible, as the hands take turns, and attention is
always more focused on the speciic feel of one or the other.101 Here
I also want to bring up a more general – and regarding what follows, quite important – remark of Waldenfels’s on the diferentiation between the (lived) body (Leib) and the physical body (Körper).
According to him, the diferentiation does not conform to the division into the interior and the exterior, for paradoxically the exterior, or the alien (as he says), is to be found inside.102 Of course we
can still speak of a self-relation, only not as conined to the dimension of interiority.
Let us note, before returning to Merleau-Ponty, that Husserl
distinguishes between diferent spaces, following the distinction
between Leib and Körper. The localization of sensings implies a
space that in principle difers from the space of the thing’s material
or physical determinations. The latter is extensional space, whereas the former is termed by Husserl ‘spreading out’, ‘spreading into’ (Ausbreitung, Hinbreitung).103 We note that questions of space
come up along with the problem of touch as soon as the body enters the picture.
In his late philosophy, Merleau-Ponty developed Husserl’s analysis of touch in an ontological direction. In what follows, I will briely
outline his explications. Their principal stepping-stone is the abovementioned idea of “a sort of ‘relection’”. In Merleau-Ponty’s view,
Husserl, Ideen II, 150 / 158.
See Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 183–208 / 159–182; Didier Franck, Chair
et corps, Paris: Minuit 1981, 97.
96 Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 196 / 171. See also Franck, Chair et corps, 97.
97 Husserl, Ideen II, 150 / 157.
98 Ibid. Kapust then regards the hand as a “souled body-thing”, or a “souled interior”
(Berührung ohne Berührung, 318–319).
99 Derrida pays no attention to the “sort of ‘relection’” in this context, although he
does mention it while discussing Merleau-Ponty (see Le toucher, 213 / 186).
100 Derrida, ibid., 196–197 / 171–172.
94
95
Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst, 36. Cf. the varying point of view of observation
Husserl emphasizes: “with a ‘diferent direction of attention’” (Husserl, Ideen II,
146 / 154).
102 Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst, 265–266.
103 Husserl, Ideen II, 149 / 157.
101
239
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SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
it indicates a relection accomplished by the body. A case in point
is the twofold touch104 (of the hands), which he usually expresses
by the formula “to touch oneself touching (say, a table)”.105 But, in
contrast to Husserl, Merleau-Ponty extends the double sensation
to other spheres of sensing as well, and especially to that of vision.
He speaks of a relexivity of the sensible (world), and of an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible.106
The following remarks are limited to touch, however, for
Merleau-Ponty inds in it an aspect that reminds us of the exposure
described in the beginning of the present text but goes further still.
It is a question of the tangibility of the one touching. What interests
Merleau-Ponty is the fact that my hand, which I feel from within
as I palpate or explore an object, is also accessible from without: it
is tangible for my other hand, for example. The idea is that when
palpating, one is exposed, and bodily so. What is more, the (right)
hand actively touching is, in its tangibility, initiated into the tactile
world. This is revealed when my other (left) hand touches it. Then
the (right) hand takes its place among the things it touches, as one
of them, and “opens upon a tactile being of which it is a part”.107
According to Merleau-Ponty, through this experience, the “‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched, descends into
the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world
and as it were in the things.”108 We note that there is an ontological
dimension to touch here.109
Touch, together with its reversibility, is here articulated in terms
of activity and passivity. The intimate proximity of these moments
in an explorative touch should be kept in mind. Otherwise we could
hardly speak of the feel of a smooth and rough texture caused by
touching a stone, for instance.
Let us take up the description of the touching hand being
touched by the other hand one more time. Merleau-Ponty suggests
that the twofold touch – which he, once again, words “to touch oneself touching” – is never completely realized. My left hand is, to be
sure, on the verge of touching the right one touching things, but in
reality, these experiences do not coincide. The coincidence escapes
at the decisive moment, and is thus not quite realized.110 My left
hand gets “hold” of the right one as touched, not as touching. The
right hand is marked with a rupture between touching and being
touched.111 This is to say that the two “halves” of the twofold touch
cannot be superposed. The failure to coincide is needed, though,
for touching to open upon the world.
The “relection” accomplished by the body thus implicates a
spread or divergence (écart), that is, a hiatus between the touching and the touched parts of the body.112 Their reversibility proves
104 Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 210 / 166. Waldenfels stresses that the “sort of ‘relection’”
found in Husserl is bodily (leiblich), as distinguished from relection in the sense
of thought. Thus, the double sensation does not mean that the sensing and the
sensed be one, but that there is self-relation in sensuousness (Das leibliche Selbst,
36).
105 In French: se toucher touchant.
106 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit, Paris: Gallimard 1964, 33 / “Eye and
Mind”, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Philosophy and Painting, trans. and
ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, Evanston: Northwestern University
Press 1998, 129; Signes, 210 / 167.
107 See Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 176 / 133–134.
108
109
110
111
112
Ibid., 176 / 134.
See Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 210 / 166–167.
Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 194 / 147–148, see also 303 / 249.
Ibid., 194 / 148.
See ibid., 309 / 256.
241
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SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
troubled by this divergence.113 The touching and the touched cannot be coupled together in the body. But on the other hand, their
junction is not to be found in the mind or consciousness, either.
The link between the touching and the touched paradoxically lies
in the untouchable: their divergent reversibility indicates it as their
invisible axis, as it were. Touch is structurally inhabited by such
a negative element. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, the untouchable is
“[t]hat of the other which I will never touch” – but he adds right
away that “what I will never touch, [the other] does not touch either”.114 Maldiney emphasizes this, noting that the untouchable is
that of myself, too, which I will never touch.115 The negativity in question is lodged in the fold of reversibility. It seems that it is in the very
same place that the question of the ‘self’ raised by the relation of
touch is to be found.116 We irst came across this place in the form
of the turning point between the right and wrong sides of the inger of the glove. Dastur calls the negativity of the untouchable the
blind spot of reversibility: it is due to it that there is, in the opening
upon the world, something tangible to begin with – just as there is
consciousness thanks to the blind spot of consciousness.117 Owing
to this negativity, the body gains ontological signiicance, and is not
reducible to an empirical fact.118
113
114
115
Reading Levinas’s comments on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the twofold touch,
and the handshake as its extension, leaves the impression that Merleau-Ponty
conines himself to the “gnosis” of touch (see Hors sujet, Paris: Le Livre de Poche
2006, 138–139, 154–155 / Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith, London:
The Athlone Press 1993, 100–101, 113–114). Levinas’s interpretation has gained
attention. According to Diprose, the notion that the handshake in MerleauPonty is of the order of knowledge misses the diverging reversibility, the difference between the touching and the touched. According to her, the standpoint of intercorporeality, from which she approaches the handshake, means
that the hand can touch only because it is “accessible from without”, that is,
because it is already touched (by another body) (see Rosalyn Diprose, “The
Ethics and Politics of the Handshake”, in Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz
(eds.), Diicult Justice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006, 230–237). On
the pathicity of sensibility in Merleau-Ponty, see also Enrica Lisciani Petrini,
La passione del mondo, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane 2002, 80–94.
Let it be noted that for Levinas, the afectivity of the senses constitutes a concrete dimension of its own, and an enigma connected to the other’s approach, and,
among other things, caress.
See Le visible et l’invisible, 307–308 / 254. Here the untouchable must be understood structurally; it does not mean something tangible that I have not yet managed to touch, or that is de facto inaccessible to me.
The untouchable, then, does not close the contact but keeps it open; and simultaneously it maintains the possibility of ‘self’ (Maldiney, Penser l’homme et la folie,
189–190).
III
Next, we should take a closer look at Heidegger, for he regards the
senses ontologically secondary. The fact that the senses can “be
touched” (rühren) by anything at all has its origin in a more fundamental level of “being-in-the-world”, as Heidegger stresses in Being
and Time.119 Whenever touch igures in his work, rather than denoting the tactile sense, it is usually evokes the sense of “stirring”, “affecting”, or “moving” (cf. “rühren” in German).120 Let us also keep in
mind “touching” in the pathic sense of the German word angehen, “to
bear upon”, “to concern”. In what follows, I try to show that this
See Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, e.g. 308–309 / 254–256. According
to Maldiney, the ‘self’ then is a matter of the abovementioned divergence, not
of relectivity in the usual sense of the word. He underlines that, for MerleauPonty, “to touch oneself” means being open to oneself (Maldiney, Penser l’homme
et la folie, 190).
117 Dastur, “Monde, chair, vision”, 101 / 42–43; see Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 308–309 / 254–256.
118 Ibid.
119 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 137 / 129.
120 Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, La pensée dérobée, Paris:
Galilée 2001, 101 / “Originary Ethics”, A Finite Thinking, trans. Duncan Large,
Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003, 186.
116
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DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
variety of the pathic vocabulary of touch delineated above is worth
noting, at least when it comes to Heidegger.121
For Heidegger, being-in-the-world indicates an ontological
disclosedness, which is a matter of a relation to “beings”, and of
the way of existing of the being termed Dasein (i.e., each of us human beings), that is, existing with others.122 The matter can be approached from the point of view of the pathic, but only if it is understood ontologically.123 Our being-in-the-world is characterized
by what Heidegger calls Beindlichkeit, attunement. It is interesting, regarding the present topic, that the German term carries with
it an aspect of afectability124; according to Maldiney, for example,
Beindlichkeit reveals the pathic dimension of Dasein.125 Due to attunement (Beindlichkeit), we always ind ourselves, as Da-sein, irst
and foremost in a certain mood (Stimmung), that is, afected in
one way or another.126 Mood, then, has to be unconventionally understood as disclosedness that is existential in nature. If we compare attunement with Waldenfels’s characterization of the pathic,
we note that attunement (i.e. afectability) constitutes the condition of possibility for Dasein’s being stirred by something given, or,
in Heidegger’s terms, by an “innerworldly” being. It is solely on
the condition of attunement that the senses can manifest sensitivity. Sensing (Empinden) – understood, following Straus, as pathic
openness to the world – is now replaced by Dasein’s attunement.127
Paradoxically, attunement, taken existentially, denotes a disclosive
submission to the world.
A kind of a light version of such dependence on the world is familiar to us from everyday life. Under everyday pressures, Dasein
surrenders itself to the “world”, to its activities, and it also lets itself be concerned (angehen) by the world. This occurs, however, in
such a way that in its experiences and attitudes, Dasein manages
to conveniently evade the uncanny undertone of its being-in-theworld.128 What is at stake here is the possibility of its inding itself
as Da-sein, that is, devoid of any imaginable support – inding itself
originally abandoned, resting on nothing but itself, “thrown” into its
naked being, Da, which is nothing.129 Heidegger calls this concrete
121
When, for instance, Heidegger in his later phase speaks of an experience with
language, he approaches it in the pathic terms of angehen: “To undergo an experience with language […] means to let ourselves be properly concerned [angehen]
by the claim of language by entering into and submitting to it.” He then pursues
the thought with words from which it can be explicitly seen that this experience
is a question of touch: “[A]n experience we undergo with language will touch [anrühren] the innermost nexus of our existence.” (Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur
Sprache, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 2007, 159 / On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D.
Hertz, New York: Harper & Row 1982, 57.)
122 Heidegger’s ontology is not an ontology of entities, but a questioning of being
(Sein) (or, the being of beings, Sein des Seienden). This way of thinking entails a
terminology of its own. For instance, Heidegger does not scrutinize the human
being, but Dasein, that is, a particular being (the human being) in its being (existing), or its modes of conduct and ways of action.
123 One thing Heidegger relies on is Aristotle’s examination of the pathē (emotions),
or, as he says, afects.
124 See Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger. Thought and Historicity, Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press 1993, 36; see also Bernard Baas, Le désir pur, Louvain:
Éditions Peeters 1992, 94–95.
125 Maldiney, Penser l’homme et la folie, 386–387.
The German Beindlichkeit is derived from the verb sich beinden, the meaning of
which is equivocal. Literally it signiies “to ind oneself (as situated or located)”.
But sich beinden also refers to one’s condition or state, to “how one is feeling”.
Stimmung, mood, is intertwined with this semantic because it makes manifest “how
one is, and is coming along” (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 134 / 126–127).
127 Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 323.
128 See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 139 / 131, also 136 / 128. On the uncanny character,
Unheimlichkeit, of the original being-in-the-world, see 276–277 / 255–256.
129 The component Da in the compound Dasein brings a spatial aspect to existing,
even though da is not, for Heidegger, an adverb of place, such as “there” or “here”,
as one could expect. Da has to understood as “the there” that being (transitively)
is; it is “place” understood existentially. Depending on the context, I also use the
expression “the there” for da.
126
245
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SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
fact of thrownness Dasein’s facticity. Even though it might seem
to denote marginalisation, it paradoxically indicates the opening
of an ontological relation to the world, as we will see below. It is
worth noting, though, that attunement discloses this dimension of
thrownness mostly by evading it, or absorbing itself in the “innerworldly” things.130
Attunement (afectability) qualiies the pathic in an important
respect. Above the pathic was characterized as exposure, or passibility, and, more exactly, exposure to something unpredictable.
According to Maldiney, passibility in Heidegger is not related to
the unpredictable, but to Dasein’s facticity.131 The disclosure of facticity can, to be sure, be unexpected, because it occurs in a mood
that seizes one.
With the terms attunement and mood – to be understood ontologically and not psychologically – Heidegger distances himself
from the tradition that concentrates on sensation and divides it into
subjective and objective moments.132 In the case of touch, the dividing line is traditionally drawn between the outer tactile sensation
and the inner feeling.133 Mood does not adhere to this dichotomy.
“It comes neither from without nor from within, but rises from being-in-the-world itself as a mode of that being.”134 The same goes
for afect, as distinguished from its psychologized version. Anxiety,
for instance, has to be examined as a phenomenon of being-in-theworld, as we will see later on. And nor is feeling (Gefühl) simply a
matter of subjective interiority: conceived of in line with mood, that
is, pathically, it is about opening to other beings and to one’s own
Dasein at the same time. Feeling is, according to Heidegger, “that
basic mode of our Dasein by force of which and in accordance with
which we are always already lifted beyond ourselves into being as
a whole, which in this or that way matters to us or does not matter to us”.135 Without going deeper into the issue here, we can note
that this is where the link between mood and the world manifests
itself.136 Dasein’s being attuned by another being is thinkable solely on this basis.137
As we can see, Heidegger emphasizes the disclosive character
of mood. However, according to him, feeling or mood can also be of
a contrary nature, so that it closes of, as its evasive function in ex-
130 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 135 / 127.
131 See Maldiney, Penser l’homme et la folie, 419; see also Jean-Luc Nancy, “La décision
d’existence”, Une pensée inie, Paris: Galilée 1990, 142 / “The Decision of Existence”,
The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. Stanford: Stanford University
Press 1993, 106.
132 See Françoise Dastur, Heidegger. La question du logos, Paris: Vrin 2007, 108–119.
On “mood” in Heidegger’s oeuvre, see Eliane Escoubas, “Heidegger: Topologies
de la Stimmung”, in Eliane Escoubas and László Tengelyi (eds.), Afect et afectivité dans la philosophie moderne et la phénoménologie, Paris: L’Harmattan 2008.
133 According to Wyschogrod, the opposition inside/outside, “which founds all theories of sensation”, is built on touch (Wyschogrod, “Doing before Hearing”, 198).
134 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 136 / 129.
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche I, Pfullingen: Neske 1961, 119 / Nietzsche, Volume I. The
Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row 1991,
99; see also 62–63, 118 / 50–51, 98. On the pathicity of feelings, see also Waldenfels,
Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 318–336.
136 See Heidegger, Die Grundbegrife der Metaphysik, 410–412, 512–513 / 283–284,
352–353.
137 Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1978,
164 / Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1998, 128; Dastur, Heidegger. La question du logos, 117.
135
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periences and attitudes makes clear.138 Thus it closes itself of from
disclosedness. But it is the disclosive function that constitutes the
basic dimension of mood – this is why I have focused on it above.
The traditional division between the interior and the exterior is replaced by the axis of disclosure – closing of.139
Thus, the primary discovery of the world rests on mood. Pure
intuition discussed above is of no avail here, and the same holds for
theoretical attitude.140 Moods are no irrelevant, accompanying phenomena, but constitute, in Heidegger’s words, the “presupposition”
for, and the “medium” of thought and action.141 For Waldenfels, however, this “ontological extension of feelings”, as he calls it, also gives
occasion to a critical comment. He compares it to his conception of
the alien origin of the pathic, which was crystallized in the notion of
af-fect above. The disclosure of the world by way of the “ontological extension of feelings” dilutes, in his view, the alienness characteristic of af-fect, the alienness (of that which) we encounter in it.142
Waldenfels’s comment merits attention.143 However, I shall not
explicitly address it here, but concentrate on rapidly tracing out the
primary discovery of the world, the uncanniness of which I hinted
at above and which is precisely what is evaded. Indeed, being-inthe-world links touch to place in a peculiar way.
This becomes clear if we look at a paradoxical phenomenon
Heidegger calls In-Sein, being-in. The notion implies a reconsideration of spatial questions, which being-in-the-world requires, and
with which we are already acquainted, thanks to the concept of
mood interfering in the opposition of inside and outside. The place
at issue is not equal to a location normally expressed by the preposition “in” (an item is in the cupboard, not outside of it). By In-Sein
Heidegger means “being familiar with”, “being used to”.144 Thus
the concept indicates, irst of all, that Dasein is comfortable among
what is familiar and trusted, and is at home in the world of everyday concerns and dealings, for this world proves signiicant. It is a
matter of disclosedness; among the familiar and the trusted one is,
to force conventional language, “outside inside”.
As we see, ‘being-in’ difers from the habitual spatial concepts
of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, opposed to each other. The latter are categories,
or in other words concepts pertaining to the grammar of the order of
entities. The terms ‘intuition’ and ‘representation’, iguring in the philosophy of consciousness, belong to the same categorial order. ‘Beingin’, on the other hand, is, like mood and attunement, an existentiale, that
is, a concept that articulates the structure of existence corresponding
to being-in-the-world. The place it refers to is of existential character.145
138 In this context Heidegger speaks of counter mood (Sein und Zeit, 136 / 128) and
seems to be analysing mood and counter mood on the axis of disclosing – closing
of. Later on (310 / 286) he suggests, however, that the two fundamental moods
of anxiety and joy, which seem opposed to each other, can be united in a disclosive fashion. Later, in the 1930’s, Heidegger comes to the conclusion that counter
mood is inherent in the very essence of fundamental mood, and refers, among
other things, to the tragedies of Sophocles, in which, as he reads in Hölderlin, the
striving unity of grief and joy becomes manifest (see Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins
Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rein”, Gesamtausgabe Band 39, Frankfurt am
Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1980; see also Sami Santanen, “Runouden pohjavirta.
Heidegger ja Hölderlin” [“The Undercurrent of Poetry. Heidegger and Hölderlin”],
in Jussi Backman and Miika Luoto (eds.) Heidegger. Ajattelun aiheita, Tampere:
Eurooppalaisen ilosoian seura ry. 2006). As I see it, this strife is articulated in
the form of the abovementioned disclosive submission to the world.
139 See Heidegger, Nietzsche I, 63 / 51.
140 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 138 / 130.
141 Heidegger, Die Grundbegrife der Metaphysik, 102 / 68.
142 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 22.
As far as I can see, the remark tackles the problem of being-with, Mitsein, in
Heidegger.
144 See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 53–59 / 49–55.
145 Françoise Dastur, “Rélexions sur l’espace, la métaphore et l’extériorité autour de
la topo-logie heideggerienne”, Alter 4 (1996), 162, n. 3.
143
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According to Heidegger, however, being-in turns out to be double-edged when considered as a network of relations, one which we
have so far encountered as something familiar and trusted. The network of bonds manifests itself as such when there is a disturbance.146
When an interruption occurs, and the sphere of the trusted unsettlingly fails, bonds and dependences step forth and reveal a being-in
in which one strangely is no more at home.147 This phenomenon or
event: the familiar being-in turning into not-being-at-home, or turning strange, as I would put it here, can be described by the German
word das Unheimliche. It means “strange”, “terrifying”, “eerie” etc.;
in this context, it is perhaps most accurately rendered by “uncanny”,
indicating a sense of no-more-being-at-home, a sense of something
uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar.148 In fact, we can ind in the
German word itself a peculiar link to the “familiar” or the “homely”
if we write it with a hyphen: das Un-heimliche.149
We can now say that the double-edged character of being-in entails touch in the form of afect(ion). The experience of “not-beingat-home” is, for Heidegger, speciically linked with anxiety (Angst),
which is an afection (Afektion), or perhaps more exactly, a fun-
146 See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 74–75 / 69–71.
147 Ibid., 189 / 176–177.
148 Dictionary definitions of the English word “uncanny” include meanings
like “uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar” (see Nicholas Royle, The uncanny,
Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003, 9–10).
149 Here I am following Kharlamov, who uses the hyphenated form (Leonid
Kharlamov, Das Unheimliche: Heidegger et Freud, Paris: Université Paris X –
Nanterre 2004, 41–44).
The word unheimlich, uncanny, is composed of the word heimlich, familiar or
homely, and its negation, un-. The spelling un-heimlich can thus be seen to bring
forth the negation: un-familiar. But it can also be viewed as underlining the connection between the uncanny and the familiar. Freud emphasizes this peculiar
connection (see Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche”, Gesammelte Werke XII, 231–
237 / “The ‘Uncanny’”, Standard Edition, Volume 17 (1917–1919), 219–225). The phenomenon of das Unheimliche (“uncanny” in the Standard Edition) leads Freud to
search for a supplement to the simple opposition familiar – unfamiliar. The supplement is found in the latter component of unheimlich, namely, heimlich, that
is, “familiar”. The word proves ambivalent, as it also signiies “secret”, “kept from
sight”, or otherwise repressed (verdrängt), so that it in fact coincides with the
word unheimlich in this respect. Viewed in this light, the uncanny and the familiar
are not to be strictly opposed; they are rather unavoidably intertwined. Indeed, I
regard the function of the hyphen in un-heimlich as both separating and uniting.
On this basis, Kharlamov interprets the phenomenon of the Unheimliche – or the
strange (étranger), as he also calls it – in terms of the own and the foreign, and
indeed in such a way that the reversibility of the familiar and the strange penetrates them both (see also Fabio Ciaramelli, La distruzione del desiderio, Bari:
Edizioni Dedalo 2000, 132–133). The unheimlich, then, is un-heimlich to us, because
it is, in its strangeness, our own, but then again, what is our own is strange to us
in its familiarity. In the end, Kharlamov proposes that strangeness understood in
this way is in a certain manner present: it touches. The reason for this is, in his
view, that the strange falls outside the relation of the subject and the object, but
does not pertain to the order of an absolute transcendence, or “the big Other”, as
he says, either. (Das Unheimliche: Heidegger et Freud, 27, 43, 54.)
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damental attunement (Grundbeindlichkeit).150 “In Angst one has
an ‘uncanny’ feeling”, as Being and Time puts it.151 Here we return
to the existential undertone of thrownness; let us keep in mind that
usually Dasein lees it by absorbing itself, in its everyday activities,
in the familiarity of the “innerworldly” things. But in anxiety, familiarity loses its grip. Since anxiety can arise for some perfectly
harmless reason, no external disturbance is needed. “Innerworldly
beings” and their relations then become meaningless and withdraw
in their insigniicance. Their familiar presence turns strange in the
sense described above. Anxiety, however, is devoid of object, because that by which one feels oppressed is nothing in particular, and
nowhere in particular. Still there is something present in anxiety,
and “so near that it is oppressive and stiles one’s breath”.152 What
is present is the withdrawal of beings as a whole, in other words,
nothing, Nichts. It is precisely nothing that, in anxiety, presses from
all the sides, leaving one no foothold whatsoever. This strange experience of the nothing is the experience of being. According to
Heidegger, anxiety is an afection of being as such.153 But what about
the abovementioned nothing and nowhere? They tell of the world as
such (which, just like being, is no being). It now becomes clear that
what causes anxiety is, paradoxically, being-in-the-world. When
Dasein is forced to let go of the familiar world, it will discover that
its being is devoted to the world.154 Thus the primary disclosure of
the world rests on anxiety.
Anxiety reveals that the experience of “not-being-at-home” involves a more primordial relation to the world than does familiarity.155 In light of the double-edged character of being-in, the familiar turns out to be a mode of the uncanny. The uncanny keeps the
familiar susceptible to disclosure, so that it would not be clung to.
The question now arises, to what extent the pathic dimension in
general is organized in terms of the strange and the familiar. Could
it be that the un-heimlich proves to be the spice of touch?
Let us, however, return to anxiety one more time, for we still
have to consider the facticity of this phenomenon of being-in-theworld, or in other words, its paradoxical locality. In anxiety one feels
uncanny, as has been noted. One becomes strange to oneself, for
this is an unsettling experience felt to the marrow, under the sway
of which there is nothing to hold on to.156 One loses, then, one’s position as a subject.157 What remains is a being that is (transitively)
nothing but this place of anxiety: “pure Da-sein”, as Heidegger sums
it up.158 The facticity of Dasein is made up of this kind of concrete
being the there. But this place, the there, is strange, and in this
case even impossible, for as we just noted, the pressure exercised
150 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 184 / 172. In addition to “afection” (Martin Heidegger,
Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegrifs. Gesamtausgabe Band 20, Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1994, 403 / History of the Concept of Time.
Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
1985, 291) and “fundamental attunement”, anxiety is, in Heidegger’s work, termed
Grundstimmung, “fundamental mood” as well (Wegmarken, 110 / 88).
151 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 188 / 176.
152 Ibid., 186 / 174.
153 Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegrifs, 403 / 291.
154 On the experience of anxiety, see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 186–187 / 174–175,
and Wegmarken, 111 / 88–89. See also Françoise Dastur, Heidegger et la question
du temps, Paris: PUF 1990, 50–52 / Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans.
François Rafoul and David Pettigrew, New York: Humanity Books 1998, 24–25,
and “Rélexions sur l’espace, la métaphore et l’extériorité autour de la topo-logie
heideggérienne”, 163–164; Kharlamov, Das Unheimliche: Heidegger et Freud, 55–56;
and Didier Franck, Heidegger et le problème de l’espace, Paris: Minuit 1986, 65–80.
155 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 189 / 234.
156 See Wegmarken, 111 / 88–89.
157 Losing the position of subject corresponds to the objectlessness of anxiety, described above.
158 See Heidegger, ibid.; see also Kharlamov, Das Unheimliche: Heidegger et Freud,
58–60.
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by anxiety leaves one no room at all. Speaking of it is still plausible
in an existential sense. For Heidegger’s term Beindlichkeit, attunement (afectability), with which we are already acquainted, and the
fundamental mode of which anxiety constitutes, (also) includes a
notion of place, as Dastur has remarked.159 Dastur herself regards
Dasein’s facticity, on a more general level, as an ordeal (épreuve),
characterized by her as “the impossible ‘localization’ of the self”.160
not in the physical sense. The touch of existence is about the sense
of being. For Nancy, Kant’s remark serves as a stepping-stone for
developing the conception further.
Nancy understands the ‘I’ in Kant’s remark to equal sensing existence.163 This means that existence senses itself as existence. The remark does not, according to Nancy, refer to the “I” sensing the existence of, say, a table outside of itself. Thus, we come across the question of the “self” again: how should it be understood in this case?
The “self” is addressed here in terms of being, not in terms of,
say, consciousness (cf. self-consciousness). As mentioned above,
existence has – when it senses itself, se sent – a relation to itself as
existence. Comparing the “self” outlined by Nancy with interiority, which is traditionally viewed as characteristic of the dimension
of relection and subjectivity, it can be said that as distinguished
from the latter, “self-sensing” now denotes a relation to the self as
exterior.164 In my view, such a relation to the outside should be considered pathic, as I try to clarify in what follows. Here self-sensing does not indicate a return to the self – which the philosophy
of the subject has conventionally seen as the condition of the ‘I’.
What is at issue is, rather, liberation. The sentiment of existence is
about sensing oneself as exterior. This is what being one’s self (être
soi) is.165 Nancy seems to be after a selfhood that is, paradoxically, a
selfness or ipseity of being outside of oneself: singularity of existing,
supported by no identity or any other ixed, essential ground. It is
IV
Let us turn to Nancy, who discovers touch in the very core of
Heidegger’s thinking of being. With Nancy, we will have the opportunity to consider, among other things, the question of the self,
a problem we already encountered in Husserl’s analysis of touch
(in which the main stress lies on the relective side). Now it should
also become clear that touch is not reducible to a mere problematic of a particular sense, as Derrida has soundly remarked.161
Nancy ofers an apt starting point with his existential elaboration of a remark by Kant, formulated by the former as follows: “the
I […] is only sentiment of an existence”.162 It will turn out that, even
if existence is something one cannot touch, as Antoine Roquentin
inds out in Sartre’s Nausea, it sure is a matter of touch, although
159 As noted above, the word Beindlichkeit is derived from the verb sich beinden.
Dastur observes that the verb not only indicates a state or condition, but also a
place, un lieu. See “Rélexions sur l’espace, la métaphore et l’extériorité autour de
la topo-logie heideggérienne”, 163, esp. n. 6.
160 Ibid.
161 According to Derrida, a potential general haptology could no longer depend on a
particular sense named touch (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 206 / 180).
162 Nancy, Corpus, 123 /132 (translation modiied). See Kant, Prolegomena zu einer
jeden künftigen Metaphysik, A 136, note / 86, note. Here Kant is distancing himself
from the notion that the ‘I’ be a substance or a concept.
The word “existence” in the citation translates the word “Dasein” in Kant’s remark. It should be kept in mind that the term Dasein does not igure in Kant in
the existential sense it acquires in Heidegger.
163 Nancy, Corpus, 123 / 132 (instead of “sensing”, the English translation speaks
of “feeling” here).
164 Here “exterior” is not opposed to “interior”, but precedes this customary
opposition.
165 Nancy, Corpus, 123 / 132.
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through such an ipseity that coming into the world takes place.166
To summarize: being one’s self (l’être soi) is being outside, being on
the outside, or, as we can also say, being exposed (être exposé), being extended (être étendu). This is what Heidegger, in Nancy’s view,
tries to express with the term Dasein.167 In the light of it, being one’s
self is concretized in a place, da.168 As we can see, existence is deined more closely as Dasein’s way of being.
The stress on exteriority in Nancy’s thought is here connected
to the notion of a tension peculiar to existing. One may ask, if this
is what the sentiment tells of. In any case, the exposedness and extendedness mentioned above are thoroughly marked by this tension.
Indeed, the terms exposition and extension can be recast as ex-position and ex-tension, to underscore the structurally tensional, exterior relation of ek-sistence.169 This existential ex-tendedness difers
from the normal, Cartesian extensionality, which deines a homogenous and measurable space, like the Euclidean space constituted
by the dimensions of length, breadth and depth.170 The distinguishing feature is tension, and, together with it, intensity, which tension
brings with it into this existential ex-tendedness.171
At the outset of my presentation, I noted that touch is an extensible and tensional concept. Now it can be said that “extensibility”
refers to the spacing aspects of tension,172 which is related to the
weight of heterogeneity, to the weight of the other or the foreign
in touch.
For Nancy, both tension and the “self” refer to a sensitive point in
the structure of existence. What is in question is touching on being
or touching it.173 Beings are then restored their weight, or being, as
Heidegger writes.174 In a sense, we have already approached this idea
by way of anxiety, but it is well worth a more general examination:
here, weight does not come down to the weight of anxiety on one’s
shoulders. What it is about is the relation of beings to (their) being.
166 Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, Paris: Galilée 1996, 119 / Being Singular
Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, Stanford: Stanford
University Press 2000, 95.
167 Nancy, Corpus, 123 / 132.
168 The there (da) is, according to Nancy, the taking place of existence (Jean-Luc
Nancy, “De l’être-en-commun”, La communauté désœuvrée. Paris: Christian
Bourgois Éditeur 1990, 204 / “Of Being-in-Common”, in Miami Theory Collective
(ed.) Community at Loose Ends, trans. James Creech. Minneapolis and Oxford:
University of Minnesota Press 1991, 2.) There is no existence without a place
(Corpus, 16 / 15).
169 Emphasizing the preix in this way is familiar to those who have read their
Heidegger. The preix ex-, or, as in ek-sistence, ek-, has its roots in the Latin preposition ex (in English, “out of”). The expression étendu Nancy uses for extension
correspondingly connotes ex-tension.
170 I’m using the form ex-tendedness to diferentiate this existential term from the
Cartesian “extension”. Nancy comments on Descartes’ “extension” in numerous
contexts. However, he interprets it unconventionally, with a view to ex-tension
(see “Cartesio e l’esperienza indistinta dell’anima”, Indizi sul corpo, ed. Marco
Vozza, Torino: Ananke edizioni 2009, e.g. 89; see also “The Extension of the Soul”,
Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand, New York: Fordham University Press 2008.). In
question, then, is the union of the soul and the body, which Nancy deems is realized in Descartes as touch (ibid.; Corpus, 120–122 / 130–132).
171 Nancy includes in-tension in ex-tension (Corpus, 126).
172 Nancy develops a notion of space that extends itself (s’étend), or, spaces itself, and
that he terms areality (Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego sum, Paris: Flammarion 1979, 37–38).
173 See Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 101 / 186. Nancy refers to
Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism’”, in which the latter, alluding to Aristotle’s
terminology (thigein), speaks of “touching upon Being, an das Sein rühren” (see
Heidegger, Wegmarken, 329 / 253).
174 See Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1987, 9
/ An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Anchor Books
1961, 9.
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It is this relation that is at stake in Dasein. For Dasein is, according to Heidegger, a being for which “in its being, this very being is at
issue”.175 The formula is succinct, but perhaps becomes more readily understandable, if Dasein’s reality (cf. the expression “in its being”) is here taken in an active sense, that is, as action and conduct.176
Moreover, the expression “is at issue” (il s’agit de; es geht um) refers,
according to Nancy, to the sense of being177, so that Dasein’s relation to (its) being is articulated as a task, the stake of which is the
sense of being, or, in other words, being as sense, as making sense,
faire sens.178 Let us note that, according to Nancy, this bringing into
play of sense emphasizes thinking as the basic moment of the action and conduct at issue. Thinking is, then, conducting oneself.179
To get a more detailed picture, let us return to Dasein’s thrownness, which is concretized, as we saw, in the place of anxiety. Even
though Nancy prefers surprise to anxiety,180 both thinkers connect
the uncanny (das Unheimliche) to thrownness.
Thrownness means that Dasein inds itself delivered over to
its being, brought before its being. The basis of this is Dasein’s attunement (afectability), the disclosive character of which we already addressed above. In Heidegger’s words: as it is thrown into
its there, da, the naked fact “that it is and has to be” is disclosed
to Dasein, even though “the ‘whence’ and the ‘whither’ remain obscure”.181 This place of being is strange in that, in addition to the
obscurity of the “whence” and the “whither”, the that in question,
in which the fact of being is disclosed to Dasein, is not perceptible
in intuition.182 It is, however, precisely the that, the disclosedness
of the existential fact, which in a surprising manner constitutes
the ofering of existence, as Nancy puts it.183 The ofering is delivered to Dasein in the form of a fact bearing upon it, or facticity:
“that it is and has to be”. Following a well-known diferentiation,
it can be said that the ofering comes from beyond (or from the
hither side of) what is (a being)184; the fact of being is disclosed in
its nakedness. What is at stake, then, is responding to this ofering.
How should this be understood? What might be of help here is
Dastur’s idea that Dasein is a being that has relations with being
and that can conduct itself in a manner or another with respect
to it.185 Dasein’s relation to (its) being is an intricate matter, even
though, following the guidelines laid out by Nancy, it turns out to
See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 12 / 10. Here I have taken into account Nancy’s formulation, see “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 89 / 175 (translation modiied).
In German, the words of Heidegger’s I’m quoting read as follows: “[daß] es diesem
Seienden in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht”. The phrase plays an important
role in Nancy’s reading, as we will see.
176 See Nancy “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 89 / 175. Correspondingly, action
(praxis) and conduct can be considered ontological issues; being is not a separate
sphere of life.
177 According to Nancy, the sense of being indicates itself in the putting into play of
being in Dasein and as Dasein (Être singulier pluriel, 46 / 27).
178 Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 89 / 175; Être singulier pluriel, 46–47
/ 27.
179 Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 89-90, 106 / 175-176,189.
180 See Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 197 / 171.
175
See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 134–135 / 126–127.
It is not a fact in the usual, empirical sense. Heidegger’s word rendered by “perceptible in intuition” here is Anschauen.
183 Nancy, “La décision d’existence”, 114 / 86. Being does not precede existence in the
form of a (general) principle, but is what is at stake in it.
184 What (a being) is (Lat. quid) indicates its essential qualities; that (it) is (Lat. quod),
on the other hand, denotes being, which precedes these qualities: the fact of being is naked. The uncanny character of thrownness mentioned above is, for Nancy,
connected with this naked essencelessness. In his view, what an existent thrown
into being, or into the uncanniness of the absence of essence, has to answer for, is
this uncanniness as something of its very own. (Nancy, “La décision d’existence”,
140 / 105.) That reminds us of the un-heimlich.
185 Dastur, “Rélexions sur l’espace, la métaphore et l’extériorité autour de la topo-logie heideggérienne”, 162, n. 1. Dastur draws attention to the abovementioned
Heideggerian formula, according to which Dasein is a being for which “in its being, this very being is at issue”, and notes that the German verb used by Heidegger,
umgehen – “[es] geht um” – also signiies intercourse, Umgang.
181
182
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be about something quite as straightforward as coming into presence, as we will see.
The situation described above is due to the fact that what is actively at stake in Dasein’s comportment is a possibility of establishing
a relation of being (Seinsverhältnis) to being, that is, to the fact of being.186 This is of central importance with respect to “touching being”;
in fact, according to Nancy, Heidegger’s notion that in Dasein “being
is at issue” itself implicates the idea of touch, since being is “the
nearest”.187 As regards the relation of being, we should note that it
is expressed in terms of existence. Existing is not some kind of simple being in general. It is a matter of the sense of being. Existing is
now articulated in terms of a task, or a duty, for, as mentioned above,
through its facticity, Dasein inds itself faced with a task: that it has
to be. The connection between this task and sense can be found in
the ofering of being. What Dasein has to be is the ofering of being, so that the fact of being is accomplished or unfolded as sense.188
Responsibility for the sense of being thus falls upon Dasein.
A little digression might be in order here. The ofering of being
can also be examined “from the point of view” of the being (Sein)
that is put into play in Dasein and as Dasein. The fact of being then
tells of a desire peculiar to being that is directed towards the accomplishment of being itself – as sense, or as the“that there is” as
such. Accomplishment, however, depends on Dasein’s responding
to the ofering, on a “itting gesture”, on “right conduct” towards
being. A itting gesture is one that touches on being or touches it,
as we can read in Nancy.189
Let us return to Dasein’s task. If we take a closer look at the offering of being, it proves to be a matter of existence, of its ofering.
Hamlet’s well-known question “to be or not to be” may help us to
map out the issue. The ofering of existence is a question of existential possibilities, or, to be more exact, a question of these possibilities – “to be” and “not to be” – presenting themselves.190 This
being the case, the existential fact of thrownness (“that”) turns out
to correspond to the equal disclosedness of these factual possibilities. If we read Hamlet’s question in this way, it in fact crystallizes
the possibility of existence. (We notice that the possibility of existence
is constituted by the equal disclosedness of the existential possi-
186 See Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 89 / 175; and also “La décision
d’existence”, 113 / 85. According to Heidegger, it is constitutive of the being of
Dasein that it has in its being “a relation of being to this being.” (Sein und Zeit, 12
/ 10) This is, then, a relation, which itself is one of being.
187 Nancy (“L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 101 / 186) alludes to the “Letter on
‘Humanism’”. Heidegger, however, notes that for the human being, the proximity
of being nevertheless remains farthest, for “[h]uman beings at irst cling always
and only to beings”, which they imagine the nearest, even though they are but the
next nearest. (Heidegger, Wegmarken, 328–329 / 252–253.)
188 See Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 90 / 176.
189 Ibid., 90–92, 100–101 / 176–177, 185–186. The desire of or for sense (désir du sens)
tells of the transitive nature of being: being is beings (l’étant), that is, “it ‘makes’
them be, makes them make-sense”.
190 Nancy examines the ofering of existence with the help of Hamlet’s question (see
“La décision d’existence”, 113–114 / 85–86). According to him, “to be or not to be”
comprises a moment in which “to be” and “not to be” originally present themselves to the existent – in the form of an undecidable coniguration. Through its
facticity, the existent inds itself in suspense faced with a decision, which is about
whether both “to be” and “not to be” will turn out to be possibilities for an existence, i.e. existential possibilities, in equal measure. The undecidability
between “to be” and “not to be” ofers itself to the existent as the place of an ontological decision to exist or not to exist. The relation to existential possibilities is
structured as a tensional decisional setting, which comprises both the moments
and and or. Thus, in the place of decision there is something undecidable on ofer
that is heterogeneous with regard to decision. To decide for existing means existence that airms undecidability, or the ofering of existential possibilities. (A negative decision closes itself of from the ofering). This openedness of the decision
ahead of itself, towards the undecidable, is of importance as regards sense, too.
For it means a new round in the opening of existential possibilities, or a renewal
of the ofering of existence and the place of decision, time and again. Thus, the
decision of existence includes being exposed to the ofering of existence, and the
other way round. In this tension, existing turns into ek-sisting.
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bilities). The task of Dasein is to appropriate the existential possibilities, but this can only occur by way of (transitively) existing the
possibilities as possibilities, that is, by bringing forth, by letting
come forth, in advance of oneself, the ofering, or the possibility, of
existence – in other words, the question “to be or not to be” – reopened time and time again. The idea here is that of existing according to an ofering of this kind. Here we come back to the question
of the exterior self-relation of existence, for this is what the relation
of existence to its possibility means.191 I want to stress once again,
however, that the task in question falls upon Dasein in the form of
an obligation originating in the ofering. That is to say, existing as
described here is tinged by being subject to a duty that bears upon
one, and thus by otherness.192 In addition, I want to emphasize that
appropriating, as it was outlined above, does not mean integrating the possibilities into one’s pre-given horizons, but establishing
and maintaining a relation to their ofering; above, I spoke about
establishing a relation of being to being. Now, if existing these possibilities (in the transitive sense) is considered an accomplishment
of existence, this relation can be understood as an ongoing coming
into presence, with surprises and tensions of its own. I alluded to
this above. The self-relation of existence thus must be understood
as the relation of existence to its possibility, that is, as coming into presence.
The crucial point here is that the ofering of existence is appropriated, or decided, in the peculiar form of an “intimate” diference
or divergence (écart) proper to existence. The relation (to the offering) requires, paradoxically, such a self-relation. That is to say,
existence is accomplished as an ek-sisting the ofering, as the being
towards itself (être à soi) of existence, as Nancy formulates the differential structure of self-relation. Coming into presence is efected by way of ek-sisting. The hyphen in ‘ek-sisting’ reveals the tensional divergence, or spacing, of existing the ofered possibilities; we
can also speak of airming disclosedness by spacing it. Above I referred to existential ex-tendedness. The place of existence, the Da,
is strangely concrete. Without entering more deeply into the problem I simply note that, for Nancy, the self-relation (that is, ipseity),
spacing, and exposition at issue here originate in freedom. What
matters in ek-sisting is the singular liberation of being.193
Nancy now comprehends this ek-sisting of the existential possibilities in terms of touch. It is a matter of touching being. Does
this indicate that touch has something to do with coming into presence? In any case “existence touches itself”, as Nancy writes. More
precisely, “[existence] ‘moves’ itself, sets itself moving outside itself
and afects itself with its own ek-”, that is, with the disclosedness of
the ofered possibilities of being. Here the ek- brings to existence
the distance that is, for Nancy, fundamental to touch;194 touching is
not merging, but contact. For him, “this action of ‘touching’ is what
is at stake in [this very] being ‘that is at issue’”.195 But what about
191
See Nancy, “La décision d’existence”, 113–114 / 85–86. The relation is a question of
the essence of Dasein. Dasein has no pre-given essence, nor one that would follow
it in the form of a ground, for its “essence […] lies in its ‘to-be’ (Zu-Sein). […] The
‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence.” Nancy cites here some of the central phrases
of Being and Time (cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 42 / 39–40; Heidegger puts the
irst occurrence of “essence” in quotation marks as well). From here, Nancy goes
on with words well worth noting: “The ‘essence’, here, is in the ‘possibility’, what
is ‘each time possible’ for Dasein” (Nancy, ibid.). We notice that the terms ‘essence’, ‘possibility’ and ‘self-relation’ are connected with each other.
192 See Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’être-avec de l’être-là”, Cahiers philosophiques 111 (2007),
67; L’expérience de la liberté. Paris: Galilée 1988, 27–39 / The Experience of Freedom,
trans. Bridget McDonald. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1933, 21–32.
193 Nancy, L’expérience de la liberté, 96.
194 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Calcul du poète”, Des lieux divins suivi de Calcul du poète,
Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress 1997, 70.
195 Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 101 / 186.
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sense, what becomes of it? Was it not, after all, supposed to constitute the stakes of the fact of being? Above I noted that the touch of
existence is all about the sense of being. Accomplishing the sense of
being is indeed what is at stake in ek-sisting, only now it is put into
play as a touch.196 For sense is nothing but the divergence (i.e., opening) in the self-relation of existence – which has proved to be constituted by touch. The tensional ex-tendedness of divergence opens a
space for sense.197 To put it succinctly: the sense of being is a matter of coming into presence – or presentation, as Nancy also says.198
But this is not all there is to coming into presence. For, taking
into account Nancy’s basic idea of sense as “the structure of disclosedness” 199, we can see that there is a plural dimension to the sense
of being. As noted above, the accomplishment of the sense of being
is a matter of being itself.200 Moreover, being itself, or the sense of
being, takes the form of being-with (être-avec). Thus, there is no ‘self’
except by virtue of a ‘with’, ‘avec’.201 This brings a new dimension
to coming into presence. According to Nancy, disclosedness presupposes the other (in its disclosedness); the spacing of existence
(ek-sistence) is, irst and foremost, exposition.202 Due to this disclosedness, the other obviously carries a lot of weight with being-with.
We note that in the light of sense, sens, being proves plural.203 Being
is, constitutively, singular and plural at the same time, as Nancy re-
196 See Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 101. For Nancy, sense (sens)
equals existence touching (on) being, that is, the existent in its proximity to and
its intimate distance from its own disclosedness – there where it is towards itself
as well as the world.
197 See Jean-Luc Nancy, “Le poids d’une pensée”, Le poids d’une pensée, l’approche,
Strasbourg: La Phocide 2008, 12 / “The Weight of a Thought”, The Gravity of
Thought, trans. François Rafoul and Gregory Recco, New Jersey: Humanities
Press 1997, 77; L’expérience de la liberté, 23 / 18. In fact, Nancy links sense with
the divergent structure of à, which characterizes existing as well as being itself:
être-à, being-towards.
“Selfness”, or “ipseity”, also has to be thought of according to the structure of à,
that is, as a relation to itself. Ipseity means à soi, towards itself, it occurs as coming; Nancy characterizes the “self” as a present of the coming (see Être singulier
pluriel, 119–120 / 95–96). Above we spoke of self-relation as a coming into presence.
198 To indicate this coming into presence, Nancy also uses the term présentation,
presentation, which thus has to be taken in the ontological sense. He understands
being as coming into presence, as presentation.
199 Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 96 / 181 (translation modiied).
Nancy refers to Heidegger (Sein und Zeit, 123 / 116).
200 “Being itself” means, according to Nancy, that being has a relation to itself (see
Être singulier pluriel, 118–119 / 94–95). Here I would like to refer the reader to
Heidegger’s idea of letting be (sein lassen), because it indicates an important aspect of making-sense, which is what the self-relation of being is about. Makingsense is, as Nancy sees it, making being be, or letting it be (Nancy, “L’’éthique
originaire’ de Heidegger”, 91 / 177). In my view, this means that being is withdrawn (i.e., liberated) from its normal categorial, or general, determinations, and
above all from the haven of essence (i.e., immanence), understood metaphysically as a fundamental, onto-theological instance. Nancy’s point is that being relates to itself as strangeness (Jean-Luc Nancy, “Strange Foreign Bodies”, Corpus
II. Writings on Sexuality, trans. Anne O’Byrne, New York: Fordham University
Press 2013, 91); above I brought up uncanniness in connection with the fact of being. What is strange, then, is the that there is as such. This is a matter of being as
such, of “[being’s] own ‘as being’”, or, in other words, of the accomplishment of
the sense of being (see Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 118 / 94).
201 Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 118 / 94.
202 See Jean-Luc Nancy, “Body-Theatre”, trans. Susanna Lindberg, in this volume.
203 The word sens, one of Nancy’s key terms, is an ambiguous word (as is its English
equivalent, ‘sense’). It means, among other things, (tactile, visual…) sense, reason,
opinion, signiication, judgment, meaningfulness, and direction. Nancy makes use
of this spectrum of signiications. In fact, he uses the term sens variably, without
deinitively ixing it to any one of its signiications. I would even go as far as to say
that in the dimension of sens outlined by Nancy, the grid, or order, of the various
meanings of the word is dislocated. Thus far, I have operated with “sense”, not
only because of the context (the sense of being), but also so as to avoid ixing the
term sens on (any established) “signiication”, which would fatally prune it, as for
its ontological character at the very least. For sens is the element from which signiications are derived.
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marks.204 According to him, it is nothing but being-with-one-another,
which means reciprocally coming into con-tact, being in touch205 –
that is, yielding to alteration. This is what being-in-the-world is all
about. But for Nancy, the world is a world of bodies.
This notion of sense merits attention, for it is no more thought
of in terms of signiication, but as a phenomenon pertaining to being, as a multifarious relation, in which touch plays an important
role.206 To get a clearer picture of the matter, a convenient example
is ofered by the joke, for it makes sense even though the habitual,
communicative privilege of signiications gives way.207 The following features are, then, worth noticing.208
The joke breaks away from the communication of signiications.
Part and parcel of the joke is the listener’s slight bewilderment at
the senseless expression, and, simultaneously, an unexpected passage to a strange, unheard-of sense occurring in the form of laugh-
ter.209 Such sense appears at the limits of signiication, from out of
nowhere, as it were, and alludes to a dimension preceding established and disposable signiications. The criterion of a successful
joke is an unanticipated, uncontrollable burst of laughter that seizes the listener, and thereby also the teller. The joke and its teller
are left at the mercy of the listener, whereas what is expected from
the listener is a readiness to take to an escapade somewhere out of
the reach of consciousness and logico-linguistic control. The gap in
signiications renders communication a matter between the teller
and the listener, but in such a way that both of them have precisely a feel of this in-between, the tension of the joke-situation, which
both unites and separates them. The point of the joke hits sensuousness, as well. The same it of laughter, which calls the privilege
of established signiications into question, also makes the order of
sensuousness shake. The senses burst out in laughter and are bent
into extreme positions with regard to each other, each into its peculiar form of enjoyment. In the best of cases, the listener gufaws
uncontrollably, with tears in their eyes, body in convulsions. The
204 See Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 48–61 / 28–41.
205 We are in touch with each other and with the rest of beings insofar as we exist
(Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 32 / 13, see also 120 / 96).
206 See Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 20 / 2; La Déclosion, 187 / 127.
207 There are, of course, many more such cases, for instance, art, which Nancy examines on many occasions. In fact, any phenomenon that has the character of an
(ontological) event could serve as an example here.
208 In addition to Freud, Weber, and Nancy, I have collected material for what follows
from the work of Jacques Lacan, Alain Didier-Weill, and Bernard Baas.
209 Freud emphasizes the double-sided character of the joke, and its linguistic duplicity due to which we do not know what it is about the joke that we are laughing at: we are not able to decide at once, to distinguish between the joking form
and the apt thought content. According to him, the motive for the formation of
jokes lies in this non-knowledge linked to laughter (Sigmund Freud, Der Witz
und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, Gesammelte Werke VI. Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Taschenbuch 1999, 148 / Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The
Standard Edition, Volume 8, 132; Jean-Luc Nancy, “In Statu Nascendi”, The Birth
to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1993,
222–223). Here I would like to add a thought of Nancy’s, which links a moment of
undecidability to laughter, for in my view the abovementioned “inability to decide”
refers to the undecidability of the two-faced joke. According to Nancy, it is laughter – by its bursting out – that ofers or presents (in)decision as such (see JeanLuc Nancy “Le rire, la présence”, Une pensée inie, 317 / “Laughter, Presence”, The
Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press
1993, 386).
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senses, then, are no longer organized to serve intelligible signiication, as usual. Being-with proves bodily.
The listener’s bewilderment, or the threshold in the expression
constituted by the gap in signiications, reveals that there is no given
sense to serve as support. It is precisely this kind of non-givenness,
or “obscurity”,210 that constitutes the essence of (the) sense (of being) also on a more general level. In Nancy’s view, it is this essence
of sense that – when one is exposed to it – touches most closely.211 He
speaks of a clear touch on the obscure threshold of sense, and of how,
paradoxically, there is access any further only by way of touch, along
this borderline of clearness and obscurity, in its enigmatic opening.212
In its own manner, the joke grants access to this dimension. We note
how the teller and the listener address one another, we note the contact and mutual exposition – that is, a reality distinguished by the
tension involved, and one that remains open, uninished and in suspense. These are the features that show that what sense amounts to
is a speciic, groundless way of being: our addressing one another.213
The communicativity of being-with, as making-sense-in-common, obviously difers from the communication of signiications.214 And inally,
sens, or being-with, is bodily. For instance, speech addressed to the
other215 – as well as writing, or a gesture in general – must be considered bodily. In the background here lies Nancy’s original notion
of bodies as places of existence.216 However, such being-body only
occurs in the manner just described, when the order of sensuousness is dislocated: in our example, laughter bursts out of the points
of contact between language and the senses fallen out of joint.217 In
any case, there is no bodily being-with without touch.218 For the “with”
is, according to Nancy, “the ownmost power of a body, the propriety
of its touching another body (or of touching itself)”.219 I shall return
to Nancy’s thinking of the body further on.
210 Above we saw that for Heidegger, “obscurity” constitutes an important moment
of the experience of thrownness. I am referring to the expression “the ‘whence’
and the ‘wither’ remain obscure”. It is from this “obscurity” that Nancy sees the
question of sense arising. What is given there, i.e. in obscurity, is the fact that
there is no given sense to being (the fact of being, i.e., “the that”). Not even within the horizon of expectations is there a given sense to rely on, contrary to what
might be assumed. But the non-givenness of sense gives access to the radical dimension proper to sense, in which what is at stake are not current signiications,
nor ixing sense to signiication in general, but having to make sense at the ontological level (See “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 94 / 179).
211 See Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 102 / 186.
212 Nancy, Le sens du monde, 131–132 / 82–83. Nancy is discussing art here.
213 Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 14 / xvi.
214 Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’ de Heidegger”, 112 / 195.
V
The idea of proximity seems to be self-evidently connected to touch.
Let us consider, say, the traditional classiication of the tactile sense
as a proximal sense, or the promise of direct and immediate contact
we are inclined to link with touch. However, there are features to
proximity that make it a more complex phenomenon, and are signiicant as for the spatial aspects of touch. What these features call
into question is the nature of contact.
Let us examine the belief in the immediacy of contact by taking
up a few general points of Aristotle on sense perception. According
to him, sensing is a matter of connection between the sensible (thing)
and the sense (i.e. the sensing one), as they are simultaneously unit-
215 See Nancy, “Body-Theatre”.
216 Nancy, Corpus, 16 / 15.
217 See Jean-Luc Nancy, “Le rire, la présence”, 321–322 / 390. Nancy remarks that the
senses and language are spaced by the mutual touches born of these bursts. Let
it be noted that surely enjoyment does not have to be as evident or perceptible as
the laughter provoked by the joke in our example.
218 Touch can also occur through the detour ofered by technique, see Nancy, Corpus,
47 / 51.
219 Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 116 / 92.
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ed and separated.220 Actual sensing, of which Aristotle talks about,
is not a phenomenon conined to the (subjective) side of the senses,
but equally comprehends the sensible. For Aristotle understands the
sensible from the point of view of its actuality, as it is accomplished in
the act of sensing. Thus, the sensible does not exist independently of
the act of sensing, in which the sense (or the sensing) and the sensible
are both accomplished. They then share the same reality (of the act).221
Now, focusing on touch on this basis, one is surely inclined to
agree with Nancy that this is all that is needed to create an appearance of immediacy.222 The association of immediacy with touch constitutes a central concern for Derrida.223 It should be borne in mind
that in touch the interval inherent in sensing the visible, the audible,
and the olfactible, seems to be reduced to nil. In touch, distance is
quickly forgotten, obscured by proximity. It passes unnoticed – or
is, rather, veiled, as Chrétien aptly puts it.224
Chrétien’s choice of words implies that in this context, distance
should not be thought of in terms of a physical, measurable interval. True, physical analysis reveals a minimal interval even in the
most immediate of contacts; and as it is imperceptible, it is, from
the objective point of view, possible that those involved are mistaken as to the “real” (i.e., physical) nature of the contact. According to
Chrétien, there is a diference inherent in touch, but it is unlike the
physical interval, which is concealed from those in contact but able
to be pinned down by objective description.225 The interval, then, is
not the only thing veiled.
This becomes clear if we acknowledge a certain heterogeneous element in touch required by the contact: the untouchable. In
Nancy’s words, contact amounts to the fact that there is (something) untouchable.226 Here the untouchable is not opposed to the
touched, nor is it something “behind” the touched, something
closed, substantial, or the like, even though it is a matter of distance and restraint. According to Waldenfels, the untouchable is
that “aspect” of the touched that hollows it out by withdrawing
from touch in the touched.227 It is here that the untouchable, while
withdrawing and in this way creating a fresh and enigmatic distance in the very core of contact, presents itself as constitutive
of proximity, because it gives the touched (and itself) as touching.
This is where the pathic enters the picture. As Nancy sums up the
paradox, the untouchable amounts to the fact of being moved, or in
220 This is how Nancy sumps up Aristotle’s conception (Jean-Luc Nancy, “Secondo
seminario”, in Tommaso Ariemma and Luca Cremonesi (eds.), Le diferenze parallele, trans. and ed. by Andrea Potestà, Miriam Ronzoni, and Roberto Terzi
[unauthorized], 2008, 37). Aristotle puts it as follows: The actuality “of the perceptible [i.e. sensible] thing and of the sense that perceives it are one and the
same, though the being of them is not the same” (On the Soul, 425b). According to
Aristotle, actual sensing requires a sense-object, or the sensible. For sensing “is a
way of being acted upon” (ibid., 424a). The sensed can afect and move the sense
faculty, but only in such a way that the actuality of this something that has the
ability to afect is accomplished in the sense faculty that is being acted upon: the
actuality of both the sensible and the sense faculty lies in the latter (ibid., 426a).
As regards the sense faculty, then, it should be noted that it “is, in potency, such
as the perceived thing […]. So it is acted upon when it is not like the perceived
thing, but when it is in the state that results from being acted upon, it has become
likened to it, and is such as that is.” (Ibid., 418a.)
221 See Wolfgang Welsch, Aisthesis, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1987, 76–100. Welsch
stresses that Aristotle considers sensing ontologically.
222 See Nancy, “Secondo seminario”, 37.
223 See Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, passim.
224 Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse, 106, 108 / 88, 90.
225 Ibid., 107 / 88–89. As distinguished from such a description, in Chrétien’s view “[t]o
touch is to approach and to be approached”.
226 Nancy, “Secondo seminario”, 38. Nancy remarks, that what violence does not accept is the untouchable (ibid.). Here I want to remind the reader of the moment
of the untouchable in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the twofold touch addressed
above.
227 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 88, 90, 140.
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other words, of being afected one way or another.228 Contact presupposes this sort of pathic overdetermination, which I addressed
above in terms of a heterogeneous feel. Touchingness, though, also tends to veil the distance in contact, that is, that “aspect” of it
of which proximity lives.229 It is possible then that proximity gets
mixed up with immediacy.
Thus, we have good reason to examine proximity more closely. Chrétien may guide us here, as he stresses a certain transition,
which he inds already in Aristotle. The analysis of the senses based
on the axis of immediate versus distant is replaced by a more phenomenological approach, in which the senses are considered in
terms of the near and the far.230 Still, this is not the same thing as
the interval-based division of the senses into proximal and distal
ones, because in that case proximity would be reduced to immediacy: as to this division, “we will be left with a nearness without a
remoteness and vice versa”.231
More broadly, Chrétien’s idea is that when understood phenomenologically, the ‘near’ and the ‘far’ are not mutually exclusive, even
though they are in a polar relation with each other. In fact, proximity presupposes distance, for without distance doing its share, prox-
imity would be indistinguishable from immediacy.232 Proximity and
distance are then interwoven in the contact, forming a tensional
distance in proximity. This occurs in touch in a paradigmatic fashion.233 The motif of distance in proximity is, in diferent forms, present in almost all the thinkers discussed here.234
The notion of distance in proximity brings the question of space
to the fore again. The distinction drawn between proximity (or distance) and interval gave us a foretaste of the heterogeneity of the
former in relation to any objective order. Interval amounts to a homogeneous space. This means that (lived) places are reduced to
locations or positions, which do not difer in character, and which
have a measurable interspace between them. In such an understanding of space, the “near” and the “far” are abstracted into intervals. Taking a broader look at the matter, it can be said that interval forms the initial stage of an abstractive process; on the second
stage space is abstracted into Cartesian dimensionality, and, further,
228 “L’intouchable, c’est que ça touche” (Nancy, Corpus, 127 / 135). Waldenfels, too, locates the untouchable in being moved, ein Unberührbares im Berührtwerden
(Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 88; see also 90, where it is stated that “in touch we
touch the untouchable”).
229 See also Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse, 108 / 89–90.
230 Ibid., 107 / 89.
231 Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne, 406 / 382; see also Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der
Erfahrung, 81.
232 Straus stresses the share of distance in proximity (Vom Sinn der Sinne, 403–409
/ 379–385). In his view, even a palpating touch presupposes the distant. As I see
it, the notion constitutes an interesting comment on Kant’s analysis of the “outer” sense of touch, for it entails the object’s being discerned, that is, circumscribed.
According to Straus, in the case of palpating, ‘distant’ has to be understood to indicate the emptiness from which the object is approached, and to which the palpating hand returns, gliding over the surface and the edges of the object. In other words, it is only possible to obtain an impression of the object by separating
it from the adjacent emptiness. In Straus’s view, every tactile sensation involves
distance as the emptiness against which the object stands out. (Ibid., 406–407 /
382–383.) Levinas, too, understands exploring touch so that the thing or being
comes to it as though from nothingness (Totalité et inini, 163–164 / 189).
233 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 194. Chrétien formulates the same idea
on the level of the senses: “To show that touch involves a sense of proximity is to
show that it involves a sense of distance” (L’appel et la réponse, 107 / 89).
234 Let it be mentioned in passing that in his reading of Benjamin, Didi-Huberman
attributes a parallel idea to him (see Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons,
ce qui nous regarde, Paris: Minuit 1992, 103–123).
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mathematized.235 All the way through this process space appears
as a parameter, as an unintermittent, consecutive continuum of its
elements permitting measuring and calculating. The same thing
tends to happen to time, as the linear conception of time reveals. If
we take into account that the “close” and the “distant” also have a
temporal meaning, we can see the fundamental signiicance of the
heterogeneity of proximity, or nearness236, even though it usually
remains in the dead zone of objectifying experience.237
What kind of space is this proximity, then? It has already become
clear that this is a question of contact. Proximity means bringing
closer – or approaching.238 The consequence is that proximity gains
features of motion – or proves to be, as in Levinas, a non-abatable
restlessness, because it is always insuicient.239
If proximity amounts to bringing closer, the question then arises as to what exactly is it that is being brought closer. Heidegger’s
answer is distance, or as he says, farness (Ferne). According to him,
nearness brings farness near, or nears it (nähern), but in such a way
that it is preserved as farness. For nearness is a bringing-near solely
when it brings the far near as the far – and in this way conceals itself
235 On the abstraction process of space, see Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen
Denken”, Vorträge und Aufsätze, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 2009, 149–151 / “Building
Dwelling Thinking”, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader, New York:
Harper & Row 1975, 155–156; Emil Kettering, Nähe, Pfullingen: Neske 1987, 260–261.
236 The term “nearness” (Nähe) is used by Heidegger, among others.
237 According to Heidegger, abstraction renders the essence of space and time unknown, especially as concerns their relation to the “nature of nearness (Wesen der
Nähe)” I am outlining here. (For more details, see Unterwegs zur Sprache, 209–213 /
102–106; also “Zeit und Sein”, Zur Sache des Denkens, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1976, 15 /
On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row 1972, 14–15.)
This relation is brought to the fore as regards time, too, when, in his later phase,
Heidegger ponders the nature of time. Instead of the familiar, one-dimensional
continuum of now-points, which permits the future, past, and present to be organized on a timeline, he now distinguishes three heterogeneous dimensions of
time: futural approach, or arrival (Ankunft), the having-been (Gewesenheit), and
the present (Gegenwart). Each one is a matter of presence (Anwesenheit) in the
sense of coming into presence; this is what separates the present (Gegenwart)
from the present in the sense of now. Presencing (Anwesen) is something that
bears upon or concerns man (angehen) – only in this way is there, es gibt, presence in the irst place, or it is “extended” (reichen), as Heidegger somewhat enigmatically says; due to it the human being, too, is singularly present (Anwesende)
to everything present and absent. In each dimension presence is “extended” in
a manner speciic to it. Gewesenheit and Ankunft touch us in their absence, and
are in this way present; they are not a matter of past or future now-points on a
timeline. The dimension of Gegenwart also has a presence of its own that bears
upon us. Heidegger now thinks the mutual relation of these dimensions, that is,
the unity of time, in terms of “nearing nearness”. It brings the dimensions near
to one another, but this is done by distancing them, by preventing and withholding their fusion. This is what keeps them open (see “Zeit und Sein”, 12–16 / 11–16;
see also Dastur, Heidegger et la question du temps, 113–117 / 66–68).
238 Straus and Heidegger speak of bringing closer, Chrétien and Levinas rather of
approach.
239 For Levinas, proximity means contact with the other. The touching and the
touched do not merge together in their contact, but are separated from each
other; the touched, which is always already other, moves of in contact. (See
Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, 103, 109 / 82, 86; see also “Langage et
proximité”, 230–231 / 120–121.) Let us note that Nancy speaks of separation as the
law of touching (Être singulier pluriel, 23 / 5).
275
276
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
in this bringing-near, in which it can unfold.240 Thus, what matters
in proximity is distance, the enduring of it or persisting through it
(durchstehen), not the abolishing of it.241 But what is distance, then?
Distantiation. Distance is not a stable condition, but something differential, evental. It should be considered in terms of a diference
or a divergence – I am referring to the French word écart taken up
above – that is, it should be understood as spacing.242 Distance in
proximity does not conform to readymade patterns.243 It is worth
noting that difering and spacing also characterize place as understood existentially: it is in this sense that the Da is diferential.
240 Heidegger links the nearing nearness with the event (Ereignis) (See Unterwegs zur
Sprache 196 / 90).
241 Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken”, 151 / 156; “Das Ding”, Vorträge und Aufsätze.
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1975, 170 / “The Thing”, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.
Albert Hofstader. New York: Harper & Row 1975, 177–178.
242 In Dastur’s view, what is characteristic of the far is precisely divergence
(Heidegger et la question du temps, 112 / 65). In Nancy, the word écart and its (verbal) derivatives usually allude to spacing.
The advantage of the French word écart is that it makes the heterogeneity of
spacing resonate with a swerve, or side step. What this comes down to is a digression or diversion from the normal, categorial, organization of space. Alluding to
Valéry, Waldenfels notes that écart originally signiies ‘side step’. It can be understood, then, as a deviation (from the self), just as the side step in dance deviates
from incessant progress. (Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 215, n. 5;
Ortverschiebungen, Zeitverschiebungen, 231.)
243 Derrida ofers some illuminating remarks on distance in proximity in his reading
of fragment 60, “Women and their action at a distance”, of Nietzsche’s The Gay
Science.
In the fragment, Nietzsche describes how the woman magically appears in the
midst of masculine noise in the form of a sailing ship silently gliding past, concluding with the following words (I quote from Derrida, Spurs / Éperons. Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press 1979, 47): “The enchantment and
the most powerful efect of woman, is, to use the language of philosophers, an
efect at a distance, an actio in distans: there belongs thereto, however, primarily and above all – Distanz!” I have left the last word of the citation in its original,
German form, so as to better bring to light Derrida’s gesture of repeating it as
Dis-tanz!
Derrida draws attention to the dash in front of the word Distanz, and to the exclamation mark behind it (see Spurs / Éperons, 46–51). To his mind, owing to them
the expression gains the following meaning: it is necessary to keep one’s distance!
This is an interpretation one would not necessarily expect, even though the dash
hints that something unexpected is to follow. Be that as it may, in Derrida’s view
the admonition concerns the feminine operation described in the quotation,
which Nietzsche formulates by parodying the language of philosophers: an actio
in distans, an efect at a distance. Thus, the expression warns us to keep our distance from distance – not only for protection against its seductive charm, but also
to experience its impact. For as distant, the woman is indeinable as to her identity,
and thus her spell might lie precisely in her distancing – and difering – from herself. Distance, then, “out-distances itself”, as Derrida puts it.
Derrida then moves on to Heidegger’s term Ent-fernung (the German Entfernung
signiies distance). By the separation of the preix Ent-, the term deconstructs
the customary understanding of distance as something stable, but in this way it
constitutes the distant as such, the distant in its distancing and difering – which
then is nothing but the “veiled enigma of proximation”.
As I see it, Derrida’s way of writing Nietzsche’s “Distanz” with a hyphen analogously separates the word from itself: Dis-tanz. In the passage in question, he
puts aside the latter component -tanz (the German Tanz means “dance”). But
what if it is precisely dance that brings out distance in proximity, its rhythm and
the touch of rhythm, with all its deviations, caprices, and side steps, all the (unsynchronized?) approaching and distancing? Rhythm would then beat spatially, in
accordance with écart (see Eliane Escoubas, Imago mundi. Paris: Galilée 1986, esp.
p 232, n. 1).
277
278
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
Here I would like to remind the reader of the notion of withdrawal, which above proved relevant regarding contact. Waldenfels
stresses its link to distancing (Sichentfernen), for in this way the
relationship gains features of asymmetry.244 In addition to this, we
can ind an important speciication of the concept of withdrawal
at issue here in Heidegger. According to him, it is by its very withdrawal that the withdrawing bears upon (angehen), or claims (me);
the withdrawing attracts one (anziehen) by its withdrawal, and in
this way unfolds its nearness.245 As we will see, Waldenfels entertains some parallel ideas.
The intertwinement of the close and the distant inally brings
us to the point from where the dimension of depth opens. It would
merit a detailed examination, but I shall conine myself to a brief allusion here. Merleau-Ponty connects distance to the experience of
depth in a compelling way. For him, depth is not the Cartesian third
dimension, objectiied depth, but a more originary space characterized by concealment and density.246 We have already moved about
this primordial dimension when hitting the blind spot, the hiatus in
the reversibility of the touching and the touched, and their link in the
untouchable. Looking at contact from the point of view of depth, I
would say that the divergence (i.e., distance) inherent in contact now
has to be conceived of as constituted by the other in relation to me
(i.e., the touching).247 The same goes for the thing; it gains depth and
resists my attempts at approach. With depth, space gives itself as
distant, or, in other words, as distance.248 The important thing here
is that this makes it impossible for the contact to be closed. This is
precisely what is in question in Levinas, too, even though he examines contact from the viewpoint of proximity, and with respect to
time.249 Levinas connects depth to proximity, to approach and touch,
and articulates it in terms of a “diachrony”, that is, with regard to the
“immemorial past”, which is what the Other of contact is.250 Contact,
then, is not wholly abreast of the times, it is prevented from being
synchronized and integrated into the present, with the result that it
is troubled by a fundamental arrhythmia. Antje Kapust calls the paradoxical “other space” of depth “touching without touching”, for it
permits separation in unity and unity in separation, simultaneously.251
244 See Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 191.
245 See Martin Heidegger, Was heisst Denken?, Gesamtausgabe Band 8, Frankfurt am
Main: Vittorio Klostermann 2002, 11–20 / What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn
Gray, New York: Harper & Row 1968, 9–18.
246 Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 272–273 / 219–220; Phénoménologie de la
perception, Paris: Gallimard 1945, 308 / Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin
Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986, 266. In Merleau-Ponty’s view,
depth is the “irst dimension”, rather than the third one in addition to length and
breadth, as the Cartesian outlook would have it (L’Œil et l’esprit, 65 / 140).
VI
The paradoxes of distance in proximity are not irrelevant as to
understanding experience. Maldiney helps us to realize this as he
247 Here I am interpreting, and making use of, Dastur’s analysis of the relation between I and the others, as well as that between I and things, in Merleau-Ponty’s
late philosophy (see “Monde, chair, vision”, 91 / 36).
248 Barbaras, De l’être du phénomène, 242; Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui
nous regarde, 118–120.
249 Proximity plays a central role in Levinas’s later thought; for him, it indicates an
ethical encounter, and thus deviates from the order of rationality. Touch is an integral part of proximity: for Levinas, touch means approach, rather than explorative palpation. Touch thus ranges over sensuousness (understood as vulnerability), and, interestingly, over language and saying as well. In the light of approach,
they prove to have characteristics of touch.
250 Emmanuel Levinas, “Énigme et phénomène”, En découvrant l’existence avec
Husserl et Heidegger, Paris: Vrin 2006, 207 / “Phenomenon and Enigma”, Collected
Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhof 1987,
65; see also “Langage et proximité”, 227 / 118.
251 For more details, see Kapust, Berührung ohne Berührung, 229–277.
279
280
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
lets the German verb erfahren252 reveal, what experience in fact
means. Conceived of in accordance with this word, experience is “a
going across that blazes the lanes of a depth”.253 Going across, then,
is here again understood as an approach in which distancing is
inherent.
We can ind a similar idea of the depth of experience also in
Waldenfels, an idea even of its “fertile depth”, as he says, citing
Kant.254 Waldenfels connects depth to his notion of the pathicity of
experience, the prototype of which for him is touch. This gives rise
to an idea of a “strong experience”, which transforms the one who
undergoes it, as well as his or her world.255 Such pathic experience
difers from the “weak”, subject-centric normal variant of experience, which is directed by the subject’s presuppositions within the
framework of experiential possibilities. In pathic experience, these
suppositions and expectations lose their structural advantage because, within the ield of experience, the accent shifts from the horizon of such unifying possibilities towards the ruptures or fault
lines (Bruchlinien) of experience, as Waldenfels puts it.256 Strong experience is not reducible to one’s own sphere, for it originates elsewhere, in the alien (in der Fremde).257 This is what the expressions “affect” (Widerfahrnis) and “being-afected-by (something or some-
one)” (Getrofensein-durch) characterizing the pathic also hint at.258
Depth can thus be considered to refer to the roots of experience,
which are not in one’s power, but derive from elsewhere. Waldenfels
also speaks of the pathic undergrounds and backgrounds of experience.259 This brings a new aspect to the dimension of precedence
revealed by the exposition characteristic of pathic experience; I
described this precedence above, following Waldenfels, in terms of
the unpredictable. I noted that the pathic structure of experience
merits a more detailed analysis. In what follows, I will scrutinize
the matter with Waldenfels acting as my guide; here again, touch
will occupy a crucial position.
This is because the pathic brings with it the dimension of contact. The distinctive feature of touch is precisely the pathic surplus
unveiled in this dimension.260 For the deepening and transformative character of experience, this is a matter of central importance.
252
253
254
255
256
The normal signiication of the word is “to experience”.
Maldiney, “Chair et verbe dans la philosophie de M.P.”, 63 / 58.
See e.g. Waldenfels, Ortverschiebungen, Zeitverschiebungen, 10.
Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 30, and passim.
Waldenfels emphasizes this by the very title of a work of his: Bruchlinien der
Erfahrung means “fault lines of experience”.
257 See e.g. Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 325. The German word
Fremde (and the whole word family: fremd, Fremdheit etc.) plays a central role
in Waldenfels. In connection to his work, the established English translation has
come to be the alien (alien, alienness etc.), which I am also using here. The German
word refers to a complex phenomenon, and thus has frequently had to be rendered by diferent words (foreign, strange etc.) depending on the shade of meaning
involved. For more detail, see Waldenfels, The Question of the Other, VIII, 1–19.
258 Heidegger speaks of the af-fecting character of experience along similar lines:
experience is something that befalls us, and transforms us (see Unterwegs zur
Sprache, 159 / 57).
259 Waldenfels, Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, 72 / 46.
260 See Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 75–80. The surplus shows that there
is more to touch than the tactile qualities perceived by the sense of touch: it
goes beyond physical feeling or groping, (tasten, betasten) concentrating on these
qualities – that is, it goes beyond the tactile world. According to Waldenfels, this
surplus, which in touch not only ofers itself to be shared, but also, as we can
say, divides those sharing in it, inds its expression in the German word berühren.
He also remarks on the ambiguity of the word. It has both the tactile signiication, “to touch”, and the more pathic one, “to move”. The point of Waldenfels’s
subtle distinctions is that one should not construct an opposition between these
diferent “aspects” of touch. For the peculiarity of the sense of touch lies in an
imperceptible slide from touching to moving / being moved and back. An example of this, and in my view an incontrovertible one, is ofered by sensuality, the
eroticization of touch. Feeling about can be eroticized, turning into enjoyable and
exciting fondling (see Sigmund Freud, “Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie”,
Gesammelte Werke, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch 1999,
49, 55 / “Three essays on Sexuality”, The Standard Edition, Volume 7 (1901–1905),
149–150, 156).
281
282
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
It is also essential that Waldenfels examines contact in terms of a
distance in proximity.261 The depth of experience then designates
neither an abyss, nor fusion or immediate contact, but a relation
that proves tensional. Such a relationship is exempliied by touch:
owing to touch the relation is spaced and becomes an intimate distance of a particular kind.262 In this process, touch is revealed to be
a sense of alterity, a sense of alienness.263
All of this relates to the overdetermination of touch. I referred to
this aspect when I irst described the reciprocity peculiar to touch,
that is, the fact that there is no touch without letting oneself be
touched by what one touches. I noted that such exposition brings
a heterogeneous moment of foreign origin to the contact. By now
it has become clear, however, that the “self-touching” of the one
who touches equally pertains to contact. Thus, we see more clearly now that touch comprises both a moment of the ‘self’ and that
of the ‘other’ (or the ‘alien’, to use Waldenfels’s term). Their status
with regard to each other – which one has the upper hand in contact – has been subject to a discussion, in which the privilege enjoyed by self-touching in, say, Husserl’s relective interpretation of
touch, has been challenged by a transitive interpretation of touch.
According to the advocates of transitivity, Chrétien and Derrida,
touching means irst and foremost touching something else, something other. For as we can learn from Aristotle, a sense (i.e., touch)
does not of itself sense itself.264 Transitivity, or hetero-contact, is
indispensable to auto-contact: this “is why I can’t sense myself without sensing the other and without being sensed by the other”, as
Nancy puts it – “’self-touching’ […] necessarily passes through the
outside”.265
Waldenfels’s notion of the overdetermination of touch unfolds along these lines. The moment of the ‘alien’ gains in importance, and is radicalized in pathic experience. This is to say that
contact, which can be interpreted literally as a touching-with
(Mitberührung)266, deepens as it unfolds in the direction of dis-tact –
Dis-takt is Waldenfels’s somewhat foregrounded term for describing
the pathic imbalance of touch.267 The reason for this is the goad of
alienness active in pathic experience that originates in af-fect and
that lifts the ‘self’ of its mount. Thus, due to its pathicity, contact
remains open or uninished, but this is precisely how it proves to
have the nature of an event, taking place between those sharing in
it.268 Af-fects create a time and space of their own.269 The spelling
con-tact can be considered to refer to this evental betweenness, or,
in other words, to mutuality, if the hyphen is understood to be simultaneously uniting and separating.
Now we can better understand Waldenfels’s conception of pathic experience. It is important to note that for him it is an alien ex-
261 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 194.
262 Waldenfels connects a “distance within the most intimate of proximities” to touch
(ibid., 64, 194).
263 Romano, “L’unité de l’espace et la phénoménologie”, 128; Waldenfels, Bruchlinien
der Erfahrung, 64.
264 Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 16 / 6. He reads in Aristotle that the faculty
of sensation is only potential, not actual; this is why senses do not produce sensations independently of external objects (see Aristotle, On the Soul, 417a).
265 Nancy, Corpus, 125 / 133 (translation modiied).
266 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 78. Romano inds a notion of reciprocity
in the etymology of the (French) word contact: con-tact is tact-avec, or, literally,
toucher-avec, touching-with (Romano, “L’unité de l’espace et la phénoménologie”,
127).
267 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 78. As I see it, the term Dis-takt comprises a notion of touch being out of time, for the German Takt refers, among other
things, to time (rhythm, measure).
268 Here contact is not approached from the point of view of those involved in it,
those who would, as distinct entities, enter into a relation, but as an event that
constitutes the parties as heterogeneous.
269 Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 369.
283
284
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
perience (Fremderfahrung). The term is borrowed from Husserl;
it opens on to paradoxes, such as the “accessibility of what is not
originally accessible”, an expression that Waldenfels extracts from
Cartesian Meditations to show that alien experience indicates an
impossibility inherent in the experience itself.270 It is precisely this
kind of a lived impossibility of which the abovementioned paradox,
“touching the untouchable”, tell us as well.271 Indeed, we could say
that if alien experience means an experience of the alien, it is not
only about encountering the alien, but, more radically, about the
experience itself becoming alien; the alien will not be kept at arm’s
length, but rebounds on experience. Experience, then, is inhabited by the same uncanniness (das Unheimliche) which resides in
the familiar domestic sphere.272 To get a better picture of the heterogeneity of contact, we must examine this kind of experience
more closely.
The experience of surprise nicely illustrates the alienness of
experience, for it does not keep to the beaten track. Indeed, when
we are struck by surprise, it is only when we can inally respond to
what just happened that we notice being surprised. The surprise
comes too early to be expected, whereas the response comes too
late to measure up to the experience, to square it up.273 This means
that the status of the one undergoing the experience is undermined.
When I am surprised, I precede myself, but become aware of this
falling out of myself only afterwards, when, forlorn, I am searching
for a foothold again. The temporal shift (Verschiebung) surfacing
here is worth noting, for it reveals a certain phase diference in alien experience. As we will see, the experience is constituted by its
diferentiation into the moments of previousness (Vorgängigkeit)
and afterwardsness (Nachträglichkeit).
Let us irst take up the methodical basis of Waldenfels’s analysis, for it is radical, and perhaps unexpected as well. It presents
touch as the prototype of pathicity. Precisely touch can discreetly
teach us something about the fold that indicates the passage of experience to a level preceding the sphere of normal experience. This
transition is essential as regards alien experience (as well as the
dimension of contact), and it depends on the weight af-fect is assigned in experience. As I have tried to show, it is precisely this
question that presses touch, and at a sore spot at that. Consenting
to af-fect means complying with the overdetermination and pathic
surplus of touch (or experience). Nancy gives the idea a polished
form: “[Touch] makes one sense what makes one sense.”274 The matter is nuanced, but I would say that here “sensing”, or “feeling” (sentir), originates in hetero-afection, and is thus characterized by the
pathic, not the cognitive dimension. Waldenfels also emphasizes
the pathic, but as a phenomenologist, he delineates the pathicity
of touch against intentionality. Due to its pathic surplus, the experience of touch precedes intentionality: it precedes intending something as something.275 Taking pathicity into account, the touch (of
something, “je-ne-sais-quoi”) is not reducible to understanding (this
270 See Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag
1995, § 52, 117 / Cartesian Mediations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans.
Dorion Cairns. The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhof 1982, 114 (in German
the expression reads: Zugänglichkeit des original Unzugänglichen). Waldenfels
stresses the fact that such a paradox is a matter of an experience that runs counter to itself, of a lived impossibility (see Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des
Fremden, 115–116 / 74–75).
271 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 92.
272 Waldenfels, Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, 120 / 77; see also 8,
116 / 3, 75.
273 Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 325; see also Ortverschiebungen,
Zeitverschiebungen, 147.
274 Nancy, Les Muses, 35 / 17. Touch thus proves equal to proximate distance (ibid.).
275 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 60, 78.
285
286
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
something).276 True, the heterogeneity of af-fect can be normalized
and integrated into the existing order: it may be taken as no more
than an impetus to an intentional or rule-guided meaning process,
or classiied as an anomaly, for instance277.
The primordial radicality of the pathic comes out if we consider the word pathos at the background of Waldenfels’s thoughts.
The Greek pathos signiies “af-fect” as described above, and in that
respect, refers to a singular, surprising event – not to some pronounced tinge of emotion, or whatever else “pathos” is taken to
mean in colloquial language. Pathos is an experience of being affected – devoid of awareness or a representation of that which affects.278 This experience of being moved (that stems from the alien)
forms Waldenfels’s starting point. Here experience is not organized in terms of subjectivity; let us keep in mind how being moved
is connected to distance in proximity, to the withdrawal of the untouchable in the touched, as discussed above. Touch is now equated
with being moved, being touched.279 One is then, in a certain sense,
owned by af-fect, singled out by it. When subjected to pathos, one
is “outside”, as Waldenfels notes.280 In the form of af-fect, pathos
then constitutes a radical experience of its own kind, the alienness
of which is literally “ecstatic”: being outside of oneself.281 Being af
fected and exposed in this way is not a matter of consciousness, but
points back to the body.282
At this point, however, the question arises as to what is it that we
are touched by when moved. Here we should proceed warily, though,
for in pathic experience the “efect precedes its cause”.283 Pathic experience is radical in that even though it is overdetermined, and as
such derives from elsewhere, nothing precedes it in the form of a
pre-given instance.284 The whole idea that there is a something that
afects and that can be asked questions about only arises after the
fact, when one returns to what has happened, and even then one
should not think that the answer establishes the agent as something
identiiable, say, empirical. According to Waldenfels, that which affects and the af-fect itself are, in a sense, one and the same – but in
another sense, they are not, as the belated questioning in its own
way shows.285 Expressions such as “being moved”, or the above
discussed “being-afected-by”, Getrofensein-durch,286 reveal that
the event itself has, as heterogeneous, withdrawn from the reach
276 I am referring to Barthes’s description of the pathic surplus of the punctum with
regard to the studium organized by the search for meaning.
277 See Waldenfels, The Question of the Other, 22–25.
278 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 124. Waldenfels remarks that there also is
a pathic background to the event of af-fect, that is, a certain attunement or susceptibility to the surprising (Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 324).
279 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 91.
280 Ibid., 188.
281 Ibid., 124, 205–206, 219; Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 324–325.
282 Waldenfels, Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, 74 / 46–47. Waldenfels
speaks of a bodily self who is “not a master in his own house”. We cannot overemphasize the pathic characteristic, which this standpoint of the body and the bodily
self brings into the betweenness of contact, mentioned above. Waldenfels refers to
Merleau-Ponty, who replaced the term “intersubjectivity” with “intercorporeality”
(ibid., 85 / 53).
283 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 58. Here ‘cause’ and ‘efect’ are not to be
understood in the causal sense. The precedence of the efect is due to the fact
that it exceeds its own possibility (ibid., 59).
284 Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 323.
285 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 189, see also 100. Waldenfels refers to
Aristotle’s conception of the sensible and the sense / the sensing, discussed above
at the beginning of chapter V.
286 According to Waldenfels, here the grammatical passive has to be understood as
the archaic passive (Urpassiv) (Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 324; “L’assise
corporelle des sentiments”, in Eliane Escoubas and László Tengelyi (eds.) Afect
et afectivité dans la philosophie moderne et la phénoménologie, trans. Ingeburg
Lachaussée. Paris: L’Harmattan 2008, 207).
287
288
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
of questions which try to obtain a conscious hold of it. It is not for
nothing that af-fect has been discussed in the past tense.287 The alien is intrusive, but evasive at the same time.288
But the emphasis on afterwardsness was pertinent, too. For here
we have good reason to conceive of questioning as a responding to affect, afterwards but not self-suiciently. This reminds us of the working through of experience. Waldenfels’s basic idea is to understand
alien experience as a responding, and responding – even if it only occurs afterwards – again as strictly rooted in the af-fect, even though
it distinguishes itself from the latter. What is in question is an efect
that indirectly assumes its cause. Responding stems from pathos: it
originates elsewhere, with the alien.289 However, it is not capable of
making away with the lag ensuing from this. Pathos and responding
are thus temporally apart. Still, they must be thought of together,290
as a double event, for without the supplement ofered after the fact by
responding, it would be impossible to speak about alien experience in
the irst place. But the diference between responding and the previous pathos does not come down to a diferent position on a time line.
Pathos and response are not two distinct events but one and the same
experience shifted in relation to itself 291; we saw this above concerning
the two-phased structure of the experience of surprise. I am referring here to Waldenfels’s notion of the rupture of pathic experience.
But what is it that makes one respond, then? Let us return to
Waldenfels’s starting point, the pathic experience of being-afected.
He draws attention to the possibility that the af-fect I have met with
touches me, bears upon me. It is as if the pathic surplus showed its
singularizing edge. One may ask, in that case, if what has happened
troubles me, or if I feel that I have been addressed. In any case, I
am confronted with an appeal-like, alien call or demand (fremde
Anspruch) aimed at myself, one that is revealing of the ethical, obligative dimension of the pathic.292 We note how afection turns into a demand, which, however, still originates in the af-fect.293 The
potential response to the demand indicates a shift within experience: the afected becomes the respondent.294 At any rate, the whole
process up to the demand (and including the af-fect itself) is only
thinkable thanks to the fact that one responds.295 Here, responding
means not only responding to the demand, but also taking it upon
oneself to answer for the whole process, or in other words, for the
alien experience itself. The alienness of the experience thus depends on responding.
The essential thing about the shift in experience is that one’s own
response and the alien afection split (auseinandertreten) in experience, but in such a way that through this gap they stay together, for
as mentioned, one’s own doings have their origin elsewhere. This
stepping apart is marked by the overdetermination already familiar
from touch. We come back to the question of the ‘self’ and the ‘alien’,
their status with regard to each other, for when it comes to responding, instead of the “own”, we can just as well talk about the “self”.
287 Waldenfels characterizes pathos as a primary passion, Urpassion (see The
Question of the Other, 45–47).
288 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 193. According to Waldenfels, a phenomenon like the alien is a kind of a hyperphenomenon, because it shows itself only by
eluding us (Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, 56 / 35).
289 Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 325.
290 See e.g. Waldenfels, Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, 49–50 / 31.
291 Ibid.
292 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 11, see also 98–99; and Grundmotive einer
Phänomenologie des Fremden, 56 / 35.
293 This demand is twofold: in it, an appeal directed at me is inseparably intertwined with a claim to something (in the sense that “something is being demanded from me”). Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 102–103; Grundmotive einer
Phänomenologie des Fremden, 59 / 37.
294 This reminds one of Barthes and his absorption in the element of punctum.
295 For a more detailed analysis of the whole process, see Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der
Erfahrung, 98–120.
289
290
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Waldenfels addresses this juncture of splitting with his notions
of con-tact and betweenness. For splitting, he uses the term diastasis, which very well describes its heterogeneous reality, the tension of the mutual juncture peculiar to betweenness. The tensional
character of alien experience is due to the fundamental dissymmetry of the process of responding; above I remarked on dis-tact.
What matters is the following: that to which one responds (i.e. the
demand), is not identical to that something one was originally affected by, even though the demand has a pathic undertone owing
to the surplus of af-fect.296 These two do not converge – a hiatus remains between them – and thus it is impossible to work through
the experience exhaustively. Furthermore, the hiatus is multiplied:
what one responds difers from what one responds to. Because of
its pathic tinge, the latter – that is, the demand – cannot be invented, but it sure is singular, with what it inherits from the af-fect. It
is possible, then, for it to lend weight to what we respond, which
again is allowed latitude, especially if the response is inventive.297
In fact, in its heterogeneity the demand appears as a demand only
when the response is creative, for paradoxically it is precisely such
a response that can tackle the diference in question. To put it more
generally: for pathos and the deferred response to be thinkable together in their mutual split, so that the hiatus is not closed, the response must be a creative or inventive gesture.298
These hiatuses merit attention, if responding is examined in
terms of the ‘self’ and the ‘alien’. The self-relation is instituted
when one returns to the af-fect, in other words when one distinguishes, or separates, oneself from what has happened, for instance
by asking, “what is it that I was afected by?”. Through this separation an alien relation is established – its form is now that of the
relation to the Other, to its otherness – that is to say, what is established is a relation to what one is afected by. Waldenfels’s introducing the Other here is worth noting, as it brings a useful extra diferentiation into the analysis of the alien experience, as we
will soon see. The point is that the Other, by whom I prove to be
afected in separation, is not only somebody diferent from me, but
my alike (meinesgleichen, mon semblable) – and yet at the same time
incomparable, as Waldenfels puts it. The Other, its otherness, then,
is not to be understood as, for example, the wholly other (ganz
Andere) outside of any order. 299
Waldenfels’s point regarding the establishing of a relation to the
alien is that it inevitably passes through the priority aforded the
‘self’, or self-thematization. According to him, the separation is of
a one-sided nature,300 even if tinged with the pathic. Whom indeed
would af-fect bear upon, if not the self? But there is a reverse side
to self-separation, namely the withdrawal of the alien.301 For, as the
hiatuses described above show, the surplus of af-fect, or afectedness outside the self, i.e., the ecstatic alienness, cannot be exhaustively appropriated. It can be said that the self encounters the alien
within itself, or, in other words, in its split (Spaltung); at its core, the
self does not coincide with itself. But at the same time, the alien is
encountered elsewhere, with the Other, by which one feels afect-
296 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 60.
297 Waldenfels, “Réponse à l’autre. Éléments d’une phénoménologie responsive”, 374;
The Question of the Other, 24–25, 34.
298 Waldenfels, Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, 49 / 31.
299 Waldenfels, The Question of the Other, 81–82; see also Grundmotive einer
Phänomenologie des Fremden, 84–90 / 53–57.
300 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 203. True, it should be underlined that the
constitution of the self-relation is of alien origin.
It should be noted that separating oneself from the alien difers from a distinction
drawn between the self and the alien by an impartial spectator.
301 Waldenfels, Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, 26–27 / 15–16.
291
292
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
ed already in advance.302 This is where the Other, as introduced by
Waldenfels, enters the picture. Now, the idea is that the ecstatic
alienness (of the self) “is reinforced by the duplicative alienness of
the Other”.303 Interestingly, Waldenfels here alludes to the motif of
the double (Doppelgänger).304 This reminds us of the uncanny. In
any case, Waldenfels stresses that “the doubling of myself in and by
the Other” is constitutive of the self-relation. We can see that distinguishing oneself from the Other occurs with the Other305, as the
notion of an inventive response, and the previousness of the alien
implicated by it, in my view reveal. – Waldenfels sums up the issue
as follows: to put “into words that by which (Wovon) we are afected, and that to which (Woraufhin) we respond.”306
However, this whole process must be seen to occur afterwards,
through responding. As noted, alienness in its previousness depends on responding and on the surplus arising from the latter, so
it is not integrated into any past or future now moment, into any
point on the time line. Conceived of in accordance with afterwards-
ness (Nachträglichkeit) time is not linear but diastatic. The previousness of the af-fect and the afterwardsness of the response concur
in experience.307 I am referring here to the double event discussed
above, in which the moments of previousness and afterwardsness
remain tensionally together in the temporal shift.308 Con-tact in
its dissymmetry adheres to this diastatic model of time. The relation unites the parties, but in a delivering manner: it makes up an
entbindende Band. 309 The alien in contact is irrevocably archaic and,
simultaneously, always located in a non-place, inaccessible, elsewhere. Judging by Waldenfels’s explications, he regards a relation
of this kind as distance in proximity. And as noted, touch ofers a
paradigmatic example of it.310
302 Waldenfels describes in detail (see Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 186–215), how
the constitution of the self-relation is organized into a process of self-doubling
(Selbstverdoppelung). The ‘self’ doubled at the junctures of separation is thematized as “afected”, “addressed”, “touched by the demand”, as a “respondent”.
There is a pathic undertone to these selves, for they originate with the alienness
of pathos. Thus, in the course of self-constitution, various “selves” are diferentiated, but without self-uniication (Selbsteinigung) as the hiatuses suggest. Here
Waldenfels’s idea difers from notions adopted by the philosophy of relection. To
each self-thematization corresponds a (self-)withdrawal.
303 Waldenfels, The Question of the Other, 82; see also Grundmotive einer
Phänomenologie des Fremden, 86 / 54.
304 Ibid. Waldenfels quotes Valery, who in his Cahiers writes: “The Other, the like
of me, or maybe my double, that is the most magnetic abyss – the most reviving
question, the most malicious obstacle – something which alone prevents all that
remains from being confused, from being altogether estranged. Rather ape than
imitator – relex which responds, precedes, amazes.”
305 Waldenfels uses the term ‘Veranderung’ (‘Othering’) to describe this process.
306 See Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 335.
VII
In what follows, I shall set forth a few remarks connected to touch
and limit to accompany the previous discussion of the pathic experience. The questions of limit and of drawing boundaries are, to be
sure, present in Waldenfels in various ways, for according to him
the alien is a limit phenomenon par excellence.311 What I am concerned about here, however, is touch itself as a limit phenomenon or
a threshold phenomenon.312 I am referring to the analyses of Nancy
and Derrida, which show that the limit and touch constitute each other.
307 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 103.
308 In my view, this amounts to the spacing of experience.
309 As regards the reciprocity discussed in the irst part of the present essay, the dissymmetry of con-tact has to be taken into account. Waldenfels borrows the notion
of a bond that delivers, entbindende Band, from Heidegger (Unterwegs zur Sprache,
262 / 131).
310 See Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, 325, and Bruchlinien der
Erfahrung, 193–194.
311 Waldenfels, Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, 15–33 / 8–20.
312 Derrida, referring to Nancy, speaks of the limit as a igure of touch (Le toucher,
Jean-Luc Nancy, 121–123 / 103–105).
293
294
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
Above I have, in diferent contexts, touched upon the idea of
limit without paying speciic attention to the problematic. It is evident, for instance, that touch is a sensation of limit. The fault lines
of pathic experience as described by Waldenfels are also easily associated with the idea of the limit of experience. Moreover, the tension of contact, as well as the hyphen applied to the spelling of the
word (con-tact), are revealing of a borderline, although they have
been discussed above mostly in terms of uniting and separating.313
In addition to these, processes usually regarded as mental, such as
thinking, are not immune to the impact of the problematic of the
limit; according to Nancy, the decisive question thinking has to
tackle is its experience of its own limits.314 We note the interesting
fact that the theme of the limit covers various registers, in a manner alike to Nancy’s term sens.
Conceiving of touch as touching the limit is one of Nancy’s key
points.315 At the background lies the notion of initude, denoting exposition, not privation or incompleteness, as is customary. The concept of limit in fact supplements in a useful way my previous outline
of the touch of existence. However, I shall not pursue the thought
further here, but simply remind the reader of the radical starting
point of Waldenfels’s analysis of alien experience, that is, the being-afected. Now, this experience of being moved (i.e., hetero-afec-
tion) comes close to Nancy’s conceptions, for he understands such
being moved as an experience of the limit.316 The experience of the
limit resembles the “lived impossibility” described by Waldenfels:
due to the touch of the impossible, or the incommensurable (the
heterogeneous other), experience takes a step to the limit, ending
up in the grip of afection – and in this way, feels its limits. As mentioned many times above, touching means letting oneself be touched
by what one touches. Here being moved is understood as an emotion, or (e)motion, as a pleasure mixed with pain, a discordant feeling, or sentiment, in which pleasure and pain touch each other.317
313
According to Nancy, there is no tension except at the limit (Jean-Luc Nancy,
“L’ofrande sublime”, Une pensée inie, 181 / “The Sublime Ofering”, A Finite
Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003, 234). It
should be noted that the threshold can, of course, be thought of as something
that unites and separates.
314 In Nancy’s view, thinking is not intellectuality, but the experience of its limits
(L’expérience de la liberté, 158 / 122).
315 According to Nancy, touch is the limit and vice versa (La communauté désœuvrée, 96 / The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael
Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press 2012, 39; “L’ofrande sublime”, 182 / 235).
316 Nancy develops thoughts when scrutinizing Kant’s analysis of the sublime
(see “L’ofrande sublime”). He notes that the Latin sublimitas (the corresponding
adjective is sublimis, from which the word “sublime” is derived) can, as a word,
be interpreted as what stays just below (sub) the limit (limes – or limen, threshold), as what touches the limit. It is a matter of reaching the limit, as it were, for
within the tradition of the sublime, limit is conceived of in terms of (absolute)
height (179 / 233).
Kant describes the limit experience of the sublime as an emotional efect, or being
moved (Rührung), and also uses the word bewegt, denoting agitation (Immanuel
Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Werkausgabe Band X, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel,
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1977, B88, B98 / Critique of Judgment, trans.
Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett 1987, 108, 115.) True, he analyses this limit experience with regard to the imagination (Einbildungskraft); according to Nancy, in the sublime imagination touches its limit, and this touch
makes it feel itself, or, “its own powerlessness”. But, as the imagination, from the
Kantian point of view, plays a decisive part in the constitution of object-oriented,
representational experience, it can be thought that the limit (of the imagination)
traced out in the sublime radically intervenes in the conditions of possibility and
constitution of representational experience. Derrida considers it possible that
when speaking of the sublime, Nancy is in fact speaking of experience in general
(see Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 129 / 111). It should be noted that the limit of experience, as described here, should be conceived of as that from which experience,
paradoxically, springs.
317 Nancy, “L’ofrande sublime”, 183 / 235–236; see also Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft,
B88, B97 / 108–109, 114–115.
295
296
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
As I see it, Nancy interprets this discordant sentiment as being
revealing of a speciic sensibility (sensibilité).318 Limit, then, must be
thought of as being traced, or brought out, in the form of this sensibility. The limit is not given, not already there, for what it is all about
is the event of being moved. Thus, the tension of the pleasure and
pain touching each other indicates the sentiment of (the tracing out
of) the limit. It is worth noting that such a limit of experience does
not pertain to the subjective sphere of perception. Therefore, it is
quite in order to switch to the vocabulary of touch.319 Sensuousness,
then, begins to be articulated otherwise. Among other things, the
traditional, subjective basic form of sensuousness mentioned earlier, namely intuition (Anschauung), loses ground.
It is essential to note that neither is the sentiment, its intimacy
notwithstanding, reducible to subjectivity here. For the sentiment
of the limit is simultaneously the limit of sentiment. This means
that sentiment borders on insensibility, apatheia320, which, paradoxically, is to be found in the intimate core of sensibility. What is
at issue is the fact that pleasure and pain do not coincide in the
discordant sentiment of being moved, but touch each other, each
due to the touch of the other, so that an anaesthetic hiatus remains
between them. This intimate hiatus or diference indicates that being moved by the touch of the heterogeneous, or experience taking
to the limit, equals being exposed to insensibility. But at the same
time such a reaching for the limit means being drawn towards the
self, as we will soon see. Instead of “insensibility”, we could just
as well write the “untouchable”, for this is a matter of contact.321
It could also be replaced by the “outside”, a term we already encountered in Nancy, who uses it in this very context. According to
him, intimacy derives from this kind of exposition to the outside,
and is linked to it. In Nancy’s analysis, the pathos familiar from
Waldenfels turns out to be a pathos of apatheia, a sentiment of insensibility. Here sentiment presents itself under its pathic aspect.
The link to the moment of the outside detaches it from subjectivity, and renders it singular.322
But how to understand the idea, that when reaching for the
limit, experience is tensionally drawn towards the self? To clarify this, I will take up the body, to which Nancy already introduced
us through the touch of existence. In that context, I hinted at the
peculiarities of his ontological thinking of the body. One of these
is constituted by the order of sensuousness falling out of joint, of
which the bursts of laughter provoked by the joke already gave us
a feel.323 This dislocation can guide us when trying to see how sensuousness can be articulated otherwise. What I am getting at here
is sensuality, or the eroticization of the senses, which constitutes
a central dimension of Nancy’s thinking of the body. As we know,
318 See Nancy, “L’ofrande sublime”, 183–184 / 235–236.
319 The limit does not come into view. According to Nancy, the mode of the presentation of a limit is its being touched. Thus, we have to “change sense, pass from
sight to touch”. (“L’ofrande sublime”, 179. The quoted passage is missing from
the English translation – transl. note.)
320 Nancy (“L’ofrande sublime”, 183 / 235) extracts the Greek word apatheia from
Kant, for whom it means affectlessness, Affektlosigkeit. According to Kant,
even afectlessness (apatheia, phlegma in signiicatu bono) is sublime (Kritik der
Urteilskraft, B121–122 / 132–133).
321
This moment of the “untouchable”, which, according to Nancy, lies in the heart of
contact, gives him occasion to conceive of contact in terms of threshold, and to
employ the formula the sensing/sensed (or: the feeling/felt, the touching/touched).
The threshold of touch shows that interruption and spacing are inherent in contact, as Derrida underlines (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 221 / 195). The idea here
is that those sharing in contact share that which divides them.
322 Let it be noted that the dimension of sense (sens) opens up from the limit of insensibility. I am alluding to the “obscure threshold” of sense mentioned earlier. At
the same time it should be noted that, in its incommensurability, this dimension
precedes not only sentiment but also concept. (See Nancy, “L’’éthique originaire’
de Heidegger”, 108 / 191.)
323 According to Derrida, the singularity of Nancy’s work lies in another thinking of
the body (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 140 / 122).
297
298
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
touching, for instance, can be eroticized into an enjoyably exciting
stroke.324 By sensuality, Nancy understands a sensibility that enjoys itself (jouit d’elle-même) instead of being content with providing sensorial information.325 I remind the reader of the Aristotelian
notion brought up earlier, according to which a sense senses, and
at the same time senses itself sensing; a moment of self-relation is
inherent in sensing. 326
Sensuality modiies the settings of the discordant sentiment of
pleasure and pain, for it is a matter of sensual pleasure. The starting
point for the notion of sensual pleasure developed by Nancy here
is Freud’s idea of sexual fore-pleasure (Vorlust), which is localized
in the erogenous zones of the body, and indicates the zoning of the
erotic relation as well.327 Fore-pleasure amounts to the excitation
of an erogenous zone, that is, a feeling of tension rising step by step.
Or, to put it more exactly, and with the help of Freud himself, what
is in question is a zoned tension that increases gradually, a tension
in which pleasure (Lust) caused by, say, touch, arouses a desire for
more pleasure.328 Indeed, excitation increasing stepwise simultaneously both produces a feeling of satisfaction (i.e., pleasure) of its
own, and, in the form of desire, adds to the (unpleasantly) impel-
ling state of tension.329 Now, diverging in this regard from Freud,
Nancy conceives of pleasure in terms of the model of excitation,
or tensional fore-pleasure.330 The unpleasant, even painful feature
brought into pleasure by tension pertains to it just as much as does
the temporary phase of satisfaction.331 With its moments of desire
and satisfaction, the pleasure Nancy has in mind proves ambiguous,
and is no more reducible to satisfaction as mere relaxation, difering in this from pleasure as traditionally understood.332 This kind of
324 I am referring to Freud, who states that regarding touch, it is generally known
what a source of pleasure and, together with it, an influx of a fresh excitation is aforded by the tactile sensations of the skin of the sexual object (Drei
Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 55 / 156, see also 49 / 149–150).
325 Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Plaisir au dessin. Paris: Galilée 2009, 59 / The Pleasure in
Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong. New York: Fordham University Press 2013,
p.46.
326 Nancy formulates the matter as follows: sensing “signiies […] quite simply to relate to oneself the efect – and thus the afect – of a non-self or exteriority [un dehors]” (ibid., 103 / 83).
327 Pleasure in general is tied to a relation (ibid., 84 / 66).
328 See Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 111 / 210. The term “desire”, used
by Nancy, refers here to Freud’s expression “a need for greater pleasure”. It is a
matter of additional pleasure (ein Mehr von Lust) (ibid.; Nancy, Les Muses, 33 / 16).
329 Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 114, and n. 1 / 212, and n. 1. Freud’s
basic notion of pleasure is economic, and complies with the pleasure principle coined by him. According to it, an increase in psychic tension, or intensity,
amounts to an unpleasant, even painful, feeling of displeasure (Unlust), whereas
a decrease in tension is felt as pleasure (Lust), and thus, as one would imagine, as
something preferable. With regard to this model, sexual fore-pleasure is contradictory, for in it pleasure and pain are no longer mutually exclusive states.
330 Unlike Freud, Nancy does not think that the fore-pleasure produced by erogenous
zones constitutes a preparatory phase of genital discharge, pleasure in the relaxation of tension.
331 In fact, according to Nancy it is tension that should be conceived of as implicating
the moment of satisfaction (see Le Plaisir au dessin, 103 / 83).
332 Nancy brings up Freud’s allusion to the German word Lust, which is equivocal.
The word “has two meanings, and is used to describe the sensation of sexual tension (‘Ich habe Lust’ = ‘I should like to’, ‘I feel an impulse to’) as well as the feeling of satisfaction”. (Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 114, n. 1 / 212, n.
1.) On the ambiguity of pleasure, see Nancy, Le Plaisir au dessin, 61, 101–109 / 47,
81–88.
299
300
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
ambiguous pleasure in tension, or pleasure of desiring, is contrary
to the pleasure principle and leads beyond it.333
But what about the question of self-relation that prompted
these considerations on pleasure? It is worth noting that, according to Nancy, Aristotle’s idea of the self-relation required by sensing – se sentir sentir – holds good not only for sensation, but also
for feeling, or sentiment, and, consequently, for pleasure.334 Above
I stated that sensuality amounts to a sensibility that enjoys itself.
Sensuality, then, can be linked to fore-pleasure, or excitation, in the
manner described above335, but in what sense can one speak of a
self-relation pertaining to such sensual pleasure? The answer is to be
found “beyond the pleasure principle”.336 But now this “beyond”
should be understood as “internal” to the pleasure in tension, for,
due to the gradually tightening tension of excitation, pleasure is
marked by a diference that is not levelled out337, as it should be, if
pleasure were addressed in terms of inality. The diference in question, characteristic of sensual pleasure, is unequable, and cannot be
evened out at the expense of either of the moments, satisfaction or
tension. It can be said that the stakes of sensuality are to be found
in the self-relation of pleasure rather than in the dissolving of its
ambiguity – whether into a deinitive form of pleasure (cf. exhaustive satisfaction) or beyond it.338 For excitation is a matter of an intimate relation to the other.
Nancy now thinks of this unequable diference as pleasure.339
Owing to it, sensual pleasure turns out to be a pleasure that is dislocated – and in such a way, moreover, that it is exactly in this manner that it becomes localized: dis-location. 340 In what follows, we will
examine the zoning of the body. But the matter is of central importance regarding the question of the self-relation of pleasure, too,
for the dislocation makes pleasure a limit phenomenon. Sensuality,
which “takes pleasure in tension”,341 follows the logic of limit and
333 The pleasure principle gives priority, not to the pleasure in tension, but to the
pleasure in satisfaction, or the discharge of tension, understood as the goal of
the whole process. In the Freudian model, the fore-pleasure only serves this
sort of “end-pleasure” (Endlust), which is “wholly a pleasure of satisfaction”, and
is “brought about entirely by discharge”; with end-pleasure “all tension is removed” (see Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 112, 114 / 210, 212). The
ambiguous pleasure (Lust) Nancy has in mind is in this model divided, its two aspects corresponding to two pleasures of diferent origin.
On a more general note, Nancy remarks that it is actually impossible for pleasure
to be realized as “wholly a pleasure of satisfaction”, as it, according to the pleasure principle, is supposed to. For what the pleasure principle ultimately comes
down to is exhaustive satisfaction, or a inal and generalized discharge of tension,
its being levelled of. Such entropy of desire should, however, be felt as a relaxation, but such an experience is impossible, because of the liquidation of the relation to the self. (See Nancy, “In Statu Nascendi”, 228–229; “Système du plaisir
(kantien) (avec post-scriptum freudien)”, La pensée dérobée, Paris: Galilée 2001, 79
/ “System of (Kantian) Pleasure (With a Freudian Postscript)”. In Phil Rothield
(ed.) Kant after Derrida, ed. Phil Rothield, trans. Céline Surprenant. Manchester:
Clinamen Press 2003, p.138–139; Le plaisir au dessin, 103 / 83.)
334 Nancy, Le Plaisir au dessin, 103 / 83.
335 See ibid., 59/46.
336 The expression “beyond the pleasure principle” is Freud’s.
337 See Nancy, “Système du plaisir (kantien) (avec post-scriptum freudien)”, 79–80 /
139.
338 The ambiguity of pleasure is not settled by satisfaction. And the same holds true
for another possibility that represents just as one-sided an attempt by pleasure to
realize itself, but this time beyond the pleasure principle, as it were. For tension
does not attain an intensity such that it would surpass the opposition between
tension and its abatement (that is, satisfaction) and permit – at the expense of the
ambiguity in question – tension being fully present to itself (see L’”il y a” du rapport sexuel. Paris: Galilée 2001, 43 / “The ‘There Is’ of Sexual Relation”, Corpus II.
Writings on Sexuality, trans. Anne O’Byrne. New York: Fordham University Press
2013, 17). As I see it, both the alternative attempts at realization approach pleasure in terms of identity (and those of inality). All in all, the diference of tension
proves unequable (“Système du plaisir (kantien) (avec post-scriptum freudien)”,
79–80 / 139), and perhaps, as Nancy suggests, “rhythmic” (Le Plaisir au dessin, 65
/ 49).
339 Nancy, “Système du plaisir (kantien) (avec post-scriptum freudien)”, 79–80 / 139.
340 See Nancy, Les Muses, 33–34 / 16; Le sens du monde, 205 / 133.
341 Nancy, Le Plaisir au dessin, 59 / 47.
301
302
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
touch.342 Each step of excitation, progressing stepwise, is a fresh
and singular step that takes excitation to its limit. Pleasure as dislocated, or dis-located, then proves to be pleasure at the limit or limit
pleasure343 that takes place through the touch of the other. Above
we already got acquainted with the sentiment of limit.
In this limit pleasure, what is to be taken as a limit phenomenon, precisely, is the rhythmically344 recurrent tension. According
to Nancy, there is no tension except at the limit.345 If we return to
the self-relation of pleasure, we can ind the “self” in this tension.
The idea may seem peculiar, but, as already noted, according to
Nancy the “self” is a relation to the self. I previously discussed
the divergent self-relation of ek-sistence, which we came to know
in the form “towards itself” (à soi). The “self” is now speciied as
the tension of this “towards itself”.346 Taking into account the connection of tension with the limit and touch it can be said that here
pleasure (in tension) touches itself as a limit. Let us recall here that,
for Nancy, the self-relation is connected to coming into presence.
To summarize: The unequal diference indicates that the self-relation of pleasure is constituted solely by the tension of the “towards
itself ” of pleasure – or as a “[threshold] at which [excitation] properly touches the intimacy of its own being excited”.347 We can see
that when it comes to sensual pleasure, the self-relation should not
lead one to neglect the touch of the heterogeneous (other), “the
proximity of the distant”, as Nancy puts it.348 The step taken by
sensuality to its limit – its self-relation – is, in fact, revealing of the
fact that due to its touchingness, the other weighs on the core of sensual pleasure.349
The erogenous zone follows this logic of excitation. The topic
would require closer scrutiny, but here I will conine myself to a couple of remarks. Sensuality indicates a zoning of the body, but this
zoning is at the same time extended to the erotic relation that excitation is all about.350 Let us keep in mind Nancy’s ontology of the
body, of the being-with of bodies. Zoning amounts to the eroticization of the sense, or its dislocation into the divergence of its enjoyment. The zones are not physiological, but organs of pleasure-desire
spaced by gradually growing tension, “mobile and leeting circumscriptions”, as Nancy says.351 Zoning, then, locally dislocates the
normal order of sensuousness. Sensuousness is articulated anew,
as I noted above; the body becomes diferentiated and marked by
tensional pleasure. What is more, in the local divergence of its enjoyment the body is ex-tended and touchable. For Nancy, the possibility of bodies to enjoy each other lies here. The body enjoys being
touched by other bodies.352
342
343
344
345
346
As noted above, the limit and touch constitute each other.
See Nancy, Le sens du monde, 205 / 133.
See Nancy, Le Plaisir au dessin, 105 / 84.
Nancy, “L’ofrande sublime”, 181 / 234.
Nancy, Le Plaisir au dessin, 103–104 / 83. Nancy stresses that the “self” is to be
understood as “towards itself”. According to him, here the self is a matter of tension, for it cannot be ixed. It does not amount to interiority, nor is it a goal, but,
as Nancy somewhat enigmatically puts it, the “tension’s extension” (le tendu de la
tension) (ibid.). I want to remind the reader of how there is an undecidable ambiguity to the German word Lust.
347 Nancy, L’”il y a” du rapport sexuel, 41 / 16.
348 Touch only attains a relation to itself when touched by what it touches and because it touches it (see Nancy, Les Muses, 35 / 17). Here I want to take up once
again the abovementioned remark of Nancy’s concerning self-touching “[that]
necessarily passes through exteriority – this is why I cannot feel myself without
feeling the other and being felt by the other” (Corpus, 125).
349 The self-relation is intertwined with consent to “an outside, to an other – to an alterity or alteration” (Nancy, Le Plaisir au dessin, 44 / 32; see also 86 / 67–68).
350 This relation as zoning is to be understood as the coniguration of a body of relation (Nancy, L’”il y a” du rapport sexuel, 44 / 18).
351 Ibid., 42 / 16–17. As “mobile and leeting circumscriptions”, the zones are “identical to the gestures that designate them as zones and excite or inlame them”
(ibid.).
352 See Nancy, Corpus, 102–103 / 117.
303
304
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
It is noteworthy regarding the present topic that the logic of
sensuality gives primacy to touch. Nancy remarks, for instance,
that according to Freud visual stimulation ultimately derives from
touching.353 It could be added to this that being stimulated by what
one sees – excitation that is, as such, kindled by the attraction of
what is seen, by its touch354 – gives rise to a sensual pleasure, the
increasing tension of which is equally articulated in terms of touch,
as we saw earlier. The primacy of touch among all the senses355 results from the fact stressed by Nancy that even though every sense
senses itself sensing, touch more than the other senses takes place
only in touching itself, its own limit, or in other words, in touching
itself as limit. And this is due to the touch of the heterogeneous.356
Touch is, so to speak, conined to touching the limit. According to
Derrida, however, the limit of touch simultaneously amounts to a
certain kind of non-limitation. In his view, this can be seen from
the fact that touch – precisely because of the feature of self-touching typical to it – “is the being of every sense in general” and thus
constitutes the sense of the senses. It thus gains in Nancy a “quasi-transcendental” position in relation to the senses and sensibility.357
In fact, according to Nancy, the impact of touch ranges even wid-
er within the sphere of the term sens, all the way to understanding
and reason.358 Indeed, it becomes the “’transcendental’ of sense”.359
It should be borne in mind, though, that due to the incommensurability of the untouchable it brings with it, touch is not a uniform
concept. In this regard, speaking of a quasi-transcendental, or putting “transcendental” in quotation marks, is quite in order.360
353 Nancy, Les Muses, 34 / 16–17 (see also Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie,
55 / 156 and 111 / 209). According to Nancy, the point no doubt holds good for all
the other senses, too.
354 Freud speaks of visual impressions (optische Eindruck), which most frequently
are the cause of libidinal excitation (ibid.). But what I have in mind here is pathic
touchingness, not an impression. I am alluding to Derrida, who adapts the logic
of touch to the other senses as well. According to him, it is quite possible to be
touched by what one sees or hears, but it is not at all necessary that one be seen
by what one sees, or heard by what one hears (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 312 /
276). As I see it, such afectability is what sensibility amounts to.
355 See e.g. Nancy, Les Muses, 34 / 16.
356 Nancy, “L’ofrande sublime”, 183 / 235.
357 Jacques Derrida, “Le toucher – Touch / to touch him”, trans. by Peggy Kamuf,
Paragraph, vol. 16.2, 134; Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 309–311 / 274–275.
358 See Jean-Luc Nancy, “Res ipsa et ultima”, La pensée dérobée, Paris: Galilée 2001,
184 / “Res ipsa et ultima”, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, trans. Steven
Miller, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003, 316.
359 Jen-Luc Nancy, “Sens elliptique”, Une pensée inie, 293 / “Elliptical Sense”, A Finite
Thinking, 110. Nancy speaks of touch as the “limit of sense”, too, but straight away
warns against assuming that we should in this way have found the essential sense
of touch (Corpus, 40 / 43).
360 See Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 311 / 275. Conceptual condition of possibility, which is what transcendental means, here comprehends a moment of
impossibility.
361 Let it be noted that according to Derrida, touch cannot be thematically dealt with
before asking who touches whom, and how (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 84 / 68–69).
362 Nancy, “Calcul du poète”, 69.
363 Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 61–62 / 47–48.
VIII
To conclude, I will return to some of the themes I started of with.
In particular, I am thinking about Derrida and his willingness to
draw attention to the manner in which touch should be examined,
or touched upon.361 Likewise, in relation to touch itself, we can pose
the question of how to touch. But what I have in mind here is not
some particular way of touching, such as caressing, hitting, stinging, or the like, but rather tact and a potential measure for touch.
Speaking of measure might seem odd in this context; have I not
all down the line emphasized the heterogeneity and incommensurability of the pathic in relation to measurable space? Nancy, however, remarks that touch requires a measure.362 Moreover, Derrida
manages to track down a notion of measure in Aristotle as well.363
305
306
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
It should be kept in mind that according to Aristotle, also that
which is not to be touched, that is, the intangible, constitutes an
object of the tactile sense, for it is a matter of an excessive touch of
the object to which touching might expose.364 This demands restraint – “thou shalt not touch too much [nor] let yourself be
touched too much”365 – but of course does not do away with the
desire for touching, as can be seen also from Derrida’s subtle analyses.366 Here it is important to note that, on the basis of the intangible, Derrida suggests that Aristotle’s thinking of touch touches
the untouchable; in this respect he inds in it a point in common
with Nancy.367 This merits attention when it comes to the potential
measure for touch.
But to go further, let us recall the demand of tact we encountered at the very beginning of the essay. Nancy brings up a sensitive point residing in touch: it is one that calls for sensitivity, or
tact, so that touch could – the temptations of immediacy notwithstanding – pursue its exposing subtlety.368 Tact is likely to bring
out something very much to the point about the heterogeneity of
touch. However, we should also note the disturbingly apt words of
Derrida: it is tactless to touch too much, but equally tactless not
to touch enough.369
Focusing on tact itself, we come to realize that it is a question
of something that can but must not be touched. This “can but must
not” can, following Derrida, also be given the form: tangible, un-
touchable.370 We note that tact forces the thinking of touch to think
the untouchable, but in such a way that the latter is included in the
tangible as an impossible and yet inevitable “aspect” of it.371 Above
I have addressed the untouchable in pathic terms, and presented it as the withdrawing “aspect” residing in the touched, thanks
to which the touched is touching. In my view, tact is well suited
to articulate such sensitivity. However, one should bear in mind
Derrida’s central concern, namely the danger of immediacy lurking in touch, since it threatens to obscure the heterogeneity and
overdeterminedness of touch. In Derrida’s view, tact breaks with
this immediacy due to its untouchable “aspect”.372 “To touch with
tact is to touch without touching that which does not let itself
be touched.”373 We can see that here contact (and touch) is approached in terms of interruption. We could also speak of a hiatus,
threshold, or limit, for Derrida considers them part of this lexicon
of interruption constitutive of touch (and contact).374 From this
point of view, touching is possible solely by not touching. Earlier I
spoke of distance in proximity.
364
365
366
367
368
369
Aristotle, On the Soul, 435b.
Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 61–62 / 47.
Ibid., 82 / 66–67 (see also 62 / 47–48).
Ibid., 30 / 18.
See Nancy, Noli me tangere, 25 / 13.
Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 91 / 75.
370 See ibid., e.g. 79 / 65. See also 334 / 298, where Derrida makes a distinction between the intangible, i.e. the cannot-touch, and the untouchable, the must-nottouch: “Between the intangible and the untoucable, the diférance of tact.”
371 See ibid., 30 /18, and also 334 / 297–298. Here Derrida connects tact with the limit
of touch.
372 See ibid., e.g. 328 / 293. The untouchable then presents itself as the limit of touch,
it is inaccessible to tact itself; not even sensibility can reach it (see ibid., 332 /
296).
373 Ibid., 328 / 292.
374 According to Derrida, interruption constitutes touch as self-touching (ibid., 129 /
111). In this context, he refers to experience as an experience of the limit (that is,
as a touching the limit).
307
308
SAMI SANTANEN
DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH
Now, if it is tact that gives the measure to touch, this measure
of touch is the untouchable and withdrawing aspect inherent in
the tangible.375
I want to return once more to Derrida’s troubling words on tactlessness. It is not diicult to discern in its two versions – “to touch
too much” and “not to touch enough” – two heterogeneous moments
(“to touch”, “not to touch”), which we can see are put in contact376
in the paradox of tact, formulated by Derrida as follows: “to touch
without touching”. Tact shows that touch is properly a touch of its
own limit. 377 But what is disturbing is the fact that when touching
one’s own limit, one, according to Derrida, ultimately touches too
much, or too little (not enough). In other words, touch gains an improper tone from the touch of what is most proper to it. It seems
that tact is not reducible to skill or know-how.378 Let it be noted
that for Derrida, tact is a matter of law rather than know-how. He
speaks of a law of tact.379 This essentially afects the framing of the
question. On a more general level, Derrida emphasizes the hiatus
or divergence in con-tact, or a non-contact at the heart of contact,
for according to him it constitutes the condition of the experience
of contact.380
But inally, what about thinking? How does the touch of the untouchable afect the thinking of touch? Or, looking at the matter
from a wider perspective, must thinking in general take into account the problematics of tact?381 These questions are too extensive
to be answered here. I shall conine myself to briely remarking on
an idea to be found in Nancy. He conceives of the untouchable as
something that weighs, and that weighs on thinking (the thinking
of touch). Above I discussed the untouchable in terms of impossibility, heterogeneity, and incommensurability, but in this context,
one can also speak of its inappropriability. For the untouchable escapes the hold of thinking, even though it weighs on it. According
to Nancy, it is the body in its ex-tendedness that in this way pushes
thinking to its limits.
Early on in this essay I noted how touch demands a pathic mode
of thinking that difers from discursivity and representativity. I alluded to the feel that that which is touched upon (i.e., examined) –
in this case, touch, or the sense of touch – requires from thinking.
Now the point of contact we sought after in the form of this “feel”
is occupied by the weight of the untouchable. Nancy’s idea is that
at this limit thinking, penser, turns into weighing, peser.382 Thinking
then becomes a weighing of the unthinkable, or a measuring of the
incommensurable, impossible, and unbearable that weighs on it.
375 At one point Nancy says that it is withdrawal that gives the measure of touch (see
Noli me tangere, 28 / 15).
376 See Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 83 / 67–68.
377 It should be noted that here the haptic and pathic notions of touch are not necessarily distinguished from one another.
378 I am forced to heavily simplify Derrida’s subtle ideas here (for more details, see
Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, e.g. 129 / 111).
379 See ibid., e.g. 81–84 / 66–69.
380 See ibid., 249 / 221. It is interesting that Derrida phenomenologically traces the
sense of contact back to the interruption of contact. He also speaks of tact beyond
contact (ibid., 91 / 76). Hence, the sense of contact or contact as such does not
manifest itself in contact (see ibid., 257–258 / 228–229).
English translation by Anna Tuomikoski
381 I refer here to Nancy’s idea of thinking as conducting oneself. Let us also note
that Heidegger, in his “Letter on ‘Humanism’”, outlines a Gesetz der Schicklichkeit,
a “law of ittingness” concerning the thoughtful saying of the history of being (see
Wegmarken, 359–360 / 276). Heidegger’s sketch makes one wonder, if the German
word Schicklichkeit is, in this context, tinged with tactfulness.
382 Nancy elaborates on these thoughts in “Le poids d’une pensée”. See also Derrida’s
comments in Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 87–90 / 72–74, 329–335 / 293–299.
309
CONTRIBUTORS
CONTRIBUTORS
is an artist-researcher currently working as professor of
artistic research in ine arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki.
He has published several articles on touch-related issues, among
others “Digital inger: beyond phenomenological igures of touch”
in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture vol. 4 (2012).
is a French philosopher and emeritus professor
of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. He has published numerous inluential texts since early 1970’s, many of them addressing
touch-related issues, among others Noli me tangere, Paris, Bayard
2003.
MIKA ELO
J E A N - LUC NA N C Y
LAURA GRÖNDAHL is a scenographer currently working as university lecturer in preforming arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki.
Her research interests include the epistemic implications of scenographic strategies and documentary aspects of contemporary theatre.
DAV I D PA R I S I is associate professor of emerging media at the
College of Charleston, US. He is the author of Archaeologies of Touch:
Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of
Minnesota Press, 2018), as well as of several other texts on touch
and tactility, with speciic focus on media archaeology.
is an artist-researcher currently working as professor of visual culture and art at the Aalto University School of Arts,
Design and Architecture. He has published widely on art-related issues, among others “Evident Necessities” in Altern Ecologies: emergent perspectives on the ecological theshold at the 55th Venice Biennale,
eds. Taru Elfving and Terike Haapoja, Frame Visual Art Finland
and University of the Arts, Helsinki, 2015.
HARRI LAAKSO
is a scenographer and postdoctoral researcher at
the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Her
current research focuses on questions of mediated performance,
expanded scenography and critical spatial practices.
MAIJU LOUKOLA
is a philosopher and translator teaching at the
University of the Arts Helsinki. His areas of expertise are continental philosophy, questions of translation, and aesthetics. He has
published widely on contemporary philosophical issues in phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought.
M I I K A LU O T O
is a Helsinki-based philosopher and lecturer. His
areas of expertise are psychoanalysis, continental philosophy and
aesthetics. He has published numerous theoretical texts over the
past three decades.
SAMI SANTANEN
311
ART THEORETICAL WRITINGS
FROM THE ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS 12
As a sense modality, touch has been both over- and undervalued
in Western culture. On the one hand, touch has been regarded as
the basis of sense certainty and as a rather normative support to the
theoretical gaze. On the other hand, it has been considered as vague,
vulgar, drive-related or impure. Due to these contradictory and
potentially subversive qualities, touch has been invested with various
emancipatory expectations. In its ambivalence, the very sense of
touch is essentially over-determined.
The texts of this volume address various dimensions of touch,
where touch is not only a matter of sensory experience or bodily
capacity, but also one of technics and vulnerability, of exposure and
depth, of delicacy and tact. Some of the chapters venture out to the
obscure borderlands of the phenomenal world where knowledgeoriented approaches encounter their limits, while others address
something we could call generative patterns, or, as the title suggests,
“igures of touch”.
ISBN 978-952-7131-45-9