TACT Webinar (Touch, Arts, Affects) - 3rd series
Convenors: Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle, IUF) and Rachel Aumiller (Radboud)
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Wednesday 5 February (5pm-6.30pm CET)
Marit Grøtta (Oslo): “Touching Photographs: The Role of Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf”
In the writings of Proust, Kafka, and Woolf, we find numerous scenes in which the characters look at portrait photographs in affective ways. They engage physically with the pictures, touching them and kissing them. Yet these scenes are ambivalent; they also depict feelings of frustration and highlight the challenge of relating to a visual “double”. This talk discusses the haptic dimension of portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf and the “love of the medium” in modernist literature. The aim is to understand how portrait photographs brought about new way of relating to others. A key idea is that the touch is crucial for the experience of analog photographs, whereas the digital pictures surrounding us today to a lesser degree invite touching. The talk is based on my book, Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
Respondent: Carole Maigné (Lausanne)
Link: meet.google.com/ovg-zfyr-myg
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Wednesday 12 March (5pm-6.30pm CET)
Àger Pérez Casanovas (Barcelona): “Touching Access: A Deweyan, Sensorial Approach to Disability Justice Groups”
This paper reimagines disability justice activism through the overlooked yet powerful lens of the sense of touch. Grounded in Dewey’s social theory and Disability Justice principles, it argues that collective access—conceived as a deeply embodied, sensorial phenomenon—shapes group formation and democratic engagement. Drawing on nonvisual artist Carmen Papalia’s “open access” manifesto and his touch-centered Pain Pals project, alongside Amanda Cachia’s curatorial activism, the analysis challenges traditional notions of normativity as abstract state impositions on bodies. Instead, it posits that democracy emerges from a collective sensory regulation among bodyminds that honors every individual’s access needs. By foregrounding tactile experiences, this work reveals new dimensions of political participation, suggesting that the very act of touching becomes both a metaphor and a concrete mechanism for inclusive, embodied activism.
Respondent: Vivienne Matthies-Boon (Radboud)
Link: meet.google.com/zsx-zszt-jui
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Wednesday 9 April (5pm-6.30pm CET)
Erica Fretwell (Albany): “Out of Touch: Towards a Haptic Episteme”
The haptic is a term with a distinctly slippery texture: a perceptual modality (coined by psychologist Max Dessoir in 1892) tactile in nature but irreducible to touch; the visceral surplus of affect (Tina Campt); fugitive sociality (Stefano Harney and Fred Moten); a queer historiography (Elizabeth Freeman); the embodied copresence of image and viewer (Laura U. Marks). While these various accounts fruitfully pressure the conflation of modernity and visuality, this talk attempts to collate the nineteenth-century historical conditions – including the invention of embossed print type for blind readers; psychophysical studies of the senses; the rise of the object lesson in pedagogical theory – that made haptic perception a thinkable concept in the first place. Building on the scholarship of Mark Paterson and David Parisi, this account sketches out an “aesthetics from below” (Gustav Fechner’s term) that tethers the fin de siècle psychology laboratory to the Montessori classroom as a space for experimenting with the haptic foundations of knowledge and, conversely, the epistemological contours of hapticality.
Respondent: Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne)
Link: meet.google.com/aoa-vgab-qok
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TACT (Touch, Arts, Affects)
The goal of the TACT network (Touch, Arts, Affects) is to interrogate the experience of touch in works of art and to explore the diversity of haptic affects across artistic media. With speakers from various disciplines and areas of expertise, we intend to discuss the elusive tactility of the arts in relation to technology, science, ethics, politics, and everyday life.
Though long considered as a minor sense, touch is now reclaimed as the “first sense” (Fulkerson), which defines intersubjectivity from embryonic formation to social interactions. The main hypothesis of this seminar is that touch constitutes a primordial dimension of aesthetic experience—and cannot, as such, be reduced to the language of affect. When texts, films, dances or performances touch us, how do they mobilise and mediate haptics—even when there is apparently no actual contact? Didier Anzieu’s psychoanalytical concept of the skin-ego, theorised after Freud’s early work on “contact barriers,” revalued the epidermis as a founding affective boundary. The recent discovery of C-tactile afferents in neurobiology has subsequently renewed the understanding of “affective touch” (McGlone), now conceived of as a physiological category distinct from discriminative touch. In dialogue, but also in contradistinction with the science of affective touch, this seminar defends the ability of the arts and the humanities to register tactile experiences and affects, to retrace their genealogies, and to imagine haptic futures.
The singularity of the tactile sense lies in its reflexivity—one is touched when one touches (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty). Focusing on the ethics and politics of this chiasm, this seminar foregrounds the ability of haptic aesthetics to disrupt and remodel relationality. From Marinetti’s utopian “Manifesto of Tactilism” to Jan Švankmajer’s tactile collages, from the transgender craft of “the handmade” (Vaccaro) to “touchscreen archaeologies” (Strauven), from the “shared motricity” of contact improvisation (Bigé) to the body-centered medium of performance, touch produces aesthetic dissensus and reconfigures communal sensorialities. But tactile experience also materialises acute forms of vulnerability—“hapticality, the touch of the undercommons” (Moten and Harney). Haptics alerts us to shared conditions of exposure and embodied forms of exclusion, even as it opens up concrete modalities of care (Puig de la Bellacasa).
The third series of this seminar will more specifically address touch in literature, photography, disability aesthetics, pedagogy, and psychology. As such, it will engage with multiple “senses of touch” (Paterson) and varying degrees of haptic presence and absence across media. In our economic and technological “age of excarnation” (Kearney), what can the arts and the humanities remind us about our own skins?
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Works cited
ANZIEU, Didier, The Skin-Ego, 1985, trans. Naomi Segal (London: Carnac, 2016).
BIGÉ, Emma, “Sentir et se mouvoir ensemble. Micro-politiques du contact improvisation,” Recherches en danse [online] 4, 2015.
FREUD, Sigmund, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters, Drafts and Notes to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1902, ed. M. Bonaparte et al. (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 347-445.
FULKERSON, Matthew, The First Sense. A Philosophical Study of Human Touch (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2014).
HUSSERL, Edmund, Recherches phénoménologiques pour la constitution, Idées directrices 2 (Paris: PUF, 1982).
KEARNEY, Richard, Touch. Recovering Our Most Vital Sense (New York: Columbia UP, 2021).
MARINETTI, F. T., “Manifesto of Tactilism” (1924), Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009), 264-69.
McGLONE, Francis, et al, “Discriminative and affective touch: sensing and feeling,” Neuron 82.4 (2014): 737-55.
MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice, Le Visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 172-204.
MOTEN, Fred, and Stephano HARNEY, The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013).
PATERSON, Mark, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects, and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
PUIG DE LA BELLACASA, María, “Touching Visions,” Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 2017), 95-122.
STRAUVEN, Wanda, Touchscreen Archælogies: Tracing Histories of Hands-On Media Practices (Lüneburg: Meson P, 2021).
ŠVANKMAJER, Jan, Touching and Imagining, An Introduction to Tactile Art (London, I.B. Tauris, 2014).
VACCARO, Jeanne, “Handmade,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1-2 (2014): 96-97.
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Contact : caroline.pollentier@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
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With the support of Institut Universitaire de France.