Talk at GRAMA, July 8, 2021. I would like to thank Deanna Cachoian-Schanz for editing this paper.

Handling the Concept of Touch as a Tool

A short reminder about my approach to touch. I do not handle the concept of touch and contact primarily from the perspective of the senses. While touch cannot be disconnected from issues pertaining to sensation and perception, perception is not where I start, nor where I end. Instead, I use the concept of touch as a tool and, I should add, as an instrument—a useful distinction made by Gilbert Simondon. For Simondon, a tool prolongs the body to enable it to do something, to act upon the world (like a hammer), while an instrument prolongs the body to make something perceivable (like a telescope).[1] In my project, the concept of touch fulfills both functions.

Today, I will focus on the concept of touch as a descriptor for sociality. I will start by engaging with what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “Law of Touch” in order to then show, by following Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s description of the “experiment of the hold” in The Undercommons, how the technology of the hold, reiterated in the technology of the prison, violates the law of touch established by Nancy. This violation results in what Harney and Moten call hapticality, by which they describe a specific form of fugitive sociality. The horizon of my reflection and the aim of my presentation today is to start to understand how technology has the ability to violate the law of touch in specific ways and how this violation shapes sociality.

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Law of Touch 

In the first footnote of Being Singular Plural,[2] Jean-Luc Nancy acknowledges what he owes not only to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time but also to Hannah Arendt and her reflection on “human plurality.” Nancy’s text is, without a doubt, on more than one level indebted to Arendt’s political philosophy. Nancy takes on Arendt’s ethical emphasis on the singularity of each human being, while specifically focusing on their embodiment. For Nancy, each body is irreducible and absolutely irreplaceable. The “we” as the signifier of sociality does not rely for Nancy on a common human essence, or on a property commonly shared among humans. Instead, “we” solely consists in the “being-with-one-another,” a “being-with” understood as the sharing of and partaking in a common world. Nancy approaches sociality as ontology or the other way around: Being, das Sein, is nothing else than the being-with of human beings.

Nancy’s ontology of sociality is not, strictly speaking, anthropocentric. For him, the realm of beings who share a common world and that come into relation are “person, animal, plant, or star.”[3] Nancy’s ontology of sociality offers something similar to a relational ontology, even if not strictly so. Indeed, “Being” means “relationality.” In another words, Being is nothing else or other than “being-with.” The relation, however, does not precede the relata—contrary to the media anthropological approach of our graduate school or to new materialisms. Instead, Nancy conceives of the relation as contemporary to the terms it connects. This contemporaneity, also called simultaneity, is the result of touching operations: the touching proximity of bodies produces their contemporaneity. 

Touch and contact are used by Nancy to describe the structure of Being, which, again, consists in the relationship between human beings:

From one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity. There is proximity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasizes the distancing it opens up. All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation; moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other. Contact is beyond fullness and emptiness, beyond connection and disconnection. If “to come into contact” is to begin to make sense of one another, then this “coming” penetrates nothing; there is no intermediate and mediating “milieu.”[4] 

It is worth proceeding carefully while reading this passage. Following Nancy, touching always establishes a limit and thus the separation implied by this limit. Only bodies that are separated from one another can come into contact.[5] In his book Corpus, Nancy insists on the exteriority of a body towards another by taking on Descartes’ understanding of the res extensa as “partes extra partes.”  “Partes extra partes” designates the fact that bodies relate to one another through external relations and cannot occupy the same space at the same time. From this understanding, the law of touch is a law of separation. And this law expresses the ontological structure of the world, consisting of bodies external to each other, and whose boundaries touch each other. This touching proximity involves a contiguity between bodies—literally a “being-in-touch-with” (from the Latin contingere). Contrary to continuity, contiguity implies the differentiation of what comes into contact. The limit of what comes into contact is an in-between or spacing (espacement). This spacing, as Nancy pointedly insists, is not a milieu, however. It does not mediate. 

What Nancy names here “the law of touch” is the acknowledgement that there is only contact with the separation, and thus, the differentiation of what comes into contact. Apart from spooky phenomena in quantum physics described by Karen Barad, this seems obvious enough. Yet, the law of touch, as I interpret it, is not solely descriptive. It also entails an ethical dimension, by insisting on the impenetrability of the touched body—in other words, its inviolability. Additionally, it is an acknowledgement of the irreducible difference of what comes into touch.[6] Through touch, bodies converge indefinitely without ever overcoming their constitutive separation—this space in-between that refutes the immediacy that touching seems to promise. However, while touch, to Nancy, is not immediate, it is also not a figure of mediation either. Then what does the “in-between” of bodies signify? Literally nothing. I quote: 

If “to come into contact” is to begin to make sense of one another, then this “coming” penetrates nothing; there is no intermediate and mediating “milieu.”[7]

And further along in the book:

Here, on the contrary, it is a matter of mediation without a mediator, that is, without the “power of the negative” and its remarkable power to retain within itself its own contradiction, which always defines and fills in [plombe] the subject. Mediation without a mediator mediates nothing: it is the mid-point [mi-lieu], the place of sharing and crossing through [passage]; that is, it is place tout court and absolutely.[8] 

Nancy’s enigmatic description of the “in-between” as nothing or as a mediation without mediator may be related to Heidegger’s clearing (Lichtung) and Derrida’s spacing (espacement). Nancy’s law of touch first seems to imply a complete refusal of mediation. But after taking a closer look at the “power of the negative,” it becomes clear that his rejection of mediation relates to his associating it with the Vermittlung that characterizes the moment of sublation (Aufhebung) in the Hegelian dialectics. The movement of dialectics iteratively establishes through sublation the non-separation of what first seemed to be distinct. Sublation consists in the recognition of the identity of what first appeared different. It presupposes the distinction between subject and object, self and other in order to negate/keep this distinction in an identity of higher level. Rejecting the objectification and hierarchy between the self and the other tied to the Hegelian dialectics, Nancy describes the other as “one of us.” Without this “us,” that is, without the structure of the “being-with,” through which each and every body is “one of us,” there might be some body, but there is no self. In that sense, the relational “we” precedes and constitutes the “self.” The “in-between” is not a mediating element; it is the empty place for the encounter of bodies. 

While Nancy’s law of touch is explicitly anti-dialectical, I do not think of it as being incompatible with concerns around mediation and more precisely technological mediation. To show this, let’s take a closer look at one touching operation I am particularly interested in: the textual one. As a descriptor for the structure of being, the law of touch finds its typographic equivalent in the procedure of hyphenation—as for instance in “being-with,” or in “being-with-one-another.” Hyphens typographically express the “with” as the “essential trait of Being.”[9] 

The with is the most basic feature of Being, the mark [trait, Zug] of the singular plurality of the origin or origins in it… The “with” is or constitutes the mark of unity/disunity… It really is, “in truth,” a mark drawn out over the void, which crosses over it and underlines it at the same time, thereby constituting the drawing apart [traction, Zug] and drawing together [tension, Spannung] of the void.[10] 

Hyphenation—omnipresent in Nancy’s writing—replicates the law of touch, of separation, of spacing, by performing the discursive and conceptual conjunction and separation of the terms it puts in touch. A hyphen is the mark of “distancing, spacing, and division,”[11] which characterizes the structure of Being. At the same time, the hyphen holds close what it presents as separate.

One could ask Nancy the following question: what is spacing if not something very much technical—like a hyphen—or material—like the air between skins that touch. And what are both hyphens and air if not mediation and milieu? Can the law of touch be understood solely structurally? Or should it rather be understood in terms of medium and mediation? While Nancy’s law of touch establishes and confirms the boundaries, and thus the separation and the distinction between the bodies coming into contact, I seek in my work to emphasize how the technical occupation and/or shaping of the spacing between the bodies often violates separation and impenetrability. My work challenges Nancy’s idea that touching necessarily involves establishing a limit. I argue that touching operations can haunt, dissolve and/or reconfigure the very limits of the body.[12]

To show this, I now turn to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s discussion of the experiment of the hold—in other words the forced containment and transport of enslaved bodies—in their book The Undercommons. In my analysis of Harney and Moten’s text, I aim to show that the experiment of the hold is a technological operation, which systematically violates what Nancy calls the law of touch, destroying the kind of sociality attached to it.

Stefano Harney and Moten’s Hapticality and Love

Reading the works of Black Studies’ theorists Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, I understand the experiment of the hold as the negation of the “law of touch” and thus the negation of a sociality that is based, following Nancy, in separation, comprising the constitution of and the regard for the limits and the inviolability of bodies and which involves a sense of self-possession and sovereignty. 

The experience of the hold is the result of a complex technological apparatus that Harney and Moten call “logistics,” which violently forces upon the enslaved a proximity without distance. Logistics—etymologically the art of calculating (logistike)—is the field of study concerned with operations tied to the organization, control, and optimization of the movement of commodities, materiel, bodies, be it in the field of the military or of free market economy.

Where did logistics get this ambition to connect bodies, objects, affects, information, without subjects, without the formality of subjects, as if it could reign sovereign over the informal, the concrete and generative indeterminacy of material life? … Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against the Atlantic slave.[13]

The Atlantic slave trade is the first station in the development of logistics, whose goal is to do away with the Black subject, by connecting and “containerizing” all the components in the chain of production of surplus-value—be it human or non-human. Through their logistical handling, slaves are forced into the ontological status of the thing. I would argue that the reduction of the black body to the “concrete and generative indeterminacy of material life” has to do with the violation of the law of touch, made horrendously obvious in the diagrammatic representation of the hold. It is worth stressing that such diagrams are part and parcel of the field of logistics. 

The experiment of the hold is the experiment of bodies forced to an absolute proximity in the hold of the ship. That, which results from this violently imposed proximity—its “terrible gift”—is the production of what Harney and Moten name the “dispossessed feelings in common.” Such a feeling is usually an “exception,” an “aberration,” reserved, as Harney and Moten stress, to people functioning as medium: the shaman, the witch, the poet, “who feel through others, through other things.”[14] The experience of the hold generalizes a feeling that was only an exception before. This kind of feel is not grounded in the unifying function of a subject or a collective and sovereign “us” be it a settlement, a state, a nation. This feeling, born out of the violation of the law of touch, is a “feeling through others, a feel for feeling others feeling you” that Harney and Moten call “hapticality.” It is a feeling where one feels the other feeling oneself, as if the experience of the hold were reversing the directionality of the reflexivity of touch—feeling oneself in feeling the other—and thus interrupting the primacy of the body proper—contra Merleau-Ponty and a phenomenological understanding of touch.

Instead, hapticality is a feel that is felt beyond the limit of one’s own flesh; it seems to expend the limits of the flesh beyond any possibility of re-possession of the self. The hapticality advanced by Harney and Moten is a feeling beyond identification. Instead, it is a haunting feeling where one’s body haunts other bodies and is haunted by others, so that one is not one, not the singular, separate, distinct body described by Nancy. One is always more than one. The sociality that results from this “feel” is consequently different from the one portrayed by Nancy. This feel eludes its being reabsorbed by regulating instances like the state or the people because it neither individuates subjects, nor does it unite them in an experience that would transcend the feeling bodies. In addition, this feel does not produce the belonging to a unified space-time. On the contrary, as bodies haunt each other, the present becomes haunted by the past, the “inherited caress,” and the yet to come (“the feel that what is to come is here”).[15] It connects in a kind of synesthesia, the organs of touch with the inarticulation of breath and language. In hapticality, touch functions as a synesthetic operation.

Thrown together touching each other we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Though forced to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment, history and home, we feel (for) each other.[16] 

To feel for each other implies the reciprocity of feeling each other and the recognition of each other’s sentience, which was denied by the experiment of the hold. 

I understand what Harney and Moten call hapticality as the systematic negation and destruction of the in-between in which Hannah Arendt locates the political, or of the law of touch that Nancy sees as the condition for sociality. The same rule—the negation of the law of touch—repeats itself, in different places and times, violently enforcing the proximity of bodies through containerization. The forced proximity of bodies in prisons, or in refugee camps, replays, again and again, the logistical experiment of the hold. The destruction of the in-between is obtained by a technology or logistics of containment, by which bodies are literally handled, stored, and transported like commodities. “Forced to touch and be touched,” they are allowed to take up as little space as possible and forced to give up their sense of self. 

Where does this leave us? In my reading of Nancy and Harney and Moten, the law of touch and its violation designate technical operations of assembling bodies. The denial of spacing, in other words, of the law of touch in the experiment of the hold, results not so much in an immediacy as in the haunting relationship between bodies—a haunting that spectralizes and virtualizes the now, negating Nancy’s contemporaneity. Past, present, future are superimposed, occupying a place without spacing. 

Endnotes

[1] Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 2012), 161.

[2] Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

[3] Ibid., 20.

[4] Ibid., 5.

[5] Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 

[6] Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 23. In On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida insists on this in-between or spacing that he understands as Nancy’s ways of deconstructing the metaphysical conception of touch as immediacy and continuity. Cf: Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 137.

[7] Ibid., 5.

[8] Ibid., 94-95.

[9] Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 38.

[10] Ibid., 61.

[11] Ibid., 2.

[12] In this context, I mention Nancy’s concept of ecotechnie as the techne of bodies Nancy, Corpus, 88 f.. By that, Nancy means as Derrida understands it (Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 131) the intrusion of other bodies in the own body (transplant, prosthetics). I argue that this conception still belongs to a humanist understanding of touch.

[13] Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 92.

[14] Ibid., 98.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.