In the first part of this interview (October 2014), David Parisi spoke of the sense of touch as being at the basis of almost every use of media. At the same time, he reviewed the history of haptic apparatuses, highlighting the remarkable lack of theoretical engagement with this topic. In the second part, he presents different varieties of “touching from a distance” and suggestions for a politics of touch.

Christian Höller: Our culture seems strangely divided on the issue of haptics. On the one hand, the tactile is seen as a sort of guarantee of the real, of authenticity, that cannot be produced in any other sensory area (think of the expression “to be touched by something”). On the other, we see touch, when it means direct contact, as something dangerous that contains within it the potential destruction of both the toucher and the touched. How does this dichotomy manifest itself in present-day hi-tech media environments?

David Parisi: Do we have to consider these two strands as being necessarily contradictory? It seems to me that both of them are always interwoven in tactile communication. One of them emphasizes the possible rewards of touching, while the other points out the risks associated with these rewards. But ultimately, these narratives (like most narratives about our senses) are culturally driven. We should rather ask ourselves to what extent tactile media possess the potential to give these narratives a different direction.
As far as the first strand is concerned: just as the reproduction of images and sounds has changed seeing and listening – indeed, physiological knowledge about possible ways to deceive our aural and visual senses has influenced the design of media apparatuses – haptic feedback devices confirm the idea that the sense of touch can also be deceived, that the haptic system can also be fooled, if there is enough knowledge about the psycho-physiological processes behind the production of our mental images of haptic space. But the sense of touch retains its cultural status as a guarantee of the real because the media that could deceive it are not yet as advanced as those that trick our eyes and ears. However, this does not mean that the sense of touch has to lose this status as soon as its reproduction in media is far enough developed. Instead, we should recognize a certain historical contingency in its cultural standing.
In the case of the second strand, that of possible destruction at the moment of direct contact, haptic interfaces try to alleviate precisely this fear by screening off the touchers from the touched and packaging the haptic system in a kind of sensuous armor. In the 1950s, American researchers tried a clever way to work with radioactive material. They designed robotic hands that could be used to touch the substances, with the operators sitting behind a protective glass screen. But to touch something without feeling it – manipulating an object without receiving any feedback from it – turned out to be a difficult matter; the operators mostly just groped around clumsily with these robotic arms. Finally, they built in pressure-guided feedback mechanisms that allowed touching and feeling without dangerous side-effects. Most haptic interfaces are based conceptually and technically on precisely this principle and filter the material that flows through them according to the same almost ideological selection criteria.

Höller: “Old media” such as radio were a technological means for “touching at a distance”, as Marshall McLuhan said in the 1960s. Do more recently developed media such as the internet or virtual-reality environments reduce this distance? Do they improve the use of tactility? Or do they increase this distance by making the sensory impression of touch even more transient?

Parisi: It is helpful here to distinguish between two meanings of “touch” that are different, though related. McLuhan often uses the term as a metaphor to describe a kind of affective inter-subjective contact. In a literal sense, though, the term means the physical, material contact between two subjects or subject and object. So it depends on whether we are talking about “touch” in the metaphorical sense – as in the famous advertising slogan inspired by McLuhan, “Reach Out and Touch Someone” used by the telephone company AT&T/Bell System.1 Or whether we mean the interaction with physically distant or virtual objects using electromagnetic extensions of our body.
I am more interested here in the first meaning: “touch” in the sense of an affective or emotional contact. I do actually believe that the internet, by virtue of the deeply personal and emotionally charged relationships that can be produced on line, allows the same intensive “touching at a distance” as older media did. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, online communities such as Usenet and reddit, dating services such as OK Cupid and Tinder,2 even communication practices such as “sexting” – all of these testify to the fact that people feel connected and “in contact” in some valid way.
But the popularity of these applications can be interpreted less favorably, as the philosopher Richard Kearney recently did in a New York Times editorial entitled “Losing Our Touch”.3 In it, he maintains that digital contacts are extremely inadequate and incomplete imitations of the kind of emotional reactions that arise from real contacts. According to Kearney, these applications remind us of a body that has simply been pushed into the background by the dominance of screen-based interpersonal relationships. Here, the second meaning of “touching at a distance”, that is the real physical contact, comes into play again: the Hug Shirt from CuteCircuit or iFeel_IM by Tachi Lab,4
which users can employ to send each other computer-generated hugs via SMS. These are attempts to simulate physical contact between people separated in space, based on the assumption that words, images and sounds cannot easily replace the feeling of a hug. There are also “Teledildonic” devices such as the Sinulator, RealTouch or cybersex versions of the Falcon by the company Novint,5 which allow intimate forms of touch at a distance. Richard Kearney would be certain to object that all these interfaces continue the process of alienation from our bodies, but I am interested less in this claim as such than in the methodology with which the interface designers have tried over the past 40 years to overcome physical absence by means of haptic surrogates.

Höller: For some time now, haptic interfaces have been playing an important role in military technology, where “touch at a distance” takes on yet another, completely different meaning. “A military tactility shields the touching subject from feeling the touched object,” you write in one of your essays.6 How is that to be understood, exactly?

Parisi: By reconstructing human senses in a selective and strategic way, interfaces screen users from the painful or undesirable aspects of the environments they simulate. Like all media, interfaces extend or reinforce the human senses, but they do it in an extremely fragmentary way. In Paul Virilio's book War and Cinema, he maintains that the closed cockpits of military planes numb the pilots' senses and “technically isolate” them from their environment.7 The interface thus shields the pilots from the impact of their actions and makes it possible to strike at a distance, with the pressure-proof cockpits ensuring their safety. The command centers from which American drone pilots guide missile strikes on remote continents should also be seen as continuing on from earlier attempts to cope better with the psychological stress that war inevitably causes. However, the “remote-control cockpit” generates its own forms of mental stress,8 as pilots have to acquaint themselves with new challenges and demands on their attention.

Höller: What do yo think are the main aspects of a “politics of touch”, if there is such a thing at all? What role would the technological simulation of the sense of touch play in it?

Parisi: I think there is a “politics of touch” - in my view, it centers around the fundamental question of who may touch whom under what conditions. Perhaps a distinction should be made between a formal and an informal type of politics, particularly where violent or sexual contacts are concerned. In the case of formal politics, the state regulates and decides over the conditions applying to inter-subjective touch. With informal politics, these contacts are regulated by social norms and customs that define patterns of acceptability and unacceptability. The technological animation or simulation of the sense of touch makes possible new forms of touch, including the bridging of space and time. Just as with other technologies of perception, the appearance of new sensory machines will favor the gradual development of a new politics of touch, both formally and informally. The question of who may touch whom will be asked in completely different ways when we touch each other over great distances by means of haptic interfaces.

Höller: What will be the next steps of development with regard to such multi-sensory interfaces? Will the tactile area be integrated fully into the other sensory areas? Or will there be a reformatting of all the sensory spheres?

Parisi: It is of course possible to speculate on a fundamental reconfiguration of multi-sensory interfaces: by using haptic full-body suits,9 as were seen in the film The Lawnmower Man (1992); by connecting our brains to neuronal interfaces, as William Gibson describes in his novel Neuromancer (1984); or by means of perfectly synchronized tele-robots as in the film Surrogates (2009). But that would be a seductive, even techno-fetishist view of things, that implicitly evokes the dystopian, quasi-Luddite spirit underlying these texts. The paradigm of the brain-computer interface promises precisely this kind of reformatting, in which a direct transfer of signals from and to the brain overrides the mechanical confusion of individual sensory organs.
I rally do believe that the integration of the sense of touch into computer interfaces will continue gradually, or bit by bit, just as has been the case up to now. Owing to the huge number of touchscreens in use, the biggest advances can probably be expected in the area of improving vibration feedback. I don't completely rule out a radical shift towards more robust haptic interfaces – the reawakened interest in virtual reality and the fascination with full-body cybersuits are pointing in this direction – but this seems somewhat unlikely in the short term.
As a media archaeologist, I am more interested in the long-cherished hopes surrounding tactile feedback devices. Since the 1990s – and even before that, if you think of Maria Montessori's touch boards, F. T. Marinetti's “tactilism” or Aldous Huxley's “feeling cinema” – the assumption has been that the development of haptic interfaces was directly, or indeed almost inevitably, imminent. This indicated a profound discomfort with the status quo of computer interfaces; haptic interfaces seemed an apt way of rehabilitating a body that had been alienated from media technology or of enhancing the feeling of immersion in media simulations. All of this is in keeping with the logic of an analogue form of mediatisation in which a technically upgraded sense of touch regains the central position of which it had formerly been stripped; media apparatuses will enable it to overcome space and time just as in the case of seeing and hearing. It is true that the technological knowledge needed to make this possible is growing more and more refined – there is a stream of new information about how the human haptic system functions, but also what the software and hardware for simulating it should be like. Microsoft, Sony, Apple and Disney, as well as small companies such as the Immersion Corporation invest a lot in developing and patenting haptic devices.10 What ultimately makes haptic technology so fascinating (and perhaps so seductive) is the uncertainty surrounding its future development. It promises a departure from the dominance of the audio-visual in conventional media; it possesses the potential to diminish the physical distance between people and remote places; and it is possibly capable of reconfiguring the aesthetics of media simulations.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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