Touch
It is difficult to touch the real, as was once said in the art world some time ago. From today’s perspective, however, it is even more difficult not to be touched by the real – in a more or less unpleasant way. The experiences of the last months and years speak their own language in this respect, even if this is mostly only unconsciously accessible to the feeling subjects. Touching and being touched, as much as they may seem like opposites at first glance, are possibly in a much more intricate relationship to each other than a clearly defined grammar of terms would like to admit. Perhaps this is one reason why one should start with the general term “touch” in order to make relevant derivations from it.
At first, it seemed as if – after the drastic experiences of lockdowns and social distancing – a need for closeness would increasingly emerge again in society. A need that ideally expresses itself in the touch of another person. However, after protection from touch has gained top priority in the context of the pandemic, concepts such as bodily integrity and identity have also experienced a recharging. In many cases, ideas that tend to be compartmentalized have been pitted against more open, fluid, or multiple concepts of the self – not without serious social and political consequences. Immunity, broadly understood, has thus become a kind of internal barrier that cuts across any form of community. Empathy, in contrast, can hardly be related to intimacy, tenderness, or emotional connection any longer. Performance, competition, compartmentalization and self-care, profoundly neoliberal concepts that already had high priority before, have once again been cemented as the guiding principles of society.
Even the newly strengthened talk of solidarity – especially in the wake of the war in Ukraine or the climate catastrophe – cannot change that significantly. It is true that the necessity of a common consciousness, of being close to one another in spite of all differences and oppositions, seems to be unrelenting. But when it comes to concrete steps on how to implement this closeness and common touching, whether in pandemic or climate matters (not to mention how to stop an unleashed warlord), real standing together quickly reaches its limits.
And yet: the problems surrounding “touch”, touching and being touched on different levels, should serve here as a trial balloon to tie in more comprehensive social and aesthetic dynamics. Andrij Ripa, for example, in his essay speaks of different levels of affectation in connection with the invasion of Ukraine. Starting from the tangible and life-threatening “touching” by an increasingly perfidious enemy, he tries to draw conclusions about a general economy of violence, which in its will to destruction is not far removed from historical patterns of “total war”. The extent to which aesthetic parameters are also affected by this, for example when it comes to giving this form of “being touched” an appropriate artistic form, also comes up in Ripa’s explanations.
More generally, the cultural theorist Karin Harrasser discusses the criteria of proximity and distance in the discourse on touch. The many ambivalences that come into play in this are just as much a topic as the fundamental aspect of vulnerability that inevitably resonates in any form of “touch”. Harrasser translates this into the idea of spaces that are not already fixed, but first have to be created, in which something like an equal, solidary touch becomes possible in the first place.
A kind of scientific underpinning to this is provided by Karen Barad’s essay, which explores the physical phenomenon of touch at the level of quantum field theory – one of Barad’s fields of expertise. The startling finding of her complex exposition: To touch an object in the world always means to get in touch with an otherness in oneself, thus to exceed one’s own sovereignty in the direction of alterity. This insight is underlined by the contributions of Anna Daučíková, Raluca Voinea and KUNCI Study Forum & Collective, which, in various combinations of artistic and discursive approaches, bring to light hidden aspects of the topic in question.
This focus is complemented, as announced in the last issue, by selected perspectives on documenta fifteen. The largely negative impact of the show on the German-language media world is countered by more differentiated perspectives here – or perspectives that have generally been neglected in the reception to date. Touch and touching, one might say, are here applied more broadly to the field of art criticism.
When it comes to touch, unforeseen sensibilities often stir. But haven’t emancipatory theories always regarded the outside less as a solidified boundary than as moving matter, animated by movements and folds that at the same time also form a kind of inside? Or, in order to be able to touch one another again in a sense of solidarity, is an even more profound ontological reorientation needed? Touching and being touched, as envisaged in the contributions to this issue, imply a reconceptualization of what matter does, or rather what matter is: a condensation of the capacity to react, to respond. In such a way, the attempt to rethink the relationship between physicality and cultural representation, as attempted here, also implies an active participation in the world’s becoming dynamic.