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Most people are dependent on physical contact for their survival and well-being. While a lot of information may be gathered by visual contact, most significant experiences involve physical contact—especially with another individual—coupled with the other senses. This chapter presents literature of significant theoretical perspectives with regard to touch. It also discusses theoretical issues, as well as the history of interest among psychologists and philosophers in the field of touch, especially on how it is exhibited by the blind. The study does not assert the sensory compensation hypothesis; rather, it claims that practice and relative familiarity matters. This chapter also discusses terms that will be used throughout this book: haptics, tactual and tactile. Haptics, referred to as active touch, are the normal circumstances where people actively take hold of an object to perceive it. Tactual and tactile are referred to simply as touch. Dynamic touch is another term presented, used to refer to cases when an instrument is used to examine the world. Finally, the chapter also gives readers a guide on how the book is organized.

This chapter explores the altered body maps of haptics and synaesthesia in short experimental films with spiritual and erotic material. It provides a critical analysis of several relevant films including Kenneth Anger's Puce Moment, Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man and Tony Conrad's The Flicker. The chapter suggests that films stimulate virtual sensation and induce affect by haptics and synaesthesia, and argues that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's reconceptualisation of the body as anorganic is both radical and contentious.

This chapter undertakes a tactile exploration of the sense of touch in modern American culture and religion. After briefly recalling the denigration of tactility in Western thought, the discussion considers the usefulness of the work of two theorists, Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin, in recovering the sense of touch—the intimate caress, the violent shock—as deep background for tracking basic modes of religious tactility. By paying attention to sensory media and metaphors, the chapter proceeds from cutaneous binding and burning to kinaesthetic moving and to haptic handling in order to enter this field of tactile meaning and power. Specific cases of tactility are quickly considered, including binding covenants, firewalking, flag burning, alien abduction, global capitalism, and cellular microbiology. By exploring the religious dynamics of the sense of touch, this chapter points to the presence of a tactile politics of perception circulating through religion and popular culture.

This essay analyzes visual perception under conditions of obscurity. It uncovers a pervasive lowering of the Sublime from its Burkean associations with an aesthetics of mounting terror, Kant’s uplifting starry heavens, and the vanishing steepness of Romanticism’s dim precipices. In contrast, our twenty-first century plummeting into inscrutability extends to the receding vistas of genetics and to the downward compression of information technologies in bottomless data mines. This essay inquires whether the reversal of the traditional emphasis on an upwardly-directed verticality might yet lead to a surface sublimity. This bringing of a corrective cognitive depth to the horizontal is already visible in skin-smart embeddedness, William Gibson’s locating of haptic presence within arcane and secret Japanese fabrics, or flush with Iris van Herpen’s polymaterials, or situated within the acoustic and chromatic digital effects of Tim Otto Roth’s interactive brandless art.

This chapter extends the sequential analysis of human action to encompass intimate co-operative action, accomplished through the haptic, temporally unfolding intertwining of multiple bodies. The focus is on the construction through public social practice of tactile intercorporeality. Within a basic social institution, the family, members make use of culturally appropriate tactile communication (including the hug, the kiss, and other intertwinings of the body) during moments of affectively rich supportive interchanges. Materials for the study are drawn from video recordings of naturally occurring social interaction in thirty-two Los Angeles families who were part of the UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families. Examination of forms of experiential embodiment is important for articulating the participation frameworks through which affectively rich intimate social relationships are established, maintained, and negotiated.