Touchlessness

The problem then is not exactly the prioritization of intimacy over remoteness, but rather the disqualification of remote intimacyTherefore, in relation to the sensing layer more generally, positive biopolitics must collapse the dichotomization of interpersonal and infrastructural modes of sensing. We must see them instead as mutually reinforcing.

What’s striking … is the apparent shift from a politics of reason to a politics of experience… In the eyes of many, personal experience has become the new way of being at home in the world. It’s like the bubble that holds the foam at a distance. Experience nowadays trumps reason… We’re led to believe that sensibility, emotions, affect, sentiments a... See more

Jean-Luc Nancy, commenting on “touch and touchlessness,” describes how all touch is ultimately and finally touchless, that touchlessness is the basis of our intimacies. As we view a grid of hundreds of viewers in a videoconference, where voices and images of faces surely touch all of our ears and eyes, he reminds us how even the most intimate encou... See more

His most emphatic point is that we are touching and being touched constantly, and thus mediation is not a secondary condition of our embodiment, it is the condition of our embodiment.

Looking toward a post-pandemic politics, the problem of over-individuation within the systems we use to model ourselves is compounded by the physical isolation each of us experiences in extended rhythms of lockdown. The situation has brought new cultural and interpersonal realities, many of them unfamiliar and uncomfortable, such as the tense chore... See more

This context of touch and mediation between bodies and persons in the fulfillment of social encounters had become invisible in conventions like handshakes, which today seem inappropriate. If before touch was not seen as something that needed to be so deliberately calibrated, that is no longer the case. The touch-fulness of these touchless encounter... See more

How, when each of us is forbidden to touch, can a renewed sense of our biopolitical entanglement emerge? It may come through a recognition that societal care is not only a personal, face-to-face, and skin-to-skin experience, but something that also happens at a distance, through impersonal systems upon which each of us relies. These too are social ... See more