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Touching technologies, touching visions. The reclaiming of sensorial experience and the politics of speculative thinking

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Abstract

The sense of touch is being revalued in disparate places, from cultural theory to expanding markets of haptic technologies. In this paper I explore the potential of thinking with literal and figural meanings of touch. My standpoint inherits from discussions in feminist knowledge politics and constructivist conceptions of science and technology that problematize epistemological distances – between objects and subjects; knowledge and the world; and science and politics. In this direction, touch expresses a sense of material embodied relationality that seemingly eschews abstractions and detachments that have been associated with knowledge-as-vision. Engaging speculatively with experience, knowledge and technology as touch, I explore the differences made by touching visions.

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Notes

  1. I thank Rebecca Herzig for bringing Dumm's work to my attention.

  2. http://www.toltech.net: last accessed 10 October 2008.

  3. BBC News, DATE http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7654878.stm, last accessed 10 October 2008.

  4. FORTIS bank, Brussels 2008.

  5. BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7174333.stm, last accessed 10 October 2008.

  6. See Laura U. Marks (2002, Chapter 7, The logic of smell) for an account of attempts to commodify the yearnings of our nostrils.

  7. The Economist, 8 March 2007.

  8. For an overview of applications see Eurohaptics: http://www.eurohaptics.vision.ee.ethz.ch; about adding touch perceptions to training in laparoscopic surgery, see: Basdogan et al (2001); about how a ‘hapstick’ enhances video billiard games: http://www.vrlab.buffalo.edu/projects_haptics/hapstick; as for haptic cybersex, the fantasy seems still to exceed actual implementation or significant research.

  9. http://www.tactiletechnologies.co.za/why-touch.htm, last accessed 10 October 2008.

  10. I thank Rebecca Herzig for suggesting this point and providing references.

  11. For a creative approach to the crafts of virtual handling and grasping as well as to knowing as embodiment, see Natasha Myers’ work on the relations of scientists with computer protein models (Myers, 2008).

  12. That reminds the haptic quality that Deleuze and Guattari attributed to (nomadic) art, when perception and thinking operate in smooth spaces for which there is no pre-existent map (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, Chapter 14).

  13. I learnt about politeness as a political art of distance and proximity with Deleuze's Pericles et Verdi (1996). Haraway also insists in politeness for living well in interspecies relating (Haraway, 2007, p. 92).

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Puig de la Bellacasa, M. Touching technologies, touching visions. The reclaiming of sensorial experience and the politics of speculative thinking. Subjectivity 28, 297–315 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.17

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