‘Let us be in touch.’

I could start with this phrase: ‘Let us be in touch.’

There is a delicate invitation and a dangerous promise in hold here. It unravels if you allow yourself to linger. In this slow, aimless lingering, the expression ‘let us be in touch’ tumbles into a rabbit-hole of questions: What does it mean to say, ‘let us be in touch?’ What does it mean to be in touch? What is (the nature of) this being that emerges in touch? How does it emerge in touch? How is this being different from the one that is not in touch?

Let us be in touch: Who do we address when we say ‘let us’ – who is the subject of this transitive here? From whom is this permission and opportunity for touch sought?

If you trace the history of the verb ‘touch,’ you reach the old French ‘tochier’ from the late 13th century meaning ‘to touch, hit, knock; mention, deal with.’ From around this time, it comes to mean ‘bring into physical contact; come to rest on, border on, be contiguous with;’ and ‘mention or describe’ – which are the ways in which we use the word today. In the 14th century its connotations suggesting ‘having sexual contact with’ first surface. Interestingly, this reference to touch as sexual touch is also coupled with another meaning, one which is now in disuse: ‘to get or borrow money’ (Touch, Online Etymology Dictionary).

Tracing these etymological turns, one notes the various functional locations touch comes to occupy as its connotative and denotative meanings continue to shift. To be in touch with someone conveys the sense of communication. To say touché is to acknowledge a hit, a mode of attack in fencing an argument. To ‘lose my touch’ points to a loss of a skill, an aptitude, a distinctive style. To be touched by something, by a gesture or by some words for instance, is to be moved, a feeling akin to gratitude. To be untouched is to be in one’s original, primary state, but to remain untouched is to fail to be affected. And then again, to be ‘touched in the head’ is to be decidedly strange, odd, not normal.

Words travel in mysterious ways.

Signing a question (Ode to Derrida)

When our eyes

touch

Is it day

or is it night

 

When words roll off

as you speak

and I taste

rose petals in my mouth

Am I listening

or are we kissing

What makes touch (into) care and what makes it (into) eros?

Touch, it appears, is always in the danger of being too much or too little, too coercive or too reticent. Thus, the presence of so much regulation to secure it to its proper place, if ever there was one. It cannot easily be said whether touch is inside or outside. Is it on the skin, or is the skin only a medium for a deeper sensation. One brings to mind Merleau-Ponty’s famous illustration of one hand touching the other, the hand felt from within, but also accessible from without, tangible for the other hand, ‘its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate.’

We speak, after Freud and Derrida, of tact – making contact through words – words that can reach out delicately, that can touch and transform. When I think of touch, it seems self-evident. Fleeting, ephemeral and yet as incontestable as the fact of my breathing. Touch poses for me not a problem of truth, but one of language. Language, in turn, poses a problem of truth.

This transformation of the subject of touch into the subject of language is what the work of culture poses as a problem.

 

The making of the cultural sensorium is a saga starting with our earliest tactile experiences, foundational in so many ways, yet to a large extent no longer conscious to us. Our life begins in absolute merger with and dependence on the mother. The maternal embrace enfolds us in a soothing envelope of comfort and security. Her embrace is the crafting of our first skin that can contain unbearable states – states of hunger, of excitements, of waiting, of distress, states that cannot be communicated in words. The warmth and tenderness of her touch reassures us of a safe and benevolent world. Her coming and going, her presence and absence, will come to formulate our internal rhythm of the passing of time and our sense of the space in which we can play. For all of this, the mother has to feel supported in turn by the familial and cultural environment around her.

Psychoanalysis gives us to understand that the deep stirrings of fusion and separation that we will meet in our later loves mimics in some ways this first romance. Feeling held and fed and cared for by the nourishing other enables our minds to hold absence and to hold us in absence.

It is thus said of the psyche, that it is a relationship between two bodies, one of which is absent.

 

The life of the body continues to transform with age. As we grow out of infancy and childhood, our body comes to be disciplined in line with what our culture considers to be civilized. To be considered acceptable, the excitations and excesses of our bodily life must now be staged in accordance with the rules prescribed by sociality. These are the rules of social distancing and of erotic intimacies. Embedded in these rules, we learn to read intention in touch, we learn to distinguish between good touch and bad touch, and we learn what pleasures to keep intensely private.

The demands of modern working life require the body to be dematerialized and silenced, its pleasures deferred and its pains ignored. Marcuse (1970) notes that in the model of civilization that we subscribe to, a model that is necessarily historical but one that has been a historically universalized in the post-colonial frame, freedom is possible only on the basis of the unfreedom or suppression of the natural human instinctuality. Through this suppression we get transformed from the subject-object of pleasure into the subject-object of work, alienated from nature, from our own nature, and our capacities for enjoyment. Thus, happiness is always a pleasure whose gratification comes after delay that we must learn to tolerate in the form of unpleasurable work.

 

Freud, in formulating his idea of Eros, or life instinct, had used the term ‘sexuality’ in its broadest possible meanings to suggest the pleasures derived from the zones of the body. The idea of sexuality as genital, reproductive, private and monogamous is a historical fiction with its own story intertwined with patriarchy and capitalism. Marcuse suggests that since the individual is inherently sexual, it must be desexualized, for it to carry out the unpleasures of work. This desexualization is accomplished in two ways:

First, by regulating sexuality and governing what comes to be called as normal and normative, our early erogenous pleasures are expected to be sublimated towards higher goals. If we fail in doing so, these pleasures come to be seen as perversions inviting social censure. (For instance, daytime is associated with work, and nights reserved for sexual indulgences. And yet, in practice, more and more of our days and nights have become indistinguishable as work has entered home and ‘flexible work hours’ have eroded the separation of time reserved for work from that kept aside for leisure and other pursuits.)

And second, through the very institution of ‘love’ premised on an ‘ethical taming and inhibiting of Eros…’ such that the nucleus of society remains the romantic monogamous couple instead of other forms of intimacies including friendships and polyamorous relationships.

Our public lives – social and professional – place unceasing pressures and demands which force us to keep up by becoming automatons removed from our own thoughts and feelings. The privatization and universalization of our leisure-time activities further robs us of the psychic space in which we can process our feelings and recognize our experience. Little wonder then, that when we begin to become conscious of these thoughts and feelings, when we begin to connect to what our bodies are telling us, and re-member ourselves as sensuous beings, the emotional and psychological process is often complicated and we feel it akin to a kind of sickness.

‘Unwell’¹

All the world’s great work

is done

without ambition to excel

By people who proceed

unsung

and feel a little bit

unwell.

 

The neglect of the body and of sensuousness in mainstream academia and texts reflects a certain epistemology, which can be understood partially by turning to the history of western philosophy. The relative neglect of touch in the history of western philosophy has been noted by placing it against the background of the primacy accorded to vision. In both Plato and Aristotle, there is a relative privileging of sight as the noblest of senses, even as it is in Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’, that the sensation of touch is taken up in vivid detail. In classical idealist philosophy, sight is elevated to the status of the higher senses – those that are closer to the divine. By contrast, touch is denigrated as base, dirty, carrier of contagion. In Kantian Enlightenment, there is yet again an invocation of the sense of vision in the use of the metaphor of light, in a way that simultaneously imbues it with a symbolic and moral significance: Reason, ultimately, will allow us to ‘see’ the truth clearly.

In Psychology, the first formal attempt to study the somatosenses is made at the turn of the 19th century. This endeavour marks the beginnings of European psychology as a legitimate scientific discipline, separate from philosophy and its introspective method. The paradigmatic question for this newly emergent science is: What are the laws of the mind? Similar to Physics, which furnishes the laws of the natural world, Psychology sets out to outline the laws of the mental/human world.

The field of psychophysics appears promising as it seems to offer a formula for the relationship between physical stimuli and corresponding perceptual experience. The new science of psychophysics aspires to provide laws that would correlate the objective external world of stimuli with the internal human world of perception. As the excitement around this new scientific paradigm grows, the realm of individual experience – considered too subjective and too idiosyncratic for all of its specific history and complexity that complicates the scope for generalizations – is expunged from mainstream psychology. The experience of touch is replaced by the evidence of sensations. The quantification and measurement of sensory processes assumes greater significance than the reflection on the softness or hardness of touch and its associations with all things lush, ripe, coarse, grainy, pulpy.

 

On the margins of the world of psychology there is a different story that awaits. This psychology is not one that aspires to sketch universal laws of the ‘normal’ or ‘average’ mind, but one that dares to understand abnormality as a continuum with what is treated as normal. Its laboratory is the clinic. Its method is a hands-on practice that concerns itself with the inexplicability of the symptoms of the hysterical woman. Its site is the body that experiences pain for which no underlying organic causes are to be found. The body of the hysteric has the 19th century scientific establishment with all its paraphernalia of diagnosis and measurement foxed. It is only when a young physician decides to take the experience of the hysterical woman seriously that a new field of understanding human consciousness opens up. Psychoanalysis is born and Sigmund Freud’s first patient, Anna O., names it ‘the talking cure.’

 

The story of touch may well be a story of the state of our knowledge and knowledge systems and the value we place on hands-on experience. The Cartesian thinker is a thinker without hands. Rodin’s thinker, on the other hand, is a figure sitting on a rock, his chin in his hand, as though deep in thought. This is the figure often used to represent the philosopher: a representation of deep thinking in a gesture where the face is touched by the hand. If you pay the slightest attention to what is visible on the body, on the face, in the act of thinking, there is an interesting pattern to be found. Sometimes it is the play of fingers on the lips, in an unself-conscious way, a light brushing as the fingers appear to trace the texture of the lips while ‘the thinker’ herself seems elsewhere. Supporting the chin on the hand, as the palm cups and caresses the round of the cheek, is yet another posture that can be found in a state of immersion.

Rodin goes even further to suggest: ‘What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.’

Within psychoanalytic practice today, there is a near total prohibition on physical contact between therapist and patient. Touch is largely assumed to be invasive and transgressive. It is assumed to be rare, and certainly inferior to the verbal-symbolic register which is considered the hallmark of emotional maturity. While Freud had first begun his therapeutic practice with a technique in which he applied pressure by placing his hands gently on the forehead of the patient to release dormant memories, eventually he came to substitute it with the technique of free association. In free association, the patient is to say whatever comes to her mind, but touch between the therapist and patient is to be totally avoided, and abstinence is to be complete. It is understood that if there were any physical contact between the therapist and patient, then the particular dynamics of this kind of work – transference and counter-transference – would be compromised.

 

Part of what makes Freud give up this initial pressure technique and institute a taboo on touch has to do with the way in which the trappings of academic respectability at the time govern how science must be conducted. Freud has already opened up a can of worms with his audacious forays into the study of hysteria and sexuality. It is only by conforming to the established norms and regulations of medicine and science that he is able to distance himself from accusations of esoterism or, much worse, those of quackery. A total prohibition of physical contact between therapist and patient would supposedly ensure legal immunity in a situation of accusations of sexual abuse levelled by the patient.

In practice, however, occurrences of touch are not uncommon. A comforting pat, a friendly handshake at arrival or departure, even a hug sometimes, are more than occasional, yet they become wrapped in a neurotic shame and fear as now no one wants to talk about it. The presence of this repression in this setting produces a complementary incitement to discourse – either about the desire for touch and what it means, or about the anxiety and guilt that surfaces from transgressing the taboo.

For some, the touch taboo in the clinic strengthens the cultural dissociation from the body and its complex psychological experience that has to be carefully teased apart. And for others, it is in this electric awareness of its absence, the awareness of non-touch and all its charge, that the patient gets de-desensualized and over time rediscovers her sensuous self.

 

A young woman in her late twenties recounts how she was molested at a party, by her own friends, who took her state of inebriation to suggest consent. She recounts the details without emotion. It would be too horrific to feel, for feeling it would entail acknowledging her own trust in the world sundered apart. She is barely able to remember the long years of abuse at the hands of her lover, whose violence she bore and absorbed, she says, as ‘the burden of (my) Savarna guilt’.

A mother of two teenage children, working professional, enormously talented and ambitious, speaks of her sexless marriage. One evening after a bitter fight, the husband crawls into bed, insisting on getting inside her body without caring to know what is inside her mind. She ‘puts up with it’, confused about an act that is without pleasure, but the only one in which some tenderness of touch seems to come her way.

A single woman in her fifties writes with relish of her sexual escapades one night with a stranger half her age. ‘In the throes of insane passion, he cared to stop and ask if he could touch me before he proceeded to do so. Nothing has been sexier.’

In the psychoanalytic clinic when touch is placed in the binary of eros versus care, it begs the question of how this might overlap with the opposition of pleasure and safety that our gender system places on women, and the intra-psychic effects of the same. While the clinic needs to be experienced as a safe space for the woman, such that the infantile and non-rational parts of her sexuality can be explored, a blanket ban on touch or a suggestion that only the most regressed emotional state would justify physical contact paradoxically replicates a protectionist mentality in which the woman is once again denied any subjective sense of agency.

 

Academic writing reveals the same paucity about narratives of sexual and sensual pleasure in women’s lives as the general dominant culture. It is difficult to come upon academic texts, which present interesting and compelling narratives of a woman’s body as a site of her pleasures where there can be agency and choice. In writing autobiographical accounts of our experiences, the tension between honesty of expression and loyalty towards those whose stories are enmeshed with ours operates powerfully. The positive possibilities of wording and worlding our experience – articulation, exploration, reflection, play and re-creation of symbolic meanings – has to be carefully weighed against the social costs that make all such acts of disclosure highly vulnerable. We resort to pseudonyms and, like consummate ventriloquists, we create alter-egos that can speak our truth away from our body, hoping to reach and to touch hidden others.

We learn to hush up our passions and our laughs, anxious that in doing so we might betray our sisterhood with those that are more vulnerable. We worry if our abandon and ecstasies would be read as selfish insensitivity or disregard towards the pain of others. There is also the unease of the risks associated with losing the status of a ‘good woman’ – the woman who exercises proper control and vigilance in how she conducts herself as well as how she manages the desire of the other – a risk that is very real and very proximal when there is a social contract in which only ‘good women’ are entitled to safety. Reclaiming pleasure, then, is no less an act of revolution.

 

The cultural recasting of our sensuous lives in the binary of good touch and bad touch assumes that these experiences are flat and two-dimensional while overemphasizing the passivity and helplessness of the woman. The truth is that our lives, in their ordinary dailyness, are deliciously sensuous and the range of these pleasures extend to everything that enlivens the body to us, pleasures that extend beyond those imagined within the structure of compulsory heterosexuality.

Take the space of the home for instance. When domesticity is not coerced and imposed as a fixed gender role, there is a rich universe of sensations that resides here in all the tender comforts we create and want to nestle in. The kitchen is abundant with aromas and flavours that drench us even before the pleasures of orality come into play. Kneading dough can be delightful in its soft pliability as the flour yields to the gentle deliberate rhythm of the hands. My mother calls it ‘natural acupressure’. The resplendence of the bed that caresses our tired soul and lulls us into sleep is no less comforting than the restful maternal lap of our childhood or of the adult lover. The body itself unfurls as a surface of unexamined intensities where care and pleasure are no longer uncomfortable bedfellows.

 

Our sensual encounters with ourselves and with the other are curtains to an entire cosmos of experiences – relationalities that open up to us through the sense of touch and of non-touch.

It may, I suspect, well hold the key to our becoming human.

 

‘Losers Keepers’²

I may lose the taste for sugar,

for salt, I may lose the taste

for most of much. What I hope

keep, in its lack, is the sugar

and salt of the human touch.

 

Footnotes:

1. By Michael Leunig.

2. By Anannya Dasgupta.

 

References:

Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005.

Graeme Galton (ed.), Touch Papers: Dialogues on Touch in the Psychoanalytic Space. Karnac Books, London, 2006.

Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers and Charles Wolfe, ‘The Senses in Philosophy and Science: From the Nobility of Sight to the Materialism of Touch’, in H. Roodenburg (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance. Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2014. ffhal-02069998f

Thomas H. Leahey, A History of Psychology: From Antiquity to Modernity. 8th ed. Taylor and Francis, Florence, 2017.

Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia. Beacon Press, Boston, 1970.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1968.

Amrita Narayanan (ed.), The Parrots of Desire: 3000 Years of Indian Erotica. Aleph Book Company, Delhi, 2017.

Carole S. Vance (ed.), Pleasure & Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston and London, 1984.

Donald W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. International Universities Press, Madison, CT, 1965.