The Portal of Touch

Renaissance naturalists, repeating a belief inherited from Pliny and Ovid, claimed that a bear cub was born as a lump of flesh that was licked into ursine shape by its mother's tongue.1 While the myth exemplifies an extreme form of maternal touch, twentieth‐century scientific studies of animal behavior repeatedly demonstrate that nurturing contact between a mother and her offspring—behavior distinctive to mammals—is vital to establishing the physiological processes that sustain life in the organism. A mother cat licks her newborn kitten less to clean it than to stimulate its bodily systems; without this lingual touch, the kitten is less likely to survive.2 Psychosocial medical research, following H. F. Harlow's pioneering work on rhesus monkeys in the 1950s, extended this insight to human infants: babies deprived of touch because of hospitalization or separation from the mother showed deficits of intelligence, abnormal psychological development, and perhaps compromised immune systems.3 The media's coverage in 1990 of the plight of Romanian orphans under Nicolae Ceauşescu's regime brought the tragic effects of tactile deprivation to renewed and sensational public attention. Western culture's relatively recent recognition of the primacy of touch is striking because it stages a retrieval of tactility, foregrounding the importance of a sensory faculty that seems to have been lost or overshadowed by the other four senses. Throughout its history, in fact, touch has always been simultaneously the least and the most important of the five senses. The human sensory faculties of sight, smell, taste, and hearing are housed in elegantly concentrated organs in the head. The sense of touch, by contrast, is dispersed throughout the body. Receptors of touch—Meissner and Pacinian corpuscles, Ruffini endings, Merkel's disks—bound the body and organize its relationship to the ambient world through their delicate calibrations of pleasure, pain, weight, and temperature. The “medium of the tangible,” Aristotle proclaimed in De Anima, “is flesh.”4 Touch inheres in the body and is contiguous with its substance. Tactility is the essential sense, according to Aristotle, because it orients the body to qualities of temperature and texture that allow it to sense danger. All bodies that possess souls also have the faculty of touch, he argues, for “without touch an animal cannot exist.”5 More than any other sense, touch establishes our sentient border with the world. It is also the sensory faculty that shapes our social connections; it is primarily through touch that we form and express our bonds with others. Gestures of contact—a handshake, kiss, or caress—define the nuances of our relationships, the subtle inflections of class, power, and familial bonds. The social “tact” that regulates these interactions recognizes the incendiary power of sexual touch, even as it also affirms our fundamental need for human physical contact. The twentieth‐century acknowledgment of tactility's importance, however, is counterbalanced by warnings about the dangers of such illicit touching as incest, child abuse, and sexual harassment. Conflating touch with the flesh, as historical understanding of the sense does, exacerbates its ambiguous nature, its indispensability, and its hazards. Although haptic sensors congregate densely in such strategic locations as the sexual organs and the hands, touch, as the poet Phineas Fletcher put it in his seventeenth‐century allegory of the body The Purple Island, has “his abode in none, yet every place.”6 The history of touch is shaped by this anomaly of its corporeal distribution, of being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Embedded within the skin and the flesh, tactility is assimilated to—and often considered to be coterminous with—the body. The deep ambivalence about corporeality inculcated in Western culture through Christianity and Platonism thus also encompasses the sense of touch. In his great cosmological dialogue the Timaeus, Plato turns from his description of chaos, the primary elemental and geometrical bodies that make up the universe, to a discussion of flesh, the mortal soul, and sensation. Describing the body's phenomenological experience of heat, weight, roughness, and smoothness, qualities that orient the body to the world, he delineates the operations of touch without ever naming it. Touch for Plato is a quality of the flesh, a sensible apparatus that interprets the impressions around it. “That is called hard to which our flesh yields, and soft which yields to our flesh,” he says, describing the body's encounter with pliant and unyielding substances.7 The characteristics of the environment are named through their relationship to the sensing instrument of touch. If the body constitutes the world through sensation, the world also reciprocally establishes bodily coherence through that contact. Plato's imaging of the tactile flesh as a creative interface between body and world uncannily anticipates Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's description of touch as the double sensation: the hand embodies both the agency of touching and the receptivity of being touched.8 To touch is also always to be touched. While touch is for Plato fundamental to bodily experience, his ambivalence about its importance is registered through his refusal to name it, an elision that necessarily works as a kind of erasure. Crucial to human existence but invisible, touch is consigned to the first, and lowest, place in his hierarchy. Plato's ascending ladder of the senses—touch, taste (a form of touch), smell, hearing, and sight—established an order with long‐lasting metaphysical implications.9 The power of touch lies in its capacity to establish relationship, but this capacity depends upon the proximity, the contiguity, of toucher to touched. The relative supremacy of vision for Plato, by contrast, inheres in its ability to see things at a great distance: stars, the sun, the heavens. The sight of the alternations of night and day created numbers, Plato tells us, which gave us time, and the ability to inquire “about the nature of the universe.”10 When Plato speaks of sight as streams of vision “touching,” the beams are composed of ethereal streams of light, and they are far removed from the density of fleshly matter that characterizes touch. Whereas sight is associated with philosophy and transcendence of the body, touch for Plato is resolutely anchored in the sensible flesh. Plato distinguishes touch from the other senses through its capacity to produce pleasurable or painful sensation: an impression or touch that is contrary to nature (burning or cutting) provokes pain, and one that returns us to nature allows us to feel pleasure.11 Later iconic representations of touch depicted the poles of bodily sensation in images of tooth extractions, painful bites from parrots or falcons, flagellations, and naked breasts that promised the pleasure of sexual indulgence.12 Although Plato does not make the connection explicit, subsequent early modern thinking about the emotions tied sensation to the passions. In The Passions of the Mind (1601), Thomas Wright understood the senses and the passions as being bound together like “two naughty servants,” for the passions are “drowned in corporall organs and instruments, as well as sense.”13 The passions, aided by their “cousin german,” the senses, are the body's rebels, mutinous forces that must be controlled by the will and reason. If touch designates in its most literal sense a contact between bodies or objects, an abutting in space that produces feeling, it is also imbricated with the passions and the emotional states that come to define the self. We can observe this connection in a set of metaphorical connotations that pertain to the emotional life of human subjects: “to feel deeply” and “to be touched” are expressions that describe passionate or affective response. The OED's entry for “touch” is the longest in the dictionary. It catalogues early examples of the emotional valence of touch, which often begin with an impossibly literal description of interior contact, a physically invasive touch to the brain, the mind, or, most commonly, the heart.14 This semantic migration emerges in the early philosophical debates about the phenomenology of touch. Citing Aristotle and the Paduan anatomist Julius Casserius Placentinus, Helkiah Crooke, in his encyclopedic English anatomy Mikrokosmographia (1615), invokes the central debate concerning sensory perception: does sensation occur because the organ of sense acts upon an object, or is the object itself the agent, making the sense organ merely a passive recipient? Although Crooke ultimately reconciles his sources, arguing that sensation must be a complex mixture of action and reception, a dialectical interplay between the subject and the ambient world, he also suggests that “to perceive is a kind of suffering,” for “Sensation hapneth in that which is moved and suffereth.” Crooke is, of course, activating the ety‐mon of “passive” from the Latin passivus, “to be acted upon,” but his language offers a physiology of feeling that links the senses to the passions: the action of the senses is, he says, “a motien through a body which suffers in the Sensation.”15 Suffering turns out to be reciprocal, not unlike Merleau‐Ponty's discussion of mutual touching. For Crooke, sensation happens when the sense is converted into the nature of the sensible thing, in other words, through an alteration. The sensible object changes the sense, transforming it to its own nature, and it is this conversion of essence that causes suffering. The interface between touch as sensation and emotional feeling, a legacy that pervades the history of tactility and our everyday language, has been explored with great fertility by such psychoanalytic and philosophical as and In his psychoanalytic work The that the history of touching the and the qualities of his or her emotional us that development, the itself into the and the The the that the and the and we of the as in the body's both are of the To the is in the Western culture at the or the of a for essential and is thus to the has on the as the however, because it the of at the of which at the recognizes the essential that most the in the and of the human The as skin both are sensory of or us that have a which he to one as a and the other as a is a not of the brain, but also of the body's its interface with the Although Aristotle and early modern skin was a between the sense organ and the object of of touch, and which of its was the body's as a of or touch is a of the body's skin the and most essential organ of This is Crooke tells us, because everywhere the for the of the life of the the between tactility and is a for when the is in the of the not any thing, but yet of the sense of that he be to The delicate of thus the with the world. 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The of and up the of their public the a of their flesh. is a by to from a or which to the painful that from an of and it also to the of the skin in a of The of iconic of the within the the of and that is always of the history of touch. 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