Touch, by Richard Kearney (introduction)

Touch Richard Kearney

RECOVERING OUR MOST VITAL SENSE

Introduction Are We Losing Our Senses?

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grew up in a country— Ireland—where people only touched when they were either drunk (south of the border) or trying to kill each other (north of the border). So the joke went— though, fortunately, my own upbringing told another story. My mother’s people were called the “kissing Kinmonths,” as they were always, for some reason, kissing each other. And my mother was certainly true to her name, pouring abundant affections upon her seven children, her bedtime hugs— accompanying prayers— being positively Proustian in bounty. My father’s people were doctors through four generations, well known for their “bedside manner” and “healing touch.” Indeed, my grandfather earned the title of the “French Doctor” for his famous handshakes with patients. Apparently, the Irish assumed the French would do anything with their bodies, including shaking hands with people. My father and five uncles followed the medical vocation, as did four of my cousins and my eldest and younger brothers. I will

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return to “therapies of touch,” but suffice it for now to say I grew up in a very affectionate family where siblings, parents, and grandparents kept in close touch across generation, even as our surrounding Irish culture carried scars of historical trauma (famine and colonization) and religious stricture (Catholic Jansenism and Protestant puritanism). State legislation against contraception, divorce, and homosexuality was still, in my youth, symptomatic of a war against “sins of the flesh.” And frequent physical abuse in schools left deep wounds to be worked through.

While much has changed since, I can safely say that my own formative experience was a mixed bag of positive and negative, keenly felt.

But this is neither autobiography nor an anthropology of Irish cultural attitudes to the flesh. It is an essay for any interested reader concerned with the crisis of touch in our time— an age of simulation informed by digital technology and an expanding culture of virtual experience. My question is: are we losing touch with our senses as our experience becomes ever more mediated? Are we entering an era of “excarnation,” where we obsess about the body in ever more disembodied ways?1 For if incarnation is the image becoming flesh, excarnation is flesh becoming image.

Incarnation invests flesh; excarnation divests it. So, we ask, are we losing touch with touch itself? Are we in danger of forfeiting our most vital and indispensable sense? And if so, what can we do about it? The crisis of touch that epitomizes our time has, needless to say, been dramatically amplified by the “distancing” culture required by the COVID-19 calamity visited upon the planet in the spring of 2020 as I was completing the manuscript of this book.2 The

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pandemic eclipse of the tactile is a defining moment to which I will return in my conclusion.

But, right off, let’s admit the obvious: the Internet is an amazing, magical, fabulous, otherworldly, and weird invention. Few have felt its lure and not wanted more. It makes communication possible across impossible distances. It allows us to exchange culturally, socially, and commercially with all kinds of people in all parts of the world. It makes space plastic and time elastic. Social media platforms afford us unprecedented information, pleasure, and entertainment, offering a welcome escape from everyday pain, confusion, and boredom— and, above all, offering “connection.” The World Wide Web links us virtually with other people’s struggles and dreams in the furthest regions of the earth— as global solidarity movements show. The world is our oyster at the tap of a key. But a vital question arises as we travel this path of “hyperreality.” For all the extraordinary gains, are we not perhaps diluting our sense of lived experience? Losing our grip on reality— our basic common touch? As we increase our cyber connectivity are we not compromising our indispensable need for carnal contact?

Studies show that a primal hunger for soothing touch and proximity overrides even the most basic needs for food and drink.3 We know that without repeated touch, an infant will wither away; and that our skin—the largest organ of our body—is the way we wiretap into the brain and become healthier human beings.4 “Tender touch” alleviates anxiety, bolsters the immune system, lowers blood pressure, helps with sleep and digestion, and wards off colds and infections.

It feeds us body and soul. In short, tactile communication is absolutely vital to our physical and mental well-being.5

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So how do we get back in touch with touch? How do we return to our senses?

It is clear today that more and more of our existence is being lived at a distance—through social media and digital communications, e-gaming, e-mailing, e-banking, e-schooling, e- dating, e-sporting, e-hosting.6 Even global conflicts are now being waged vicariously through so-called psy-ops campaigns, online news flashes, and Tweets.7 Cyber politics is the order of the day, with national leaders passing from TV shows to the highest seats of power. (Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky were screen stars before becoming presidents.) And sex, the most intimate domain of touch, is increasingly mediated through online dating sites, sexting, and social media platforms; while pornography has become a $4 billion a year industry in the U.S., with porn sites receiving more visitors per month than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined.8 Meanwhile, the gaming industry grossed over 150 billion dollars globally in 2020, fast becoming the most popular form of human entertainment on this planet.

But all this should give us pause, for as cyber technologies progress, proximity is replaced by proxy.9 Our putatively materialistic world is becoming more immaterialized by the day, with multitouch screens serving as exits from touch itself. Indeed, it is ironic that the primary meaning of “digital” today refers not to our fingers but to cyber worlds— the virtualization of touch becoming a form of dactylectomy.

Not to mention the fact that while Americans check their iPhones a billion times a day, one in every five U.S. citizens suffers from a mental illness largely related to loneliness.10 The more virtually connected we are, the more solitary we

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become. We “see” brave new worlds but “feel” less and less in touch with them. Optical omnipresence trumps tactile contact.11 Cyber connection and human isolation can go hand in glove.

To cite one recent personal example: traveling to downtown Boston on a subway, I was struck by the fact that almost everyone aboard (apart from the driver) was “wired” to iPhones or iPads, oblivious to their fellow travelers and all that was going on around them. One passenger appeared anxious by what he was viewing online, another amused by a podcast she was hearing—but no one seemed aware of anyone sitting beside them or the physical landscape flashing by. Technology overcomes distance, but it does not always bring nearness.12 Our digital age of excarnation is suffering from an “epidemic of loneliness.” While we currently inhabit the most technologically connected age in history, rates of human solitude have doubled since the 1980s. In a recent survey, AARP estimated that 42.6 million American adults over age forty-five suffer from chronic loneliness; while a 2018 study

by Cigna, the global health insurance company, revealed that each generation, oldest to youngest, is more socially isolated, with the Greatest Gen and boomers the least lonely and millennials and Gen Z the loneliest.13 The more of our lives that we spend in front of screens, the more susceptible we are to depression. At the same time as social interactions become more virtual, there emerges another kind of isolation with serious ecological and climactic consequences—what nature writer Richard Louv calls species loneliness: “the gnawing fear that we are alone in the universe with a desperate hunger for connection with other

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life.”14 Louv argues that we need more contact not only with fellow humans but also with other-than-human kin in the animal and natural kingdoms. In addition to medical prescriptions we need “nature prescriptions.” Or, to put it in more contemporary terms, we need to evolve beyond the Anthropocene—marked by our technological domination of the planet—to a Symbiocene (from the Greek symbiosis, meaning “companionship”). Such a mutation, of body and mind, entails an ecology of mutualism requiring the transformation of technology in light of a renewed interaction with nature. The Symbiocene affirms the interconnection between human life and all tangible sentient beings, signaling a movement from the age of human exceptionalism to an age of holistic tactile communion.15 So is it not time to return to our senses? To get back in touch with ourselves and with others, reinhabiting our skins, reclaiming our bodies and emotions? Which does not mean—let’s be clear—turning the clock back to pretechnological times. There is no going back, even if we wanted to.

We must find new arts of touch and technology to meet the challenge of our age. A vital challenge we will return to in our final chapter.

This volume offers a modest proposal in three movements. First—we analyze our common understanding of touch as it pertains to the five senses. Second—we revisit formative wisdoms that have shaped our interpretation of the body in Western myth and philosophy and still inform much of our thinking today. Third—we explore ways to recover the joys of incarnation in a world where many of us have become distant from ourselves, virtually there while hankering to be here. Such recovery is urgent, given the

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contemporary phenomenon of “touch hunger”— a telling symptom of our basic human need to reconnect the virtual with the tangible. It is only when something is missing that we long for it again, when it is broken that we want to fix it, when it is threatened that we appreciate it for what it really is. Or, as Joni Mitchell sang: “Don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone?” (“Big Yellow Taxi”). What is touch? Where is touch? And how might we get it back again? Such questioning— dramatically exposed by the pandemic eclipse of the tactile— calls, I submit, for the cultivation of new arts of touch reconnecting us to each other in our digital age. Arts that solicit a renewal of our tangible experience— a reinvention of a community of bodies interacting with the World Wide Web. What I call a new commons of the flesh.

The present essay is a plea for healing in an age of excarnation, identifying some contemporary anxieties and hinting at possibilities of recovery. It is written in praise of the desire for tactile proximity with our fellows on this earth.

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“A fascinating piece of work by one of the most interesting thinkers of our age.” j Simon Critchley, author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

“In this openhearted study of touch, Richard Kearney leads the reader masterfully through thinkers past and present who have wondered deeply in response to the mystery of feeling things.” j Fanny Howe, author of Second Childhood and winner of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

“Kearney is acutely aware of how our digital technologies exacerbate the drift to excarnation in modern culture. This book casts much light on how we lost sight of touch—and might regain it.” j Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age

“Kearney writes with urgency, fluency, and commitment. He connects serious and complex thought to ideas on how we might live better in the world. His work arises not only from deep reading but also from a belief that just as philosophy comes from the world it has a duty to touch and transform its own source.” j Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn: A Novel

Richard Kearney holds the Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College. He is director of the Guestbook Project for creative peace pedagogy and he has written many books on the philosophy of imagination and embodiment, translated into over a dozen languages. His previous Columbia University Press books include Anatheism: Returning to God After God (2009) and Reimagining the Sacred (2016).

NO LIMITS Cover design: Lisa Hamm

Columbia University Press/New York cup.columbia.edu PRINTED IN THE U.S. A .

ISBN: 978-0-231-19952-0