Falling into extremity

Patricia Cahill

pp. 82-101

in: Lowell Gallagher, Shankar Raman (eds), Knowing Shakespeare, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

There is no such thing as "the sense of touch"; there are only senses of touch. As philosopher Mark Paterson argues, touch must involve much more than tactility or the receptivity of skin surfaces to pain, pressure, and temperature: it must also embrace proprioceptive matters such as one's awareness of balance and of bodily movements through space (2007: 3–5). Touch in this more capacious register may be described as "haptic," a word defined through its Greek etymology as meaning "able to come into contact with" (Bruno 2002: 6). To engage notions of the early modern haptic may appear anachronistic, for the word entered the English language only in the late nineteenth century as part of a specialized psychological and linguistic lexicon — the wider currency it has recently achieved in aesthetics, film theory, and architecture has to do with the modern science of haptics, which focuses on simulating touch and touch-based interfaces in virtual worlds. It is nevertheless true that early modern culture, no less than our own, recognized the entanglement of tactile and proprioceptive knowledge.