Page 147 - Cyberculture and New Media

138 The Implicit Body
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accomplish it, fulfil it, and satisfy the intentional movement of a desire as the
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desire for presence.” The history of haptics reveals a similarity across
shifts in approaches; namely, the exposure of visible form to the incorporeal
look fulfilled by the promise of the immediacy of haptical intuitionism. 131
Even the great “idealist tradition” (from Plato to Berkeley, from Kant to
Husserl) relies on figures of touch as the assurance of access to immediate
presence. Pace Hansen, Nancy reads Western philosophy from Aristotle to
Merleau-Ponty to show how it has characterized and/or understood touch as
giving access to immediacy, as central to the provision of continuity and
synchrony. This tradition accords to touch “immediate external perception”
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and sets it up as “co-extensive with the living body.” Touch is then what
founds the two more objective senses; that is, sight and hearing.
In contradistinction to this tradition, Nancy, in his meditations on
touch as “syncope” emphasizes touch as deferral, as a technical supplement
(in the Derridean sense) in relation to bodiliness. In the haptocentric tradition
the assurance of touch is on the side of the act or the actual, and this
assurance institutes a resistance to the virtualization of touch. Nancy’s work,
on the other hand, explicitly intimates a thinking of the virtualization of
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touch. “There is no ‘the’ body; there is no ‘the’ sense of touch; there is no
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‘the’ res extensa.” Syncope allows instead the thinking of touch as virtual,
as partaking of an originary separation or spacing, or what Nancy elsewhere
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calls partagé (a sharing out at the heart of all self-relation).
Touch is, for Nancy, unparadoxically always a sharing and a
separation, it is an instance of both contact and difference. It is touch with
tact. We touch the limit of the other but the other is not immediately given to
our touch. Our touching does not fix and confer meaning - bring to presence -
the other as same, but is touching “in both a tangible and intangible sense, to
gain access to her specificity, to be exposed to it, to be affected by it and to
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respond to it, not to subsume or annihilate it.”
This is an aesthetic model of contact that rules out the “fantasy of
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immediacy.” Here neither the artist is inscribed within the work, nor is the
viewer-participant inscribed via the work - they are not touched/moved by the
work in the sense that they have accessed the heart of the work, or felt it in all
its fullness/presence.
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Touch is syncopated - interrupted - or exscribed. So too then,
Nancy writes the body as “being-exscribed” [l’être-excrit], not only
inscribed. The body comes to sense; it is not only an effect of signification.
For Nancy, writing (or in our case, interactive body art) “exscribes meaning”
and materiality every bit as much as it “inscribes significations.” It exscribes
meaning; that is, it shows that what matters “is outside the text, takes place
outside writing … to write [to interact] … is to be exposed, to expose oneself,
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to this not-having.” What is exscribed, this outside, is neither a referent nor
a material datum, nor is it the immanence of a thing-in-itself or the un-