Mediating Touch, 2024 Continued Description

When, in 2022, we first approached the drawing board with the idea to devote the first LACE Symposium to the topic of touch, we did so with caution. Touch is simultaneously what every person has more than a lifetime of experience with and one of the most intricate, layered, sensitive, and delicate notions to theorise. Especially at the time when the West is struggling to reckon with the reasons why touch and touching continue to be readily associated with negative notions, such as exploitation and harm.

To study touch in its complexity and this contradiction that it exposes, we decided to shift our focus slightly. It’s inadvisable, after all, to stare directly at the eclipsing Sun.

In any challenging discussion that involves touching or touch, touch is frequently appointed the necessary source of all confusion. But what if touch and touching need not be the source of confusion? What if the source of confusion could emerge from the way touching and/or touch is mediated, communicated, observed?

If we are to assume that touch is what every person has more than a lifetime of experience with, we could decide that it is not the lack of experience with touch that anyone will be struggling with. Touch, as the assumption suggests, must be a deeply embodied and a necessarily intuitive technology. Furthermore, if we are to assume that touch is one of the most intricate, layered, sensitive, and delicate notions to theorise, we could decide that the reason for that is exactly in the fact that touch is a deeply embodied and an intuitive technology. And what do we know about embodied and intuitive technologies? We know that they are not compatible with linear technologies, such is language. Isn’t this why humans started dancing in the first place? Painting, singing, knitting, shaping clay? Because some experiential phenomena were simply too complex and too beautiful or painful to commit to linear time.

Perhaps what we’re looking at, in the attempt to resolve some of the issues that come from trying to talk about touching in public, is the coördination between how one communicates their experience of touching and of being touched – with themselves or others – and how that communication is being received, acknowledged, observed – by themselves or others.

This coördination — between one’s inwardly and outwardly, and between oneself and others — is what we suggest we study under the term mediation. Possibly what we suggest is to study mediation itself, and to study mediation first, as the condition that will eventually enable us to develop a more detailed discourse around the topic of touch as such.

At LACE #1, a variety of examples were observed that showed what mediating looks like, what it feels like, what resources it requires; and described what challenges successful mediating unearths in different and differently sceptical or hostile professional contexts. The Symposium itself, on multiple occasions, became an example of the challenge that comes with mediation and, in case of successful mediation, the challenge that comes with touch and touching, with coming to touch, and remaining in touch. We wish to further these efforts.

Touch is vibrant, touch is life. To stay in touch, just like Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, is to intentionally remain in-relation to flux, the chaos that comes with incoming stimuli. Life unedited, not-yet-compartmentalised. Un-comfortable. LACE #2: Mediating Touch wants to zero in on that experience and ask, What does it take to stay in touch, to remain in touching and continue to be touched? What does it take to actually stay with the trouble? To speak with the trouble and to listen with the speaking trouble? What does the discomfort of intentional staying-with in-time teach us? What resource does staying-with in-time requires? And why would we even consider investing in this troubling effort of staying-with in-time?

What’s at stake for us at this time is relational knowledge, that embodied order of knowing that emerges in relation, and states relation as the primary condition of its emergence. Relation, then, and staying-in-relation must be the condition for the future of body-based research, for the future of dancing and continued development of the field of dance-science. But relation is not only the condition of professional interaction. Relation is the condition of social interaction, and everything that social interaction leads to. Political, economic, local and worldly, interaction, i.e., community. What’s at stake for us at this time and forever more in this world is and must remain community.

Would you like to contribute to LACE #2: Mediating Touch and join our speculative effort to secure the future of community operated relational research? Please respond to our OPEN CALL! The deadline is January 19, 2024! For more information, please follow this link.