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.
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Notes
On this point, see Jacobus: “Without breathing, one would not acquire the sensation of inhabiting the dimensionality of either space or time. For Anzieu, breath structures the third dimension, orienting the body and giving it a sense of volume, along with a psychical ‘sound-space’ within which there are rumblings, echoes, and resonances” (2005: 132).
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© 2010 Patricia Cahill
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Cahill, P. (2010). Falling into Extremity. In: Gallagher, L., Raman, S. (eds) Knowing Shakespeare. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299092_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299092_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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