Public Acts: Touch and the multitude

Through a series of readings and discussions, An Ungrammatical Multitude has been grappling with the challenges that the notion of multitude introduce to common understandings of subjectivity and action. Thanks to Christine's project Public Acts, we have stumbled upon the idea of touch as a valuable heuristic to continue thinking through these important themes. For what is a multitude without touch? Touching is an action, but one that complicates individualistic notions of constrained agency. Non-physical touch, which must be bracketed in order to imagine the multitude's constituents as singularities, precedes the will to be one or many; materialised touch, in turn, defies in a strict sense the monologic separation between toucher and touched.
Public Acts invites us to reconcile the politics and poetics of this everyday act/term. We wish Christine all the best with her project.

Thoughts on "touch"

We met today (August 4, 2006) to discuss the term "touch" as part of our participation in Christine Shaw's project, Public Acts.

In typical Ungrammatical Multitude style, our conversation ranged far and wide, considering the term in various ways as well as mulling over several possible courses of action. We considered hosting events (e.g. discussions, parties) as well as engaging in different types of actions (e.g. guerrilla gardening, "flash-mob hug-ins") .

In the end, perhaps Sebastian put it best - our inability to come up with a concrete definition of the term or agree on an event of some sort demonstrated that our collective is not at a stage where we are prepared to speak with a single voice, even if only for the moment it takes to write a short article.

That said, our discussion did end with a plan of action: to write short entries as individuals regarding the term "touch" over the course of the week. Please add your thoughts as comments to this posting.