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.
posted by Frank Zappatista @ 11:13 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Given my impending departure for Alberta, I will risk looking foolish, defy good academic protocol and dare to speak without having carefully considered each word. My apologies for its rambling incoherence in advance...
As is often the case when we pause for a moment to look carefully at the familiar and the seemingly concrete, today's discussion on "touch" only served, for me at least, to make the term more nebulous and strange. That said, I seem to be fixated not on the term's more familiar meanings like "contact", "tactility", "pressure", etc. all of which denote an aspect of immediate physicality. Instead, I'm drawn towards touch's more abstract sense, as in affect, to be affected by something. This was my immediate repsonse at our first meeting with Christine and it recurs today.
Even as we discussed possible events or actions to explore touch, physical contact of some kind, for me, remained a secondary concern, an aspect of a potential intervention but secondary to the affective dimension such an event or action might produce. That is to say, I wanted one of the effects of our activity to be the production of affect. But because it seems to me that all intervention produces affect, I was thinking of a particular form of affect.
I wasn't keen on participating in a public event (i.e. discussion, forum) hosted by Ungrammatical Multitude because I'm generally disappointed by them. In Jon's Spinozan terms (from an unpublished manuscript he shared with the collective), I find that most events of this nature generally have little positive impact on my capacities to act; instead they produce sadness, a diminished capacity to act.
I'm more interested in actions that have the potential of producing unexpected results, results that are more immediate - tangible effects, I suppose - and consequently seem more likely to extend my capacities to act - that is, in Spinozan terms, to produce joy.
My suggestions were two different guerrilla gardening actions that some friends are planning. Interestingly, Ted suggested that these interventions could be seen as moments of contact or touch with an urban environment. Aside from the obvious tactile nature of surreptiously planting cedar seedlings in an area once covered by a forest of adults, or flinging clay missiles filled with wild flower seeds into abandoned lots, he noted the broader impact of a return to the soil. That is, urban gardening might be seen as small attempts at transforming the city from a nodal point where inputs flow in and outputs flow out, to a closed circuit where inputs and outputs remain local (see Cuba's amazing return to organic gardening).
Such romanticism at midnight...
Our effects in actions of these sorts are marginal in the extreme, of course. And yet, the joy of taking collective action in our community serves to ward off in small part the weight of these dangerous times that threatens always to crush our capacities to act, remain hopeful and joyful.
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