Laura Marks: Haptic Visuality
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Haptic visuality: In Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Marks defines, among other kinds of hapticity, 1) haptic, which is associated with the tactile, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic senses; 2) haptic visuality, an expressive mode in which “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch”(not actual touching) resting on the surface of images “rather than plunging into depth” (2, my emphasis, 8); 3) haptic cinema, often do to a lack of distinction in the image, “do not invite identification with a figure [secondary cinematic identification] so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between viewer and image [dynamic intersubjectivity produced through the senses]” (3); and, 4) haptic criticism, a methodology of interpreting images that is “mimetic . . . presses up to the object” creating a robust movement between “sensuous closeness and symbolic distance” (xiii).
In general, Marks recognizes a problem in writing about visual culture—which she refers to as an act of translation. Too often, she notes, critics use preconceived theories to address film and video rather than letting the visual arts generate theory particular to its own constraints. Turning to Walter Benjamin’s concerns about the “basic error of the translator,” she writes, “We critics cherish our ideas and forget that they become hard tools that chip at, or merely glance off without ever touching, the surface of the other. But if we measure with more delicate tools, fashioned for the occasion, our critical activity becomes less a hacking away and more a sort of precision massage” (xv). She develops the interpretive model of haptic criticism, the corollary of haptic visuality, to offer a more embodied form of film analysis. Haptic criticism (like haptic visuality) offers a method of sensory analysis that does not depend on the presence of literal touch, smell, taste or hearing, but the affective solicitation of these senses. Marks derives her haptic criticism from a reading of the haptic in Deleuze and Guattari. For Deleuze and Guattari, the haptic defines “smooth space,” a spatial zone that “must be moved through by constant reference to the immediate environment . . . . Close-range spaces navigated not through reference to the abstractions of maps or compasses, but by haptic perception, which attends to their particularity, their specificity” (xii). Deleuze and Guattari distinguish smooth space from striated space: They write, “It seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space. The Striated, on the contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space – although the eye in turn is not the only organ to have this capacity” (xii). While these two spaces differ fundamentally in nature, they in fact exist constitutively. Smooth space is occupied by intensities and events; that is to say, a vectorial space rather than a metrical one inhabited by packs and nomads. Striation seems to be, at least in part, the effects of technological mediation resulting in quantities as opposed to qualities. In striated space, one closes off a surface and "allocates" it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one "distributes" oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of one's crossings. These two functions, allocation and distribution, serve as the organizational principles of smooth and striated space. Following this analytic, Marks writes, “The haptic critic, rather than place herself within the ‘striated space’ of predetermined critical frameworks, navigates a smooth space engaging immediately with objects and ideas and teasing out the connections immanent to them” (xiii). Haptic criticism is defined by the distributed quality of gliding along the surface of the object of inquiry—what Mark’s at other times calls “unfolding” so as to “increase the surface area of experience” (xi)—rather than attempting to “penetrate or ‘interpret’ it” as is common in classical film theory. If criticism is observing something in order to form an opinion of it, haptic criticism observes in close contact with its object. This closeness or proximity is not an erasure of the distance of representation, but to slide between the registers of critical remove (symbolic) and nearness or nearby-ness (sensuousness). Haptic criticism is opposed to the notion that analysis merely bridges a chasm between thing and representation, rather it is a continuum between the two, with the possibility of “getting close enough to the other thing to become it” (xiii). “Haptic criticism is so sensitive to its object that it takes on a form of subtle complexity, building toward its object, brushing into its pores and touching varied textures” (xv). Criticism is the process of attempting to translate events, conceived in the broadest possible way, into verbal expression. The critic’s success is only asymptotic—at some point the interpretations necessarily lift off the surface of the object or event and begin to do the things that words do best. Whether or not criticism is “haptic,” is in touch with its object and bound in “connective materialism,” is a matter of the point at which the words lift off. Haptic criticism keeps its surface rich, textured, and sensitive to the particularity or “strangeness” of things and environments, so it can interact with them in unexpected ways. It has to be fungible, willing to alter itself according to what it is in contact with. All our senses rush up to the surface to interact with another surface; this isn’t a loss of difference, not a totalizing becoming (becoming with rather than becoming), but as Marks say using Deleuze and Guattari, a “plane of immanence” (x). When this happens there is a concomitant loss of depth—the critic becomes fractal-like, changing as the surface against which she slides changes. She cannot help but be altered in the process of interaction, giving up the notion that meaning is formed after the fact, and attribute power to create meaning to the interaction itself, a kind of differential becoming (becoming with).
I would extend Mark’s analysis with an ardent attention to materiality, the technological interface as part of one’s sensuous reach. Even the reproductions that you the reader are looking at are stratums of digitization, ink, publishing, and uploaded and downloaded filing. Moreover, and of central concern in this book, the refracting and diffracting principles of light in and through water are gathered up in this luminous interchange. Substantial elements spread across ecosystems of technology, people, knowledge production, copyright, and modes of production. So too are the legacies of perspective, beauty, captivity, and spectacle folded into this image.
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Seawater, seewater
Water? Shimmering, undulating, rinsing depth, how does one transmute water, that deep element, into language? Italo Calvino has said of its surface, “To describe a wave analytically, to translate its every movement into words, one would have to invent a new vocabulary. . . .” (1983: 17).[1] No doubt a grammar of liquescence would start by turning all nouns into verbs, an anthemeric language. You would need, constantly, the irrigating verb to make fluid. Liquefy, deliquesce, and liquate: from the first dissolve water seems to evade us. The various enunciations that we cup it with—poetics, symbolism, and empiricism—over-flow at contact.
[1] Calvino continues, “ . . . and perhaps also a new grammar and a new syntax, or else employ a
system of notation like a musical score or algebraic formulas with derivatives and integers”
(17).
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