ON TOUCHING:
THE ALTERITY WITHIN

Karen Barad, Hold Me Now – Feel and Touch in an Unreal World, Netherlands
2018, 59 min 02 sec

Studium Generale Rietveld Academie invited Karen Archey, Mark Paterson, Rizvana Bradley, and Jack Halberstam to each inaugurate a discursive and performative programme on how the haptic – relating to or based on touch – is thought and experienced artistically, philosophically, and politically in life, art and design, and theory.

“Situating the body as itself a project of crafting, making, building, and unravelling, the ‘Reach Out and Touch’ talks and performances explore the physics of touch, gestural repertoires of grasping and feeling, the aesthetics of the handmade, the limits of sensory perception, the social dynamics of bodily regimes of doing, making, and exploring. In addition, we will think about the haptic body in time and space. For Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in The Undercommons (2013), hapticality is a way of being in relation to the now, the touch of the present as it holds you. They define ‘hapticality’, as ‘the touch of the undercommons, the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here.’ These concatenating feelings – sentiment, touch, sense – arrive at a place that is now and here, close at hand. The philosophy of the now, for them, is a philosophy of feeling. On this day, at this event, we will all be or become ‘philosophers of the feel’. Participants Karen Barad, boychild, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Mel Y. Chen, Paul B. Preciado, Jeanne Vaccaro.