Hem / Att delta i NSU / Särskilda arrangemang / 2009 Touch


Nordic Summer University Research Group ”The Five Senses”
CALL FOR PAPERS Winter Conference in Turku March 20-22, 2009

Touch


Our culture is based on the visual. If asked to name one sense we could not do without, most of us answer spontaneously: ”the sight”. This belies the fact that a great number of people live full lives without vision, whereas nobody can subsist without the sense of touch.

Touch is the most basic of senses: a sense we share not only with the animals, but also some plants. But what does touch mean to us? How is touch portrayed in the visual arts or the literature? What is the importance of feeling the coolness of the wind in one’s hair, or the smoothness of a baby’s skin under one’s palm? Can one truly love someone and not want to touch the object of one’s love?

Cultural historians have described the recent interest in the human senses a ”sensual revolution”. Together with members of other disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, historians have begun mapping our sensual world. Their attention has turned from sights and sounds towards less explored realms of sensory experience.

”Touch”, Winter Conference of the Research Group ”The Five Senses” of the Nordic Summer University, welcomes you to take part in a revolution within a revolution. The aim of the conference is to examine the sense of touch and the meaning of our tactile experiences from an interdisciplinary perspective. For this purpose, we invite papers discussing touch not only from the historical point of view but also papers approaching the subject philosophically or from the standpoint of psychology.

Please send your abstract of 150 words to Anne Helness (anne.helness@ifikk.uio.no) or Anssi Hynynen (anssi.hynynen@abo.fi) no later than December 15, 2008.

The conference will be held at the Philosophy Department of Åbo Akademi in Turku, Finland, 20 - 22 March 2009. For the practical information about the conference, please contact Anssi Hynynen (email address mentioned above)

Welcome!

Abstracts


VS 2009 NSU

Andrej Slávik, “The touch of light: photography as a haptic medium”
Our culture is based on the visual, and the visual is frequently opposed to the haptic – just as theory is often opposed to practice, or thinking to acting. But is the boundary between the visual and the haptic really that clear? This paper will argue that photography, mostly seen as a paradigm of the modern hegemony of the visual, ought to be considered a haptic medium as well! Drawing on the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and the development of his concept of indexicailty in recent film studies, I will try to elucidate this basic point with Alain Resnais’ compilation film Nuit et brouillard (1955) as an example.

Andrea Hynynen, ”Touch and sensuality in Marguerite Yourcenar’s prose fiction” I will be discussing the importance of the sense of touch for love and sensuality in literature, paying particular attention to how the French author Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) uses touch and tactility in her depiction of love and/or eroticism. According to Louis-Georges Tin (2008: 147), love is most often linked to the sense of sight. Desire is often provoked by visual beauty, as the cliché “love at first sight” illustrates. Love is also communicated through the eyes, by the way of looks, and glances. In his book leurs yeux se rencontrèrent – la scène de première vue dans le roman (approximately “their eyes met – the scene of the first sight in novels”) Jean Rousset (1984) studies literary scenes of lovers’ first meeting. Their first sight of one another is a crucial moment in love stories, and it sets the scene for the rest of their relationship. In Yourcenar’s novels, however, touch is almost as important as sight for interpersonal relationships. Although physical beauty, which appeals to eyesight, is essential for her characters’ erotic desire, her protagonist Hadrian claims that even the most basic emotion ends or begins in physical contact (Mémoires d’Hadrien), whereas the young musician Alexis’s homosexuality is intimately connected to his hands (Alexis ou le Traité du vain combat). The most important erotic metaphor in Anna soror… is a foot. In fact, all of Yourcenar’s characters show a strong interest in the body, and therefore touch becomes an essential element of any sensual and/or erotic relationship.

Marit Steinsli, “Å berøres av den indre og den ytre virkelighet – forholdet mellom det inderlige og det sanselige i Søren Kierkegaards tenkning om høreselsansen”

Aksel Øijord, “A philosophical argument providing that the haptic sense is not directly informative of the dimensions breadth, length and depth” Position is a feature of dimensionality and it is a general rule that it cannot be more than one quality in the same position. A quality is a homogeneous unit, which first of all implies that a quality is a numerical one, and if a quality, together with other qualities, constitutes a positional system, it follows that no other quality shares the same position. A position is namely a relation between some existing qualities; it is not an independent place that can be filled, just as we imagine is the case with a position in three-dimensional (empty) space. I will argue that feelings of touch fall short in manifesting such a positional system.

Olli Lagerspetz, "Att känna sig fram. Känselsinnet som sanningssökande sinne"

Avsikten är i korthet att diskutera kontrasten mellan känselsinnet, uppattat enbart som det sinne som förmedlar förnimmelser på hudens ytor (och alltså ses som väsentligen passivt), och känselsinnet som innefattar rörlighet och utforskande. Psykologen J.J. Gibson kommer 
att vara aktuell i beskrivningen av det senare perspektivet. Den allmänna tesen är (förhoppningsvis) att alla sinnen väsentligen är utforskande, och således uttryckligen sanningssökande.

Ida Antonie Lerfald, “The liturgy of seduction: Unexpressed desire in Kurt Weill/Berthold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera” This paper examines the literary and theatrical motif of seduction in Weill/Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. The main discussion is how this motif is being used, its purpose and effect, and how it relates to conventions, context and gender. In The Threepenny Opera, the body forms a subject-object-relation, which makes it both the senses foundation and at the same time, its object. The play’s main character, Polly, both has a body and is a body. This ambiguity is being made visible through the fact that Polly not just senses the world, but also herself. – And she senses herself as a sexual subject. This tension in Polly is played out on stage, and the motif of seduction is therefore not just manifested in Polly’s relation to her husband, Macheath, and the other characters, but also through the audience: The Threepenny Opera is characterized by a “play within the play”. By looking at the staging of the body, this paper will argue that The Threepenny Opera invites to a meta-theatrical consciousness on the meaning of role playing to sustain gendered stereotypes. In The Threepenny Opera, gender is first and foremost related to what we do, and not so much who we are. I will illustrate this through Foucault and Butlers theories on gender and sexuality, Baudrillard’s thoughts on seduction and Goffmans theory on role playing. My assertion is that desire and seduction cements in the tension that forms between the theatrical and the meta-theatrical.