Per-forming the Sense of Touch: A Spatio-Temporal Embodied Technology of Resistance

How does resistance and struggle arise and from where? What embodied mechanism and social conditions allow for thought to be thought and for action to emerge? To what extent are movements and freedoms already ‘choreographed’ or pre-determined by regulatory bio(techno)systems and how can post-modern choreography incorporate the radical social shifts and conflicts of our times towards equally radical ‘post-safe’ ethics and practices? A historical, philosophical and psychoanalytical study of the senses with a focus on the sense of touch will aim to reveal the unexpected tactile dynamics of biopolitics (Foucault, 1979) and insert touch into the relational workings of post-capitalistic struggle. Expanded beyond mere contact, touch is posited as a pivotal socio-political instrument of regulation and orientation, and by deduction, an equally powerful mean of resistance. Using historical and contemporary forms of activism, this paper will assert touch as precursor to action in an event arising from the body. The lived body via the senses – of which touch is posited as the mother of all (Montagu, 1971) – is reformulated as a technology bearing and reproducing sensory values and hierarchies structured by ideology (Howes, 2005), therefore as historical and subject to change and intervention rather than physiologically stable entity (Duden, 1991a). Here, the sensual body is boldly re-drawn as wilfully trans-forming, of itself and social relations at once.