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THE DEEPEST SENSE
A Cultural History of Touch
By Constance Classen
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03493-0
Introduction
THE INSIDE STORY
Among men it is in virtue of fineness of touch, and not of any other sense, that we discriminate the mentally gifted from the rest. —THOMAS AQUINAS Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima
Until the eighteenth century at least, touch remained one of the master senses ... It verified perception, giving solidity to the impressions provided by the other senses, which were not as reliable. —ROBERT MANDROU Introduction to Modern France
If a history could be written of touch, what would it embrace? Hot fire and cold wind, smooth silk and rough wool, spinning wheels and threshing flails, relics and frolics and the healing touch of a king? A world of meaning can lie within the simplest gesture, a kiss, or the touch of a hand. If such a history could be written, why hasn't it? Touch lies at the heart of our experience of ourselves and the world yet it often remains unspoken and, even more so, unhistoricized. Indeed, in many historical accounts the past is so disembodied that it appears little more than a shadow play, a procession of ghosts who surely never felt the pinch of a shoe nor the cut of a sword. This omission of tactile experience is noticeable not only in the field of history, but across the humanities and social sciences. It seems that we have so often been warned not to touch that we are reluctant to probe the tactile world even with our minds.
Touch—and sensory experience in general—is often downplayed or disregarded even within such fields as the history of the body or the history of medicine. (Compare, for example, the centrality of touch in Daniel Defoe's 1722 literary rendering of the Great Plague to its marginalization in recent historical accounts.) The decision to omit tactile data is probably not a choice contemporary historians have made as individuals. The decision would seem to have already been made for them by a general, unspoken consensus among academics.
We can find this attitude already in the historical writing of the nineteenth century when the notion that "high" culture requires the suppression of the "lower" senses was formalized. Touch was typed by the scholars of the day as a crude and uncivilized mode of perception. In the sensory scale of "races" created by the natural historian Lorenz Oken, the "civilized" European "eye-man," who focused on the visual world, was positioned at the top and the African "skin-man," who used touch as his primary sensory modality, at the bottom. Societies that touched much, it was said, did not think much and did not bear thinking much about—except perhaps by anthropologists. To achieve respectability, societies needed to be seen to have risen above the "animal" life of the body. To achieve respectability, historians had to show that in their work they had done the same.
The potential benefits of reversing this tendency are considerable. Exploring the history of touch makes the past come alive. It clothes the dry bones of historical fact with the flesh of physical sensation. Sensuous history is more interesting and more memorable. An embodied approach saves historical figures from being perceived as lifeless puppets who move across the stage of the past without any real feelings. When we allow historical figures to be of flesh and blood we make it possible to relate to them as fellow beings and, therefore, to make meaningful comparisons between their lives and situations and our own (see Hoffer 2005: Introduction).
The ways in which sensuous description can make history—and indeed any cultural account—come alive might in itself be enough to justify the historical study of touch. Yet, however valuable this descriptive dimension may be, it cannot in itself reveal the significance of touch in other times and places. To understand the sensory life of a society one must look at the cultural values that inform its ways of sensing the world. The history of the touch involves not just a search for experience, but for meaning.
In this book the quest for tactile meaning begins in the Middle Ages. The reason for this is that the early Middle Ages was often included among the "uncivilized" hands-on societies that did not bear much thinking about. This was a time when, it was said, "Europe lay sunk in a night of barbarism which grew darker and darker ... a barbarism more awful and horrible than that of the primitive savage, for it was the decomposing body of what had been a great civilization" (Briffault 1919: 164). The very use of the term "Dark Ages" to refer both to the centuries immediately following the fall of Rome and to the entire medieval period conveyed the notion of an age when people groped about blindly, feeling their way through life. Indeed, according to this sensory classification of historical periods, it was only in the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century age of reason, that the light of learning finally dispelled the shadows of past ignorance and enabled people to think clearly about the world.
The term Dark Ages, with its pejorative connotations, is no longer generally used by historians, who now concede that, though most of the medieval population may have been unlettered, they were not intellectually benighted. In the words of the eminent historian Keith Thomas, "It would be utterly wrong to think that [premodern] illiterates lived in some sort of mental darkness" (1986: 105). Early admissions that the darkness of the Middle Ages was pierced by a few rays of light have led to assertions that the Middle Ages had its own "enlightenment(s)," prefiguring that of the eighteenth century. In recent decades so much work has been done on the cultural achievements of the Middle Ages that the period might now be said to be positively basking in the sun.
Despite all of the recent scholarship on the Middle Ages, there nevertheless remains much to be learned about the tactile values that shaped the sensibility and sociality of the period, the embodied life that so repelled earlier historians that it seemed akin to savagery. By exploring the corporeal sensations and symbols of the Middle Ages, The Deepest Sense attempts to both give readers a feel for medieval life and to demonstrate the social and religious centrality of touch during this formative period of Western civilization.
The emphasis in much of the present book is on the persistence of collective practices and beliefs involving touch over the longue durée. At points throughout the book and specifically in the last chapters, however, the reader's attention is directed to the interplay of tactile practices and cultural change as the West undergoes its long transition from the structures of medieval life to those of modernity (here used in the sociological sense to refer to the period beginning with the eighteenth century). Among the subjects considered are the decline of the medieval "tactile" cosmology, the development of a culture of comfort, the "discovery" of the nervous system, and the industrialization of touch. As the reader moves through the book from topic to topic and from period to period the plot thickens and broader issues of social control and representation come to the fore.
The eight chapters of the book explore different tactile realms, from the feel of the world to the (dis)comforts of home, from the rites of pleasure to the disciplinary uses of pain, and from the gestures of faith to the postures of the drill. Each chapter provides a general overview of its subject matter together with intimate accounts of tactile experiences. Where citations are made from medieval texts, translations or modernizations have been selected that give a good "feel" for the original. Reading through poignant descriptions of the devastation occasioned by the Black Death in the fourteenth century or the harsh conditions of nineteenth-century prison life, we find that history, far from being a dry and lifeless subject, touches us to the quick.
To some, exploring the history of touch may seem like an attempt to reassert old stereotypes of earlier periods as crude and unenlightened—as dark ages. However, it is precisely this engrained association of touch with irrationality and primitivism that must be overcome before one can appreciate the tactile values of any particular period. As regards the Middle Ages, it bears noting that many people of the time were proud of the accomplishments of their age and quite ready to use tactile metaphors to express it. The eleventh-century Abbot Guibert of Nogent, paraphrasing a biblical text, declared that "our little fingers are thicker than the backs of our fathers," to signal the superiority of his own period (Guibert of Nogent 1984: 10). A medieval critic of the later gloomy assessment of the age might well have responded like one of the characters in a seventeenth-century play by Shadwell: "I am not so dark either, I am sharp, sharp as a needle!" (1927: 263).
If the aim of the history of touch is not to denigrate premodernity as a primitive world of mindless sensations, neither is it to romanticize it as a purveyor of warm tactile experiences in contrast to the cold visual values of modernity. The intention is rather to explore how the corporeal practices of any particular period relate to the cultural context of the time, and how this relationship changes under the influence of new factors. As the following chapters show, touch does not simply recede from cultural life in modernity, it is reeducated, and while it retreats from some domains, it expands into others.
The topic of touch is, of course, capacious, and the first question to ask before undertaking its study is what one means by touch. While the sense of touch may be most closely associated with physical contact, it can also include sensations of heat, pain, pleasure, and movement, among others. To the extent possible, I have tried to consider a range of tactile sensations in this work, while at the same time taking into account those aspects of touch that were of particular relevance in the periods under study.
Touch is not only highly complex in itself, it is also closely related to the other senses (as well as to the emotions). Indeed, all of the senses can be, and have been, thought of as having tactile dimensions—even sight involves eye movement. It is not my aim here to try to disentangle tactile experience from its multisensorial context, but rather to foreground sensations that have customarily been understood to be so basic to bodily existence that they have been taken for granted.
The Deepest Sense does not intend to offer a comprehensive history of the culture of touch. There are, inevitably, gaps in the material covered—tactile, cultural, and temporal. The historical investigation I have initiated here might be taken backward to antiquity or forward to the present day, or across to other cultures. It might be fleshed out—reshaped—in numerous ways by further research. While I have done my best to produce an informed and thought-provoking guide to the tactile past, the exploration of past worlds of touch provides more than a handful for any historian.
I have generally given less attention to topics that have already been the subject of extensive research, such as the history of sexuality. On the other hand, I have developed areas that thus far have received little consideration within the history of the body and the senses, such as the relationship between humans and animals. While I refer to scientific theories of perception within their cultural context, I do not try to employ modern data about the physiology of touch to explain the practices of the past. Sander Gilman has noted that works on touch tend "to return over and over again to the physiological 'realities' for their understanding of the history or culture of touch" (1993: 198). This remains the case today when concepts and conclusions drawn from neuroscience tend to creep into, if not dominate, cultural investigations of the senses across the humanities and social sciences. Yet to rely on science for a true understanding of perception is both to disregard the ways in which science is itself a social construct and to detract from the significance of culturally specific models of sensation.
The history of touch presented here is grounded in the work of the Annales School, which aimed to broaden our understanding of the past by investigating collective beliefs and practices within their social, physical, and economic environments. One of the founders of that school, Marc Bloch, explored medieval structures of corporeal behavior and social organization in works such as The Royal Touch (1973) and Feudal Society (1989). Another of its founders, Lucien Febrve, provocatively suggested in 1947 that "a series of fascinating studies could be done on the sensory underpinnings of thought in different periods" (1982: 436). Other Annales historians—such as Philippe Ariès, Robert Mandrou, Jacques Le Goff and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie—would take up the challenge, at least in part, and bring perception into the historical domain. The first full-length history of the senses, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, was written by Alain Corbin (1986). This seminal work was later followed by an influential exploration of the significance of sound in nineteenth-century rural France titled Village Bells (1998; see also Corbin 1995 and 2005).
Some sixty years after Febvre first called for a historical investigation of perception, work on the history of the senses is flourishing. The most recent books on the subject include Robert Jütte's A History of the Senses (2005) and Mark Smith's Sensing the Past (2007), along with a number of specialized studies (e.g., Woolgar 2006; Cowan and Steward, 2007; Nichols, Kablitz, and Calhoun 2008; Schleif and Newhauser 2010). When it comes to works on individual senses, however, there is a marked disparity in the amount of scholarly attention each has received. While the cultures of sight and hearing have been the subject of numerous important studies, much less has been said about the senses of smell, taste, and touch. Yet the so-called lower senses have not been left completely unhistoricized. As regards the history of touch, works dealing with issues in the field include Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle's (1998) examination of the significance of hands and posture in the sixteenth century, Laura Gowing's (2003) study of women's corporeal experience in the seventeenth century, Elizabeth Harvey's (2002) anthology of essays on touch during the same period, and my own edited collection of writings on touch in history and across cultures, The Book of Touch (Classen 2005a). Mark Paterson (2007) has recently explored the history of philosophical treatments of touch and its relevance to the haptic technology and digital culture of the present day. While not explicitly on touch, Stephen Connor's Book of Skin (2004) reminds us that the cultural meanings and sensory qualities of the human skin are multifold.
Along with the work of the Annales historians, another formative influence on this book has been the methodological approach known as the anthropology of the senses. In the 1990s Canadian anthropologist David Howes, along with others, advocated that attention be paid to how sensory experience is collectively patterned to shape people's understanding of and interaction with the world (see Howes 1991; 2003; 2005). A knowledge of the groundbreaking work of the anthropology of the senses is now essential for any one wishing to explore the life of the senses in cultural context.
A distinguishing feature of an anthropological approach to the senses is that it makes it possible to transcend the bounds of language. The historian of the senses undertakes what could be called deep anthropology, seeking the unspoken messages of our bodies and exploring our most intimate relationships. Often people, particularly in societies that feel no compulsion to "put it all into words," don't talk about their experiences. A lack of words, however, does not mean a lack of feelings or of social significance. Many feelings are difficult to put into language, they are too subtle or too powerful or too complex. The anthropology of the senses sensitizes us to the multiple ways in which humans communicate and express themselves through nonlinguistic modalities.
Historians, unlike anthropologists, must rely a great deal on texts for their material, though an exploration of the visual images and material artifacts of the period under study can contribute enormously. Even when dealing with texts, however, those who seek sensory references will find plenty to occupy them. Take for example, the following passage concerning the life of the castle and the countryside written in 1518:
Whether perched on a peak or situated in a plain, the castle was built not for pleasure but for defense, surrounded by moats and trenches, cramped within, burdened with stables for animals large and small, dark buildings for bombards and stores of pitch and sulfur, swollen with stores of armaments and machines of war. Everywhere the disagreeable odor of powder dominates. And the dogs with their filth—what a fine smell that is! And the comings and goings of the knights, among them bandits, brigands and thieves. Usually the house is wide open, because we do not know who is who and do not take much trouble to find out. We hear the bleating of the sheep, the mooing of the cows, the barking of the dogs, the shouts of men working in the fields, the grinding and clatter of carts and wagons. And near the house, which is close by the woods, we even have the cry of the wolf. (Ulrich von Hutten, cited by Braunstein 1988: 540).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE DEEPEST SENSE by Constance Classen Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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