Last week, interesting talk by D. Mathiowetz at UCSC on “Haptic hierarchies”. How does hierarchy feel, especially luxury, and can one theorize luxury? Here is what I understood of the lecture, and some thoughts about it. From what I could gather, the project being pursued here is a radical re-examination of the metaphors that have long be used in political (con)figurations. Most evidently, shouldn’t the metaphor of seeing, which seems to dominate the discourse of politics and science be abandoned and replaced by that of touch, and touch be theorized (as well as smell and taste)? Note: I would add the sense of hearing, which leads to another kind of politics, but see further down on that one.
The language of luxury lost its religious force in the 18th century. Luxury used to be luxuria, extravagance, one of the capital sins in late antiquity’s lists. Luxury is not only a mark of surplus, but also something felt, haptic, connected to pleasure, the pleasure rising from the satisfaction of desire rather that from the plainer satisfaction of a need. If one is in great pain caused by an acute illness, does it make a difference to have silk pajamas on as well as luxurious sheets? Only 10 minutes after you get the morphine, I would guess [but if you have silk pajamas, chances are you also have access to a good health plan]. Touch rather than sight could be the driving sense. With that metaphor in the driving seat, one could imagine the rebuilding of a new political life that would incorporate pleasure in daily life: slow food movements, organic markets by the thousands, local health care…
To understand where this is going, I’ll have to read more on the project, obviously. In any case, after Castoriadis and others, I can see that ever since something like a surplus or abundance became a reality (i.e., a distinct plus, over and beyond the satisfaction of the basic needs of a larger sector of the population: in the late medieval period? early modern??), it became possible to theorize a lack or scarcity of resources and a super-abundance and infinity of desires. It began with various texts on the good usage of concupiscence in Renaissance times and culminated with Mandeville’s Fable of the bees, and Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand” (don’t look or touch, eh?). It also becomes possible to theorize luxury and pull some or all of it from the hell where it had been enviously consigned by all kinds of moralists until modern times. If the concupiscence of more and more agents is the driver of the cybernetically perfect machine we call the market or global economy, it stands to reason that luxury should be reevaluated. And if in the medieval to modern discourse on luxury, sight was the driving metaphor, whereas touch was devalued, perhaps it is a sign of the times that there are attempts to reverse course and expand our moral imagination.
But is the expansion of our moral imagination going to go towards the building of new forms of community, or is it going to be subsumed and consumed by new forms of capitalistic behavior? I can see the effort to transform housing, transportation, health, food in a “haptic” direction, to be a boon to new forms of distantiation of individuals from each other.
Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
From houses or hotel rooms which we order and “organize” by touching icons on a telephone, or the new organic and taste-your-food movements (“slow food”), to health care for old people done by very expensive robots that are substitute touching, feeding, watching machines, passing by…. I tend to think that greed will gulp and make its own all of these good intentions and feelings.
Touch and taste look like problematic political metaphors to me: how does one gather people around touch, taste, or smell? de gustibus non est disputandum. Mathiowetz referred in passing to the story of doubting Thomas in the gospel, in the context of the negative appreciation of touch. Yet, in the gospel of John, which is the most far-reaching in its use of rhetorical devices, the sense of touch is used in puzzling fashion. It looks obvious that touch is found wanting in the story of the resurrection: “Do not hold on to me,” (μή μου ἅπτου) Jesus says to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, and to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” So, yes, touch is devalued here. Yet, yet, there is this extraordinary story in the fourth gospel, during a meal:
Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ‘Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?’ (John 12.3–5)
A festive meal, the implied reader imagines, extraordinary perfume, this wiping of a man’s feet with a woman’s hair… and a message from the author about politics: there is a time for luxus, and a time for redistribution. But the fourth gospel’s main argument is that community can only be built and broadened around something that was once visible but is only accessible through trust in witnesses (by seeing/hearing: more on that below). Touching is framed as something much too narrow for witnessing, or only once, as a pre-funeral arrangement in which there will be no body left to touch. No new politics based on relics.
This leads me to reflect on the five senses and their metaphorical use in John and in the Bible. I start from the simple notion that in the ancient world the senses of sight and hearing were given pride of place because of the built-in distance from the object. This distance implied that more people could potentially share in the experience and interpretation of the seeing or hearing. To which give priority? Seeing because of our capacity to call others and observe something together? Therefore a sense more congenial to the democratic and scientific enterprises? vs hearing, which implies a transmission from someone: a prophet-like individual, a repeat, and a sustained effort to remember what was heard…
In John: there is a surprising passage from “seeing” to “hearing,” Jesus being the paradigmatic seer whom one then hears out (the gospel begins with “in the beginning was the word”…). John 8.38 says: “what I have seen near my father, I say; as for you, you do what you’ve heard from the father” (ἃ ἐγώ ἑώρακα παρὰ τῷ πατρὶ λαλῶ· καὶ ὑμεῖς οὖν ἃ ἠκούσατε παρὰ τοῦ πατρὸς ποιεῖτε). Compare this verse to Luther’s “seeing and hearing” rhetoric. For Luther, the ears are the quintessential Christian organ, because they require faith. The same mixed metaphors can be seen elsewhere in the Bible. John normally uses “hear” in chapters 8-9 of the Gospel. Jesus is presented here as having seen the word of truth, which means that Jesus had direct contact rather than being at one remote from the original revelation.
Hans Jonas, in a paper on Heidegger and theology, makes interesting remarks on the use of these two metaphors.(“Heidegger et la théologie,” Esprit (July-August 1988), pp. 172–95. This text is a little more developed than the English version in the Second Consultation on Hermeneutics, Drew University, 9-11 April 1964). He begins his paper by showing how Philo of Alexandria gives pride of place to the Greek and Hellenistic mode of thinking, for instance in the way he portrays Jacob (Israel) as a “God-seer.” Jacob’s seeing, argues Philo, gives him a more authentic relationship with God and his word, whereas Ishmael (Jacob’s alter-ego in spite of the change of generation) is but a “God-hearer.” The texts quoted by Jonas are: De fuga et inventione, 208; De ebrietate, 82; De migratione Abrahami, 47 and following. See also the more theoretical passages on seeing and hearing in De Abrahamo.
The Bible itself, such as we have it now, i.e. according to the order created in the post-exilic period, incorporates a sustained reflection on those two modes of contemplation, without choosing one over the other, while progressively complicating their modalities. God appears to the biblical heroes in the full of day at the beginning of the stories of Adam, Noah, and Abraham, but soon only at night (Jacob) or even is barely present in Joseph’s dreams, before returning in the fullness of day for Moses, and becoming a “seeable word” for prophets and kings (vision and hearing), chronicles, etc….
I’ll continue Jonas’ thought. In his comment on Exodus 20.18, Philo, after the translators and even the editors of the Bible, perhaps following an ancient tradition, proposes that God’s logoi, which are at the same time erga (and not rhemata), are meant to be seen (De decalogo, 47). According to Philo, ears are to be converted into eyes (here too, one is in need of a phenomenology of the senses). The often-quoted text of Ex 20.18 says “and the whole people saw the voices,” (וראה כל העם את קולות). The “voices”, which in this story are also imagined thunder in the context of a theo- or kratophany, are in the plural. In Elijah’s story, in 1 Kings 19, the natural elements are actually negated as source of divine inspiration, and God’s voice itself is reduced to its simplest expression, silence. For Exodus 20.18, the standard Greek text we have has ἕωρα τὴν φωνήν, i.e. “saw the voice,” in the singular. One may wonder what Greek text Philo was reading, in which he found Hebrew qolot translated by the plural λόγοι or rather λόγους.
One might think there is no more here than the sort of metaphorical play that is frequent in many languages, or put to use in the synesthetic adventures of XIXth c. poetry, as in Baudelaire’s magnificent poem, Correspondances, in which all the senses are gathered in a bouquet and there are rich fragrances “qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.”
But I would like to speculate and propose that to give pride of place to sight and contemplation, i.e. to the clearest path to authenticity and objectifying rationality, may lead to inaction and therefore to disorder and death. This is a danger that the biblical tradition, post-exilic or older perhaps, attempted to avoid by setting obstacles to sight: clouds in the Sinai theophany, night vision, Yahweh seen from behind in Moses’ story, etc…. To choose hearing, on the other hand, conceals other dangers, such as irrational adventurism, the mad rush after illusions and the all too easy acceptance of the absolute authority of prophets who claim they heard voices. Can I hear something someone else has heard? At the same time? or later, by an effort of recall, memory, anamnesis, by way of writing most probably. On the side of sight, according to Jonas, one has the form (eidoi, idols, i.e. images), immediate presence, contemplation, real objects and concepts, the pride of autonomous reason, a self-affirming and -confirming subject. On the side of hearing, as Jonas again says, there is the call to mission, “rapture,” the event, response, humility, and piety.
What of Heidegger and modern thought, then, in this regard, which was the topic of Jonas’ paper? Heidegger’s thought, he thinks, is very attractive to contemporary theology, because it invites one to “convert” one’s objectifying eyes into ears ready to listen to a call (the ontological call). But under the modest appearance of this original philosophy which has discreetly borrowed from the Jewish and Christian tradition, what is actually being used by imprudent theologians is a pagan ideology which is much bolder than any previous one. Its fundamental ideas are in contradiction with theology itself, for instance its notion of a thought without beginning or original (anfänglich), when theology starts from a given revelation. This has serious consequences for theology, because it finds itself serving the Heideggerian philosophy: the notion of a continuous revelation of being sets in, the ideas of salvation and redemption are threatened, etc….
Can one say that the more distant a thing is felt (or the more capable one is of feeling at a distance), the higher will the sense be placed on the scale of feelings? Could it be that for this reason, hearing is placed above other senses? Yet, it is not a fully assured place, since the sense of seeing reaches in the far distance too (see Abraham, Jacob, the prophets). Modern psychological experiments show that people listening to a single message repeated by a person whom they see on screen and whose expression changes dramatically tend to focus on the expression and interpret it in a way that disregards what is being said. This might be less telling about the importance of the visual experience, however, because it could be the product of early and intense use of images in our culture, and the converse disregard of hearing (“obeying”).
On the other hand, have the sense of touch and taste, which encompass things close to us, been devalued because they are too easy to use and require less interpretation?? Between hearing and seeing there will be a struggle, or rather a dance, as there is between the memory of seeing (photographic memory, or geographic memory, the remembrance or recomposing of places and colors, easier for some than for others) and the memory of sounds or sayings (less automatic, more difficult for some, and for that reason found of more value because less “natural,” more human). Both of these senses are found in the Bible. The writers who have edited the Bible and framed it in the shape it has now have given thought to this as much as the Greeks, because one finds both senses used metaphorically in the first biblical books, but together later, in strange turns of phrase like “The word which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2.1).
Seeing, a sense given pride of place by the Greeks who were followed by Philo as shows Jonas, was not left aside or discarded by the Biblical authors. To introduce it in some of these sayings was their way to say that seeing (understanding) was as important as hearing (obeying) and that each alone, or an unmixed metaphor relying upon one sense only, was dangerous.
