Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media

by Laura U. Marks.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2002.
280 pp., illus. Trade, $54.95; paper, $19.95.
ISBN: 0-8166-3888-8; ISBN: 0-8166-3889-6.

Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Texas Woman’s University,
Dallas, TX,
dgrigar@twu.edu

Haptic, from the Greek haptos, refers to the sense of touch and implies taking hold of an object, grasping, binding it, or hanging on to it. Rhetorically speaking, it describes argumentation as in setting upon an opponent’s word and attacking it. Current usage of the word can be found in computer engineering and the biological sciences in conjunction with virtual reality and the function of receptors residing under the skin, respectively. For these, haptic connotes an interaction achieved through force, a phenomenon that can be objectively studied, quantified, and mastered.

The full flavor of this word and its many uses is important to note when reading Laura U. Marks’ new book Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, which utilizes haptic as an approach to critiquing art. In this collection of thirteen essays, Marks rejects these definitions and, instead, borrows from early 20th Century art critic, Alois Riegl, who uses the word to theorize about the tactility of art. Expanding this theory into a methodology for critiquing film and digital media, as well as the visual arts, Marks describes haptic perception as a process involving tactile, as well as "kinesthetic and proprioceptive functions" (2), one that renders the relationship between critic and art "erotic" like that between lover and beloved (xvi). Devoid of violent connotations, Marks’s notion of touch suggests the critic glides gently across a intimate subject rather than collides roughly with a distant object.

Eroticism, therefore, emerges as a major trope in the book. The first chapter, "Video Haptics and Erotics," lays out Marks’ theory and methodology of haptic perception and visuality, while the four parts and the remaining twelve chapters that follow are intended to demonstrate haptic critique.

At first glance, because it removes the critic from an antagonistic relationship with a subject, rejects language of violence, and resists objectification of the subject, Marks’ theory resembles feminist methodology. However, her innovation to this approach and to Riegl’s critical theory, as well––indeed, the strength of the book––is that Marks offers a way to incorporate multiple sensory perception in the service of understanding art. In light of the recent appeal to auditory, tactile, olfactory and kinesthetic senses by visual arts, film, and new media, which Marks describes in detail in various chapters, a theory utilizing an approach that itself relies upon multiple senses makes a whole of sense. Both scholars and critics will find much in Marks’ book useful and her ideas, seductive.

Her strongest chapters are those she saves for last and that move her away from a direct critique of art––that is, those essays in parts three and four relating to the science of smell and digital technology. She confesses early on that she has always been fond of "tiny things" (xx). Beginning with her explanation of the material make up of odors and how the brain perceives them in chapter 7 ’s to the synergistic behavior of subatomic particles in chapter eleven, Marks demonstrates an ease with explaining scientific phenomena, not to mention enacts the very process of haptic perception she calls for. In these two sections she hits her stride.

Weaknesses of the book is presaged by Marks herself in the introduction. Because all but three essays in this volume were previously published in part or whole in various journals as far back as 1993 when she was a student and critic for various non-scholarly venues, language and style appear at times disjointed and ideas, outdated. For example, formal academic language in the introduction gives way to hip lingo in chapter five. The style of chapter 4, which begins with a letter written to a filmmaker, an approach so engaging and innovative, may put off some academic scholars who like their scholarly presses publishing traditionally written books. Proclamations about the upstaging of video by interactive art in chapter ten is at odds with recent developments in digital technology as seen in Apple’s release of the iMac. Additionally, assumptions Marks makes in regards to literary art (it is "dry" not "wet"), death ("materiality is mortality"), the issue of nature versus nurture ("we are genetically prone to invent rather than rely on instinct") and gay men’s club scene ("voyeuristic") are out of place with the many brilliant assertions she makes ("it is a poor theory that destroys pleasure").

Despite these minor issues, Touch offers a fresh and much needed approach to art, one that should appeal to scholars and critics tired of wrestling, struggling, grappling, penetrating, and just plain beating up their subjects.