Staying with Touch

Abstract

We’ve lost touch; a few thousand miles between us with months turning into years, things get in the way as reality strikes and hands slip. “Let’s stay in touch” we’ve said over and over again. And somehow we do; through screens, cables, worldly horrors, walls; but not in the way we thought we would. Fingers scroll, tap, click, pinch. Voices travel, sink, drown, reappear. Things excite you, they frighten me—by staying in touch, we’ve lost staying with it. I sift through the thick goop that is the history of us only to find that there is not much of me in there—a once-was, morphing into will-be. And as days fill the space in between, as worlds move and hostility prevails, through absence you say “we‘re at a loss when we stay”. PS. Re-centering the notion of touch suggests embodied and material ways of being with and knowing the world differently from an out-of-touch late modernity. Feminist physicist philosopher Karen Barad suggests that space is not merely a container in which we must “realise our situatedness” and in which activity takes place, but rather that we are in fact always already a part of the becoming of space as an iterative space-time-mattering of the world (Barad, 2007, p. 91). The dynamic (re-)mattering of space-time as the enactment of in/justice(s) is powered by an ethics of touch with/by/ as more-than-human bodies — a “posthumanist ethics, an ethics of worlding” (Barad, 2007, pp. 391-392). PPS. Touching on touch is also an inquiry on different ways of designing. An embodied exploration of “life-centered” and “relational” designing beyond objects and representationalism, and a haptic encounter with a radical extension of design “as an open-ended capacity and a mode of acting in the world” (Escobar et al., 2024, p. 152) — an ontological designing. Touch at once de-centers professional design practice and the expert architect, while re-situating them in a praxis of worldmaking. What might touch prompt for theorizing-practicing architecture beyond the phenomenological and representational? And how do we collaborate with touch in the extended entanglement of more-than-human agencies? PPPS. With folds, scribbles, artefacts and annotations we will engage in a practice of re-connecting and staying with/in touch with long lost friends through a mixed- register long form letter (3,000-5,000 words). Between lines of correspondence related histories of mail art, and feminist and decolonial theories of embodiment and difference un/re/fold in the context of authoritarian censorship and surveillance, violent bordering and policing of bodies.