Touch comes before the other senses. We, grown-ups, would like to forget this. If only because it makes it easier to live alone, and it is a useful skill. But when we reach back into our memory for what we cannot remember, the hierarchy of immediacy returns to our own appearance in this fairy tale. Without that forgotten touch, there would be no us and our amazing ability to observe every barely perceptible nuance at the edge of the horizon. From this ability we have developed many sophisticated arts and sciences that can bring each new experience closer, classify it, make it clearer. We all work hard to stretch, loosen, widen the horizons that bind us, make the world go round and even, as the optimists (in the West) believe, modernise and improve. When we stop working, there is a moment of uncertainty, the simplest one, literally: a reflex, what to do with the hand? What to touch, without a clear purpose, without conviction, slightly uncertain and yet touching. These are the most private moments, when abstract horizons disappear and everything is what we feel through our skin.
We know many cultural codes that tell of the immediacy of essential human relationships in such a pretentious way, with the childlike naivety of “good poetry”. For example, the story of Unfaithful Thomas, a little out of step with his savvy bandmates – a direct support of what is radically new. There is as yet no iconography to show the extent to which he is fascinated by the possibilities of touch, of stroking all those slick screens that constantly present us with the latest information about the farthest horizons, the deepest cuts, the freshest wounds. Touch, too, has been affected by the invasion of our world by the flood of images and words transmitted non-stop online. Who among you today has not touched a telephone, a terminal, a truism, to stop at just one, the titular letter for the transforming world of technology: the T?
