Something I find particularly interesting about contemporary culture is that we are saturated by the pursuit and aggressive promotion of “experiences” across multiple cultural industries. Consider, for example, virtual reality games. Here, the aim of experience is to make us genuinely feel, even without “touching” — as Sedgwick would put it — thereby bypassing much of our embodied experience.

What seems problematic to me, however, is that within popular culture we are not taught how to touch “properly” or at the “right” moment. In other words, there is little to no pedagogy of tactile sensitivity. In that sense, we are like Robinson Crusoe: alone on our own island. More problematic still, given our tactile “illiteracy,” we increasingly delegate to technique and technology the task of providing us with these experiences without requiring any bodily effort on our part.

I wonder what our society would be like if this capacity were developed in a more integral way. What would our intuitions about the world look like? Would we not gain a far richer and more appropriate sensitivity, one that would enable us to establish a more intimate epistemic and aesthetic relationship with the world?

Thank you in advance for your reflections. They make me think, once again, about the importance of affects and bodily sensations as dimensions that the West is only beginning to recognize as fundamental axes of both human and more-than-human life.