DO NOT TOUCH -- Scyborgs, Touch, and Cultural Objects: Reading Group Sessions 1.2

During our first reading group session, our conversation surfaced something important: a hunger to think about and with modes of knowing that are more visceral, more tactile, that emerge not from abstraction alone but from bodies reaching toward one another and inhabiting places.

In response, our second session will turn to Erin Manning’s Politics of Touch.

In the Introduction, Manning argues that the body does not move into space and time; it creates space and time. There is no space and time before movement.

In “Do Not Touch,” Manning explores the tension between touch and tact. Tact, etymologically, also means touch. But tact has come to mean knowing when not to touch. Touch, by contrast, is always a reaching toward.

We will pair Manning with Fred Moten’s “Nowhere, Everywhere” on Theaster Gates, a “scyborg” figure who we spoke about generatively in our last discussion. Gates, trained in urban planning and ceramics, practices a kind of custodianship: critical redeployment of culturally significant Black objects, archives, and spaces. Moten tracks what it means for Gates to do this work from nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, on the south side of Chicago.

Both writers are asking what escapes capture: for Manning, the sensing body that exceeds the grids of the body politic; for Moten, the mobile inhabitant who resists citizenship in favor of another inhabitation.

We will gather at the Smart Museum of Art (5550 S Greenwood Ave), where Gates’ exhibition Unto Thee is currently on view. There, among many signs that read “Do Not Touch,” we might reflect upon a guiding question:

What forms of knowledge, what politics, emerge from bodies that insist on touching anyway?