Review of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing by David Parisi (University of Minnesota)

Archaeologies of Touch announces itself as an opening salvo for a new media studies sub eld capable of addressing this ongoing haptic reconstruction of our media environment. Parisi charts a genealogy of haptic interfacing that begins with seventeenth-century experiments using electrostatic generators and culminates in the latest projections for virtual reality. Over several centuries, we have become rendered “haptic subjects” through an “ongoing cultural training” (43) though “tactile media”—a “shifting assemblage composed of technical elements, embodied sensations, and cultural practices” (97). No longer aiming to stimulate the full surface of the esh, what now counts as touch-based media assures but one or a few points of contact between the tip of the nger and the screen. Far from ful lling the fate of electronics by rebalancing the human sensorium, haptic feedback as we know it today seems a step in the opposite direction. Parisi closes his book with a spirited call to action insisting on the need for an interdisciplinary sub eld of haptic media studies, on par with visual cultural studies and sound studies. Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing. By David Parisi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 452 pp. (paperback) ISBN 978–1–5179–0059–5. US List: $28.00. In the space of just over a decade, touchscreen displays have bounded from novelty to ubiquity, now present in airports and grocery checkouts, in libraries and public parks, built into our vehicles and our appliances, snapped onto our wrists, and snuggled into our pockets. In this timespan, the technology itself has developed at a fantastical pace. Since the 2004 release of Nintendo DS, the rst successful mass-market touchscreen device, the US Patent and Trademark Of ce has reviewed some two million applications and granted nearly 800,000 patents related to touchscreen development and design. The commercial enthusiasm for the future of technologized touch could hardly be more pronounced. Fading fast is the age of the unapproachable image, the unidirectional interface, the ever looming, ever alien spectacle. Tech developers and marketers hail ours as a new era in sensorial rebalancing, with products like multi-touch displays and force feedback controllers heralding the collapse of the strong visual bias of late-twentieth and early twentyrst-century computing and, more broadly, the twilight of ocularcentric modernity. David Parisi’s momentous new book Archaeologies of Touch announces itself as an opening salvo for a new media studies sub eld capable of addressing this ongoing haptic reconstruction of our media environment. Parisi charts a genealogy of haptic interfacing that begins with seventeenth-century experiments using electrostatic generators and culminates in the latest projections for virtual reality (and something Parisi dubs “the teledildonic imaginary” (303)). Parisi’s book is in close rapport with Lisa Gitelman’s inquiries into the normalization and routinization of earlier modes of media interfacing , as well as with Jonathan Crary’s landmark work on nineteenth-century visual culture. It also supplies a powerful rejoinder to the in uence the latter’s work has had, as Archaeologies of Touch explores how, over several centuries, we have become rendered “haptic subjects” through an “ongoing cultural training” (43) in “tactile media”—a “shifting assemblage composed of technical elements, embodied sensations, and cultural practices” (97). While Parisi calls for others to develop counter-narratives, his is the story of a “progressive mediatization of touch” (150). By the time we get to the touchscreen and the smartphone, we nd “the whole of the tactile system [reduced] to the single point of contact between nger and screen” (275). Parisi’s approach is scholarly and sober, yet it is hard not to view this as a still-unfolding tragedy. With the attening of touch, its multifaceted sensitivities and capacities are pruned down and primed to engage a stultifying interface that struggles to simulate such outmoded contrivances as sliders, buttons, and knobs. The rst chapter—Parisi appropriately calls them “interfaces”—depicts two centuries of attempts to manipulate touch sensitivities through the use of electrical currents. Beyond the electrostatic generator (of 1663), we nd the Leyden jar (1745) and Alessandro Volta’s rst batteries (1800). By the end of the eighteenth century, “electricity [had become] an object of scienti c curiosity, a commodity for spectacular consumption, and a medical technology” (45). Alongside these developments, especially in the run-up to “the golden age of electrotherapy” (1880–1920), bloomed an enduring commercial interest in tactile media. A genealogy in the Foucauldian mold, Parisi’s work implicitly invites us to contemplate how at each turn things might have evolved otherwise. But the express focus is to supply a culturally and historically informed critique of the present, speci cally a critique of how new media apparatuses channel and distribute power today. Along the way, Parisi seeks to perform a double rescue of touch: rst, from its diminution by emergent habits or practices of the touchscreen trend; second, from the margins of media studies as it has been conceived of and institutionalized to date. It is touch, Parisi argues, that supplied the “original mode of communicating with electrical machines” (95), and so it is touch that today we are most in need of recovering. Interface 2 examines the increasing re nement of haptic research towards the turn of the twentieth century: the consolidation of power in the space of the lab, and the standardization of experimental protocols and measurement techniques. Touch, as “an object of rational experimentation” (107), gradually was “enclose[d] within a new epistemological framework” (105) that we continue to operate within. Parisi depicts this process of normalization and management as one in which the esh was “rendered as data” (125). This rendering, in turn, would open the door for “the idea that touch could have its own particular, formalized, machine-generated language” (160). Interface 3 looks at a series of episodes in the broad movement to integrate touch into the “communicative economy” that now plays such a decisive role in the maintenance and reproduction of contemporary capitalist societies. The extraordinary efforts Parisi culls from the archives (think Teletactor, Tongue of the Skin, Tactile TV) would, alas, all fail, or at least fail to travel beyond the space of the lab. But even in failure, earlyto mid-twentieth century touch research laid important groundwork for the distinctly capitalistic (and often militarized) cultivation of the twentyrst century haptic subject. As psychophysiologists, linguists, electrical engineers, and eventually computer scientists came to imagine touch as a re ned communications system, “the skin’s vast expanse became an untapped and underexploited resource...that could be capitalized on through the design and iterative re nement of signaling systems and languages” (194). 1