On Touching: The Alterity Within, Karen Barad

Hold Me Now - Feel and Touch in an Unreal World
Was a conference-festival organized by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on March 21, 22, 23, 24 2018
Studium Generale Rietveld Academie invited Karen Archey, Mark Paterson, Rizvana Bradley, and Jack Halberstam to each inaugurate a discursive and performative programme on how the haptic - relating to or based on touch - is thought and experienced artistically, philosophically, and politically in life, art and design, and theory.
March 24, Sat
Reach out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand): Feel Philosophies
Curated by Jack Halberstam
“Reach out and touch/Somebody’s hand/Make this world a better place/If you can.” The confidence that reaching out or outreach can make the world better infuses Diana Ross’ debut solo release in 1970. Reaching out has not proven the utopian project she imagined, but it remains an important gesture within the political repertoire of queer and trans subjects who centre the body and its desires, needs, limits, and potential. In the work of the theorists gathered here, the hand, handicraft, handmade items all jostle in the space of contact articulating new forms of art, communication, desire, and movement. Situating the body as itself a project of crafting, making, building, and unravelling, the ‘Reach Out and Touch’ talks and performances explore the physics of touch, gestural repertoires of grasping and feeling, the aesthetics of the handmade, the limits of sensory perception, the social dynamics of bodily regimes of doing, making, and exploring. In addition, we will think about the haptic body in time and space. For Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in The Undercommons (2013), hapticality is a way of being in relation to the now, the touch of the present as it holds you. They define ‘hapticality’, as ‘the touch of the undercommons, the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here.’ These concatenating feelings - sentiment, touch, sense - arrive at a place that is now and here, close at hand. The philosophy of the now, for them, is a philosophy of feeling.
On this day, at this event, we will all be or become ‘philosophers of the feel’.
Participants
Karen Barad, boychild, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Mel Y. Chen, Paul B. Preciado, Jeanne Vaccaro.

[@IzzyCubito]

This lecture is in itself a projection from 2018 to today 2020 and our lives as we have begun social distancing, no touching, not understanding our relationship with another human being...

[@newoysters9884]

Thank you

[@natalie.natalie.natalie]

Really good.

[@bert6644]

Brilliant

[@user-uh5hh5jo9v]

Does anyone have a citation on who this person is referring to here? at 47:15?

[@JulesDufresne-vg5hm]

I think the abyss is a key concept in Edouard Glissant's work, but as an example : " Yet, the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipi­tates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss." Glissant, E. (1997) The Poetics of Relation.

[@thulaniearnshaw4094]

$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[@johnhannon8034]

An example of what can happen when a physicist refuses to simply “shut up and calculate.” Although she doesn’t use the term, Barad seems to be espousing panpsychism here.

[@gregyoung3243]

Is she just saying touch is an emergent phenomenon? Electrons don’t touch, so we never touch. Seems trivial

[@vinylmeister2165]

Not physics

[@macguy14]

physics is understanding the movement between bodies

[@objektivone3209]

The lady does not have an idea what she is saying.

[@monstersoftheid4693]

May it not be truer to say that you have no idea?

[@kevinilango7896]

​@@monstersoftheid4693 do you know what they are saying? a lot of "meeting the universe halfway" from my reading is just inaccessible vocabulary. barad seems so dependent on foucault but is also trying to distinguish their work from his. the only example of intra-action that they have admitted concretely is that they wrote the book and the book wrote them.

[@user-sp1kd6ob3e]

She is an outstanding speaker

[@Ronnybengt]

Brilliant