Erotic Morality: The Role of Touch in Moral Agency / Edition 1

Excerpt from Erotic Morality: The Role of Touch in Human Agency by Linda Holler

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"All power emerges from erotic power either, in life-giving form, from our acknowledgement of it and our ability to live in that understanding or, in destructive form, from the brokenheartedness that refuses to understand it."-Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys of the Heart
For more than two decades feminist and other ethicists concerned with social justice and ecology have called for and worked toward an understanding of morality that is body-affirming rather than body-denying. Just as dualistic, disembodied philosophy inevitably gave rise to an ethic based on logos-on rules, authorities, and duties -so embodied awareness is giving rise to an ethic based on eros, a somatic, intuitive form of agency in which empathy, compassion, and care are the central moral qualities. This book seeks to be part of the transformation, within ethics, that hopes to reshape understandings of the moral life by teaching us to value our senses and our experiences as sentient beings.
In this text, touch is used as the primary sense around which to compose a discourse about moral agency. Touch is the first sense given to us in evolutionary and individual biological history, and in its physiological and psychological dimensions touch may be our most foundational erotic sense. Erotic in poet Audre Lorde's use of the term, touch unites sensory and emotional feeling. The ways that we are physically touched help to determine our repulsions, attractions, and indifferences and our ability to respondemotionally to what goes on around us, that is, to care passionately and compassionately about our own lives and the lives of others. Eros is this passion for life, the embodied expression of the relational nature of existence in constructions of identity, awareness, and action. In her classic essay, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Lorde describes eros as inclusive of all forms of love, joy, and shared feeling; it is "creative energy empowered" because one is touched from within and from without, both emotionally and physically.1
As the interweaving of the inner and outer dimensions of identity, eros is, as I see it, the home of Trinh Minh-ha's infinitely layered self: "I am not i can be you and me."2 Because bodies define the conscious and unconscious boundaries of our interconnectedness, our senses act as seats of consciousness, places from which we construct identities and subjective relations. Touch is the sense by which our contact with the world is made most intimate, and it is therefore home to both our wisdom and our neuroses. Boundaries blur as self and not-self meet. In any touch, we both touch and are touched; we give and receive. Replete with pleasure and pain receptors, skin is the largest organ of the body. Studies have shown that premature infants gain almost 50 percent more weight when touched and that people who touch animals recover from illness more quickly than those who do not. Touch helps to lower blood pressure and slow the pulse; it relaxes as well as stimulates us. Primates have literally been driven to brain damage from being denied touch, and the abused become abusers through violent touch.
Compared to vision, our other senses of hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching-in that order-bring us increasingly into actual physical contact with the world and therefore can serve to prevent forms of denial, solipsism, and idealism.3 We touch the world and are touched by it in all perception-for example, the eyes have been called the windows of the soul because when we make eye contact we touch each other very deeply. But the proximal senses-taste, smell, and touch-are the most direct means by which we take the world within us and leave our marks upon it.
Besides our senses, other bodily functions, such as eating and breathing, provide important examples of the self-world intimacy represented by touching. Smell, taste, and touch warn us of potential dangers, but they also trigger some of our most powerful-and earliest-erotic memories. All of our senses help to compose boundaries for our protection, but the senses also determine how permeable the borders are that allow us to be nourished and come closer to each other. When I eat, breathe, or put clothes on my back, I am touched by means of the sensations in my mouth, lungs, and skin, but in each of these acts I also touch the material conditions of my existence-soil, plants, animals, photosynthetic processes, biosystems, and laborers. From this perspective, one's skin stretches as far back into our evolutionary history as the first cell and as far out into space as the energy that sustains life on this planet. Attention to embodiment reveals selves and worlds constructed out of their interrelations rather than an isolated self-as Diane Ackerman has suggested, in A Natural History of the Senses, perception is a form of grace.4
Daniel Goleman has called the process of coming to our senses "emotional intelligence," while Buddhists call it the practice of "mindfulness"-the simple, straightforward awareness of feeling as it happens, described by one Buddhist teacher as a ruthless, nonsolipsistic form of realism.5 Whatever we call sensual awareness, coming from non-sense to sense is a moral and political act because it restores our ties to the material world and to the consequences of our actions. Tactile forms of consciousness are forms of embodied wisdom that help us remain in touch with the extended network of our biological and economic lives. In so doing, erotic awareness creates a subjective life attuned to bodies, or-as Marx might have said-a materialism that takes subjectivity seriously.6 Thus, in the phenomenology of touch that I am constructing, touch is a metaphor for the entire sensual gestalt and further assumes a relational ontology in which-to borrow another phrase from Buddhism-"This is like this because that is like that."
The extent to which the senses, particularly touch, form crucial links among self-awareness, world awareness, and emotional feeling became clarified for me by a source that initially seemed most unlikely: two women discussing their struggles with autism. Victims of Asperger syndrome, a form of autism linked to very high intelligence and linguistic proficiency, Temple Grandin and Donna Williams withdrew from touch because they were born experiencing almost all touch as painful. Because of their sensory disorders, each of these women in her own way knows that consciousness of the body and of the world are inseparable, that feeling makes the world ontologically present in ways that concepts alone never can, and that intersubjective life is lost when the body is experienced as an alien other. As articulate witnesses to the futility of solipsism and to the distortions of reality that attend a mind divorced from the body, both women have written eloquently about the ways that distorted sense experience affects the development of selfhood, intersubjective life, and world awareness.7 Each of them emerged from sensory and emotional chaos by practicing a reflective kind of awareness about boundaries and attachments, barriers and openings, and prisons and sanctuaries that are associated with feelings. This practice of awareness made it possible for them to find ways to outwit their own defenses and fears and develop strategies allowing them to be physically and emotionally at home in the world-which is also, I will argue, what we need to do.
Grandin is a professor in the department of animal sciences at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic and Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism. She demonstrates remarkable rapport with animals and is known internationally for her design of feedlots, dip chutes, humane restraining devices, and slaughterhouses. Her "squeeze machine," a mechanically controlled hug device that she fashioned for herself from a cattle chute, particularly impressed me as a magnificent example of how touch can be used to connect us to each other. Grandin says that through the comfort and calm the machine's embrace provided, she came to learn empathy and the ability to comfort others. She credits the squeeze machine with giving her what other people could not give her due to her autism- comfortable tactile sensation. "When I was in the chute, I felt closer to people like Mother . . . it broke through my barrier of tactile defensiveness, and I felt the love and concern of these people."8 A scientist by training, Grandin is secure in herself and her autism. "If I could snap my fingers and be non-autistic, I would not," she declares. "Autism is part of who I am."9 Her knowledge of animal behavior and neurophysiology and her own experience of tactile deprivation are valuable resources for thinking about the erotic nature of morality. In this work, her squeeze machine is a central symbol of eros, that is, our ability to connect to the world in an empathetic way through comforting, loving touch.