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Reviewed by:
  • Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media
  • Dene Grigar
Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Mediaby Laura U. Marks. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A., 2002. 280pp., illus. Trade, paper. ISBN: 0-8166-3888-8; 0-8166-3889-6.

Haptic, from the Greek haptos, refers to the sense of touch and implies taking hold of an object, grasping it, binding it or hanging on to it. Rhetorically speaking, [End Page 330]it describes argumentation as setting upon an opponent's word and attacking it. Current usage of the word can be found in computer engineering and the biological sciences, in conjunction with virtual reality and the function of receptors residing under the skin, respectively. For these, hapticconnotes an interaction achieved through force, a phenomenon that can be objectively studied, quantified and mastered.

The full flavor of this word and its many uses is important to note when reading Laura U. Marks's new book Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, which utilizes the term hapticas an approach to critiquing art. In this collection of 13 essays, Marks rejects these definitions and instead borrows from early 20th-century art critic Alois Riegl, who uses the word to theorize about the tactility of art. Expanding this theory into a methodology for critiquing film and digital media, as well as the visual arts, Marks describes haptic perception as a process involving tactile as well as "kinesthetic and proprioceptive functions" (p. 2), one that renders the relationship between critic and art "erotic," like that between lover and beloved (p. xvi). Devoid of violent connotations, Marks's notion of touch suggests that the critic glides gently across an intimate subject rather than colliding roughly with a distant object.

Eroticism, therefore, emerges as a major trope in the book. The first chapter, "Video Haptics and Erotics," lays out Marks's theory and methodology of haptic perception and visuality, while the four parts and the remaining 12 chapters are intended to demonstrate haptic critique.

At first glance, because it removes the critic from an antagonistic relationship with a subject, rejects language of violence and resists objectification of the subject, Marks's theory resembles feminist methodology. However, her innovation to this approach and to Riegl's critical theory, as well—indeed, the strength of the book—is that Marks offers a way to incorporate multiple sensory perception in the service of understanding art. In light of the recent appeal to auditory, tactile, olfactory and kinesthetic senses by visual arts, film and new media, which Marks describes in detail in various chapters, a theory utilizing an approach that itself relies upon multiple senses makes a lot of sense. Both scholars and critics will find much in Marks's book useful and her ideas seductive.

Her strongest chapters are those she saves for last and that move her away from a direct critique of art—that is, those essays in parts 3 and 4 relating to the science of smell and digital technology. She confesses early on that she has always been fond of "tiny things" (p. xx). Beginning from her explanation of the material makeup of odors and how the brain perceives them in Chapter 7, to the synergistic behavior of subatomic particles in Chapter 11, Marks demonstrates an ease with explaining scientific phenomena and enacts the very process of haptic perception she calls for. In these two sections she hits her stride.

Weaknesses of the book are presaged by Marks herself in the introduction. Because all but three essays in this volume were previously published in part or whole in various journals as far back as 1993, when she was a student and critic for various non-scholarly venues, language and style appear at times disjointed, and ideas outdated. For example, formal academic language in the introduction gives way to hip lingo in Chapter 5. The style of Chapter 4, which begins with a letter written to a filmmaker, an engaging and innovative approach, may put off some academic scholars who like their scholarly presses to publish traditionally written books. Proclamations about the upstaging of video by interactive art in Chapter 10 are at odds with recent developments in digital technology...

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