The Haptic Arts

This book examines how the sense of touch complements the senses of sight and hearing, expanding notions of “art” and “aesthetics” to include worldly arts such as medicine, nation building, and translation while re-thinking more traditional arts of literature, music, and painting.

Touch is a form of reciprocal interchange – touching always involves being touched in return. It creates a sense of embeddedness in a world that promotes a willingness to take social action, and it heightens concern with spatial perception and metamorphosis with an eye towards transforming experience itself.

This book offers a systematic alternative to the Romantic notion that the arts are “disinterested.” It does so by focusing on subjects as diverse as Helen Keller, the evolutionary history of the human hand, practical “haptic” endeavors (including tool-making, which extends and strengthens reach), and art-forms such as ballet, caricature, poetry, fiction, opera, and storytelling. Rather than situating art beyond everyday cares and pursuits , it frames the haptic arts as tools that extend and strengthen our reach into the world.