As Franz Fanon concludes Black Skin,White Masks he follows his call to cease the subjugation of man by man with a series of questions. It is here he asks, “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” In the face of systems of violence, Fanon presents touch as a mode of engaging the other that collapses the hierarchies of being that serve as Western civilization’s matrix. This call to touch is radical in its break from epistemologies of the other that privilege visibility— a sense European post-war philosophies of the other overwhelmingly remain committed to, despite its role in maintaining categories of difference within hierarchical orders of being. Fanon’s inquisitive turn to the haptic opens pathways for rethinking the terms of relationality and inspires the concern of corollary lines of thought. For instance, how might the double sensation —the simultaneously active and passive quality of the sense acknowledged by early phenomenologists— that is touch, trouble the distinction between the self and the other? How do proximity and distance inform our responsibility to the other? What is our ethical obligation to those who are out of reach, and are not physically proximate? How might solidarity be forged across this space? And perhaps most pertinent to this paper— is there a way to maintain touch’s double sensation across distance?
Touch seems to depend on the most intimate proximity, on the collapse of all distance. But touch is also used in a figurative sense across space. Used figuratively, the term touch can describe phenomena that unfold at a distance, such as, communication (to get in touch with), emotional impact (her words touched my heart), awareness (to stay in touch with current events). Figurative touch can describe a state of being affected by the condition of another quality, or influence. However, I cannot help but notice that the double sensation that is touch is troublingly absent from figurative uses of the term. When considered figuratively touch becomes unidirectional, moving from the source to the affected body without reciprocation.
The phenomenon of “double sensation” that Husserl discusses in his 1907 work Thing and Space refers to the fact that when one hand touches the other, the sensations of touching can always be reversed into sensations of being touched. Merleau-Ponty extends this idea to proclaim the “double sensations” of the touched/touching body that enacts a form of reflexitivity, or affective experiences that are not merely representations. Through the doubleness of its sensation touch presents an opportunity to relate against the representations that organize society, that cannot help but commenting violence through necessary reduction to legible sign. When we touch and are touched by the other we are forced to encounter something beyond our will, for we can never surely anticipate the specificities how this interaction that is both of our making and not, that comes to us from both an external entity and from within, will feel. It is in touch’s double sensation that we develop an awareness of the fact that we are not bound or sovereign beings. It is through touch that the singularity of our being collapses and the porous nature of the body’s experience becomes evident. The single directionality implied by “touching a nerve,” “getting in touch with,” “being touched by kindness,” on the other hand, works to preserve the bounded notion of the body, a the non-literal touch’s betrayal of the doubleness that defines the haptic sensation of the same name, reduces touch to a unidirectional act in which one body is touched by the other from contained subject positions.
In an effort to extend touch’s double sensation across space, I consider sound as a haptic sensation that works over distance. Sound is inherently haptic; it moves as frequencies that physically interact with the body. The outer ear directs sound waves to the eardrum and causes it to vibrate. These vibrations move through the middle ear and into the inner ear where hair-like stereocilia vibrate, sending signals to the brain. The act of speaking and listening, therefore, enacts a kind of double sensation: the speaker’s voice resonates in their own body as it travels to the listener, who in turn is physically affected by the sound waves. The generally accepted standard range of frequencies audible to the average human is 20 to 20,000 Hz. Sound waves are heard because of the matter (in most cases air) that is displaced in their wake, an effect that inextricably links hearing to contact. Those frequencies that occur below 20 Hz are generally felt rather than heard, assuming the amplitude of the vibration is great enough. Every object has a frequency, every object has a natural rate at which it vibrates and resonance exists beyond listening.
Sound waves can also stimulate the vestibular system—responsible for balance and spatial orientation—disrupting equilibrium and coordination. Sound waves, particularly low-frequency ones, can directly stimulate the hair cells in the inner ear responsible for balance which are typically only activated by head movement, leading to the perception of motion when stationary. Associations between selfhood and the mind are then troubled by the reality that one’s most essential sense of being, which has long been located in that space between the ears, can be effected by low-frequency sound waves. Low-frequency noise is characterized by deep pitch and long wavelengths. These sounds are highly resilient and capable of traveling vast distances. The sonic and the vestibular therefore become a way of being touched by the other, who must also be touched themselves, across space. Sound allows for a distance we do not usually associate with touch, which, in the non-figurative sense, collapses all distance. However, the space through which sound travels is limited. A typical audible distance for a human is a few hundred meters. To hear still depends on a proximity that I hope our ethical obligations extend beyond.
By considering the vestibular and turning to Kara Keeling’s meditation on Hortense Spiller’s use of the phrase “vestibular culture,” we might be able to bind the here and the there to each other. For Keeling, the vestibular serves as a sort of pathway for reimagining existence so that suffering at a distance feels proximate. Keeling takes an interest in the vestibular after Spillers uses ‘vestibular’ three times in her seminal text, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” to describe the culture that differentiates between the body and the flesh. The term ‘vestibule,’ like gateway or hall, implies a transition, a liminal space of not yet having arrived but significant to arrival. For Spillers there is a distance between cultural vestibularity and culture. As the system that acts as the body’s spacial and temporal anchor, vestibular culture might be understood as the threshold to the cultural anchored in the here and now. And Keeling points out that the vestibular, as the anchor to the here and now, then becomes the site where futurity is possible — where that which has not yet happened but must— will have to occur. The now is the only time in which a different way of being can emerge. So it is the vestibular that becomes the site of speculative possibility. It is in Spillers’ articulation of the vestibularity of culture that we are reminded that culture is constantly in transition, not yet arrived and forever bound to the now.
It is because of the vestibularity of culture that the subjugation of man by man need not persist. In the space of constant becoming, living otherwise is possible, new subject positions emerge and old ones fail. Through touch, another sensation of the now, we might learn that the subject always was a fiction, and it might be possible to return the presence of flesh, “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.” Spillers presents the distinction between the flesh and the body as the central distinction between liberated and captive subject-positions, between superiority and inferiority. The flesh, being the primary narrative exists before the body. And the body, being that which is read as a cultural text, is legible according to systemic logic that ties particular bodies to particular social positions. Epistemologies of otherness committed to sight affirm efforts to read the body of the other and categorize bodies based on visual difference. To touch is to return to the flesh, for it is the flesh that feels, the flesh that senses. Through touch, a redemption of the flesh is possible.
In his call to touch, Fanon proposes a radical ontological shift, challenging the dominance of sight as the primary epistemology of relationality. His turn to touch, as proposed in the critique of epistemologies grounded in sight, challenges the frameworks that tether bodies to fixed, legible social positions. Touch, particularly in its ‘double sensation,’ offers a means of disrupting the unidirectional processes of recognition and categorization that sight perpetuates. It invites an encounter with the other that is dynamic, reflexive, and resistant to reduction. When linked to the vestibularity of culture articulated by Spillers, touch also becomes a mechanism for speculative possibility—a site where the present moment anchors transformation and the emergence of alternative ways of being. By engaging with the haptic, it might be possible to unlearn the sovereign subjectivity upon which Western ontologies depend, moving instead toward the fleshy presence that resists systemic legibility. In this liminal space of becoming, solidarity across distance becomes conceivable—not as a static state but as an active, resonant practice that acknowledges the interdependence and mutual vulnerability inherent in human relations. It is through this touch, that we may begin to undo the subjugation of man by man and reimagine relationality beyond hierarchical paradigms and bound subjectivities.
Fanon, Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. New York, Grove Press, 2008.
Husserl, Edmund. Thing and Space : Lectures of 1907 : Pbk. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2010.
Keeling, Kara. “Notes on the Vestibular.” Thinking Gender 2024 Keynote. Center for the Study of Women, UCLA, March 1, 2024.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, trans Colin Smith. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 2002.
Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Rutgers University Press, 2009.