The following considers the first two chapters of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. In the first chapter of the book, Berger foregrounds sight and history. My first thoughts comprise his method of centering certain types of knowledge, specifically the linguistic and the visual, while downgrading others. He says of touch, “close your eyes, move around the room and notice how the faculty of touch is like a static, limited form of sight.” (8-9) I found this statement immediately undermined his argument. Both because it, in my opinion, underestimates the strong sensory and interpretational aspects of touch and because it dismisses an important part of his own writing. On page 31 he states:

Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it. In this special sense all paintings are contemporary. Hence the immediacy of their testimony. Their historical moment is literally there before our eyes.

We might argue that the connection he mentions is purely based on the lack of mechanical production involved in the creation of a “masterpiece,” i.e. the lack of a camera or a printer. There is a buzz to these processes, these mediations, even if we struggle to articulate it. But this simplistic understanding is not all that’s apparent in this passage. He contributes this “silence and stillness” to “the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painters immediate gestures.” These strokes are more than just peaks and valleys which one might follow with their eyes, they were created by an artist’s hand, through the act of feeling. Further, they are tangible, their structure may not be felt (as any museum security guard will tell you) but they can be. It is their tangibility that makes an impression on us, and it is their tangibility that implies a closeness to the artists that produced them, that helps us “see” them in their work.

His “silence and stillness” is the result of a physicality that makes a work “immediate” or “contemporary,” that has the power to “close the distance in time.” Berger worries mystification will separate us from collective histories, stating “[m]ystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident,” (14-15) and I see this in his effort to insist on the static nature of touch, as he ignores the way touch demystifies. Take his second chapter, the visual one on the female nude. The acts of comparison, detachment, disrobement, and segmentation, all work to mystify the female body. To make it into something visual and ultimately something consumable, something inhuman or even dead. The proximity of touch, the same proximity he is arguing for in the materiality of the painting, is likely to help undermine such mystification.

To be clear, I’m not arguing for a one sided touching, or rather the ability to touch the women pictured. Instead, I might insist that dimension and its unstable and reciprocal nature is a critical part of “understanding,” and further life, one that is not always included in discussions of knowledge that insist upon language (usually Euro-American) to interpret all that is, including the textural aspects of paint, “explaining away what might otherwise be evident.” Might I suggest that the silence of touch lies in its lack of “information” as we traditionally know it. The informational schemas that lie in all our linguistic and visual associations (or mediations) are strangely absent in touch, touch allows us another way of connecting, its a form of communication and pleasure that is not always already beholden to the gaze.

The following projects critique schemas that might lack this dimensionality, and I’d like to first put forth touch as a heuristic mode of proximal understanding that might work to repair the damage done by the harmful assumptions, associations, and requirements set out by the visual and the linguistic.