in_touch

Among the roots we talked about touching each other from the edges, of inhabiting that oblique corner, always on the tip of the tongue.
I caress you and think: what is touching? Karen Barad and Maria Puig's texts revolve through my mind without any coherent or concrete order, and I go over the sentences I find with the constant feeling I am missing something. We lie down, I feel the grass in contact with my body.
I remember:

So, do I feel the repulsion that my body is emitting against the grass, or the repulsion that the grass is exerting against me? An ant climbing my body as the electrons repel each other. I feel the repulsion of a bee sting penetrating my skin and the theories of physics drift
I read:

I see the dead body of the insect and think about the double directionality of touching. Is it touching to be touched? Is it possible to touch without being touched? If we have never been in contact, when have we begun to touch each other?
In order to embrace new ways of understanding touching that allow us to perceive more broadly how we touch and affect the world around us, it is necessary to redefine concepts such as "consent", "individuals" or "innocent".
In Western culture, vision has been imposed as dogma, relegating the entire sensory world to the background. However, how are we affecting our environment beyond what we can see? In what way are we touching without perceiving it? Which politics are hidden behind invisibility? What do we mean by affecting?
Touch is never pure or innocent. It is inseparable from the field of differential relations that constitute it. [2] Let’s ask with them:

Touch has been an object to study for centuries. It has been seen as an innocent form of engagement and positioned in the history of philosophy as a mutual consenting act between individuals, free of culture, history, and politics.

Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog?
Whom and what do we touch when we touch electrons? [4]
What touching signifies for thinking and knowing in more than human worlds? [5]

According to the physics explanation, touching does not involve contact. Electrons are negatively charged particles, so what we understand as "touch" is actually the electromagnetic repulsion force between them.

Since the beginning we shared atelier and we became
I placed a sensor in the soil of your pot and I would get closer to you slowly. Even from the distance, halfway between your leaf tip and my fingertips her electrons and mine met, triggering the sound of the sensor. My eye could still only see the "empty" space between you and me, my sense of touch had not yet alerted me to any interaction, but with the sensor I could clearly hear that something was happening. Could I say, then, that we were in contact? What part of "us" was in contact? Are those electrons halfway part of me, or part of you, or something else? Link
I keep looking at the space between you and me until I accept that I don't understand what is going on. Together we speculated various possibilities, I was remembering the experiments of The Secret Life of Plants and my imagination directly started to think about the possibility of communication. If your electrons are like mine, if your electrons are now mine, if we are both conducting bodies, couldn't we find a common language?
I look around me and wonder how many things my electrons are in contact with right now. How close do we have to be to touch each other?
Suddenly the space between you and me has become an infinity of possibilities, a place where we meet halfway.

What are touching when we don't feel like touching anything? What happens when de Dogma of the vision fails and we are suddenly capable of perceiving a hole invisible network hidden underneath?
How many other things would appear if we would change our apparatus? What other relationships have we been ignoring because of their invisibility to our eyes?

All my cultural heritage [6] and I had placed the plant at a lower level. My own anthropocentrism had prevented me from thinking about the possibility that, while I was studying the aloevera, it was studying me. Seeing myself suddenly situated in this role exchange and confronted with this abrupt reciprocity destabilized the perception of what I had been understanding by "working together" with the plant.
No one said that shifting the anthropocentric focus was always a pleasant experience. Can we really collaborate with other species from a point of view that does not place the human being at the centre?

I remember Lynn Margulis saying that words like collaboration or competition are just anthropocentric worlds which lead us to dangerous metaphors.
I remember the experiences of Quimera Rosa becoming plant.
I remember the story of the mechanic from “The Universe of Things” that, for a few moments, can feel and see the world from an alien’s perspective.

Dead and safe. A world where humans are isolated and separated from the rest is only safe for those who want to exploit it without any consequences for their own profit. Situating some lives in an inferior level than others validates a narrative full of massive genocides without ressentiment. It validates a world where the final product is presented perfectly packed, and it leads us to forget the large chain of affections behind the plastic layer.
Therefore, a world where humans are isolated and situated over the others only benefits a System that isolates and hierarchizes people. A System that kills and destroys under the excuse of progress.
But we do not believe in progress anymore.
We claim ourselves precarious.
We do not look forward, but down to the soil, to the mud.
We have never been individuals.
From an ill world are coming pandemic societies because we have been always part of the same body.
We are part of an environment with millions of lives and materia in constant relation where, in that space halfway, we have never stopped touching each other.

That day I had forgotten about you. I was absently looking at my cell phone next to the stove until I was struck by a noise I couldn't identify that I heard every time I touched the screen of my cell phone. Where was it coming from?
It took me a few minutes to realize that it was you that, still connected to the sensors from your pot located 2 meters away, were reacting to my movements.
My first reaction was to feel watched and invaded (maybe a bit afraid) at this intrusion into my privacy and I was surprised at my own hypocrisy.

In the course of a long evening, as he works on the car, the mechanic has an epiphany – or a hallucination. He experiences, for a moment, what the aliens’ “living world” is actually like: his own tools seem to come alive. The experience is disconcerting, to say the least. “He stared at the spanner in his hand until the rod of metal lost its shine. Skin crept over it, the adjustable socket became a cup of muscle, pursed like an anus, wet lips drawn back by a twist on the tumescent rod.” The living world is obscene and pornographic. Existence is suffocating and unbearable. Everything is suffused by “living slime. . . full of self, of human substance,” but somehow rendered other. This is what happens when you have “succeeded in entering the alien mind, seen the world through alien eyes. How could you expect such an experience to be pleasant?” The mechanic is terrified and nauseated. All he wants is to return to the loneliness and security of the customary human world: a world in which objects remain at a proper distance from us, because they are “dead, and safe.”

Touching and being touched

Is there any moment where we are not in contact with the other? Materia is configurated with intra-actions, all the material entities are intertwisted relations in constant becoming-with. Materia itself is always touching and being touched by infinite configurations of other times and living beings. Is not the other, then, part of the self?

Let’s create alternative stories to drift, to shake the structures of definitions. If our body is in constant relation, where does it start and end the idea of “us”?

We don’t preexist our relations. [9]

In an important sense, in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of response-ability. Touching is a matter of response. Each of “us” is constituted in response-ability. Each of “us” is constituted as responsible for the other, as being in touch with the other. [10]

Hay que permanecer en el problema
Stay with the trouble, somebody says…
Make kin not babies, somebody says…
Hay que permanecer en el problema
The trouble now, is the body
Or rather, the trouble now is the limits of the body
The trouble is that:
If the limits of the body are porous
Where do you begin?
Where do I end?

What do we understand with "we"? In between of a network of complex communications, constant flow of information, people, objects in which everything is interconnected, Neo-capitalism pushes the individual into a state of constant competition, where everyone is individually responsible for his or her own achievements and failures. Thus, the globalized world appears to our eyes as a fragmented world, in permanent conflict and competition, and between the I and the whole we do not know where to place our links, our complicities, our alliances and solidarities. [11]
The word "we" functions in our language as a plural of the first person. As a personal pronoun, "we" does not sustain itself. In "we" the "I" always predominates because there is no "we" except from "I" and this "I" is subject to the not-I element because of its transcendent quality. The presence of the I is constitutive of we". [13]

So then:

What if we change the pont of view of “we” towards a singular common dimension, instead of a plural I? What would imply a new dimension of us in more than human worlds? What would imply a new dimension of us in a world where we are constantly in touch halfway? “We” is distributed, tentacular network, hummus in constant movement.

[1] Karen Barad, “On Touching - The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1).” in /Power of Material / Politics of Materiality/, ed. Kerstin Stakemeier and Susanne Witzgall, (Munich: Diaphanes - Misceallenous, 2018), 153.
[2] Barad, “On touching”, 161.
[3] Donna Haraway, /When Species Meet/, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 3.
[4] Barad, “On touching”, 160.
[5] “What caring signifies for thinking and knowing in more than human worlds”. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, /Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds/ (Minneapolis: Unversity of Minnesota Press, 2017), 110.
[6] For more information about cultural heritage in our perception of plants go to Mancuso, /Sensibilidad/, 12-23.
[7] /Symbiotic Earth/, Directed by John Feldman (Bullfrog Films, 2019), DVD.
[8] Steven Shaviro. “The Universe of Things” in /The Universe of things. On Speculative Realism/. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 47.
[9] Haraway, /When Species Meet/
[10] Barad, “In touch”, 161.
[11] Marina Garcés, /Un Mundo Común/ (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2013), 21.
[12] Ariadna Guiteras, /Shapeless and All Shapes/, performance script, 2018.
[13] Émile Benveniste, /Problèmes de linguistique générale/, (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), quoted in Garcés, /Un Mundo Común/, 233.
[14] Donna Haraway, /Staying with the trouble/, (EEUU: Duke University Press, 2016), 32.