Spatial Textures: Place, Touch, and Praesentia

Kevin Hetherington
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Kevin Hetherington: Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, England

Environment and Planning A, 2003, vol. 35, issue 11, 1933-1944

Abstract: In this paper I consider the everyday ways in which people make place through touch. Beginning with discussions with visually impaired people about their experiences of museum places, I seek to offer a more general understanding of the coconstruction of place and subjectivity through the role of touch. Touch produces a form of confirmation of the subject–world at the interface between the materiality of that world and the hand. Such an encounter is understood not as initially meaningful and representational to a subject who is distinct and distally knowledgable about the world, but as constitutive—through a proximal encounter with the praesentia of a place, which is both present and absent—of the subject itself. As such, I aim to contribute to ongoing debates around the themes of performativity and nonrepresentationalist knowledge within geography.

Date: 2003
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:35:y:2003:i:11:p:1933-1944

DOI: 10.1068/a3583

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