Tactile Dreams

In​ the early 20th century, enclosed compartments gave way to open carriages on the London Underground. Passengers jammed together ‘like herrings in a box’, according to one contemporary commuter. People bunched up on shared seats or circumspectly distanced themselves from others. Those left standing looped their hands into straps and braced their bodies against the rhythms of the carriage, swaying ‘like marine vegetation’, as the writer Arnold Palmer put it. Newspapers became shields against the eyes of others, the search for a cigarette lighter a tacit excuse to escape unwanted attention. Through countless bodily adjustments – by turns deliberate, half-conscious or automatic – passengers learned to ‘mind the gap’ not just between train and platform, but between one another. At crowded stations, railway constables were tasked with distinguishing between accidental bumps from fellow travellers and the stealthy brush of pickpockets, between innocent encounters and sexual opportunism on the train platform. The bearing of a body – its posture or gestures – could be interpreted for signs of intent.

In Intimate Subjects, his wide-ranging study of touch in modern Britain, Simeon Koole asks what we can learn from tactility itself: how did people decide who could touch whom – and when and where – and who was allowed to do the deciding? The British aversion to touching wasn’t limited to the Victorian era: comparative studies confirm that we continue to be more selective about when and where we are touched than people from other countries. But we have never not touched one another. Those prim Victorians who supposedly shrank from bodily contact were also people who, in expanding industrial cities, had never been in such close physical proximity to crowds of strangers.

Even these tropes of avoidance, Koole points out, highlight the ‘central importance of touch’. Why else would it need to be policed, fretted over, regulated, repelled and desired? Around the turn of the 20th century, changing gender relations and new opportunities for mixing in cities ‘made touch increasingly charged’. Koole’s book is at once a history of ideas, of the way scientists, sociologists, educators and lawmakers thought about touch, and a cultural history of everyday encounters between bodies. Mass urban living brought new sensory pleasures but also required distinctively modern subjectivities articulated through ideas about personal space, autonomy and consent.

Touch is an elusive subject. Historians of the senses have to read sources against the grain, feeling between the lines for instinctive, often unspoken bodily experiences. At the same time, this everyday sensory history has been from its inception a kind of master narrative for explaining the existential condition of modernity. Contemporary social observers reflected a great deal on the changing relationship to tactility. The world they described was one in which there was more physical contact than ever before but less meaningful connection, and in which all the senses were vulnerable to unwanted incursion. This was the ‘cerebral age’, D.H. Lawrence thought, where ‘we are humanly out of touch.’ For E.M. Forster, the modern city was a place of ‘telegrams and anger’, of ‘hurrying men who know so much and connect so little’. Modern technologies were felt to be co-opting the human senses into the machine-like rationality of industrial capitalism. On Oxford Street, Virginia Woolf wrote, the news changed ‘quicker than in any other part of London’. The press of people hurrying along the crowded pavements seemed to ‘lick the ink off the placards’. The mind itself became a newspaper onto which sensations were endlessly imprinted, ‘a glutinous slab’ receiving ‘a perpetual ribbon of changing sights, sounds and movements’.

The consensus was that urban life disorientated the senses. Cities were maelstroms of activity: a ceaseless barrage of traffic and noise, an endless succession of images and encounters that threatened to overwhelm the observer. Sociologists developed theories of modernity that attempted to characterise the experience of the individual amid the urban crowd. For Georg Simmel, people caught up in this sensory disorder found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between stimuli. Anyone attempting fully to register the chaos around them – every face in the crowd, every vehicle rushing past – encountered such a confusion of impressions that it threatened to collapse the boundary between the self and the world outside. To avoid psychological breakdown, the urban dweller had to become ‘blasé’ – less an attitude in Simmel’s account than the result of the ‘incapacity to react to new stimuli’. Modern life required people to develop a correspondingly modern technique of perception, from which they could view themselves as standing apart from the swirling energies around them.

Yet even as people insulated themselves from these demands on their attention, the temptations of urban life drew them in. In Walter Benjamin’s metropolis, the visual spectacles of advertisements, shop windows and department stores conspire to seduce the passing flâneur. For Karl Marx, the history of capitalism itself could be told as a story of sensory change. In his Paris notebooks, he wrote that ‘the forming of the five senses’ was intimately bound up with humanity’s changing relationship to what it produced and consumed. For Marx, however, capitalism didn’t overwhelm the senses so much as prevent their proper development: ‘The case-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the finest play. The dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the specific character of the mineral.’

These writers made compelling arguments. The problem, Koole thinks, is that we have taken them too readily at their word. From the start, ideas about the historicity of the senses were bound up with the changes historians sought to explain, making it difficult to imagine an alternative history, one in which the senses in modernity are not simply ‘overstimulated, alienated or managed as a cause and consequence of urban, industrial and social change’. The implicit assumption is that sensory change occurs in a linear fashion – a neat historical trajectory by which, for instance, the domination of visual media in the modern world has caused us to ‘lose touch’ with older, more tactile ways of knowing. Making sense of historical change becomes a matter of charting ‘perceptual revolutions’, in which ‘the senses become “more” or “less” sensitive, alienated, ordered, objectified [or] commodified’ in the transition to modernity. Koole argues for something much more contingent than these theories can accommodate. As he sees it, city dwellers were not simply acted on by their environment but actively shaped and negotiated it.

The same implicit logic that Koole resists is at work behind much writing on governmentality and liberal capitalism. Accounts of the modern city have described the way sensory disorder was managed and how this management became central to political and social order. The narrative goes something like this: after intense and unplanned Victorian urbanisation, the feverish energies of modern cities compelled municipal authorities to regulate space. Architects and planners were brought in to control sensation through the managed movement of bodies. On public transport networks, passengers were directed to follow set routes around stations and intercourses, ensuring the stream of bodies only ever moved in one direction (important both for safety and efficiency). Venues from concert halls to tea houses were examined – and even policed – to ensure crowding (and opportunities for illicit mixing) was limited. Over time every urban process was fine-tuned to make it smoother, more predictable and more efficient. In the ideal city, no one would be late for work due to congestion in an underground tunnel or find themselves crushed against a barrier at rush hour. Advertisements would draw consumers into shops at exactly the same rate that supply chains replenished the products on the shelves. In this reading, the development of both capitalism and liberalism depended on the regulation of sensation in everyday life. Eventually, what emerged in the early to mid-20th century was the modern, ‘self-regulating liberal subject’ and a society of citizen-consumers who were governed to govern themselves.

Koole suggests we might think about this differently. As he reminds us, there is a long history of counterproductive attempts to manage the movement of people on public transport. Throughout the 20th century, a paradox for planners of the London Underground was that improvements in efficiency seemed only to encourage more rushing. As the waiting time between trains was reduced to just a few minutes, more people were injured while rushing for the doors, despite there being less reason to hurry for a particular train. A lift might be quicker than an escalator, even if it involved a wait at the doors, but people experienced escalators as the swifter option because their journey continued seamlessly. The more passengers hurried, the more impatient they became with any waiting time at all.

If it is tempting to explain this phenomenon using theories of mass society and the clockwork rationality of railway time and industrial capitalism, Koole throws a spanner in the works. Why didn’t people experience the same impatience when waiting for buses? What we overlook, by focusing on the mechanics of moving people – through cities, into ‘modernity’ – is how variably people behave in different contexts. There was no single, steady shift into being ‘modern’ or experiencing time in a ‘modern’ way. People behaved – and still behave – in diverse and improvisatory ways. Physical proximity to strangers felt very different on a shared seat on the Tube compared to a seat on a bus, different again when weaving through a crowded street, and different still when entering a theatre or a tea shop. Unspoken boundaries were created and recreated in every encounter.

Intimate Subjects​ includes some irresistible case studies that illustrate the myriad ways in which touch was navigated and examined in the period. In one, the Reverend Harold Davidson walks into a tea shop. Making his way through a sea of empty tables – 49 in all – he seats himself at the sole table that is already occupied, beside a woman dining alone. She makes her own assessment of his intentions. After a few unsolicited comments about her choice of oxtail stew (‘I should not have that … you do not know what they put in it’), he runs across the room to chase down a waitress and ask her to the theatre before ‘advising’ the assistant manager, having ‘caught hold of her arm’, on how to treat ‘the girls’. This was part of a pattern of behaviour that eventually saw Davidson brought before a consistory court, accused of ‘accosting, molesting and importuning young females’. His defence argued that the vicar’s behaviour was motivated by a sincere concern for the plight of young women in the city. The case was taken up by the press, making a celebrity of Davidson (who was defrocked after the trial) as well as stirring up debate about the status of women workers in public places. Did they need protection or might they exploit their proximity to male customers? Many establishments banned tipping as a way of protecting their reputations.

In another of Koole’s case studies, the neurologist Henry Head writes to Ruth Mayhew, to whom he will soon become engaged. As he sits alone at his desk, her ‘vivid presence’ is so tangible to him that he can barely set words on the page. Mere ‘written words’ seem inadequate ‘when offered to the palpitating happy living creature whose touch I feel on my arm, whose joy envelops me as a cloud’. Less than a month after their engagement, and without his fiancée’s knowledge, Head instructed surgeons to sever the cutaneous nerves of his left forearm. By identifying what feeling remained after these nerves had been cut, and discovering what sensitivity returned with time, he hoped to chart a new course for the understanding of touch and revolutionise the field of neurology.

During experiments that mapped precisely what and where Head could feel in his arm – neither heat nor cold at first, nor the prick of a pin or the brush of cotton wool – he found his mind wandering repeatedly to thoughts of Ruth, specifically her touch. Twelve days after his operation, he wrote to her that he had been transported ‘last Sunday walking hand in hand with you’. He was ‘no longer a man devoted to the diseased and disordered aspects of life … but just a little child walking quietly in the rain … my hand in your dear warm hand’.

Mayhew, in turn, often wrote to Head with her own thoughts about touch. Wasn’t it strange, she reflected, the way one sense could be connected to another? The idea had occurred to her on cutting the pages of a new book. As the paper knife caught against the thick, ‘woolly’ paper, it ‘brought to my tongue the taste I knew as a child when we loved to put our disobedient lips to iron railings’. Head replied by recounting a ‘tactile dream’ told to him by a colleague, who had dreamed he was steering a ship and awoke still feeling ‘the wheel in his hands’.

Koole’s many short case studies (which are often told in the present tense, presumably for immediacy) paint a dynamic picture of a society in which new ideas about touch were emerging from personal experience and experimentation as well as more distanced observation. The teeming city, with its indistinguishable hordes, was also the sum of thousands of interactions and reactions, charted by individuals who were creating new social rules as they went.

Not all these studies make for comfortable reading, and women in particular had to manage the ‘difficult bodily performance of desirability and distance’. Koole is keen to register that the story of touch is also the story of what it means ‘to be a body available to and able to affect others and how this experience structured power relations of race, class, age, gender and sexuality’. We learn much of this without ever needing to be told – how to hold ourselves in a crowded train carriage, engage with a waiter or our boss, embrace a lover. We don’t need to be instructed to know what is the ‘right’ amount of personal space for ourselves and others as the train carriage empties; or that touching a stranger’s arm to catch their attention is normal in a queue but not at a urinal. When these boundaries break down, it is deeply unsettling, because there is potential for both violence and tenderness in every encounter.