Cassandra Voices

Tag: Richard Kearney

  • Review: Richard Kearney’s Touch

    Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense is a recently published work by Irish philosopher and public intellectual Richard Kearney. The book is the third in the ‘No Limits’ series published by Columbia University Press.

    The blurb and introduction promise a timely meditation on the importance of touch in an age of virtuality. The book, we are told, asks how we are to reconcile the physical with the virtual, our embodied experience with our global connectivity. Unfortunately, however, it contributes little towards answering these questions, spending most of its few pages mulling over the history of philosophy and Western medicine; lingering around the goalposts without registering a direct hit.

    This is disappointing because Kearney has his finger on the pulse of a real undercurrent of dissatisfaction with our mainstream cultural model. Many of us believe that something has gone wrong, so we turn to our writers, artists and public intellectuals to identify the root cause. Is capitalism to blame? The invention of print? The discovery of fire?

    Kearney considers a neglect of touch as a key feature of our cultural predicament. It all began with the Greeks – he suggests – exemplified by Plato’s valorisation of the spiritually pure sense of sight over our beastly sense of touch. Now, we see the unhappy conclusion of such an idea; a culture founded around the image, where life is increasingly lived virtually at the expense of our physical existences.

    This mass sense of disembodiment, caused by engagement with digital technology, Kearney calls excarnation, a term loaded with esoteric theological significance. This aspect to our culture was brought into stark relief during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Thus, most workers and students began working virtually from their own home, as nationwide quarantines were enforced, and social distancing was put in place in supermarkets, restaurants, and other public places. We realised that this was, in a way, the logical next step to the virtualisation of education and work. We just needed one catastrophe to put it in place.

    Worthy Premise

    ‘A civilization that loses touch with flesh’, writes Kearney, ‘loses touch with itself.’ (p. 47). This is a worthy premise to a book, and from this beginning, one can imagine an author moving towards a rich discussion of the effects of ‘excarnation’ on such matters as sex, violence, sport, the prevalence of body dysmorphia, self-harm etc. in our contemporary culture.

    The topic of ‘touch’ is indeed broad, but contemporary writers and cultural critics have gained good mileage with similarly broad topics in the past. An example is Maggie Nelson’s book The Art of Cruelty (2011), which takes the broad theme of cruelty as a foundation to a wide-ranging discussion on everything from avant-garde performance art, to the tropes of advertising, to the coverage of U.S. war crimes during the so-called ‘War on Terror’.

    This book, however, fails to deliver on its ambitious premise. Instead of diving into an analysis of contemporary culture, it stalls before it starts with two lengthy chapters introducing a glossary of terms, distinctions and concepts that are seldom used later in the book.

    Kearney meanders through etymologies and distinctions, drawing neat moral messages from vague, linguistically questionable associations. The root cause of this may be the unnecessary broadening of an already vague theme. Thus, he writes:

    As I hope I clear by now, when we speak of touch we are not just referring to one of the five senses … we are talking about touch in a more inclusive way, as an embodied manner of being in the world, an existential approach to things that is open and vulnerable, as when skin touches and is touched. (pp.15-16)

    This is a little too sweet to swallow. Even if we accept the Heideggerian mysticality of this passage, it’s obvious that Kearney is widening his subject matter out of manageable proportion.

    Indeed, he draws strongly on Heidegger in his concern with words and their hidden meanings. At times, this can be surprising and intriguing, but at other times, the connections seem banal. He argues:

    But tact is not the same as contact. Being tactful with someone does not always imply immediate physical proximity. One can be tactful, for instance, by practicing discretion in particular circumstances, as one negotiates the right space between oneself and others. (p. 10)

    Handshake

    A baby-steps approach would be justifiable on philosophical grounds if Kearney wasn’t taking flights of fancy elsewhere. At one point, he speaks of the handshake as being the ‘origin of community’(p. 42) without adequately explaining how.

    Indeed, in many cultures bowing or other non-contact gestures are the norm. We turn to the endnotes to find an essay that ‘analyses the first wager of hand-to-hand encounter between Diomedes and Glaucus in Homer’s Iliad and Abraham’s greeting of the strangers at Mamre.’ These literary scenes are certainly interesting, and may indeed point to episodes passed down through folk memory, but to suggest that they represent a historically verifiable moment in human history is unsatisfactory.

    The first chapter is structured around the questionably useful coining of new terms to describe sight, taste, smell and sound being used ‘tactfully’. ‘A person with tactful taste is savvy.’(p. 17), Kearney writes, a person with a good nose has ‘flair’(p. 21), and so on. But when we talk about the ‘tactfulness’ of touch we don’t really mean the sense of touch; remember we mean the metaphorical way of being in the world that touch acts as an analogy for.

    It’s odd to focus on the specifics of each sense when we’ve already established that we aren’t taking the theme of touch literally. In any case, is it still believed that there are only five senses? Isn’t it the case that there are many others beyond those traditional five?

    At this point in my reading, the unanswered questions become overwhelming, and I decided to stop thinking too hard about them. Instead, I focused on the texture of Kearney’s style, clearly influenced by Continental Philosophy. There is a lot of jargon, which is at times hard to follow. On the flipside, it is quite playful, making use of a number of touch-based puns and idioms. There is also a tendency towards moralistic aphorisms, and using words poetically. The following sentences give a flavour:

    Without the transversality of touch, sensibility risks sensationalism: sense without sensitivity, perception without empathy, stimulation without responsibility. (p. 16)

    Savvy is a carnal know-how. (p. 18)

    For if ontogeny repeats phylogeny, it also repeats cosmogony. (p. 20)

    Hearing is tactful when it resonates with what resounds. (p. 27)

    In response to this, however, I am moved to quote Wittgenstein: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.’

    Visual Culture

    It is popularly acknowledged that we live in a ’visual culture’, and Kearney sees this ‘optocentrism’ as the source of our woes. In his own words, ‘Optical omnipresence trumps tactile contact. Cyber connection and human isolation go hand in glove.(p. 5)’

    But Kearney never specifies exactly what a visual culture is, or what it means to live in one. What does the shortening of our attention spans, our growing inability to read longer texts, or the increasing popularity of podcasts and audiobooks actually mean in a ‘visual culture’? Do these elements suggest a deterioration in our visual faculties? Kearney doesn’t linger on these questions. In his eagerness to champion touch, he fails to determine exactly what it is he is fighting against.

    The second chapter of Touch is even murkier than the first. Kearney embarks on a historical tour of different philosophical considerations of touch, but only discusses two philosophers at any length: Aristotle, and Edmund Husserl. This leaves a gap of some two thousand years in between. Was there nothing to say about the Christian philosophers and touch, or about Descartes’s suspicion that his physical sensations could be a mere dream?

    As someone untrained in philosophy, I found the explanations of Aristotle’s thought particularly difficult to follow. I couldn’t tell where Aristotle’s opinions ended and Kearney’s began, especially since Kearney quotes Aristotle using terms like “tact”, which Kearney had given idiosyncratic definitions for in the previous chapter. Are we to take it that Aristotle aligned with Kearney’s usage of the word?

    At one point, Kearney remarks that Aristotle saw touch as the most foundational sense, since all the other senses rely on it. Food must touch the tongue to be tasted, soundwaves must ‘touch’ the eardrum, and ‘light strikes the iris’(p. 43). But was Aristotle aware that photons were material objects? And are photons actually material objects, if they have no mass, and can act like waves?

    When you start considering this subject at a quantum level, everyday notions of touch break down. After all, when I ’touch’ a table, at a molecular level none of the atoms in my finger are touching the atoms in the table, and I am only feeling the electromagnetic resistance of the table’s atoms.

    Likewise, none of the atoms in my body are ’touching’ each other, but are held in a bond through their orbitals. So, in what sense can you say that light ’touches’ the eye, or sound ’touches’ the ear?

    Odysseus and Polyphemus (1896) by Arnold Böcklin.

    No Central Thrust

    Even if you accept all the concepts, definitions and distinctions found in the philosophical survey, your work won’t be rewarded because Kearney barely mentions them again. Instead, the text turns to medicine. In chapter three, he talks about literary/folkloric/mythological figures like Odysseus and Oedipus who embody a ’wounded healer’ archetype. Then, in chapter four he talks about the importance of physical touch in modern medicine, particularly in psychotherapy.

    At this point, to my mind at least, it became clear that there was no central thrust to this book, and my attempt to follow his train of thought would go unrewarded. Instead, I found a collection of loosely connected rambles through Kearney’s reading, with no development between the chapters.

    The final chapter on popular culture (social media, video games, movies) finally gave me what I had been hoping for – a discussion of touch in contemporary culture – but is, sadly, the least satisfactory of the lot. Kearney is clearly unfamiliar with the details or nuances of internet culture, consistently misusing terms. At one point, he refers to the leaking of Hillary Clinton’s emails as ’revenge porn’ (p. 119), a blunder that reveals a deep unfamiliarity with the expression he is using.

    At another, he disparages the state of internet discourse as infuriatingly simple compared to the Golden Age of communication that existed back in an Edenic past: ’communication is becoming daily more simplified by social media tweets, memes, acronyms, and hash tags – ’What’s up’ being replaced by WhatsApp.’

    Putting aside the cringeworthy final sentence, is it really self-evident that internet communication is more ’simplified’ than print or verbal speech? Couldn’t you argue the opposite – that the increasingly ironic, self-referential, meme-ified soup of internet discourse is actually maddeningly Baroque?

    Avoiding odious comparison, you could speak of internet discourse not as better or worse, simpler or more complex than speech, but just as a new modality which is still in the process of growth, of finding its feet and testing its limits.

    There are plenty of scholars analysing internet culture now. It may seem absurd to study memes, but when you consider their effect on politics, it appears intellectually reckless to dismiss them as simplistic, and unworthy of analysis.

    Grand Theft Auto V.

    Video Games

    The ignorance latent in Kearney’s cultural analysis hits a peak in his discussion of video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V (2013), which he calls ’controversial’. When describing it he first gives an inaccurate description of its contents, speaking of how players can ‘build or destroy cities’ (Is he thinking of SimCity (1989), perhaps?) and ’seduce strippers’ (according to my research on the GTA forum, you can only purchase lap dances from the strippers in the game).

    He gives an inaccurate account of what it feels like to play a game he surely hasn’t played. It’s ’vicarious’ he says. With ’a click of a button, one exits the world of tangible reality and enters a computer-generated universe’. If only GTA V gave one the escape from tangible reality Kearney imagines. Alas, however, technology can only progress so fast.

    After painting this Black Mirror-esque picture of the reality-warping power of the computer game, Kearney exhorts the lost souls of gamers that ‘it is but a simulacrum’, and warns against ’the risk of losing touch’. The only one out of touch here is Kearney himself.

    Apart from GTA V, Kearney lists a number of examples from modern media that deal with the sense of isolation and alienation engendered by digital media, referencing such titles as ‘Her’ (Spike Jonze, 2013), ‘The Truman Show’ (Peter Weir, 1998) and ‘Black Mirror’ (Charlie Brooker, 2011 – present). But all these works communicate much more nuanced and rich critiques of contemporary culture than Kearney is able to muster in this text.

    There are insights and interesting titbits scattered throughout the book, but on the whole it is lacking in a sense of progression, with little development from chapter to chapter, and a cumbersome amount of time is spent advancing distinctions and definitions that are never called into use.

    Columbia University Press claims that the No Limits series ‘brings together creative thinkers who delight in the pleasure of intellectual hunting, wherever the hunt may take them and whatever critical boundaries they have to trample as they go.’ With Touch, we see the weaknesses of this interdisciplinary approach, as the book’s lack of precision and relative naivete provides unsatisfactory responses to important questions in contemporary culture.

    Featured Image: A Missouri National Guardsman looks into a VR training head-mounted display at Fort Leonard Wood in 2015

  • Matt Talbot and the ‘Theology of Incarceration’

    The Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has unleased another wave of soul-searching in Ireland. How could a society claiming to be ‘Christian’ have failed to protect, and even to have harmed, its most vulnerable – unmarried mothers and their ‘illegitimate’ children? The harrowing accounts fit within a wider ‘Theology of Incarceration’ that inculcated subservience and prevailed on the downtrodden to await their rewards in heaven.

    ‘The story of Matt Talbot is significant because it reflects the traditional approach of the Irish Catholic Church to the question of social justice’ wrote Ronan Sheehan in his seminal account of enduring exclusion in Ireland’s capital: The Heart Of The City by Ronan Sheehan and Brendan Walsh Brandon Books, (Dublin 1988); a second edition was published as Dublin: The Heart Of The City by Lilliput Press (Dublin, 2016).

    Matt Talbot’s legacy continues to resonate through Dublin, and beyond: in the name of Talbot Street off O’Connell Street; and in one of its foremost bridges: the Talbot Memorial Bridge linking Memorial Road (and Custom House Quay) on the north bank of the river to Moss Street (and City Quay) on the south where there is a sculpture of Matt Talbot by James Power erected in 1978 and irreverently called ‘the pain with the chains.’ There is also a shrine to the ‘Venerable’ Matt Talbot’s inside the Neo-Romanesque Church of Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street dating from 1954, and a plaque on Granby Lane off Parnell Square.

    Granby Lane, Dublin 1.

    Life and Death

    The ascetic figure of Matt Talbot assumes centre stage in a chapter in Sheehan’s book entitled ‘Moral Issues and the Catholic Church’. After Talbot’s death in 1924 the example of his life would serve as propaganda for the Church. This posthumous status far exceeded any ambition in a humble working man, who drew solace from a profound religious conviction after struggling with alcohol addiction during his youth.

    Sheehan recalls:

    In his teens and twenties Talbot, like the other men in his family, drank heavily and was probably an alcoholic. Like the drug addicts of today the Talbots often stole to finance their habits and one occasion they took a street musician’s fiddle. Matt would pawn his boots for drinking money and walk barefoot. One day in 1884 after an idle week that had left them penniless, Matt and his brothers, Phil and Joe, stood outside a public house waiting to be invited inside for a drink. No one asked them ‘if they had a mouth on them’. Talbot went home and later that evening went to Clonliffe College where he took the pledge.

    And so began Talbot’s recovery, engendering a moral rectitude that saw him repaying gambling debts and vainly searching for the fiddler whose instrument he had misappropriated. From that point onwards Talbot became a regular mass-goer at St. Saviour’s Dominican Priory on Upper Dorset Street. Indeed, it was while on his way to mass on nearby Granby Lane that he collapsed and died of heart failure. There is now a plaque dedicated to his memory at the site.

    Plaque to Matt Talbot on Granby Lane.

    Labourer and Ascetic

    For much of his life Talbot worked as a labourer at a timber yard, at a time when workers’ movements were in ferment, and revolution in the air. Sheehan writes:

    His [Talbot’s] relationship to the labour movement is a matter of dispute. He was on strike in 1900 and in the General Strike of 1913 and he was a member of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. He refused to collect strike pay and when his colleagues pressed it on him, he gave the money to strikers with young families. Unusually for a Dublin man, he often admitted publicly that he could not understand issues and was prepared to be guided by people he felt were better informed. ‘Jim Larkin knows the rights and wrongs of it,’ he is quoted as saying with reference to the strike of 1913. Most frequently he referred issues to his spiritual advisors, or consulted texts they recommended.

    Talbot’s mortification of the flesh included sleeping on a plank with block of wood for a pillow. Sheehan tells us that ‘When he died, in 1925, it was discovered that he had worn chains about his body.’ In death rather than life he would play an important role for the Irish Catholic Church: ‘Talbot’s subservient piety was adopted by the Church as a symbol in ideological crusades of the thirties, forties and fifties,’ and any deference to Jim Larkin’s methods would be obscured.

    Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1.

    Irish Catholicism

    A strong association between Church and State was perhaps predictable in a newly independent Ireland, given Catholicism’s role in preserving a distinctive Irish identity after the failure of the United Irishmen movement in the 1790s to bring lasting unity between Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter. Declining use of the native language after the Great Famine of the 1840s made religion an obvious point of distinction between ‘Catholic’ Irish and ‘Protestant’ English.

    The Catholic basis of Irish nationalism was affirmed during the struggle for independence: the 1916 Easter Rising was consciously suffused with religious symbolism; and in its aftermath prominent Republican figures from Protestant backgrounds such as the Countess Markievicz, and Roger Casement converted to Catholicism.

    After independence in 1922, devotion to the ‘one true Church, Apostolic and Universal’ crossed the political divide between the Pro- and Anti-Treaty Civil War factions of what became Fianna Fail (1926) and Fine Gael (1933).

    In conformity with Catholic doctrine, in 1925 divorce was prohibited in Ireland, a bar that was only removed after a referendum in 1996; while in Dublin in March, 1925 – the year after Matt Talbot’s death – according to Sheehan, ‘the police mounted a massive raid on an area variously known as the kips, Monto, the digs, the village. This was the brothel zone.’

    Moreover, the Constitution that came into force under Éamon de Valera in 1937 – and accepted by a majority of the electorate – identified a ‘special position’ for the Catholic Church, in an article only deleted after another referendum in 1972.

    Right up until the 1990s – the revelation in 1992 that Bishop Eamon Casey had fathered a child with an American woman is often viewed as a pivotal moment – there was little challenge to the pre-eminence of a Church, which created a state within a state through the provision of education and health that brooked no opposition. Thus in 1951 a combination of the Church hierarchy and the medical profession scuppered the ambitions of Minister for Health Noel Browne to introduce a measure of universal health care through the Mother and Child Scheme.

    In its aftermath then Taoiseach John A. Costello of Fine Gael announced unapologetically: ‘I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first, and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong.’ In truth, few among the political class would have demurred from Costello’s unequivocal deference to the Catholic hierarchy.

    Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1.

    ‘Dominion of Damnation’?

    Nonetheless, Fintan O’Toole arguably goes too far in a recent assessment of the Church’s ‘Spiritual Terrorism’: ‘There was no such thing as ”society” as distinct from … dominion of damnation, no neutral State beyond its reach. It pervaded everything and invaded all of our bodies.’

    For Irish men, at least, an independent caste of mind, and sense of humour, remained possible within fixed parameters. Building on the Irish Literary Revival, by the 1950s Dublin contained a remarkable artistic community, which included writers such as Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and J.P. Dunleavy, while the gay artist Patrick Scott was emerging on the scene; meanwhile many Irish Republicans of that period were being influenced by Marxism, to the consternation of the Church.

    Notwithstanding greater emphasis on social supports under Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fail from 1932, including an ambitious house building programme; and the introduction from 1948 of Keynesian fiscal policies under Fine Gael’s John A. Costello – whose son Declan would develop the idea of Christian socialism within that party with his Just Society document – for most of the population even socialism remained a dirty word; while Communism was considered the work of the devil.

    Shrine to the ‘Venerable’ Matt Talbot, Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1.

    Archbishop John Charles McQuaid

    According to Ronan Sheehan, ‘The political message that the image of Talbot is supposed to communicate is that the working class is properly a subject class.’ This ‘theology of incarceration’ was expressed by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid in an introduction to the first full-length biography of Talbot:

    Yet it will be seen that the author in setting out the main events of the life of the Dublin workman has helped us to understand the sanctity to which he ultimately attained. The evidence is of a very remarkable spirit, or rather, gift of prayer, the practice of self-denial in poverty and work, the habit of recollection in the presence of God, a very tender graciousness towards children and a deep love of the most Holy Mother of God … We cherish the hope that the Church may set the seal of her approval from the virtues that made this obscure and gentle workman an image, in our midst, in Dublin, of the Patron of the interior life, St Joseph.’

    McQuaid’s unctuous benediction seems the realisation of W. B. Yeats’s concern about an emerging Ireland where ‘men were born to pray and save’; in political terms, as Sheehan, put it:

    When proletarian energy is focused upon the ‘interior life’ it is rendered politically tame. In Talbot the class struggle for justice is replaced by an individual struggle for holiness. It is precisely because he was a worker that we can see in Talbot’s spirituality the epitome of the negative ideological role Marx and Engels attributed to religion.

    Sheehan caustically observed: ‘Instead of attempting an analysis of the society in which he lived, he meditated.’

    Through no fault of his own, the political quiescence of Matt Talbot produced an ideal role model for the Catholic Church of an uncomplaining working man, who awaits his reward in heaven. Importantly this was before the arrival of a Theology of Liberation in the wake of Vatican II that animated many Irish radicals in the 1960s, including the journalist Vincent Browne.

    The importance of religious devotion to Talbot in his battle against alcoholism remains significant. Developing spiritual practices or a religious faith can often be beneficial to recovering addicts. However, Talbot’s apparent deference to authority as a working man suited the capitalist structures which the Catholic Church of that period legitimated.

    Granby Lane, Dublin 1.

    God after God?

    A more activist Irish Catholicism infused with Liberation Theology is now closely associated with the continuing work of Father Peter McVerry, whose approach to poverty, according to Sheehan, ‘stands in contrast to that of the promoters of the cult of Matt Talbot.’

    The philosopher Richard Kearney in his book Anatheism: Returning to God after God (Columbia, New York, 2010) proposes ‘the possibility of a third way beyond the extremes of dogmatic theism and militant atheism: those polar opposites of certainty that have maimed so many minds and souls in our history.’

    Thus the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer awaiting execution in a Nazi concentration camp for participating in a plot to kill Hitler proposed a reformed Christianity after the ‘Death of God’ heralded by Nietzsche, Freud and totalitarianism. Bonhoeffer wrote: ‘The God of religion, of metaphysics and of subjectivity is dead; the place is vacant for the preaching of the cross and for the God of Jesus Christ.’ To Kearney: ‘Christianity thus becomes not an invitation to another world but a call back to this one, a robust and challenging ‘Christianity of this world’, a secular faith that sees the weakness of God as precisely a summons to the rekindled strength of humanity.’

    Throughout most of the history of the State Irish Catholicism reinforced a social order in which the working class were asked to count their blessings rather than their wages; while ‘fallen’ women and their progeny were treated with indifference and cruelty. A sanitized account of Matt Talbot’s life provided a useful lesson in subservience. Now that the spell is broken, it remains to be seen whether a Catholicism after Catholicism can yet emerge in Ireland.

    All Images (c) Daniele Idini

    Statue of Matt Talbot on the south side of Matt Talbot Bridge.