On the Inspiration of Touch: An Afterword on the Question of Delicacy in a Molecular Age

The beautifully delicate structure of graphene

Image by AlexanderAIUS on Wikipedia

Someone wrote to say how much they enjoyed the recent post on the Lawrentian notions of touch and tenderness and to agree on the need for delicacy and lightness of hand. But I fear that they have a rather more utopian understanding of these things than I do and thus misconstrue my position. 

To be clear: I'm attempting to problematise Lawrence's work and would agree with Steven Connor that delicacy isn't the ideal binary opposite of grasping or rough-handling. In other words, it's not an entirely innocent form of contact, nor is it completely free from the exercise of power within the world. Further - and this might rather offend some Lawrentians - the term delicacy might even be said to refer to a form of touch that is more mental (more abstract) than other heavier, less refined forms of tactile sensation; a form of touch-in-the-head.

Conner notes:

"Delicacy involves work on a scale that makes it a matter of mind, work that approaches the condition of weightlessness [...] work that seems untouched by human hand [...] work that refines the idea of work."

If weightlessness is one of the defining features of delicacy, so too does it involve "the apprehension of altered scale". To touch something delicate in a delicate manner, is ultimately to draw closer to the invisible world of the tiny object which can be viewed only through a microscope. This has become increasingly true in an age of molecular science, quantum mechanics and nanotechnology. For what is more delicate, for example, than a sheet of graphene; a carbon allotrope consisting of but a single layer of atoms prettily arranged in a hexagonal lattice?

The fact is, power is not simply "mitigated in delicacy" and we are obliged - like it or not - to recognise that "our world is one in which delicacy itself has become a modality of power." In a crucial passage, Connor writes:

"Sensitivity used to be at the opposite end of the scale from power, which needed to make itself blunt and insensible to maintain its power. The rise of biopower means that power involves, no longer the brute manipulation of life, but insinuation into it, infiltration and manipulation of the miniscule balances that maintain systems.
      Power used to be applied. That is to say, it needed to be brought up against its object, which would either resist, buckle, or be displaced by the pressure. Such meetings, impressions or collisions take place on the outside of things [...] Now, it is not that there are no comings together, no bearings down, no adversity any more. It is that it is no longer quite clear where the outside of things is to be found. In the age of interface which is now upon us [...] everything is at once inside and outside everything else."      

In other words, there is now a promiscuous and paradoxical intermingling of all bodies, all objects, large and small. And delicacy is just a more subtle form of violation; a method of overcoming the natural reticence and resistance of the Other. For serious readers of Lawrence, this means they must perform a radical reappraisal of the ethics and erotics of (phallic) tenderness. Simply put, the world of Lady Chatterley is long lost and the lightness of her lover's touch can no longer be so clearly distinguished from the hand that wields power.

See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on pp. 267, 268, 280 and 281.

Note: those interested in reading the post to which this forms an afterword can click here.

Golden Girls (with Reference to the Case of Jill Masterson)

Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964) 

looking burnished and beautiful 

For many skin fetishists, epidermal eroticisation involves marking the surface of the body; with a tattoo needle, for example. Others look to impose more serious abrasions, lesions, or lacerations and delight in scabs and scar tissue. But there are also those individuals who hate any blemish or disfigurement and dream of a perfectly smooth, gleaming skin designed to produce a reassuring fantasy of impenetrability and becoming-inorganic.

Sometimes the latter achieve this fascinating look with latex or tight leather clothing. But it's perhaps best accomplished with the use of metallic body paint that displays the flesh in the manner of a precious object whilst, at the same time, immaterialising it by reducing the physical body "to the spill and shimmer of light across a surface". 

This is illustrated in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton), in which the character Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton, is given the kiss of death by Mr Goldfinger, the man with the Midas touch. Seeing her, lying naked on a bed and gilded from head to toe, is one of cinema's most astonishing (and kinkiest) moments.

Amusingly, Bond pseudo-scientifically explains to his superiors that Miss Masterson died of skin suffocation and that this has been known to happen to cabaret dancers with a penchant for performing nude apart from a coat of paint: 'It's alright so long as you leave a small bare patch at the base of the spine to allow the skin to breathe.'

Even more amusing is the fact that the filmmakers seemed to believe their own claptrap and decided to be better safe than sorry by leaving a patch of Miss Eaton's abdomen ungilded. Today, there are still many people who genuinely believe that she risked (or even lost) her life filming this scene. It's an urban legend which, according to Steven Connor, testifies "to a willingness to believe in the skin's capacity to drown or suffocate in its own waste products, to which gold, the radiance of the body, can always revert".

For Connor is convinced that the secret pleasure of fetishistically painting a woman in metallic gold or silver paint is a scatological one rooted in the "extreme ambivalence of images than conjoin the radiance of a skin that is all aura and effulgence with the suggestion of faecal daubing, thus either lifting faeces into the condition of light or lowering light into shit".

Personally, I'm not entirely convinced by this (psychoanalytic) line of argument. I think that the thrill of becoming-mineral and hardening into pure objectivity and brilliant exteriority is far beyond this Freudian game of Gold und Scheiße.


See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 53, 176-77.