We live in digital culture that elevates sight and downgrades touch. This cultural bias has deep philosophical roots that go all the way to Plato. Aristotle disagreed, pronouncing touch the most universal and intelligent of the senses, but ultimately lost the argument. There is no going back from our digital culture but by making space in our life for offline activities, and developments in haptotechnology, we can hope to bridge the gap between virtual and embodied experience, writes Richard Kearney.

Her, the sci-fi movie by Spike Jonze, a man falls madly in love with his Operating System. So madly that he can think of nothing else and becomes insanely jealous when he discovers that she (called OS) is also flirting with a few hundred other subscribers. Eventually OS feels so badly for him that she decides to supplement her digital persona with a real body by sending a surrogate lover in her name. But the love scene fails miserably because while the man touches the embodied lover, he hears the virtual signals of OS in his ears and cannot reconcile the two. The split between digital absence and tactile presence is too much to bear. The man loses touch with himself as an incarnate person and can only relate to the virtual chimera. He freezes up.

Welcome to the age of excarnation and the postmodern paradoxes that attend it. With the proliferation of internet sex via chat rooms, Instagram, and advanced simulation technologies, we are witnessing a shift in our relation to the body. As we pass through the touchscreen, we replace tangible persons with intangible personae—surrogates who sate our fantasies, Alexa and other avatars who do our bid- ding, GPS voices who tell us where to go, Amazon shop- ping hosts who execute our commands. No need to move to get what we want. Indeed, is it not ironic, in a culture addicted to body images, that we seem to have gotten so out of touch with touch itself—the mirrored work-out rooms, the self-peeps, the looking each other over in virtual posts, cropped photos, and edited profiles, all circling in a cyber- world of simulations?

With the proliferation of internet sex via chat rooms, Instagram, and advanced simulation technologies, we are witnessing a shift in our relation to the body.

I shared with my students Plato’s tale of Gyges’ ring, which gave the wearer the power of invisibility—to see others without being seen. And this led us to consider whether the gains of today’s digital revolution—which we all agreed are huge—might not be accompanied by a real risk: namely, losing touch with ourselves and each other. We concluded by wondering if the “Platonic” heritage of optocentrism, prevalent for two thousand years, was not culminating in today’s culture of “spectacularity”—a digital theatre where the eye rules supreme. Was today’s virtual dater not at risk of becoming a reiteration of Gyges, viewing everything at a distance with- out actually touching or being touched by anything? Were we not entering a “Civilization of the Image” where the world is a screen, out of touch with the real?

The Platonic origins of our sight-centred culture