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Tension, Time and Tenderness: Indexical Traces of Touch in Textiles

This book chapter summarises research developed by Pajaczkowska between 2006 and 2010 as a participant in the AHRC-funded Centre CATH (Culture, Art, Theory and History) at the University of Leeds, working on the presence of indexicality as a significant part of visual culture. Framed by the growth of digital and virtual cultures, the Centre’s research seminars, lectures and colloquia brought together historians, theorists and practitioners to generate interdisciplinary dialogues on cultural change.

Pajaczkowska’s essay considers the disciplines and practices of textile production as one example of manufacture, applied arts and crafts where the traces of the hand as evidence of agency is particularly significant. She argues that, whilst touch is indexical, sight is virtual: the opposition between visual and phonological signification is less relevant than the divergent knowledges produced by embodied experience, touch and tacit knowledge.

In developing the argument, Pajaczkowska allied the theory of semiotics to the psychoanalysis of pre-Oedipal subjectivity in order to develop a new paradigm for thinking about the knowledge generated in artefacts and making. Pajaczkowska concluded that the metaphors of holding, containment, reach and grasp are actively present in contemporary cultures. The contrast with digital economies serves to heighten awareness of this dialogical tension.

The research into the coordination of hand and eye as a signifying and libidinal economy that informed this chapter was also disseminated through papers given at the conference ‘Artists in Industry’ held at the University of Bucharest in November 2012.