Touching, Feeling, Noting. On Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Indisciplinary Method

 

Dis/Connection

If I take notes, I only take ‘feel notes’. This is because I mainly note feelings – from the tangible feel of material objects, substances or surfaces, to noting the emotions elicited by learning new things; thoughts precipitated by the feel of things.

The connection of contact with feeling, and of feeling with touch is complex and – appropriately – intimate.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s book, Touching Feeling, sets this out well. One of her primary interests in that work is the inextricability of touching and feeling. In the opening pages she connects this with matters of texture.

I returned to Sedgwick’s book after many years because I wanted help thinking not merely about touching but also about grasping, holding, brandishing and wielding. I also wanted help thinking about writing – specifically the different disciplines of different disciplinary styles of writing. (I have always linked styles of academic writing with styles of martial arts practice. All of my works on martial arts have been just as much works about academic discipline.) Rereading Touching Feeling, I realised I share a relationship to disciplinary orientations with Sedgwick.

Sedgwick wonders, early on, whether ‘one of the cumulative stories told by Touching Feeling may be of a writer’s decreasing sense of having a strong center of gravity in a particular intellectual field’ (Sedgwick 2003, 2).

However, I noticed that, at the same time as confessing her untethering from a specific intellectual field, Sedgwick also admits her ‘intransigent fascination’ (2003, 3) with the notion of ‘performativity’.

This term derives most directly from J. L. Austin’s scholarship on performative speech utterances, and Jacques Derrida’s subsequent critique of Austin’s work. Her fascination with this topic, Sedgwick knows, is something that inevitably also keeps her entangled within a certain ‘intellectual field’ – or at least with the poststructuralist cultural theory that permeates numerous overlapping and interlinked academic fields.

This is because, like Sedgwick, poststructuralist cultural theory tout court has long been interested in the role of performativity in the production and maintenance of identities. Performativity is often opposed to ideas about ‘essences’, enabling poststructuralist theory to develop an ‘anti-essentialist’ stance in relation to identity. So, even as Sedgwick does not feel that she has a ‘strong center of gravity’ (by which she perhaps means investment, sense of identity, or belonging) in any of the fields she was earlier associated with (queer theory, gender studies, cultural studies), she knows that her concerns remain within their orbit, or gravitational pull, and that she is unable to fully disconnect, even as she no longer feels a strong compulsion to preoccupy herself with the ‘proper’ concerns of those fields.

I believe I share something of this with Sedgwick – a feeling, attitude or ethos that is perhaps what Jacques Rancière means when he speaks of ‘indiscipline’.

In/Discipline

In my understanding, indiscipline is neither anti-disciplinary nor even fully inter-disciplinary. It is more like improperly disciplinary – as in, the position of someone who knows full-well how to play the games of disciplinarity, who has perhaps been playing them for decades, but who also now knows that they are only games, and has learnt that you really don’t have to stick to all of the rules all of the time, especially when the rules seem to close down and forbid more than they open up and enable.

After all, if we believe poststructuralist theory at all, then we know that conventions are convened by a community, more or less consciously, more or less experimentally, more or less creatively; and hence that sometimes the most proper (most ethical, most responsible) way to develop both the gameplay and capacities of that community is by proceeding ‘improperly’ – innovatively.

Put differently, the indisciplinary attitude is one that ignores the loud superego-type voices that seem only to want to police us back into place, or into playing the game according every letter of the perceived laws or protocols of our discipline – such as only taking proper (recognisable) objects of attention, only ever using proper (established) theoretical orientations, methodological procedures, and so on.

Instead of worrying about this, the indisciplinary attitude rejects toeing such lines when it seems that they are barring us access to new vistas, issues and areas. The indisciplinary attitude chooses to try to work out how locate, see, hear, touch, engage with, respond to and do justice to those other things that seem to call out to us, at least sometimes, as if trying to be heard. The indisciplinary attitude tries to find ways to engage with them, even if by using approaches that differ from established disciplinary norms and conventions.

Dis/Investing

However, such an orientation is not about the wholesale rejection of disciplinary conventions. It is rather about disinvesting from those that hinder rather than help the exploration of the new or the different.

In Touching Feeling, Sedgwick walks away from many of the earlier topics and objects that came to define the ‘proper’ concerns of fields such as gender studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, and so on, into which her work intervened – indeed, fields that her works helped to produce. But Sedgwick’s is not an active turning away (or rejection). Rather, it is a turning towards something else – reaching out towards and delving into new topics and questions, those she feels are calling out to her for serious engagement and attention. My own interests and orientations feel similar. As Sedgwick says in her introduction:

The title I’ve chosen for these essays, Touching Feeling, records the intuition that a particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions. But the same double meaning, tactile plus emotional, is already there in the single word ‘touching’; equally it’s internal to the word ‘feeling’. I am also encouraged in this association by the dubious epithet ‘touchy-feely’, with its implication that even to talk about affect virtually amounts to cutaneous contact. (Sedgwick 2003, 17)

I first read Touching Feeling around two decades ago, when I was trying to conceptualise and express the impact of Bruce Lee on Western popular culture, while becoming immersed in questions of East-West cross-cultural encounters. The chapter I raced to, back then, was her closing chapter, ‘The Pedagogy of Buddhism’. I barely noticed the other chapters.

However, in November 2024, while trying to conceptualise, formulate and express some new concerns, I felt drawn back to the book. I did not exactly know why, but I felt that it had a lot to do with my need to work out how to think about touch, specifically perhaps grip, and this dimension of physically engaging with material objects, such as weights, levers, and (of course, as a martial artist) other people.

So, one Saturday afternoon, I picked up the book again and started reading, slowly, not really knowing what I was looking for or what I might find, after so many years. I was immediately captivated by Sedgwick’s discussion of touch, feeling, and texture.

Her own project was animated by an ‘intuition that a particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions’. My own animating intuition was that there are un- or under-explored dimensions to the experiences and affects of exercise, dimensions that were going to require my serious engagement with phenomenology and affect theory, in the first instance, in order at least to establish a vocabulary and conceptual universe capable of formulating and articulating that ‘certain’ (i.e., uncertain) ‘je ne sais quoi’ of the experience of certain kinds of physical exercise.

Feel Notes as Method

I had started to think and write about the affective dimensions of certain kinds of exercise five years earlier – as soon as I started to learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), in the months immediately prior to the global Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. It was my reflections on the profundity of my physical, psychological, emotional and perceptual transformations during this period that marked my own first serious engagement with what is known as ‘affect theory’.

It was during my first month of BJJ training that I started to call the notes I jotted down before and after every training session ‘feel notes’. These were neither ‘training notes’ in the practitioner sense (many BJJ students keep a journal of what they have learned and what they are working on), nor ‘field notes’ in the anthropological or ethnographic sense. They were ‘feel notes’, in a more affect studies sense. These notes, too, were ‘indisciplined’, in their own way, from the outset. They did not fall into any genre. I wrote down whatever occurred to me, whatever I seemed to need to write. In writing such notes, I did not pretend to be anything other than a professional academic steeped in cultural theory, someone who interrogates any thought at any time using any academic theoretical frame that presents itself to my consciousness.

Thus, my feel notes were my indisciplined observations, scattered speculations, and spontaneous reflections that arose in response to experiences or insights that occurred in or around training that felt significant. However, although my first months of BJJ were an intense period of transformation and writing, I realised belatedly that I have almost always jotted down what I now call ‘feel notes’.

When I started to learn the Filipino ‘stick fighting’ martial art of escrima in late 2012, I would jot down perceptions and insights on my iPhone, using the Notes app. Looking back through these, I saw that they were never mere technical observations, but were always driven by my sense of something profound, at once physical, psychological, and emotional – never merely (even if also) technical.

My notes were always idiosyncratic, and fell into no clear category of writing. They were certainly useless if viewed as entries in a training diary: very little of a technical nature was ever noted. And they would likely be regarded as unacceptable, invalid, or needing to be approached with reference to a wide range of caveats if evaluated according to the methodological protocols of what ‘good’ field notes in ethnography, autoethnography or anthropology might be. Nonetheless, the observations that I jotted down came out of me spontaneously. I actually felt compelled to write them – perhaps because I had no one to say them out loud to. I could think of no one for whom they would have the same significance as they did for me, and I could think of nowhere else – or no-way else – to put them.

As my eventual publication of an article based on my field notes in the affect studies journal Capacious suggests, I eventually decided that the field of affect studies seemed to be to be the ideal intellectual field for the serious treatment of my feel notes. Certainly, affect studies seems most equipped to ‘handle’ them. For me, the terms and concepts of affect studies have been most enabling for my thinking, helping me to work with, through and out my intuitions and arguments about martial arts, exercise, identity and ideology.

Phrased in yet another way: my own attempts to work out what my own workouts mean, enable, connect with, and do has constituted my own entry point ‘into’ affect studies. Reciprocally, I hope that by writing on exercise in terms of affect, it may help others to ‘get’ the value of it too – whether the ‘it’ that gets ‘got’ be the value of affect theory in understanding the importance of exercise, or the importance of exercise in understanding affect theory.

In my own approach to exercise, both in practice and in theory, what has always been most important is the feel. This is not an uncommon kind of statement to hear in discourse about exercise. However, for me, the feel of an exercise is not just a matter of good exercise practice. It is also of profound importance in thinking about how identity is constructed (or perhaps, instead of ‘constructed’, we might say ‘trained’, ‘moulded’, or maybe even ‘coaxed’). For, ‘the feel’, I think, is always inextricably intertwined with identity and with ideology. As Lauren Berlant has proposed: along with everything else that affect theory may be, it is also our most current way of thinking about the relationship between bodily experiences, feelings, skills, practices and wider matters of discourse and ideology.