ABSTRACT
The chapter contextualizes the anatomical knowledge and approaches to touch that Weber's experiments gradually displaced before describing his method. Prior to Weber's experiments, touch is largely unrepresented in scientific literature on perception. What was a relationship of mutual dependence became one of domination, as the stereoscope indicates the 'remapping and subsumption of the tactile within the optical'. However, this is a strictly optical account, not just of modernity, but of tactility; Crary fails to consider the possibility that touch has a both a function and a history independent from apprehending images. Conversely, the chapter describes this reorganization of the perceptual field from the standpoint of tactility; the modernization of touch involved coming under the dominion of a particular set of evidentiary techniques similar but not equal to those that impacted vision. Tactile modernity thus designates a new set of discursive formations and disciplinary structures that encompassed the tactile and defined it as a distinct psychophysical system.
