ABSTRACT
This passage covers the symbolic significance of skin, as well as its physiological role as the main organ of touch in which the other sensory organs are located – many of them placed next to, or around the described orifices. All the senses, including sight, can thus be understood as extensions of touch. Juhani Pallasmaa suggests that ‘[w]e could think of the sense of touch as the unconscious of vision. Our eyes stroke distant surfaces, contours and edges, and the unconscious tactile sensation determines the agreeableness or unpleasantness of the experience.’80 This means that what we see proves what we have already experienced through touch. In fact, from childhood, our sense of touch is the sense that most fundamentally assists the production of our memories. It creates the basis for a repertoire of emotions concerning the materiality of objects and thus our material cognition. While vision is our sense of distance, touch is our sense of proximity and intimacy. Vision controls and scrutinizes its surroundings, whereas touch gets close and gropes. Hence, if the eye plays a key role in classifying disgust from a distance, touch allows for feeling it from close up. The former stands in direct relationship to our defensive system, propelling us away from what we see but would / have not touched. The latter is the driver of our instinctive curiosity for more information, the
result being attractive or repellent. Miller articulates the relation between the materiality of things and disgust through a range of expressions that all evoke a strong experience of touch:
This implies the role of a certain level of temperature in the judgement of material disgust, as Miller well describes in the following passage:
