One particular aspect of interactive navigation in performative cartography is the successive rendering of changing positioning in physical space which is, in turn, used for reading and traversing this space. I propose to consider this thehaptic aspect of engagement. Engagement brings together the aspects of agency–the doing–and the experiential–the seeing and feeling. It is the haptic engagement, understood as form of interactivity and as experience, which is significant for mobile screen gadgets. I will briefly explore here how a conceptualization of hap-tic experience addresses precisely the intersection of touch and physical interac-tion with the experience of the device, on the one hand, and the agency in and experience of spatial unfolding on the other. It is in haptic engagement that the creative meets the cartographic.
Brought into currency in the wake of Deleuze’s work on aesthetics, the term haptic has become quite popular in recent film and media theory–so much so
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that its meaning is at risk of becoming diffused, and as a consequence lost. ‘Hap-tic’comes from the Greek verbaptô, which means to touch. The term is currently widely used in three fields of study–art, cinema, and interface studies. The term is used to qualify a certain kind of looking, a specific gaze. In that sense, it exists in opposition to another kind of gaze, namely the optical one.
Aloïs Riegl introduced the term in 1901 in a distinction between haptic and optic art. In distinction from the optical gaze, which is limited to the eye that sees at a distance, haptic looking means that the look can graze the object, caress it with the touch, and by extension, experience it with all the senses. This poten-tial entails close proximity.20
Deleuze discusses the haptic primarily in relation to painting. This is the first of three fields that exploit the haptic in today’s culture. In Deleuze and Guattari’s various entries inA Thousand Plateaus(2004 [1980]), where they discuss the haptic quality of primarily abstract painting, the attempt to circumscribe the non-optical quality of haptic looking, figures and forms are replaced with flux, movement, forces; continuous variations most pointedly characterized by the sea or the desert with ever-moving, fleeting constellations. For example, instead of connect-ing points, lines move between points.21For a painter, this means that the artist is so close to the object to be depicted that it is no longer possible to distinguish discrete features; the object within a smooth field without fixed points. For the viewer, such looking entails the loss of the distinction between form and back-ground, as well as, in its wake, that between form and content. Hence, Deleuze’s interest in abstraction.
In film theory the idea of the haptic has come to stand for an engaged look that involves, and is aware of, the body–primarily that of the viewer. Vivian Sobchack (1992 and 2004) has developed this perspective on haptic perception of cinema in her phenomenological theory of cinematic spectatorship with the ambition to bridge the theorized gap between viewer and screen. This gap had been put for-ward in the psychoanalytical film theory of Metz and Baudry. This theory gives the spectator a passive position, written into the dispositif of classical cinema. Laura Marks (2002) also makes a claim for haptic visuality as a way of looking within a more intimate and dialogic relationship between screen and image on the one hand and the spectator on the other. In her view, haptic perception is less based on mastery than optical visuality, allowing for a more intimate form of criticism.
This is considered a direct consequence of spatial difference: the proximity of touch is considered more intimate and less controlling than the distancing gaze (2000; 2002).22
These perspectives on the haptic as an overlooked aspect of the experience of viewing are ultimately focused on visuality. Touch, then, becomes“folded into optic tactility”as David Parisi critically remarked (2008: 65). In his project, Parisi is concerned with the actual ‘touching’ of interfaces. Marks purports that her main objective is with the construction of subjectivity in the haptic, but she
never-theless emphasizes the haptic within the context of visual perception. When she points out how a haptic quality can be attributed not just to the way of looking but to the object of the gaze, she argues how this relationship changes because of this reciprocity of the haptic:
The term haptic visuality emphasizes the viewer’s inclination to perceive hapti-cally, but a work itself may offer haptic images. Haptic images do not invite identification with a figure so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image. Thus it is more appropriate to speak of the object of a haptic look than to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image. (3; emphasis in text)
A third notion of the haptic is pertinent for interface studies in a derived but different sense. There, it indicates the presence, activity and role of other senses than vision alone. The attention for the haptic has increased awareness of the pervasive presence in cultural artifacts of synesthesia–the trope of the different senses merging, or rather, of transferring meaning from one sense domain to another. There is, moreover, an obvious attraction to a haptic perspective because of the senses implicated in using interface devices, primarily the actual physical touch. However, from a perspective of haptic interfaces, touch is embedded within an extended sensory perception, which not only includes the entire body with all its other senses, but also the extension of them by the handheld device;
the interface itself is incorporated in the haptic.
Interfaces such as touchscreen and tactile feedback, as well as the interactivity such devices require, easily lead to an assumption that the resulting gaze is hap-tic. This is not necessarily the case, but for that very reason, they have made thinking about agency, materiality, subjectivity, but also the status of the‘text’
urgent. For my argument here about the cartographic gesture of interactive, and as I argue, creative navigation, my concern is not so much with the‘touching’of the interface–which I addressed in previous chapters, in particular in Chapter 3 on the touchscreen–nor with the question if the result is a haptic way of looking, but with the procedural and unfolding creation of space in navigation. It is there that the haptic can take its place.
Here, the notion of haptic space allows a useful distinction from representa-tional regimes of space. Yet, with performative cartography I propose to find a convergence between these regimes: the haptic and the optical visual converge in navigation. This convergence renders the image or map always already pre-repre-sentational. Supplementing these views of the haptic, here I wish to draw atten-tion to the consequence of such a look for the object. The object of haptic vision is in movement, in flux; it has lost all fixity. This is precisely what characterizes the practice of screens of navigation, in particular in relation to location, some-thing we traditionally see as fixed. In contrast to this traditional conception of
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location, haptic screens of navigation put forward a practice that incites us to rethink the notion of locating as a fixating gesture. This gesture is not necessarily fixating, since such screens enable a mobile engagement with the screen.
The haptic is part and parcel of the trends in mobile, digital cartography I have discussed above–tagging, plotting, stitching and (AR) browsing–which estab-lish the practice of navigation as performative construction: a practice ofmaking space. This construction takes time and is hence also temporal. Multi-dimen-sional, performative navigation is a cartographic practice in that it is constructive, flexible, open-ended. Moreover, because it makes the space the user then enters, it is pre-representational. Instead, it is physical and experiential. In this thinking about navigation, a different notion of cartography is being unfolded. Cartogra-phy is not a precondition only, but aproductof navigation, and as such, cartogra-phy is more than a systematic representation of space. It is a performance of space in a true sense: a making and expressing of space in the collaboration of the device and its user. This practice is a truly haptic performance of cartography.
With the analysis of the performativity of the practices of screen-based naviga-tion, I propose to reconsider notions of one-directional screening practices of dis-play,including older ones, whether this display is based on storage, transmission, or even interactive feedback. This perspective develops the notion of a hybrid spa-tiality of a ‘navigable’ screenspace. Contrary to a common-sense idea about screens, media and technology as distancing and alienating facets of modernity, such a notion in fact foregrounds a fundamentally corporeal, or embodied experi-ence of space this technology makes possible. This is the creative potential, I would say, of mobile screen cartography in its relationship with the haptic: the ensuing haptic and productive engagement with screenspace. Interacting with screens in a mobile dispositif not only implies a full-bodied experience, it is a performative act.