One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.” Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.
ROLAND BARTHES, Camera Lucida
∵
This fragment has lingered with me like a fault line, ever since Professor Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre, during my PhD viva, drew me into it and suggested that it might be read as a “primitive scene of the haptic vision (or the haptic drive) in Roland Barthes,” an allegory of a hidden lineage that runs beneath the optic, refusing resolution yet never vanishing. From that moment it has continued to haunt me, showing me that scholarship is not only argument but conversation, that ideas live as much in gestures offered by others as in solitary writing. Osvaldo also showed me that one need not close one’s eyes to hear better, and once even remarked, half seriously, half in earnest, that if it depended on me, academia would become a continuous performance. Perhaps he was right. For if this book is threaded by spirals and surfaces, it is also sustained by strata: layers of memory and presence sedimented over years of dialogue. Much like the runtime of a program, which executes rather than inscribes, each activation of this work has been contingent on the timing of others’ interventions, their generosity, their questions. What appears here as solidity ‒ arguments, chapters, structures ‒ is in fact performed volatility, alchemical endurance staged against the impermanence of writing.
It is out of such strata that this book emerges, as a continuation of my PhD thesis in the Materialities of Literature doctoral program at the University of Coimbra. The program’s focus on the transformations of communication technologies and their impact on reading and writing provided the ground for my research into haptic reading processes, especially as these were being reshaped
Much of what appears here began in conversations and collaborations with colleagues who offered guidance and support. Among these, I owe special thanks to Sandra Bettencourt and Ana Marques da Silva, for their comments on early drafts and for being companions in our travels across Europe; to Nuno Miguel Neves, for his aesthetic insights into chess (and life); and to Caio di Palma, for his faith in the metaphysics of poetry. Beyond the doctorate itself, my vision of practice-based research has been shaped by the communities and collaborations that unfolded alongside it. To fellow researcher-artists João Santa Cruz, Sandra Guerreiro Dias, Pedro Ferreira, Ana Gago, Carolina Martins, Bruno Ministro, Nuno M. Neves, Ângela Saldanha, Cristina Sá, Álvaro Seiça, Liliana Vasques, and Pedro Alves da Veiga, I am grateful for the experiences we shared, both on stage and in life.
This book also reflects the continuation of my work as a researcher in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Digital Culture and Innovation (CODA) and as an integrated member of the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa (ILCML) at the University of Porto. I am grateful to my colleagues for their support, and in particular to Professor Fátima Outeirinho for her trust and partnership. With her I had the opportunity to co-teach a course dedicated to Literature and Digital Media, where I was able to apply and refine many of the theoretical and practical principles gathered in these pages.
From there, the spiral widens further, reaching outward into the international field of electronic literature and cultural theory. To Mark Amerika, for showing me that creativity is at once embodied and machinic, performed as
Equally vital has been the work of the artists, to whom I am grateful for granting reproduction rights. Their inventions and experiments are not only points of reference but conditions of possibility: without them, the reflections gathered here would have no ground on which to stand. Linked to this, I also owe much to the spaces that sustain literary life in the present, the independent bookshops that persist against the odds ‒ among them Pablo González de la Torre of Trama Bookshop (Porto), who also enabled my connection with Lendl Barcelos and the Haptic Thought Lab, and Paulo and Ricardo of Aberta Bookshop (also in Porto). Through these intermediations, references and orientations converged, helping me to continue a spiral already far advanced.
At the level of publication itself, I owe much to Brill. In the persons of Christa Stevens, Stephan Besser, Masja Horn, and the team of reviewers and editors, I am deeply grateful not only for their invaluable insights but also for the care with which they accompanied this project from proposal to publication. Their comments sharpened its arguments, broadened its scope, and led it to touch upon points I would not have reached alone. This book bears the imprint of their commitment to experimental scholarship and to the dialogue between literature and digital culture.
And last but not least, I thank all those who paved the way for this writing to happen. “There is a return in difference, not a repetition in identity,” wrote Barthes. Taking this seriously, over the past two decades several significant books on haptic touch, and even more on haptic interfaces, have appeared ‒ from philosophy and cultural theory to cognitive neuroscience and studies of technology, not to mention the sacred. Building on these pillars, the present volume proposes a multidimensional definition of haptic touch, embracing artistic, literary, philosophical, technoscientific, mythical, and mystical dimensions,
Finally, to all those unnamed but not forgotten, who in ways small and immense shaped the trajectory of this work. If there are flights and afterimages here, it is because I have not travelled alone ‒ every touch is already the trace of others, transmuted less into gold than into gesture and thought.
Publication History
Some of the chapters included in this book have already appeared in earlier forms. They are reproduced here in substantially revised and expanded versions, but I remain indebted to the venues and editors who first welcomed them. Chapters 1 and 5 include excerpts first published in “Tacto/Contacto: Processos de Experienciação Háptica no Corpo Cíbrido,” MATLIT: Materialidades da Literatura 2, no. 2 (2015): 73–97. Chapters 1 and 2 also include parts published in “Poetic Fingerprints: Digital Literature’s Countercultural and Metamedial Integration of Vision and Touch,” Neohelicon 44 (2017): 55. Chapters 2 and 3 are adapted from “Through the Touching Glass: Literature for Haptic Inter[(surf)aces],” in Anaïs Guilet and Emmanuelle Pellard (ed.), Poétiques et Esthétiques Numériques Tactiles: Littérature et Arts (Cahiers virtuels du Laboratoire NT2 8, 2016). Parts of Chapter 2 were also published recently in Italy, in “A Dream of Transparency vs. a Desire for Opacity: digital literature’s self-reflexive critique through glassy surfaces,” The Materiality of Modernisms (G. Casara, S. Palmeirim, V. Tocco, M. Tortora, A. Volpone; eds.), pp. 41–72. Milano: Ledizioni, 2025. Chapter 4 is adapted from “‘Grasp All, Lose All’: Raising Awareness Through Loss of Grasp in Seemingly Functional Interfaces,” in Nikolova, Z. (ed.), Binary Modernisms: Re/Appropriations of Modernist Art in the Digital Age Special Collection (Open Library of Humanities 8, no. 1, 2022). Chapter 5 incorporates sections adapted from “The Endgame or a Wake?: Tropes of Circularity. Literature Then and Now,” in CounterText 2, no. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 191–216. This book originated in the author’s doctoral research at the University of Coimbra, supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) through the Doctoral Grant PD/BD/52249/2013. It was subsequently developed during the author’s affiliation with the University of Porto, within the Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa (UID/00500/2025 | https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00500/2025) and CODA – Centre for Digital Culture and Innovation (https://doi.org/10.54499/CEECINST/00050/2021/CP2787/CT0003), research units funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. The author also gratefully acknowledges the support of the University of Coimbra’s MATLIT LAB.