Optic and Haptic Perception

Definition

Optic and haptic perception name the two alternating modes of perception by which Alois Riegl explained the succession of artistic styles: optic perception is "a kind of long-range vision, characteristic of perspective and ancient Greek art," while haptic refers to "a kind of close-range vision and tactile perception characteristic of flat reliefs and late Roman art." The schema grounds Riegl's definition of style in the psychology of form: man "is not just a being perceiving exclusively with his sense (passive), but also a longing (active) being" who interprets the world "in accordance with his inner drive (Wollen)… (which may change with nation, location, and time)." Deyong's chapter makes the schema's architectural-historical stake explicit: this pairing — together with Wilhelm Worringer's parallel categories of abstraction (an inner sensation) and empathy (a joyous affinity with the material world) from his 1907 doctoral thesis — is the theory of style that "would prove influential" for the modern interior, in contrast to Semper's craft-based definition that presaged "form follows function" for structure and exterior.

A genealogical note for the wiki: this art-historical "haptic" is not the same as Pallasmaa's later haptic turn (see perception and embodiment). Riegl's haptic is a mode of vision — close-range, tactile vision, as in flat relief — not the multi-sensory primacy of touch. Yet the lineage is real: Riegl's haptic is a direct ancestor of the vocabulary with which twentieth-century theory (and the wiki's phenomenology cluster) critiques ocularcentrism. Merleau-Ponty's account of Cézanne — painting "what the mind-body complex perceives in time" — is the phenomenological continuation of the same problem of perception (see space-time-continuum).

Key Thinkers

• (Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry — the optic/haptic alternation and Wollen; Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1907 doctoral thesis) — abstraction as inner sensation vs. empathy as affinity with the material world.)
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the phenomenological transformation of the same problem: perception by the "mind-body complex," painting as the depiction of reality "in the process of becoming."
• Sarah Deyong — traces the schema's influence from art history into the modern interior.
• Juhani Pallasmaa — the later architectural haptic turn; contrast case for what "haptic" means in architecture.

Related Concepts

• Perception — the general concept; the optic/haptic pair is its art-historical periodization.
• Style — the concept the modes ground: styles follow the dominance of one mode of perception or the other.
• Abstraction — Worringer's "inner sensation," the haptic pole's aesthetic programme, later the avant-garde's method.
• Lived Body — the phenomenological successor concept: perception relocated from the visual field to the body-subject.
• Space-Time Continuum — what optic (perspectival) perception represses and what modern painting restores.
• Aesthetic Experience — the "philosophy of aesthetic experience" to which Deyong's alternate interior history belongs.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — Riegl's two alternating modes and their association with styles; the Worringer parallel; the claim that these theories (not Semper's) shaped the modern interior.
• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) (via Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne) — the perceptual ground of modern painting: "what the mind-body complex perceives in time."
• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the literary instance of the conjoined modes, twenty years before Riegl's terms entered architecture: of Pater's child, "Here the haptic and the visual conjoin to create an impressionistic body" (p. 70) — vision not detached but "emerg[ing] from and return[ing] to a body through which images move along the nerves" (p. 70). Colley's Pater supplies the model's positive pole (aesthetic-body), Ruskin's eye-only spectatorship its optic purism (invisible-body) — the pair lived as childhood modes of inhabitation rather than art-historical styles. See aesthetic-body, invisible-body.
• Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the architectural distribution of the pair: the picture window as the modern interior's pure-optic device ("visual distantiation, physical separation, and even a sense of supremacy over nature" — vision at long range over a nature it cannot touch), against Bloomer's haptic remedy — "touching and the possibility of touching are critical to establishing the connection with nature that biophilia promotes," and ornament "layered over the hard structure" to restore "the multisensory experience." The grotto itself is the haptic pole's typology: shell work, trickling water, "the sumptuousness, tactility, and rhythmic sequencing of ornate pattern." Bloomer's debate thus restages Riegl's alternation as a design programme: the modern interior drifted to the optic pole, and biophilic ornament is the mechanism for returning it to the haptic. See picture-window, biophilia, performative-ornament.
• Touch, Taste, Smell (Brown 2018) — the neuroscience register: the pair's strongest empirical statement in the wiki. Citing Lacey & Sathian: "Many brain regions previously considered to be specialized for various aspects of visual input are now known to be activated during analogous tactile or haptic (passive or active touch, respectively) tasks… when feeling an object, one naturally imagines what it looks like" — the modes not alternating (Riegl's history of styles) but co-activating: "Touching an object does not exclusively contribute to the touch sensation; it adds a layer to visual sensation as well." Brown's museum cases operationalize the conjugation: gloved handling at the Uffizi ("feel the textures and intricate details much like the artists themselves would have"), the tactile models whose manual exploration "enriched" sighted visitors' viewing (Howes: aesthetics "in the conjugation of the senses"), and Touching the Prado's 3D-printed paintings — touch as the channel through which the blind visitor "imagines" the visual work. See multisensory-museum, embodiment.
• Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — the cultural-suppression register: touch as the "sublimated" sense of modern culture. Via Stuart Ewen and Egmont Arens's Consumer Engineering (1932): "touch is one of the 'sublimated' senses of modern culture – touch is a primitive faculty that has been culturally supplanted by the more intellectual, 'objective' senses of sight and sound," with designers "encouraged… to appeal to the forgotten pleasures of tactility" (p. 211). The register's mechanism: "The sense of touch demands direct contact between body and product; like taste and smell, touch incorporates the object of perception – physically consuming it – rather than observing it from a neutral distance" — touch not as one perceptual mode among others but as the incorporating sense (the object consumed by contact), whose marketable suppression and engineered revival (the streamlined product's appeal to "the forgotten pleasures of tactility") is part of the consumer economy's design (see streamlining, consumerism).
• source-notes/la-coe-2018-quadrature

Open Questions

• Can Riegl's haptic (a mode of close-range vision) and Pallasmaa's haptic (the primacy of touch against the eye) be unified, or is the shared word concealing two different theories of the body?
• If the alternate history of the interior runs through the psychology of perception, is the interior's field of expression constitutively perceptual — and what follows for a design discipline organized instead around inhabitation and use?
• Does Worringer's empathy (joyous affinity with the material world) have an architectural theory, or did abstraction monopolize the modernist reception?