Gabriele Klein and Katharina Liebsch’s book “Distant Bodies”

Whe writes treatises, although there is a lack of brilliant ideas, manages surprisingly well on the non-fiction book market with the suitably spiced vocabulary. Consider, for example, the following statement: “In the preview image, the distant sense of sight has come before the close sense of touch and taste, the image aesthetics of the food before its enjoyment.” Translation: We like to photograph our food for our social media channels before we plaster it. What does it show? According to Gabriele Klein and Katharina Liebsch, digital culture has become a “reassurance of one’s own physical and sensual existence”. If you share snack photos online, comments are only a matter of time. A “It looks delicious!” proves the “affecting effect” of the recording.

The book by the two sociologists is about “touches in everyday digital life”. In addition to our food, they deal with online sex, home office, sports, digital care and live streamed cultural events. The guiding consideration is not new: if you meet in a networked space, “empathetic understanding” and imagination are required. In this way, Klein and Liebsch feel certain “figurations” (Norbert Elias says hello) of the contact that still allows the juxtaposition of online and offline.

What comes out is amazing. On the one hand, the book serves as a dump for junk phrases: “The eye eats with you”, “Sexual online worlds are supermarkets of sexual desire”. On the other hand, the passages between such utterances are either written in an academic nominal style with adjective caventsmann (“body phenomenological”) and cues from the elite group (Bourdieu, Mauss, Simmel, Benjamin, Foucault) – or they seem to be aimed at schoolchildren. It says about the depiction of food: “Painted, colour-accentuated pictures tie in with the tradition of the still life, a tradition in European painting that goes back to the 16th century.” triggers sexual fantasy and, for example, simulates sex between two bodies through tones and noises.”

The authors often draw on aesthetic categories that are difficult to grasp, such as atmosphere or presence. However, they don’t think about what it means to have an aesthetic, effect-oriented experience beyond meaning. Instead, they say something, only to say it again a little later. If analog thinking looks like this, then let’s go into the digital world.

Gabriele Klein and Katharina Liebsch: “Distant Bodies”. Touch in everyday digital life. Reclam Verlag, Ditzingen 2022. 164 p., br., €16.