Christian Metz: "Tickling" - An ambivalent sensation between pleasure and displeasure
Laughter, nerve tension, desire: the tickling is an intense sensory impression between pleasure and displeasure, which has left many traces in the history of the body and mind. The literary scholar Christian Metz follows them up - from ancient philosophy to modern tickle porn.
Fingertips that approach the sole of a foot like spider legs. A feather heading towards an armpit. A goat tongue that causes convulsive twitches. A brush that tampered with your neck. Such scenarios are by no means timeless, teaches a cultural studies study that fundamentally changes the view of the tickle.
If you let yourself be tickled after reading this book or prepare for a tickling attack, you will also think of Aristotle, Darwin or Freud. They all play important roles in the history of tickling, which Christian Metz examines in his six hundred-page habilitation thesis.
“Under the magnifying glass” is to be understood literally in this case, because the investigation of the literary scholar and critic unfolds - quite analogously to its subject - through the finest touches or supposedly minor remarks. Although the tickling spots in world history tend to be marginal notes, you will surprisingly often find them, explains Metz. He sums up the research project of his "Genealogy of a Human Sensation" as follows:
“Not only such complex emotions as love or fear, but also such a basic sensation as the tickling is steeped in history and powerful. Because being ticklish is a characteristic of the human being, because in tickling the elementary aspects of being human (sensibility, pleasure, pain) form, because dealing with being ticklish is a basic body technique. Even if the thought that the tickling makes great history should reach too high, it still writes stories. "
Laughing tickle - a fundamentally human quality
In the following, the author wanders from ancient philosophy through the literature of the 18th century or the evolution theory of the 19th century to the tickle porn of the present - a far reaching panorama to prove the relevance of the tickle: it is well hidden, but definitely influential. The variety of forms examined includes characteristics such as the gentle or the hard tickle, the laughing tickle, the sexual tickling or the thrill. What they have in common is that they appear as mixed sensations in which pleasure and pain, play and fear merge.
Even in antiquity, being tickled turned out to be a revealing quality: Aristotle, who is classically appropriated for a theory of laughter, put tickling in front of laughter, explains Metz. This is also due to the fact that the diaphragm played such a large role in ancient times. As a transformer, it separates the upper from the lower body parts, regulates the body fluids - and translates the tickling stimulus into laughter. For Aristotle it follows:
“The interplay of delicate skin contact, diaphragm (vibration) and laughter is reserved exclusively for the human body. It ensures that people become people. Not just laughing, but the laughing tickle in particular is a fundamentally human quality. "
The tickle becomes the subject of science
But even with Plato the tickling is of particular importance. With two tickling points in the “Symposion” - the poet Aristophanes tickles his nose with a feather - Metz fans out ancient desire and lets the love discourse pass in review. And another component emerges in antiquity: in the medical writings of Hippocrates, the stimulus of desire is central. Men and women feel it in the sexual organs, with the female orgasm playing a decisive role.
At the beginning of the early modern period, a type of “gentle tickling” emerged that was concretized in a subject of art: the “Madonna and Child”. Our Lady tickles the - human - baby Jesus, which, however, never goes beyond a moderate level of affect:
"The touch occasionally triggers a smile, but (...) the body contortions that are typical for laughing or even an orgiastic loss of control never occur."
After this Christian takeover, more worldly tickling theories emerge again: Descartes shifts the tickle into the brain and Grimmelshausen spells the tickle torture on the soles of the feet in "Simplicissimus". Around 1800 Metz observed an epoch-making reshuffle, because with the upgrading of the body, the tickling became a central element of subject formation. From the aesthetics of the sublime to the comic theories: In the shudder as well as in the ridiculous, the mixed sensation is reassembled. Then there are the sciences that connect the tickle with the nerve tracts. The tickle stands for a hinge between body and mind, external stimulus and internal excitement - with different accents: sometimes a mere metaphor, sometimes real twitching and squirming. The author finds what he is looking for in Jean Paul, Goethe, Hegel, as well as Nietzsche,
Hegel, the clitoris and the gender order
The fact that the clitoris is known in German as the Kitzler opens up numerous areas of gender-historical research for the genealogy of the tickle. Hegel, for example, determines the mental positions of men and women analogously to anatomy:
"Just as in the man the uterus sinks down to a bare gland, so in the woman the male testicle remains enclosed in the ovary, does not stand out in opposition, does not become an active brain by itself, and the clitoris is the inactive feeling in general."
Mostly this passage is interpreted in such a way that Hegel places the man on the active, understanding side and the woman on the passive, soulful side. Metz ventures a contrary thesis: The clitoris is an irritating residue that leads to uncertainty about the gender order. But whether the one and only mention of the clitoris can actually shake the dialectical order that Hegel had also intended for the sexes, one might doubt. In any case, the reading gain does not necessarily lie in agreeing to every detail of the interpretation in all points - but in the equally informed and elegant walk through the body and mental history that this tickle panorama offers. Here an author trained in deconstruction writes who follows his research subject in a comprehensible way through the centuries.
Tickling as communication between mother and child
One would have liked to have learned more about some topics: Neurological studies show that rats, for example, are also ticklish, notes the literary scholar. But what does it mean when the primal human tickling sensation is shared by other species? Speaking of human: Metz also points to the relevance of early childhood development. In the symbiotic mother-child relationship, tickling is part of pre-linguistic communication - and gently dissolves the first bond.
"By tickling her child, the mother interrupts the previously natural breastfeeding and replaces the (unconditional) wish fulfillment with the ambivalence of rejection (prohibition) and simultaneous affection."
The study ends with an excursion into the world of tickle porn, in which no body fluids are exchanged, but the soles of the feet, ribs or armpits are irritated.
After six hundred pages you may be exhausted for the time being - but equally impressed and convinced that there are still numerous tales of tickling to be told. Last but not least, you learn that this mixed feeling is a kind of ambivalence training machine for enduring ambiguous feelings.
