Semefulness: a social semiotics of touch

This paper explores the multiple significances (semefulness) of touch, as experienced by us as embodied subjects. Prompted by the development of a range of touch-based technologies, I consider the current writings about touch in a range of fields and how these have contributed to contemporary understandings of the meanings of touch. I then explore a number of these meanings – connection, engagement, contiguity, differentiation, positioning – for their contribution to our understanding of the world and of our own embodied subjectivity. I also explore the deployment of these meanings by contemporary technologies.