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I have been in conversation with Liane Carlson for the better part of ten years. I can’t think of a topic we’ve come across where she hasn’t been able to pick it up, turn it around, see otherwise invisible facets, and describe what she sees in language that sparks with sharpness and clarity. Basically, she’s one of my favorite people to talk to, which is why I wanted to speak with her for this month’s issue about the pandemic so she can help us think through how the world has changed, what’s still changing, and what needs to change.

Kali Handelman: Your book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Experience and Meaning, was published exactly two years ago, in July 2019. Our lives — everyone’s lives — have changed an enormous amount since then. In the book, you seem to have had a kind of intuition that we need to think more, and differently, about the concept of contingency and the significance of touch in how we understand social relations. I would love it if you could summarize the book’s argument about the relationship between contingency and touch? How does touch, as the title tells us, shape experience and meaning?

Liane Carlson: I was seven or eight the first time I really remember sensing the problem of contingency. I have a strong memory of pausing for a moment in the upstairs hallway of our house, where something about the flutter of a curtain caught my eye. I had passed that spot a dozen times a day for nearly my entire life and it was very familiar to me—the exact shade of pink of the curtain, the texture of the wood floor under my feet, the slight grit that our dogs seemed to track in everywhere—but all at once it struck me as incredibly strange that this was my house, my life, my toes wriggling on the floor. That these people were my parents and not any other people, even that I had been born at all, when it so easily could have been otherwise, if only a few circumstances in my parent’s lives had been different. There are lots of different ways to define contingency, but it’s that very basic sense that things could be otherwise that has always interested me. That moment in the hallway was my first personal recognition of contingency.

The book came from that kind of experience; I was interested in the way those moments of dislocation ambushed people. After all, it’s theoretically always the case that our lives are fragile, tenuous, and capable of being upended at any moment, but we only really feel that to be the case on occasion. Mostly, we just carry on, locked in routine tasks, taking the basic contours of our lives for granted, even if we occasionally kick against them. So why is it that sometimes that sense of strangeness floors us?

And that’s really where touch comes in. There’s an old Christian theological tradition that sees contingency as the lot of mortal creatures. God, (or the God of philosophers, anyway), is changeless, immovable, immune from passions. But we are vulnerable, thrown into a world that batters us and tosses us about. The impulse to deny or minimize that vulnerability is strong; that’s really what the Stoics, Spinoza, and a whole host of other people were struggling with in the history of philosophy. It’s not possible to shut out recognition of our frailty and contingency altogether, though, because we have bodies. You simply can’t sustain the illusion that there’s some sort of unerring course for your life when at any moment you can be struck down by illness, wounded in battle, bleed to death after childbirth, and so on.

For the thinkers I’m looking at in the book—nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and German thinkers, writing in the wake of this Christian tradition—we are most open to the world through our sense of touch. In part, they’re playing on the etymological roots of contingency. Contingent comes from the Latin tangere, to touch. They’re also just building lovely, sensitive descriptions of what it feels like to touch and be touched. Someone grasps you, hard, for the first time by the arm and you realize in a rush that all the clauses of the social contract you’ve relied on your entire life are just a collective fiction that won’t save you; someone else (the same someone?) brushes a thumb over the back of your hand and a new life opens before you. Or, in 2020, you hug the wrong person and suddenly, like a friend of ours, you’re twenty-seven and suffering from a stroke in the aftermath of Covid.

KH: Talking to you has made me think about how, in the pandemic, touch became scary just as it also became precious in new ways. We’ve gone from advisories not to touch our faces or groceries, to months of isolation and new social negotiations around handshakes and hugs. So many norms have been exposed and disrupted. I wonder how contingency might help us to understand what’s been happening and, perhaps, offer a roadmap forward in this new landscape?

LC: Well, I think that recognition of contingency isn’t so abstract anymore. Someone went to a wet market seven thousand miles away and the whole world shut down. It’s hard to get a much clearer example of the contingency of our entire global order, of our lives, than that. The impact of Covid on our daily routines was huge, of course. Suddenly we had lockdowns, masks everywhere, schools going remote, cities emptying out. Worlds upended in a way that felt unbelievable when it started. At my office, we even left our plants because we figured…well, no one really knows what we figured. That it would have to be a blip? That we’d be back to our old routine in a week? That something so abnormal couldn’t last for so long?

But Covid also changed the way we touch each other and our surroundings. I would sometimes meet a friend of mine who is in her 80s in a local park over the last year. In normal times we would hug when we met. Maybe it would have been fine to hug her. Or maybe it would have killed her. That’s the sort of calculation we all found ourselves making over the past year, constantly.

If I learned anything from the various thinkers I studied in my book, it’s that touch shouldn’t count for so much, not regularly at least. It’s fine and normal for the occasional experience of touch to draw us in and engulf us. Kissing someone for the first time, sidling up to a partner on the couch, petting a dog—these are all very real pleasures, even necessities, as we learned. A huge, huge part of moving through the world with any level of confidence is the ability to turn off our awareness of touch, though. I want to be able to grab my keys, chop some vegetables, punch an elevator button without being overwhelmed by the awareness of the objects I grasp. I want to handle objects and tools, as if I have some level of control over my surroundings; I want to be able to touch things without feeling them touch me.

Covid challenged that, and not on an intellectual level. I would often go running during Covid on my lunch breaks. When I reached a certain spot, the edge of a pier, it was always my habit to slap the iron gate—just one of those little runner’s rituals. I kept doing it during Covid but the experience was different than it had been prior to the pandemic. I could never do it without feeling my fingers buzzing with the memory of that gate, its pebbled texture, the coolness of its metal. Or think of the way people punch elevator buttons with their knuckles, or the example of a man I saw the other day who held the door to my apartment building, using the very tippy end of his fingers, shielded by the scrunched-up fabric of his sleeve. The world touches us, whether we want it to or not, and it’s unsettling, even an attack on our basic ability to believe that we have some level of control over our environment. I sometimes think of this moment in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea when the narrator is struck down by horror at the feeling of a doorknob in his hand when he goes to open a door. “Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.”

KH: Yes, totally! That vibrating awareness of being touched or having touched something really resonates. I wonder if the world has always been like that for some people, though, and now the experience is becoming more widespread? That this sense of both vulnerability and responsibility (or even guilt) is/was universalized? In other words, are there ways the pandemic has revealed something that was already there?

LC: That widespread wariness is an example of how Covid let us see that our experience of touch is contingent. Touch is not just some natural, timeless way of accessing the world. It’s shaped by history, culture, science, and personal experience. In times of great turmoil, our experience of touch can change. Yet Covid also amplified pre-existing experiences of touch. It made clear, as you say, how precious it is and how debilitating it is to be denied the warmth of human contact. I don’t just mean that psychologically. It’s physically debilitating to be cut off from touch. You can find photos online of patients in comas with their hands cradled between two latex gloves filled with warm water. Nurses in Brazil came up with the idea because family and friends weren’t allowed to visit patients in the hospital. They thought the gloves would mimic the warmth of human touch and, by all accounts, it worked. Patients’ vital signs started picking up after they were given the gloves. And I’m sure the need for touch is why so many people got dogs. (Also, dogs are great.)

The past year also let us really feel what a risk touching someone for the first time can be. I live in New York City and my neighborhood emptied out more-or-less completely in the early months of the pandemic. Every day, I would go on my evening walk with my husband and my dog. Mostly we strolled by the river, next to empty tennis courts. One night, we saw a couple sitting on a bench. They had their backs to me and their heads turned to each other. I could just make out their profiles, silhouetted under the dim orange light against the river—her face, a little sharp and angular, his broad and blunted. As we passed, the two leaned in close and I saw his finger gently pull down her white, cotton mask. That’s when I turned away. I felt like I was watching something pornographically intimate. Who knows what that kiss was actually like for those two people. Maybe it was great and they’ll go on to live happily together until ripe old age. Maybe it was awful and she’ll spend years telling the story about how she chanced it all to kiss a boy during a plague year, only to feel his tongue flopping around in her mouth like a stranded trout. But I am sure a first kiss in an abandoned city during an uncontrolled pandemic must amplify the mixture of trepidation, desire, trust and doubt experienced during any first kiss. I’m sure in a hundred years people will be writing smutty historical fiction about two people kissing for the first time during Covid.

We’re in an interesting moment where things are rapidly returning to normal, at least in the U.S., but you can still see these lingering effects of the last year on how people move through their environments and touch the world. I had lunch with a friend recently who went to a conference in-person for the first time in a year. I asked him how everyone handled social distancing and he told me that it was mostly fine, but that he had someone stride up to him and stick his arm out to shake hands. Since he didn’t want to be rude, my friend shook the other guy’s hand, but spent the whole time mentally counting down until he could douse himself with Purell without being too obvious about it.

I think the pull to return to normalcy is very, very strong, but still our bodies remember the uncertainty.

KH: Yes, definitely, I think you’re right that we’re at an inflection point in assessing what “normal” was and what a “new normal” could, or ought, to be. Which makes me think about issues you’ve written about in the Revealer before, like the climate crisis, Me Too, apologies and forgiveness, and the precarity of intellectual life. How might these ideas about contingency and touch offer us further insights not just (just?!) about the pandemic, but these other interlocking issues?

LC: Arguably, a lot of people have been feeling how contingent their lives are for quite some time. If your ability to pay rent hinges on Uber tips, if you worry every time you drive a car that you might be pulled over by the police and shot, if you live in a flood zone or near forest fires, you already know on some level that all you need is one bad day and everything in your life could change. Even if you don’t face those immediate uncertainties, I do think there’s a more general sense of fragility in the air. A year or two ago I read Czeław Miłosz’s autobiography, Native Realm. He talks about living in Poland between WWI and WWII, and the whole country feeling certain that something awful was going to happen, just not knowing when or what, exactly. A few years earlier, I might have read it and thought, oh he’s claiming to be so prescient to make himself sound wiser and smarter. Now I read it and think, yes, exactly.

Covid really democratized that sense of contingency. It also shook up some of the gender dynamics of touch. When my friend was telling me about his experience with a handshake, I laughed. Partially because I could imagine exactly what he was feeling, but partially because he had perfectly described the mental process of a woman dating in her twenties—30% convinced that the boor standing next to her might kill her, but mostly worried about how to extricate herself without seeming rude.

I think a lot of people, particularly women, already knew how unsettling it can be to lack control over who and how they are touched, but a lot of people didn’t. When I was researching the book, I would constantly read these very clever arguments by French (male) thinkers, like Derrida, about how touching only ever touches the boundaries of another person’s skin, so, in a sense, touching never touches. And I would think, “Clearly this is a man who has never been groped on a subway.”

The question, of course, is whether any of these revelations of vulnerability will linger or result in any meaningful change in our attitudes toward others or toward our environment. I don’t know. I tend to think our capacity to bury unpleasant experiences or at least displace them elsewhere is tremendous. Think of how we essentially repressed the memory of the Spanish flu in our culture. Or look at the way people who don’t want to wear masks have picked up the language of “my body, my choice” from pro-choice advocates. They’re trolling the left by using that language, of course, but they might also be completely sincere about their fears of losing bodily autonomy. Covid hasn’t made it any easier to have a conversation about bodily autonomy, though. On the contrary, Roe vs. Wade is probably going to be overturned, or at least severely restricted, at exactly the moment the language of “my body, my choice” is everywhere.

I think academics, particularly in my world of continental philosophy of religion, spent a very, very long time assuming the sort of disruption and attack on our sense of certainty that we experience through contingency was obviously good, because it made us a little humbler and tore down old, ossified ways of being in the world. I’ve never been that confident that our experience of our own contingency is necessarily a good thing that opens space for a better world. That’s the problem with contingency—our experience of it is always contingent and so are our reactions to it.

Kali Handelman is an academic editor based in London. She is also the Manager of Program Development and London Regional Director at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a Contributing Editor at the Revealer.

Liane Carlson has a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion from Columbia University and has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and NYU. She currently lives and writes in New York, where she is working on a book tentatively titled Against Forgiveness. Her first book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Meaning and Experience is available from Columbia University Press.