The Haptic Transfer and the Travels of the Abstract Line: Embodied perception from classical Islam to modern Europe

Abstract

The major formal elements of Western modernism, the haptic image and abstract line (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987), arrived to the West in considerable part through the influence of Islamic art. The occurrence of these tendencies in the nineteenth century accompanied a new understanding of perception as subjective and performative--an understanding that was long at work in Islamic aesthetics and philosophy. Theories of perception from Islamic thinkers such as Al Kindi and Ibn Al Haytham, as early as the ninth century, influenced European early modern optics, were eclipsed by Renaissance conceptions of visuality, and were revived--with their origins obscured--in the late nineteenth century in the new discipline of psychology the thought of Bergson, Riegl, and others. Abstract line and haptic space in European modern arts appeal to this embodied and subjective perception. What I call the haptic transfer and the travels of the abstract line facilitated the spread of Islamic aesthetics to the West in a time of genuine intercultural hunger, deeply altering the recipient society.