is smiling, but serious, and speaks with the calm, attentive expertise of a medical professional. But the glasses she is wearing are too big; they keep slipping down her nose. A reminder that her seriousness, although it is earnest, is not entirely serious.
It is not only her performance, it is mine, too. I have to go along with it, even just a tiny bit, for it to work. I have to receive these recorded, mediated attentions as if they were really directed at me, personally, in the here and now. And it works: when Olivia says, I’ll just gently touch the area of your jaw, my jaw responds, it feels noticed. It’s sort of like it blushes, flinches ticklishly at the mention of its name.
With the serious, scientific-sounding term ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ (ASMR) in mind, I read that, in biology, an autonomous response ‘usually refers to an involuntary motor reflex such as breathing or vomiting directed by the spinal cord that is not processed by the brain’.[2] Is this an accurate way to describe what is happening when Olivia says your jaw, and my jaw tingles in response? In other words, is my jaw’s response ‘autonomous’? Is this something my jaw does on its own? It somehow feels that way, but cannot be, for it is the verbal cue that calls my jaw into play. Olivia’s spoken words are what allow me to imagine and thus feel as if certain parts of my face are being, or about to be, touched. And, as one who thinks with and through performance, my interest lies precisely in the ‘as if …’ and the creative and theoretical space it opens. For me, ASMR is less a question of biological autonomy than linguistic agency – of a body felt, a self experienced, through language.[1]
3.
Pitched somewhere between a careful ritual and a routine check-up, the ‘close personal attention’ explicitly offered by ASMR videos is reassuring precisely inasmuch as it is impersonal. Olivia dedicates her gestures not to a named person (this would be distractingly specific), but, repeatedly, to
