Communicating through touching: The Lorming technique
In my journal I explored the art of lorming: it’s a technique of communicating through certain ways of touching the hand. There are different ways of tipping and strolling the palm of someone elses hand, each touch symbols another letter, the whole hand represents the alphabet.
by Marthe Völker
Published onJul 13, 2023
Communicating through touching: The Lorming technique
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H A L L O
How to communicate, when you can neither see nor hear? Hyroniemous Lorm (09.08.1821 - 03.12.1902) created the Lorming technique (in German just: Lormen), it’s a technique of communicating through certain ways of touching the hand. Hyroniemous Lorm, former known as Heinrich Landsmann was a jewish Austrian, who had several diseases, and lost his eyesight and ability to hear when he was about 15 years old so he developed this technique. He never got in touch with other deaf blind people, that’s why the lorming technique almost fell into oblivion. But after his death, H. v. Chlumecky got in contact with his widow and daughter to learn and spread the technique. Nowadays it is used by many deaf blind persons in the German speaking world.
There are different ways of tipping and strolling the palm of someones hand, each touch symbols another letter, the whole hand represents the alphabet.
Lorming is a very intimate form of communicating, because it contains touching (or being touched) in a very sensitive way. At the same time it blurs boundaries between (spoken) language and (bodily) expression, and lets them coincide.
I’ve heard from the Lorming Technique because my flatmate sometimes communicates with her aunt through Lormen.
I decided to learn it, follow me on this experience:
I’ve researched that there is a certain glove, with which it would be easier to learn which letters belong to which finger. I ordered one at “Blinden- und Sehbehindertenverband Sachsen e.V.” and waited for it to arrive, so that I could start learning the technique.
During my research I found out, that there are already “Hight-tech” versions of this glove, for example the “Lorm Glove” which was developed by a research group under Tom Bieling in 2016, which can translate the Lorm-Touches in digital text (e.g. SMS or Email), and the other way around.
This research group also developed the “Lorm-Hand”, which is a “Fake” hand, which transfers the touches in e.g. posts or texts on social media: so that the lorming person can communicate with people in far distance. Because this is a relevant point: the Lorming Technique is based on close personal contact, you can only communicate in a distance of one meter (or however long your arms are). So the research group tried to find ways to support deaf blind people to stay in contact with people who are not nearby.
A few days later the glove arrived, and with it a “letter-for-letter” explanation of the whole alphabet.
So I sat down and tried to memorize each letter and the way of touching the hand or fingers like learning vocabulary, without the glove.
I just told myself every 4 letters and repeated them a few times, and then I looked up the next 4 letters. This way I went on and on, repeated and repeated.
Trying to rehearse the alphabet by just remembering it.
DAY 3
The next time I wanted to practice with the glove. I thought that I know the letters by now and that it would be much easier if I use the glove to practice.
Practicing with the glove
I soon realized that it is much more confusing because you do not rely on what you remember, rather you try to read the glove and get completely confused, and do not remember anything anymore. I talked to Miri (my flatmate) about it, and she told me that the thing with the glove is slightly paradox anyways, because a deaf blind person could never read the letters on the glove, so the affected people wouldn’t use the glove to learn the technique.
So we thought, that the glove is maybe important for deaf blind people to communicate with people who do not know how to lorm, and who can use it to communicate just a little bit. But it’s interesting to think about the reasons, why some techniques which should benefit certain people, also have to include the people who do not need it “themselves”. It’s because communication is not linear, and not singular, it always needs more parts than one, and that’s why it is extremely important to develop tools which make it easier for people who do not “need” it themselves, so that an interaction can happen. Because at first I was a little bit upset, I was like “why do they develop this glove, if the people for whom this way of communicating is developed, cannot use e.g. read it?” But ways of communicating are never made or used for or by one actant. It always need more than one. In a way it only emerges when there are different (or: more than one) actants involved.
DAY 4
I decided that I do not like the glove, and did not want to practice with it anymore. I reconsidered why I think the glove is not helping and tried to think about more reasons than the the ones already mentioned.
While thinking I practiced the alphabet, letter for letter, and suddenly I realized: when I practice, I do not look at my hand. I look away, I try to only connect the fingers and the touch in my head. It confuses me to look at the hand while “talking”: and I thought that must be the thing with the glove: you concentrate on something which is written, rather than on the touch which becomes a letter in your mind: so this process is kind of disrupted with the glove. You see the letter before the touch is transformed into a letter in your mind, and that destroys the whole process of connecting your body and your mind and leaves you hanging between the letters, let’s you stumble between the touch and the letter somewhere in this process.
So without the glove, I memorized the letters in this order, just like the alphabet. I repeated and repeated, over and over again: while waiting at the supermarket, while waiting for the coffee machine to run faster, while smoking a cigarette outside of the library. I realized that I always confused the same letters (T and H) and I didn’t know how to change that.
DAY 5
On this day I talked to Miri about my realizations and asked her how fast she remembers all the letters, and how difficult it is for her. Then she told me some mind-blowing things, that I did not realize before.
She said, once you understand the system of which fingers are the vocals, and which are B, D, G, H, it is much easier. I was totally shook. Once you realize that all letters which are in some way connected in the alphabet (and/or in your mind) are connected on your hand as well, it makes it much more easy! Because at first, as I already mentioned, I always confused T and H, but now, when I connect H with BDG, this does not happen anymore. You will see, knowing these few hacks will change everything!
Miri told me, that her aunt teaches this technique in Austria. She is deaf blind herself, and (de)classified as non-viable, she gives this courses for the caritas 1-2 times a year, so, as you can see, she is able to work. From her aunt Miri knows, that there are many ways to abbreviate groups of letters, like ch, sch or sp, yes and no. But we both decided that this is too complicated for us for now.
DAY 6
Miri and I enjoyed the summer days at Schlachtensee, when I finally was brave enough to ask her if we could try to talk a little bit through lorming.
Lorming at Schlachtensee
It was my first time to talk to someone else, and we soon realized that it is not the same talking to your own hand, as to someone else’s. I confused the direction of strolling the whole time, and we tried it over and over again.
“Mir geht es gut”
We both realized while filming and looking at the hand through the phone, you do not understand at all what the other person is telling you. It’s almost similar to the glove maybe: the mediation itself destroys the hand to mind connection.
REFLECTIONS
It is something really intimate about this technique, maybe because it relies on being so immediate: via touch you draw pictures in someones mind, you have to be completely concentrated to understand what the other person is saying and on the other hand (funny coincidence) you have to concentrate to find the right letters: it creates an atmosphere of total interest in this interaction on both sides, a very sensitive and aware “get together” which is even stressed with the touching.
“Ist das Leben nicht schön?”
But even though you have to concentrate on finding the right letter, at the same time you understand what the other person is saying even though the maybe tip the wrong finger: for example, if you are careful, Miri and I sometimes confused the M and the N (we talked about both of us always confusing it), and of course you will understand what the person is saying anyways. Miri told me about the interaction with her aunt, and that even though she uses one wrong letter in every word, she still understands what she wants to tell her: because of the context the letters are connected.
But I want to get back to the immediate: Isn’t it interesting, that it is possible to have a two sided communication with the exact same sense (organ)? It’s always touching: it’s touching and being touched, it’s not like speaking and hearing, or writing and reading, or using sign language and looking at sign language.
It is a way of communicating which coincides with the body and creates an immediate connection between body and mind, which shall not be disprupted otherwise it will get lost?
Reflection on the whole process of dealing with the Lorming technique during the seminar “Anthropology of Techniques / techniques of Anthropology”
At the very first session of the seminar I would not have expected to learn a new language at the end of the semester. I remember how Sharon and Maxime told us that we should pick a technique which we would like to learn during the seminar. We worked with a very wide concept of techniques, following Marcel Mauss (1973: 70): “I deliberately say techniques of the body in the plural because it is possible to produce a theory of the technique of the body in the singular on the basis of a study, an exposition, a description pure and simple of techniques of the body in the plural. By this expression I mean the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies“ (Mauss 1973: 70), Tim Ingold (2010): „In this view, making is a practice of weaving, in which practitioners bind their own pathways or lines of becoming into the texture of material flows comprising the lifeworld“ and John Tresch (2016): “I wish to propose a discussion of “techniques” of a more intimate nature, of a physiological, psychological, mental, and even spiritual form; techniques that concern also the interior milieu“.
In our seminar “technique” is understood as a form of relating to a certain activity or a certain object (or better: subject?), a way of bringing your body to interact with something in a new kind of way and to practice this new way over and over again.
I remember how I was stressed out during the first sessions of the seminar, because I couldn’t think about a technique in which I could be interested. Sharon and Maxime suggested we should choose something we always wanted to learn, for example take a dance class (which would be an example of a technique-activity, with which the body learns new ways to move itself and to feel itself) or to learn an instrument (this would be an example of a technique which reshapes the relation between the instrument (the object) and the body).
But it’s short sighted to speak of “interaction”, as Tim Ingold puts it: “Interaction is a between relation. Correspondence, however, goes along” (Ingold 2020: 9). Speaking of correspondence instead of interaction gives room for the two relating subjects (or objects) to change in the time of relatedness (caused by the relation or caused by something else) so it does not just describe the “between” the two, correspondence tries to grasp the whole process, how Ingold says: “This shift from interaction to correspondence entails a fundamental reorientation, from the between-ness of beings and things to their in-between-ness” (Ingold 2020: 9).
So I thought a lot about what kind of technique I could study or learn or get to know better. Then suddenly it crossed my mind that my flatmate Miri once told me, that she communicates with her aunt in a certain form, because her aunt is deaf blind. I remembered that it had something to do with touching the hand. So I asked Miri about it, and I knew this would be the technique I would like to get a deeper understanding of throughout the seminar. She told me that the technique is called “Lormen” in German (I call it “Lorming” in English even though there is no translation because its only used in the German speaking world- in English speaking countries deaf blind people communicate with a certain variation of the twelve finger alphabet (https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingeralphabet)).
When I first told the seminar about my technique, everyone was utterly bewildered because no one had ever heard of the Lorming technique. When I explained that it’s a way of communication through touch the finger and palm of the hand in different kind of ways, no one still seemed to get it. Sharon and Maxime were very interested in the Lorming technique and said that they’ll be looking forward to how I am going to journal my process of learning it.
The next session I brought the glove to the seminar and everyone seemed really afflicted by it, because it just looks so interesting and complex in the best kind of way.
It was obvious that I would have to be creative to find a way how to present the technique. At first I tried to find different ways to scetch a situation in which Miri told me something through Lorming, but I realized very soon that drawing hands is quite difficult and it did not make sense to stick to the sketching. My favorite way of documenting the learning process would have been to film short videos of the hand being touched and to draw arrows in the video from the spot where the hand is being touched. But I did not find the right software with which I could draw in videos.
So for the process of learning I just took photos and videos and took handwritten notes of the process.
While the workshop came closer I thought about how to present my journal and decided to put my notes and footage together in a pubpub and reformulate my notes so it becomes a coherent history of the process of learning how to lorm. For the workshop I thought it would be interesting for the participants to experience the same learning process I went through while trying to remember the different letters. I wanted them to try to remember it by themselves and to maybe find different logics or styles of remembering. Then I wanted to show them a few helping hints that Miri gave me after a few days to see if these hints would make such a big difference to the participants as they did to myself.
But when I gave my workshop there wasn’t much time left, so the time in which they tried to learn a few letters by themselves was just about 5 minutes, so every group of two people prepared one short word for the whole group, but they did not have enough time to really try to learn the alphabet.
I really underestimated that I only practiced Lorming with Miri, in a relaxed atmosphere and that it made a huge difference to practicing it in contradiction to doing so during a workshop with a bunch of people around. At the beginning I asked the others to try to tell me something on my hand and I was so nervous that I did not understand anything what the participants wanted to tell me. Once again it just confirmed what I realized before, that you have to be really aware and present when you try to understand what is being lormed to you, because you have to make the immediate transformation of the touch to the letter in your mind. And when you’re not fully concentrated it slips your mind and you’re completely lost.
But in the end I think the workshop worked out pretty well and I was able to discuss with the others my ideas of the connection between body and mind and how the Lorming technique gets you to think differently about it. “The body has commonly been constructed as something distinct from, even opposed to, knowledge. Desires, appetites and emotions seem to detract from the cold, hard objective fact. The body has been ‘othered’ as an object that is necessary for the mind to exist, but which also threatens to overrun and overrule it (Alcoff 1996: 15).” (Machin 2022: 168) The dealing with the Lorming technique makes you realize that it is not possible to differentiate between knowledge and body, that it is intertwined, and every time you try to separate it (for example with the glove) it makes you fail to understand.
So I guess through this experience I really have experienced by myself what it means to “embody a technique” and get a profound understanding of such connections.
Sources
Alcoff, Linda Martin (1996): Feminist Theory and Social Science: New Knowledges, New Epistemologies, in: Duncan, Nancy (ed) (1996): BodySpace. Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, London/New York: Routledge, p. 15.
Bakke, Gretchen; Peterson, Marina (ed) (2018): Between Matter and Method. Encounters in Anthropology and Art, London/New York: Bloomsbury.
Ingold, Tim (2010) The Textility of Making, in: Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34 (1) (January 1, 2010): pp. 91–102.
Ingold, Tim (2020): Correspondences, Cambridge/Oxford: Polity.
Machin, Amanda (2022): Bodies of Democracy. Modes of Embodied Politics, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
Mauss, Marcel (1973, 2016): Techniques of the body, in: Economy and Society, 2:1, pp. 70-88.
Tresch, John (2016): Anthropotechnics of the Anthropocene, in: Technosphere Magazine, 1.
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