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Dissertation Abstract
How has the saturation of the mediascape by touch based devices purposively affected epochal discourses of subjectivities? This dissertation takes aim at the critical analysis of touch based media technology, as seen through the conceptual lens of mimesis. Specifically, I examine the ways in which the saturation of the mediascape by touch based technology is purposively aimed at affecting subjective constitution through processes of mimesis, focusing on regimes of representation and sensorial organization. Research proceeds through a history of ideas, and a two part content analysis of touch based technologies currently being researched in industry, and public and personal use touch based technologies currently on the market. Using formal publications by the producers of said technologies (research papers, user manuals, and official company descriptions via the web and officially produced video content), I implement the methodologies of the sociology and history of technology to draw out an analytical schema connecting produced technological artifacts to the theoretical research on subjectivity, control, and sensorial experience.
Research proceeds through the observation that present touch based devices differ from prior forms of tactile technology in their reaction to and utilization of the body (i.e., through capacitance versus manipulation in the case of personal touchscreen devices), their power being in the extension of the mimetic faculty toward a more corporeal experience. Through mimetic processes, touch based devices create an interface that brings us into closer contact with our subjectivities by hypermediating processes of (in)dividuation. Subjectivity is explored through Jungian individuation and Deleuzian dividuation, as joint operations allowing for analysis of the (in)dividual as a ceaseless modulation of coded information embedded within a society that both pre-exists and is affected by it.
In using mimesis as my defining analytical concept, I am prompting the social studies of technology to adopt a more humanistically oriented analysis and to reassert the value of the human in studies of technology. This is in stark comparison to the trend within STS to focus on ideas of the post-human or trans-human. I trace a lineage of the term mimesis from the classic Platonic and Aristotelian idea of re-presentation as a means of knowing things outside ourselves, through the Frankfurt School analysis of Walter Benjamin and Sigfried Kracauer, looking at technological reproducibility, where representations on the screen serve to redeem physical reality, no longer through symbolic experience, as with Plato’s cave, but through the hypermediation of actual, lived experience. It is my assertion that, along this lineage, another progression is occurring, whereby the necessity of an original to be reproduced found in classical mimesis is usurped by present technology that has achieved a mode of operation that negates the very possibility of any original, a true hypermediation, coupled with a greater utilization of the full corporeality of the human. I identify touchscreen technology as a vital fulcrum of this shift from a visual ontology to a tactile ontology, as, with the emphasis of corporeality in the technology, we now experience a mimesis-like process through a greater involvement of the entire self, and a movement towards deeper experience in the kind of revealing relationships made possible by mimesis. Now we can gain access to not only the shadows of objects outside the cave, but our own internal selves, our very humanity. My research shows that through the technological, we ultimately return to the human, albeit at a substantially deeper level. The fundamental question, then, is not to what end technology can be used; the goal is not to see technology as an almighty means that is an end in itself, but to examine the state of the human in the age of technological reason.
How has the saturation of the mediascape by touch based devices purposively affected epochal discourses of subjectivities? This dissertation takes aim at the critical analysis of touch based media technology, as seen through the conceptual lens of mimesis. Specifically, I examine the ways in which the saturation of the mediascape by touch based technology is purposively aimed at affecting subjective constitution through processes of mimesis, focusing on regimes of representation and sensorial organization. Research proceeds through a history of ideas, and a two part content analysis of touch based technologies currently being researched in industry, and public and personal use touch based technologies currently on the market. Using formal publications by the producers of said technologies (research papers, user manuals, and official company descriptions via the web and officially produced video content), I implement the methodologies of the sociology and history of technology to draw out an analytical schema connecting produced technological artifacts to the theoretical research on subjectivity, control, and sensorial experience.
Research proceeds through the observation that present touch based devices differ from prior forms of tactile technology in their reaction to and utilization of the body (i.e., through capacitance versus manipulation in the case of personal touchscreen devices), their power being in the extension of the mimetic faculty toward a more corporeal experience. Through mimetic processes, touch based devices create an interface that brings us into closer contact with our subjectivities by hypermediating processes of (in)dividuation. Subjectivity is explored through Jungian individuation and Deleuzian dividuation, as joint operations allowing for analysis of the (in)dividual as a ceaseless modulation of coded information embedded within a society that both pre-exists and is affected by it.
In using mimesis as my defining analytical concept, I am prompting the social studies of technology to adopt a more humanistically oriented analysis and to reassert the value of the human in studies of technology. This is in stark comparison to the trend within STS to focus on ideas of the post-human or trans-human. I trace a lineage of the term mimesis from the classic Platonic and Aristotelian idea of re-presentation as a means of knowing things outside ourselves, through the Frankfurt School analysis of Walter Benjamin and Sigfried Kracauer, looking at technological reproducibility, where representations on the screen serve to redeem physical reality, no longer through symbolic experience, as with Plato’s cave, but through the hypermediation of actual, lived experience. It is my assertion that, along this lineage, another progression is occurring, whereby the necessity of an original to be reproduced found in classical mimesis is usurped by present technology that has achieved a mode of operation that negates the very possibility of any original, a true hypermediation, coupled with a greater utilization of the full corporeality of the human. I identify touchscreen technology as a vital fulcrum of this shift from a visual ontology to a tactile ontology, as, with the emphasis of corporeality in the technology, we now experience a mimesis-like process through a greater involvement of the entire self, and a movement towards deeper experience in the kind of revealing relationships made possible by mimesis. Now we can gain access to not only the shadows of objects outside the cave, but our own internal selves, our very humanity. My research shows that through the technological, we ultimately return to the human, albeit at a substantially deeper level. The fundamental question, then, is not to what end technology can be used; the goal is not to see technology as an almighty means that is an end in itself, but to examine the state of the human in the age of technological reason.