Somatechnics and Popular Music in Digital Contexts by Laura Glitsos

Author:Laura Glitsos
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030181222
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Somatechnics as Conceptual Apparatus

In reading the touchscreen as a skin, I suggest that the screen/skin interface has reshaped music listening because of how we relate to our skin and the skin of others. I deploy the conceptual apparatus of somatechnics that enables me to explore an understanding of skin (human or other) as a technology produced through bio-social-psychic structures. The body itself might be conceptualized as a technology, and as a technology, the body interacts with other technologies, both machinic and organic. For Dahl and Sundén, somatechnics is an intervention in critical inquiry that indicates “that technologies are not something that are added to bodies, but rather the means by which bodies and their politics are formed and transformed” (2013, 227). In the somatechnical model, listening is informed just as much by the technology of the ears, skin, and discursive apparatuses (such as language), as it is by machinic assemblages and digital networks. Somatechnics is valuable for this exploration because, as an investigative tool, it allows for the creative production of a variety of “open-ended” figurations in which to “imagine knowledge, bodies and subjectivities otherwise and in multiplicity” (227; original emphasis). For example, in this chapter, I imagine the bodies of both human and mobile media devices as deeply relational and indicative of the way bodies and their affects and/or emotions can be fundamentally changed by their contact with other bodies (human or otherwise). Thinking about mobile touchscreen technology using a somatechnical model therefore unlocks a variety of theoretical doors, through which the potentialities of music listening are coupled with the affective dimensions and emotional repercussions of skin on skin relations.

The field of somatechnics emerges from the legacy of feminist theories that sought to reimagine the body, in particular Haraway’s cyborgian vision (Dahl and Sundén 2013, 227) in which hybridities of machine and organism serve as an ontology that might decolonize the body from so many political and social traumas. In particular, it cleaves from “the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the production of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other” (Haraway 1987, 2). Somatechnics advances and extends these ideas to build an understanding of technology as an “intimate part of what we have come to think of as our bodies” (Dahl and Sundén 2013, 227). In doing so, as Dahl and Sundén note, the core of somatechnics is about “border crossings” and “boundary confusions” (228).

It is the confusion and subversion of the screen/skin interface that concerns me here. I interrogate how these boundary confusions between screen-skin/human-skin can reconfigure emotional and affective dynamics in the listening experience, especially in regard to the way that affective dynamics of skin relations can mark expressions of love, tenderness, or even disgust and fear. Affect theory is deeply imbricated with models of somatechnical thought too. For Dahl and Sundén, affect constitutes the “somatechnical assemblages of images, media technologies, and bodies” (2013, 231). I

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