Formatting the Senses of Touch

Abstract

Today, as different sensations and faculties are combined in new ways with the aid of computers, the role of our sensorium and its inner hierarchies seem to be undergoing various changes. In this article I address the role of media in the transformation of experience in terms of sensuous formatting. I study the interplay between new media and sensory experience, focusing on the significance of touch, especially with regard to its sheltering/exposing function. In the experiential horizon of digital culture, the status of touch as a sense is unstable, as a great deal of what we consider real is anything but tangible, even when we find it touching. Therefore one of the key questions of the article is how to relate mediated forms of tangibility to the conceptual, affective and social dimensions of touch or feel. My thesis is that haptic appropriation of things and events that are made digitally accessible makes use of processes that can be explicated in terms of Freudian theory of psychic defense mechanisms. As I indicate, touch plays here an ambivalent role, as it does in Freud’s theory. I also relate these processes of formatting and their ambivalence to what Cathryn Vasseleu calls “formalization of touch” as well as to Samuel Weber’s remarks on various forms of targeting that are deeply rooted in Western thinking. These analyses will find their place in the second half of the article. In the first section I prepare my analysis of sensuous formatting by outlining the multifacetedness of touch. Hereby, my main points of reference relate to the phenomenological tradition, which offers a rich starting point for media theoretical reflection on sensuous formatting.