| This dissertation explores the question: how are touch-based devices intended to alter epochal discourses on subjective constitution and how is mimesis deployed in this pursuit? Touch-based devices are critically analyzed as being 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 devices currently in research, and public and personal use touch-based devices currently available on the market. Using formal publications by the producers of said technologies, methodologies of the sociology and history of technology are implemented to draw out an analytical schema connecting produced technological artifacts to the theoretical research on subjectivity, control, and sensorial experience. In using the term "mimesis," a lineage is traced from the classical use through the Frankfurt School analysis of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, to what is termed "epimimesis," or a mimesis-like quality that negates the very possibility of an original while utilizing the full corporeality of the human in epimimetic experience. Touch-based devices are examined as a fulcrum of a shift from a visual ontology to a more corporeal ontology, resulting in technological experience that deploys a mimesis-like process through a greater involvement of the entire self. Such explorations of present technological practices are conducted in the vein of Merleau-Ponty's call to reexamine our habitual backgrounds, casting a critical eye on touch-based devices as highly proliferated artifacts of the mediascape. It is found that, in the process of designing touch-based devices, producers come to imagine an "implied user" and script this into the device itself, thereby naturalizing certain ideations of the human, human nature and human ability. The language of touch and gesture is codified by device producers, ossifying a certain discourse of human ability. Actual users must then adapt to this implied user in order to properly utilize the device, thereby creating "altered users." This is of particular interest to touch-based devices, as they are often posited by producers as "natural" and "intuitive." The political implications of such reifications and scripting of discourse is explored. |
