Screen as Skin: The Somatechnics of Touchscreen Music Media

Abstract

This chapter explores the way mobile music devices with touchscreen technology produce new somatechnical figurations that reshape emotional dynamics of music listening. Touchscreens imply the relationship between skin on skin—the skin of our body (in particular the hands) against the skin of the screen. It follows that mobile touchscreen devices suggest a degree of sensuality—in the coming together of bodies, fluids and other organic materials which ‘stick’ to the touchscreen, the language of ‘stickiness’ pointing to Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of the way affect can “stick” to bodies. The function of skin, both in a corporeal and a discursive sense, cannot be. Skin is not politically benign. By “thinking through the skin,” to use the Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey’s words, the author reads mobile touchscreen technology as an exciting new way to imagine music listening in terms of cyborgian relations.