The Double Logic of Touch

Abstract

The Double Logic of Touch is a work that focuses on various artistic practices, including sculpture, film, print literature, electronic literature, and photography, and the ways in which technology, from etching needles to prosthetic hands to typewriters and cameras, alter the sensory function and affective meaning of touch. Tools that extend the hand, I argue in my dissertation, serve as prosthetic devices with an inherent double logic as instruments that simultaneously supplement and point to a lack in the human body: a tension which in affective terms puts objects and tools within hands’ reach but nevertheless fails to recuperate the sense of intimacy and immediacy associated with human-to-human, skin-to-skin interactions. The effects hereof are felt as a sense of loss and estrangement that is both destructive and constructive, aesthetically pleasing and shocking. Broadly speaking, The Double Logic of Touch falls within the framework of affect theory; however, my intervention into that conversation – largely facilitated via an intentional focus on the works of German-speaking artists and theorists who speak, directly or indirectly, to the importance of touch – serves to redirect the apparatus of affect theory away from its pervasive preoccupation with the visual.