ABSTRACT
The technologies of recorded sound revert with an odd insistence to such helical images: in Edison’s phonographic cylinders, the spirals of the gramophone disk, the spoolings of audio- and videotape, and the spiral sequences of optical data inscribed on the compact disc. Helical sound also confers the magical power of running sound backward. Sound is imagined in the same two-sided way as skin: both as that which touches and that which is touched, both as a medium through which people feel and as something that is itself subject to touching and assault. But sound always seems to carry touch with it, perhaps more than ever in our era of “disembodying”—the preservative touching within the evaporations of shape and substance. As such, touch will also always preserve the something-to-be-touched: the skin of the world, the skin that joins us to the world.
