Surface Visions

The last few years have seen a remarkable revival of interest in surfaces, in my own discipline of social anthropology to be sure, but also in human geography, architecture and design, and in studies of literary, visual and material culture. That this revival appears to have issued from multiple disciplinary sources more or less spontaneously, and at much the same time, suggests that its roots lie in broader intellectual currents across the arts and humanities, which many have identified – albeit in the somewhat arch lexicon to which self-styled ‘theorists’ are prone – with an inversion of the relation between ontology and epistemology, or more prosaically, between the conditions of being in the world and of having some knowledge of it. This inversion has undone the metaphysical assumption that the true essence of things and persons is to be found deep inside them, in an inner core that can be reached only by breaking open the external appearance behind which it hides. It is this assumption that so often leads us to equate the surface with what is ‘superficial’. It is why we distrust surfaces and the meanings they convey: why we think we have to break through them or peel them aside, if we are ever to arrive at real significance. But what if there is nothing underneath? What if surfaces are the real sites for the generation of meaning? Then by mining them, excavating them, or clearing them away, we may in fact be destroying precisely what we seek to find, and that lies under our very noses, convinced as we are that the truth can never be on the surface but somewhere deeper down.

There is a risk, however, that as we surface from the depths we veer too far the other way, lifting off into stratospheric domains of hyper-abstraction in which surfaces are not so much broken through as vaporized. So I would like to begin with a plea for humility in our attending to surfaces. We should defer to them. There is so much to see; so much to learn! Theorists, only too keen to inaugurate the latest turn, to announce yet another transformation in human sensibilities, or to tell us – yet again – how anything one might have thought to stand for itself is ‘always already’ inextricably and irrevocably implicated, intertwined or even imbricated with everything else, are inclined to feats of hyperbolic excess that do not so much undermine the surfaces to which they refer as over-mine them. ¹ It is all very well to speak of the entwinement of threads in a textile, or of the imbrication of tiles on a roof; in both, surfaces are formed through the iteration of basic operations, as we can observe from watching a weaver or a tiler at work. But the metaphorical extension of these operations to such imponderables as nature, culture and technology drains them of significance. The point is that the very move that brings us back to surfaces has consequences for the kind of intellectual work we call theory. A theory of surfaces that practises what it preaches must not only raise being ‘up’ from the depths, but also take knowing ‘down’ from the heights. It must join with the texture of the world, with its materials and processes, answering to them as they to it. The practice of theory, in short, must be a modality of habitation – a way of thinking and working with stuff – on a level with the materials of its trade.

Perhaps the place to start, then, is with the mundane surfaces of everyday life: surfaces which do not draw attention to themselves for their spectacular novelty, technical exceptionality, iconic imagery or transgressive audacity, but which have nevertheless forever held human life in their folds. I mean the surfaces of water, mud, stone, tree-bark, field and skin; of brick, cloth and paper; of pottery, glass and metal. And by the same token, we could also start with the everyday gestures that orient themselves to surfaces and contrive to treat them: they include washing, scrubbing, brushing, sweeping, raking, shaving, ironing, mowing, polishing, scraping, grinding, and much more. These are operations that turn rough into smooth, dull into shiny, opaque into transparent, written scrawl into blank slate. Many of them involve utensils that remain unsung, scarcely even warranting an entry in any inventory of material culture. Our technical manuals customarily give pride of place to the point and the cutting edge, things with which to make an intelligible mark on the world, or to craft a form, at the expense of implements more commonly used for preparation, removing blemishes or unwanted growth, covering up mistakes and cleaning up afterwards. Yet where would we be without dishcloths and dusters, mops and brooms, irons and rubbers, files and sandpaper? ² What all of these share, in use, is a back-and-forth movement of the hand and arm that is neither precisely measured out nor targeted, that covers a surface without delimiting it, that ever exceeds or overflows its objects, but that nevertheless harbours an intense and intimate ‘feel’ for the materials of which these objects are formed. Perhaps the best generic verb for this movement, in the English language, is ‘to wipe’ (from the Proto-Germanic wipjan, ‘to move back and forth’).

To wipe a surface by hand – whether bare or holding a cloth or brush – is to register every bump or hollow, every crease or fold, not as a feature set upon the surface, as though the surface were but a homogeneous and isotropic stage on which everything of interest is placed, but as a variation intrinsic to the surface itself. This is a modality of perception otherwise known as haptic: it is close-up, affective and kinaesthetic. Indeed, wiping is a haptic gesture par excellence. But is it limited to the hand? Can I not also wipe the surface with my eyes? Could eyesight be as haptic as manual touch? ³ Indubitably, the same prejudices that have biased our accounts of gesture and tool-use have also affected theories of perception. Vision, traditionally ascendant in the pantheon of the senses, has long been defined by the point and the cutting edge: thus we have inherited from Greek Antiquity the comparison of the act of looking to the bowman’s shooting an arrow towards its target; and from Renaissance theorists of perspective the notion of the line of sight as a taut thread that cuts orthogonally through the plane of projection. ⁴ It is the singular property of vision, according to this view, that it allows us to have the world at a distance, to obtain a knowledge of forms so objectively detached from the visceral conditions of existence as to be unsullied by the vagaries of sensory experience. Vision, understood in this light, sets up an optical relation between mind and world. In this relation both the seer and the seen, both the eye and the objects of its attention, are fixed in place, and the line of sight connects the two.

Of course, this optical relation is no more confined to vision than is the alternative, haptic relation confined to touch. The fundamental distinction between a perceptual space defined, on the one hand, by unfettered oscillatory movement, and on the other, by measured point-to-point connection, is independent of the particular sensory modality involved. ⁵ There can be optical touch as well as haptic vision, nowhere more than in the operation of touch-sensitive electronic devices, in which everything depends on the precise point of contact at the fingertip, not on any feeling for the screen. For us, however, the key question is this: how does the switch from an optical to a haptic mode of perception alter the way we think about surfaces? For optical vision, the vectors of projection are rays of light. The most important thing about surfaces, then, is how they affect the passage of rays. Are they transmitted or absorbed, reflected or refracted? A perfectly transparent surface, such as a window pane free from dirt and impurity, cannot be seen but affords the sight of what lies behind. However, the opaque surfaces visible behind the window disclose in their reflective properties the visible forms of objects. By way of an optical back-projection, these forms are cast in appearance though not in substance – that is as images – on what we take to be the surface of the mind. Appearances, of course, can be deceptive, which is why a psychology of vision that assumes opticality by default is so obsessed with the phenomena of illusion, and why the myth persists that it is possible, at least in principle, for the eye to be so tricked by the realistic painting of a scene that the viewer imagines it as real life. ⁶

Optical vision, in short, alights on surfaces only to pass directly through them or to bounce directly off them; not to remain there. ⁷ Surfaces are important not in themselves but for what they potentially open up, and for what they disclose. But they are also important for what they hide, and for the deceit that they can practise on us. In their transparency they specify nothing but give us access to a world of objects; in their opacity they specify the outward forms of these objects while yet closing off access to their interiority. Haptic vision, by contrast, abides with surfaces, and dwells in them. Its interest is less in the conformation of the surfaces than it is in their texture. And this texture tells not of the form of things but of their substantive composition. Any ordinary surface is revealed in subtle variations of pigment and illumination, and especially of light and shade. Introducing his ecological approach to visual perception, psychologist James Gibson lists among what he calls the ‘ecological laws of surfaces’ that any surface has a characteristic texture, depending upon the composition of its substances. Moreover, we can recognize a texture, and know of what it is composed, only because the surface is neither completely homogeneous nor completely amorphous. Thus the typical surface, Gibson says, is ‘both speckled and rough’. ⁸ Observe the surface of your hand, or of a cloth, of a puddle in the rain, a patch of gravel or a grass lawn. Every fold of the skin, every stitch of the cloth, every ripple of water, particle of grit or blade of grass is picked out in the contrast between the relative illumination of its light-facing convexities and the relative darkness of the concavities in their shade. A crease is the shadow of a fold, a hollow the shadow of a bump. But since fold and crease, or bump and hollow, are of the surface rather than on it, the surface, in its dappled texture, is self-shadowing. ⁹

These shadowy variations, moreover, are ever-changing, and a haptic vision follows and answers to them. Think, for example, of the waves of the sea or the rippling waters of a stream, or a wheat-field swept by the wind. A haptic vision seeks not to freeze the surface corrugations in some momentary form, so that they may be modelled in the mind through a one-to-one mapping of data points on the surface and in the model, but to join with the currents and with the wind. It is to feel the waves, the ripples and the swish of the field as movements. There is a sense in which optical vision always arrives after the fact: as in a game of grandmother’s footsteps, on the very instant that you turn to face the world, to take it in at a glance, the movement stops. The world is already formed; you are too late to catch it in its incipience. But haptic vision is always along in the continual birth of things, alert to the movements going on behind your back, or, more likely, on the periphery of the visual field. As is well-known, peripheral vision is more sensitive to movements than to forms; foveal vision vice versa. ¹⁰ Or consider the human face. Only in the most artificial situations do we fix the face of a fellow human in an unblinking and immobile stare. One of those situations is in passport control, where the aim is to identify the face of the traveller with the face in the photograph. Another is in the bizarre experiments of psychologists, in which subjects are asked to rank facial snapshots in order of preference with a view to the discovery of innate and evolved biases in the perception of facial beauty. ¹¹ This is not of course how we see the faces of others in everyday life. We rather see them alive with movement, in continually changing variations of complexion.

Complexion is indeed as good a word as texture, if not better, to epitomize the constitutive quality of any surface to which a haptic vision attends. Though the origins of the word lie in medieval physiology, in the combination of humours that was supposed to determine the temperament of a being, human or otherwise, it remains in common use today – with primary reference to the skin, and above all, the face – in a way that reveals the sheer impossibility, in practice, of separating expression from affect in the encounter with another living being. In complexion, the lines and wrinkles of the face, and its palette of shades from pallid to ruddy, are so completely blended with health and mood, and even with the atmospherics of weather, that they cannot be disentangled. ¹² This has a very important corollary, however. It means that in its complexion, the face does not belong to the head; nor the skin to the body. More generally, the surface – as it emerges within the field of haptic perception – is nothing like the surface of the object (or body, or head) as it is revealed to optical examination. With the latter, the surface is simply the outer envelope of a form, separating what is inside the form from what is outside. Indeed, it is thanks to the surface that we can regard the form as a coherent and self-contained entity that can be distinguished from its surrounds – or in a word, as an object. As we have seen, the surface allows the form to be inspected from the outside while concealing its interior content. It is the guarantor that inside and outside keep to their respective domains and do not mix. ¹³ No surface; no object.

With complexion, however, it is just the opposite. For here, interior and exterior are not set apart by the surface. It neither encloses a cavity nor discloses a volume. Rather, the surface emerges in the very fusion of an affectivity that intensifies from within and the weathering – including such atmospheric effects as sunshine, wind and rain – that brings its influence to bear from without. The surface, produced in this commingling of forces and movements, constitutively from the ‘inside out’ and erosively from the ‘outside in’, is itself of both inestimable depth and limitless in the extent of its outpouring into the surroundings. ¹⁴ As in a landscape of glistening rocks and dark pools, in its variations of light and shade the recesses of the earth meet and mingle with the brilliance of the sky. In the idiom of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, surface complexion – whether of face or landscape, and there are many parallels between them – is generated in the interplay of the ‘black holes’ of affectivity and the ‘white walls’ of expressive significance, of shadow and illumination. ¹⁵ This holey surface, at once profound and animated, weighty and buoyant, is not so much superficial as interstitial. The great Victorian social thinker and art critic John Ruskin was getting at much the same thing when – introducing the fifth and final volume of his Modern Painters, published in 1860 – he described the surface of the earth as a ‘veil of strange intermediate being’. Deep down, Ruskin argued, the earth is dead and cold, but at its surface – in the textures of its meadows and forests, rocky outcrops, moor and heath – it ministers to its inhabitants through this veil: ‘which breathes, but has no voice; moves, but cannot leave its appointed place; passes through life without consciousness …’. ¹⁶

Perhaps, then, we should follow Ruskin in thinking of the surface of haptic perception as a veil. Ruskin himself began with the injunction: ‘To dress it and keep it’. Dressing, here, is an act of care; not of looking at but of looking after. The veil covers, but does not cover up; it dresses but does not dress up. It is not a disguise but a revelation. Encrusted with its own material, the veil is not just a self-shadowing but a self-adornment. Far from hiding the depths behind the surface, it allows us to feel the depths in the surface. Why else do we use the verb ‘to wear’ to mean, in the same breath, both adornment and erosion? The worn face, wrinkled and ruddied by long exposure to sun and wind, wears its expression; worn hands wear the folds and calluses that come from years of working with materials, ancient stone steps wear the patina of thousands of passing feet, worn ground wears the texture of its wearing away. And with that, we can at last return to the gestures and implements of wiping with which we began. I have observed that in their polishing, grinding, brushing and so on, these are operations that smooth the surface, that remove its striations, erase its inscriptions. They are operations that bring one surface into contact with another: interfacial not in the sense of crossing a threshold between the exterior and interior of an object or a body, but in the sense of establishing a relation between faces, and not always a sympathetic one. What cheeky child has not been reprimanded with the words: ‘Wipe that expression off your face’? Who has not felt the blush of embarrassment? Yet neither cheek nor blush is visible, save in the face of another whose expression answers to it. Is it not, precisely, in such relations of interfaciality that social life is lived? If that is so, then the turn to surfaces is nothing less than a restoration: the restoration of social life itself.