1
Introduction
Turning to surfaces
Mike Anusas and Cristián Simonetti
Introducing surfaces
This edited volume seeks to explore and influence ways of thinking about and studying the earth, its inhabitants and their material formations through surfaces. Life is conveyed by and carries on through surfaces of bodies, materials and environment. Yet modern thought and science teach us that knowledge lies occluded beyond or beneath surfaces. Traces of this thinking can be found in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art, biology, design, geology, history, neuroscience, psychology and many others. For instance, the histories of the earth are understood as deeply hidden beneath the ground and seas and the workings of organisms beneath their living skin. Similarly, while social life is lived in the meeting and contact of bodily and material surfaces, these surfaces often divide an interior, micro-world of the mind from an exterior, macro-world of the environment. Accordingly, language and discourse are conceived to operate in a double register where on the one hand, everyday communication might seem superficial, but on the other, intellectual thought conveys profound insights. Mirroring this perspective, the surfaces of modern commodity objects are typically designed to cover up and hide the technological entanglements that sustain everyday life (Anusas and Ingold 2013).
These conflations of superficiality with ‘surface understandings’ and of meaningful knowledge with ‘in-depth’ insight have limited the development of a more encompassing and critical engagement with surfaces. This conflation of surface with superficiality, and depth with meaning, maps to another dichotomy, between sense and reason. According to this, our human intellect has the capacity to transcend immediate sensory experience and to access the essence of things deeply hidden beneath surfaces. Among humans, those with the power to transcend immediate sensory experience – particularly those in modern science and technology – have privileged access to profound truths – truths which are often regarded as timeless, in that they remain eternally in waiting, underneath a boundary of enclosure which can only be broken or opened with the appropriate intellectual expertise or scientific equipment.
In recent years, authors across many fields have critiqued the assumptions of the superficiality/depth dichotomy. For example, in archaeology, Julian Thomas (2004) explores how such a dichotomy facilitates a perspective on time whereby the past is occluded in a depth beneath surfaces. However, Harrison (2011, 2013), in response to Thomas, questions this convention in archaeology to suggest that the past is in fact visible on the surface of the present, as otherwise how would we encounter knowledge of the past (see also Simonetti 2018)? In human geography, Forysth et al. (2013) have invited scholars – following a path opened by Tuan (1989) – to transcend the modern superficiality/depth dichotomy by attending to the intricate varieties of surfaces which compose human environments. Similar arguments exist in other fields, such as architecture (Chatterjee 2014; Bruno 2014; Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi 2002; Imperiale 2000), design (Adamson and Kelley 2013), history (Amato 2013), literary studies (Best and Marcus 2009) and anthropology (Miller 2010; Manderson 2011).
This scholarly turn to surfaces overlaps partially with recent attention to the senses in the humanities and social sciences, which questions the logocentric emphasis of the so-called linguistic turn since the 1950s. This renewed attention to the senses has been accompanied by studies that question the supremacy granted to vision in the western sensorium (Classen 1993; Hamilakis 2015; Howes 1991; Jay 1994; Stoller 1989). Occularcentrism in science, which favours a perspective that truth lies beyond immediate experience, leads to a domestication of the everyday senses, with the power of insight given to those equipped with technical optics and a stance of detached observation (Simonetti 2019). A critical engagement with western perception therefore involves a shift from the detached singularity of optical vision to the intimacy of haptic perception, where vision is inseparable from movement and touch is crucial in how we come to know the world (Ingold 2000; Bruno 2014). Kinaesthesia, a bodily sense lost in classical accounts of the senses in the west, is crucial in how we come to know the world, in that seeing – as well as any other form of sensing – is inseparable from moving (Sheets-Johnstone 1999). Considering surfaces, knowledge of the world is not that of an optical incision through superficiality to the matters of a fixed depth in waiting but rather that of a responsive sensorial encounter with entanglements of life that are ever moving and growing.
A turn to surfaces also overlaps with a willingness to incorporate materials and things into the social imagination and which counters ideas of sociality as that which is an abstract signification impressed onto a passive material world (Drazin and Küchler 2015; Ingold 2013; Latour 2005; Miller 2005). As for the senses, the turn to materials is an invitation to transcend the classical emphasis on text which has dominated the humanities and social sciences since the turn of the century, including in fields dedicated to the study of material things, such as archaeology (Knappett and Malafouris 2008; Malafouris 2013; Marshall and Alberti 2014; Olsen 2010; Olsen et al. 2012). Key to this invitation is also the need to address a dichotomy that parallels superficiality/depth and mind/matter, that is, of solidity/fluidity. Where superficiality supposes a homogeneous and settled layer, covering a deep heterogeneous complexity, so then it correlates with ideas of thought and mental life as fluid and in transition, against a world of matter that is more solid – a dichotomy traditionally mapped in the western imagination on a separation between sky and earth. Our reach towards understanding the world through surfaces seeks to disrupt the notion that mind and matter can be regarded as two existential domains, held in the fixity of nouns, and rather to see minding and mattering as differing practices in a solid-fluid world that is in constant becoming (Simonetti and Ingold 2018; also Barad 2007).
Dialoguing with these complementary agendas on sensing and mattering, this volume seeks to overcome dichotomies of modern thought by attending to surfaces not as entities on one side of a division but rather as transformative thresholds which manifest different qualities in the meeting of minds, bodies, materials and earth. This volume folds together ten anthropological contributions on surfaces from five continents and seven countries in correspondence with the scientific practices of archaeology, neuroscience and psychology; the creative disciplines of architecture and design; the skilled crafts of basketry, bookbinding, knitting and taxidermy and the ritual practices of fertility and mortality with smoke and soil.
Perceiving surfaces
Although this volume is inevitably part of a scholarly turn to surfaces, a number of chapters in this book criticise existing ideas put forth by other writers on surfaces. Therefore, as editors, we are resistant to see our interest in surfaces becoming as a homogenous intellectual movement or part of yet another turn in the humanities and social sciences which – as is so often the case – ends up reproducing the existing categories of thinking it seeks to overcome, albeit with a proliferation of new and fashionable terminologies.
While there is a contemporary turn towards surfaces in the humanities and social sciences – also known as surface studies (Coleman and Oakley-Brown 2017) – our interest in surfaces starts farther back, from James J. Gibson’s (1986) seminal work, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Turning the mind of classic cognitivism inside out, Gibson constituted the act of perception as existing amidst the relationship between an organism and its surrounding environment. In doing so, surfaces became a plane of engagement by which cognition could be explored and explained (also Simonetti, this volume). For Gibson, perception did not result from the interiorisation of information, mediated by mental images and categories. Rather, perception occurred as part of an ongoing process – an ‘education of attention’ (Gibson 1986: 254) – whereby the growth of an organism concurs with its dynamic movement and interaction in a visual field of surfaces.
For Gibson, then, ‘[t]he surface is where most of the action is’ (ibid: 23), and surfaces exist wherever a medium meets a substance in relation to the perspective of the organism. For example: for an aquatic organism, where the medium is water, a surface would be encountered at the seabed, but for a terrestrial organism, where the medium is air, the ground would be encountered as a surface. For Gibson, that the surface is ‘where light is reflected or absorbed, not the interior of the substance’ and that ‘the surface is what touches the animal, not the interior’ (ibid.) is thus the most important condition for understanding perception and behaviour, and thus, for ‘terrestrial animals’, the ground becomes ‘the most important of all surfaces’ (ibid.: 16). It is thus the ongoing interactions with the texture, form and reflected luminescence of the ground that afford direct perception to a moving organism. Thus, qualities of perception, such as depth perception, have more to do with relational surface encounters than they have to do with the contained mental processing of ‘the fallacy of the retinal picture’ (ibid: 147).
Gibson’s emphasis on surfaces provides a compelling perspective for how to think about the world relationally, and it highlights a necessary attention to be given to the thresholds that occur between different states of matter. However, his organisation of matter into substance and medium befalls the same dichotomic fate as that of solidity and fluidity – as we discussed previously – and it becomes apparent, as Ingold (2013, 2015) has recently highlighted, that Gibson’s substance and medium require a marked settled coherency in order for a surface to exist.
When Gibson (1986: 66) states that ‘the environment consists of the earth and the sky with objects on the earth and in the sky, of mountains and clouds, fires and sunsets, pebbles and stars’ and ‘the furniture of the earth, like the furnishings of a room, is what makes it [an environment] liveable’ (ibid: 78), it seems that all worldly manifestations of substance and medium exist as if in a ‘still life’ painting and even the most ephemeral conditions of substance – e.g. clouds, fire – are retained as ‘objects’. Thus, when Gibson set out to offer an alternative to a Newtonian world view, observing that ‘the terrestrial world is mostly made of surfaces, not of bodies in space’ (ibid: 148), he may have filled that space with the richness of a medium, but he left substantial objects intact, whether held in that medium, above a coherent ground or placed on such clear and certain grounds.
For Gibson, then, the surface is a relational threshold, but the hold of such a threshold is overemphasised ‘in spite of reactions between substances and medium’ (Ingold 2015: 43), and so surfaces are taken as ‘proof of the separation and immiscibility of substances and medium’ (ibid). Such a separation between substance (earth) and medium (sky) is fundamental to the western imagination and maps onto that between material (objectual) and immaterial (spiritual) properties of the world (Ingold 2011). Gibson’s view of the ground – as a platform to furnish objects – also coincides with ideas of earth’s history as a series of horizontally compiled layers, where life has been lived on at a particular time and place (Simonetti 2018). This view of earth history has an uncanny resemblance to the orthogonal forms that dominate contemporary built environments and which ‘convert the ground into the kind of surface that theorists of modernity always thought it was – level, homogeneous, pre-existent and inert’ (Ingold 2015: 45). ‘Solid’, ‘smooth’, ‘opaque’ and ‘impermeable’; these surfaces afford a sense of the urban to be detached from the rural and of manufactured objects to be disassociated from their flows of environmental making (Anusas and Ingold 2013; Simonetti and Ingold 2018).
Surfaces becoming
As Ingold (2015) pursues in his account of the ground, so we aim to discover surfaces as phenomena of many becomings, occurring through continuous interstitial knittings, rather than as strata being a fixed condition of matter. As the ground is for Ingold, so surfaces are for us a transformative zone, where substance and medium mingle to become categorically imperceptible and this mingling is necessary to make life possible. As the ground does not constitute a set of horizontally compiled and rested layers – which terrestrial organisms live upon – so, then, surfaces are like Ingold’s constitution of the ground which is continuously growing over into itself in the process of its formation. Thus, life occurs not on top of surfaces but emanant and stitched into them, and surfaces are thus where ‘substances are binding with the medium’ (ibid: 43).
Ingold’s notion of a surface as a ground becoming can also be considered with respect to the surfaces of organisms. Through inhaling breath and swallowing food and fluids, terrestrial organisms gather their surrounds into themselves and then, in exhaling and defecating, organisms expend part of themselves back into their environment. Thus, to consider surfaces as zones of growing over and becoming is not only a conceptual perspective but a metabolic condition. And this perspective on surfaces can also be considered with respect to the formation of material arte-facts and structures. In considering the making of a basket, Ingold (2000, 2013) observes that a certainty of form does not exist in abstract and precede the movements of the weaver but that rather form – and occurrences of surface – grows and develops through a continuous sentien...
