What is a surface? Boundary? Veil? Partition? To claim that one has only “scratched the surface” implies that a certain level of breadth has not yet been reached. In psychoanalysis, what one expresses on the surface is something like a foggy articulation of one’s inner psyche. To think at surface level is presumably to think superficially. But if the surface is a point of division, it is, too, a point of contact. And there is something to be said for thinking sur-ficially – with the bowels and recesses of our surfaces, and the flows and rhythms that snarl around them.
Surfaces are sites of power. I love the way that Latour describes surfaces as translators in his theorizing on inscriptions and their role in mediating knowledge production.1 The map, the papyrus, figures, charts, illustrations – they depict and document, becoming reproducible, translatable, mobile knowledges. As surfaces, they function to distill the complexities of the cosmos, on the one hand making them knowable and interpretable and on the other, obscuring plenty. Our screens, infrastructures, maps, or toilets are objects that facilitate our engagement with the world. They are never comprehensive in their translations, nor are they isolated from the relations by which they are constituted. The surface is a site of obscurity and at once one of contact and mediation.
The hard-surfacing of our urban landscapes and the primacy of asphalt and pavement are thick with stories of shit and filth. In the late 1700s, as American cities rapidly industrialized, miasmia theory became a widely accepted conjecture of public health reformers. Linked to enlightenment ideals around rationality, miasma theory was the belief that foul air rising from decaying matter and waste was a primary source of disease. Sanitary reformers believed that if stench and disorder brought about sickness, control over the environment – sealing (strangling?) the land – was requisite to reasserting both physical and cultural order. By the 19th century, hard-surfacing became part of broader urban reform. Dirt and gravel streets were leveled and paved, and asphalt became a dominant city surface. The idea that paving and sealing surfaces would contain waste, reduce stench, and prevent disease entailed a vision of control and order. Of a nature bounded by “man, “of a human life insulated from dirt, mud, and the material flows that make modernity. Proponents of soil sealing spoke of how man, unencumbered with the inconveniences of earth, was freed to focus on those greater matters of business and trade – a development in modernization, enlightenment. “Man” here becomes separate from, superior to, conquerer of nature.2 The logic of hard-surfacing is thus not just utilitarian but deeply ideological, and bound up in dynamics of race, class, gender, and power. Infrastructural development and standards of cleanliness are never neutral. Wealthier, whiter districts were paved first. The distinctions between who or what was deemed “clean” and the very ideals of order, hygiene, and progress which underpinned these projects were rooted in racialized logics of power and domination.
Surfaces are politically charged. They sew moral and ethical ideals into the material fabrics of our cities. While we may no longer wade through industrial runoff and rotting waste on our way to work, my point here lies in the ways that such material circulations have been intentionally obstructed from our view. Design of public space operates on principles of enclosure and separation - landfills and power plants are relegated elsewhere, withdrawn from our quotidian arrangements. So are the human and non-human labors that maintain such “elsewheres.” Space and geography are categorized into discrete regions. Architectural configurations abide by neat distinctions between that which is meant to be seen and hidden. Floors are vacuumed and facades are polished, while networks of ventilation and energy are concealed and sequestered.3 This displacement severs us from the currents and circulations of natural resources we consume. Our environmental relations are shaped not only by the constructions of our surfaces but by our rituals of sur-ficial care. In the vein of Mary Douglas, rituals of purification sustain the boundaries that uphold social life. They stabilize distinctions between inside and outside, nature and culture, order and disorder.4 We sweep, scrub, shave and seal - gestures that sediment the maintenance of order into habit and affirm reality. Our conventions and routines, our traditions of care, weld us together with the textures of materiality.
In one of my favorite essays on surfaces, Tim Ingold traces the relationship between the book, word, and page. I am thinking in particular here of his reflections on parchment and medieval scribing culture. Even as the palimpsest is over and over scuffed and sanded, some trace or stain of something always remains. Each score accumulates as a slow weaving of matter, gesture, and consciousness.5 Writing becomes a sort of haptic lace. Ingold reminds us that such surfaces are never passive but active participants in meaning-making. The computer radically alters this intimacy by reconfiguring our relationship to text and surface. It flattens and sanitizes the circuits it implicates: electrical currents and hard drives, rare minerals and motherboards, boiling data centers and industrial processors. Tactical weaves of weight and motion are traded in for a disembodied input wrapped in a sterile-white bow.
If the surface deceives, such a deception is often disrupted by cracks, breaches, malfunctions, and failures. Less so a physical rupture in the surface, this is more of a finding oneself consciously imbricated in the circulations and interdependencies that the surface once so thinly veiled. Surfaces perform the double-work of making the world appear staunch and solid even as they disclose the lattices of material, energy, and motion that course through them. When torrents of rain flood the subway platforms, when sanitary workers strike, when the ceiling leaks, we are reminded that the surface is tenuous, unstable, provisional. Even despite the myth of impermeable order and stability that our hard-surfaced cities naturalize, our urban fabric is everywhere marked by interfaces, points of contact and disruption. Polymers and petrochemical compounds bind our sidewalks, vegetal bodies pry open their seams, sedimented layers of labor and capital sustain the weight of our built environment. The same holds true for the deception of the body as a discrete unit of individuality. The boundaries of self exceed skin as a container of flesh and mass. We are porous and leaky holobiants, co-constituted by the microbial, chemical, and environmental rhythms that sustain us. It might be more useful then to think of the surface not as a site of obstruction but as one which shapes, gives form, or brings into relation. We might, in turn, be compelled to consider surfaces as sites of meaning-making in their own right, rather than searching beyond or beneath them in the hopes of some faithful interiority.
“Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands” — Bruno Latour
“Urban Pedogeneses: The Making of City Soils from Hard Surfacing to the Urban Soil Sciences” — Germain Meulemans
“Designing Environmental Relations: From Opacity to Textility” — Mike Anusas & Tim Ingold
Purity and Danger — Mary Douglas
“Surface Visions” — Tim Ingold
FLOORS ARE VACUUMED AND FACADES ARE POLISHED!!! ur writing never ceases to amaze me