Some very surface notes on substance and surfaces
This is a quick updating of old blog post I never published from 2019. Having recently been involved in some bread making experiments, the picture caught my eye (from 2014, taken while on a residency at Inshriach Bothy, Aviemore).
2019:
I had been thinking a lot about surfaces and why I struggle with the emphasis on ‘surface’ in some of the film theory and philosophy that interests me.* Surface, in this context, sometimes comes into play in linking ideas about celluloid and skin and the tactility of both. Perhaps there is something about surface that speaks to boundaries involved in categorisation. Not in the Deluezian philosophical sense perhaps, where surfaces are continually folding into themselves, but in a more prosaic metaphorical sense, iff you emphasise surface, it could be argued that you emphasise surface boundaries and borders. Operating in even an infinity of two dimensions, don’t you ignore what moves beneath the surface in every encounter?
Perhaps not, a folded surface, if likened to a dough, is both surface and interior. Then why speak of surfaces at all? It seems a peculiarly mathematical way to conceptualise bodies.
It makes me wonder if this tendency to look for edges and boundaries is connected to categorisation? According to the Cambridge online dictionary, category is defined as “(in a system for dividing things according to appearance, quality, etc.) a type, or a group of things having some features that are the same”. In order to categorise then, you have to find commonalities, and ignore any feature that does not unite the category. The nature of categorisation relies on practicing wilful ignorance of any phenomena’s complete (let alone possible and emergent) qualities, in order to emphasise what it shares with a particular set of other phenomena. It’s something we learn to do in order to organise our worlds and communicate with others through language. But the act of partial translation it requires to force something actual and emergent into a pre-designated category can feel quite arbitrary and stultifying at best, and encourage violent exclusions at worst. When we choose to sever an object, person or phenomena from its own unique non-verbal language of action and emergence, much is lost. I love language when it creates something new: perhaps in my ideal world, all description would be poetry and neologism.
But it would make ordering difficult in restaurants.
2024:
I love this quote from a book I’m currently reading ‘Silent Whale Letters” a series of letters from 2020 between Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini (Sternberg Press). Their correspondence is about an inaudible recording of a blue whale call held in the Natural History Museum in London and in one letter Vibeke notes:
When a whale’s voice reaches another whale, it is not like light: sound doesn’t bounce off the surface of the other whale’s skin, in the way our eyes perceive reflected light and create an image. Sound can actually, effortlessly, pierce the skin to reflect an image that is part-external, part-internal back to the receiver. Like an X-ray rather than a photograph. This way a whale might see its friend from a far distance, while simultaneously seeing in its stomach what it had for breakfast. (Mascini, 2020) p21
Perhaps that is why the scholars of film interested in body, and touch - even those concerned with how sound contributes to tactile affect, often use surface as metaphor, because of the historical emphasis in cinema on the visible, the photographic as a tracing on a surface. Not just perhaps because of the skin like properties of celluloid—the traditional film medium—but because, even in the digital age, the way the light records and reproduces an image whether in image-making or in life, is all about the reflection of surfaces. And perhaps, this helps to explain why I’m drawn to sound as an alternative emphasis; highlighting the fleshy throughput of the cinematic experience, thgat can help draw ones whole body into the mise en scène, and enfold the world of the film into our flesh.
*MARKS, L. U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
DONALDSON, L. F. 2018. Surface Contact: Film Design as an Exchange of Meaning. Film-Philosophy, 22, 203-221.
DONALDSON, L. F. 2017. "You Have to Feel a Sound for it to be Effective" : sonic surfaces in film and television. In: MERA, M., SADOFF, R. & WINTERS, B. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group.
MARKS, L. U. 2021. Talisman-Images: From the Cosmos to Your Body. In: PRZEDPEŁSKI, R. W., S. E. (ed.) Deleuze, Guattari and the Arts of Multiplicity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.