Surfaces. Transformations of Body, Materials and Earth [1 ed.] 9781138126299, 9781315646947

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: turning to surfaces
2 On opening the book of surfaces
3 Air, smoke and fumes in Aymara and Mapuche rituals
4 In light and shadow: surfaces and polarities in rituals of second burial in Central East Madagascar
5 Re-animating skin: probing the surface in taxidermic practice
6 The temporality of surfaces
7 Threshold as social surface
8 Vital surfaces and the making of urban architecture
9 On the substance of surfaces: situating materials and design in Melanesian environments
10 On knitted surfaces-in-the-making
11 A life surficial: design and beyond
12 Epilogue
Index

Citation preview

Surfaces

In attending to surfaces, as they wrap, layer and grow within sentient bodies, material formations and cosmological states, this volume presents a series of ten anthropological studies stretching across five continents and in observation of earthly practices of making, knowing, living and dying. Through theoretically reflecting on time spent with Aymara and Mapuche Andean cultures; the Malagasy people of Madagascar; craftspeople and designers across Europe and Oceania; amongst the architectures of Australia and South Korea and within the folds of books, screens, landscape and the sea, the anthropologists in this volume communicate diverse ways of considering, working with and knowing surfaces. Together, these writings advance a knowledge of the world which resists any definitive settlement of existential categories and rather seeks to know the world in its emergence and transformation, as entities grow, cohere, shift, dissolve, decay and are reborn through the contact and exchange of surfaces, persisting with varying time, power and effect. The book principally invites readers from anthropology, the creative arts and environmental studies but also across the wider humanities and social sciences as well as those in the neighbouring scientific fields of archaeology, biology, geography, geoscience, material science, neurology and psychology interested in the intersections of mind, body, materials and world. Mike Anusas is Lecturer in Design & Screen Cultures, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Originally having trained and worked as a designer and engineer, he retrained as a social anthropologist to teach and research at the intersection of design and anthropology, exploring relationships between skilled practices, form-making and environmental perception. Cristián Simonetti is Assistant Professor in Anthropology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His work concentrates on how bodily gestures and environmental forces relate to notions of time in science, the topic of a monograph he published in 2018, also with Routledge, entitled Sentient Conceptualisations. Feeling for Time in the Sciences of the Past.

Routledge Studies in Anthropology

Security Blurs The Politics of Plural Security Provision Edited by Tessa Diphoorn and Erella Grassiani Cultural Models of Nature Primary Food Producers and Climate Change Edited by Giovanni Bennardo Guatemalan Vigilantism and the Global (Re)Production of Collective Violence A Tale of Two Lynchings Gavin Weston Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary Christos Lynteris The Biometric Border World Technologies, Bodies and Identities on the Move Karen Fog Olwig, Kristina Grünenberg, Perle Møhl and Anja Simonsen Amerindian Socio-Cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica Toward an Anthropological Understanding of the Isthmo-Colombian Area Edited by Ernst Halbmayer Surfaces Transformations of Body, Materials and Earth Edited by Mike Anusas and Cristián Simonetti Mambila Divination Framing Questions, Constructing Answers David Zeitlyn www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Anthropology/book-series/SE0724

Surfaces Transformations of Body, Materials and Earth

Edited by Mike Anusas and Cristián Simonetti

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Mike Anusas and Cristián Simonetti; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Mike Anusas and Cristián Simonetti to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-12629-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64694-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: turning to surfaces

vii viii xi 1

M I K E A N U S A S AND CRI S T I ÁN S I MONE T T I

2 On opening the book of surfaces

14

TIM INGOLD

3 Air, smoke and fumes in Aymara and Mapuche rituals

29

J U A N C A R L O S S KE WE S AND DE BBI E GUE RRA

4 In light and shadow: surfaces and polarities in rituals of second burial in Central East Madagascar

46

C H R I S T E L M AT T HE E UWS

5 Re-animating skin: probing the surface in taxidermic practice

62

P E T R A T J I T S K E KAL S HOVE N

6 The temporality of surfaces

80

C R I S T I Á N S I M O NE T T I

7 Threshold as social surface

97

R AY L U C A S

8 Vital surfaces and the making of urban architecture A N U R A D H A C H AT T E RJE E

116

vi

Contents

9 On the substance of surfaces: situating materials and design in Melanesian environments

139

G R A E M E WE RE

10 On knitted surfaces-in-the-making

152

LY D I A M A R I A ARANT E S

11 A life surficial: design and beyond

167

M I K E A N U S AS

12 Epilogue

185

S U S A N N E K Ü CHL E R

Index

191

Figures

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1

8.2 8.3 8.4 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4

Map of West Bezanozano and surroundings. Image of the land and the weather. Turning the destinies of the tomb. A tomb. Inside and outside realities. Creating manikins for a jackdaw out of wood wool, displayed next to the skinned body. Maurice Bouten, 2011 roebuck head demonstration, UK Guild of Taxidermists. Maurice Bouten, cast of deer nostrils. Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren studio, detail. Head of a gigantic shark. Visual representation of the psyche. Development of the brain. Forward projection of the brain. Packages in movement via wheeled platforms and a porter with A-frame. Axonometric drawings of the unfurling market. Plan drawings of Seomun Market. A sectional drawing through the flea market of Dongdaemun. A) Corner view, Monaco House (2007), Melbourne, by McBride Charles Ryan Architects. B) View of balconies, Monaco House (2007), Melbourne, by McBride Charles Ryan Architects. BHP Billiton Headquarters (2004), Melbourne, Lyons Architects. Looking up from under one of the canopies, BHP Billiton Headquarters (2004), Melbourne, Lyons Architects. Glass façade, Nigel Peck Centre for Learning and Leadership (2008), Melbourne, John Wardle Architects. Suggestive surfaces – materials in the workshop. Gesturing surfaces – Post-It sketches in the ideation phase. A moment of making. James’ desk.

47 49 50 52 59 65 69 71 73 82 84 90 91 103 105 107 110

129 131 132 133 173 177 179 180

Contributors

Mike Anusas is Lecturer in Design & Screen Cultures, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Originally having trained and worked as a designer and engineer, he retrained as a social anthropologist to teach and research at the intersection of design and anthropology, exploring relationships between skilled practices, form-making and environmental perception. He has contributed to the edited volume Designing Anthropological Futures (Bloomsbury, 2016) and to journals Design Issues and Cultural Anthropology. He has recently worked on the European Research Council project Knowing From the Inside (KFI, 2013–18) and has recently contributed to the Centenary Programme for Bauhaus Dessau. Lydia Maria Arantes is an assistant professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Graz. In 2014 and 2015, she was a visiting researcher at UCL for a period of six months. For her doctoral thesis, she carried out (auto)ethnographical research on knitting, carving out sensory, material, mathematical, social, historical, economic and gender dimensions of a practice hitherto rather ignored in anthropological research. Panama Publishers (Berlin) published her thesis in 2017. Arantes’ research interests include textile craft practices, material culture studies, sensory ethnography/anthropology, ethnomathematics, reflexive ethnography and ethnopsychoanalysis. Anuradha Chatterjee is an architect and academic based in India and Australia. She is the author of three books: Surface and Deep Histories: Critiques, and Practices in Art, Architecture, and Design (Cambridge Scholars Publishing); Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined Sydney (Copal Publishing); John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture (Routledge); and she contracted as the Area Editor for South/East Asia for the Bloomsbury Global Encyclopaedia of Women in Architecture 1960–2015. Dr Chatterjee is Companion to the Guild of St George; Member of Editorial Board for Architecture, Cambridge Scholars Publishing; and Senior Research Fellow (Honorary), Centre for Architecture Theory Criticism History at the University of Queensland. Debbie Guerra, Anthropologist, Assistant Professor of the Institute of Anthropological Studies, Universidad Austral de Chile. Her work focuses on gender

Contributors

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and feminist studies, including women and the environment and sexual and reproductive rights. Current research concentrates on the relation between women and the forest. She collaborates with the Centre for Environmental Studies and is a Member of the Council of the National Institute of Human Rights. Her published work includes Las Ñañas (Valdivia: Ser Indígena Editores, 2014). Tim Ingold is Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His recent books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018) and Anthropology: Why It Matters (2018). Petra Tjitske Kalshoven (Ph.D. 2006 McGill University, Montréal) is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Manchester. Her work explores skilled manifestations of human curiosity and play. She is the author of Crafting ‘the Indian’: Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment (Berghahn Books, 2012), an ethnography of a contemporary amateur practice in Europe predicated on expert performance and replication of Native American life worlds from the past. More recently, her research has centred on hunting and taxidermy as lenses for thinking through human–animal relations. She currently pursues her interest in expertise, materials and landscapes with an ethnography of nuclear decommissioning. Susanne Küchler is Professor of Anthropology and Material Culture at University College London. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and Eastern Polynesia over the past 25 years, studying the modular, composite image in its relation to political economies of knowledge from a comparative perspective. Her work on the history of the take-up, in the Pacific, of cloth and clothing as ‘new’ material and ‘new technology’ has focused on social memory and material translation and on the epistemic nature of pattern. The question of the return to the object and its theoretical and methodological imperative is the central theme of her forthcoming work which follows publications on Malanggan: Art, Memory and Sacrifice (2002); Pacific Pattern (2005) and Tivaivai: The Social Fabric of the Cook Islands (2009). Ray Lucas is Reader at Manchester School of Architecture, Manchester Metropolitan University. He has a Ph.D. in social anthropology with the thesis Towards a Theory of Notation as a Thinking Tool (Aberdeen, 2006) and an M.Phil. by research on filmic architecture (Strathclyde, 2002). He is author of Research Methods for Architecture (Laurence King, 2016); Drawing Parallels (Routledge, 2019); Anthropology for Architects (Bloomsbury, 2020) and coeditor of Architecture, Festival and the City (Routledge, 2018). His research

x

Contributors interests include graphic anthropology, architectural drawing and the informal architecture of festivals and marketplaces.

Christel Mattheeuws works on religion, philosophy, development and ecology, with a strong attraction to islands and mountainous regions. Her work focuses on the relationship between perception, form-giving processes of both the material world and less substantial phenomena and different kinds of knowledge. She has published on the subject of astrology in Central East Madagascar and on experiences of synchronicity. She is currently exploring the relationship between Malagasy astrology, spirit and soul. Cristián Simonetti is Assistant Professor at the Programa de Antropología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His work concentrates on how bodily gestures and environmental forces relate to notions of time in science, the topic of a monograph he published in 2018, also with Routledge, entitled Sentient Conceptualisations. Feeling for Time in the Sciences of the Past. He currently leads the projects Solid Fluids in the Anthropocene (with Tim Ingold) and Concrete Futures, funded respectively by the British Academy and Fondecyt, Chile. For more information, see www.solidfluids.org and https://futuroscon cretos.wordpress.com Juan Carlos Skewes, Anthropologist, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Universidad Alberto Hurtado. His research field includes studies in landscape, heritage and community, anthropology of nature and environmental conflicts. Current research focuses on anthropology of the forest in central and southern Chile and mainly on the relation between humans and trees in indigenous and non-indigenous communities. He teaches anthropological theory (Materialism in Anthropology). Graeme Were is Chair and Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol. His research interests include museum anthropology, digital heritage and material culture studies, and he has a regional specialism in Papua New Guinea and Vietnam. His new book (2019), How Materials Matter: Design, Innovation, and Materiality in the Pacific, is published by Berghahn Books.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Tim Ingold for his encouragement, support and advice during the inception of this book. We would also like to thank Routledge staff Max Novick, Lola Harre, and Marc Stratton for their assistance; the attention and work by Kangan Gupta, Ganesh Pawan Kumar Agoor and the continued enthusiasm of Katherine Ong. Further, we are grateful to the anonymous reviewers who commented on the proposal and whose considerations contributed to the formation of the book. Our thanks also to the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, where the co-editors met amongst a doctoral student culture of significant vitality and imagination and where we first discussed anthropology, archaeology and design and a shared interest in surfaces.

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

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(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

Introduction 3 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

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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

Introduction 5 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 artefacts 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 sentient moving and sharing across mind, body and materials. This is an observation on the growth of form which Anusas also makes in this volume in attention to the surfaces of designers, materials, studios and workshops as they mingle in the making of contemporary product design. The vitality of surfaces as becomings is particularly salient in Skewes and Guerra’s contribution to this volume, which considers the transformative properties of fire, as observed in the lives of the Mapuche and Aymara people who flame the ground into smoke, creating clouds of particulate surfaces. Neither a solid object furnishing the ground, nor an entity positioned in the sky, fire transpires in-between the ongoing mingling of earth, sky, substance and medium. Such mingling is also apparent in the famadihana ritual of Madagascar, described in this volume by Mattheeuws. Highlighting a contrast with western mortuary practices – which lodge the dead underground, separate from life above the surface – in the famadihana, ancestors shift through surfaces, being lifted up through the matrix of the ground into the currency of the air. Through this practice, in a play of light and shadow and of breathing and singing, ancestry life evolves through the landscape in an ongoing participation with the current affairs of living beings. A mingling of earth and sky also occurs in Chatterjee’s exploration of the wall – inspired by John Ruskin – where she shows how the façades of architecture stretch through the sky to weave into the ground, disrupting any clarity on where a wall might end and the ground might begin. This continuity can also be leafed through in the opening chapter by Ingold where he traces the history and future of reading and writing across the surfaces of books and into our present world proliferated by screens, where he would no doubt agree with media philosopher Vilém Flusser’s (2002: 21) perspective that ‘it was formerly not so urgent as it is today to try to understand the role surfaces play in human life’.

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Simonetti also explores a mingling of matters, with respect to how time and space concepts in psychology and neuroscience intersect with understandings of earth history in the geosciences. Corresponding to what Bateson (1973: 429) suggested some time ago, that ‘the mental world [of an organism] is not limited by the skin’, Simonetti argues that despite the mind being modelled on a view of earth history as enclosed within surface, it has never been bound by the surface of the skin, and the very concepts that compose abstract scientific thinking are revealed to be gravitational in nature. Following the intricacies of mingled skins, Tjitske’s work with taxidermists also challenges the idea of skin as a resolute container or definitive boundary (see also Manderson 2011). From the perspective of taxidermists, each skin is a biography of the animal, as bones, sinew and flesh retain a narrative of the growth and experience of the organism in its environment. And through bodies mingling with needles and yarn – in the process of hand-knitting an article of clothing – Arantes shows how experiments in making become entangled in our love for others.

Surface frictions and tensions If surfaces are worked with as an ever-transformative zone of mingling, then it is possible to consider that the notion of surface might itself be unnecessary, if indeed any coherent sense of surface seems to dissolve into the fluxes and flows of everyday life. This is a direction which Ingold (2007: s32) actually pursues in considering the constitution of weather-world, where he states that ‘[i]n this weather-world there is no distinct surface separating earth and sky. Life is rather lived in a zone in which substance and medium are brought together in the constitution of beings which, in their activity, bind the weather world into the texture of the land’ and also in his considerations of the meshwork: ‘[b]y the same token, beings that inhabit the world (or that are truly indigenous in this sense) are not objects that move, undergoing displacement from point to point across the world’s surface. Indeed the inhabited world, as such, has no surface’ (Ingold 2011: 71). In these statements, the notion of surface is invalidated, giving way to textures and tangles in a direction that is reminiscent of Heidegger’s (1971: 167) critique of the solidity of objects as defined by their ‘over-againstness’ and working towards a consideration of things as gatherings of relations, materials and life. However, while we too agree that the composition of the world is not that of a collection of utterly solid, hermetically bounded and statically positioned objects, it is critically important to acknowledge that life does require some persistent and enduring sense of matter in order for it to continue. Were this not the case, there would be no congealment of place for life to stitch itself into and grow outward from, and there would be no substance on which to trace past lives and give rise to memory. For as Bergson (1998: 16–17) states, ‘wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed’ and ‘the very basis of conscious existence is memory, that is to say, the prolongation of the past into the present, or that is to say duration acting and irreversible’. And this duration extends beyond the skin and clothes of humans, deep into their surrounds, which are shared with and influence the growth of other organisms.

Introduction 7 It is thus our contention that the texturing, meshing and entangling that Ingold sees as constitutive to life do indeed give rise to a zone that is matted and dense enough for life to grasp onto and inscribe into, a zone which we view as surface. Thus, rather than conflating surfaces with a certain solidity, we approach them as coherences of a sort which acquire different properties, characteristics and textures through different zonal conditions and interferences. Surfaces are therefore highly variable, and they can have equally varied consequential effects for perception and imagination. This manifold possibility of surface is what Ingold (2015: 42) pursues in more recent work where he discusses mountains and walls as folds of earthly surfaces and considers that ‘the surface can be observed at different scales, from close up to far away, and each will reveal different patterns, textures and grains’. Here, Ingold discusses surface conditions both of the growing earth as well of engineered formations, with each having different perceptual qualities and possibilities for the generation of life. Thus, surfaces might, on one hand, be very loose in composition – and thus likely to be visually incoherent – or, on the other hand, very tight in composition – and thus likely to be more visually coherent. Therefore, life exists and persists not through completely open flows of matter but just as much because matter knots, congeals and meshes itself up into zones of coherence – surface – which takes on a form of its own and gives grounds for further possibilities of growth. Thus, surfaces draw us to acknowledge that life furthers itself not only due to flows of matter but also due to frictions of matter. As there can be no growth of a plant without its interference with and entanglement into the ground, so there can be no movement of a vehicle without its wheels coursing into, rubbing into and mutually degrading with the asphalt of the road. For any condition of life, there is no traction without friction, and no movement or growth can occur without the meeting and meshing of surfaces. Indeed, the very evolution of the earth – and the life within it – can be considered the result of surface friction. At greater scales, the earth is formed by the rubbing and collision of tectonic plates, its lands eroded by the forces of weather and its atmospheres shifted and shaped by the activity of organisms, increasingly impactful by humans. Terrestrial movement occurs through the roughness of skins and clothing meshing with surfaces underfoot, offering a resistance with which to push ahead from. Aquatic movement, through the seemingly smoothest of watery mediums, is enhanced in speed by skins as rough as sandpaper, in the case of sharks (Dean and Bhushan 2010). Bergson’s (1998) ‘register’ thus becomes apparent as a surface open and compliant enough for time to be scored into so that memory can endure and consciousness can live on. Furthermore, as some of the chapters in this volume address, the forming of surface is intertwined with the frictions that involve – both implicitly and explicitly – power relations. Power can be considered as intrinsic to surfaces as a direct result of the emphasis on becoming proposed previously, for becoming in the world does not mean only to mutually relate and acquire form but to also undergo transformation – whether willingly or unwillingly – and perform acts of absorption, dissolution and domination, fostered by the operational effect of

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surfaces and what they can do. Such a perspective requires viewing surfaces as performative as they express power and force in the entangling and shaping of sociality and matter. Matters of power are most evident in Were’s ethnography of the design and making of leaf fibre baskets in Papua New Guinea, New Ireland, where political, economic and gender relations are weaved into the forming and effect of basket surfaces. Lucas also – in his written and illustrative observations of urban marketplaces in South Korea – evidences how local market sellers improvise, adapt and make a living through continuous informal designs and improvised architectures which attach onto larger existing urban structures and also interweave within and disrupt the imposition of grand modern architectures which attempt to formulate Seoul into an ultra-modern global city. These contributions – along with those from Anusas, Arantes, Chatterjee – explore surfaces as they become manifest in the practices of architecture, design and craft, and they show that different types of skilled practices give rise to different conditions of material form: some of which are loose, open to exchange and improvisation, and others which tighten towards ideals of object form. Through these practices, surfaces hold and conduct power relations in that material coherence and density can influence whether a surface exists as a semi-transparent veil – giving access to knowledge beyond the surface – or as a hermetically sealed cover – concealing specific matters into a hidden interiority. These latter effects of surface concur with Harkness, Simonetti and Winter’s (2015) considerations on the modern city, where the power of mass surfacing – typically with concrete – is used to overwhelm pre-existing habitats and cement modernity’s claim on the present. Such surfaces reformulate mottled ground into solid inert planes, through grand gestures of pouring and levelling and increasingly finer gestures of screeding and trowelling, to reinforce the illusion of a ‘nature’ which humans are correspondingly separated from. Thus, the potential for surfaces to acquire such an intensified coherence, overpower aspects of life and create the perception of a wholly distinct object or absolute boundary is something of notable concern. This manifestation of surface is what Ingold (2015: 45) terms ‘hard-surfaced’, and while we wholly concur that this ‘is an extreme, however, that is never realised in practice’ because such a surface always ‘cracks and crumbles’, we remain cognisant that such notions are powerful and pervasive in the shaping of social life. As conceptual as the notion of an absolute surface might be, it manifests in academic writings and passes without critical interrogation when Amato (2013: 19) states that ‘[s]urfaces are the boundaries of both natural and human environments’, reinforcing a perspective that ‘the world can exist as nature only for a being that does not belong there’ (Ingold 2000: 20). Whilst Amato offers a wide-ranging and often seductively written account of surfaces as they pervade through all aspects of the world, the extent to which surfaces seem to be in and of anything and everything – yet also reinforcing of conventional western perceptions – seems conceptually flawed. For example, where Amato (2013) sets out with an enthusiastic advocation of Gibson’s approach to direct perception, he later goes on to state that ‘when miniaturized – in the form of images, symbols

Introduction 9 and ideas – surfaces become the currency of the conscious mind’ (ibid.: 26) and that this miniaturisation explains – according to Amato’s evolutionism – why Homo sapiens sapiens, unlike any other creature, ‘lives in part submerged in the complex depths of its own subjectivity’ (ibid.: 40), a view that is in opposition to Gibson’s theory of perception. These absolute and hard surfaces are ones by which cognitive science has modelled the mind, in correspondence with a Christian encapsulation of the soul within the body and beneath the surface of the skin (Taylor 1989). And then modelled on the encasement of artificial intelligence, such formulations of matter and life are further reinforced – in problematic splendour – in Hofstadter and Sander’s (2013) recent book Surfaces and Essences, exploring the concept of analogy with a heavily reliance on modern narratives of occlusion and directed by Freud’s writings on memory (also Simonetti, this volume). And while it might seem that technological artefacts present the most enduring aspirations of hardened surfaces hiding and locking-in artificial intelligence and automations, Shapin (1996) has challenged the notion that technological mechanisms have always been housed in opaque enclosures. Indeed, early public clocks displayed in medieval cities from the late thirteenth century had their workings exposed; it was not until the early modern period, during the sixteenth century, that the workings of clocks became hidden behind solid surfaces. This ‘logic of form’ (Anusas and Ingold 2013: 61) has persisted through the design of the modern world, and it is only more recently that experimental technologies seem to be bringing the workings of things back to the surface, namely through developments in ‘electronic textiles’ (Orth 2009) and smart fabrics which, for Küchler (2008: 116), demonstrate that ‘we are moving from a mechanical materialism to a kind of material vitalism’ and which suggest the possibility of ‘a new kind of surface ontology which replaces the opposition of inside and outside, invisible and visible, immaterial and material with a complementary relation that thrives on transformation rather than distinction’ (ibid.).

Turning to surficiality In this volume, we thus advocate a way of thinking about, observing and working with surfaces that acknowledges their variation, complexity, richness, effect and power in everyday social life. Approaching surfaces in this way means working against any notion that surfaces are thin in meaning, quality or presence, which often occurs when surface is conflated with of superficiality. Certainly, the etymological meaning of surface – from the Old French sur- ‘above’ + face – implies a condition at the periphery and so this could be assumed to be a thin condition, or, as historian Kelley (2013: 13) states, ‘[s]urface is the topmost or outermost layer of an object or substance’. Such a conception of surface coincides with theoretical conceptions of form in mathematics and geometry, synonymous with the ‘étendu plane [extended plane]’ (Robert, Rey and Morvan 2001: 873 cited in Lehmann 2013: 148), which has magnitudes of length and breadth, but no thickness (Best and Marcus 2009). Such mathematical conceptions of surface correspond with

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Aristotelian hylomorphism where form (morphe) is a theoretical construct that imposes itself on and shapes matter (hyle). However, even mathematical surfaces with a theoretical zero thickness have meaning, effect and a social history. And whereas hylomorphism may imply that the form of things is ultimately conceptual and insubstantial, this has been challenged by Flusser (2014), Ingold (2013) and Thomas (2012), who argue that formation cannot exist prior to or in abstract from the gestures of the body or an intimate knowledge of materials. As in the case of basketry mentioned previously and in many of the contributions within this volume, the practitioner’s mind and body, in dialogue with the properties and possibilities of materials, is a generative matrix whereby form arises therein, and so form – like surface – can never be a detached immaterial theory but is rather always imbued with social histories and propensities. The formation of surface is therefore akin to what Pye (1968) terms a workmanship of risk, where form is implicit in the becoming of materials and always in transformation. In pursuing a more careful, critical and meaningful attention to surfaces – regardless of whether they seem to be thin or thick – we thus resist the term superficial, which has become somewhat soured in its usage, and instead direct towards alternative terms of surficial and surficiality. Surficial(ity) as a term has a more direct indication of surface, and we use it to reinforce that surfaces are always rich and profound. Such a direction concurs with Adamson and Kelley (2013: 1) in their opening of Surface Tensions, where, inspired by a fold of a cloth creating a pocket, they find that ‘[t]he surface is not so much a barrier to content as a condition for its apprehension’. Thus, an encounter with surface can draw one into a close engagement with the intricacies of matter rather than being reflected away from this. Surfaces are therefore not confined to the outskirts of things, forming a definitive separation of interiority from exteriority, but rather we regard them as akin to knitted tapestries which mingle minds, matters, media, substances, atmospheres and grounds. Furthermore, the term surficial(ity) is used to enliven an attention to the becoming of surfaces as zones of transformation, in contrast with surfaces being fixed to any particular structure of thought, perception, matter or life. This is important in that we see an attention to surfaces as a way to resist further scholarly attempts to theoretically define how the world really is – in some essential form – and rather to advocate an attention to surfaces as a way to think critically with the world in the course of its becoming – that is, to follow its occurrence. Thus, we are much less concerned with ‘what are surfaces’ (Forsyth et al. 2013: 1013, emphasis added) and more interested in what surfaces can do and how they come about in social life. We also wish to explore what a practice of observing surficially might have for anthropological technique and theory. Stated in Flusser’s (2002: 22, original emphasis) terms, we are thus not only concerned with practical and theoretical questions of ‘what do [these] surfaces mean?’ but also with ‘how do they mean it? Are they adequate to the world, and if so, how? And do they mean the “same” world that is conveyed by written lines?’ In this endeavour, we thus reach to work with and know social life through the ontogenesis of surfaces,

Introduction 11 and we hereby invite you to turn the page of this chapter and continue into this book of many surfaces.

References Adamson, G. and V. Kelley. 2013. Surface Tensions: Surface, Finish and the Meaning of Objects. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Amato, J.A. 2013. Surfaces: A History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Anusas, M. and T. Ingold. 2013. Designing environmental relations: From opacity to textility. Design Issues 29(4): 58–69. Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bateson, G. 1973. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books. Bergson, H. 1998. Creative Evolution, trans. A. New York: Dover Mitchell [originally published in 1907]. Best, S. and S. Marcus. 2009. Surface reading: An introduction. Representations 108(1): 1–21. Bruno, G. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Chatterjee, A. 2014. Surface and Deep Histories: Critiques and Practice in Art, Architecture and Design. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Classen, C. 1993. Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge. Coleman, R. and L. Oakley-Brown. 2017. Visualizing surfaces, surfacing vision: Introduction. Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8): 5–27. Dean, B. and B. Bhushan. 2010. Shark-skin surfaces for fluid-drag reduction in turbulent flow: A review. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 368(1929): 4775–4806. Drazin, A. and S. Küchler. 2015. The Social Life of Materials. London: Bloomsbury Press. Flusser, V. 2002. Writings, trans. E. Eisel, ed. A. Ströhl. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Flusser, V. 2014. Gestures. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Forsyth, I., H. Lorimer, P. Merriman and J. Robinson. 2013. Guest editorial. Environment and Planning A 45: 1013–1020. Gibson, J.J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hove: Psychology Press. Hamilakis, Y. 2015. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Harkness, R., C. Simonetti and J. Winter. 2015. Fluid rock: Gathering, flattening, curing. Parallax 21(3): 309–326. Harrison, R. 2011. Surfaces assemblages: Towards an archaeology in and of the present. Archaeological Dialogues 18(2): 141–161. Harrison, R. 2013. Scratching the surface: Reassembling an archaeology in and of the present. In Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity, ed. A. GonzálezRuibal. Abingdon: Routledge. Heidegger, M. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter. New York, NY: Harper and Row [originally published in 1952]. Hofstadter, C. and E. Sander. 2013. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. New York, NY: Basic Books.

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Howes, D. (ed.) 1991. The Varieties of Sensory Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Imperiale, A. 2000. New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2007. Earth-sky, wind and weather. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13: S19–S38. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2015. The Life of Lines. Abingdon: Routledge. Jay, M. 1994. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kelley, V. 2013. A superficial guide to the deeper meanings of surface. In Surface Tensions: Surface, Finish and the Meaning of Objects, eds. G. Adamson and V. Kelley. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 13–25. Knappett, C. and L. Malafouris (eds.) 2008. Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. New York, NY: Springer. Küchler, S. 2008. Technological materiality: Beyond the dualist paradigm. Theory Culture and Society 25(1): 101–120. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leatherbarrow, D. and M. Mostafavi. 2002. Surface Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lehmann, U. 2013. Surface as material, material into surface: dialectic in Carol Christian Poell. In Surface Tensions: Surface, Finish and the Meaning of Objects, eds. G. Adamson and V. Kelley. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 147–163. Malafouris, L. 2013. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manderson, L. 2011. Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Marshall, Y. and B. Alberti. 2014. A matter of difference: Karen Barad, ontology and archaeological bodies. Cambridge Archaeology Journal 24(1): 19–36. Miller, D. 2005. Materiality: An introduction. In Materiality, ed. D. Miller. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–50. Miller, D. 2010. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Olsen, B. 2010. In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Olsen, B., M. Shanks, T. Webmoor and C. Witmore. 2012. Archaeology: The Discipline of Things. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Orth, M. 2009. Maggie Orth: Art, Technology, Design. URL: www.maggieorth.com [Accessed: 1 November 2018]. Pye, D. 1968. The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robert, P., A. Rey and D. Morvan. 2001. Le grand Robert de la langue française. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert. Shapin, S. 1996. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sheets-Johnstone, M. 1999. The Primacy of Movement. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

Introduction 13 Simonetti, C. 2018. Sentient Conceptualisations: Feeling for Time in the Sciences of the Past. Abingdon: Routledge. Simonetti, C. 2019. Scales and telescopes: Optics in the study of prehistory. In Time and History in Prehistory, eds. S. Souvatzi, A. Baysal and E.L. Baysal. Abingdon: Routledge. Simonetti, C. and T. Ingold. 2018. Ice and concrete: Solid fluids of environmental change. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5(1): 21–33. Stoller, P. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, J.S. 2004. Archaeology’s place in modernity. Modernism/Modernity 11(1): 17–34. Thomas, J.S. 2012. Archaeology, anthropology, and material things. In Archaeology and Anthropology: Past, Present and Future, ed. D. Shankland. London: Bloomsbury Press, pp. 219–232. Tuan, Y. 1989. Surface phenomena and aesthetic experience. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79(2): 233–241.

2

On opening the book of surfaces Tim Ingold

A book – this book, which you now have open as you read these words – is a three-dimensional stack of rectangular sheets, aligned and bound along one edge. Each sheet is of an identical size, thickness and texture. The only variation lies in the covers, of a thicker material that wraps around the front, back and spine of the stack. The covers are coloured and bear a design. But the sheets, otherwise known as pages, while uniformly white, are sprinkled all over with tiny black marks, neatly aligned in parallel rows, within margins equally offset from the outer edges. The marks are letters, combined into words, in turn strung end to end in sentences and paragraphs. Words sparkle like jewels on the page. Is the book, then, like a jewellery box? Imagine a box of exactly the same size and proportions as this book. We can lift the top like a lid to reveal thousands of tiny gems, perhaps arranged into compartments. We could list the compartments like the chapters of the book and make an inventory of their contents. Both the book and the box are containers of a kind; the contents of both can be revealed by an act we call opening and hidden away again by an act of closure. Inside the box are gems; inside the book are words. But to open the box and to open the book are operations of very different kinds. There is only one way to open the box – that is, by lifting the lid – but having done so, all the precious stones therein are equally accessible, making it easy for a thief to rob the contents without having to take the box as well. All he has to do is empty the jewellery into a sack and make off with the haul. The book’s contents, however, are not enclosed within its surfaces but indelibly imprinted on them, to the extent of partaking of their very substance. They are not easily stolen, then, without taking the whole book, or at least without ripping out some of its pages. Nor can they be accessed all at once. This is because the book affords as many different ways of opening as it has pages, and every way reveals a different array of words. Since every opening of a book is a possible unfolding, to unfold it at any one page means folding up all the others. The book as a whole, then, is the sum of all the different ways of opening it. It is a compendium of surfaces, and the words are hidden in its folds. It follows that the book’s interior surfaces do not enclose a volume – as do the surfaces of the box – rather, they comprise a volume. To open a book is not to lift the covers but to turn the volume inside out. It is at once to fold and to unfold.

On opening the book of surfaces 15 My question is this: what is the relation, in a book, between the words and the pages on which they appear, and indeed between the pages themselves? Is the page a ‘blank slate’ on which anything could be written? Even if the page is indifferent to the words’ semantic values, does not the ink from which they are formed bind materially with the surface in ways that might contribute to meaning? Our predecessors of medieval times, it seems, approached these questions in ways very different from the way we do today; moreover, in a world increasingly dominated by the paraphernalia of digital technology, our thinking on these matters appears to be changing yet again. In what follows, I shall set out four ways of thinking about marks and surfaces in the history of the book. In the first, corresponding to medieval scribal culture, the surface of the page may be likened to a veil, woven by the lines of handwritten text. In the second, inaugurated in early modernity with the printing press but modelled on Renaissance principles of perspective, the surface could be better compared to a window pane, through which the reader looks to discover the meanings behind. Somewhat in contradiction to this is the third, founded in the practical operation of the press, in which the page becomes a face, relating to others through surface-to-surface contact. Finally, in our present digital era, the page is giving way to the screen: a projective interface that, in every respect, is the opposite of the veil from which we began.

Veil In the twelfth century, the Parisian philosopher-theologian Hugh of St Victor declared that ‘the whole sensible world is like a kind of book written by the finger of God’ (Harrison 1998: 44).1 This is one of the earliest known references to the idea of the book of nature, and it rested on a homology between the word of God (verbum Dei), in the composition of the scriptures, and the works of God, in the creation of the world and its creatures. In reading their liturgical texts, the monks of the time would re-enact the performance of their composition by tracing the inscribed lines with their fingers while murmuring the corresponding sounds, from which the words would once again re-emerge as if the page itself was speaking to them. Time and again, the monks would compare the meditative practice of reading to a process of wayfaring through the terrain. They would picture themselves as hunters on the trail, drawing on – or ‘pulling in’ – the creatures they encountered, or the events to which they bore witness, along the paths they travelled. The Latin word for this drawing or pulling in was tractare, from which is derived the English ‘treatise’ in the sense of a written composition. Surrounded by the voices of the pages as the hunter is surrounded by the sounds of nature, the medieval reader would listen to them and take counsel from what they had to say. Writing, too, was a meditative practice, as reading was, and just as laborious. It would begin with the preparation of parchment, a material that started life on the backs of sheep or goats, and a quill pen from a feather that had once graced a bird in flight. To bring pen to parchment was also to unite the elemental domains of sky and earth. As sky meets earth, so pen meets parchment, at the ground. But the

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writer also needed ink, and for that he had to enter the woods. How did medieval people know that the best way to obtain durable black ink is to boil crushed oak galls with a rusty nail while patiently reciting paternosters? To a mind accustomed to the idea that trees speak volumes in the rustling of their leaves, and none more so than the mighty oak, the idea might not have seemed as surprising as it does to us moderns. If the oak’s prophecies are pronounced through its leaves, is it any wonder that they should be written in the dissolution of its galls or that this writing should be fixed with nails as the carpenter fixes planks and beams?2 Indeed, the very word ‘book’ – coming as it does from the same source as that for another giant of the woods, the magnificent beech – speaks to its arboreal origins: its pages the trees’ leaves, its binding their branches, its covers their trunks.3 Once the scribe brings pen to parchment, however, another analogy comes into play. It is with the weaver’s loom. Just as in weaving, the weft goes back and forth between the warp-lines stretched taut on the loom, so in the medieval art of writing, the letter-line, inscribed with pen and ink, would oscillate between ruled lines that had first to be scored in the parchment. The analogy is indeed precise: the woven textile and the written text are of a kind, produced by operations that are formally identical, barring the critical difference that they deal in alternative kinds of lines, respectively, threads and traces. In weaving, the tight intermeshing of threads forms a surface, with a characteristic pattern and texture. Is it not the same, then, with writing? The resemblance of a page of writing, densely packed with Gothic script, to a blanket of woven cloth is unmistakeable, and it lies behind the designation of one such hand, dating from the fifteenth century, as textura. Significantly, it was textura that Gutenberg adopted for his first printed type.4 But it raises puzzling questions. How does writing change the way the surface of parchment is perceived? And what difference does it make to this perception when the lines that weave the texture are no longer inscribed on parchment but printed on paper? Here I address the first of these questions, and return in the next section to the second. We might be tempted to answer that the woven text adds another layer to an otherwise bare surface, much as a naked body might be covered by clothes. Writing, then, would be like dressing up. Yet such a view is belied by all the scoring and scratching that is done to the surface itself in the course of its inscription. When parchment was reused – as it often was, due to its expense and the labour of preparation – the lines written on it could not simply be peeled off, as today we might peel a transfer from the page of a sticker book. The surface had to be scraped, with a penknife otherwise used for cutting the quill and for scoring, until all traces of the script had been removed. The severally reused surface is known as a palimpsest. But contrary to what is often supposed – especially by archaeologists who have adopted it as a metaphor to describe the overlaying of traces left by successive strata in the occupation of a site5 – the palimpsest is formed not through superposition but through reduction, in the alternation of tracing and scraping, or of inscription and erasure, to the point when the original surface is so reduced as to be no longer usable. At this point it is literally worn out. An alternative answer to the puzzle, however, may be suggested by returning to our earlier comparison of parchment to the ground and of reading to wayfaring.

On opening the book of surfaces 17 The ground, too, has its textures, woven from the tracks and trails, roots and runners of its plant and animal inhabitants. But there is no such thing as a bare ground over which the texture is draped. To the contrary, texture wells up from within and beneath, from the depths of the earth, only to be laid bare by atmospheric forces of weathering and erosion that operate from above. Thus are seams of rock scoured by ice, vegetation levelled by wind, footprints washed away by rain. Far from imposing an impermeable barrier between sky and earth, confining them to their respective domains – such that what is below stays below and what is above stays above – the ground is an interstitial surface, where the constitutive writing of the earth, in its lines and wrinkles, rises from below to mingle with the erosive influences of the sky that bear down on it from above. John Ruskin, who did so much to restore a Gothic sensibility to his own Victorian time, famously referred to this surface as ‘a veil of strange intermediate being’ covering the entire earth: in meadows and forests, moorland and heath, screes and mountainsides.6 The veil is worn, in both senses of the term: as outer coating and as material abrasion. The earth wears the ground, yet in that very ground is the earth’s wearing away. If the ground is a veil, in Ruskin’s sense, could the same not be said of written parchment? Its texture, too, is woven in the tracing of its lines. Like an assiduous gardener, the scribe tends to his lines as they grow or issue forth from the soil of the parchment, without ever detaching themselves from its surface. After every season of growth, he rakes the surface smooth. All the care and devotion that goes into the work translates directly, through the gestures of the hand, into the traces it leaves. The ever-composing lines, as they divide, spread and multiply over the page, enter with it into a relation of sympathy – a kind of mutual undergoing. The scribe suffers through the labour of writing but joins in his suffering with the parchment that is written upon. With architectural design theorist Lars Spuybroek, one could say that the scribe dresses the parchment, or clothes it in a veil, ‘in an everyday act of caretaking, calm and dutiful’ (Spuybroek 2016: 98). Yet as Spuybroek insists, dressing is one thing, dressing-up quite another.7 To dress up is to hide a plain reality behind an overlay of ostentation. But that is not what writing, even of the most ornate kind, does to parchment. It covers the surface, to be sure, but it is not a cover-up. As with the veil, the parchment is dressed with the tracery of written lines, but is not dressed up in it. Once we turn from writing on parchment to printing on paper, however, it is quite otherwise, as I shall now show.

Pane The introduction of the printing press radically altered the perception of the relation between the written word and the surface of the page. For while the textura that Gutenberg adopted for his printed type might have looked like a weave, the appearance was deceptive. It was indeed a cover-up. Far from having been woven into the surface of the page, the letter forms were externally imposed upon it. No longer did the script emerge, as in a handwritten work, from a performative engagement with the material; it was rather deposited, pre-assembled from discrete verbal fragments, onto the paper surface (Ingold 2007). Whereas the lines of

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the scribe would continue without beginning or end, carrying on from the completion of one copy to the commencement of the next, the printed book is an already completed composition, even before it is committed to paper. Technically, printing severs the link between the manual gesture and its trace: while the ductus of the writing hand would flow without interruption into the inflections of the letter-line, the shapes of the graphic marks delivered by the press bear no relation to the movements of their production. Not that the process was any less laborious: letters had to be engraved and assembled in a galley, and this required at least as much care and devotion as the work of the scribe. But once done, multiple copies could be run off without too much effort. They were not, however, woven. To call these printed works texts is indeed an anachronism, motivated in large part by nostalgia for a lost tradition. With the disappearance of the scribal letter-line, the page lost its voice. It was silenced. Recall that throughout the Middle Ages, it was usual for liturgical texts to be read aloud, with a murmuring sound often compared, by the monks of the time, with the buzzing of bees, while simultaneously tracing the letter-line with a finger. Thus the words could be heard and felt, but they could not actually be seen. This was because they were normally written in scriptio continua – that is, without any spaces between them. One would read the writing, then, as would a musician or chorister, by performing it, and the words – initially invisible – would ‘fall out’ from the performance. All the feeling would come from the performance itself.8 But if words that flowed from pen to page could be felt and heard but not seen, printed marks deposited on the surface could be seen, but neither felt nor heard. Where the ear and the finger of the medieval reader would follow the line of text, always remaining close to the surface, for the reader of the printed page, there were no lines to follow, no emergent texture of sound or feeling. The reader’s attention, now more cognitive than performative, more optical than auditory or haptic, was no longer guided on its way to meaning along the textual paths threading the page but cut orthogonally through it, looking behind the printed words for their meaning. For an attention that cuts through, the graphic designs of the marks themselves no longer afford paths to meaning but rather distract from it. They are more likely to ensnare the gaze. A reader overly absorbed in their calligraphic formation risks becoming apotropaically stuck to the surface of the page and never making it through to the meaning behind.9 In a world of print, calligraphic virtuosity is a manifestation not of sympathy but of trickery and deceit or of hyperbolic ostentation. As we have already found with Gutenberg’s textura, it is a way of dressing up, of making it look as if the writing carried an affective charge, when in fact it does not. The scribal line emerges in feeling, from the haptic engagement of pen and parchment. But printed letter-forms can only stand as surrogates for feeling. Nor is the substitution confined to the written word. A print-saturated culture such as our own enjoins us to take a similar approach to speech. We suppose that hearing the spoken word is equivalent to looking at the printed one, as if there were some sonic counterpart to the page which we have to pierce in order to reach the meanings that lie behind.10 Thus the verbal chant that medieval readers

On opening the book of surfaces 19 would once have passionately followed has come to be recast, in our times, as an enchantment that distracts. Listeners are warned not to be lured by the melodic inflections of the voice, as readers might be lured by inflections of the line, lest they fail to attend to the meaning of what is said. The reader of the printed work, in short, no longer inhabits the page as a walker inhabits the terrain, betwixt sky and earth, making his way by finger rather than foot. He is rather set over and beyond it, transcendent rather than immanent, and holds it in his sights. Unlike the ground-veil, which covers but does not cover up, the page is perceived to have a near side and a far side. The reader is on the side of cognition; on the other side is a world of meaning to which he seeks access. With no line for the finger to follow, no surface on which it can find purchase and that might be compared to the ground underfoot for the walker, the depth and opacity of the textured veil, whether of ground or parchment, gives way in perception to a spatial surface that is now homogeneous, transparent and wafer-thin, measured out not with the pacing of feet or the oscillations of the pen but with the calculated partitions of an abstract grid. Black and white, once absorbed and absorbent, appear to part company: the black lifts off as the white recedes. It is as if the letters were sucked from the page, through the black holes of the eyes’ pupils, into the inner sanctum of the cogito, at the same time that the whiteness of the paper withdraws into a background upon which the mind projects its meanings. Drained of both black and white, the page remains as no more than the ghost of its material presence: an invisible and insubstantial pane that one does not so much read as read-through. The resemblance of this ghostly page to the picture plane of perspective drawing is not accidental. It is usual, in treatises on the subject, to compare the latter to a window pane, transparent and infinitely thin. Every drawn mark indicates a point of intersection where the line of sight, linking the eye with the thing seen, punctures the plane. Leon Battista Alberti, introducing the principles of perspective in his De Pictura of 1435, likened the line of sight to a thread so fine that it could not be split.11 Many such lines, Alberti reasoned, would fan out into a surface akin to a veil. This veil, however, did not – like Ruskin’s – cover the earth. It rather stretched from eye to world. The lines of the drawing are where the veil bisects the picture plane. Though the printed word is not bound by the same geometrical conventions or commitments to realism as the perspectival drawing – and indeed differs from the drawing rather as algebra differs from geometry – it could nevertheless be suggested that every graphic mark registers the intersection of a line of thought with what could be called the ‘plane of letters’. As the line of sight connects the eye with the thing seen, so the line of thought connects cognition with its objects. A veil of threads, made up of such lines, intersects the plane of letters just as it does the picture plane. Thus, the overall effect of print was to convert the ever-ramifying lines of the medieval journeyman-scribe into a total verbal composition, visible at a glance, drawn not along (as in the original sense of tractare) but orthogonally through the surface of the page, turning the totality inside out – as philosopher Michel Serres (1995: 80) has it – ‘like the finger of a glove or a simple optical diagram’

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and plunging it into the dark, utopian recesses of the mind. ‘The black hole’, says Serres (ibid.), ‘absorbs the world’. In short, with the transition from handwriting to print, and from parchment to paper, the generative principle of the line was subordinated to the projective principle of point and plane. Herein, according to Serres, lie the seeds of modernity. Yet only in our times have these seeds finally born fruit, with the development of a technology that has the digital point and the projective plane at its heart. The perspectival window pane has become a computer screen, while the page, as a substantial surface, has vanished. To medieval people, the idea that one could read writing without a page to read from would be as absurd as supposing that you could go for a walk without ground to walk on. The fact that we can dispense with this surface with equanimity – that we are not baffled by the thought of off-page reading – can be attributed to the separation of black from white inaugurated by printing. Yet with the press, this perceptual decomposition of the page did not amount to its material dissolution. Quite to the contrary, as I shall now show, the printing press is a technology of surfaces par excellence.

Face Is there really no feeling in the printed word? Historians of language have adduced compelling evidence to show that as print media became more widely distributed, there was a veritable explosion in the coinage of new words to describe qualities of feeling, motivation and experience. These words were needed, as they had never been before, to compensate for the lost expressive power of the handwritten line.12 And, as we have seen, this lexical explosion was accompanied by a fundamental change in attitude towards the surface of the page. However, to concentrate on the words alone, in their relation to the page, is to miss out on what is perhaps most fundamental to the printing process itself: that it entails a relation between surfaces. How, after all, can there be a press without pressure, and how can there be pressure without one material surface forcefully bearing on another? Indeed, in retrospect, I realised that I had missed this obvious point myself. I had understood print only negatively, as the enemy of the scribal practice of handwriting, rather than positively, as a craft in its own right, with its own repertoire of tools and techniques for engraving, etching and pressing, as well as materials for inking and for taking the press itself. To gain a richer understanding of printing, I realised I would have to redirect my attention back from line to surface. What would happen, I wondered, if we were to think of printing as a way of working with surfaces rather than lines? The point is that print is not just about making marks on surfaces. It is more fundamentally about bringing two surfaces together: the inked surface and the surface destined to receive it. The feeling that is lost, in breaking the link between the manual gesture and its trace, is at least partially recovered in the sympathy of surfaces for one another. Could this be a source of meaning in itself? There is a certain magic about the way ink takes to paper, in an engagement entirely hidden from the view of practitioners. The attention of the scribe can join with the trace

On opening the book of surfaces 21 and follow its evolution, but for the printer, there is no knowing what is going on between surfaces under the press – not, at least, until it is opened up for inspection and the results revealed. No sooner are they revealed, moreover, than they are folded away again, concealed from sight like an old-fashioned letter in an envelope. Paper is nowadays mechanically cut to size prior to printing, but in the past, what would end up as several pages would first be printed as one large signature sheet, which would then be folded to page-sized sections for binding. For example, in octavo, the sheet would be folded three times, yielding a section of eight leaves or sixteen pages. In the folding, pages would be brought together that, on the original sheet, were positioned not only far apart but even upside down relative to one another. Only in the folding were the pages brought back into concordance, kept like a hidden secret. Before anyone could read the book, the pages had first to be slit open along the folds, by means of a paperknife, the convex edge of which perfectly matches the concavity of the fold. Even after cutting, the rough edges and slight unevenness from page to page – as each would have to be slit separately, by hand, and along different axes – would give the book an unfinished look, drawing attention to a process of gestation that runs seamlessly from printing to folding to binding to slitting and finally to opening and turning the pages, whereupon the book’s words are at last birthed into the world. On opening the book, words that had intimately touched one another, within the folds of the signature sheet, are once again parted on opposite sides of the centrefold, apparently denying that they ever had anything to do with one another! Concentrating on the words and their meanings, we are inclined to forget how central the act of page-turning is to reading. Yet every turn is a moment of profound revelation, affording not an end but a new beginning. On the page as in the world, is it not in the intimacy of surface-to-surface contact that all new life is generated? With this question in mind, let me return to my earlier point that printing is fundamentally about bringing two surfaces together, in an intimacy of contact that is itself generative of life and meaning. Can this tell us something more about the relations not just of page to page but of page to face and of face to face? In order to address this question, I would like to begin with a story which at first glance might seem far from the history of the book and yet which shows it up in an unaccustomed light. The story concerns Sangama, a man of the Piro people native to the Peruvian Amazon, and a reputed shaman.13 Though formally illiterate, Sangama had observed that his white masters – Spanish landowners and colonial officials – would spend long hours reading their newspapers. They appeared absorbed in these complex patterns of black marks arrayed on a white background. Sangama, too, claimed to be able to read the newspaper. But what he saw in the sheet were not messages encoded in the marks printed on it. Rather, he saw a face. It was the face and lips of a beautiful woman, and she was speaking to him. He – Sangama – was lip-reading. Now in terms of Piro cosmology, this makes perfect sense. Piro suppose that their bodies are suffused with vibrating patterns that come to them with the shimmering light and are transformed at the surface of the skin into sound. Piro bodies and artefacts are covered all over with

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these radiant patterns, through which they speak and sing. So it is no wonder that Sangama interpreted the patterns of newsprint in the same way. He was reading the woman’s face. The face is indeed a mystery. Remember that except in a culture such as ours, which has surrounded itself with mirrors, the face is one part of the body that its owner cannot normally see. Rather, where the face is, we see the world, including other persons who may or may not be looking at us. So is the face part of the body at all? Or more specifically, is it part of the head: seat of the brain, eyes, ears and the organs of speech? Philosopher Gilles Deleuze, along with his collaborator, psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, argues that it is not. The body (including the head) is constituted anatomically within what they call the ‘volume-cavity system’. It has an inside and an outside, bounded by the skin. But the face, they claim, is not included in the body, nor is it confined to the head. For the face is a surface: ‘facial traits, lines, wrinkles’. And it is produced by a quite different system: they call it the ‘white wall/black hole system’. Black and white, here, are not the poles of an absolute dichotomy; they rather denote the way in which the face emerges from the play of affect and meaning. A face that speaks and sings, smiles and frowns, that wears its expressions on its surface, must have a surface on which to express them. And for these expressions to well up from the depths of feeling, sunk into the surface must be orifices from which these affectations spring. In the idiom of Deleuze and Guattari, the surface is the white wall, the orifices are the black holes, and together they furnish the conditions of emergence for what we perceive as a face, with its luminous surfaces and shadowy orifices.14 This, precisely, was what Sangama saw in the paper he was reading: a surface with holes, from which there appeared a lively face reading his. But it is not what modern readers see, accustomed as they are to the conventions of print media. For as we have already learned from Serres, the principle of projection that lies at the very genesis of modernity has pulled the black hole, like the inverted finger of a glove, into an apical point where the eye opens to the mind of the conscious subject, while the white wall has receded to a plane on which the subject projects its meanings. The hole is like the lens of a projector; the wall like a cinematic screen, indifferent to the images that play upon its surface. The modern subject, peering through the eye as through a lens, sees no other face than their own. It is their peculiar predicament that they can see without being seen, read without being read, save by themselves. Historically, this predicament is the exception, not the rule. ‘Looking at the entire early history of human faciality’, notes philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (2011: 192–205), ‘one can say that humans have faces not for themselves but for the others’. Throughout this history, what each face offered the other was not so much a reflection or reproduction as what Sloterdijk calls an ‘affective echo’. Faces, in short, did not exist independently, as though each adhered to its own body as a unique index of personal identity, but were necessarily constituted in relations of interfaciality and therefore presupposed, at the very least, a bipolar configuration, like an ellipse with two focal points. It was the ubiquitous mirror, Sloterdijk argues, that eventually cut the ellipse in two, setting up ‘a pseudo-interfacial relation with another that is not another’. The face before the mirror, he continues, ‘can relish the illusion of being in a closed

On opening the book of surfaces 23 field of vision, as it has expelled . . . the others from its inner space and replaced them with technical means of self-completion – the media in their modern function’ (ibid.: 205). Is this, then, the function of the printed page: to furnish the reader with such means? When we look at the surface of the page, are we (like Sangama) observing the face of another, both beaming at and speaking to us? Or are we (like Sloterdijk’s modern individual) gazing into the mirror, seeing in it the reflection of our own soul? Could it be because of the page’s having taken on a mirror function in a system of projection that reading has become the solitary, silent and self-absorbed activity that it is today? What if we were to restore the pages of the printed book to the primary relation of interfaciality, given not in the optics of the mirror but in the mechanics of the printing press? And, finally, could such interfaciality, in which each renders to the other not a reflection but an affective echo, give us a model for human social life itself?

Screen These are large questions, and I am not yet sure how to answer them. What I am sure, however, is that they require us to think of the ‘interface’ in a quite different way from that to which we are accustomed. Classically, in the field of design, the interface is understood as a face-between. As such, it is one component of a triad that defines the closed form of an object. The other components are surface and infrastructure.15 The surface, characteristically smooth and opaque, divides exterior from interior – or, from the perspective of a ‘user’ of the object, the near side from the far side. The infrastructure comprises the inner workings of the object that lend it its functionality. Hidden and protected by the surface, they cannot usually be touched or seen. The interface, then, is made up of one or several interruptions or perforations in the surface that afford some sort of exchange between exterior and interior, allowing the user to activate the infrastructure. They come in the familiar form of buttons and keys, switches and knobs, all of which puncture the surface. The configuration of interfaces has always been a dilemma for designers. Too few, and the user’s ability to control the object is compromised; too many, and the integrity of the object itself is placed in jeopardy. For it would end up, in the words of design philosopher Vilém Flusser (1999: 81–84), ‘with as many holes as a Swiss cheese’. Now at first glance, there is a striking parallel between this view of the object surface riddled with holes and what Deleuze and Guattari have to say about the surface of the face. Recall that for them, too, the face is a ‘holey surface’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 189). In truth, however, these are surfaces of entirely different kinds. For like the body with its head – including apertures that also mediate material and sensory exchange between exterior and interior – the object is constituted by the volume-cavity system. But the face, as we have seen, is produced by the white wall/black hole system. And in the terms of this latter system, the interface is not a face-between but a between-faces. Where the facebetween is single but has two sides, near and far, the between-faces is double, but its twin surfaces have no far side. An obvious example of the former, which we have already encountered, is the window-pane. A slightly less obvious example

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of the latter is in the meeting of surfaces under the press or, subsequently, in the surface-to-surface contact of pages in a printed book. This example is less obvious since ostensibly, a page is as two-sided as a pane. But it would be more correct to say of the page, printed front and back, that it has a reverse than that it has a far side. For, like the two visages of the mythical Janus, god of transitions, back and front face in opposite directions; nothing passes through. To turn the page of a book is not to cross a face-between but to transition from one betweenfaces to another.16 Let me return, momentarily, to the comparison with which I began, of a printed book with a jewellery box. With its surface, dividing inside from outside, its shiny contents and the lid serving as an interface, the box is clearly constituted within the volume-cavity system. Perhaps the book, with its front and back covers and spine, could also be considered partially boxed. Raising the front cover lifts the lid on the book. But when it comes to turning the pages, the book no longer figures as a cavity with volume, accessed by way of a face-between, but a volume in itself, comprising an assemblage of between-faces. Ever since the birth of print, the materiality of the page, with its two faces pointing in contrary ways, each in surface-to-surface contact with the page preceding or following, has come increasingly into contradiction with a mode of perception that cuts directly through, as vision cuts through a pane. It is a contradiction between the two modes of interfaciality, respectively between-faces and face-between. Only in recent decades has the contradiction been resolved, decisively in favour of the latter, through the development of digital devices with flat-panel screens. On screen, there are no more pages to open or turn, only windows to look through. And with this, we come to the fourth and final chapter in our history of the relation between mark and surface. It is the story of the screen and of how it has evolved to be the opposite, in every respect, of what it was originally. Once upon a time, the screen was a woven fabric. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, in a treatise on the origins and evolution of architecture, Gottfried Semper argued that the first walls were screens, plaited from sticks and branches: there were fences, designed to keep animals out, and pens to keep them in. From there it was but a small step to the weaving of textiles, to patterngeneration and thence to the making of carpets. Nowadays, we are inclined to think of walls as made of such solid materials as brick or stone and of wallbuilders as masons or bricklayers. But Semper concluded, quite to the contrary, that the first ‘wall-fitters’ (Wandbereiter) were weavers of mats and carpets, noting in his support that the German word for wall, Wand, shares the same root as the word for dress or clothing, Gewand.17 But Semper was also careful to distinguish the light, screen-like enclosure, denoted by Wand, from the massiveness of the solid, protective earthwork, for which German has the word Mauer. Writing in much the same vein, but over a century later, Flusser also distinguishes between two kinds of wall, corresponding to Wand and Mauer: these are the ‘screen wall’ (Flusser 1999: 55–57) of woven fabric and the ‘solid wall’ (ibid.: 81), hewn from rock or built up from heavy components. Throughout the towns and villages of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, houses were traditionally made of solid walls. Screen walls were the specialty of tent-dwelling nomadic pastoralists.

On opening the book of surfaces 25 Now the wall of a tent, like the sail of a ship or the wing of a glider, has first and foremost to contend with the wind. Flusser compares the tent to a nest in a tree – a place of rest in a turbulent medium – where people, and the experiences they bring with them, gather, interweave and disperse in a way that precisely parallels the treatment of the fibres in fabricating the material from which the tent’s screen walls would have been made. Indeed the very word ‘screen’ suggests, to Flusser, ‘a piece of cloth that is open to experiences (open to the wind, open to the spirit) and that stores this experience’ (ibid.: 57). He could equally well have been speaking, however, of the written or woven text. The screen could be a veil, a Wand, which – like Gewand – dresses a surface without dressing it up. Indeed, Ruskin’s earth-veil, Semper’s Wand and Flusser’s screen wall are of a kind with the handwritten, scribal text. For as we have already seen, the text is also a surface that assembles, processes and disseminates experience in the very weave of its lines. Yet here I am, writing these lines on a laptop computer (to my regret and by force of circumstances, knowing that I would rather be putting pen to paper), staring at what everyone tells me is a screen. And it seems to have absolutely nothing in common with the textual surface. Indeed, so great are the differences that it might better be called an ‘anti-screen’. Consider these differences. First, the surface of the screen is heterogeneous; on it, writing emerges as a continual differentiation within its veiled texture. But with the anti-screen, like the one I am staring at now, the surface is perfectly homogeneous; it has no texture. It is wholly indifferent to the fragmentary letterforms that play on it, forms that seem to dance before my eyes. They are set off against a white background; however, the background is not the same as the surface but lies somewhere behind and shines through. Instead of a complex pattern of light and shade, the anti-screen sets up an invariant opposition of transparency and opacity. Second, the lines of the screen are woven with an ongoing attention that is close-up, kinetic and haptic, infused with movement and feeling. This is an attention that goes along. The anti-screen, by contrast, demands an attention that cuts through the surface, stopping movement and feeling in their tracks. This attention is optical, not haptic, and rests on a principle not of gathering but projection.18 Critically, the distinction between the optical and the haptic overrides that between vision and touch: thus, the medieval reader’s vision is haptic as it accompanies the finger in tracing the letter-line; the touch of the computer operator is optical as the finger makes only punctual contact with the keyboard. And, finally, if the epitome of the screen is the fabric, the epitome of the anti-screen is the mirror. Writing on the laptop, nothing but my own words come back at me. There is no other. What we have in the anti-screen, in short, is something akin to the perspectival pane of optical projection, a perfectly transparent window that opens to a white wall, upon which the isolated and cogitating subject casts its thought. Indeed, the operating system I use, along with millions like me, is known as ‘windows’, and is branded with a design showing projected beams of light streaming through four rectangular panes of glass. Clearly, the manufacturers of the system are thinking along the same lines. They want us to compare the computer’s anti-screen to a window pane, and it is not hard to do so. For them, moreover, it is an interface in

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the classical sense, coming between me and the hidden workings of the machine. With the apparent triumph of the anti-screen over the printed page, the material conditions for the production of the written word seem to have been cleared of remaining vestiges of feeling. The fate of the book, in this clearance, surely gives a foretaste of what might become of our own social lives, which up to now have been lived for the most part like the book’s pages – that is, between faces. What would social life be like in a world of face-betweens, a world in which every other is a projection of the self? Some would say that this is indeed the modern predicament. And where modernity goes, technology follows, bent on converting its imagined world into an experienced reality. Is it a world we really want? As you close the book of surfaces, and return it to your shelf, spare a thought for the future!

Acknowledgements The original idea for this chapter came from an invitation to speak at the 2014 Print Biennale at the University of Newcastle. Apart from having the opportunity to see some of the amazing work on display there, I was given a guided tour of the print studios, which was a revelation to me. I first presented my thoughts on the subject in August of the following year, in a talk at the 2015 Rencontres internationals de Lure, in the Provençal village of Lurs, a meeting – and a village – entirely devoted to the art and evolution of letters, typography and graphic design. I have benefited from opportunities to develop my ideas further in presentations to the symposium on Earth Writing: Literature and Geography at the University of Düsseldorf in April 2016 and to the conference Digital Practices: Situating People, Things and Data at the University of Siegen, Germany, in June of the same year. The nearest thing to a first draft for the chapter was presented as an invited lecture at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in November 2016. I thank the participants and audiences on all these occasions for help in guiding me through a field that is still very new to me. The chapter remains the work of a novice, however, and any residual faults are my own. I wrote it during my tenure of an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, for the project Knowing From the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design (323677–KFI). I am most grateful to the Council for the support that made the research and writing for this chapter possible.

Notes 1 For a fuller discussion, see Ingold (2013: 740–742). 2 For these insights, I am indebted to Spike Bucklow. See Bucklow (2014: 43–44). 3 In Latin, the word codex, applied to the first manuscript books of folded parchment to replace the scroll, came from caudex, meaning ‘tree-trunk’. 4 For further discussion of weaving, text and the origins of textura, see Ingold (2007: 68–71). 5 The originator of the metaphor in archaeology was Osbert Crawford, who compared the landscape to an ancient parchment that ‘has been written on and erased over and

On opening the book of surfaces 27

6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14

15 16

over again’ (Crawford 1953: 51). Roads, field boundaries, woods, farms and all the other products of human labour, according to Crawford, are the letters and words inscribed on the land. Ruskin introduces the earth-veil in the final volume of his Modern Painters. See Ruskin (1903–1912: VII, 14–15). Here I have drawn extensively on Spuybroek’s brilliant discussion of ornamentation in The Sympathy of Things (Spuybroek 2016: 53–105). For a discussion of reading practices during the later Middle Ages, see Saenger (1999). Alfred Gell has discussed the ‘the apotropaic use of patterns’, including complex designs such as in Celtic knotwork, as a means of protection from potentially malignant demonic forces. Mesmerised by the designs, the demons are lured to the surface and become stuck in the intricacies of pattern, never reaching the other side where their potential victims remain safe and secure. See Gell (1998: 83–90). ‘Language-as-word’, according to philosopher Don Ihde, ‘even while sounding, does not draw attention to itself as sound’ (Ihde 1976: 161). It rather draws attention through sound to the meaning it conveys. ‘So for us a line will be a sign whose length can be divided into parts, but it will be so slender that it cannot be split. . . . If many lines are joined closely together like threads in a cloth, they will create a surface’ (Alberti 1972: 37–38). Historian of language David Olson (1994: 108–109) has shown that particularly during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a large number of verbs were coined in English, specifically concerning ways of thinking (e.g., ‘to assume’, ‘to infer’, ‘to predict’) and ways of stating (e.g., ‘to assert’, ‘to criticise’, ‘to explain’), that went on to have a pronounced influence on the later development of a psychology and philosophy of mind according to which feelings, motivations and experiences are outward projections of interior subjective states. The story is told and analysed by anthropologist Peter Gow, based on his ethnographic fieldwork among Piro people. See Gow (1990). See Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 186–190). The interpretation I offer here is my own. The original text, from Part 7 of A Thousand Plateaus entitled ‘Year Zero: Faciality’, is fiendishly hard to understand. It is all too easy to jump to the conclusion that the ‘black hole’ corresponds to the penetrating gaze of the modern subject and the white wall to the screen on which it projects its images. I have to own up to having made exactly this mistake in an earlier work (Ingold 2015: 101–102), despite the fact the Deleuze and Guattari warn emphatically against it: ‘The gaze is but secondary in relation to the gazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality. The mirror is but secondary in relation to the white wall of faciality’ (2004: 190, original emphases). In other words, black hole and white wall are not respectively on the near and far sides of the face. They are the face itself, in its emergence. I hope to have gone some way, in the present chapter, towards rectifying my earlier error. For this understanding of the classic form of the design object, and a critique of the same, I am indebted to Mike Anusas. See Anusas (2017). In an extended philosophical essay on the interface, cultural theorist Branden Hookway develops an ostensibly similar distinction. Any interface, Hookway argues, can be seen in two ways, as ‘between faces’ and ‘facing between’ (Hookway 2014: 9). His terms, however, are wholly set within the volume-cavity system and describe alternative perspectives on the interface understood in the classical design sense of a conduit that allows passage across a threshold, from exterior to interior or vice versa. From one perspective, of ‘between faces’, what lies on either side conditions the relation between them; from the other, of ‘facing between’, the relation conditions what lies on either side. Both perspectives, however, presuppose the existence of some kind of membrane, interposed between one side and the other, through or across which force or information is transmitted. That, for me, is the condition of the ‘face between’.

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17 Semper’s treatise, The Four Elements of Architecture, was first published in 1851 (Semper 1989, and pp. 103–104 on Wand and Gewand ). See also Ingold (2015: 27–31). 18 On the distinction between optical and haptic perception, see Ingold 2011: (133–134).

References Alberti, L.B. 1972. On Painting, trans. C. Grayson, ed. M. Kemp. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Anusas, M. 2017. Beyond Objects: An Anthropological Dialogue with Design. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. Bucklow, S. 2014. The Riddle of the Image: The Secret Science of Medieval Art. London: Reaktion. Crawford, O.G.S. 1953. Archaeology in the Field. London: Praeger. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum. Flusser, V. 1999. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. London: Reaktion. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Gow, P. 1990. Could Sangama read? The origin of writing among the Piro of eastern Peru. History and Anthropology 5: 87–103. Harrison, P. 1998. The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hookway, B. 2014. Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ihde, D. 1976. Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Ingold, T. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2013. Dreaming of dragons: On the imagination of real life. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19: 734–752. Ingold, T. 2015. The Life of Lines. Abingdon: Routledge. Olson, D.R. 1994. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruskin, J. 1903–1912. The Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, 39 vols., eds. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn. London: George Allen. Saenger, P. 1999. Reading in the later Middle Ages. In A History of Reading in the West, eds. G. Cavallo and R. Chartier, trans. L.G. Cochrane. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 120–148. Semper, G. 1989. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. H.F. Mallgrave and W. Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Serres, M. 1995. Gnomon: The beginnings of geometry in Greece. In A History of Scientific Thought: Elements of a History of Science, ed. M. Serres. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 73–123. Sloterdijk, P. 2011. Spheres, Volume I: Microspherology, trans. W. Hoban. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Spuybroek, L. 2016. The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design. London: Bloomsbury Press.

3

Air, smoke and fumes in Aymara and Mapuche rituals1 Juan Carlos Skewes and Debbie Guerra

Introduction Miguel de Unamuno states that substances in the world aim not only to persist but also to change. In his words: We attribute some sort of consciousness . . . to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits. Unamuno (1954: 141) Unamuno’s claim that things aspire to be something else suggests a contradiction that goes beyond Spinoza’s contention that ‘[t]he smallest or simplest body or bit may indeed express a vital impetus, conatus or clinamen’ (Spinoza, cited in Bennett 2010). Conatus for Spinoza is no more than the effort to persevere in existence once this is given (Deleuze 1996). Or, as phrased by Jane Bennett (2010: 21): ‘Anything . . . will always be able to persist in existing with the same force whereby it begins to exist’. However, vital life does not necessarily remain bound to its original material confines; there is always the possibility that things may morph into something else. Jane Bennett’s (2010: viii) concern with ‘the material agency or affectivity of non-human or not-quite-human things’ provides a framework for interrogating the interaction among substances in an inhabited world. Bennett offers an interpretation of the material powers, which while aiding or destroying, enriching or disabling, ennobling or degrading us, call for our attentiveness. Things have power; more strictly, they may be defined as thing-power, which acts not in its pure negativity or recalcitrance but also regarding its positive power, a power of its own. Bennett’s notion of vitality relates, indeed, to the capacity of things to act as forces with propensities. Therefore, her idea of vitality goes beyond Spinoza’s conatus. Bennett’s view may be criticised for attributing power to things, defining these as actants, as Latour (1993) does: as a source of action that can be either human

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or non-human and which efficacy lies upon their capacity for altering the course of events. In this sense, she grants things human attributes that make them historical beings. Bennett’s (2010) notion of vitality needs to be reframed, answering her claim about rendering more attentiveness to things. Her vital materialistic approach may be perfected if closer attention is paid to the interaction among things – or substances, as we prefer to term them – where power seems not to lie in things themselves but more precisely in their interaction. Such interactions, however, ought not to be seen as a mechanical coalition, as Bennett (2010) does, but as a process of sophisticated exchanges between substances through their mediums. Surfaces, in this view, deserve to be studied in detail. Bennett’s (2010) assertion of thing-power as the contradiction posed by Unamuno (1954) – between things that aim to be others while remaining themselves – leads to an attempt to study surface as a zone of contact and exchange (Ingold 2011). Transformations occurring in substances – while modifying the medium – give place to the emergence of new surfaces, which are created when two phenomena meet. Surfaces are a threshold, an interface between substance and medium – as Gibson (2015: 19) states: surfaces are an ‘interface between any two of [the] three states of matter – solid, liquid or gas’. Or, as Ingold (2008: 4) considers, ‘Every surface in the inhabited environment . . . is established by the separation of substances from the medium’, and these surfaces are characterised by having ‘a relatively persistent layout, a degree of resistance to deformation and disintegration, a distinctive shape and a characteristically non-homogeneous texture’ (Ingold 2011: 22). Surfaces are critical for understanding flows of radiant energy: they either reflect or absorb it; they are ‘where vibrations are passed to the medium, where vaporization or diffusion into the medium occur, and what our bodies come up against in touch’ (Ingold 2011: 22). Absorption, reflection, diffusion, condensation and other dynamic processes inform the transformation of substances into the medium and vice versa. Thus, the change of the components of the inhabited environment ought to be understood as particular instances of articulating surfaces, substances and medium. Exposed to permanent change, these articulations express the cultural particularities in the making of life, as it is revealed in ritual practices among indigenous peoples.

Smoke in the Andean cultures The use of smoke in rituals in Aymara and Mapuche Andean cultures is especially revealing of the processes that occur when substances and medium meet to invoke cultural practices with evanescent materials. Smoke, in this sense, represents a very particular kind of substance. It is fundamental to environmental change, to physical transformations occurring at a molar level, and it is radical in being elemental to the coming and going of entities in and out of existence (Gibson 2015). The ritual use of smoke positions itself amidst events where particulate substances are manipulated into existence, modifying the medium.

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Rituals associated with the use of smoke are common among the Andean cultures, including the southern Mapuche. Tomás Guevara (1929, 1909), María Ester Grebe (2002, 1996, 1995) and Rodrigo Moulian (Moulian and Espinoza 2014), among others, suggest commonalities between the Mapuche and the Andean cultures. Although the historical aspects of this relation are open to debate, ritual and language reveal a close link between these cultures. Among the many aspects shared by these cultures is the ritual use of sahumerio (smoke) or sacred fire and tobacco in their ceremonies, as described by Guevara (1929). Guevara believed that this was evidence of the cultural influence on the Mapuche coming from the central Andes. Independent of the presumed origin of such practices, there is substantial proof of the use of pipes in Central Chile before the conquest (Planella et al. 2012). The use of smoke in ritual practices that are the gathering of microparticles in motion, moving through the air (the medium), suggests the emergence of dynamic surfaces that provide either ritual protection or access to perceptions that are absent in ordinary life. Smoke, as a result of combustion, fills the medium and new evanescent substances as fleeting surfaces are visible in its midst. In this case, substances, mediums and surfaces are articulated in ways that demand exploration. The medium – air for humans – allows moving around with little resistance. It also transmits radiant energy and mechanical vibrations, making it possible to see, smell and hear (Ingold 2011). The medium facilitates movement and perception. The alteration and manipulation of the medium transforms relationships with reality. Whereas we might consider that some particular material forms, such as a window, may frame a feeling of separation from a surrounding environment (Kuma 2007), the case of materials dispersed as aerial and volatile substances, by contrast, draws indigenous peoples into a close connection with their surroundings. The indigenous ritual practices indicate that although the distinctions between surface, substances and medium are clear, the interaction among them is complex. The medium seems to offer something more than ‘little resistance’ to the moving bodies. Human and non-human trajectories may be strengthened as well as weakened by the medium. Moreover, the medium is continuously used by birds, seeds, humans and other beings to expand their mobility or by mechanisms and structures which transform its qualities into physical forces for other purposes; as in the case of windmills, whose sails provide sufficient energy for pumping water or milling grain. Surfaces are also used by organisms to appropriate their environments, as when fish use vortexes to gain speed underwater or people project images on the air for the eyes to read. In these scenarios, the medium seems to behave like a surface. The relationship between medium and substance is contingent upon the organisms of consideration: for an organism that uses the air-water threshold (surface) to traverse, while its body is moving through the air-space, then air is its medium and water a substance. However, for an organism which crosses the air-water threshold (surface), with its body moving through water-space, then water is its medium and air a substance. Meanwhile, surfaces, dependent on substances, are

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in tension insofar as the latter undergoes constant change. Thus, the threshold is dynamic and its coherence relates to the nature of the substance. Surfaces and their layouts persist for as long as substances remain, and their change is dependent on the conditions of the substance. In this sense, as Gibson (2015) suggests, it is better to speak of persistence under change and to consider that resistant lightreflecting surfaces may at any point disappear. Although there are not surfaces or sharp transitions in the medium (Gibson 2015), the dynamics of substances and surfaces find peculiar expression in it, especially if scales of space and time are considered. For example, the surface tension that results when liquid molecules face cohesive forces due to the presence of other substances around them (borders) affords diverse possibilities of interactions with a multiplicity of organisms. As Gibson (2015: 17) writes regarding water as a substance or as a medium: ‘the distinction depends on the kind of animal considered’. The small water-walking insects ‘water-walk’ because they treat water as substantial matter, a substance. By infiltration, substances can change the medium’s composition. Some organisms, under certain conditions, intentionally create evanescent surfaces in the medium: for example, when octopuses protect themselves by darkening the water. Thus, a surface is set up in the medium; the octopus injects a fluid (substance) into its medium (water), and the surface is created via an ink-water threshold (interface). It is a fascinating surface, as it is composed of highly complex curvatures that are constantly in motion and dynamic within the dual-fluid space. In this case of the octopus’s ink, the substance loses its substantial qualities, and it becomes subsumed into the medium. The substance and its respective surfaces seem to dissipate altogether. In the case of air, the variations of the medium regarding pressure, temperature and aerodynamics influence the mobility of substances. Not only birds, but also leaves, seeds, dust and smoke move according to the weather conditions that they face. Any substance that changes into a gaseous state is no longer so substantial, and the surface, together with its layout, ceases to exist (Gibson 2015). However, burnt particles, for example, remain as substance, even if their infinitesimal size renders them almost invisible to the human eye. The medium of air is filled, in these scenarios, by both organisms and substances. The dynamics between substances and the medium include flowing, mixing, interchanging, displacing and absorbing. Absorbing is crucial insofar as a thing may incorporate other things or, in the process of absorbing, may be correspondingly transformed. Smoke particles tend to be absorbed by their medium, and their substantial state disappears. The absorption of a volatile energy can prove lethal to an organism, but not so for the absorption of light by a plant. Furthermore, the absorption of nutrients is critical for the continuation of organic life. Absorption might reveal the relative power and influence of two substances while the medium becomes prevalent insofar as dissipation cancels out any continuation of either substance. Smoke is a case in point. It is the product of fire, that is, a chemical event, a large-scale rapid oxidation consisting ‘of complex motions and deformations,

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fluctuating luminous surfaces, reddening and blackening of the opaque surfaces, billowing smoke, and finally a disappearance of the solid surface’ (Gibson 2015: 16). Events are changes happening at a molar level rather than at a molecular level: they are not physicochemical but environmental events. Fire is subject to human manipulation, mostly for functional purposes such as cooking, warming and destroying. But fire is a means to produce very particular substances: particles. Such particles, in spite of their tiny size, are nonetheless solid. Injecting such particulates into the air as smoke opens up powerful possibilities for the shaping of perceptions and cultural practices. Smoke, as a combination of liquid and solid particles and gases – and gas dynamics, including not only air but many gases – create conditions for the emergence of short-lived substances that are here described as evanescent. In such a case, the surface is evanescent due to the dissolution of substance and medium into one another: the dispersed particles are absorbed by the medium while, through oxidation, elements of the medium precipitate on the burnt surfaces of the particles. When different matter states coalesce, one of the phenomena, either substance or medium, may pervade: there could be so much substance injected into a medium that the medium is overwhelmed by substance. In the ethnographic setting, this dynamic produces unexpected vitalities between humans and non-humans. Among the circumstances that require permutations of this sort are relations with the supernatural, an uneasy, or at least an elusive, relation for a vital materialist approach. Instead of assuming that those relations are part of a pseudomaterial world or a metaphorical substitution of physical experiences, what is important here is the experience of embeddedness in a world where material connections exceed the semiology of ordinary life and where a shift in perception allows access to domains that are invisible in daily life. The contribution of Eduardo Kohn (2013) is decisive for dealing with a semiotic order where different beings are part of the communication process. Kohn starts with Peirce’s (1998: 478) definition of ‘a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former’. Peirce’s contribution lies in the role that the interpretant has in making meaningful the sign. Such a role leads to an open-ended process of semiosis, dependent on the interpretation. Simultaneously, the division of signs into icons, indexes and symbols – where icons represent a mere community in some quality or likenesses, indexes the correspondence in fact and symbols the imputed character of the object – allows for an expansion of the communication process to a heterogeneous world of interpreters. Peirce (1978) deals with those thought-provoking signs that enter through perception and exit through the door of intentional action. Human activity is inscribed in a context where other beings are engaged in simultaneous communication processes that are not always perceptible to humans. Kohn (2013) suggests that the world is made up of living thoughts: behaviour is iconic, embodying the interpretation that each participant has about his or her living circumstance. ‘All life is semiotic, and all semiosis is alive’,

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Kohn (2013: 16) writes. However, semiosis is not an exclusive prerogative of humans; ‘Representation is something both more general and more widely distributed than human language’ (Kohn 2013: 38). Thus, Kohn suggests, the starting point is not the ontological differences amongst beings but the universal properties of communication. The world is inhabited by diverse kinds of thinking. Other than humans, there are multiple thinking selves. From this viewpoint, smoke lends itself to the semiotic process, turning iconic, symbolical or indexical and – depending on the context of its use – expands the arch of the thinking selves who translate their interpretations into actions. The association of smoke with the supernatural has a long, although declining, significance in Western traditions. Frankincense and myrrh were the preferred substances to burn. Their origins are in Somalia, where ‘a scraggly, thorny tree, Commiphoramyrrha, yields myrrh, while Boswelliafrereana and Boswelliacarteri, both taller, with tiny leaves growing at the ends of their branches, produce frankincense’ (Casson 1986: 150). However, odours associated with the ‘sweet smell of Sanctity’, were identified by early church fathers as sinful when associated with the body and sexuality, ‘unanimously condemning secular uses of perfumes (especially among women)’ (Thurlkill 2007: 138). As a result, smoke remains solely an instrumental ritual symbol within the Catholic tradition (Parachin 2012), removed from the central place given to myrrh and frankincense in the biblical narrative of the birth of Jesus. Among the Aymara and Mapuche people, events occurring in the air have an important role. Winds, rainbows and fog, among other meteorological phenomena, are incorporated into daily life. Likewise, the presence of smoke, a sum of burnt particles, is an integral part of Andean and Mapuche culture, and as an expression of the general metabolism implied by fire among living creatures, its presence is noticeable and sustained in everyday life. Chroniclers, early historians, and researchers describe the use of smoke as a part of divination, healing and communication in the Andes (Bouroncle-Carrión 1967, 1964; Burman 2009; Mamani 2001; van Kessel 2001, 1983), and similar uses are described for the Mapuche (Bacigalupo 2007; Guevara 1929). Smoke, in particular, is an integral part of rituals among Aymara and Mapuche. The use of smoke is a means for understanding not only the social construction of the supernatural but also the material transformation of the connection between humans and non-humans. Smoke, air and fumes as used in rituals pose an important question to the assumption implied by the conatus, that is, the insistence of a substance to persist in its condition. Smoke and gases pursue expansion and movement, and the course of this expansion is dependent on what it is expanding into, whether a substantial closed volume or an open, expansive medium. In a closed setting, fumes, gases and smoke become compressed, but in the open, gases dissipate. The latter challenges the ‘persistence’ of substance: smoke or gas seems to persist less and more dynamically move and merge. Thus, for such formations, dissolution seems their destiny; they represent the recalcitrance of the evanescence rather than the recalcitrance of things (Bennett 2010). Aside from its entropic character, dissolution may be understood as a means for reconnecting the living experience to its

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milieu. Kuma’s (2007) invitation to dismantle a world of objects that separate humans from their environment represents a contemporary equivalence of the aims revealed by the ritual exercises that include smoke. In Kuma’s architectural work, the use of water, for example, contributes to dissolving the borders that buildings – objects – artificially erect between humans and their surrounding landscape. Like Kuma’s use of water, the production of smoke is part of lifegiving processes. In Mapuche and Aymara ritual practices, fog, winds, smoke or odours are an indispensable means for exchanging the properties of persons and things in ways that make them differ from their ordinary condition. ‘Smells, smoke, and fragrances are the means of ritual communication; they are the elements that enable the establishment and sustenance of relationships and they enable life to flow, mix and interchange’ (Burman 2009: 126). The ritual transforms volatile air into an evanescent surface used as a shield – the particulate cloud is dense at its instigation – either to protect the person, animal or thing from disruption or to prevent them from being disruptive by creating a platform whereby exchanges between humans and spiritual beings may occur. The selection of specific trees (canelo [Drimyswinteri], for example) or plants (ají [Capsicum spp.]) for burning is not arbitrary. Such substances produce dense and penetrant smoke by which particles remain for a while, suspended in air. With the introduction of these substances (particles of smoke), a new evanescent surface arises amidst the medium. Such particles contribute to a mass constitution of micro-surfaces, a cloud of micro-surfaces. At some point, these micro-surfaces become broken down so finely that they become subsumed into the medium, and thus the surfaces disappear. Fire, it must be remembered, consists of complex motions and deformations, fluctuating luminous surfaces, reddening and blackening of the opaque surfaces, billowing smoke and finally a disappearance of the solid surfaces (Gibson 2015). From this viewpoint, smoke works through its transformative power upon the medium – air – where humans are immersed: an evanescent cloud of microsurfaces may sustain an extra-ordinary experience that confounds humans and non-humans. By using smoke, the ritual allows the perception of out-of-sight things which support indigenous life, making explicit the interface between binding and unbinding ‘when the weather is weathering and the field is fielding’ (Ingold 2011: 121). People see things through the presence of the particulate substance – that is, they see it in the substance through the vague surface between medium (air) and substance (smoke).

Smoke and ritual Disclosing Although different in their composition, fog and smoke open alternative views of reflecting surfaces. Fog is another type of particulate substance, one composed of air-suspended water droplets and crystals. In these terms, it is similar to smoke, but not the same. In spite of their differences, both are present in the indigenous

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practices, providing the basis for accessing what is missing in the ordinary experience of the medium. In this sense, they disclose what otherwise remains invisible. The link between smoke, fumes and odours and the human body is critical for relating to death, sickness and the spiritual world. In the description of the mortuary rites of the Aymara provided by van Kessel (2001), the disclosure offered by the smoke is evident: moments after the death, non-relative neighbours arrive to wash the body and dress it in its best clothes (Sunday best). For the wake, they lay the body out, with the feet pointing west, on a white-clothed table. Beside the head, a candle is kept lit at all times. The explanation for this custom is that the deceased’s soul will not come home; rather it leaves on a journey to find its destiny beyond the sea of storms (‘mar de tormentas’) also known as ‘cocha grande’. When the traveller (the deceased) is ready with his bags for the trip, he leaves with his llama and dog, and they circle round the western side of the house to head towards the countryside downhill (‘para abajo’), accompanied by their mourners and neighbours. Three hundred metres away from the house, a small camp is organised, presided over by a friend or relative who represents the dead person. A candle, cigarettes, alcohol and coca leaves are left on a table. At dinner time people eat, except the person representing the deceased: the spirit eats the essence of the food. Firewood brought from the nearby house is used for the burning. The llama is sacrificed by cutting its throat. The blood is left running into a hole in the ground as an offering to the Manqhapacha. Once the animal is completely dead, the sacrificer understands that the dead person has gone to the cocha grande. His clothes are burned along with his dog and the previously sacrificed llama. Coca leaves are burned, and an exchange of alcohol and cigarettes takes place. Meanwhile, the fire is challada (sprinkled) with these elements. In the evening, five male relatives of the departed stand guard over the fire, watching carefully to see the spirit of the dead coming to take away his belongings. It is of utmost importance to see if the dead comes alone or with a relative. The presence of a relative or neighbour accompanying the dead is seen as a bad omen; the companions, who appear in the flames, will also die. The ghostly presence of the dead and his animals in the middle of the flames highlights not only the divinatory power attributed to fire but also the physical and material continuity of existence that transcends the limits imposed by the ordinary constraints of the senses. As stated by Gibson (2015: 9), ‘when an object has been consumed by fire, nothing has really gone out of existence. . . . Even if terrestrial matter cannot be annihilated, a light-reflecting surface can and this is what counts for perception’. Fire is an event with a surface, although a very unusual surface (Gibson 2015). Human control over fire allows creating such an event which displaces, although episodically, the medium. The duration of the fire, nonetheless, secures access to the spiritual realm. Similarly, although using droplets and crystals instead of fire, the ankawenumapu, among the Mapuche, corresponds to the weather world, where the climate and the spirits of the winds (ngenkuruf  ) dwell. Evil spirits, lurking in the clouds, may act against people. There is a tradition in the west which

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relates steam, condensation, drinks and souls. In the Christian tradition, spirits are also meant to ascend, connecting souls with the heavens. In that sense, there is a parallel in the West relating to fumes and the world of spirits. Breathing would be another example in relation to the soul, going all the way back to Ancient Greece. However, such understandings are now regarded as mere metaphors. Furthermore, there is no apparent turning of the medium into a surface as in the Aymara and Mapuche world. The indigenous peoples might have reinterpreted Christian traditions, especially the use of incense, but if so, it is on a distinctly different premise. This spiritual world, rendered immaterial in anthropological accounts (Ingold 2011), is accessible to the Aymara and Mapuche through direct and indirect visual and sensory means (feelings concerning the weather, the flight of birds, wind direction or changes in the wind). It is also revealed through the interplay of the wind, smoke and odours. Smoke reveals the world that is invisible in daylight. As described by Bouroncle-Carrión (1967), smoke and fire are present before the Aymara start to sow: they render homage to fertility. On a slight rise in the terrain, they place a small statue and burn an offering, put on a grill over a small fire pan, at its feet. As it smokes before them, those present try to see signs in the rising wisps and curls, favourable or otherwise, regarding the work they are about to start. Fortune-tellers try to read the omens depicted on the earth by a handful of coca leaves thrown on the ground. Among the Mapuche, the machi (shaman) blows smoke from her mouth in the direction of the dwellings or the enemies: the direction taken by the smoke indicates the path the spirit followed (Faron 1964). Mapuche elders who invoke the pillán or spirit of the volcano by offering him tobacco smoke carry out a similar practice: ‘Accept this, Pillán’, they say. Fire and flames are as important as smoke and so are the processes of keeping things lit and the process of combustion. To ‘light’ a fire establishes a correspondence between light and flames. This aspect is highly transformative: substances and mediums can radically change state when they are subject to dynamic conditions. That is, gaseous mediums (e.g. air) can be liquefied through extreme energetic transformations. Solid substances (e.g. wood) can transform to particulate substances (smoke) when involved in energetic relations, and light (in the form of flames) plays a significant role in this process. In this sense, rituals imply the use of energy for transforming substances and creating evanescent surfaces. Feeding Pachamama has a mouth that eats and receives food and is challada. But Pachamama also eats us. There is a mutual phagocytising between human beings and non-humans: van Kessel (2001) emphasises that among the Aymara, the word burying means seeding potato (papa). Entities other than human, such as the wind, lightning, whirlpools, floods and volcanoes, claim to be fed by the people (Bugallo and Vilca 2011). ‘Smells, smoke, and fragrances are the means of ritual communication; they are the elements that enable the establishment and

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sustenance of relationships, and they enable life to flow, mix and interchange’, states Burman (2009: 118). In addition to flowing, mixing and interchanging, absorbing also seems crucial. Things do not always mix equally, but sometimes one thing absorbs another. When a particulate substance and its corresponding cloud of micro-surfaces disappear, it is absorbed into the pervading medium. This is heavily linked to feeding and food where one being literally absorbs another, as is necessary for life to continue. With absorbing, power relations between one being and another are displayed in terms that are situationally defined: to absorb or be absorbed offers a potential for hierarchical relationships. Among the Aymara, spirits in general feed primarily on smells and smoke (sahumerios [incense]):2 the penetrating scented aroma released by the fire pans reaches the spirit, who is expected, if satisfied, to respond to the claims of the devotee (Fernández 1995). The ajayus (or protective spirits) are fed on odours and smoke. Therefore, Aymara rituals are organised to feed the ajayus through the burning of plant elements, minerals and animals. Odours and smoke are a means of ritual communication, elements that enable the establishment and the maintenance of the relationship with the ajayus, making the life flow (Burman 2011). The absorbing nature of the spirits establishes a dominant position over the humans who aim to satisfy them. Among the Mapuche, in the descanso (a small shrine by the house honouring a dead person), the spirits of the relatives are given cigarettes and mate. The descanso is a shrine erected by the side of a tree, chosen by a person prior to his or her death, which will remain as the site for encounters between the living and the spirit of the dead. The shrine is built on the border of the family plot and is also a decoy that will distract the spirit from returning to the house: he or she instead will go to this outside post. Control and memory are part of the interplay that is enacted whenever someone dreams with the dead person and remembers him or her by burning some cigarettes under the shade of the tree (Skewes et al. 2011). Like in the Aymara case, the Mapuche spirit ( püllü) gains command and control over the living relatives. The feeding of the spirits is in direct connection with tastes that might, on the one hand, satisfy them or, on the other, disgust them. The spirits are beings which are continually trying to absorb everything or as much as possible. The relation with the spirits needs to be worked through a contradictory balance that keeps in check the necessary, although not always desired, presence of forces that can both act against or favour the people. To keep them in check, spicy odours and bitter tastes are frequently used in both the Mapuche and the Aymara worlds. The use of ají or chilli peppers (Capsicum spp.), for example, is associated with purification and is mentioned in several birth and funeral customs. A person, when sick, is made to inhale chilli-pepper smoke to clear his head and lungs. Among the Aymara, illness in children is attributed to a spirit that has succeeded in getting hold of their body. To cure the victim, anise is burned in the sick child’s room. The bitter smoke is thought to provoke the retreat of the demon (Faron 1964). Increasing the application of energy is another transformative exercise associated with ritual practices: breathing in the offerings, as well as blowing smoke on

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animals or people, is part of many rites used to cure diseases. To expel the wekufe (malignant being) from the body of the sick person, the machi drinks chicha and strikes her pipe. Absorbing, in this case, empowers the shaman with spiritual strength. The medium – air or smoke – is moulded or hardened for dealing with evil spirits and for protecting the living (Faron 1964). Likewise, before using a new house, the Aymara make an offering to Pachamama, burning the foetus of a llama or sheep together with other substances that please the divinity, such as fragments of ostrich eggshells, minute tin figures, sugar loaves, coloured candy, coca, llijta and cigars. While these products are being burned, the prayer ‘Our Father’ – an obvious influence of the Christian religion – is recited in Spanish. The ashes are buried in a corner of the house, which becomes taboo, and they must not be dug up. To chase away the evil spirits who may have installed them inside the hut, a handful of ají (cayenne pepper) is burned, the bitter smoke of which is unbearable (Metraux 1973). Processes of absorption dominate relations among humans and spirits. The one who is absorbed into is losing his or her existence and power, and the absorber, the spirit, is the one growing in existence and power. But with toxic substances the power roles are reversed, and that which is absorbed acquires power, as would be the case of the shaman. For those beings, their keenness to absorb becomes their undoing. A good example of this is the Mapuche myth about the Canillo, a voracious baby who eats the family’s food. This myth, originally documented by Quiroz and Olivares (1987), was recounted to the authors in Pucatrihue, southern Chile. Food, the story tells, was prepared only once a day and was kept in a big pot, but upon their return, the family always found the pot empty. The family became suspicious about the boy. One day they decided to discover what was going on. They left the pot as usual and went out, but they stayed nearby to see what was going on. They found that Canillo had grown large, reached the pot and eaten the food. Although they threw Canillo into the river, he escaped to the sun and punished his people with heavy droughts. To placate Canillo, they asked Huenteao, another mythical founder, to marry him to his daughter. The wedding was celebrated, and Huenteao told Canillo: ‘You stay here, in my house, because you are my son-in-law. And never again go doing wrongs. Imprison yourself here’. Canillo absorbed the family’s food, then he absorbed the sun’s energy, but, finally, through kinship, Huenteao absorbed him. In the west, burning is meant to get rid of something or to extract energy from it. In the indigenous context, burning is done to further processes of absorption, and absorption is crucial to transformation. To burn is to make a hard substance absorbable into a medium. The substance, through combustion, disintegrates, producing light (energy, flames) and a particulate substance (smoke), and the particulate substance disperses into the medium until it becomes completely absorbed. Thus, burning enacts absorption. Things that are hard and difficult to be absorbed are made absorbable through burning. Further, regarding surfaces, there is a process of continual breakdown and the undermining of surfaces. Hard substances have very discernible surfaces, fluid substances less so, and particulate substances (e.g. smoke, fog, odours) have highly indiscernible surfaces. Particulate substances can be absorbed, and their surfaces will dissipate. What transpires is an

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intention to disrupt surfaces so that they are broken down, again and again, into increasingly indiscernible states. Smoke, as Burman (2009) notes, depends on the nature of the elements from which it is made. The quality of the smoke, in this sense, ‘is derived from the elements that are burnt’ (ibid.: 118). In a similar way, as smoke connects humans with spiritual beings, there is also a link between species and spirits. Burman (2009) suggests that although spirits are fed with odours and smoke, not every odour is suitable for them. Some are used to attract them, to satisfy them; others, on the contrary, are means of protecting the community from an unwanted spirit. Smoke, in this sense, works either as a threshold or as a shield for humans. The notion of food for the spirits and its association with smoke that has been worked through specific preparations implies injecting a substance into the medium to transform its relation with ordinary life. Substances are manipulated to shift materials from hard, fast and non-absorbable states into states which make them absorbable (via a particulate state, smoke) to the spirit. The action and energy to shift states inject a particulate substance into the medium, and thus the spirit absorbs it, sucking up all particulate substances as it seems colloquial bent on doing. The agency and power of the people relating to spirits develop skills to shift hard matter and discernible surfaces into states where the surface breaks down and can be absorbed. The action seems to be to inject a particulate substance into the medium like a sort of cloud rather than setting up a hard shield. Hardening The incorporation of smoke in the ritual life of Aymara and Mapuche societies provides a different understanding of the intermingling of humans and nonhumans. Its use directly concerns air as the medium where human life is immersed. Variations in the medium, we suggest, allow modes of communication between humans and non-humans other than those prevalent in daily life. The behaviour of air and smoke (and water and other particles that it transports) encompasses human life. As María Ester Grebe (1995) describes, the wind, depending on which cardinal points it comes from, is treated as follows: winds from the east ( puelmapu) are considered good and are associated with spirits that are benefactors. Likewise, the wind that comes from the south (willimapu) announces a good harvest, and it is considered a bearer of good luck. Contrary to these winds, one from the north predicts bad weather, thunderstorms, frost, disease and death, and it brings bad luck. The westerly wind (lafkenmapu) carries darkness, evil, storms, tidal waves, damaging rain, snow and frost, as well as bringing crop ruin, serious illness and death. It is associated with the wekufe (evil spirit), bad luck and evil. In general, the Mapuche are sensitive to climate changes: they attribute changing weather, gusty winds or unexpected rain to the misbehaviour of human beings. The Aymara are also sensitive to the wind and, as such, might be considered a weather culture. Van Kessel and Enríquez (2002) describe the winds as an integral part of the Aymara living experience. The words vintur cussi used for the wind mean joy and the end of the serranía (mountain range). The wind is a partner in

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many agricultural activities, and a good part of the work would be impossible to undertake with no wind. The winds come from sajama, the west, and some of his echoes are heard in its blowing, echoes that are equally meaningful among the Mapuche and are known as aukinkos. The intense ritual life organised around air, fumes and steam suggests ways of co-opting materials that integrate human and non-human domains. Inhalation, burning, production of coloured smoke and the use of specific materials for fire to attain specific ritual goals are meant for assembling inner parts of the human body and spirits and for linking humans and non-humans (Burman 2009). Diverse types of smoke are ritually worked for various purposes, using particular types of wood from different species of tree or plant for firewood – such as foye (Drimyswinteri) or pellin (Nothofagus obliqua). Before his funeral, for example, the corpse of a Mapuche ulmen (wealthy, rich man) rests on a wooden grid made from the pellin or Chilean roble tree and is enveloped by smoke from the foye or canelo (Latcham 1909). The selection of the materials for the fire is far from arbitrary. The canelo is a sacred tree for the Mapuche, but it is also rich in tannin, which makes its smoke spicy and astringent. Tannin also contributes to preserving the body that has to await its funeral that will take place some months later. When entering the nguillatún – the Mapuche main religious celebration – the participants are required to approach the fire where the pellin is burnt. The pellín is a tree that has strong ties with humans, especially in funeral ceremonies (Skewes et al. 2011). The participant is invited to the nguillatún to apellinarse, that is, to protect him- or herself using the smoke born out of the fire. This use of the word differs from the most traditional one that refers to someone who has grown old enough to achieve maturity. After the funeral of an Aymara person, relatives and neighbours must sahumarse (cleanse themselves) with the smoke of aromatic plants such as rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis), sage (Salvia officinalis) or chilli (Capsicum annuum) before entering the dead person’s house (van Kessel 2001). Before travelling, a machi rubs herself with the dense fog that – early in the morning – is abundant in the area. As an explanation, she says that it is a way of protecting herself from the trip’s dangers. In so doing, she emulates the pitrén, mountains that shield themselves behind the fog when some unwanted intrusion occurs. Both the machi and the mountains are responding to the same pattern of self-protection, and from the viewpoint of the medium, they are both manipulating substances to create an absorbable surface that makes them indestructible when faced with unwanted forces. Furthermore, as Latcham (1909) points out, the smoke is a part of the machi: it is regarded as his or her family spirit. The notion of shielding denotes the efforts made to thicken the air. Burning certain substances is clearly intended for that purpose. Some of the shamanic rituals of the Mapuche include the burning of canelo (Drimyswinteri) by the entrance door of the machi’s ruka (hut). ‘From the fire arose a thick, pungent smoke, which completely shrouded the entrance’ (Latcham 1909: 365). Then, the machi takes his stand in front of this fire, ‘face upturned and eyes unblinking for more than half an hour, inhaling without flinching the clouds of suffocating

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smoke that enveloped him, and seemingly lost to everything around him’. More than a hundred years later, we have witnessed the same pattern in the initiation rite of a machi from Riñinahue, in the Ranco Lake area. The ceremony – the machipurrún – was the last one in her initiation process. Under the surveillance of an elder machi who trained her, and counting on the assistance of her helper and translator, she danced and climbed the rewe (the ceremonial pole) and entered into a state of ecstasy while speaking in tongues. Her dramatic dance was constantly stimulated by smoke, both coming from a fire and from the tobacco that her assistant provided her. The absorption of the smoke made it possible for her to access the spiritual domain and to become symbolically united with the sacred branches of the cinnamon, as Faron (1964) describes. The manipulation of the medium, in this case, creates a rarefied atmosphere that wraps up the shaman, isolating her from her followers and the experience of ordinary life.

Conclusions The contribution of philosophers such as Miguel de Unamuno (1954) is crucial for understanding that agency is more a relational property rather than an attribute of agents. Authors such as Ingold (2011, 2008), Massey (2005) and Latour (1993) have emphasised that on-going agential processes result from the interaction of entities and not from entities in and of themselves. The ritual practices concerning smoke among the Mapuche and the Aymara suggest that more than the endurance of things, it is in their transformation – into different states – where the conditions for the existence of a world in process ought to be sought. Contrary to Spinoza’s conatus and Unamuno’s views of things aiming to be other while persisting as themselves, the rituals of the Mapuche and Aymara indigenous world suggest that things are meant to be others, or even to be more than one thing at any given time, depending on the circumstances and the point of view. Such transformations are associated with the energetic shifting of things as hard and persistent (with discernible surfaces) to substances, which are dispersed and evanescent, having their surfaces continually ruptured. By injecting substances – smoke – into the medium, the Aymara and Mapuche rituals create conditions for the interaction between humans and spiritual beings. These rituals create multiple surfaces with increasing perceptual uncertainty, and, in an evanescent condition, such surfaces are furnished with the means that might absorb or disperse the transcendent beings. In so doing, the ritual practice expands the articulations among substances of the landscape that escape daily awareness. The visible connections between humans and non-humans in everyday life are no more than a thin crust that hides more than it reveals, that is, the material forces that are shaping the landscape. Naïve realism consists of the mere belief that the real corresponds to the visible. Contrary to this notion and certain about the existence of deep vibrant forces, Mapuche and Aymara ritual practices aim to access domains that escape from the self-evident presences of daily life. To reach such domains, substances, surfaces and mediums ought to be altered. The twisting of the relation between medium, substance and surface is a powerful avenue for accessing fields that are far removed from ordinary experience. To

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traverse into such domains, people have to walk through an evanescent surface made of smoke. Likewise, in moving through the uncertain domains, the body itself needs to be shielded with the thin surface provided by smoke. Such a shield is simultaneously coloured and scented in ways that are pleasant for good spirits and unpleasant for evil spirits. As a chemical composite, the smoke requires burning elements that vary according to local knowledge, the most powerful ones being those that concentrate odours. Coincidentally, the trees and bushes that provide the sources for the good smoke are invested with high ritualistic value. Although not enough evidence is available for demonstrating a process of cultural exchange prior to the Conquest, the Aymara and the Mapuche people, in the use of fire and smoke, have created an important repertoire of resources aimed at accessing domains that escape ordinary consciousness. The presence of smoke is key in altering daily consciousness, in divinatory practices, in retribution for what came from the land, in purifying bodies of humans and animals and so forth. A more detailed study of the commonalities found in this research could prove more intimate connections in the Andean world. Is the spiritual world a material realm that escapes ordinary consciousness? The question goes far beyond our possibilities of providing a convincing answer. Nonetheless, a close cultural examination of the material discussed in this chapter suggests that local cosmologies, as those of the Mapuche and the Aymara, deal with spirits as beings, living in other environs that require avenues to connect them to the daily life of the living. Instead of assuming the existence of a division between the spiritual and the material world, or between the sacred and the profane, a more productive approach is the one suggested by the local cosmologies: elements of the universe are connected by material conduits, such as smoke, and they deserve close observation. From a theoretical point of view, some reflection ought to be given to Gibson’s (2015) concepts of substance, surface and medium. The consideration of smoke as a particulate substance, no matter how evanescent it can be, suggests that definitions about the materiality of the landscape are contingent on time scales, cultural practices and local definitions. Sometimes, contrary to Spinoza or Unamuno, things such as fire or smoke aim to become something else.

Notes 1 This chapter is part of two research projects, Fondecyt 1120139: ‘La impronta andina en el sistema cosmovisionario mapuche williche’ and Fondecyt 1140598: ‘Antropología del Bosque’. An important contribution came from our research assistants, Pablo Rojas B. and Wladimir Riquelme M. The authors acknowledge the stimulating work of Mike Anusas and Cristián Simonetti, editors of this collection. Finally, a significant contribution was made by Christine Hills, who reviewed this chapter’s grammar. 2 The sahumerios are offerings of incense that are thought to be pleasant for the spirits.

Bibliography Bacigalupo, A.M. 2007. Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among the Chilean Mapuche. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bouroncle-Carrión, A. 1964. Contribución al estudio de los Aymara: primera parte. América Indígena 24(2): 129–169. Bouroncle-Carrión, A. 1967. Contribución al estudio de los Aymara: segunda parte. América Indígena 27(3): 233–269. Bugallo, L. and M. Vilca. 2011. Cuidando el ánimu: salud y enfermedad en el mundo andino (Puna y Quebrada de Jujuy, Argentina). Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/61781 [Accessed: 28 June 2019]. Burman, A. 2009. As Though We Had No Spirit: Ritual, Politics and Existence in the Aymara Quest for Decolonization. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Gothenburg. Burman, A. 2011. Yatiris en el siglo XXI: el conocimiento, la política y la nueva generación. Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/61331 [Accessed: 28 June 2019]. Casson, L. 1986. Points of origin. Smithsonian 17: 148–152. de Unamuno, M. 1954. The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J.E. Crawford. New York, NY: Dover Publications. Deleuze, G. 1996. Spinoza y el Problema de la Expression, trans. H Vogel. Barcelona: Muchmik Editores [originally published in 1968]. Faron, L.C. 1964. Hawks of the Sun: Mapuche Morality and Its Ritual Attributes. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Fernández, G. 1995. Ofrenda, ritual y terapia: las mesas aymaras. Revista Española de Antropología Americana 25: 153–180. Gibson, J.J. 2015. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Grebe, M.E. 1995. Continuidad y cambio en las representaciones icónicas: significados simbólicos en el mundo sur andino. Revista Chilena de Antropología 13: 137–154. Grebe, M.E. 1996. Patrones de continuidad en el mundo surandino: creencias y cultos vinculados a los astros y los espíritus de la naturaleza. In Cosmovisión Andina. Segundo Encuentro de Cosmovisión Andino-Amazónica, Centro de Cultura, Arquitectura y Arte, La Paz, pp. 554–572. Grebe, M.E. 2002. Los mapuche en el contexto del mundo andino: algunas perspectivas interculturales. Lengua y Literatura Mapuche 10: 23–34. Guevara, T. 1909. Psicología del Pueblo Araucano. Santiago: Cervantes. Guevara, T. 1929. Historia de Chile. Chile Prehispano. Santiago: Balcells. Ingold, T. 2008. Bindings against boundaries: Entanglements of life in an open world. Environment and Planning 40: 1796–1810. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Kohn, E. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kuma, K. 2007. Anti-Object: The Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture. London: Architectural Association Publications. Latcham, R. 1909. Ethnology of the Araucanos. London: Royal Anthropological Institute. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mamani, L. 2001. Alma Imaña: rituales mortuorios andinos en las zonas rurales aymara de Puno circunlacustre. Chungará: Revista de Antropología Chilena 33(2): 235–244. Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Metraux, A. 1973. Religión y Magia Indígenas en América del Sur. Madrid: Aguilar.

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Moulian, R. and P. Espinoza. 2014. Pneumatología, paisaje y culto: patrones andinos en los procesos de ancestralización de la cultura mapuche williche emplazados en la naturaleza. Chungará: Revista de Antropología Chilena 46(4): 637–650. Parachin, V.M. 2012. The Christmas tree: An ancient tradition. The Priest: 50–51. Peirce, C. 1978. Lecciones Sobre el Pragmatism, trans. D. Pavón. Buenos Aires: Aguilar [originally published in 1903]. Peirce, C. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings: Volume 2 (1893– 1913), ed. the Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Planella, M.T., C. Belmar, L. Quiroz and D. Estévez. 2012. Propuesta integradora para un estudio del uso de plantas con propiedades psicoactivas en pipas del período alfarero temprano y sus implicancias sociales. Revista Chilena de Antropología 25: 93–119. Quiroz, D. and J.C. Olivares. 1987. Amuatan Pucatra Agüelito Huentiao, Amuatan Pucatra. Permanencia de una pauta adaptativa en San Juan de la Costa. Boletín del Museo Mapuche de Cañete 3: 13–26. Skewes, J.C., P. Rojas, D. Guerra and A. Mellado. 2011. ¿La memoria de los paisajes o los paisajes de la memoria? Los enigmas de la sustentabilidad socioambiental en las geografías en disputa. Desenvolvimiento E Medio Ambiente 23: 39–57. Thurlkill, M.F. 2007. Odors of sanctity: Distinctions of the holy in early Christianity and Islam. Comparative Islamic Studies 3(2): 133–144. van Kessel, J. 1983. Ayllu y ritual terapéutico en la medicina andina. Chungará: Revista de Antropología Chilena 10: 165–176. van Kessel, J. 2001. El ritual mortuorio de los aymara de Tarapacá como vivencia y crianza de vida. Chungará: Revista de Antropología Chilena 33(2): 221–234. van Kessel, J. and P. Enríquez. 2002. Señas y Señaleros de la Santa Tierra: Agronomía Andina. Quito: Abya Yala, Iecta.

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In light and shadow Surfaces and polarities in rituals of second burial in Central East Madagascar Christel Mattheeuws

Introduction Writing about surfaces, in a Malagasy context, is no easy task. There is no direct translation for ‘surfaces’ as the outer layer or boundary of something that divides a space into what is above or what is below, or what is superficial and what is deep. People, plants and animals live on the earth but not on the surface (of the earth). Farmers work the soil and not the surface (of the soil). Even so, when people dig a hole to elevate a standing stone, they understand the standing stone as standing on the earth. Yet, when a small cavity is dug for sowing seeds, which is then covered with soil, a seed becomes something that germinates in the soil, to then grow on it. A family tomb is built with a section that extends above the earth and a part that remains in the soil. The dead are, however, said to be buried below the soil to express the difference in the depth of seeds covered with soil and indicate the place where the dead dwell. Yet this place is, in turn, not as deep as the belly of the earth where precious stones, petrol or other mining products are found.1 This chapter will show that in a Malagasy context, surfaces are made (although Malagasy do not use the word ‘surface’) through, for instance, by putting a mat on the earth near a tomb, where the dead are placed to be rewrapped in shrouds;2 by clothing the dead and ancestors with shrouds; by building tombs or through astrological technics. A surface can act as a device for socialisation, an instrument for concealment or protection or as a way to deviate, conform or unite. They can be material or imaginary. This chapter will also demonstrate that, from a Malagasy perspective, surfaces shape bipolar unities as they operate at the interface (elanelany) of two poles. It will introduce ideas developed by Goethean scientist Jaap van der Wal (2003), who proposes that polarities are one of the fundamental principles of life. For van der Wal, poles do not operate according to an either/ or principle, nor are they simply two sides of one reality. Rather, polarities are creative and transformative since everything craves its opposite in order to form a whole. The idea of interface comes from Sloterdijk, as ‘the production of a bipolar world of intimacy’ (Sloterdijk 2011: 163). Whilst Sloterdijk considers faciality an exclusive part of anthropogenesis, interfaces are considered here an intrinsic part of the Goethean understanding of polarity since poles cannot exist and live without each other or act alone.

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Figure 4.1 Map of West Bezanozano and surroundings. Source: Christel Mattheeuws

The materials for discussion are derived from long-term fieldwork in West Bezanozano3 and will concentrate specifically on the dead and the rituals of the famadihana, the turning (of the dead into ancestors). Famadihana are held in late winter and springtime in the months July until October, at the interface of winter and summer. The ritual aims to turn death into a life-generative capacity, namely to bend the dead into ancestors. West Bezanozano is situated in Central East Madagascar along the western banks of the river Mangoro about 170 km northeast of Antananarivo. The villages are inhabited by extended families that arrived in the area less than 200 years ago from North Merina, fleeing social disasters and wars in the era of Merina kings and queens.4 Most people are rice farmers and zebu herders. The land in West Bezanozano is shaped by marshy valleys and small to moderate-sized rivers, etching the relatively open highlands.

West Bezanozano cosmo-ecology According to West Bezanozano cosmo-ecology, Andriamanitra (The Creator) sent the Zanahary (Children of the Creator), along with celestial beings and sacred beings on earth, in all directions. In turn, the West Bezanozano bring all creations of beings, things and places back to Andriamanitra.5 This bond between Andriamanitra and its children is summarised by a passage in the myth of creation,

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which was narrated to me by Rafaravary, a Saragoaika villager, in July 2004: ‘When the Zanahary asked the Andriamanitra, the Sweet Smelling Prince, about their generative role, he replied: “You [Zanahary] will take care of the bodies and I [Andriamanitra] take care of the wind”’. As I have explained elsewhere, this myth relates to a double source of life – a heavenly and an earthly – a double astronomical perspective of zenith and horizon and a double focus of astrological practices creating time and place (Mattheeuws 2018: 283). Landscape creations in West Bezanozano are all generated astrologically as moments of the world’s unfolding and growth, a plaiting work that is never finished. Astrological practices are a poiesis of life, and they are also the implementations of a practical knowledge, a cosmo-ecological consciousness that grows from and endures in an active involvement with what Ingold (2007) describes as an earth-sky world; this is a perception of the environment not limited to the horizontality of land common to cartography but a confluence of the earth and cosmos. Acknowledging that the people of my study conceive the earth-sky world as similar to western people before the Copernican revolution, I concur with Sloterdijk (2011) in that that they still understand life as inside a ball, since the earth is protected by the heavens, instead of on the outside of a ball, faced by open, cold and silent galaxies. For West Bezanozano, the earth on which they live is the earth in the medium of the sky, while the earth where the dead belong is the earth below the sky. Life develops in the light, while death in its shadow. West Bezanozano astrology is about appearances, transformations, movements and directions of beings, phenomena, materials, places and activities. Every new moon brings one of the twelve destinies that follow each other and that carry specific qualities equivalent to the western and Arabic zodiac signs.6 Although the destiny brought by the new moon gives the quality of the whole month, all the other following destinies appear during the waxing and waning moon, giving the qualities of the days until the starting destiny reappears with the dark moon. The following new moon then brings the next destiny, and so forth. All beings carry throughout their lives the destiny of their birthday. Hence, each astrological day determines in what capacity or with what quality beings, places, things and activities are generated and take shape. The changing moon, the appearances of the destinies and the generation of things should be understood as harmonious appearances across concurrent moments, each one a new beginning. One can imagine this as different things caught in the same weather conditions, since the West Bezanozano understand the qualities of the destinies in terms of weather. They live in what Ingold (2007) describes as a weather world, whereby ‘the task of habitation is to bind the weather into substantial, living forms, and in that way to participate in weaving the texture of the land’ (33). Until recently, the farmers of the area noticed a covalent bond between the happenings above and below. Nowadays, however, climate change disturbs this relationship. This disturbance, as the inhabitants of the Sarogoaika told me back in 2016, is often understood as a severe punishment of Andriamanitra because of a global eradication of taboos of land and water bringing drought, a burning sun and very unstable weather. Since a moon year is eleven days shorter than a sun year, the astrological moon carrying each destiny drifts backwards against the seasons for approximately

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thirty-three years before it once again reaches approximately the same place in the solar year. That particular year is called a ‘big year’ because the path of the moon, the sun and the stars is said to meet. This conjunction gives birth to the destinies as invisible forces, brought by the new moon in a specific relation to the yearly paths of sun and stars. Although there is no direct evidence that people still know and observe the conjunction of moon, sun and stars, computer simulation shows that only during a big year do the equivalent western and Arabic zodiac signs appear at their culmination point at approximately 9pm (Mattheeuws 2018). I therefore view this moment as a sacred act of Andriamanitra establishing a zenith astronomy. A zenith astronomy is, however, always linked to a horizon astronomy, related to the Zanahary, who have been sent into the four directions. West Bezanozano astrology is not only embodied in an astrological calendar but also in what people term ‘the image of the land’, the arrangement of the twelve destinies along the four cardinal directions (see Figure 4.2). For people in West Bezanozano – as one of my informants suggested – the sacred destiny Alahamady can be both ‘the sun passing the zenith and about to decline in the month of December’ and ‘the winter sun at about 9am in the northeast’. The emergence

Figure 4.2 Image of the land and the weather. Source: Christel Mattheeuws

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Figure 4.3 Turning the destinies of the tomb. Source: Christel Mattheeuws

of something in a centre or zenith is hasina, and what appears at the periphery embodies hasina. Hasina are the generative potentials and life-giving forces or beings and places possessing these types of forces. They become operative when joined with jiny – forces that assure the earthly world order of existence in the cosmo-ecological morphogenetic fields of relations with death as their origin – forming jiny-hasina complexes. We can understand ‘the image of the land’ as the embodiments of the destinies perceived as emergent change constituting directional places. Directional places imply the direction of destinies as revealed by their qualities – see again Footnote 6. They appear at the periphery, generated from a centre, becoming new centres of generation.7

Death and ancestors in West Bezanozano People in West Bezanozano, as elsewhere in Madagascar, put great effort into taking care of their ancestors and securing their existence. They believe that the living only grow and take care of life, whereas the ancestors give or generate

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life. This relates to another story in the West Bezanozano cosmo-ecology: that the earth and moon were dark and dead until they were brought to light with the appearance of the sun. This gives the experience of life via light under the leadership of the sun and the experience of death via darkness under the leadership of the moon. Since the moon and earth were generated before the sun, the moon takes precedence over the sun in astrological practices. Similarly, the ancestors have precedence over the living. This gives them power over the living, being a condition of their existence.8 Precedence as a condition for a person’s existence does not, however, mean that the generative capacity of that which leads is a natural state in the present structure of the cosmos. The earth considered as the realm of darkness and death par excellence cannot transcend its own nature; it does not become alive by itself. Earthly forces need to be brought to light in order to become life giving instead of life killing. In this sense, death and life, or darkness and light, become bipolar unities. Dead human beings belong to the realm of the earth since corpses ( faty, that which is dead) are buried below the (superficial) soil in family tombs. Burial brings a corpse – after having been wrapped into shrouds – from the sphere of the living on earth in the light (village, east) to the sphere of the dead below the (superficial) soil (tomb, west), as illustrated in Figure 4.3. A person’s life story often starts with a drama or crisis (isairana) and ends up in a satisfying climax (mafinaritra). Isa-ira is the very fine single thread that is made by the silk worm, while mafy-aritra means solid, able to give substantial support and having perseverance. Life is understood as the weaving together of single threads into a mutually supportive fabric. Shrouds keep the dead warm – socially and physically – so they can remain in existence, and the layers around the corpse are threefold, analogous to bodily flesh. The first layer is a very thin shroud (lamba manify), akin to a membrane connecting bones to muscles. The second layer is composed of shrouds collected during one’s lifetime or given by family members; these are akin to muscles. The more shrouds one has been able to acquire and the more extensive the family circle giving the shrouds, the thicker this layer is and hence the warmer the dead and the longer they will continue in existence. The third and final layer is a single and strong shroud (lambabe, big shroud) which forms the skin considered part of one’s family personality. The colour of the skin indicates racial origins as well as the person’s temperament and character. When, at the end of the burial, the southern fires are lit, the grave is temporarily turned from being a place where ancestors dwell, embodying the northwest (adijady), into a place where the corpse will dissipate, embodying the southeast (asorotany) – see Figure 4.3. The corpse is lowered to the bottom of the grave, which is kept permeable for the bodily fluids to find their way into the soil. It is acceptable for the dead to be physically leaky, for as long as this leakage and life energy are channelled and pulled down towards the earth. Indeed, a tomb is always tied to a specific valley where the forces of the decomposed body help to enrich the soil and growth of those particular marshes. Once the corpse has been separated from the living and united with the dead and ancestors in the tomb, the bodily negativity should fade away from the realm

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of the living. Yet the more elusive parts of the human being (ambiroa, the double) are still wandering around. What the living mostly fear is the dead going to fetch other living people, causing a chain of deaths. It is said that once a tomb has been opened, it has a hunger that is never satisfied, even when closed after burial. If this happens, then a special ceremony is required to stop a chain reaction of subsequent deaths. A tomb, as a cultural entity, carries the destiny of ‘the soil that closes well’ (adijady), as villagers proposed. It acts as a surface to contain the dead and prevent them from pulling or sucking life energy away from the living. The structure of a tomb makes it possible, however, to open and close it through a mouth (vava), facing west. This mouth is closed with two transversal stones and a superficial layer of soil on top. When soil and stones are removed, a downward stair appears, leading towards the door of the tomb below the (superficial) soil – see Figure 4.4. Dissolution of the flesh dries the corpse, and the hard and durable bones of the body appear. Bones are considered the ideal shape of a corpse, and from the moment they emerge – after one to two years – a dead person can become an ancestor, named in his or her material shape ‘the white bones’ or ‘the eight bones’. The first refers to the whitening that occurs when skin is removed, as happens when rice is pounded. The second refers to the eight-boned structure of legs and arms (tongotr’aman-tanana). In speeches, ‘legs-and-arms’ suggest, respectively, the elder and younger descendants (centres of action) connected to the central body (centre of vitality) both in the realm of the living and in the realm of the dead. The West Bezanozano like to keep their dead for as long as possible in their individual bony shape. Wet bones (taolana lena) have not yet fallen into pieces since ‘fat’ (menaka) still keeps them together. Bones can be preserved for thousands of years when shut off from the air, but they may cease to be intact after a much shorter period.9 When no longer intact, they enter a condition termed ‘having become dry bones’ (taolana maina). West Bezanozano believe that bones become hard and well-formed during the lifetime of the person when he or she is well fed with highland food such as manioc or kidney beans. Good food and ageing, in the eyes of the people, make long-lasting, fat bones. After being buried

Figure 4.4 A tomb. Source: Christel Mattheeuws

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and wrapped, the shrouds should not be changed for at least thirty years, people say. They complain, however, that nowadays the ancestors ‘change’ within ten years. Among the reasons they give for this are that shrouds are no longer made of (traditional) silk – see also Green (1998). Silk shrouds are more permeable to fluids and are more cooling that new nylon shrouds, which results in over-heating. This can have significant consequences, particularly when an ancestor needs to be moved to a new tomb. If the individual bones of an ancestor have fallen apart and mixed with other ancestors, they cannot be moved to other tombs because people are afraid to move the incorrect bones and create a mix that should not occur. And not being able to be make such a move could spell the end of ancestorhood for a dead person, as he or she becomes forgotten by younger generations.10 The ‘eight bones’ appearing from the decomposition of the corpse are not, however, sufficient in themselves to make the dead into ancestors. Famadihana are needed. In the first place, the dead must be protected from the cold by being provided with new shrouds. Green (1998), who has focused on the meaning of the shrouds used to rewrap the dead among the Betsileo,11 observes that they are the most physical means of interaction between the dead and the living. The surficial work of clothing the dead is a humanising act. Shrouds represent humanness since they protect the dead and the ancestors against cold, dispersal, loss of identity, harm and disrespect. In West Bezanozano, bones must also be re-joined with the soul of the dead person wandering on the earth in order to prevent the soul from disintegrating and becoming part of the deadly forces of the earth. A famadihana is meant to make the dead become persons again and able to participate in the diversity of the realm of the ancestors after having been depersonalised by the processes of death, which cause corpses to fall apart and souls to wander around. In a cosmo-ecological sense, the west is the directional place of the dead earth. Adijady is the destiny of division: the separation of a new year from the old one, of present from the past, of an umbilical cord from a newborn or of the dead from the living through the process of funerals. The rupture created in the west has to be overcome so that new bodies can remain alive. People resolve this by bringing new bodies into a field of nurture and care where people, land, ancestors, sky and even the divine principle maintain and grow in accordance with one other (north) – see also Mattheeuws (2013: 217–218). A famadihana overcomes the separation between past and present, the rift between the souls of the dead and their body, so that the dead can partake again in the processes of continuous creation. Famadihana are rituals of birth and are preferentially held between the end of July and October (northwest). The structure of the grave expresses both the process of decomposing bodies in the darkness – which make the bones appear – and the processes of birth in the light to becoming ancestors – see Figure 4.4. A part of the grave is built below the (superficial) soil, where the corpses are laid to decay, and another part rises on and above the earth, where the ancestors dwell, yet remaining to be separated from the realm of the living, since they reside in the tomb. The living take care of the dead in order to ensure their continued existence – despite the dramatic rupture between earth and sky – while the

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ancestors bless the living in return. The living and the dead need each other and together form a dynamic whole.

The famadihana: a ritual for the dead helped by the living The famadihana is a blessing for the dead (tsodrano maty), with some customs (  fomba) and much astrology (andro, destinies). The ritual practices are simple, but the astrologer’s work is notably challenging, because he or she must keep the destinies of the dead and living separate, even when they both physically meet at the tomb. The astrologer keeps these destinies apart by holding the destiny of the famadihana very firmly as a mediating destiny in between the ones of the living in the village and the destinies of the dead at the tomb. The destiny of the famadihana is the astrological date on which the ritual starts, chosen by the astrologer. This date is held in place by way of the astrologer literally standing in this destiny when elevating the ritual space by staying in a house in this destiny during the events in the village or by placing staff in this destiny at the tomb.12 On the first day of the famadihana, the guests – wider family members and friends – play a vital role in the warm-up for the event. They offer money to the organisers, expressing their willing participation in the process of the famadihana. This willingness is reciprocated through the provision of a meal of rice and beef in a greasy stock to give a foundation to the forces that will be generated through the nocturnal feast. The actual famadihana is (astrologically) introduced by a traditional band around 5pm,13 the astrological time of procreation and regeneration, in the light of the declining sun as it reaches the earth (alasaty – see Figure 4.2). Bamboo flute melodies go with a rhythm of drums which produces a blunted sound akin to the pounding of rice or footsteps in the sand. The drumming represents the forces of the soil, while the flute corresponds with the reverberation of soil which can move freely, yet always back to the earth. The same interplay happens between the owners of the event and the guests. The crowd is impregnated with the subtle movements of the owners of the event, who appear and disappear from the house of the ancestors. The village activities happen in the courtyard of the ancestor-to-be’s house, where a ritual centre has been erected: the ‘the white house’, a wooden structure, covered with canvas. At around 7pm – the time of gestation (admizana) – a disco takes place, and the people dance through the evening and into the night. The nocturnal feast is a fusion of emerging ancestral earthly forces induced by the people who are packed together, singing, dancing and sweating in the white house, spreading the scent of the digesting food which has been harvested from the ancestral soil and injected by the subtle movements of the owners of the event. The sweat that is spread will be recognised by the wandering spirits of the dead and draw them to the place during the next day for the blessing of the shrouds. The blessing of the shrouds is the pivotal point of the famadihana when the destiny for the living in the village is turned into the destiny for the dead in the tomb. Around 11am, the eldest owner of the event appears from the house of the ancestors and enters the white house as the first person to dance, followed by

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other owners of the event. All of them are dressed in new clothes, and the women wear make-up and nail polish. The astrologer, who has been sitting in a particular house – that coincides in place with the destiny of the famadihana during the past twenty-four hours – comes into sight, too. Baskets filled with shrouds for the dead, as well as some mats and rum, are put on a table in the centre of the white house. As a blessing, rum is blown over the table and then in all directions so that the shrouds and the living are linked by this same blessing. A breeze passes the white house, causing the canvas to flap. The ritual time initiated by the blessing – between 11am and noon – is from the perspective of the dead, when the shadow in the west is about to disappear, giving leadership to the light in its culmination (adalo/alohotsy). It is the time when the danger of death is about to pass, when the last tears for the dead are shed (adalo). The single breeze that moves the canvas during the blessing marks the arrival of the spirits of the dead and the ancestors. Yet until the corpses are danced around the grave, the destiny of the dead will remain separate from that of the living by the destiny of the famadihana in which the ceremony takes place, with this separation held firm by the astrologer. The life force that appears in the culmination of the sun is set in motion when the shrouds are lifted on the heads of the children of the ancestors and moved in a swaying circular dance. Then, at a particular moment, they break out of the white house, led by the astrologer. The path to the tomb is the path of the dead to the grave, yet it is protected by the destiny of the famadihana. The opening of the tomb begins at 1pm, when the sacred destiny of the sun is about to decline (alahamady). The astrologer and some male children of the ancestors sit on the roof, observing what is going on. Other male children of the ancestors search for the dead to be rewrapped in the tomb, to take them out. The female children of the ancestors remain outside, unrolling the mats on which the corpses will be put. Both the female and male children of the ancestors will wrap the corpses in the new shrouds, which can take some time, until 2.30 or 3pm. When all the corpses are ready, they are rolled into the mats and taken on the shoulders by females and males. The astrologer takes his staff away from the destiny of the famadihana, opening the way to dance the corpses around the grave seven times, in correspondence with the seven steps from new to full moon and the rising, growing light through the darkness. It is an act to grow the life-giving forces of the dead. The dead are thus raised out of the decaying and deadly soil towards the sacred life-giving realm of the ancestors. In the tomb, they will no longer be put on the lowest level or on the ground but rather placed on a higher level. In this phase, the soul, caught by the shrouds, also joins with the new body. The living, who are dancing the corpses, are not in danger, and they are not to be afraid of the destiny for the dead since the shadow in the late afternoon appears in the east, away from the west, while the strength of the life-giving forces of the light in the west is already very old and weak by that time of the day. The rewrapped dead, now dwelling in the realm of the ancestors, will be able to give life to new bodies, places and activities whenever they are called on during blessings, appearing in step with the winter sun, ascending in the northeast at 9am.

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Surfaces of polarities in the famadihana Bloch (1971), who observed dispersed Merina family members gathered together at a tomb to regroup the living and the dead in the ancestral village, wrote that the famadihana helps create an illusion of corporeality and locality, considered an ideal form of society as remembered from the past. They create this illusion by ritually conquering everything that threatens family unity and continuity, expressed in the humiliation of women, who, according to Bloch, symbolise the negative dispersal of descent group members and individuality. Life, women and individual houses stand in contrast to the tomb in which the dead are depersonalised and regrouped when they enter the realm of the ancestors during a famadihana. Graeber (1995), in a review of the Merina famadihana, showed convincingly that there is no need to expel life (heat), individuality and movements of dispersal in order to create a contrasting realm of the tomb and the depersonalised unity of ancestors, as Bloch argues. The process of becoming an ancestor happens in life. Graeber describes how socially, historically, economically and also physically, the living establish and grow tombs, ancestral bodies and ancestral relationships. This is what I observed in West Bezanozano, but with the distinction that I did not note contrasting realms of the living and the dead but rather bipolar realities, as expressed by Sloterdijk (2011). Thus, bipolar worlds form the core of the West Bezanozano cosmo-ecology as a twinned source of life: a heavenly and an earthly, a double astronomical perspective of zenith and horizon and a double focus of astrological practices, creating time and place. The famadihana takes this bipolarity to extremes because in this ritual the living and the dead are literally brought together in an act of care. And it is in this sense of polarity, as constituent to perception and growth, that there is a striking correspondence with my observations and the ideas of Goethean anthroposophist Jaap van der Wal (2003) in ‘Dynamic Morphology and Embryology’. To consider van der Wal’s work in dialogue with beliefs of the West Bezanozano enriches an understanding of how bipolar realities operate in the most elemental aspects of life. In posing the question ‘Why do we see the head as round?’ – as it is phenomenally perceived – and juxtaposing this with how the head is understood through scientific analysis, as a morphology with ‘scores of protrusions, crests, ridges, and angular edges’ (ibid: 89), van der Wal critiques the reductionist procedures of conventional medical analysis and argues for a consideration of perception as holistic, dynamic and comparative. Through this approach, he considers the head, so that if we: start from the human skeleton or body as a whole and let our gaze wander from head to arms, back again to the head and then to the legs, back and forth, in short, if we regard the head in its polarity to the extremities, we will learn from the extremities how round the head or the skull really is. (ibid: emphasis added) Considering this polarity as intrinsic to perception and growth, van der Wal sees this dynamic sense of perception as expressed in the form of the lemniscate: ‘a

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“breathing” figure, one that transcends the polar one-sidedness of radius and circle (sphere) in a movement which connects both polarities’ (ibid: 115) and which ‘brings home how one pole is the other one turned inside out’ (ibid: 116). In considering this dynamic morphology, van der Wal asserts that there is no existence, no form which can be understood as singular, separable or static: ‘Bearing in mind that all shapes come into being through movement, we can postulate that the two poles are each one-sided manifestations of one single dimension which comprises and unites the movement (process) of both’ (ibid: 117). Therefore, van der Wal, informed by ‘the spirit of a Goetheanistic approach’ (ibid: 89), sets out his theory for a understanding of perception and growth as that which is bound up in a movement across and through polarities and whereby ‘Rhythm is a constant swing of the pendulum between the boundaries imposed by form and the radiating outwards of movement’ such that ‘Life is a process, a “breathing in and out” between poles. Life is rhythm.’ (ibid: 121). Indeed, this rhythm of polarity is notably evident in the lives of the West Bezanozano, where extremities and the head are the directions and intentionality of the body centre (breast and belly) where all the vital forces reside (heart, lungs, stomach, womb, intestines and so on). Limbs and head make the body grow, move, act, think, bind and develop as a living being-in-the-open. However, limbs and head would not have the force to do that without the vital forces generated in the body centre. Correspondingly, the relation between living and ancestors is conceived as the living being the bodily extremities and head, while the ancestors are their breath. They need the ancestors to make every place and construction alive during ceremonies of blessing. But this is only possible if the living have helped the dead towards ancestorhood ‘because the dead cannot move themselves physically’, as people say. While the corpse of a dead person is left alone and separated in the tomb in order to go through the stages of decomposition until the bones emerge, I understand the famadihana as a ritual whereby multiple bipolar interfaces of intimacy intercede and support each other, such as the direct kin and spouses who help to lift the dead, the guests and the organisers, the flutes and drums and the light and shadow. It is through their interactive movements that life breathes. This notion of life coincides with Ingold’s (2006, 2008) assertions that to think of life as being lived in the open presents a direct challenge to established western thought, which regards organisms as self-contained entities positioned within a distinct, surrounding environment. For Ingold, organisms are open to and enmeshed in their surrounds, and while life might bind and fuse together, it does not produce boundaries which are fixed or surfaces that are hermetic. Astrological phenomena present this sense of life fusing together with some particularity but yet affording growth through openness. As discussed, the famadihana is mediated by an astrological date, determined by the astrologer and incorporated through actions during the event. We can thus understand the destiny of the famadihana securely maintained by the astrologer as an astrological technique that forms the interface of life and death. It shapes what would be the invisible middle of the lemniscate. While the living and the dead each carry their own destinies, the astrologer carries both during their bodily movements at the famadihana.

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The literal meaning of the famadihana – ‘the turning’ – expresses the movements of individual lives as well as the interchanging of poles. Human beings are born on the earth and they become, in a continuous movement through the earth below the (superficial) soil after death, to then appear in the light again, as ancestors, with the aid of the living. The night becoming day, the winter becoming summer, the interplay of guests and owners of the event, the interactions of drums and flutes; they all unfold in a similar way and form subtle layers of the ongoing exhaling and inhaling of life. The crescendo of the event – when the dead are danced around the tomb without the protection of the destiny of the famadihana – allows the living to become part of creation and for the ancestors to become manifest, as they are elevated upon the shoulders of children. It is in this dance with the children that the ancestors are born. These occurrences follow the line of the lemniscate, akin to that of a Möbius strip, where surfaces are both front and back and inside and outside, in a continual process of turning.

Conclusion: inside and outside manifestations of life Whilst there is no direct translation for ‘surfaces’ in the Malagasy language, it is observable that wrapping the dead in shrouds, placing the them on mats and forming tombs around them could be understood as surficial work. However, a notion of surface as an outer layer or boundary that divides the world into stabilities of above and below, or superficial and deep, simply does not exist in West Bezanzano, because of the bipolar nature of their cosmo-ecology with these poles in a continual intertwinement. If surfaces can be thought of as polar facialities which manifest through turning, then this would make more sense in a West Bezanozano context. That is not to say that notions of inside and outside do not exist for the West Bezanozano; these notions do exist, but in a way more nuanced and layered than is often the case in western thought. The West Bezanozano consider the place where the living live on the earth to be part of the outside of the world existing in light and the earth itself as having a dark and shadowy interior. Therefore, the dead and their tombs are part of the inside, whether made visible or not. Whilst an elevated stone might stand on the earth in remembrance of a particular ancestor and carry living destinies that are in contrast to tombs, it is still part of the inner realm because stone is a material used for the dead. However, life on earth also has insides and outsides, and the sky is a world with inward and outward manifestations, such as night and day. Thus, the physical world has insides and outsides, such as with clay used to build houses or stone used to build tombs, and insides and outsides exist in realms of emotion, intuition, dreaming, shadows, spirits and so forth. Importantly, however, all realms with inner and outer manifestations can intersect with each other. For example, the invisible double of the living at the outside of the physical body is linked to the realm of the dead on the inside, while perceptions of life and death are in the medium of the sky and weather, whether eliminated or not. This gives a complex manifestation of emerging outer and inner realms that offer numerous ways of sensing the world, in the light and in the shadow (see also Lambek 2002).

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Figure 4.5 Inside and outside realities. Source: Christel Mattheeuws

It is remarkable that experiences of the outer and inner realms of the external world (the realm of the living) and the outer manifestations of the inner world (the material world of the dead) are familiar to local people and scholars alike. However, insights into the internal realm of the inside world vary greatly from person to person, and these are most frequently and deeply experienced by particular specialists. The internal realm of the inside world is the most secret and hidden dimension of the world’s becoming and is apparent only through revelations, dreams, visions and possession rituals. This realm is the most powerful manifestation of life, and the generative or destructive forces whose absorption occurs by ‘seeing’ them, or participating in them, require much protective medicine to be taken by all ritual participants. Every ritual that involves killing, like the sacrifice of a zebu as part of a circumcision ceremony, has to be cooled by many blessings. If a zebu is sacrificed in a ritual for the dead, it is even prohibited for people to see the slaughtering, as it needs to be performed by a specialist who can bear the forces of death. Furthermore, a person can only become an active healer, or an astrologer, having reached a point of maturity whereby their own life is sufficiently hardened to bear the powerful innermost forces of the inside. This realm of the world is seldom visible for most people, but it remains latent in elevated stones, tombs, sacred medicines, ritual instruments and the ritual centre, as well as in rice fields, marshes, rivers, stones and trees.

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Notes 1 E. Rakotomahay, personal communication, March 2016. 2 I am grateful to Michael Lambek, who pointed out in an email on 27 August 2015 the use of lafiky antany (a mat on the soil) by older Sakalava to present placing the corpse of the deceased sovereign on a mat rather than on the earth itself. 3 Extensive fieldwork 2000–2001 – followed by number of shorter visits in 2003–05, 2007, 2012, 2015–16 – was conducted mainly among the extended family of the Zanadroandrena but with many excursions into other places in West Bezanozano. 4 Merina are one of the eighteen official ethnic groups living on the central highland plateau. 5 Andriamanitra (Fragrant Prince) is the Highest Divine Principle, the Male Creator seated hidden and immobile in the zenith of the sky. 6 The twelve destinies are: i) Alahamady, the fire that makes life; ii) Adaoro, the soil made alive by the fire of Alahamady; iii) Adizaoza, the water flooding the land not knowing any obstruction; iv) Asorotany, the cold wind that brings snow or the owner of the jiny and the source of all the plants; v) Alasaty, child of Asorotany that brings the smoking fire; vi) Asombola, the land that gives the destiny to the people; vii) Admizana, the destiny of flat water; viii) Alakarabo, the stagnating wind, the wind that warms or the wind that makes fertile; ix) Alakaosy, the destiny of the fire that became ashes; x) Adijady, the destiny that locks and ties or the land that gives strong roots; xi) Adalo, the child of Adijady that holds the water strongly, the tears for the dead or the immobile and rotten water of a lake; xii) Alohotsy, the last destiny of the astrological year when the forces are exhausted, the lightest destiny in the cycle and called the ascending wind that lit the fire. 7 For a practical example of this, see Mattheeuws (2013: 209–211). 8 For a further discussion of this, see Ottino (1995: 119). 9 M. Pearson, personal communication, 2006. 10 An example of a disastrous mixture of ancestors is narrated in Graeber (1995). 11 Betsileo are one of the eighteen official ethnic groups living in the central mountains of the Vakinankaratra. 12 For a further discussion of these astrological matters, see Mattheeuws (2008: 234–272). 13 The hours of the day also carry destinies, starting with Alahamady at 1pm.

References Bloch, M. 1971. Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages, and Kinship Organisation in Madagascar. London: Seminar Press. Graeber, D. 1995. Dancing with corpses reconsidered: An interpretation of ‘famadihana’ (In Arivonimamo, Madagascar). American Ethnologist 22(2): 258–278. Green, R. 1998. Once Is Never Enough: Textiles, Ancestors and Reburials in Highland Madagascar. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Art Museum. Ingold, T. 2006. Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought. Ethos: Journal of Anthropology 71(1): 9–20. Ingold, T. 2007. Earth, sky, wind, and weather. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(1): 19–38. Ingold, T. 2008. Bindings against boundaries: Entanglements of life in an open world. Environment and Planning A 40(8): 1796–1810. Lambek, M. 2002. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York, NY: Palgrave McMillan. Mattheeuws, C. 2008. Towards an Anthropology in Life: The Astrological Architecture of Zanadroandrena Land in West Bezanozano, Madagascar. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen.

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Mattheeuws, C. 2013. Reading the future in the landscape: Astrology in Zanadroandrena Land, Central East Madagascar. In Sky and Symbol: Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Sophia Centre Conference 2011, eds. N. Campion and L. Greene. Bristol: Sophia Centre Press, pp. 203–227. Mattheeuws, C. 2018. In memory of Razafindrabe: A general ethnography of the astrologer’s skill in West Bezanozano, Central East Madagascar. Culture and Cosmos 22(1): 41–61. Ottino, A. 1995. First settlers, rice cultivation and the alliance with nature spirits: Agrarian rituals and the reproduction of the world-order in Madagascar. In L’étranger intime, mélanges offerts á Paul Ottino. Saint-Denis, Réunion: Université de la Réunion, pp. 117–141. Sloterdijk, P. 2011. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). van der Wal, J. 2003. Dynamic morphology and embryology. In Foundations of Anthroposophical Medicine: A Training Manual, eds. G. van der Bie and M. Huber. Edinburgh: Floris, pp. 87–160.

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Re-animating skin Probing the surface in taxidermic practice Petra Tjitske Kalshoven

I picked up a dead bird the other day, a Blackcap lying prostrate in a Manchester gutter. It looked and felt quite fresh and intact, and yet distinctly deflated. Not because it had been flattened by the car that must have swept it aside, but because the life had gone out of it. There was no breath left to animate it – literally, to put anima into it. Its chest had fallen, making it look weightless and very different from the animated creature I knew with its strong and melodious song. I marvelled nonetheless at the neatly folded wings and the delicate feathers, so much more interesting and intricate close-up. Some excitement pulsed through my veins as I wrapped the bird in a plastic bag and put it away in my rucksack, wondering whether I would be capable of putting some life back into the feathered skin, the tactile and aesthetically pleasing surface organ that envelops bird life while being intricately wrapped up in it. I had not tried my hand at such a small specimen before – the weekend courses in bird taxidermy that I had attended as part of an ethnography into craftsmanship were usually populated with members of the Corvidae family, which are easily available to instructors as vermin shot by gamekeepers and have a relatively sturdy skin that is not too difficult to strip off.

Surface as animated matter For bodily volume to be perceived and appreciated by probing minds and bodies, an outer layer is required: a skin or a surface delimiting a three-dimensional space. Surface matters because it reveals volume, creating shapes in what would otherwise be a cognitively and sensorially confusing mass of matter. But without volume, surface falls flat. The interdependence of surface and volume is particularly poignant in the skilled practice of taxidermy, where practitioners seek to convey lifelikeness by sculpting volume into an otherwise deflated skin which has been detached from the dead animal’s body. In creating an illusion of life, practitioners engage in an imaginative tour de force as they move between surfaces turned inside-out and real, simulated or imagined volumes. In this chapter, I will draw on my ongoing ethnographic inquiry into taxidermy in Britain and the Netherlands with a view to exploring the interdependence of volume and surface in what is essentially a practice of expert covering and uncovering. A recent tendency amongst scholars of taxidermy to dig beneath the surface and expose what hides inside the taxidermic object not only reveals a fascination with taxidermic technique and process, but could also be indicative of a modern suspicion

Re-animating skin 63 of the ‘superficiality’ of illusion. What I propose to do in this chapter, rather, is to approach skin and volume in taxidermy as informing one another. This includes paying attention to the memory of the discarded animal body that resides in its preserved skin and helps shape the volumes that practitioners create to support it. Interrelatedness of surface and volume has recently emerged as a theme in a number of publications that will help me in making this case for taxidermy. In Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media, Bruno (2014), a scholar of film and visual studies, discusses examples of what she calls ‘technological alchemy’, which occurs when things change medium – in particular when a physical object becomes an image in film. ‘With regard to materiality, I aim to demonstrate that the physicality of a thing one can touch does not vanish with the disappearance of its material but can morph culturally, transmuting into another medium. I like to call this technological alchemy’ (Bruno 2014: 7). She argues that surfaces may be thought of as vitalised by paying attention to their material aspects and how these morph (rather than disappear) when they are captured on film. Her focus is primarily on images, which she considers intimately connected to and indeed comparable with three-dimensional, palpable things. What is interesting for my purposes is that the notion of morphing is very pertinent in the process of making that underlies taxidermy, where dead animal bodies are turned into animal-objects by transposing a surface (the animal’s skin that remembers the original body’s shape) onto another medium (which replaces the original body). Also useful is that Bruno (2014: 93) conceives of surfaces as architectures that reveal texture, layers and depth. From this perspective, she analyses architectural and artistic engagements with surface, with a specific focus on the sartorial, leading her to think of surface as a fabric. A similar perspective is embraced from a historical point of view in a study of architectural and artistic surfaces animated by accessories that mimic the mineral, vegetal and animal in Papapetros’s (2012) On the Animation of the Organic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life. Key in the analysis is an assumption of life manifesting itself in objects, which Papapetros associates with notions of animism. He considers objects part of an ecology of life: ‘Although glacial and inorganic, modern artifacts are radiant and electric; they emanate magnetic powers and vibrate with energy, life, and desire of their own’ (ibid: viii). Claiming that a new kind of animism is occurring in contemporary object culture, Papapetros wishes to ‘reformulate the foundations for an animated epistemology of the surface’ (ibid: 31) by revisiting signs of animation of the inorganic in earlier times. He pays attention in particular to a fin-de-siècle fascination with accessories and hair extensions on antique or Renaissance sculptures that seem to take on movement. The ideas he presents are of interest to a discussion of taxidermy as a practice of animation, where dead organic materials are manipulated to look lifelike again through interventions that involve both organic and inorganic matter (see Kalshoven 2019).

The phenomenon of taxidermy Over the past decade or so, practising taxidermy, or at least dabbling in it, has become a rather fashionable pastime. Not only are amateurs trying their hand at

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an old craft – long considered somewhat sinister because of its association with death – but mounted skins are emerging from storage rooms and attics to make a comeback in museums, art galleries and private spaces. A renewed interest in natural history and materiality seems to have combined with a fad for Victoriana (cf. Henning 2007) and a return to curiosity (Bann 2003, 2007) in making taxidermy cross over from the natural history to the art gallery and to middle-class homes in Britain and north-western Europe whose inhabitants have a penchant for the trendy. A proliferation of coffee-table books has followed, featuring ethnographylite taxidermy narratives, artworks and conversation pieces, ranging from the Victorian to the contemporary and engaged (e.g., Purcell 1999; Snaebjörnsdóttir and Wilson 2006; Milgrom 2010; Eastoe 2012; Morris 2013; Turner 2013; Fuller 2014; van Soest 2014). As a phenomenon that may shed light on twenty-firstcentury sociocultural sensibilities, taxidermy also enjoys a presence in scholarly work on materiality and posthumanism in the Anthropocene (e.g., Asma 2001; Henning 2007; Patchett and Foster 2008; Lange-Berndt 2009; Patchett, Foster and Lorimer 2011; Poliquin 2012; Patchett 2015; Aloi 2018; Kalshoven 2018). Even though taxidermy seems to have gained greater acceptance in certain circles, keeping and displaying dead organic material in more or less lifelike poses that do not quite achieve the illusion of life remains an odd practice in many people’s eyes, as I found during my fieldwork. This is particularly the case when displays are not seen as part of a quest for scientific knowledge or its dissemination, as in contemporary art. Taxidermy intrigues because its surface appearance triggers a recognition of the real (the live animal), seemingly frozen in its entirety. And yet this surface appearance conjures up unpleasant associations with insalubrity, stuffiness and death and is at odds with what hides inside: in the process of creating a taxidermic animal-object – called a ‘mount’ by practitioners – the skinned body is replaced by a model, a morphologically correct form or ‘manikin’ fabricated from wood wool, polyurethane, balsa wood or foam. Troubling the boundaries between organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, surface and inside, real and fake, taxidermic animal-objects, with a physical indexicality to life that is ‘only’ skin-deep, provide provocative material to consider what surfaces do and to what extent they may or should be trusted in terms of epistemic value, that is, in terms of the knowledge they harbour or convey. As art historian Petra Lange-Berndt has suggested, in a fascinating book on taxidermy’s diachronic role in art, ‘mounts are utterly incomplete artefacts’ (2009: 29, my translation) – not quite nature and yet not not-nature, sculpted from a hybrid combination of materials. More recently, Giovanni Aloi (2018) has proposed the term ‘speculative taxidermy’ to emphasise the potential of certain contemporary artworks to act as interfaces that harness vital materialities in a bid to rethink human–non-human animal relations and ontologies. Aloi insists on taking taxidermic surfaces seriously by paying attention to the animal materials they are made of (ibid: 181). My approach here is an ethnographic one, seeking to understand the role these surfaces play in taxidermic practices of making and animating, and exploring how these practices complicate surface, both as a material substrate and as a concept, through manipulation of what goes on below the surface.

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Taxidermy as sculpting Practicing taxidermy involves a number of skill sets, including skinning, manikinmaking and modelling. Even though its name (a combination of the ancient Greek words ‘taxis’, order/arrangement, and ‘derma’, skin) refers to the skill of arranging skin, which distinguishes taxidermy from other practices that seek to preserve animal matter,1 a key skill involved in taxidermy is creating a volume over which skin may be draped. In other words, taxidermists sculpt. Sculpting occurs at different stages during the process of making: towards the end, when animal remnants (the skin, plus, depending on the species, a few bones and the skull) and substitute parts (such as the manikin and wires that provide stability and allow for the attaching of the extremities) are assembled to create the mount (or animal-object), but also, and importantly so, in preparing the artificial body (or manikin). Creating a manikin requires different ways of sculpting, depending on the materials the practitioner chooses to use (for details on manikin-making, see Kalshoven 2020). A manikin is either built up from soft materials such as wood wool, with the practitioner adding layers so that the surface continues to extend outwards (Figure 5.1), or it is carved down from firm materials, such as foam or balsa wood, with the practitioner cutting off layers, exposing a new surface with each removed layer, while working inwards. The former approach is associated

Figure 5.1 Creating manikins for a jackdaw out of wood wool, displayed next to the skinned body. Source: Petra Tjitske Kalshoven

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with intuition and flexibility, allowing for adaptation along the way. The latter approach is associated with a precision achieved through the taking of detailed measurements from the dead animal’s body, which are then transposed onto the manikin. Taxidermists consider carving down a less forgiving method than building up, but its advantage lies in the possibility to create more precise detail on the manikin’s surface. Rather than sculpting a manikin themselves, practitioners can also buy pre-fabricated polyurethane manikins that are available from specialised suppliers for a multitude of different species. Even when a pre-fabricated manikin is used, however, this often needs to be adapted – carved down or built up – to fit a particular skin. In all cases, taxidermists use clay to add detail to the manikin once it has been shaped and before the skin is stretched over it. The manikin is modelled after the body that is detached from its skin. In taxidermy, then, the ‘bundles of lines’ (Ingold 2007a: 64, 83, drawing on Deleuze) that are living feathered birds and furry animals are robbed of the nerves and blood vessels that constituted paths of life extending outward, connecting with the world. In creating an illusion of life instead, practitioners engage in a handson and imaginative tour de force as they slice open, invert, empty out, fill up, reinvert and stitch up skins. Some real challenges present themselves when the skin of a specimen is turned inside-out in separating it from the rest of its body. With birds in particular, the novice tends to be confused by the resulting mass of skin and feathers, presenting the ‘wrong’ surface and forcing the practitioner to visualise what wing or leg is supposed to sit or come out where – having lost the familiar sense of the relation between surface and volume, the novice has difficulty tracking where the limbs used to be situated in relation to the normally perceptible surface. Once bits of grease and fat have been scraped off and products for preservation applied to the dermis, the skin is supposed to be closed around the previously prepared replacement body – the manikin – without leaving traces of the arduous work that came before. Taxidermy is thus a process of restoration of a former life to a lifelike state. To what extent taxidermy is successful as a process of displaying specific organic materials (animal skin) that indeed connote ‘the real’, that is, an animal, is a matter of surface effect; the overall impression of a mount in terms of lifelikeness, however, depends on a successful interaction between a healthy-looking surface and a convincing posture. As we will see in the examples I present subsequently, not all practitioners strive for a realistic-looking mount, and the volumes they sculpt correspond in varying measures to the anatomies of living creatures, depending on the goal of preservation. Key, however, is that these volumes will be re-covered by the ‘original’ skin – a skin that has been carefully cleaned and prepared and has thus become in many ways a different surface, ready to defy the ravages of time.

Surface illusion exposed Part of the recent artistic and scholarly engagement with taxidermy takes pleasure in re-removing the skin and exposing the artifice involved in taxidermy by emphasising the materials and skill that go into the process of making mounts,

Re-animating skin 67 drawing attention away from the surface to what hides inside the skin – that is, to the manikin. The epistemic value of these artefacts is thus situated under the surface rather than in any direct sensual, ‘surficial’ encounter with the mount. Several natural history museums now include cases displaying the taxidermist’s tools and training credentials (e.g. Basel Natural History Museum) or show video clips revealing ‘the making of’ (Natural History Museum at Tring 2016). An initiative with arts institutions in Lancashire (including Rossendale Museum, Rawtenstall) had historian and taxidermy connoisseur Pat Morris performing x-rays on antique pieces, uncovering the wires but also the stories that went into their making.2 There is some resonance here with an interesting debate on interrelations between restoration, copying and surfaces in a recent volume entitled Coping with the Past: Creative Perspectives on Conservation and Restoration (Gagliardi, Latour and Memelsdorff 2010). Reacting to a paper by Carlo Ginzburg, Joseph Leo Koerner points out that art museums have a tendency ‘to approach the original work of art as not fundamentally constituted by its visible surface, its final paint-layer, but as something else, by showing the public things that they can’t physically see’, for example, by using infrared to show underdrawings (in Ginzburg 2010: 147). Koerner suggests that the museum reinforces its authority by showing that it has the power, in possessing the original, to provide the public with access to the original’s very materiality, something that would not be possible with a reproduction, however expertly done. Showing underdrawings allows the museum to insist on the material authenticity of the paintings in its collection. In my example of taxidermy, the inverse is seen to happen, as authenticity is undermined rather than reinforced by delving beneath the mount’s surface, as this spoils the primary goal of taxidermy, which is to convey an illusion of life. In both cases, however, it is important to note that surface alone does not inspire adequate trust – which ties into a tendency to deconstruct and lay bare surficial rhetorics, such as those performed in taxidermy. Moreover, stripping skins off a manikin can also be an expression of protest: trophy heads in particular have been reappropriated strategically and performatively to tell stories about all that is seen as wrong about Victorian imperialism or about environmental destruction manifested by the extinction of species and natural habitats. Artistic examples of such acts of exposure include re-assembled, painted or stripped manikins that are displayed naked – so-called ‘botched taxidermy’ (Baker 2000: 55ff, 2006; cf. Lange-Berndt 2009: 183).3 Exposing the mount’s morphology, insisting on the process rather than on the product of making, plays into a trope in the anthropology of skill, which draws on insights from phenomenology and on the thingness of material culture to explain how materials in a perpetual flux can congeal and become things, as they are caught up in a web of relations, and then fall apart again as they decay (cf. Ingold 2007b). However, in the case of taxidermy, exposing this process through, as it were, a processual deconstruction of mounts reveals not only an interest in process but also an insistence on the artefactual nature of what used to be a living being, thus breaking the illusion of the lifelike that practitioners seek to convey. It is the apparatus inside, the morphology of the crafted animal-object, that gives

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it away as a cultural object, a lifeless artefact rather than an animal that was once alive. This approach of exposing the artifice, then, seems to insist on an ontological distinction between a deceptive outside and a truthful inside (cf. Miller 2005: 32–33, on depth ontology). In other words, exposing the mount’s inside could be seen to be indicative of a modern suspicion of the ‘superficiality’ of illusion. It could also be considered less inimical to surface impressions, however, if we approach it as a play with different surfaces, enabling new encounters as layers get peeled off – the latter is the perspective that I embrace in this chapter. What I wish to do, then, is to bring our attention back to the neatly stitched-up specimens whilst emphasising the close connections between perceptible surfaces and the volumes that sustain them. In other words, I will conceive of the skilled practice of taxidermy as an engagement with different volumes that seeks to show off multi-layered surface materials in order to achieve specific goals. I will draw on my encounters with taxidermists in presenting two examples taken from different realms of practice, one offering a naturalistic and the other an artistic perspective on ‘skin arrangements’ and how these may help us theorise surfaces.

Naturalistic perspective: trophy heads I first met Maurice Bouten at an event organised by the UK Guild of Taxidermists in Derbyshire in March 2011 and subsequently visited him several times at the Dutch company Bouten & Son in Venlo, the Netherlands. Maurice is the ‘son’ in Bouten and Son, a fourth-generation taxidermist in the family business and a former world champion in making roebuck trophy heads (see Marvin 2010 for an ethnography of hunters and their attachment to trophy heads). The firm, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2018, has its premises in the most southern province of the Netherlands, close to the German and Belgian borders. The boss, Maurice’s father Leon, employs around twelve people, most of these on a parttime basis. The firm is a hub of activity and nicely illustrates the kind of traffic in things and materials that goes on in commercial taxidermy: old and tatty mounts from museums in Dublin, Brussels or Leiden are trucked in, restored and sent back. Hunters bring in skins from big game safaris in Africa; most of these travel on to Leipzig for tanning and then come back for expert mounting. Pre-fabricated polyurethane manikins produced by American companies are flown in and sold on, with the firm acting as a distributor. Maurice Bouten has also designed lines of manikins himself, out of a feeling of dissatisfaction with the quality of those available on the market. Because of his reputation in creating award-winning, lifelike illusions grounded in expert craftsmanship, Maurice had been invited by the UK Guild to give a demonstration at its annual conference. Guild events privilege an exchange of know-how and skill, particularly important with a recent influx of new members – an increase of 10% had occurred over the previous few years, with membership numbers rising to around 220. This is from my notes as I watched Maurice mounting a ‘trophy head’, the head of a roebuck shot by a hunter, using a pre-fabricated manikin (Figure 5.2).

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Figure 5.2 Maurice Bouten, 2011 roebuck head demonstration, UK Guild of Taxidermists. Source: Petra Tjitske Kalshoven

Maurice starts out with a skin that has already been prepared for him. The roebuck’s face is lifeless and blind – it is eyeless and flaccid, just a skin with nothing inside to support it; its antlers have been mounted onto a creamy white, almost translucent polyurethane manikin that is waiting to be covered.

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Petra Tjitske Kalshoven The manikin is a solid, smooth shape that mimics the contours of a deer’s head and neck, without the ears but with spaces foreseen for artificial eyes. Maurice begins moulding the skin into shape, beginning with the ears. He is putting polyester paste into the ears to make them stand up. He works the paste underneath the skin and then turns to the outside to comb the hair inside the ears with his fingers. Sculpting them, brushing, trimming, sculpting. Before the skin is stretched over the manikin, Maurice applies clay to its face to simulate a muscle that sits in front of the ear to make it twitch. Clay is applied around the eyes as well. Maurice tells the audience that he tries to manipulate the skin over the manikin in such a way that it looks as if the animal has more hair. It needs to look full and lush. The skin is draped over the manikin and stapled onto it with an electric stapler. The manikin protrudes through the animal’s mouth as the skin is loosely folded over it. Maurice pushes the skin, applying force where necessary. He massages the neck, a tender gesture followed by the harsh sound of the stapling. He caresses, staples, caresses, staples, cuts off some excess skin. Don’t tuck in the lower lip too much, he cautions, as it will look as if the deer has no teeth. He knocks on the ears for us to hear that the epoxy paste has properly hardened. He puts a plastic cover over it for the night.

Maurice loves experimenting with the aim of making his mounts look more lifelike: which is, he told me, a matter of looking closely whilst skinning, studying muscles, flesh, skin, mucus, making one cast after another from dead animals and parts of them, studying and drawing where wrinkles sit as muscles twitch. When I visited the company’s premises in March 2013, he worked on a new line for a fallow deer and was making casts for its lips and tongue, showing me how he would mimic the nose, either in a neutral position or sniffing, and how he would create real depth by drilling into the cast for the nose to simulate nostrils (Figure 5.3). He grabbed a torch to shine into the nostrils of one of his mounts to show me how deep the holes went. Maurice was intent on creating an animated surface, which was not simply a matter of using formerly alive material to cover an artificial manikin. Rather, the animation on the surface came about by work done in between skin and manikin. The skin needed to be draped in such a way that it revealed a memory of the shape that sat there before through small clues such as the bits of clay added by Maurice onto the manikin, or the nostrils that allowed the skin to be folded in – creating a surface that, rather than being smooth, suggested the relief and folds of life, as a surface organically connected to its volume. The ripples on the skin change, he said, when the ear moves forward – so if the ear is positioned forward, corresponding animation must show in the fur. Maurice was not only concerned with modelling an anatomical reality – he was also working the surface with a view to conveying health, strength and movement in his still lifes, striving for an impression, common in competitive taxidermy, that could be considered hyper-real or ideal. In particular for competitions, taxidermists work with the best-looking specimens, as judges will not look kindly upon mounts that show ‘flaws’. In many of the conversations I had, a specific

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Figure 5.3 Maurice Bouten, cast of deer nostrils. Source: Petra Tjitske Kalshoven

perspective on aesthetics went unquestioned and became conflated with the natural and lifelike. Moreover, in creating an illusion of life, the focus is firmly on a visual impression: once finished and dried, mounts feel hard to the touch when probed beyond plumage or fur. Maurice mentioned this as a problem with pets, which, when mounted to look naturalistic, are no longer suitable for cuddling. An alternative would be soft preparation, sometimes requested by blind clients, which involves using soft-tanned hides and a filling of wood wool, foam and cotton wool in restoring the dead pet’s tactility. Serving display purposes, mounts often live within the protection of a glass enclosure, which means that sensory engagement with taxidermic objects beyond the visual is mostly the privilege of the crafter – the faber – for whom I would argue that surface acts most fully as a fabric, as layers are revealed and added (cf. Bruno 2014) – and yet, the goal of the crafter is to create an illusion of tactility for those viewing as their eyes roam over the mount’s undulating surface (cf. Marks 2000, on haptic visuality). The tactile and sensual experience of working with these organic materials, which become a fabric as they are being worked, was mentioned as an incentive in learning taxidermy by several of the novices that I met. Collector Errol Fuller, who is almost exclusively interested in Victorian taxidermy (interview June 2015, Kent), offered rare praise for contemporary work

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in discussing Maurice Bouten’s creations. In a house filled to the brim with Victorian cabinets and domes, a shoulder mount of a red deer by Bouten is tucked away in the attic – not because it is not worthy of being seen, but because its presence is too overwhelming. Writing that taxidermy is similar to sculpting, Fuller suggests that it adds an additional challenge to the best craftspeople striving for naturalistic reality because of the constraints of the skin that must be fitted onto the sculpted manikin – something that helps mediocre taxidermists cover up flaws. For a practitioner such as Maurice Bouten, however, ‘the skin becomes an additional nuisance – a nuisance that needs to be bent to his will’ (Fuller 2014: 245). Fuller’s perspective is at odds with anthropological analyses of crafting that emphasise a more fluid exchange between maker and materials, as in Ingold’s critique of a ‘hylomorphic model’ that implies a form or design being forced upon matter (Ingold 2011: 178). Maurice’s practice of interworking surface and volume did include instances where he needed to intervene forcefully in making radical adjustments, but he did not refer to skins as annoying materials on which he needed to impose his will. He told me the story of a giraffe that had been shot in Africa and was sent as a skin, alongside measurements, to the company. Maurice stuck to these measurements in sculpting the manikin, but ran into problems when the neck turned out to be too long as a result of the posture the client had asked for. It’ll fit, he thought, but then he spent a full day trying to sew up a leg with the skin getting tighter and tighter. Maurice and his assistants kept readjusting the skin, pulling it up and down until they were finally forced to give up. The leg was undone, and an additional two days’ work in fitting and sewing was required. The skin proved a constraint indeed, forcing Maurice to readjust his manikin and the posture that threatened to burst out of the envelope. And yet, this constraint could be said to keep him on the right track, remaining faithful to the animal whose imprint was preserved in its skin – an endeavour that was meant to lead, ultimately, to a believable, lifelike-looking result. Particularly interesting in Maurice’s practice was the forceful and yet at times tender interaction with the skin that made it come alive by connecting it to different sets of volumes: manikins he designed himself, bits of clay bringing in detail and a lush, voluminous appearance arrived at by working the fur and creating depth. Maurice sought to re-animate a surface in interplay with a series of volumes that added depth and layers (cf. Bruno 2014 on surfaces as architectures), presenting an illusion of animation meant to enable humans to embrace the animal-object in exploring an ecology of life (cf. Papapetros’s 2012 call for an animated epistemology of the surface).

Artistic perspective: Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren The constraints involved in taxidermy-as-sculpture also arose in discussions at the art studio Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren (visits April and September 2015; Figure 5.4). In a former slaughterhouse for horses in Haarlem, the Netherlands, former art directors Jaap Sinke and Ferry van Tongeren have set up a taxidermy studio that has drawn international attention in only a few years of producing work. In 2015, Damien Hirst bought their entire output for incorporation into

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Figure 5.4 Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren studio, detail. Source: Petra Tjitske Kalshoven

his MurderMe collection. Theirs is an artistic endeavour in which they seek to follow their own path on the way to success and satisfaction, after having spent years in the advertising business and having had to wax poetic – as Sinke put it – at the taste of strawberry jam. Two fashionably bearded men with a passion

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for craftsmanship and aesthetics, Sinke and Van Tongeren revel in the beauty of feathers and how their colour and appearance can be further enhanced – not by striving for a ‘naturalistic’ effect as Maurice and most ‘traditional’ taxidermists, as Sinke and Van Tongeren put it, would privilege, but by accentuating a bird’s posture in stretching the limits of what would be anatomically possible. Moreover, they would look for eyes that match fur or plumage rather than reality, using antique props and ornaments in creating supports and framings. Sinke pointed to a crane with chicks, its hind leg stretching back gracefully – not a striking bird in itself, he said, but it’s the movement that makes it interesting. One of the pair’s art pieces is a ‘real life’ re-enactment of Dutch painter Jan Baptist Weenix’s seventeenth-century still life of a dead swan (see Fuller 2014: 274– 275). Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art were inspirations, they explained, because of the emphasis on beauty, elegance and experimentation with movement rather than ‘naturalistic’ realism – connoting the animation Papapetros (2012) situated in the surficial. Sinke and Van Tongeren pointed out that they were influenced by the use of ‘contrapposto’ in sculpture. From the mid-fifth century BC onwards, Greek sculptors, notably Pheidias, Polykleitos and Praxiteles (Richter 1974: 112–149), experimented with this skill of twisting a body to make it show off all its best parts – letting a hip drop, turning up the corresponding shoulder and relaxing the knee. Why would anyone make the effort constructing a well-turnedout mount with all the skill sets that go into it (sculpting, skinning, even being a hair dresser), Sinke and Van Tongeren asked provocatively, only to display it in a dull and conventional manner, sitting motionless on a branch? Van Tongeren had trained with a seasoned professional before he launched the taxidermy venture with Sinke, who was mostly involved in the finishing of mounts, such as the painting in of details on exposed skin. To what extent, I asked, thinking of my discussions with Maurice, does the material allow contortions and flamboyancy and still yield a believable result? Well, they said, you’d still have the body to study its anatomy – and besides, after all is said and done, the skin needed to fit back on. ‘Anyone can see when something looks wrong; you just know. The body will dictate what you can do’. As in Maurice’s example of the stubborn giraffe skin, then, the remnants of the animal-to-be-mounted put limits on what can be done to its recreation. The memory of the body, or rather the memory of its shape, can be thought of as being embedded in the skin. The skin, a surface that never becomes completely detached from the discarded body precisely because of this material memory, animates the mount even as it gets pushed to its anatomical limits. Key in achieving unusual postures, Sinke insisted, was an expertly sculpted manikin. A successful mount could not be achieved without the proper volume over which to drape the skin. Many taxidermists would buy pre-fabricated manikins that, he felt, led to a homogenised product. In our case, he said, because we explore the limits of a pose, each manikin must be created by hand. For small animals, this may be a matter of first creating a frame and then building up with wood wool and clay. For larger volumes, a mould would be created, cast from the animal itself. This was how they proceeded for a project involving horse heads.

Re-animating skin 75 From each mould, a cast would be created that would subsequently be carved down and built up for detail. Two of the horse heads were sitting on a desk, one covered in skin, the other still a naked cast with veins added to its surface. They were meant to receive baroque hairdos, for which Van Tongeren hoped to use horse tails that he was softening down with conditioner. With their eye firmly on surficial aesthetics, Sinke and Van Tongeren insisted on an appropriately fashioned supporting volume needed to create the desired contrapposto, still anchored in the body’s physiology – a physiology of which they sought to stretch the limits in exploring what it could achieve rather than what it would do in real life. Thus, the pair were expanding on memories of movement lodged in the skin, enriching these with memories of movement lodged in art traditions with which they were familiar and with ornaments and framings contingent with an earlier, more baroque period. In the meetings I had with the pair, they showed themselves well aware of other artists embracing taxidermy with a view of conveying messages on inequality in human-animal relations or of offering a critique of scientific classification, often by using recycled or ‘fake’ mounts.4 What set Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren apart, they suggested, was the absence of a message other than the importance of beauty in a world that they felt had its abundant share of ugliness. But if elegance is primarily a matter of body posture and reality is of secondary importance, the awkward constraint of ‘skin’ may be avoided altogether by substituting organic surface materials by synthetic ones – with the added advantage of moving away from the controversy of working with once-living bodies that may have met a violent death. If elegant posture is your goal, I asked, do you actually need animal remnants as indispensable crafting materials? No, Van Tongeren replied immediately. But as we continued our discussion, he had second thoughts, and it turned out that Sinke and Van Tongeren would not be particularly interested in crafting a piece from non-organic materials – in particular, birds’ plumage, they felt, cannot be outdone. They failed to be impressed by the surface quality of a gorilla, crafted by museum taxidermist Wendy Christensen out of yak and artificial hair, that had recently triumphed as a ‘re-creation’ at the World Taxidermy Championships (Christy 2015). Judging by the photos they had seen, they felt it just did not look convincing. Besides, Van Tongeren added, materials did matter also from the customers’ point of view, as people were either intrigued or repulsed by the ‘real thing’. More recent work from the Haarlem studio showed a rather different material expression. Drawing on his expertise in and fascination with photography, Sinke had been experimenting with images of bird skins soaking in a solution in the workshop’s large white cleaning basin. Presenting this new work as ‘Unknown Poses’, the artists write on their website: ‘While these empty skins float in the soapy water, they seem to be revived back into life, performing a sort of graceful water ballet’ (Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren 2019). Surprisingly, the pair did not consider this output intrinsically different from taxidermy in the round. Central again, they said, was craft. ‘It shows part of the process involved in mounting’, Sinke explained. ‘These animals have to take a bath anyway, right here in the

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studio. Besides, it is again posture that takes the lead, as these floating skins will assume graceful shapes’. Van Tongeren elaborated on how the milky substance of the soapy water interacted interestingly, almost dreamily, with the striking colours of the floating plumage. ‘These are skins after all’, Sinke added, a remark that resonated with Bruno’s ‘technological alchemy’, with which she refers to an image’s materiality as enduring in another medium, such as photography or film. Bruno (2014: 128) suggests that it is light that affords the transformative movement from one medium to another, as all objects, subjects and surfaces are held together and at the same time revealed by an envelope of light that lends them yet another surface. Whilst these floating shapes lacked a manikin, they afforded a different experience with volumes interacting: the milky water allowing for sufficient transparency for the skins to be visually present and constitute a surface.

Surface and volume constituting one another The encounter that practitioners seek to enable between a preserved animal and a hunter, an art collector or a museum visitor takes place on the surface, experienced as alluringly real and material since it is an organic remnant of the dead animal: its skin. Expertise and effort go into the draping and sculpting of this skin. As became apparent from the ethnographic examples, skin is both an enabling factor, as it carries forward in time organic remnants as well as the memory of the animal it held, and a constraining factor, as it puts limits on the practitioner’s sculpting of volumes. The skin must fit: a taxidermic mount can work its magic of illusion only when the skin is neatly stitched up, presenting a convincing outer layer. But surface, as I argued, is a matter of volume. Taxidermists, despite their expertise in draping skin, conceive of morphology, knowledge of shape and volume, as ontologically prior in conveying life. My discussion partners emphasised the importance of an expertly sculpted, organically connected manikin in achieving an illusion of animation. They readily shared peeks into the material substrates that allow skins to convey life, movement and elegance – substrates that themselves come about through moulding, casting, arranging, sculpting, carving and adding details, revealing new surfaces as the crafter proceeds, either inwards or outwards. Even within the surficial, layers and depth become apparent, as work takes place in preparing and in connecting the dermis to the reworked surface of the manikin or in positioning it in a milky bath – surfaces that may remain hidden from view in the end product but play important parts in guiding processes of making. ‘Surface’ is a conceptual category that enables humans to make sense of their environment. As a reality, it may recede, catch the light and open up, always caught in a jumble of interrelating volumes that practitioners must negotiate. I took the Blackcap out of the freezer. Its wings sat tightly frozen and it looked deader than when I picked it up, quite flat and lacklustre. A few feathers came off, and in my unskilled hands, things did not bode well for the years to come.

Re-animating skin 77

Acknowledgements Part of the fieldwork informing this chapter was made possible by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant that I received in 2012–13, for ‘Mastership in taxidermy: artistic interventions in human – animal ontologies’. I am indebted to the expert practitioners I worked with for demonstrating their skill and sharing their insights with me.

Notes 1 As, for example, erosion moulding, which is not considered taxidermy in the strict sense as it involves positioning a dead animal in a mould in which perishable matter, including skin, is dissolved whilst hairs get trapped in resin that replaces the original body and skin. 2 See the New Light on Old Bones research project: https://newlightmanchester.wordpress. com. Cf. Morris (2010). 3 Not all manikins stripped by artists are meant to expose the problematic nature of humananimal relations. Aberdeenshire artist David Blyth, for example, celebrates taxidermy as a skill by displaying old manikins naked and contributing new ones in a show of disarming vulnerability; see: http://sca-net.org/articles/view/strange-attractor-a-conversationbetween-david-blyth-petra-tjitske-kalshoven-and-alana-jelinek. 4 For example, American artist Mark Dion’s recreations of endangered species such as polar bears, presenting a critique of human-environment relations (Lange-Berndt 2009: 152–164; cf. Sheehy 2006; and Kalshoven 2015: 567–566), or French artist Annette Messager’s recycled sparrows, discussed by Lange-Berndt (2009: 90–119) as an expression of feminist activism.

References Aloi, G. 2018. Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Asma, S.T. 2001. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baker, S. 2000. The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion Books. Baker, S. 2006. You kill things to look at them: Animal death in contemporary art. In Killing Animals, eds. The Animal Studies Group. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 69–98. Bann, S. 2003. The return to curiosity: Shifting paradigms in contemporary museum display. In Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. A. McClennan. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 117–130. Bann, S. 2007. Ways Around Modernism. Abingdon: Routledge. Bruno, G. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Christy, B. 2015. Taxidermy. National Geographic, August, pp. 94–105. Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren. 2019. Unknown Poses: Art Prints Collection by Sinke & van Tongeren. URL: www.finetaxidermy.com/unknown-poses [Accessed: 10 June 2019]. Eastoe, J. 2012. The Art of Taxidermy. London: Pavilion Books. Fuller, E. 2014. Voodoo Salon. London: Stacey International. Gagliardi, P., B. Latour and P. Memelsdorff (eds.) 2010. Coping with the Past: Creative Perspectives on Conservation and Restoration. Florence: Casa editrice Leo S. Olschki.

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Ginzburg, C. 2010. Invisible texts, visible images. In Coping with the Past: Creative Perspectives on Conservation and Restoration, eds. P. Gagliardi, B. Latour and P. Memelsdorff. Florence: Casa editrice Leo S. Olschki, pp. 133–160. Henning, M. 2007. Anthropomorphic taxidermy and the death of nature: The curious art of Hermann Ploucquet, Walter Potter, and Charles Waterton. Victorian Literature and Culture 35: 663–678. Ingold, T. 2007a. Lines: A Brief History. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2007b. Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 1–16. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Kalshoven, P.T. 2015. Beyond the glass case: Museums as playgrounds for replication. In The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, eds. S. Macdonald and H.R. Leahy, Volume 4: Museum Media, ed. M. Henning. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 553–575. Kalshoven, P.T. 2018. Gestures of taxidermy: Morphological approximation as interspecies affinity. American Ethnologist 45(1): 34–47. Kalshoven, P.T. 2019. What Animates? Imaginations of the Lifelike. Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology, in Life/Nonlife: a forum. July 2019. Kalshoven, P.T. 2020. Nature’s inner workings: Manikins and the lifelike in contemporary taxidermy. In 3D Modelling: Bodies and Buildings in Anthropology, Anatomy and Architecture, ed. E. Hallam. Abingdon: Routledge [Contracted for the series Anthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception, series editor Tim Ingold]. Lange-Berndt, P. 2009. Animal Art: Präparierte Tiere in der Kunst, 1850–2000, edition metzel. Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber. Marks, L.U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marvin, G. 2010. Living with dead animals? Trophies as souvenirs of the hunt. In Hunting: Philosophy for Everyone: In Search of the Wild Life, ed. N. Kowalsky. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 107–118. Milgrom, M. 2010. Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Miller, D. 2005. Materiality: An introduction. In Materiality, ed. D. Miller. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–50. Morris, P.A. 2010. A History of Taxidermy: Art, Science and Bad Taste. Ascot: MPM Publishing. Morris, P.A. 2013. Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy. London: Constable. Natural History Museum at Tring. 2016. Colour in the Collections: Bird Taxidermy. URL: www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/bird-taxidermy.html [Accessed: 10 June 2019]. Papapetros, S. 2012. On the Animation of the Organic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Patchett, M. 2015. Witnessing craft: Employing video ethnography to attend to the morethan-human craft practices of taxidermy. In Video Methods: Social Science Research in Motion, ed. C. Bates. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 71–94. Patchett, M. and K. Foster. 2008. Repair work: Surfacing the geographies of dead animals. Museum and Society 6(2): 98–122. Patchett, M., K. Foster and H. Lorimer. 2011. The biogeographies of a hollow-eyed harrier. In The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie, ed. S.J.M.M. Alberti. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, pp. 110–133. Poliquin, R. 2012. The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Purcell, R. 1999. Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Re-animating skin 79 Richter, G.M.A. 1974. A Handbook of Greek Art: A Survey of the Visual Arts of Ancient Greece. Seventh Edition. London: Phaidon Press [originally published in 1959]. Sheehy, C.J. (ed.) 2006. Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the University as Installation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Snaebjörnsdóttir, B. and M. Wilson. 2006. Nanoq: Flat Out and Bluesome: A Cultural Life of Polar Bears. London: Black Dog Publishing. Turner, A. 2013. Taxidermy. London: Thames & Hudson. van Soest, A. 2014. Raamslachtoffers. ’s-Gravenzande: Drukkerij van Deventer.

6

The temporality of surfaces Cristián Simonetti

Encountering depths across surfaces Surfaces pervade our understandings of the universe, earth, life and humanity. Moving from the inner space of the earth to the outer space of the cosmos requires crossing defined layers that we imagine divide the atmosphere. The ground and the sea constitute the primary surfaces we cross each time we wish to explore the interstices of our planet. Membranes and skins encapsulate the source of life, emotions and thoughts of sentient and intelligent beings. Similarly, the essence of things and the complicated inner workings of information technologies tend to be hidden underneath smooth and opaque surfaces. All these surfaces entwine with particular ways of conceiving time. Science and humanities scholars of all sorts have to cross boundaries to understand the history of the universe, earth, life and humanity. As astronomers point their telescopes up to the sky, geologists hammer into rocks, biologists search for a genome under their microscopes or psychologists dialogue their way into people’s minds, they all search for a past deeply hidden beyond surfaces. Interestingly, the historical resemblances between these temporal processes are enormous. One has been particularly systematic, namely those that exist between the surfaces of the earth and of the mind. Sciences that excavate the past tend to conceptualise the study of the past as an exploration that removes surfaces in a downward direction. These sciences visualise time as a sequence of layers accumulated vertically from bottom to top. Common not only in the geosciences, but also adopted throughout the twentieth century by the social sciences and the humanities, this view has worked as a conceptual foundation for important academic debates. Drawing on ethnographic work with scientists that excavate the past as well as an analysis of the development of the visual language of disciplines that have adopted a stratigraphic view of time, I show how knowledge in the social sciences and the humanities became enclosed by surfaces, providing a frame for discussion among rival approaches. Similarly, I reveal how both the mind and the brain have been understood stratigraphically, matching hierarchical notions of interdisciplinarity, where disciplinary knowledge accumulates sequentially, from hard facts to soft knowledge. In relation to narratives of occlusion discussed in the introduction to this volume, I reveal the development of a paradoxical relationship within contemporary understandings of surfaces. While partially responsible for creating non-democratic and hierarchical views of knowledge, surfaces are

The temporality of surfaces 81 also offered as an alternative to the modern emphases on occlusion. This can be observed in established critiques of modernity that attempt to dissolve occlusion by setting up a surface ontology, whereby essences are simply brought back to the surface. Challenging these attempts, I conclude by emphasising the need to distinguish superficial from surficial knowledge. Unlike the former, surficial knowledge grows out of sensuous engagement with surfaces, in ways that are responsive to movement and gesture. Unfolding in a world in constant formation, surficial knowledge becomes profound through enskilment.

Mental and terrestrial surfaces Traditionally, the body has been conceived of as divided from its surroundings by the surface of the skin. Yet a long history of resemblances exists in Western science between our understandings of the inner workings of the body and the outer workings of the world. Let me start by providing an example from the work of Nicolaus Steno, one of the grounding fathers of geology, known as the first to formulate the principle of superposition in 1669, according to which soils arrange sequentially from bottom to top as a result of gravity. Justified by his previous training, Steno (1916) used anatomical analogies for understanding the buried history of the earth. While practicing anatomy, Steno found himself conducting geological research after being commissioned by the duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II, to inspect the head of a gigantic shark found on the coast of Livorno (Figure 6.1). Puzzled by the resemblance between the teeth of the shark and some fossils known in the area, Steno (1958) concluded, supporting biblical tradition, that the land he stood on was once covered in water after a deluge. In moving from the interstices of the body to those of the earth, the superposed layers of the land seemed crossed by veins full of blood. To Steno’s already developed anatomical perspective, the history of the earth in its relation to the sea became an object of medical scrutiny, an association not entirely surprising given how, in the Christian biblical tradition, and from a reverse angle, Adam’s body was moulded from a handful of soil which God picked up from the ground (Genesis 2:7). Steno’s image still survives in geoscience in what the archaeologist Laurent Oliver describes in his recent book on time, as ‘underground endoscopies’ (2011: 41). According to Olivier, archaeology involves an exploration below the surface of the land ‘as if beneath the membrane of life [where things lie] present and invisible, like the strange world of layers and walls interspersed with cavities, canals, and tendons that lie beneath our skin’ (2011: 39). Following Steno, the earth sciences have developed a vertical conception of the passage of time, according to which events are superimposed stratigraphically from bottom to top. As I have argued at greater length elsewhere, this contrasts with the ways that other disciplines interested in the past conceptualise time, particularly history, where events in time move from left to right (Simonetti 2018). This horizontal view of time, undoubtedly the most widespread understanding of chronology within Indo-European languages, matches the way reading and writing unfold in Latin scripts. Unlike this horizontal chronology, the vertical view of time places early events in the sequence at the bottom rather than the left, as is often common

Figure 6.1 Head of a gigantic shark. Source: Reproduced from Steno, Nicolaus ‘Canis Carcharia Dissectum Caput (1667)’, translated by A. Garboe as The Earliest Geological Treatise, 1958.

The temporality of surfaces 83 in geological charts. Interestingly, this coincides with an understanding of scientific practice as a downward movement into the past. Scientists who excavate their object of study, such as geologists and archaeologists, use expressions in everyday language that suggest an image of the past as no longer behind but coming to the fore. Such temporal inversion is shared by most sciences interested in the past, including history. However, in the case of geoscientists, the past is not just in front but buried beneath their feet. This is illustrated by how archaeologists and geoscientists gesture whilst using expressions such as ‘going deeper in time’. With a downward-pointing gesture coinciding with the word ‘deeper’, archaeologists tend to place the past beneath the ground. Interestingly, the conceptual background of this, and other similar expressions, tends to pass unnoticed by geoscientists. Experts struggle to verbalise the systematic relation their concepts share with stratigraphic knowledge, particularly those that exist between ‘past’ and ‘depth’. Furthermore, most of those who arrive at this relation, as well as the complementary one between ‘surface’ and ‘present’, tend to describe them as a new discovery (see Simonetti 2018). Accordingly, it is unsurprising to note how theoretical archaeologists have only recently started to pay attention to surfaces in relation to other related concepts such as ‘depth’ and ‘past’ (see, e.g., Thomas 2004; Harrison 2011). This understanding of time did not remain isolated within the geosciences but had a huge impact on the social sciences and the humanities, particularly in how the mind was understood. This is not entirely unexpected given the long history of connections that exists in the West between an enclosed view of the soul and a fascination with the mysteries of time. This can be traced back at least to St. Augustine, who is credited not only with conceptualising the soul as encapsulated within the body (Taylor 1989) but also with turning time into a familiar stranger (Augustine 2006), a doctrine that still pervades Western views on time (see Frazer 1987). As a phenomenon that could be experienced but not explained, time – like the soul – became enclosed deep inside us. The early days of psychology were also influenced by geological time. Freud, one of the founding fathers of the discipline, developed a view of the mind that relied upon the stratigraphic principles from archaeology as first formulated by Steno, particularly superposition. Fascinated by antiquity and the study of ancient myths, Freud read extensively on archaeology, collected artefacts and displayed them prominently in his office – a practice which gave his patients the impression of entering a museum (Wolf-Man 1972: 139). Following archaeological theory, Freud conceived the mind as resulting from the superposition of layers, and he understood the process of analysis as a downward exploration deep into the stratified mind. According to Freud, in his much-celebrated work the Ego and the Id, ‘we shall now look upon an individual as a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose surface rests the ego, developed from its nucleus Pcpt. [perceptual] system’ (Freud 1961: 24). Here the present emerges in proximity with the senses, while memories – which allow fantasy and imagination to take place – are stored behind them deep inside the head. Although, Freud is suggesting a downward encounter across stratified surfaces, it is hard to discern with certainty whether he is conceiving of a vertical

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stratification of the mind. It remains unclear where in space Freud and his followers are placing the depth when they speak of ‘deep psychology’, an expression often used to define the psychoanalytic approach. In science, there are many ‘depths’ referring to a past, where the past is not necessarily placed underneath the ground. One example is the cosmological depths that astronomers peer into as they gather light from the sky, looking upwards to try fathom the origins of the universe. Unlike earth scientists, astronomers move upward into the past. Accordingly, it remains unclear whether the quote breaks the sagittal projection of the mind, common within Western understandings of human cognition, which tend to follow the perceptual experience of an observer walking on the ground. According to this sagittal view, memories are situated at the ‘back of the mind’, while the senses are co-situated with the present, as they project forward to a world that opens in front for an observer standing on the ground. This coincides with expressions, common in Indo-European languages, where accompanying pointing gestures situate the future and the past respectively in front and behind for an observer moving horizontally across the landscape. Examples include expressions such, as ‘moving forward into the future’ or ‘leaving past events behind’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Figure 6.2 presents one of Freud’s most famous illustrations of the psyche, which helps clarify how he resolved some of these conceptual challenges. In this

Figure 6.2 Visual representation of the psyche. Source: Redrawn from Freud, Sigmund ‘The Ego and the Id (1923)’, in J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIX, 1961, page 24.

The temporality of surfaces 85 illustration, the perceptual system is represented as an eye that looks upwards. This is thought to happen when patients lie down on the analyst’s couch to free associate. Underneath we see the ego, which grows from the resistance of reality against the push of our desires. Subsequently, underneath it, passing through the fractures of repression, rests the unconscious where early experiences have been stratigraphically accumulated. In this position, the biographical past could be both at the back of the mind and underneath the present, while the analysis constitutes a projection both forward and downward into the mind. Thanks to the couch, Freud could respect both the sagittal projection of the mind and the vertical understanding he borrowed from archaeology. This view of the mind had a huge impact across the social sciences and the humanities, while the confluence of these two trajectories – back to front and bottom to top – introduced one of the most difficult and enduring challenges in Western understandings of memory. Such challenges can be summarised by the following question: how can memory be both behind and underneath the senses, hidden from the present, while also being the guide of sensory experience? Let us consider this paradox by imagining the actual process of psychoanalysis. As when the archaeologist explores the stratified ground with his eyes gazing downward, the psychoanalyst inspects the mind of a patient – now lying down on the analyst’s couch facing upwards – from above. Based on Freud’s view of the mind, such an encounter would resemble the meeting of two inverted stratigraphies. The biographical past of the patient and that of the psychoanalyst would point in opposite directions.

Depths and surfaces in structuralism and phenomenology The confluence of sagittal and vertical views of the temporality of mind introduced by Freud had a significant influence on the social sciences and the humanities. In anthropology, for example, it was adopted by many students of Boas – Sapir among them – and, subsequently, by structural and symbolic anthropologists including Lévi-Strauss (1973), Turner (1967) and Geertz (1973; see also Simonetti 2018). It also impacted the history of knowledge production, particularly the work of Foucault. Their contributions led to famous controversies explicitly concerned with the tensions between profundity and superficiality. Examples include the debates Lévi-Strauss and Foucault had directly or indirectly with Merleau-Ponty in France around the tension between an emphasis on buried meanings and the perceptual encounter of the phenomenal world. They all accused each other of being superficial for different reasons. However, as structuralism emphasised a depth below the senses, phenomenology proposed a depth that opened before them. The latter results from Merleau-Ponty’s challenge of the sequential view of the mind, which brought the past back to the phenomenal field, becoming an unfolding horizon that coincided with the future. According to this often-incomprehensible debate, the past was placed either underneath surfaces or all around at the ground level. A good starting point in the debate is the work of Lévi-Strauss. Influenced by Freud, Lévi-Strauss used stratigraphic analogies for understanding memory and history and often suggested the practice of anthropology required uncovering

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essences that were hidden underneath surfaces. In his book Tristes Topiques, Lévi-Strauss stated, in a psychoanalytic form of argumentation, ‘that the true reality is never the most obvious’ (1973: 57). According to Lévi-Strauss, there were three sources of inspiration that led him to this view: psychoanalysis, Marxism and geology. All these sources agreed on a principle of occlusion, which according to Lévi-Strauss contrasted radically with how phenomenologists approach the world. In his words: Phenomenology I found objectionable in that it postulates a kind of continuity between experience and reality. I agree that the latter encompasses and explains the former, but I had learned from my three sources of inspiration that the transition between one order and the other is discontinuous; that to reach reality one has first to reject experience. Lévi-Strauss (1973: 58) Many authors have followed Lévi-Strauss in this critique of phenomenology. A famous example is Foucault, whom many contemporary scholars regard as a structuralist thinker. Like Lévi-Strauss before him, he agreed on the limitations of phenomenological analysis for understanding the latent aspects of social life. For example, immediately after outlining his approach to the history of knowledge in his Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault set out his analysis explicitly against that of phenomenology. In his words: If there is one approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which, in short leads to a transcendental consciousness. It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice. Foucault (2002: xv) For Foucault, it is in the analysis of discourse that his archaeological approach is situated by revealing what he called, following Freud, the ‘positive unconscious’ (ibid.: xi) underneath the surface of everyday discourse. In addition to Levi-Strauss and Foucault, other influential authors have explicitly distanced themselves from phenomenology. A more recent example is the contrast Bourdieu (2003) set between phenomenology and his method of participant objectivation. Although Lévi-Strauss, Foucault and Bourdieu proposed distinctive approaches, a detailed description of which is unfortunately beyond the scope of this chapter, there is a clear resemblance between their arguments. They all agree that phenomenology is a rather shallow approach when it comes to analysing social phenomena. Returning to Lévi-Strauss, his criticism was probably directed against Merleau-Ponty who, at the time, was the most renowned and influential phenomenologist in France. Like his critics, Merleau-Ponty used similar stratigraphic analogies throughout his work for conceptualising phenomenological analysis.

The temporality of surfaces 87 For example, according to him, in a text written at the time of his candidacy for the Collège de France: we must rediscover the structure of the perceived world through a process similar to that of an archaeologist. For the structure of the perceived world is buried under the sedimentation of later knowledge. Digging down to the perceived world, we see that sensory qualities are not opaque, indivisible ‘givens’, which are simply exhibited to a remote consciousness – a favourite idea of classical philosophy. Merleau-Ponty (1964: 5) Here, Merleau-Ponty argues against classical philosophy and its detached understanding of perception, particularly the view that experience of the world depends on abstract, pre-constituted knowledge. Even though both Merleau-Ponty and his critics use the stratigraphic analogy for understanding analysis, each proposed an arrangement of soils that looked like the mirror opposite of the other. If LéviStrauss has to reject everyday experience to access unconscious reality underneath, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis invites us to remove the top layer imposed by traditional philosophy, which he refers to as ‘critical thought’ (ibid.: 3). Clearly, in both approaches, there is a complex and reciprocal relationship between the different layers, in that each influences the other. In the case of Merleau-Ponty, even though critical thought hides and bypasses the world of perception, it is nevertheless informed by it. In the case of Lévi-Strauss, our everyday conscious states deny the unconscious forces underneath, while those dynamic forces influence our everyday lives. However, both approaches would see a different type of agency coming from the bottom layer (ideational vs. sensorial) and a different degree of continuity between them. What for Lévi-Strauss looks like a series of discontinuous layers for Merleau-Ponty seems continuous. This is apparent, for example, when Merleau-Ponty (1964: 3) suggests that the world of perception informs the understanding of truth on which critical thought rests. But, more crucially, both differ in where this downward movement takes them. For structuralism, the movement is fundamentally to the unconscious past, whereas for MerleauPonty, it is primarily to the present, to an encounter with the world of experience. Even though these two stratigraphic understandings of analysis so far coincide in their downward direction, Merleau-Ponty takes his approach along a completely new trajectory, distancing himself from his critics. By the time the philosopher reaches the perceived world, he stops moving vertically. To the contrary, as in following the experience of walking, he starts moving horizontally. That is why, for Merleau-Ponty, when the analysis gets to the perceived world, ‘our horizontal and vertical anchorage in a place and in a here-and-now’ (1964: 5) become evident. After the layer of critical thought has been removed, the movement of analysis is no longer downward but forward, as the idea of a vertical anchorage in the present – making reference to an upward standing position – suggests. Here the philosopher is no longer paying attention to the ground but to the horizon, and to a new depth, namely that of the phenomenal field that opens up to him in front of his eyes (see also Merleau-Ponty 2002).

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This sudden shift to a horizontal viewpoint, from the vertical excavation in which the critics of Merleau-Ponty remain, is congruent with his emphasis on a downward movement towards present experience, as opposed to the past. At the same time, it coincides with a more widespread understanding of time in phenomenology, consistent both with the experience of walking and with the image of a moving horizon. In the case of Merleau-Ponty (2002: 26), past and future open perceptually as horizons of experience that come to the fore in the exploration of the phenomenal field. Such a horizontal understanding of time, common among archaeologists who rely on phenomenological theories (see Karlsson 2001), would be part of a long tradition in the West according to which thinking and walking entwine (Simonetti 2018). Edgeworth (2006), in his analysis of the historical relations that exist between archaeology and continental philosophy, has suggested that the stratigraphic metaphor Merleau-Ponty uses goes all the way back (or down) to Husserl. Aware of the developments of archaeology at the time, Husserl (2002) also suggested that experience gained sediment over time. However, Edgeworth misses the horizontality described here in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception. In doing so, he also attributes Heidegger’s concept of clearing with a similar stratigraphic emphasis. Heidegger’s (1971) notion of clearing, like that of world, was influenced by Jacob von Uexküll’s (1957: 11) notion of umwelt, which was consistent with a horizontal view of becoming that resembled the experience of walking through a forest. Let me provide another example of this horizontal view of time by extending this controversy to another highly influential author who, like Merleau-Ponty, was also interested in perception and was informed by phenomenological ideas. I am thinking of Gibson and his theory of direct perception, according to which the world is perceived directly rather than being reconstructed inside the mind. Compared to the majority of his contemporaries, Gibson (1986: 23) turned the world inside out by locating the phenomenon of perception as happening at the surface. The meaningful interaction between organisms and their environments is an encounter between surfaces. Like Merleau-Ponty, Gibson gave special attention to what the traditional understanding of perception could not explain, namely the depth of the perceptual field. Such depth opened mainly forwards, following horizontal movement on the ground surface which, according to Gibson (2002: 85), played a key role in human perception in that it supported locomotion (also Merleau-Ponty 2002: 297–311). In an early article, in which he summarised some of the established theories of perception at the time, Gibson contrasted two general approaches. The first approach, called ‘literal’, referred to an understanding of perception as ultimately depending on stimulation. The second one, called ‘schematic’, depended on other elements such as attitudes or motivations. In referring to the development of this second approach, he suggested that ‘social psychologists began to have a much more ambitious conception of their subject. Social perception was not merely the top layer, as it were of a man’s awareness but extended downwards to its base’ (Gibson 1951: 92). This contrasted with his understanding of space at the time as ‘an array of surfaces and edges’ (ibid.: 90) over which perception takes place. Here again, as in the tension between structuralists and phenomenologists, we have two different understandings of how significance is constituted in perception, both unfolding in

The temporality of surfaces 89 different temporal trajectories, namely a horizontality open at the ground level and a verticality that searches for what is hidden underneath the skin.1 In the case of the authors referred to in this and previous sections, we are of course dealing with analogical thinking that has not necessarily been systematised. These authors were explicitly using analogies to better understand their own fields of inquiry with respect to other approaches. However, only a thin line divides analogies from the systematic and unconscious use of concepts across different domains of experience. As when archaeologists differentiate their work from that of historians – by suggesting, for instance, that their study of the human past reaches deeper in time – psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers are probably not fully conscious of the connotations of the words ‘depth’ and ‘surface’ as they use them.

Stratified brains and disciplinary knowledge Although Freud’s understanding of the mind was more sophisticated than what I have portrayed so far in this chapter – in that sometimes past and present coexisted (Olivier 2011) – the analogies he used aligned strongly with a staged view of cognition. While the phenomenon of perceiving occurred from the outside in, remembering, imagining and fantasising occurred from the inside out. This certainly facilitated the installation of what Ian Hacking (1994) describes as memoropolitics in the experience of traumatic events, where victims of the Vietnam war had to forget (repress) trauma, to be classified as such and be subject to monetary compensations by the U.S. government. Knowing someone’s biographical past required professional verification of profound truths across the surfaces of the mind. This staged view of cognition survived throughout the twentieth century and became part of the modern and technologically advanced study of the mind. For example, the encounter of a buried past is at the base of the paleontological image Ulrich Neisser provides in his foundational book Cognitive Psychology, when he suggests that ‘out of a few stored bone chips, we remember a dinosaur’ (1967: 285).2 It is worth noting that a geological view of cognition has been applied not only to ‘abstract’ mental processes. It also provided a ‘material’ understanding of the neurological apparatus, as illustrated in Freud’s diagram. Accordingly, it is unsurprising that the image spread into broader understandings of the brain across the cognitive sciences. Let me provide an example from the work of Antonio Damasio, who is one of the few neuroscientists who in the 1990s challenged dualisms in the brain by showing the interdependence of reason and emotions in the neocortex and the limbic system. Paradoxically, he suggested a stratigraphic image of the brain that resulted in replicating the Cartesian heritage he wished to defy. In short, the activity of circuits in the modern and experience-driven sectors of the brain (the neocortex, for example) is indispensable to produce a particular class of neural representations on which mind (images) and mindful actions are based. But the neocortex cannot produce images if the old-fashioned subterranean of the brain (hypothalamus, brain stem) is not intact and cooperative. Damasio (1994: 110, emphasis added)

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One of the biggest projects in the neurosciences has been the attempt to map the surface of the brain (as cartography has mapped the surface of the earth), correlating each topographic module with a particular sensory and motor function of the body (e.g. Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994). In this project, the neural structures in the brain and cognitive processes tend to be classified and explained using terminology that follows a hierarchy in which the neocortex, located at the top, is the ultimate evolutionary accomplishment in a process called encephalisation. Subtlety matching Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, according to which ontogeny mirrors phylogeny, the evolutionary roots of our modern brain are to be found underneath in the subcortical structures that compose the so-called paleomammalian brain. Like the earth, the brain is viewed as a series of superimposed surfaces, ending with the present at the top. Figure 6.3, summarising

Figure 6.3 Development of the brain. Source: Republished with permission of John Wiley and Sons Inc, from Matthews, Gary G., Neurobiology, 2001, page 30; Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center Inc.

The temporality of surfaces 91 the structure of the brain in relation to the process of encephalisation, illustrates this understanding of the evolution of the neocortex as a movement from bottom to top.3 Returning to Freud, a similar arrangement emerges in this view of the brain between a stratigraphic verticality and a sagittal opening of a world in front. The hierarchical understanding of the brain, which results from the upward accumulation of structures over time, coincides with a forward projection of the brain in evolution. Figure 6.4 from an old nineteenth-century book on phrenology illustrates this forward projection in the growth of the so-called forebrain, responsible for advanced cognitive functions.4

Figure 6.4 Forward projection of the brain. Source: Reproduced from Sizer, N. Forty Years in Phrenology: Embracing Recollections of History, Anecdote, and Experience, 1891, page 400.

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The constant elevation of the angles in this diagram matches the progressive straightening described by Ingold (2004) in the evolution of anatomically modern humans, which ultimately resulted in a rise of heads over heels, a progressive distancing of our feet from the ground and the corresponding loss of their sensitivity – all images clearly replicated by the historian Joseph Amato (2013) in his book Surfaces. Beyond corporeal evolution, a stratified brain matches another stratigraphy, namely the one found in our understanding of disciplinary knowledge. Resembling the vertical progression of the fossil record, knowledge is also subdivided vertically from bottom to top, from the sciences that work with hard facts to the humanities whose object of study is meant to quickly blow away in thin air. The stratigraphic differentiation of layers and soils is partially what justifies the emergence of two different cultures in Western knowledge, one concerned with reason and logic, another concerned with feeling and analogy – one foundational to nature, before human signification, another on top, focused on that which seems uniquely human, namely the mind, sociality and history.

A conceptual geology The previous analysis shows how in Western academia the study of the past has emerged as an encounter of depths across surfaces. In this, our understandings of the mind, the brain and disciplinary knowledge are caught in what can be regarded as an ontology of occlusion, characterised by an encapsulation of essences within surfaces – an approach still strong among cognitive scientists (e.g. Hofstadter and Sander 2013). Clearly, I am not the first to challenge these occlusions and the dualisms they generate. Many others have attempted the same, including some of the authors reviewed previously and many more within this volume. However, it is worth noting how solutions often seem to dissolve modern dualisms and occlusions by simply turning things inside out, offering a surface ontology in replacement. This conceptual inversion is commonly visible across the sciences and the humanities. Consider how cognitive scientists, following Gibson’s (1986) theory of direct perception, have taken the mind outside the skull by suggesting the world constitutes an outside memory (O’Regan and Noë 2001). Related approaches include the notions of embodied mind (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991; Lakoff and Johnson 1999), extended mind (Clark 1997; also Bateson 1972) and distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995). Moving to other fields, consider how work in artificial intelligence, which traditionally tended to replicate the computational view of the mind, has invited scholars to turn technology inside out by bringing intelligence up to the surface (Küchler 2008; Anusas and Ingold 2013). Or how archaeologists have argued the discipline should concentrate on the study of visible surfaces to avoid its modern underpinnings (Harrison 2011; also Simonetti 2018), an effort mirrored by human geographers in response to the work of Yi Fu Tuan (1989), whose ideas were again influenced by phenomenology (Forsyth et al. 2013). Or how Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the rhizomatic has influenced the anthropological understanding of kinship and evolution, which flattens hierarchies, allowing the past to coexist with the present on a common

The temporality of surfaces 93 plane of immanence (see, e.g., Ingold 2000; Latour 2005; Bramford and Leach 2009; Helmreich 2009; Pálsson 2009).5 In these examples, what was once occluded inside has now been brought to the surface. What they reveal is a paradoxical relationship with surfaces. Surfaces are simultaneously guilty of generating hierarchical – non-democratic – occlusions and candidates to offer the most immediate democratic solution to occlusion. No doubt the examples explained previously constitute serious attempts to move away from occlusion. Nonetheless, the concepts that dominate both occlusion and surface ontologies are roughly the same. Perhaps a more promising approach might be found in Ingold’s (2011) recent turn away from Gibson’s emphasis on solid surfaces to the fluidity of mediums. Nonetheless, such an approach risks a suppression of all the frictions and resistances the word ‘surface’ has the potential to highlight and which are essential to the constitution of life. If a way beyond occlusion is to be found, we need first to distinguish between surficial and superficial aspects of phenomena, as the introduction of this book argues. Surfaces are not always superficial, as the Freudian reading of stratigraphy suggests. Digging skills in archaeological fieldwork develop as practitioners learn to follow surfaces by projecting their senses into the absent properties of the landscape as they trowel away through the soil. In doing so, knowledge of surfaces does not remain superficial but becomes profoundly meaningful through enskilment. In such a context, it makes little sense to regard past surfaces as pre-determined boundaries between soils, in that archaeologists do not simply uncover past surfaces but rather sculpt them. Accordingly, the forms of past surfaces do not precede the movements of the trowel but rather grow in tandem with its movements, as occurs, for example, in weaving (Ingold 2000). Put differently, excavation could be better described as the art of digging enough. Digging less than is required risks leaving the surfaces of the past unexposed, while trowelling excessively risks creating new surfaces, particularly as adjacent soils look similar to each other depending on the conditions of humidity and light throughout a day of excavation. Mastering this fine skill requires learning to move forward into the absent past, following the shifting properties of soils (Simonetti 2018; also Edgeworth 2012). Nonetheless, if a way forward is to be found, we need to begin by acknowledging that language is never enclosed inside the mind, divorced from the material world, as modern narratives invite us to believe. To the contrary, as this chapter reveals, our ways of talking about the mind and the earth are intrinsically entwined. As concepts of time are appropriated by different disciplines, they not only provide a metaphorical territory on which to develop abstract ideas, but they provide particular trajectories that interlace with the things and the forces of the environment. As in how the practice of archaeology excavates knowledge of the earth, the psychoanalysis of the mind stratigraphically requires a downward exploration in attendance to patients laid out on the horizontal surface of a couch. Accordingly, concepts are as gravitational as our actions in space. The mind is not simply outside or leaking from the inside out. More radically, thoughts are inseparable from the ways by which humans feel through their surroundings in

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movement and gesture. Thus, as perception is for Gibson, conceptualisation is ecologically situated. Here I am not simply referring to a tension between a universal or a historical body, as Merleau-Ponty or Foucault would have debated. More radically, body and history are implicated because conceptualisation is ultimately a geological phenomenon.

Notes 1 Similar debates have occurred between disciplines that coincide in their downward orientation. An example is how, for Turner, anthropology had a capacity to understand social meaning more deeply than psychology (1967: 44). 2 A similar skill has been lauded traditionally in palaeontology. Thomas H. Huxley, for instance, applauded Georges Cuvier, founder of French palaeontology, for his capacity to reconstruct ‘entire animals from a tooth or perhaps a fragment of a bone’ (1896: 18). 3 Similar ideas were already present in the work of Freud, who was influenced by Haeckel. Lying on the couch, the individual mind was another set of layers on top of the already accumulated history of evolution. 4 Architectonic images resembling Freud’s stratigraphic views were present in medieval understandings of both memory and the brain. However, unlike Freud, memory in medieval times constituted not so much a receptacle but an act (Carruthers 1990). 5 Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, invites explicitly to invert Platonism by following a tradition started by the Stoics. A Platonist distinction between essences and appearances was, according to Delueze, grounded on a tension between depths and surfaces. In Delueze’s words, and through the Stoics, ‘everything now returns to the surfaces’ (2004: 7, original emphasis).

References Amato, J. 2013. Surfaces: A History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Anusas, M. and T. Ingold. 2013. Designing environmental relations: From opacity to textility. Design Issues 29(4): 58–69. Augustine. 2006. Confessions, trans. F.J. Sheed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Bamford, S. and J. Leach (eds.) 2009. Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. Bourdieu, P. 2003. Participant objectivation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9: 281–294. Carruthers, M. 1990. The Book of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, A. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Damasio, A. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: Penguin. Deleuze, G. 2004. The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester. London: Continuum [originally published in 1969]. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum [originally published in 1980]. Edgeworth, M. 2006. The clearing: Heidegger and excavation. Archaeolog Website, University of Stanford. URL: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/archaeology/cgi-bin/archaeolog/? p=69 [Accessed: 18 May 2019].

The temporality of surfaces 95 Edgeworth, M. 2012. Follow the cut, follow the rhythm, follow the material. Norwegian Archaeological Review 45(1): 76–92. Forsyth, I., H. Lorimer, P. Merriman, and J. Robinson. 2013. Guest editorial. Environment and Planning A 45: 1013–1020. Foucault, M. 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. S. Smith. London: Tavistock. Frazer, J.T. 1987. Time: The Familiar Stranger. Cambridge, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Freud, S. 1961. The Ego and the Id (1923). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud vol. XIX, ed. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 12–68. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books. Gibson, J.J. 1951. Theories of perception. In Current Trends in Psychological Theory, ed. W Dennis. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 85–110. Gibson, J.J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Gibson, J.J. 2002. A theory of direct visual perception. In Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception, eds. A. Noë and E. Thompson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 77–89. Hacking, I. 1994. Memoro-politics trauma and the soul. History of the Human Sciences 7: 29–52. Harrison, R. 2011. Surfaces assemblages: Towards an archaeology in and of the present. Archaeological Dialogues 18(2): 141–161. Heidegger, M. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Helmreich, S. 2009. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hirschfeld, L. and S. Gelman (eds.) 1994. Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hofstadter, C. and E. Sander. 2013. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. New York, NY: Basic Books. Husserl, E. 2002. Lecciones de Fenomenología de la Conciencia Interna del Tiempo. Madrid: Trotta. Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huxley, T.H. 1896. On the method of Zadig. In Collected Essays, Vol. 4. New York, NY: Appleton, pp. 1–24. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2004. Culture on the ground: The world perceived through the feet. Journal of Material Culture 9(3): 315–340. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Karlsson, H. 2001. Time for an archaeological ‘time out’? In It’s About Time: The Concept of Time in Archaeology, ed. H. Karlsson. Gothenburg: Bricoleur Press, pp. 1–28. Küchler, S. 2008. Technological materiality: Beyond the dualist paradigm. Theory Culture and Society 25(1): 101–120. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York, NY: Basic books. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1973. Tristes Tropiques, trans. J. Weightman and D. Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape.

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Matthews, G.G. 2001. Neurobiology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Science. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. An unpublished text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A prospectus to his work. In The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. J.M. Edie, trans. AB Dallery. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 3–11. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2002. The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. Abingdon: Routledge. Neisser, U. 1967. Cognitive Psychology. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Olivier, L. 2011. The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory. Lanham: AltaMira Press. O’Regan, J.K. and A. Noë. 2001. A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24: 939–1031. Pálsson, G. 2009. The web of kin: An online genealogical machine. In Kinship and beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered, eds. S. Bamford and J. Leach. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 84–110. Simonetti, C. 2018. Sentient Conceptualisations: Feeling for Time in the Sciences of the Past. Abingdon: Routledge. Sizer, N. 1891. Forty Years in Phrenology: Embracing Recollections of History, Anecdote, and Experience. New York, NY: Fowler and Wells. Steno, N. 1916. The Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno’s Dissertation Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed by Processes of Nature Within a Solid, trans. J.G. Winter. New York, NY: Macmillan. Steno, N. 1958. The Earliest Geological Treatise (1667) by Nicolaus Steno, Translated from Canis Carcharia Dissectum Caput, trans. A. Garboe. London: Macmillan. Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, J.S. 2004. Archaeology’s place in modernity. Modernism/Modernity 11(1): 17–34. Tuan, Y. 1989. Surface phenomena and aesthetic experience. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79(2): 233–241. Turner, V. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Uexküll, J. von 1957. A stroll through the world on animals and men, trans C.H. Schiller. In Instinctive Behaviour, ed. K. Lashley. New York: International University Press, pp. 5–80 [originally published in 1934]. Varela, F., E. Thompson and E. Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wolf-Man. 1972. My recollections of Sigmund Freud. In The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, ed. M. Gardiner. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 135–152.

7

Threshold as social surface Ray Lucas

Making surfaces In this chapter, I work with an idea of surfaces as a status or a condition rather than as a permanent quality. The examples which follow are drawn from research conducted across a range of urban marketplaces in South Korea, where I examined markets as built environments, created without the interventions of professionalised architects. I focus on this work to explore what constructing surfaces in the constitution of an everyday livelihood might mean for the teaching, research and practice of architecture. Urban markets are sites which are often under threat from development and modernisation. City authorities look upon such sites as being untidy relics of a past era and as representing an illegitimate urban condition. Namdaemun and Dongdaemun markets in Seoul have proved resilient in the face of modernisation, whilst others such as Seomun Market in Daegu have struggled. Further examples include Busan and Seoul’s Jagalchi and Noryangjin fish markets. In this work, I aim to broaden notions of what might be considered architecture, regardless of the levels of wealth or power which makers of built environments might have. These markets in Seoul are adjacent to a large department store and shopping district and thus coexist within a broader system of exchange and a thriving urban economy. Architecture often works from precedents, examples of successful buildings which contain lessons for future building. Good architects draw on such precedents without simply replicating them, developing expressions which accommodate for variations in context, climate, programme or purpose. What this research asks is: what happens to the scope of precedent when it is expanded beyond accepted canons of design and it incorporates more modest and improvised types of built environment such as the marketplaces described in this chapter? Such divisions have their origins in a persistent misinterpretation of influential Italian Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti by the architectural profession, which reinforces Aristotle’s hylomorphic model of creation which sees matter as having no cultural value or meaning until endowed with a design of intellectual preconception. In contrast to an accepted hylomorphic model, the marketplaces studied here are one example of a built environment continually under construction in a way

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is that is concurrent with what Ingold (2011: 91) has described as a ‘textility of making’. There is no finality of form in this context, no fixed result, but rather a series of flows, transformations, unmaking and remaking. A key element of this transformative process is that of the threshold, a zone or spatial element by which people transition from one sense of dwelling to another. Architects devote much of their time to considering such thresholds, whereby even such a seemingly simple threshold, such as that of the door, is given notable attention in architectural theory (Unwin 2007; Koolhaas 2014). In these marketplaces, we see spatial practices with similar qualities, where transitions across space are moderated, negotiated and scripted. Not all thresholds are as clear and obvious as doors, but any architectural element which mediates transitory conditions can be considered a threshold. Status-based distinctions between building and architecture are persistent and problematic and restrict the scope of architectural possibility.1 More recently, there has been a turn towards architectures of impermanence, fleeting and mobile structures, or an architecture which minimises its presence as an object (Kuma 2008). Such developments shift towards an understanding of buildings as more temporal than permanent and as material states always undergoing a process of becoming. The approach of this research is embedded in both architecture and anthropology. As such, the research is part of a programme to develop a practice of graphic anthropology which sees drawing as a valid addition to written methods of knowledge production. Thus, as a programme of work, it lays foundations to work towards what visual anthropology has achieved through the use of lens-based media. The drawings in question use a range of established technical drawing conventions: plan-based drawings to emphasise spatial relationships, cross-sections to explore mass and volume as well as inhabitation, axonometric projection which works with a technique of measured three-dimensional drawing and is particularly useful for exploring complex compositions of form. Further techniques use diagrams and notations, some of which specifically address routes, movement and sensory experience (Lucas 2006, 2012). This work is also conversant with an emerging architectural literature on marketplaces, where themes of informality and impermanence are foregrounded. Of significance here is the dual publication of Informal Market Worlds – published as an atlas (Mörtenböck and Mooshammer 2015) and a reader (Mörtenböck et al. 2015) – together forming a particularly comprehensive survey of the architecture of economic pressure, with the latter containing perspectives from economic anthropology (Hart 2015) and sociology (Sassen 2015; Simone and Febriyani 2015). While this work elevates local phenomena to an important global scale and is incredibly thorough in production, it attends less to the social and material intimacies of everyday marketplace architectures. By focusing on the finergrained architectural and formative qualities of the market, further stories reveal themselves. In an interview within the architectural journal Perspecta, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2003) discusses the economics of architecture framed as the illusion

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of permanence. Appadurai cautions against practices of architecture which assume a desire for status-based social aspiration and which are insensitive to the needs of established livelihoods. Such tensions are palpable in Dongdaemun Fabric Market, Seoul, where grand architectural innovations have pushed established flea markets further out from populated areas, all so that the city authorities can tout Seoul as a ‘global city’. Thus, an agenda of this research is to directly challenge the need for such innovation, given that marketplaces can be understood as architecture in their own right.

Gibson’s surfaces and the architecture of sedimented materiality In addressing surfaces, two perspectives inform this study: that of James J. Gibson’s (1986) ecological psychology and the other of architectural theorists David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi (2002). Gibson’s perspective is key in that it not only emphasises the importance of surfaces as phenomena, but that it resists a Cartesian absolutism of axes x, y and z and instead works with a relational perspective between human experience and the environment. Gibson’s ecology of perception has three elements: substances, surfaces and medium. Substances are relatively solid things that offer resistance. Media are fluid, affording locomotion to animals. In being relative to a perceiver, media would be air for humans or water for fish. Surfaces exist as the threshold of contact between substance and medium. The potential of Gibson’s ecology is that it allows us to think carefully about space, a key concept in architectural theory. Elsewhere, I have used Gibson’s concept of medium to support a description of architectural space that is multi-sensory, with corroborations between seeing and hearing and smelling and touching (Lucas 2012). In architectural terms, the contact between two spatial conditions is typically described as a threshold. Most often, this manifests as a kind of doorway that mediates passage from one spatial state to another, such as from the outside to the inside.2 This is not a new environment – an artificial environment distant from the natural environment – but the same old environment modified by man. It is a mistake to separate the natural from the artificial as if there were two environments: artefacts have to be manufactured from natural substances. Gibson (1986: 130) Writing on the affordances of the terrestrial environment, Gibson discusses the qualities of friction, its contribution to locomotion, and describes surfaces as the basis of behaviour. Gibson’s account is largely a discussion of the surface of the earth rather than the proliferation of surfaces in a complex built environment such as the marketplaces under discussion here, but the thrust of the argument remains pertinent. If the surface can be thought of as the basis of behaviour and action, then the deliberate provision of new surfaces allows for additional kinds of action. The provision of surfaces is thus crucial to the operation of the market.

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The reason surfaces are so important lies in Gibson’s distinction between geometric and ecological descriptions of the environment. Drawing a distinction between surfaces and planes makes this clear: Surfaces and the medium are ecological terms; planes and space are the nearest equivalent in geometrical terms, but note the differences. Planes are colorless; surfaces are colored. Planes are transparent ghosts; surfaces are generally opaque and substantial. The intersection of two planes, a line, is not the same as the junction of two flat surfaces, an edge or corner. Gibson (1986: 33) According to Gibson’s ecology, a market cannot be adequately described geometrically but requires a description through surface conditions. The catalogue of surface conditions described by Gibson can be extended beyond enclosure, detached, hollow, sheets, fissures and places. Based on the following examples, we can include: embodied or prosthetic surfaces; unfurling and proliferating surfaces; appropriated, accreted and permeable surfaces and formal, informal and mobile surfaces. Architectural theorist David Leatherbarrow and architect Mohsen Mostafavi tackle the idea of surface from a different perspective and offer ideas of surface which communicate something about the intention of the architecture in question. In Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi’s (2002) account, surfaces are a framing and containing device for architecture, pierced by windows and doors, demonstrating the structure and communicating something about the spirit of the times through the use of materials. Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi open with an interest in the ‘project of representation’ (2002: 1, original emphasis), focusing their attention on one aspect of surface in architectural design. That architecture means or communicates something is essential to the history and theory of the façade. This debate is concerned with notions of style and operates through a conventional architectural history of how an articulated surface is developed through a variety of compositional and symbolic devices. Often what is communicated is civic or religious power, but sophisticated architectural designs also attempt to describe the physical forces working within a structure, such as communicating how a mass of elements are physically supported and spread across openings such as doorways and windows. Modern architecture is often held to represent a rupture in the relationship between the construction and its appearance, largely due to the capacity of materials such as steel and reinforced concrete to support the hanging of a ‘curtain wall’ with minimal visible components. Such advances in material and structural design gave twentieth-century architects a freedom with the façade, but for it to then decline into modular repetition and yet – towards the end of the twentieth century – to return back to an ornamental curiosity, directed by a postmodern programme which played with the logics of construction, albeit often with a misplaced irony. Along these lines, Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi discuss cladding: one form of material surface used in contemporary construction. This building element is

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much maligned and ignored theoretically, in that its synthetic composite nature is often seen to lack a material authenticity that is present in timber or stone or because it is bereft of an expressive quality that is inherent in other composites, namely concrete and its associated heroic brutalism. Thus, cladding is often seen as creating an architecture of false façade, directed by a programme of economic austerity. Further, cladding and its associated modular building systems are not seen to have the romantic craft of masonry construction, nor the seductive technical sophistication of more complex modular building systems that are present in ‘high-tech architecture’. Before construction, cladding panels reside in storage warehouses, standing “in reserve” for application. When they enter into the construction of a building, however, these elements of a system lose their generality and become parts of an artefact that is wholly singular; when built, every construction exists in a particular location, for an individual client, and as a representation of a unique dwelling situation. How can cladding thus transform itself, how can it be both general and particular, suitable for the economies of construction, repetition, and the claims of representation, identity? Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi (2002: 20–22) Taking this question into the market stalls of Namdaemun reveals an interesting turn, in that the identity of the market stall is one which is made, unmade and remade from a consistent set of construction elements from one day to the next, sometimes even within a single day. It is the same stall in its material components, but it is continually constructed anew in many different ways: an architecture of constant maintenance. Such a phenomenon of construction is also relevant to a discussion of memory within architectural theory, albeit in an unconventional manner. Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi cite the architect Aldo Rossi in this regard, distinguishing typologies from their actual manifestation: ‘Aldo Rossi claimed that architecture lies at the interface of memory and reason. Types were thought to preserve the reason of form, but they were also seen as the objects of recollection, even longing’ (Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi 2002: 205). This statement suggests that building type is independent of the actual building and offers a way of understanding the un/stable nature of the market stall which manifests as a different form through one day to the next, dependent on situated context, yet retaining its identity as a particular stall. For Rossi, this sense of memory is not that of conventional history but of a ‘sedimented materiality’ (Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi 2002: 209), and much the same could be said of the architecture of the marketplace, albeit in a more vital and less nostalgic mode. Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi’s (2002) theory of modular architecture – most notably expressed in the chapter ‘Framing Containment’ – provokes consideration of how market stalls reside, particularly in the case here of informal constructions which are largely composed of cladding-like elements; that is, panels, in a planar arrangement which is reminiscent of the work of Dutch modernist architect Cornelis van Eesteren and the associated De Stijl movement.

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Returning to consider the role of the façade as layer of mediation between an inside and outside, this is a phenomenon which Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi view to be present in all architectural forms. For the market, there is both an implied and material mediation, socially enforced to an extent. The vendor and stall – through their activities and construction practices working in concert – create and establish a private space within the crowded street, a space which enacts a social constraint, informing the buyer where to position themselves. Extending the consideration of architectural forms to that of structure, this occurs in correspondence with the adjacent fixed buildings, whereby the market stalls lean against building surfaces and attach themselves to posts by way of a series of clips and clamps. Other surfaces, such as closed roller-shutters, are used to hang or suspend parts of the stall. Every surface available is thus subject to a variety of strategies in order to maximise visible and usable surfaces for the promotion and sale of goods.

Embodied surfaces: transforming oneself into a surface Porters are a feature of most markets, facilitating the movement of goods from one place to another, most often as a chain where different modes of transportation are used. One notable instance of this can be observed at Namdaemun market, where the dense urban grid of the main market site renders large vehicles of limited use, often restricting them to the periphery of the market zone. Inside the market, goods are moved by a combination of motorcycle couriers – weaving expertly through the crowds – and manual labour. There are different kinds of manual labour, but one case stands out as particularly pertinent, as it involves porters effectively transforming their own bodies into surfaces. A van arrives at the edge of the market, unable to penetrate too deeply into the busy market, as it is the middle of the day. It is met by a coordinator who wears a brightly coloured vest made from webbing fabric. The vest is covered with pockets containing order books, mobile phones and useful tools and also has the identifying logo of the portering firm he works for. The coordinator is soon met by an older man with a bulky timber A-frame strapped to his back. He crouches down, back vertical and his body formed like he is sitting on a conventional dining chair. The van drivers unload a series of large boxes, clearly struggling with the weight and bulk, placing them carefully on the frame. The resulting tower, ordered from largest boxes at the bottom towards smaller ones clustered at the top, is taller than the porter himself. The stack is secured with bungee cords wrapping around the frame and the boxes, compressing the tower of boxes together. The next set of movements by the porter are the most precarious. Gradually stepping forward, the porter doubles over and allows the tower of boxes to tip forward, reaching an angle of 30–40 degrees to the horizontal. Legs clearly struggling, the porter then crouches and brings his load to the horizontal whilst extending his legs, arms outstretched. He eventually stands upright, pitched forward slightly, and immediately heads off towards his destination (see Figure 7.1). In this process, the porters are transforming themselves into a usable surface by means of the timber A-frame. Interpreted according to Gibson’s tripartite

Figure 7.1 Packages in movement via wheeled platforms and a porter with A-frame. Source: Ray Lucas

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spatial system of medium-surface-substance, the market reveals itself as a complex medium composed of people and their movements. The porter is one specific kind of actor within this spatial system, moving through the medium within which buyers and vendors also move. Gibson’s spatial system works at a range of scales, from the macro-scale of the market down to the interpersonal relationships between van drivers, porterage supervisors, vendors and the porter himself. Carrying individual boxes is awkward and inefficient, so a range of solutions to this issue is used in the market in different circumstances. Throughout the market, surfaces allow for the movement and display of goods essential to the functioning economy. Through the use and incorporation of various prostheses, porters transform themselves into surfaces, increasing the potential of the human body, while the frame becomes a technology of spatial transformation.

Unfurling and proliferating surfaces In the vicinity of Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, there is a precinct with cafes and stores to serve the student population. One section of this is a wide treelined strip of block paving, providing a little relief from the density of development elsewhere. A compact wheeled unit with handlebars and an internal engine is driven slowly and carefully along the pavement towards one of the trees, where it parks. The unit is an informal market stall, and the process of its unfurling gives an indication of the sophistication with which surface can inform the built environment. Indeed, a fully functioning piece of architecture can be assembled on site in less than ten minutes. With the unit halted and brakes applied, a series of lightweight steel projections are extended from the top of the unit, open frames sliding out from the wheeled base on the left, right and front sides. The corners of the frame are completed, making a rectangular support over which a sheet of red and brown striped textile is spread. This waxed surface hangs down over the edge, being slightly larger than the frame it covers. The vendor reaches into the base unit and pulls out a thick power cable, stretching it towards a nearby tree which has a power outlet hanging from it, protected from the weather by a cut-down plastic bottle. This process of connection is both a formal intervention – administering the use of energy infrastructures – and an ad hoc one, generated from readily available materials. Once connected, the vendor activates the motor again and the frame extends from its current position at waist height to slowly open up and provide a canopy. The top of the unit is now a surface, as is the fabric canopy, which, extending over the edges of the unit itself, defines a territory. This market stall now occupies a zone of space, with an inside and outside, managed by an overhead surface (see Figure 7.2). Further spatial definitions are made by the vendor. A series of props are arranged which further inform the space, lanterns are hung from the canopy to announce the purpose of the stall – street food – and storage is unpacked and arranged around the rear of the base unit. An unrolled bamboo screen further defines the sense that the stall has a front and a back, this surface being placed in the vertical plane rather than the horizontal. The cooking surface is arranged, ingredients

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Figure 7.2 Axonometric drawings of the unfurling market. Source: Ray Lucas

within easy reach, and the vendor lays claim to a territory around the stall. The paving bricks are no different materially or physically, but the nature of the space has been transformed fundamentally. When pedestrians move within a certain distance of the stall, they interact with the vendor: if one were to skip around the

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back, it would seem like an invasion of private space. Those who are nearby and remain stationary become potential customers and may have to awkwardly defy a sales pitch. The transformations are simple but also fundamental. Thus, a previously undefined thoroughfare develops particular social qualities in response to surfaces introduced and unfurled by the street food seller.

Accretion and layering onto formal space Seomun Market in Daegu is a general market selling a range of goods and is under pressure from urban redevelopment as well as being hemmed in on two sides by major highway developments, which were subject to construction at the time of visiting in July 2012. These conditions create a pressure for space and its usage which is common to many markets but is particularly acute here. The inhabitation of Seomun Market presents a complex set of interactions across formal and informal architectures. As with other markets in South Korea, the base building fabric is large urban blocks, between six to ten storeys tall. Seomun is an assemblage of nine such buildings – one of which is under construction and another of which is a combined car park and fire station – with a series of interstitial spaces, later covered with roof elements to create many internal spaces. Several major streets cut through the assemblage of blocks, with one devoted to street food and one allowing the co-existence of traffic and informal sellers. The materials and technologies which mediate the relationship between formal and informal are of particular interest here and of a particularly acute nature in Seomun. The exploitation of surfaces works through material interventions: strategies of clamping, clipping, hanging and leaning. In this instance, the formal market is a surface to be exploited by the informal; it provides opportunities for temporary occupation, where an attachment can be quickly assembled, mounted and demounted, or an appending structure can evolve to generate longer-term accretions, such as an upper deck providing access for delivery and trading (see Figure 7.3). Whether more temporary or accreted, these occupations make diverse usage of surfaces and any status that they offer. The cleanliness of a designed building is subverted by a gradual encrustation of attachments: steel decking, clips and clamps, conduits and cables, lean-to structures and the claiming of pavement territory by laying down a blanket or forming a canopy with a parasol or tarpaulin. This is the crucial feature of market life in Seomun: a diversity of restless improvisatory strategies to define, form and reinforce space. Each time a territory is defined, it creates a spatial distinction between an outside and an inside, which correspondingly conveys a set of conditions about how to interact with that space – a kind of architectonic notation. These conditions are socially enforced: for example, a chilli paste stall – with a sense of facing and spatial extent – has its conditions reinforced as buyers conform to the ordering of the space.

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(A) Figure 7.3 Plan drawings of Seomun Market. A) Settled building structures. B) The accretion of improvised layers of temporary settlement. Source: Ray Lucas

These conditions create a visual complexity within the market. Where blankwindowed internalised buildings would normally be considered visually unengaging, the layering of signs, infrastructure, fabric, goods on sale, food, cooking and ongoing human interactions make for a most exciting urban spectacle. The opportunities offered by surfaces are seized upon and enrich the environment aesthetically and economically.

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(B) Figure 7.3 (Continued)

Formal and informal appropriations of space As well as the sprawling complex of the main market – focused on the trading of fabric and textiles – Dongdaemun also has an associated flea market. This flea market is one of the most informal – and at times illegitimate – in the city, and it has been subject to pressure from city authorities. Having recently been moved on from its site in an abandoned baseball stadium to make way for the construction of Dongdaemun Design Plaza – a cultural institution designed by Zaha Hadid Architects – the flea market has gradually been pushed away from the main drag of Dongdaemun Market. The introduction of the design plaza seems much like a top-down imposition that contrasts with the more organic growth of the markets.

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However, it could be said that this is simply another instance of claiming territory through a radical reformulation of space which is characteristic to so much of life in Dongdaemun. Thus, while vastly different in scale and approach, there is a fundamental similarity concerning the reinvention and appropriation of space. In the operation of the main market, various props and devices are once again used to form and define spaces, albeit in this instance as logistical spaces. The turnover of goods within Dongdaemun Market is on an industrial scale. It is a wholesale market serving both national and international buyers, with networks of currency exchange, coin lockers for keeping samples and produce and international courier companies amongst the large blank-façade buildings. The market operates at night, with exchanges taking place in a variety of ways. Small-scale operations can buy directly: fabric by the metre, findings and fastenings by weight and completed garments at wholesale prices. Larger operators will send buyers out to suppliers with instructions for the types of fabric required. Often, they will select from sample books, even taking these samples back to the office in order to verify a large order. Once an order is placed, the purchases are not carried away by the buyers themselves – who are likely to be placing further large orders with other sellers – but rather the order is collated, vacuum bagged and sent down to street level for pickup by a contract porter. The spatial arrangement of this operation is also a further form of appropriation. The pavements outside these department-store–style buildings are wide and well maintained, broad surfaces upon which to organise the distribution of goods. The paving is marked, and a series of tubular steel barriers are set out to divide the zones. These zones are supervised by company staff who maintain the orderly movement of goods across a complex network of vehicles, everything from mopeds and motorcycles to large trucks.

Permeability of surface The flea market of Dongdaemun allows for the consideration of another quality of urban surfaces: their permeability. This market occupies a network of narrow streets which sell a variety of consumer goods and food. The relationship between the flea market and the main market is important, as the traffic to the main market also fosters demand for this less legitimate affair. The flea market is tolerated by the city authorities, even if they are uneasy with its level of informality (Mörtenböck et al. 2015) and its formative contrast with the design plaza, a project described as a ‘Milestone of Parametricism’ and thus bound up in the prominence of itself as an object of architecture (Schumacher 2013). In maintaining a close proximity to the main market, several parts of the flea market occupy areas of tightly constrained space, and this incurs further innovations, accretions and appropriations like those seen elsewhere. Figure 7.4 shows a space less than two metres across, with a trestle table on either side of the pavement and a narrow walkway between. Each table is supplemented by metal grids which can be propped, tied or leaned against various fixed features and which provide the vendors with surfaces to display their goods.

Figure 7.4 A sectional drawing through the flea market of Dongdaemun. Source: Ray Lucas

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This tight arrangement does not leave much room for the vendors themselves, however. This is a crowded market, with a steady flow of people passing by the stalls. Some vendors will leave a gap between tables, allowing them to stand and monitor their goods, to engage with customers and negotiate exchanges. Others are more inventive, however, and remain outside the flow entirely by standing behind the metal grids on the road rather than the pavement. They maximise their sales surface by allowing only small gaps in the metal grids to look or pop their head or arm through, reducing their bodily presence to an absolute minimum. The efficiency of surface here is indicative of the economic forces at work: an immediate and direct relationship between the surface area and the profits which can be made within this spatially constrained and competitive market where many vendors are selling similar low-cost, low-margin goods. A kit of parts – generators, utility clothing, vehicles, wheeled carts and plastic stools – is used to support the flea market, and the surface area of pavements and sidewalks is extended through the use of tables and metal grids, often underneath parasols or canopies. Vehicles are used to define logistical and social spaces for vendors: the bed of a van is a place to sit, and the open doors between two such vans offer a degree of privacy. All of these material interventions bring definition to an otherwise undifferentiated space in precisely the way an architect might hope to do, that is, to adapt and intervene within a context in order to foster the generation of specific activities. The surfaces created by metal grids can be penetrated, however: they are material conditions which the vendor must make careful decisions about. Such surfaces have a significant influence on whether their selling activity can be disembodied and allow for a greater number of wares to be on display or whether the creation of a distinctive space for an individual stall is more important than location or quantitative aspects of display. Thus, this permeability of surface is a key parameter which the vendor experiments with in defining their space.

Surface and mobility The markets of Dongdaemun also exemplify how surfaces are essential to the mobility of urban life. The idea of movement was particularly popular with 1960s avant-garde architects – such as the Archigram group, Cedric Price and the Metabolists – who conceptually experimented with the design of responsive, mobile, urban structures.3 What is notable, in the context of this study, is that these explorations – whilst original for the architectural profession in the mid-twentieth century – can be seen to be preceded by the more modest, everyday iterations and innovations of traditional marketplaces. Elements of Dongdaemun market move for several reasons: to re/position stalls within the flow of office workers during peak-time commuting, to avoid market inspectors and the fees they levy or to shelter from a sudden onset of monsoon rain. Other forms of motion involve activities of building, unbuilding and maintenance with architectures of castors and lightweight materials or through structures of tarpaulin and bungee cords. Such mobilities are highlighted by Graaff and Ha

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in their consideration of De Certeau’s strategies and tactics. According to them, ‘it is especially the vendors’ mobility that combines spatial and temporal tactics to allow them to momentarily circumvent the state’s restrictive strategies, such as those that limit their access to public space’ (Graaff and Ha 2015: 7). Thus, the vendor employs tactics in order to gain advantage, either in response to the spatial and temporal regulation of the market or in reaction to external factors such as urban schedules of work or weather conditions such as wind, rain and sun. The open and closed conditions of the market are mediated by its surfaces. Returning to Namdaemun Market provides an example. The operation of this market is cyclical, in that some days are reserved for the permanent vendors housed in fixed buildings rather than those who operate mobile stalls on the street.4 Some days allow the mobile vendors to have exclusive use of the site, and other days have every type of stall open simultaneously. This cyclical schedule means the mobile stalls must have the capability to have an open or closed condition. Mobilities of stalls are also required at the end of the working day so that they can be moved to a parking area on site. Thus, similar to the stall at Ewha Women’s University described previously, the stalls at Namdaemun can be compacted to a smaller form to then be covered with tarpaulin to secure the goods in transit from the elements and, to some lesser extent, theft. One of the most ubiquitous forms of stall is a white enamelled steel module which connects to the power infrastructure of the market. This connection to a fixed infrastructure also allows for the city authorities to impose some control over the spread of the market in that such infrastructures are prescribed to specific zones. These modular stalls are wheeled and can be hooked up in long trains, allowing them to be towed by a quad bike to the parking area. When compacted, these stalls can store goods within the unit, with overflow stacked and bound on top with a heavy-duty tarpaulin and fabric straps or bungee cords. Other more informal stalls mimic this arrangement. Here, the outer surfaces of the stalls are barriers and containers, with the carts thus appearing as amorphous and lumpy forms atop wheeled platforms. Another practice of more responsive mobility can also be described in terms of its surfaces. Some of the most informal and low-cost market stalls are composed of large platforms made from timber pallets or from shallow containers made from waxed canvas. These platforms are mounted on castors, sometimes forming chains, and are typically piled high with clothing for sale. This appearance of plenitude is an important aesthetic within Namdaemun in that most stalls attempt to dazzle the buyer with the sheer abundance of choice rather than taking the approach of selectively showcasing a smaller amount of produce. In response to surrounding conditions, these platforms can relocate swiftly, whether picked up by two people and sprinted off to another part of the market or wheeled through the crowd, albeit more ponderously and precariously. Responding to changing conditions relies on knowing and monitoring the local environment, such as being aware of office workers’ schedules or the shifting presence of competition. Thus, the surfaces of the market move and reconfigure themselves in response to a fluctuating economy; it is as a self-regulating system which continually makes best use of the resources at hand.

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Conclusion Thresholds can be perceived in a variety of ways, each responsible for formulating a sense of shifting from one space to another. Marketplaces also have their particular social customs and orderings which are directed by the form of the emergent architecture at hand. This might involve a vendor inviting a buyer to briefly enter a specific space during a transaction, the etiquette of positioning one stall relative to another or the accepted practices by which a stall can be attached to a fixed building. All of these practices and procedures are malleable to some extent and subject to continued negotiation within entanglements of skill and power, as Mooshammer discusses: ‘As spaces of exception, informal markets simultaneously uphold systems of power while concentrating their negation in a particular locale where they engender encounters between otherwise incompatible trajectories’ (Mooshammer 2015: 17). Each vendor’s stall can therefore be considered a collective of thresholds which are held in place, or loosened and re-established as negotiations between people, place, economies, institutions and patterns of weather and work. Thus, as well as being sets of thresholds which foster local interpersonal exchanges and singular transactions, they are also thresholds which activate wider multinational exchanges and the movement of goods outward and inbound, to and from, locations overseas. The stall, whether cobbled together from components and materials to hand or located as a module inside a market building, is a mediation between a locale of intimate immediacies and a world of networked dependencies. It is thus the most active and agentive of collective thresholds. Importantly, these thresholds exist as material surfaces. A wheeled street food cart has various chambers for storage, a surface for arranging ingredients and a separate one for cooking. It may also have a parasol which describes a space underneath it. This becomes a territory subject to a threshold as defined by the projection of one surface (the parasol, on a higher plane) onto another (the paved ground plane), whereby the buyer is subject to the gaze and attention of the vendor. The vendor is permitted to give you their sales pitch, but the buyer is forbidden from their sales and preparation area, which is projected behind the cart itself. Such a sense of space that is relative to and folds out from the body can be found in Otto Bollnow’s (2011) work Human Space. Here, Bollnow establishes a spatial system through the coordination of the human body rather than via the abstraction of the Cartesian coordinate system. To describe space, Bollnow uses everyday language – up and down, left and right, in front and behind – which qualitatively feels different from the positional co-ordinates of x, y and z, which equate every point in space to a theoretical neutrality. Marketplaces are a proliferation of diverse thresholds, and this multiplicity is what makes them such engaging environments to observe and be part of. In strolling through the central street in Namdaemun Market, all manner of goods, sales strategies, marketing pitches, perceptual stimuli and forms of spatial occupation are encountered. Space exists in permanent, temporary, mobile and established forms; disparate vendors cooperate and compete simultaneously, and an

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opportunistic architecture evolves which takes advantage of the shifts in market conditions as they occur from one day to the next. The market’s surfaces – that for Gibson are the threshold between substance and medium – operate as social distinctions between vendors, authorities, restauranteurs, porters and buyers. Discussing the collection of practices and thresholds from the ecological viewpoint of surfaces which constitute the market offers an opportunity to broaden the scope of what might be considered architecture. To observe, study and acknowledge the production of the marketplace presents a possibility to embrace themes of mobility, modularity and configuration in architecture which leads on from the imagination of 1960s avant-garde architecture but which does so in a highly pragmatic way. Importantly, to consider this bodily practice of architecture in correspondence with materials prompts a breakage from Cartesian coordinate geometry and points towards a sense of space that is more relative, fluid and imbued with the force and settlements of negotiation. Such a perspective asserts that architecture is, through its surfaces, constitutionally both material and social.

Notes 1 The architectural historian Niklaus Pevsner famously declared that: ‘A bicycle shed is a building. Lincoln cathedral is a piece of architecture’ (2009: 10). This is a position that still holds sway within some architectural debates but which this chapter fundamentally opposes. 2 See Lucas (2018) for more detail on this phenomenon, with reference to Katsura Imperial Villa Kyoto. 3 For an account of the Archigram group from the inside, see Cook (1999); for a discussion of Price’s projects, see Hardingham (2016) and for a detailed account of the Japanese ‘Metabolists’, see Lin (2010). 4 Many, if not all, markets have a cyclical nature – see Gell (1999) for a notable diagrammatic account of a market in Dhorai, India, highlighting matters of temporality.

References Appadurai, A. 2003. Illusion of permanence: Interview with Arjun Appadurai by Perspecta 34. Perspecta 34(2003): 44–52. Bollnow, O.F. 2011. Human Space. London: Hyphen Press. Cook, P. 1999. Archigram. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. Gell, A. 1999. The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. London: Athlone Press. Gibson, J.J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Graaff, K. and N. Ha (eds.) 2015. Street Vending in the Neoliberal City: A Global Perspective on the Practices and Policies of a Marginalized Economy. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Hardingham, S. 2016. Cedric Price Works 1952–2003: A Forward-Minded Retrospective. London: Architectural Association Publications. Hart, K. 2015. How the informal economy took over the world. In Informal Market Worlds: Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure, eds. P. Mörtenböck, H. Mooshammer, T. Cruz and F. Forman. Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, pp. 33–44. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Koolhaas, R. 2014. Elements. Venice: Marsilio. Kuma, K. 2008. Anti-Object: The Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture. London: Architectural Association Publications. Lin, Z. 2010. Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan. Abingdon: Routledge. Leatherbarrow, D. and M. Mostafavi. 2002. Surface Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lucas, R. 2006. Towards a Theory of Notation as a Thinking Tool. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen. Lucas, R. 2012. The instrumentality of Gibson’s medium as an alternative to space. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14(3). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2039. Lucas, R. 2018. Threshold and temporality in architecture: Practices of movement in Japanese architecture. In Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity, ed. S. Bunn. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 279–291. Mooshammer, H. 2015. Other markets: Sites and processes of economic pressure. In Informal Market Worlds: Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure, eds. P. Mörtenböck, H. Mooshammer, T. Cruz and F. Forman. Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, pp. 17–32. Mörtenböck, P. and H. Mooshammer (eds.) 2015. Informal Market Worlds: Atlas: The Architecture of Economic Pressure. Rotterdam: nai010 publishers. Mörtenböck, P., H. Mooshammer, T. Cruz and F. Forman (eds.) 2015. Informal Market Worlds: Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure. Rotterdam: nai010 publishers. Pevsner, N. 2009. An Outline of European Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson. Sassen, S. 2015. Shrinking economies, growing expulsions. In Informal Market Worlds: Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure, eds. P. Mörtenböck, H. Mooshammer, T. Cruz and F. Forman. Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, pp. 45–54. Schumacher, P. 2013. The Dongdaemun Design Plaza as milestone of parametricism. Space 549(August): 55–65. Simone, A. and R. Febriyani. 2015. Fields of inclusion: Notes on traditional markets in Jakarta. In Informal Market Worlds: Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure, eds. P. Mörtenböck, H. Mooshammer, T. Cruz and F. Forman. Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, pp. 119–134. Unwin, S. 2007. Doorway. London: Routledge.

8

Vital surfaces and the making of urban architecture Anuradha Chatterjee

Introduction Surfaces, says Joseph A. Amato (2013: 1), ‘evade easy definition’. In fact, the more they are defined, the more slippery and elusive they become. Surfaces may be defined as skin (Cheng 2009; Lupton 2002), textile (Anusas and Ingold 2013), image (Flusser 2000), screen (Bruno 2014), blur (Di Palma 2006), material (Ingold 2007), effect (Benjamin 2006) or the instrument of perception (Gibson 1986). In architecture, surfaces can be specifically identified as coexistent forms and effects – wall, plaster, paint, cladding, ornament, fenestrations (doors, windows and louvers), projections (balconies and loggias), transparencies/reflections/ translucencies and image. Nevertheless, according to Glenn Adamson and Victoria Kelley (2013: 1), surfaces are the ‘external appearance of things, easily manipulated, and within many traditions of thought, are held to be of lesser consequence than “deeper” or more “substantive” interiorities’; this fuels the tendency to ‘rush past the surface to excavate more complex inner truth’. This rushing past the surface is partially true for architectural theory and practice, where surface has occupied, and sometimes continues to occupy, an ancillary status. Surface is seen as capable of being interpreted but not occupied, capable of being effected but not influencing the design of the enclosure in which people live. This chapter explores and argues for a greater agency of surface in architecture.1 The writings of John Ruskin and the current field of surface studies are important in grounding these considerations. The inquiry is also aided by recent shifts in architectural discourse: David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi’s (2002) discussion of the free façade and artifice in modernist buildings, Mark Taylor’s (2003: 5) departure from the ‘oppositional format of whether surface is depth or depth is surface’, and Amanda Reeser Lawrence and Ashley Schafer’s (2007) consideration of surface as the new locus of invention and occupation. The chapter aims to challenge the limits of the discipline of architecture and reveal the spatial potentialities of surface. The first section, ‘The impossibility of surface in architectural theory’, opens with a discussion of the opposition(s) between surface and architecture. The nineteenth century marks a point of disjunction. In establishing the disciplinary definition of architecture, the constructive and the spatial took precedence over the visual, despite the fact that the nineteenth century was defined by burgeoning

Vital surfaces and urban architecture 117 visuality. The chapter considers the limitations of this premise in the context of the more recent surface turn, where surface is substance and the distinction between surface and depth diminished. The second section, entitled ‘John Ruskin and architecture as pure surface’, provides a precursor to this, through Ruskin’s theory of the adorned wall veil, a nineteenth-century theory of surface architecture, as it were. Ruskin relied upon Thomas Carlyle’s philosophy of clothes and the notion of spiritual life to argue that ‘architectural clothing’ would reveal the inner life or the moral health of the society that produced it. Architecture was thus theorised entirely through textile metaphors, defined as absolute surfaceness. The third section, entitled ‘Urban surfaces and Australian buildings’, considers the idea of looking beyond Ruskin, which alludes to the broadening of his theory of surface as architecture. This is supported by the identification of other typologies of surface, beyond that of representation, which have profound spatial agency. Through a physical study of recent buildings in Melbourne, Australia, the chapter explores the thickened surface of the urban threshold – the effect and occupation of surface, which in essence articulates a conversation between the building and the city.

The impossibility of surface in architectural theory This section foregrounds the adversarial conceptualisations of surface (and visuality) and architecture. As said, the nineteenth century marks a point of incoherence. As an age, it is defined by burgeoning visuality, where surface is at the frontier of mediating these debates on seeing, illusion, truth, unity, subjectivity and so on (Burns 2004; Crary 1990). Yet its architectural theory adheres to constructive and spatial imperatives, over the visual and the surficial, in defining the discipline of architecture. The paradox is also that, despite the overexposed status of architectural surface, it is hardly ever looked at. As Beatriz Colomina (1994: 11) explains: ‘Sometimes the best way to hide something is in full sight’. Anne Cheng (2009: 101) echoes this in a recent publication, where she states: ‘Sometimes it is not a question of what the visible hides but how it is that we have failed to see certain things on its surface’. The surface is almost always looked past, or looked through, and thus remains inaccessible to analysis. The modern era, according to Martin Jay (1988: 3), is ‘ocularcentric’, as it is ‘dominated by sight in a way that sets it apart from its premodern predecessors’. Jay argues that modern western culture is marked by a ‘ubiquity of vision’ (ibid.: 3). This condition is exacerbated in the nineteenth century and evidenced in the proliferation of images; surges in technologies of seeing; settings that foster the production, exchange and consumption of these images; and the agency of the observer and subjective vision (Crary 1990; Flint 2000; Newey 2009; Burns 2004).2 Kate Flint (2000: 1) argues that the (Victorian) fascination with the ‘act of seeing’ was about the ‘question of the reliability – or otherwise – of the human eye, and with the problems of interpreting what they saw’. The subjective and social act of seeing, framing, and recording the world was complicated by the idea

118 Anuradha Chatterjee of ‘outward and inward seeing’, or the ‘mind’s eye’, which constituted an inner world of imagination. Above all, the concern was surrounding the ‘slipperiness of the borderline between the visible and the invisible’ (ibid.: 2). While society was afforded different forms of spectatorship, it was also concerned with the ‘problematisation of that optical instrument, the human eye’ (ibid.: 2). Jonathan Crary (1988: 9) argues that vision itself became the object of study, as inquiry shifted from ‘physical optics (the study of light and the forms of its propagation)’ to ‘physiological optics (the study of the eye and its sensory capacities)’. Specifically, the investigation into the ‘retinal afterimage’ was the most significant discovery of a so called ‘optical truth’ (ibid.: 9). The preoccupation with the visual was satisfied in a number of ways. Flint (2000: 3) argues that the ‘dissemination of images, whether photographic or engraved’ became possible due to the ‘development of the press and the diminishing costs of newsprint and printing technologies’. Periodicals like Illustrated London and Graphic ‘relied as much, if not more, on images as on words in their representation of the world’ (ibid.: 3–4). Other forms of displays included exhibitions, panoramas, dioramas and the museums, all of which provided fleeting as well as permanent access to visual images. Flint (2000: 5) explains that Victorians indulged in visual excitement through the use of new optical inventions such as ‘the magic lantern, the kaleidoscope, the pseudoscope, the zoetrope,’ which provided a sensory experience without a tactile surface. The dominance of the visual had yet another implication, Flint argues – employing Foucault’s theory of the panoptic society – that ‘to make something visible is to gain not understanding of it, but control over it’ (ibid.: 7). The ‘drive to exposure’ was driven by the need to make things ‘available to the eye, and hence ready for interpretation’ (ibid.: 8). This was particularly supported through the work of the scientific community – also published and becoming part of popular culture via the increasing number of illustrated science publications – whose work with the microscope brought the invisible world forward and exercised ‘knowledge and control over the natural world’ (ibid.: 8).3 The nineteenth-century relationship between vision and surface was thus a paradoxical one, as even though surface was the cause for vision’s obscurity, uncertainty and opacity, it was also the precondition for the operation of vision. On one hand, as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus (2009: 10) argue, surface is seen as capable of prompting ‘symptomatic reading’, revealing ‘hidden meanings’ and truths that are modelled on the idea of depth. From this perspective, surfaces are ‘superficial and deceptive,’ and ‘would turn out to be false upon closer scrutiny’ (ibid.: 4). On the other hand, explains Karen Burns (2004: 80), the image ‘confounds our perceptual cues about depth of field, through the ‘potent misinformation’ it carries. To this end, surface is the ‘site of deceit – simulation – and thus potential instability within the system of representation’ (ibid.: 80). It is this scholarly fascination with depth, the conflation of depth with truth and the need to regulate depth that polarises surface and depth. These orientations no doubt complemented nineteenth-century architectural theory, because buildings too exhibit the duality palpable in nature and the human body in consisting of aspects that are

Vital surfaces and urban architecture 119 visible – exterior form, surface and ornament – and invisible – structural elements and forces and interior – to the eye. Critical reception of Ruskin provides evidence of architectural theory’s resistance to surface and its embeddedness in structural and spatial imperatives. Ruskin defined architecture as consisting of ornamental features, which were ‘venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary’ (Ruskin 1903–1912, vol. 8: 28). Ornament was ‘above and beyond its common use’, and it does not serve a use that is limited by ‘inevitable necessities, its plan or details’ (ibid.: 29). For Ruskin, ornament was valuable because it was useless. This also meant that he came across as uneducated in the discipline of architecture, insofar as this was defined as the knowledge of structural systems, perception of depth and interiority and threedimensionality of form. In 1853, Samuel Higgins, a frequent commentator on Ruskin, argued that architecture is the ‘art of the beautiful manifested in structure, of which, by its very nature, as a structural art, form must be the dominant principle’ and a ‘building in which construction is made subservient to, and whose chief glory is colour, whether obtained by painting the surface, or by incrustation with precious and coloured material, cannot be architecture at all, in the proper sense of the word’ (Higgins 1853: 723). An anonymous reviewer supported this view, as Higgins argued that Ruskin’s approach of discussing the ornament, instead of the structure, was like describing the ‘coat instead of the man, sometimes not even the coat, but the buttons and braid, which cover it’ (Anon 1853). Twentieth-century views were not all that different. Charles H. Moore (1924: 117) claimed that Ruskin’s ‘apprehensions were not grounded in a proper sense of structure and he had no practical acquaintance with the art of building’. Moore added: ‘He made, as we shall presently see, the distinguishing characteristics of Gothic to consist virtually in ornamental features – even structural members bring regarded by him as of primarily ornamental significance’ (ibid.: 117). Moore argued that even though Ruskin seemed to discuss structure, he did not fully understand the logic of the structural system. This opinion was echoed by Paul Frankl (1960: 560–561), who argued that Ruskin’s interest was always fixed on two-dimensional aspects, on the manner in which ornament contributed to the perception of the surface as an ‘integral whole’. Ruskin did not really understand important advancements in architecture like ribbed vaults, because he could not adequately visualise or understand three-dimensional interiors. Alternative and more inclusive readings, such as those of Hatton (1992) or Unrau (1978), suggest that the previously stated views failed to consider that it was interest in surface, not lack of understanding of interiors and structural mechanics, which motivated Ruskin’s architectural studies. Ruskin’s critics were no doubt in harmony with the somewhat later discovery and writings by August Schmarsow (1853–1936), who proposed the theory of architecture as a ‘spatial creation, based on bodily movement through space rather than stationary perception of form’(in Schwarzer and Schmarsow 1991: 50). Schmarsow’s theory was different from that of his predecessors, as it went against a static theory of space, and because it undermined the form-based understanding of architecture. The discovery of space permeated architectural thinking quickly.

120 Anuradha Chatterjee Gustav Platz argued that space ‘represents the highest cultivated form of our time’, and architect RM Schindler argued in 1934 that to understand modern architecture, one had to understand ‘“space” and “space forms” as a new medium for human expression’ (in Schwarzer and Schmarsow 1991: 57). Later, historians like Nikolaus Pevsner (1963: 15) also declared that the ‘history of architecture is a history of man shaping space’. Similarly, Bruno Zevi (1974: 22), in Architecture as Space, stated: ‘A satisfactory history of architecture has not yet been written, because we are still not accustomed to thinking in terms of space’. Sigfried Giedion (1941) attempted to address this issue by offering the ‘Three Space Conceptions,’ in Space, Time, and Architecture. From here on, architectural invention was defined wholly spatially, where spatiality was also narrowly understood as interiority – Adolf Loos’s theory of the Raumplan, Le Corbusier’s theory of the architectural promenade, Theo Van Doesberg’s theory of neoplastic space, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s universal space, and Louis Kahn’s plan as the society of rooms. We are, nevertheless, surrounded by and our lives entangled with surfaces. Recent writings from an interdisciplinary field of literature, science, art, design, anthropology and ethnology have given rise to ‘surface studies’, theories of life and world based on the study of ‘skin, screens, lines, interfaces, fabric, landscapes and the earth’ (Coleman and Oakley Brown 2019). In a 2005 lecture, architectural theorist Kurt W. Forster (2005) argued that even though we ‘have been taught to mistrust appearances’ and are ‘always asked to look for the substance of things and not be distracted by superficial matters’, we cannot transcend them. Noting the potency and pervasiveness of surface, Forster stated: ‘Surfaces are everywhere. It is tempting to think that we inhabit a world comprising only of surfaces.’ In fact, the fundamentality of surface for visual perception was proposed by ecological psychologist James J. Gibson (1986: 23), who argued that: The surface is where most of the action is. The surface is where light is reflected or absorbed, not the interior of the substance. The surface is what touches the animal, not the interior. The surface is where chemical reaction mostly takes place. The surface is where vaporization or diffusion of substances into the medium occurs. And the surface is where vibrations of the substances are transmitted into the medium. Even though Gibson’s thesis enables us to think of surfaces as integral to sense and cognition, his theory is underpinned by the assumption that surface exists because of substance and that its own form is reliant on the integrity and the constitutive properties of the substance under consideration. Therefore, in his writings, there are many instances where he states ‘surface of’, such as the ‘surface of a viscoelastic substance’ or the ‘surface of a rigid substance’ (ibid.: 25). The Gibsonian polarisation of surface and substance has also been complexified and contested by more recent perspectives. In particular, Tim Ingold (2011: 12) provides a rethinking of Gibson’s ‘sclerotisation’ of the environment – the assumption that sentient bodies encounter an insentient world and the moving body interacts with a fully preformed

Vital surfaces and urban architecture 121 environment. Using Martin Heidegger’s notion of dwelling and Maurice MerleauPonty’s theory of becoming, Ingold (2011: 12) argues that another way to look at this would be to consider ‘the sentient body, at once both perceiver and producer’, such that the surfaces of the world that are traversed are continuously made and remade. In my view, Ingold’s argument concerning the inextricability of the subject from the world is conversant with the entanglement of surface and substance, a point echoed by the architectural theorist, Gregor Eichinger (2011: 12), who states: ‘Essentially we have nothing other than surface. The entire universe consists of it. If we wanted to know what lies behind it, we would have to break with our given perception of the world, which is neither physically nor intellectually possible’. Along similar lines, Forster (2005) claimed: ‘As soon as we try to get beyond them [surfaces], we are called upon to make formidable epistemological efforts’. These assertions undermine the widely held belief that ‘peeling back the layers’ will lead to the substance of things, or the core of things: it will not. Truth is in/on the surface. From a textual point of view, Best and Marcus (2009) recommend that we abandon a ‘symptomatic reading’ (ibid.: 1) of surfaces that attempt to ‘plumb hidden depths’ (ibid.: 18) in texts and regard it as that which is ‘neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth’ (ibid.: 9), and so ‘A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through’ (ibid.: 9). This situates surface as content and meaning, reiterating the impossibility of separating surface from substance. Such a premise can be furthered through a Deleuze (1990) theory of sense, with sense as a ‘surface effect’ (ibid.: 82): not something to discover but to ‘produce by a new machinery’ (ibid.: 72) and also described as ‘inseparable from surface which is its proper dimension’ (ibid.: 83), not produced in/by depths of bodies, which are of ‘undifferentiated depth and in their measureless pulsation’ (ibid.: 141). Thus, surface is the ‘locus of sense’ (ibid.: 124), its organisational machinery and the ‘living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit’ (Simondon, cited in ibid.: 119). Matter is thus organised topologically, such that the categories of inner and the outer become non-existent. Everything is simultaneously inside and outside – at the limit – and always defined as/by the surface condition. Surface does not belong to substance, and substance does not have a surface. Rather, surface is substance: it cannot be transcended.

John Ruskin and architecture as pure surface This section takes the debate further, contextualising it and locating it in a nineteenth-century precursor – Ruskin’s theory of the adorned wall veil. Ruskin relied on Thomas Carlyle’s (1983) writings, particularly Sartor Resartus. Carlyle’s philosophy of clothes favoured the soul over the body, whereby the soul was located in the clothing, not the body. Along similar lines, Ruskin argued that the clothing of the building, the seamless veneer of polychromatic ornament covering the external wall, was what revealed the inner life or moral health of the society that produced it: this is architecture. The tectonic language of buildings was thus

122 Anuradha Chatterjee transformed into one of textile fabrications.4 The (building) materials were pliable and luxurious fabrics; the process of making involved cutting, gathering, stretching, stitching, draping and layering, and the outcome was dressing. Ruskin’s architectural theory was based on the wall, which was the key element in ‘The Six Divisions of Architecture,’ in Stones of Venice I, and one of the three elements (with roof and apertures) that constituted architecture. He also devoted four chapters to the wall: ‘the wall base’, ‘the wall veil’, ‘the wall cornice’ and ‘the wall veil and shaft’ (see Ruskin 1903–1912, vol. 8). The remaining chapters focused on surface details. The illustrations included wall decorations and profiles of architectural elements like bases, capitals, cornices, mouldings and brackets. Considered together, the textual and graphic documentation suggested that Ruskin was proposing a new language of architecture focused entirely on surface. This is evidenced in his argument in Seven Lamps of Architecture that the wall is the only element in architecture that is worth considering. Ruskin (ibid.: 108–9) argued: ‘Of the many broad divisions under which architecture may be considered, none appear to me more significant than that into buildings whose interest is in their walls, and those whose interest is in the lines dividing their walls’. This showed that his interest was in buildings where the integrity of the wall (mass and solidity) was sustained. This is why he argued that in the ‘Greek temple the wall is as nothing’, whereas in ‘Romanesque work and Egyptian, the wall is a confessed and honoured member’ (ibid.: 108–9). Ruskin promoted a new way of looking at buildings, which was no longer tied to period and style. His classificatory system was based on the wall, and the terms ‘Gothic’ and ‘Renaissance’ were indicative of attitudes to surface. Furthermore, the wall was not merely an architectural element: it was the (new) architectural object. The wall was ideally flat. In order to convey this point, Ruskin (ibid.: 109) compared two types of surfaces in nature: ‘For, whatever infinity of fair form there may be in the maze of the forest, there is a fairer, as I think, in the surface of the quiet lake; and I hardly know that association of shaft or tracery, for which I would exchange the warm sleep of sunshine on some smooth, broad, human-like front of marble’. This was an implicit comparison between a three-dimensional and a flat surface, between the bristly exterior of the Northern Gothic cathedrals and the decorated surfaces of Byzantine and Italian Gothic buildings. Ruskin recognised that the flatness of the wall could be reinforced by increasing its extent. This is why he delineated ‘[b]readth of flat surface’ (ibid.: 187) as the second item in the list of desirable architectural qualities. Furthermore, Ruskin (ibid.: 109–110) added that if the ‘terminal lines’ of the building were ‘removed, in every direction, as far as possible,’ it would make the ‘face of a wall look infinite, and its edge against the sky like a horizon’. The flatness of the wall was further reinforced by Ruskin’s definition of architecture, which according to him was the combination of the sister arts of painting and sculpture. Ruskin (ibid.: 11) declared that the ‘fact is, there are only two fine arts possible to the human race, sculpture and painting. What we call architecture is only the association of these in noble masses, or the placing them in fit places. All architecture other than this is, in fact, mere building’. He added that the ‘perfect building’

Vital surfaces and urban architecture 123 was one that was ‘composed of the highest sculpture . . . associated with pattern colours on the flat or broad surfaces’ (ibid.: 186). The architectural element that was best placed to negotiate and incorporate these arts into a common third form of art was the wall. Hence, the wall became synonymous with or identifiable as architecture. Furthermore, the wall itself was reinvented. It was not merely the background for the application of sculpture and painting. It was produced through the amalgamation of the sister arts. The ideal wall had to balance the sister arts, such that it could have abundant polychromy but could only receive lowrelief ornamentation. In other words, the wall was like a canvas that had abundant colour but barely any texture or relief. The comparison between the wall and the canvas was articulated in Seven Lamps, where Ruskin argued that the ‘wall surface is to an architect simply what a white canvas is to a painter’, adding also that the ‘canvas and wall are supposed to be given, and it is our craft to divide’ (ibid.: 115). The wall was seen as having expressive autonomy, not normally afforded to ‘architectural’ walls. The wall (referred to as the wall veil by Ruskin) was to be split clearly into surface and depth. He found precedence for this in geological formations such as mountains, specifically the Matterhorn in the Alps. Ruskin (ibid., vol. 9: 87) detected remarkable similarities between the mountain and a wall, specifically in the coursed form of its strata and the verticality of its ascent, and he observed that, the rock face was composed of a ‘mass of loose and slaty shale, of a dull brick-red colour, which yields beneath the foot like ashes’, which covered hard rock beneath, ‘disposed in thin courses of these cloven shales’. Ruskin (ibid: 88) noted that there were no cliffs, which did not ‘display alternations between compact and friable conditions of their material’ and, following the ‘universal law of natural building’, Ruskin suggested that the wall, like the mountain, ought to ideally consist of a delicate and decorative outer layer, which almost always conceals a solid inner core. This was a seemingly obvious tectonic condition – theorised for the first time in Italian Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s writings – however, Ruskin’s proposition was grounded in the relation between the fragile and cohesive, covering and masking a solid interior, mirroring the dressing of the human figure. The disjunction between surface and depth in the adorned wall veil was not just physical: it was also symbolic. In other words, the ornamentation of the wall was disconnected from its construction. This is evidenced in the Baptistery of Florence, which according to Ruskin (ibid., vol. 23: 298) was the ‘central building of European Christianity’. He compared the Baptistery’s wall to a ‘Harlequin’s jacket’, where the colourful and vivid diapered patterns make no reference to the disposition of musculature of the human body (ibid.: 217). This was seen in the Baptistery, where the pictorial tectonics of the arches, shafts, bays and floor levels, delineated through the use of coloured marble, neither explain nor indicate the actual disposition of space or structure inside the building. The pictorial nature of this surface was reinforced in Ruskin’s characterisation of the building as ‘one piece of large engraving. White substance, cut into, and filled with black and dark green’ (ibid.: 344). This is evidenced in his drawing of a cropped view of one of

124 Anuradha Chatterjee the bays, which indicates that the external wall may be appreciated as if it were an independently executed art object. The adorned wall veil was also a pliable entity, both in form and ornament. Ruskin discussions around the drawing ‘Pier base’, Stones I, suggested that the wall was a pliable entity. The drawing showed five types of wall construction systems – the solid wall, two sets of pilastered walls, a row of piers and a row of shafts – arranged sequentially, as if suggesting constructive contiguity. He said: ‘Now observe: the whole pier was the gathering of the whole wall, the base gathers into base, the veil into the shaft, and the string courses of the veil gather into these rings; and when this is clearly expressed, and the rings do indeed correspond with the string courses of the wall veil’ (ibid., vol. 9: 128). Along these lines, the cornice would become the capital and the plinth of the wall transformed into a base for the shaft. That these are distinct constructional systems is suppressed by Ruskin’s textile language, in which wall, shafts, piers, pilasters, capitals and cornices were seen as uninterrupted elements. It seemed as though the wall was to architecture what cloth was to tailoring and dressing, whereby the entire surface of the building was composed of a fabric-like material that could be cut, stretched or gathered. The (literary and visual) transformation of stone into fabric was also undertaken at the level of the ornament. Ruskin (ibid., vol. 3: 151) argued that ‘properties which, when inherent in a thing, make it drapery, are extension, non-elastic flexibility, unity and comparative thinness. Everything which has these properties, a waterfall, for instance, if united and extended, or a net of weeds over a wall, is drapery’. Ornament adhering to these principles would fuse and link to form a flat and a flexible membrane. It would be able to cover a substantial area without losing its form. It was these qualities that made that made the basket and lily capital in the Church of St. Mark’s basilica, Venice; inlaid spandrels in the Church of San Michele de Or, Lucca; interlaced wall ornament in Ca Trevisan, Venice; and the uninterrupted traceries of Ca’ d’Oro, Venice important to Ruskin. As mentioned, Ruskin’s interest in textile and dress was indebted to Thomas Carlyle (1833–1834) and his book Sartor Resartus, which, through the perspective of the German philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, asserts that ‘Society is founded upon Cloth’ (Carlyle 1983: 38). Carlyle (ibid.: 54) argued that ‘all visible things are emblems’ and ‘all emblematic things are properly clothes, thoughtwoven, or hand-woven’. The very basis of culture was symbolic, and all symbols were clothes that expressed a hidden idea. Even language was called the ‘garment of thought’ (ibid.: 54), as it revealed imagination, the invisible spirit of the human mind. These arguments were extended to the human body. Carlyle (ibid.: 2) claimed that clothes were the ‘grand tissue of all tissue’, the ‘vestural tissue’, that ‘man’s soul wears as its outmost wrappage and overall; wherein his whole other . . . tissues are included and screened, his whole faculties work, his whole self lives, moves, and has its being’. Clothes were imparted with a corporeal quality and importance greater than the body and were capable of setting the soul free from its subjugation to the body. Clothes were so important that Carlyle (ibid.: 25–26) compared them to architectural styles, ‘Grecian, Gothic, later-Gothic, or altogether modern, and Parisian

Vital surfaces and urban architecture 125 or Anglo-Dandiacal’. He argued: ‘In all his modes, and habilatory endeavours, an architectural idea will be found lurking; his body and the cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice of a person, is to be built’. The phrase ‘architectural idea’ suggested that the (unclothed) body did not possess innate truth but that it was constructed. The fabrication of the exterior surface of the body allowed it to come into being. That the cloth was the material, and the body the site for the construction, reinforced the importance of cloth over body. It also unhooked the soul from the body, allowing it a more direct (surface) and an autonomous (separate from the body) expression and presence. Ruskin utilised this thinking to argue: ‘Uniting the technical and imaginative elements as essentially as humanity does soul and body, it shows the same infirmly balanced liability to the prevalence of the lower part over the higher, to the interference of the constructive, with the purity and simplicity of the reflective element’ (Ruskin 1903–1912, vol. 8: 20–21). This demonstrated Carlylean influence, as Ruskin privileged soul and associated it with the added layer of ornamentation that was added to the brute masonry structure of a building. The privileging of soul over body was a contextual response. Both thinkers were responding to the increasing materialism and focus on physical sciences in Victorian England that tended to overshadow and dominate spiritual and metaphysical domains of knowledge. Nevertheless, the profound consequence of this was that, for the first time, surface was positioned as substance, as capable of constituting substance, and as having a constructive agency or role.

Urban surfaces and Australian buildings This section now considers the enormous potentiality of surface that has as yet remained undeveloped. Andrew Benjamin (2006: 30–31) defines potentiality as a ‘yet-to be realised possibility’ and a ‘generative’ field where ‘generative can be located in a set of relationships rather than being reduced to an image of those relationships’. To this end, it is stimulating to think of the consequences of surface as substance, and surface as constructive (in thinking beyond the known terrain of the representational surface in architecture). The potentiality of Ruskin’s theory of surface as architecture is in the excavation of surface typologies that have thus far been overlooked and that allow us to think of other ways of constituting (as well as enriching) spatiality and occupation, from ‘outside in’. This is not to be confused with the depth orientation of symptomatic reading. This is a form of reading that deliberately reverses the process of architectural production that is often limited to proceeding from within to without. It seeks hidden spatialities in surface configurations that are not reducible to the excavation of depth. This I have explored in a chapter in Surface and Deep Histories (Chatterjee 2014b), where four additional attitudes to surface are identified. First, surface as an urban threshold, consisting of fenestrations, entries, screens and other elements, is seen as having a key role in articulating the building’s place in the city, as well as shaping public space and public life. Second, surface may be integrated with the structural system, and its articulation may inform the spatial experience

126 Anuradha Chatterjee of the interior. Third, optically and physically transient surfaces refigure to the shifting climatic and occupational conditions, thereby challenging the identification of architectural surface as pictorial and static. And fourth, due to the figuration of surface as a topological condition in digital software, it becomes the method of generating form, structure and space (through manual and digital processes of layering, folding, pleating), offering an alternative to the classical orientations in architectural design theory. As these modalities coexist in architecture, surface becomes ‘superficial and pervasive, symbol and space; meaningful and functional; static and transitory, object and envelope’ (Chatterjee 2014a: 11). This chapter continues by exploring the urban agency of surface, first through historical case studies and then with a focus on three recent constructions in Melbourne, Australia.5 The significance of this exploration may be grasped by considering more recent critiques in architectural theory that have mounted a challenge to development imperatives that view architecture, landscape, infrastructure, geology and hydrology as separate areas of concern. Frampton (2010) was the first to articulate a critique of the twentieth-century city as consisting of ‘megaforms’. He notes the ‘“ad-hoc” proliferation of ill-related, relatively isolated, free-standing objects, which invariably go to make up the ‘non-place’ agglomeration of the contemporary urban environment’ (ibid.: 45). Here, Alex Wall’s (1999: 233) thinking around the ‘urban surface’ is also productive. He suggests that we look at projects that ‘signal a shift of emphasis from the design of enclosed objects to the design and manipulation of larger urban surfaces’ and that act as the ‘connective tissue that organizes not only objects and spaces but also the dynamic processes and events that move through them’. Wall asks that we consider the ‘extensive and inclusive ground-plane of the city’ that ‘organizes and supports a broad range of fixed and changing activities in the city’. I argue that in order to achieve the desired contiguity between buildings and cities, it is important to think not just of the ground but also of the vertical surface of the building. Specifically, it is the doors, windows and loggias (as well as niches and aediculae, or screens, projections and walls) that matter.6 In ‘The Decorum of Doors and Windows, from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century’, Kohane and Hill (2006) explain that these elements were historically conceived to attribute to buildings a sense of order, decorum and animation, which not only allowed buildings to fit into the order of the city, but it also encouraged citizens to sense correspondence between buildings and their own bodies. However, the surface elements listed previously exceed their social and corporeal consequences and they can be considered to articulate urban ‘effects’, of which I shall now explore three, as follows. The first effect of urban surfaces is the construction of the theatrical urban experience. Observable in the National Library of St Mark’s in Venice by Renaissance architect Jacopo Sansovino, the loggias not only create an experience of the urban realm as a drama to be witnessed, but they also produce a backdrop for the urbanity to unfold as a theatrical act (Johnson 2000). There is another facet to this. Architectural historian Karsten Harries (1990: 23) argues, through the writings of nineteenth-century French architect Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris

Vital surfaces and urban architecture 127 Opera: ‘Wherever two or three people gather, there is theater, at least in principle’. In fact, Garnier argued: ‘To see and to make oneself be seen, to understand and to make oneself be understood, that is the fated circle of humanity; to be actor or spectator, that is the condition of human life’ (Garnier, cited in Harries 1990: 23). This suggests a dynamic interchangeability between audience and spectator and a mode of theatricality that is relational and shifting, thereby making space for vitality in urban life. The second effect of urban surfaces is the formation of shared territories, or the space of encounter between the public and the private. Giovanni Maciocco (2014: 2) uses the word ‘territory’ to diminish the dichotomy between city and architecture, calling it the ‘intermediate space’, a system of reciprocal relations which establishes an ‘aperture, otherness, a third character, favourable towards mediation and transformation’. Maciocco (2014: 1) sees territory as the ‘space in which the city of places re-emerges in the city of flows’. This means that the territory is where the locatedness of occupation begins to emerge. Maciocco also considers the territory as ‘urban potential’ (2008: 7), where ‘new modalities of public space may be experimented, [which] are the counter-spaces of the metropolis’ (ibid.: 15) beyond the imperatives of logic and commodification. This is evident in Andrea Palladio’s Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza (1551–54), where an extra four meters of public land was acquired for the building and, in return, the ground floor loggia was gifted back to the public. Because of this, the ‘city gained a long covered walkway, running the length of the building, which to this day is a major meeting place for the citizens of Vicenza’ and ‘Chiericati gained a much larger first floor as he was able to build over the walkway on the upper level’; thus, Palladio created a ‘wonderful synergy between public and private space’ (Goodwin 2009: 12). The third effect of surfaces is as ‘event’. Fiona McLachlan (2006: 192) explains that for Robert Venturi, the ‘contradictory demands of inside and outside, private and public, should be accommodated within the façade, not necessarily resolved, but expressive of any contradiction or discord’. Indeed, in Complexity and Contradiction, Venturi (1977: 86) states that the: wall – the point of change becomes an architectural event. Architecture occurs at the meeting of interior and exterior forces of use and space . . . Architecture as the wall between the inside and the outside becomes the spatial record of this resolution and drama. And by recognizing the difference between the inside and the outside, architecture opens the door once again to an urbanistic point of view. Venturi uses the terms event and eventual in the book several times to express the unexpected or the exceptional but mostly to suggest that creating a sense of vitality and complexity in architecture is a theatrical event that needs us to bear witness. The emphasis on event highlights action over representation, performance over the stabilisation of meaning. Venturi repositions the object/ive of architecture as the production of this wall/event, and, in so doing, redefines architecture as always urban.

128 Anuradha Chatterjee The Monaco House (2007) in Melbourne, by Robert McBride and Debbie-Lyn Ryan of McBride Charles Ryan Architects, is a perfect example of the use of surface to shape public life. This is a four-storey building on a pedestrian lane called Ridgway Place, at the east end of Melbourne’s Central Business District. More specifically, it sits on a corner that is created by a small service lane that leads in from Ridgway Place (see Figure 8.1A). McBride Charles Ryan (2007) claim that the ‘process of the aggregation of the Melbourne’s allotments is now almost universally seen as a process which diminishes urban quality and diversity. There is now an earnest attempt, even in large block developments, to reintroduce fine grain urbanism that has been lost to the city’. The architects characterise the building as diminutive, and no bigger than a ‘postage stamp’, given that the site is just over 6 meters in width and 17 meters in depth, with a footprint of approximately 102 square meters (McBride Charles Ryan 2007). Lacking real frontage, I find the building is not an easy find. It slowly materialises as I walk up to it. It has a narrow frontage and almost no foreground. The folded form of the corner is the first thing I see. The folding seems dynamic, as the faceted corner folds into and up into a buoyant folded form, which seems to rise up without much effort (see Figure 8.1B). The folded angular edges that catch the sun also hold the shadows that give the building a discernible identity. The folds also echo the fact that building is experienced as a series of discrete fragments. I experience the Monaco House by looking up and not by looking at it. I am encouraged to look up as the folded corner expands into the front. As I look up, I see projecting and receding balconies (and a window). As discussed by Kohane and Hill (2006), the theatricality of these elements is written into their conception. However, it is the soffit of the projecting balcony that really catches my eye: this is a theatrical element that is not obvious. My eyes are blinded by the metal-clad punctured soffit, which catches the light and reflects it back to my eye, deflecting my gaze, yet constantly drawing it up. Meanwhile, at the ground floor level, the folded corner shapes itself into a canopy, stretching deep into the building. This forms the ground floor café, a space that visibly supports public life. The urban surface is not just an external feature of the Monaco House. This is very much a Venturian event, wherein the rise and fall of the faceted surface is actually echoed in the interior spaces, maintaining a dialectical tension between inside and outside. The BHP Billiton Headquarters (2004), by Lyons Architects, on Collins Street in Melbourne CBD, commands a greater street presence. It departs from the commercial architecture typology of the 80s and the 90s, which was characterised by the tower and podium or the tower and plaza model. Michael Ostwald (2004) explains that this building (along with other recent mid-rise buildings in Melbourne) is a ‘horizontally attenuated’ tower that meets the ground directly. In such context, asking where the wall stops and urban surfaces begin becomes meaningless. The building fights the representational limits of glass. Throughout modernity, glass has been either a cold and impenetrable membrane or a reflective refracting crystalline object. BHP Billiton Headquarters ‘reframes’ the limits of

(A) Figure 8.1 A) Corner view, Monaco House (2007), Melbourne, by McBride Charles Ryan Architects, photo provided by McBride Charles Ryan Architects, photographer: John Gollings. B) View of balconies, Monaco House (2007), Melbourne, by McBride Charles Ryan Architects, photo provided by McBride Charles Ryan Architects, photographer: Trevor Mein.

130 Anuradha Chatterjee

(B) Figure 8.1 (Continued)

glass. The curtain wall seems to be ‘torn’ and contoured, to evoke cuts, folds and lifts, akin to a stiffened textile (Figure 8.2). The curtain wall also drops down into two layers of overlapping yet staggered canopies. This, combined with the ground plane that steps back and forth, articulates four different kinds of entries to the building. Above all, it creates recesses

Vital surfaces and urban architecture 131

Figure 8.2 BHP Billiton Headquarters (2004), Melbourne, Lyons Architects, photo provided by Lyons, photographer: John Gollings.

to recede into and dwell within (Figure 8.3). As I walk down the street on a rainy day, I am led into and out of these recesses and canopies, bumping into people carrying umbrellas. Nevertheless, my movement is guided by the fact that the canopies rise up to suggest slower movement at the entrances and dip down to articulate faster movement in between. This is a commercial building that lends itself to the people and the public realm that gifts to the city a shared territory of passage and encounter. As I walk into the building, I notice that the entrances and canopies affect the contours of the lobby. The entrances protrude into the space of the lobby. One can in fact see and feel the layered canopies. The polished floor of the lobby augments this effect, as it collects and multiplies the reflections of the city. While I am somewhat disoriented, I realise that this effect is also applicable to the exterior. The reflections on the glass canopy, seen from the outside, produce reflections that make me feel as if I am in an ‘interior’ that is also populated by reflections of the exterior (cars and buses and people on the opposite side of the street). The interior and the exterior can no longer be pulled apart. These partial and fragmented reflections of the city are further interiorised in the mural made of die-cast aluminium tiles installed in the lobby. Ostwald (2004) suggests that in the mural, ‘surfaces of the parallelogram-shaped tiles are highly polished while others are textured in such a way that from a distance the otherwise flat wall presents an illusion of spatial complexity’, evoking axonometric views of a city. This, he

132 Anuradha Chatterjee

Figure 8.3 Looking up from under one of the canopies, BHP Billiton Headquarters (2004), Melbourne, Lyons Architects. Source: Anuradha Chatterjee.

feels, echoes Lyons’s City of Fiction installation for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2000, which was composed of images of Lyons’s projects on brick-sized postcards that were organised as an ‘abstracted image of the contemporary city’ (Lyons Architects 2000).

Vital surfaces and urban architecture 133 The Nigel Peck Centre for Learning and Leadership (2008) in Melbourne, by John Wardle Architects, features a façade as a long undulating three-part structure on Domain Road (Figure 8.4). I focus on the central part of the building, which can be read as the sum total of the top (the framed glazed bays), the middle (glass façade of the library) and the base (brick seating outside). The top catches my eye: it consists of multiple glazed frames that are juxtaposed in a Mondrianesque manner. As the frames are of different thicknesses, the whole composition dances in and out, off the vertical plane. The juxtaposition of the glazed frames means that I see the Domain Gardens across the road as simultaneously doubled and fragmented. The foliage is actually a very important part of the urban context, which is constantly broken, shifted and repositioned on the façade, creating a curated experience of the landscape. I witness the landscape twice. The façade is simultaneously transparent and opaque. The glass is frit-patterned, containing pixelated impressions of the fleur-de-lis of the School crest. However, as I walk towards it, the patterns appear and disappear. In fact, they frequently coalesce with the reflections of the landscape, optically ‘thickening’ the glass surface. The opacity of the façade varies with the changing angle of shadows cast by the varying depth of the frames. The building engages you: this is not normally the case for glass facades (and curtain walls) that are entrenched in the phenomenon of distraction and mass media.

Figure 8.4 Glass façade, Nigel Peck Centre for Learning and Leadership (2008), Melbourne, John Wardle Architects, photo provided by John Wardle Architects, photographer: Trevor Mein, meinphoto.

134 Anuradha Chatterjee My experience of the interior is also mediated by these framed, glazed bays. As I head up to the first floor and walk toward the glass wall, I realise that the bays engender a sense of interior occupation. Here, the typology of the window is combined with that of a balcony to create an urban threshold that seems dynamic. The bays are quite purposefully disconnected from the interior, in the sense that their composition is not choreographed to the floor slabs. I am, therefore, able to stand pressed up against the glass and quite literally suspended between the floor slab and the street. Furthermore, the frames that are neither continuous nor choreographed create an abstract pictorial space of the landscape into which I am thrown, away from the building. The framed bays undulate vertically as well as horizontally. This makes the ground floor even more interesting: there are two adjacent but distinct thresholds. The interior is remarkable for its continuously folding study space that extends all the way up to the glass wall, but this does not end here. The interior is mirrored on the outside, in the continuous brick seating that roughly echoes the profile of the furniture inside. The interior and the exterior seating are sheltered, shaded and framed simultaneously by the soffit line of the projecting bay. The doubling and the folding of the experience of inhabiting the threshold makes a point about a learning culture that is as engaged with serious academic reflection as it is in the matters of the city. This is what makes possible the ‘outward focused learning environment orienting its students toward the city’ (John Wardle Architects 2008).

Conclusion This chapter has considered the crisis of surface in architecture – the polarisation of surface and depth – through the negative reactions to Ruskin’s writings, which almost exclusively referred to surface fragments from disparate buildings. Current scholarship in surface studies calls the previously stated dichotomy into question and argues that surface is substance and that there is no otherly substance that can be uncovered by peeling away the surface. These views echo Ruskin’s writings, which suggest that architecture is the act of dressing an unadorned edifice. His ideas were grounded in a Carlylean philosophy of clothes that renewed the value of the soul as the substance of human existence, located and expressed autonomously through clothing. Ruskin’s idea that architecture could be pure surface is full of potentiality that asks one to go beyond the literalness of Ruskin’s theory and imagine other possible futures. Hence, it becomes possible to imagine buildings (past, present and future) as assemblages – of different typologies of surfaces. It becomes possible to imagine the building blocks of architecture as not limited to structural and spatial systems, but including surface modalities. To this end, this chapter refers to four surface modalities (Chatterjee 2014a), of which one is more closely examined – surface as having urban agency. The urban agency of surface is identified as constituting: i) theatrical urbanity, ii) a shared urban territory, iii) an event that captures the tension between interiority and exteriority. This is explored through the study of three Melbourne buildings – Monaco House, BHP Billiton Headquarters and the Nigel Peck Centre for Learning and Leadership. The faceted and folded corner of the Monaco House

Vital surfaces and urban architecture 135 is choreographed to the projecting balconies to articulate a sharp vertical ascent, which creates a ‘front’ without a real frontage and space for a street side café. The BHP Billiton HQ curtain wall is manipulated to gift to the city a shared territory of passage and refuge. The building’s reflective surfaces undermine the separateness of the building and the city, private and public. The Nigel Peck Centre for Learning and Leadership creates a threshold that can be inhabited simultaneously from within and without. This chapter shows that just as the conceptual categories of surface and substrate cannot be pulled apart, the inner life of the building may in fact be constituted by the public life of the city. This not only challenges the modernist distancing of the building from the city, but it also provokes a redefinition of the idea of occupation and the possibility of imagining architecture from outside in.

Notes 1 Isabelle Doucet and Kenny Cupers (2009: 1) define agency as that which defines ‘how architecture enacts, how it performs, and consequently, how it might “act otherwise” or lead to other possible futures. This possibility underlies all questions regarding architecture’s ability to be critical. Agency can be understood as the very vehicle of such drive or intention to create alternative worlds’. It is in this sense that the agency of surface is explored, as the creative capacity of surfaces in articulating alternative, but equally valuable, spatial experiences, relations, and systems. The word ‘agency’ indicates that surfaces are not just consequences waiting to be interpreted: they are designed, intended to have an effect and be inhabited. 2 This is notwithstanding the recent scholarship on nineteenth-century vision, which has been shown to be as invested in touch, texture, tactility, and hand as it is in seeing – see Tilley (2014). 3 See also Lightman (2000). 4 The term tectonic indicates that which has to do with building and construction as the mode of production. It refers to use of the term by Frampton (1996: 520), who argues that it indicates ‘not only the structural component in se but also the formal amplification of its presence in relation to the assembly of which it is a part. From its conscious emergence in the middle of the nineteenth-century with the writings of Karl Bötticher and Gottfried Semper, the term not only indicates a structural and material probity but also a poetics of construction’. Frampton is inclined towards the tectonic over the scenographic. He therefore asks ‘architects to reposition themselves given that the predominant tendency today is to reduce all architectural expression to the status of commodity culture’ (ibid.). 5 The study of these buildings was funded by the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) David Saunders Founder’s Grant in 2008 for a project entitled Touching the Surface, Looking for Substance – The Role of the Surface in Australian Architecture form 1990–2008. 6 Kohane and Hill (2006) define: ‘An aedicule was originally the architecture of the small shrine, a miniature temple that celebrated the statue of the deity within. At some point it was transferred to the opening in general, becoming the flattened “little portico”’ (ibid.: 145) and niche ‘as a type of opening, positioned and formed like doors and windows’, which was ‘meant to house a statue’ (ibid.: 152).

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Vital surfaces and urban architecture 137 Frankl, F. 1960. The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gibson, J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Giedion, S. 1941. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goodwin, K. 2009. Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy. London: Royal Academy of Arts. Harries, K. 1990. Theatricality and re-presentation. Perspecta 26: 21–40. Hatton, P. 1992. The argument of the text. In The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition, and Architecture, eds. M. Wheeler and N. Whiteley. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Higgins, S. 1853. Classical columnar architecture and the Stones of Venice. The Builder 11(3 and 10 December): 722–724, 743–744. Ingold, T. 2007. Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 1–16. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Jay, M. 1988. Scopic regimes of modernity. In Vision and Visuality, ed. H. Foster. Seattle, WA: Seattle Bay Press. Johnson, E.J. 2000. Jacopo Sansovino, Giacomo Torelli, and the theatricality of the piazzetta in Venice. The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59(4): 436–453. John Wardle Architects. 2008. Australian Institute of Architects: Nigel Peck Centre for Learning and Leadership by John Wardle Architects. URL: http://dynamic.architecture. com.au/awards_search?option=showaward&entryno=2008037709 [Accessed: 1 January 2015]. Kohane, P. and M. Hill. 2006. The decorum of doors and windows, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Architectural Research Quarterly 10(2): 141–155. Lawrence, A.R. and A. Schafer. 2007. Expanding surface. Praxis: Journal of Writing and Building 9: 1. Leatherbarrow, D. and M. Mostafavi. 2002. Surface Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lightman, B. 2000. The visual theology of Victorian popularizers of science: From reverent eye to chemical retina. Isis 91(4): 651–680. Lupton, E. 2002. Skin: New design organics. In Skin, ed. E Lupton. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 29–42. Lyons. 2000. Lyons: ‘City of Fiction’, 7th International Architecture Biennale, Venice. URL: www.lyonsarch.com.au/city-of-fiction-7th-international-architecture-biennale-venice/ [Accessed: 1 January 2015]. Maciocco, G. 2008. The territorial future of the city. In The Territorial Future of the City, ed. G. Maciocco. New York, NY: Springer, pp. 1–27. Maciocco, G. 2014. Editorial. City, Territory and Architecture 1(1): 1. McBride, C.R. 2007. ArchDaily: Monaco House/McBride Charles Ryan. URL: www.arch daily.com/8039/monaco-house-mcbride-charles-ryan [Accessed: 17 October 2016]. McLachlan, F. 2006. Dancing windows: The restless façade. Architectural Research Quarterly 10(3–4): 191–200. Moore, C.H. 1924. Ruskin as a critic of architecture. Architectural Record 56(August): 117–122. Newey, K.M. 2009. Speaking pictures: The Victorian stage and visual culture. In Ruskin, the Theatre, and Victorian Visual Culture, eds. A. Heinrich, K.M. Newey and J. Richards. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–15.

138 Anuradha Chatterjee Ostwald, M. 2004. Towering transparency. Architecture Australia 93(5). URL: http://archi tectureau.com/articles/towering-transparency/ [Accessed: 1 January 2015]. Pevsner, N. 1963. An Outline of European Architecture. Hammondsworth: Pelican Books. Ruskin, J. 1903–1912. The Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, 39 vols., eds. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn. London: George Allen. Schwarzer, M.W. and A. Schmarsow. 1991. The emergence of architectural space: August Schmarsow’s theory of ‘Raumgestaltung’. Assemblage 15: 48–61. Taylor, M. (ed.) 2003. Surface consciousness. Architectural Design 73(2): 4–91. Tilley, H. (ed.) 2014. The Victorian tactile imagination. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 19. URL: www.19.bbk.ac.uk/87/volume/0/issue/19/ [Accessed: 19 May 2019]. Unrau, J. 1978. Looking at Architecture with Ruskin. London: Thames & Hudson. Venturi, R. 1977. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art. Wall, A. 1999. Programming the urban surface. In Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. J. Corner. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 232–249. Zevi, B. 1974. Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture, trans. M. Gendel. New York, NY: Horizon Press.

9

On the substance of surfaces Situating materials and design in Melanesian environments Graeme Were

Introduction Imagine a shiny worktop surface made of the plastic laminate Formica; for many people born in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, it will rekindle fond memories of their parents’ kitchen. Then imagine learning how these worktop surfaces had undergone a complete re-branding in the twenty-first century and are now regarded as sleek and desirable, must-have materials for architects and product designers for use in contemporary design. How have perceptions of these everyday surfaces and materials shifted so dramatically, and what are the factors that led this laminate surface to be re-imagined in new ways? And how might we reimagine laminates beyond their function as hard-wearing and hygienic towards thinking about them as material sites for the transformation of memory and the expression of new modes of living? This chapter will approach these questions through an ethnographic analysis of a woven leaf fibre basket recognised for its distinctive surface design. The basket has recently been revived and undergone innovation in the Papua New Guinea (PNG) province of New Ireland, an island group lying to the northeast of the PNG mainland and a few degrees south of the equator and so provides a fitting comparative study from which to reflect on surfaces from a Western/nonWestern perspective. I will conduct an anthropological analysis of the basket’s fibrous surface – its design, production and consumption by Nalik people in New Ireland – in order to engage with the politics of surfaces and to consider what is at stake materially by pushing beyond boundaries and interfaces (Tolia-Kelly 2013: 154). Here, the surface under scrutiny is a type of slightly coarse wrap surrounding a locally produced basket, a kind of envelope or second skin, buffering the outer world and human body from the inner warp and wefts of the basket interior design and structure. In investigating the basket’s outer design, I will argue that its surface is akin to what Bruno (2014: 3) calls ‘the fabric of the visual’, the very skin of images and the space of circulation, as its materiality conjures complex relations to materials, objects, persons and environments. I will demonstrate how its surface operates as a material configuration between subjects and with objects (as challenged throughout this volume), a substance for mediating thought and action, revealing meanings, power relations, motivations and values.

140

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In framing my approach within the context of Melanesian material culture, this chapter intends to contribute to the emerging area of surface studies, alongside others in this volume, by providing ethnographic substance to J.J. Gibson’s (1979: 23) proclamation that: ‘[t]he surface is where most of the action is’.

Surfaces, substances and material relations As Anusas and Simonetti (this volume) clearly articulate, there has been an upsurge of attention relating to surface studies in the humanities and social sciences. These studies have been situated in the disciplinary fields of art history, anthropology, architecture and archaeology, focusing on the ways in which surfaces take on vital importance in design communication, spatial dynamics, crafting activities, scientific thinking and responsive environments. A key contribution is by Amato (2013), who traces out a history of surfaces, looking at the way different surfaces have impacted the social world and the transformations this has brought about. Of significance, Amato (2013) states how surfaces, through drawing, writing, weaving, pottery and metallurgy, have become material and symbolic means of self-making and self-definition. Surfaces, he adds, are ‘the wardrobe of being’ (ibid.: xv) transformed through human experience into concepts, images, symbols and language. This vitality of surfaces, as a space for action and thought, is also alluded to by Bruno (2014). She positions surfaces as the site of mediation, projection and transformation, the material configuration between subjects and with objects. Drawing on studies in the visual arts, architecture and film, Bruno situates surfaces as a form of dwelling in the material world, which both partition and connect. These theoretical developments in the emerging field of surface studies also reflect recent approaches in the anthropology of material culture which seek to collapse distinctions between persons and things, nature and culture. A series of key publications to recently challenge anthropological understandings of surface and form are by Ingold (2000, 2011, 2012). He explores the intimate relation between maker and material in the emergence of surfaces and forms as a means to engage more widely with theoretical questions about human thought and action. Challenging the conventional notion that crafting follows a template, a prescribed process in which craftspersons follow a set of skilled procedures to reach their objective (the final form of an object), Ingold argues that forms actually emerge in situ, as a flow of forces between maker and material as the basket-maker struggles with the natural resistance of her materials in the activity of weaving. Ingold’s approach emphasises the emergence of surface at its moment of inception: that is, the moments in which surface emerges organically in the world as a form of ‘situated learning’ (e.g. Lave 1988). This approach limits surfaces to discrete interactions between maker and material and does not consider, as both Barry (2013) and Tolia-Kelly (2013) have cogently pointed out, the wider political environments in which surfaces and matter are situated. Considering these environments has implications on the way we understand surfaces to emerge; for example, how Formica was reinvented beyond its physical role as a shiny clean

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buffer and to consider how it projects modernity and transforms memory. Taking inspiration from all these approaches, I will argue that surfaces condense a complex array of technical and social relations within what Ingold calls a ‘field of forces’, distilling an aggregate of dispersed thoughts and actions into forms as they emerge. Surfaces emerge not just as a collaboration between maker and material but also as an interaction with social, political and historical conditions. As dispersed and connected forces, these also shape the substance of surfaces and so enable persons to perform in particular ways. Thus, we could say that surfaces are ontologically deep, offering a window into human experience as they emerge. My approach is congruent with the thinking of other anthropologists who have pointed to the wider political relations that influence and shape the emergence of synthetic materials in society. For example, O’Connor (2011) has examined how Lycra emerged in American society during the Baby-boomer era of the 1950s. Though not explicitly concerned with the nature of surfaces, her approach does shed important light on the technical and social dimensions of surfaces, the way in which Lycra came into being through executive brainstorming sessions, consumer wear-testing, new factory mass production techniques and intensive marketing research campaigns which positioned Lycra as a superior stretch fibre for women. Importantly, O’Connor’s observes how Lycra emerged within a niche market that, for American women, transformed body image as well as their patterns of consumption and well-being. Her work reflects Bruno’s (2014) insights on surfaces, that is, how surface can be understood as a form of dwelling, as productive and empowering spaces caught up in material relations, histories and processes of commodification. Following O’Connor’s ethnography of Western industrial design processes, I will extend my analysis of surfaces in New Ireland to encompass not just those surfaces in the immediacy of material relations but also to consider how power, politics, gender and economy are caught up in this field of forces acting as dynamic thresholds, boundary conditions and complex trajectories distributed across time and space. I will consider these surface conditions and how, in PNG, such surfaces act as sites of mediation, linked to modernity, self-fashioning and commodification. These linkages are important because what makes surfaces so important to Melanesian anthropology – to which this chapter is a contribution – is their relation to processes of display and the articulation of power. In her landmark essay on self-decoration in Mount Hagen, in Highlands New Guinea, Strathern (1979) argues that acts of self-decoration, in the form of ceremonial paint, feathers, grease and other substances during lifecycle events, elicits a sense of ancestral power, community well-being and clan cohesion. Surfaces are transformative through acts of display, the outcome of which is political strength revealed and made visible. She argues how there is more to self-decoration than simply the act of concealment: in contrast to Western forms of self-decoration which aim to conceal the self through cosmetic application, Strathern claims that amongst Hageners, the act of concealment is about rendering the inner self visible and thus publicly knowable. The revelatory process not only obscures the outer public self but in making the inner self visible attests to the spiritual well-being of the body,

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gifted by the ancestors and a symbol of the clan political strength and its success in ceremonial exchange. Much like Hageners, who adorn their skins with paints and grease to express clan power, my approach will explore how Nalik women are transforming surfaces of baskets in order to re-define social worlds and fashion themselves in particular ways. The transformation of surfaces in the Pacific is highly significant to empowerment and display, as Thomas’s (1999) study of the introduction of trade cloth to the region testifies. In his analysis of a poncho-like garment that emerged with cloth’s circulation by missionaries and colonial authorities, Thomas argues how cloth could be understood as a kind of technology for effecting new forms of thinking and being in the region. Cloth – as the fabric of the visual – brought with it the capacity to be transformed into new forms of clothing (e.g. cutting, stitching, sewing, etc.) and was aligned, through material and visual connections, to colonial power relations through its exposure alongside other objects of power, such as guns, ships and government outposts. While not dealing explicitly with an analysis of surface, Thomas (1999) nevertheless demonstrates how forms of self-fashioning – such as techniques of wrapping of the body – require situating within wider social, religious and political environments beyond their physical transformation and re-working. Drawing on the insights of Thomas (1999) and Strathern (1979) as well as surface studies theorists (e.g. Amato 2013; Bruno 2014), my approach will thus consider how surfaces should be taken seriously beyond surface-depth analyses (as surface evidence of emotional states or habits) – much as Hollander (1993) has argued in her important analysis of clothing. An anthropological analysis of surface, I contend, develops an appreciation of materiality in terms of shifting geographies, socio-technical schema and the very fabric of image-ness which is critical in order to fully grasp the operational logic of surfaces in Melanesian society. In order to do so, this chapter begins by giving a brief outline of some of the relevant transformations that have taken place in the Nalik area of New Ireland before moving on to consider the political and social environments in which surfaces are situated and the types of agency surfaces enable.

Nalik people, materials and change The Nalik people are a matrilineal group of over 5000 Austronesian speakers who live in the northern part of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, along coastal settlements on the east and west coasts of the island. They are organised around an exogamous clan-based system through which marriage alliances, exchange alliances and land are structured. Northern New Ireland is arguably most famous for the practice of malanggan, a complex set of funerary rites that take place to honour the dead. These rites involve elaborate feasting ceremonies that may commence several years after death and continue over several months. The term malanggan refers not only to the feasting ceremonies but also to the carved wooden and fibre effigies that are displayed, fleetingly, during the mortuary feasts (Küchler 2002; Lewis 1969). Naliks continue to practice malanggan even though the region has undergone rapid change over the last century.

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One of the most salient changes in the region has been the influx of new materials, which has made a huge and highly visible impact on the material culture of the region, bringing with them new possibilities for design and, as Amato (2013) states, redefining environments and lives. Before colonialism and missionisation widened the availability of materials in the region, a multitude of different types of leaves, lianas, roots, barks and flowers had been used to adorn the body, often denoting rank and status in society and establishing metaphors and symbols. Local textiles were produced for clothing and coverings, using a variety of locally available plant fibres, sometimes dyed using pigments extracted from plants or soil. Plant fibres, transformed into coarse, smooth, white, impermeable or shiny surfaces through processes of weaving, stitching, tacking or thatching, offered protection from the sun and the rain as well as malevolent spirits and thus were considered vital to the maintenance of the social body as well as the articulation of status and rank (e.g. Were 2013; Strathern 1979). With the establishment of Christian missions, the types of materials experienced by local people changed dramatically. The arrival of Methodist missionaries on the island in 1875 (and Catholic missionaries some years later) heralded the onset of widespread availability and adopting of trade cloth and second-hand clothing for utilitarian as well as ritual purposes. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Were 2005), new materials such as trade cloth were adopted in a highly strategic manner according to colour, texture, pattern and so forth. For instance, items of clothing as well as ritual objects, such as wooden sculptures, incorporated tangible signs of Western contact through the incorporation of red or chequered trade cloth in discernible patterns and designs. As Thomas (1999) has argued, trade cloth became a vehicle for new ways of thinking and being and was incorporated into the material culture in often innovative ways to express links to new forms of power. In New Ireland, the introduction of trade cloth impacted the local production of barkcloth, so much so that until recently, barkcloth production in New Ireland was considered to have ceased entirely. With the social, political and ritual transformations taking place in the early twentieth century, marked by the uptake of Western goods and materials, the postWorld War Two era has equally seen a pattern of events that have led to further transformations. Since the 1950s, the region has been swept with revival activities known as kastom (Lindstrom 1993; Jolly 1992; Keesing 1982; and many others). Kastom is a set of practices deemed to emanate from the ancestral past. These activities are considered invented, revised or idealised, and are generally deployed in specific contexts such as at times of death, marriage or birth. Kastom activities may be scrutinised and contested and their enactment may be deemed overtly political and may – as is the case of New Ireland – be construed, until recently at least, as antithetical to mission life. Kastom activities have created a new public space for supporting the revival of traditional crafting activities and have fostered a new political economy of materials through the renewed production of plant materials using practices that are deemed ‘from the past’. This transformation is not unique to New Ireland; Bolton (1997), for example, has described how ni-Vanuatu women have revitalised traditional practices such as mat-making and basketry as a means to strengthen their

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relation to peles (locality/island community). Similarly, in the Nalik region, kastom activities are orchestrated at lifecycle events led by chiefly men maimai and increasingly during visits from political dignitaries or at church opening ceremonies. I have previously described how the Baha’i faithful have become known as the key arbiters of kastom in some Nalik communities (Were 2010). Senior men and women – members of the faith – commit readily to organising performances of ancestral dances (singsing), the construction of special platforms and enclosures at mortuary feasting (malanggan) and the enactment of calendrical rites to bring or hold off rain. The outcome of investing resources and energy into enacting kastom is that it brings status to the organising clans, revitalises community life and so strengthens Nalik identity (which Naliks consider to be under threat of loss). Thus, there is a perceived status in reviving objects, images or performances deemed to emanate from the ancestral past.

Basket, design and innovation So far, I have presented a snapshot of some of the changes in New Ireland society relevant to my discussion of surfaces. Now I turn to baskets in order to situate this study of surfaces within a social, historical and political context. As functional items, baskets are one of the most salient and abundant products of Nalik everyday life used as containers. Even after significant social transformations have taken place in New Ireland, baskets have endured as readily available and disposable. They are generally constructed from the young green leaflets of the coconut palm – abundant in the region after the German colonial administration established copra plantations – and plaited using a simple diagonal warp and weft technique. There are some designed for placing rubbish in and those for transporting root crops from the garden, as well as cooked or uncooked food. Baskets also function as accessories for carrying personal possessions and are instrumental in modes of self-presentation. As permeable surfaces, baskets enable persons to reveal or conceal (such as open-weave or tight-weave) themselves in certain ways and thus act in similar manner to skin in Mount Hagen (Strathern 1979). Indeed, the surfaces of baskets are ‘where the action is’ because their distinctive qualities and functions, together with their recognisable form, express relations to land, place (peles) and kinship. Basket designs – achieved through slight variations in the weave of the basket, using an open or closed weave technique or by alternating single or split leaf warps and wefts, as well as changing the form of the basket – are scrutinised by Naliks and denote the function of the basket but are also central to expressing the cultural identity of the wearer (the wearer’s relation to the peles of the donor). Thus, a basket’s surface structure is a visible and highly tangible articulation of a wearer’s identity and a visual connection to their external relations. New types of baskets are always appearing in New Ireland, and in 2009, I noticed how a type of basket had begun to appear in local communities, worn by young and middle-aged women like a local fashion accessory. This basket was known by the Nalik term aruaai. It was made from woven coconut leaves,

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wrapped in locally produced barkcloth (kapiak), sometimes decorated with tassels of coloured wool and on occasion with hand-drawn designs emblazoning the surface. The baskets were used for carrying personal possessions such as mobile phones, purses and quantities of betelnut and worn on the hip or on abdomens, the latter making some Nalik women joke how this hid any early signs of pregnancy. Much like the string bag (bilum) from the Papua New Guinea Highlands region (Mackenzie 1991), the basket made a visual reference to the procreative capacity of women through its womb-like form. The design of these baskets was based on a type of Nalik garden basket also known as aruaai. Such garden baskets are still made and used, utilising the leaves of the coconut palm which are abundant in New Ireland. They are produced using two young coconut palms which are heated gently over a fire and cut down into sections of eight leaflets. Each leaf section is cut in half along the lateral midrib and plaited, using a diagonal warp and weft technique to form an openwork surface. This process is carried out for each of the two leaves. Then, the two sections are woven together to make a basket shape, a lattice surface. The basket’s handles are made either from the run-off warp and wefts of the plaited leaflets of the coconut palm, or sometimes a rope made by stripping the inner bark of a liana is used, noted for its strength. The basket is worn by women to their gardens, suspended from the forehead and over their backs as they work. Root crops such as taro can then be easily passed over the shoulder and into the basket for carrying.1 There is, however, one important difference that distinguishes the garden basket from the fashion basket worn today by Nalik women. That is, the fashion basket is finished using a barkcloth material which is wrapped around the outside of the coconut leaf plaits and secured to make a handle. This barkcloth forms a slightly coarse fibrous surface that envelopes the body of the basket and so interacts with the body (the wearer) as the basket is worn on the chest or side, but also forms an outward surface facing the social world beyond.2 This basket is central to my discussion of surfaces because the design of this particular basket intentionally focuses attention on its surface – ‘to where the action is’ – as the wrap conceals the warp and weft structures, thus obscuring any visual reference to peles. Instead, personalised hand-drawn designs and pieces of coloured wool are attached to its surface, making it individual, distinctive and eye-catching and highly visible to others. Also, the basket is worn in new ways: wearing the basket on the front or on the hip distinguishes the aruaai from the functional garden basket, which is worn over the back. Thus, the incorporation of the surface allows the basket to transcend its classification from an ordinary functional throwaway basket to one that is individualised and sought after.

Emerging surfaces Surfaces emerge through a field of forces that extend beyond the maker/material interaction to push beyond boundaries and interfaces distributed in time and space. In the case of the basket, its surface attracts a series of processes, involving surface visualisation, surface removal and subsequent surface extraction of

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a newly exposed inner surface (of the breadfruit tree). As a site of action, the surface is also determined by natural and cultural forces that influence the way the surface appears in the finished basket. These conditions lead to the emergence of the basket’s distinctive surface and the desired effect for its public display. As Ashby and Johnson (2002) state, design involves not only a material’s compliance to shaping, joining and finishing (the biophysical properties), but it also depends on environmental conditions and constrains such as cultural, legal and economic constraints that may influence this. Basket-making first involves locating a breadfruit tree, the inner bark of which is processed to make the basket’s surface. These trees are known to be quite scarce and grow in the forested slopes of the interior of the island and a long way from the inhabited coastal areas.3 Women generally locate saplings rather than the branches of mature trees, which were used in the past when breadfruit trees were cultivated. These saplings grow when seeds from the fruit are eaten by flying foxes and birds and then carried across the island. In general, basket-makers can only cut down saplings on plots of land belonging to their matriclan, and this further limits the trees available for use. The basket’s surface emerges through a process of visualisation, which determines a sapling’s suitability for harvesting. This involves female makers carefully examining the surface of a sapling and determining its appearance, after processing, as the processed surface of the completed basket. For example, during a visit in 2009, I commissioned women to make two baskets for a museum in Queensland. I joined a small group of women in an expedition into the forested interior where mature breadfruit trees were known to grow. Nalik women told me it can take several hours to find only one sapling suitable for harvesting. The women checked the size of the sapling to determine the size of the surface they would extract. They also examined the sapling for any shoots or smaller branches, which may lead to knots and could cause the surface to tear or disfigure in some way. Once the women had located a suitable breadfruit sapling for processing, generally measuring around two metres in height, they cut it down using a bush knife and carried it back to the hamlet before they stripped off the small branches. Surfaces matter: they link techniques, beliefs and practices to enable the successful extraction of workable material for the basket (Amato 2013). These specialist skills and knowledge are restricted to certain groups of women in the community. According to women, searing the bark made the surface whiter, which was preferable to Nalik women. Once the sapling had been felled, it was brought back to the village hamlet and left to season for a few days. This allowed the milky sap to exude.4 Then, women seared the outer bark of the sapling over a small fire of dried coconut leaves. The outer bark was burnt until black. The next step involved stripping the outer seared bark from the sapling using a knife. Starting at one end, the bark was removed by cutting and scraping to reveal an inner white bark. According to Nalik women, it was considered taboo to step over the sapling, as this would make the basket’s surface liable to tear. Taking a blunt flat-ended implement (such as the back of a knife or a piece of wood), the exposed inner bark of the sapling was then beaten from the widest end. This was done very slowly, gradually working around the circumference of the sapling and along its

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length. Women sometimes stood in the shallows of the sea to perform this task. The beating of the wood was a laborious process and could take several hours, as the inner bark had to be worked very slowly so that it did not tear. Once the entire sapling trunk had been beaten, it could be pulled away from the trunk, much like a sock. The oily fibrous material revealed through the sequence of searing, stripping and beating was then rinsed in the sea and hung to dry in the sun to bleach it. The rectangular strip of material was about a metre or so in length by 20 centimetres in width. Some Nalik basket-makers would spit the chewed, interior flesh of a coconut onto the fibrous bark to enhance the bleaching effect. The entire process took just over one week from start to finish, with the preparation and stripping taking several hours to complete (and so being the most labour intensive). After the material had been left in the sun for several days for drying and bleaching, the barkcloth was ready to wrap around the woven basket. The final technical process involved wrapping the barkcloth about the prepared structure of the basket. The length of barkcloth was wrapped around the basket to form a surface and secured to make a strap. The surface was distinctive for many reasons. First, Nalik women said that the surface was soft (when compared to other locally produced materials). Although slightly coarse when first processed, after use, the barkcloth surface became softer and thus more comfortable to wear over time. This was especially important when carrying heavy loads. Second, the surface was strong and hard wearing – it stood up to everyday use and the carrying of loads – and so the hard work invested made its production practical. As Peekel (1984) had observed, in the original design of the garden basket, barkcloth had been used to carry heavy loads of root crops. Finally, a barkcloth surface was attractive to Nalik women because it turns white when it is bleached and dried thoroughly, making it particularly compliant to decoration. To heighten its visual effect, women sometimes tied short threads of coloured wool to the surface to give the basket an eye-catching and decorative effect. Occasionally, hand-drawn designs were applied to the surface using a coloured pen. These designs included slogans, symbols and nicknames of people. The surface shapes the identity of the basket by the qualities and meanings it affords. The fact that the basket could be designed in individualised ways created an emotional attachment to the product, a key aspect of what Norman (1988) regards as successful design. The surface’s scarcity and the hard work involved in its production (compared to other coconut leaf baskets) also increase its symbolic value because, as it is hard to find and involves labour, the basket appears to Naliks as new and desirable. Furthermore, the fact that the material is harvested from the land, which itself carries the names of ancestors, shapes the identity of the basket as specifically local. People regard the basket as ‘from New Ireland’, and it can be modified in personalised ways.

The positioning of kapiak and shifting geographies Much anthropological literature on the experience of modernity in Melanesia has examined the transformation of Melanesian society from corporate and clanbased structures to individualised agency (e.g. LiPuma 1998; Sykes 2007). In New

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Ireland, this individualised agency is expressed through the private accumulation of wealth, property and resources and stands in marked contrast to traditional clan-based structures. I argue that it is Nalik women’s control over the production of basket, their fashioning of the surface as modern and innovative, that have enabled women to assert this form of individualised agency in the community. Women produce baskets for sale, displaying them at roadside stalls or market places. Basket-makers also receive commissions from friends or acquaintances. Money earnt from sale allows women to purchase store goods for themselves and their families and so take control of finances in their households. A key reason Nalik women are able to assert this individualised agency over the commodification of baskets and thus be resourceful is because the basket has remained outside of the male-controlled realm of kastom and, crucially, is not classified as kastom. Maintaining the production of baskets outside the domain of kastom and the everyday (as a garden basket) has ensured that women are free to produce the baskets for sale and thus secure some financial reward for their hard work. By holding onto the means of production – through access to specialist knowledge – the basket has become an important resource for women to exert their agency in the community and therefore enact transformations, thereby translating their control over production of cloth into political authority, as Weiner (1989) has famously asserted, though in new ways. Surface is central to understanding this transformation and the positioning of this surface, as a visible sign of female agency, to other available surfaces in Nalik society. The basket’s surface helps fill a niche in Nalik society because it creates a space whereby a new form of basket is designed which can compete with other types of fashion baskets available for purchase from Asian-run trade stores in the provincial town of Kavieng, a day’s round trip on public transport. These baskets, made from colourful cotton and synthetic fibres, are expensive to buy and are generally of low quality. Moreover, people are always complaining about the quality of imported (foreign) products sold in the shops in Kavieng (and so this is linked to place and belonging). The use of kapiak surface in the design of the basket has transformed the identity of an ordinary basket by making it fashionable and desirable, thereby creating a niche for women to market their wares. This emphasises what Shove et al. (2007) identify as the co-productive nature of materials and objects: that is, the performance of the object is made visible through the use of certain materials, and the performance of materials informs its use as an object. As a basket in the marketplace, it offers Nalik women the opportunity to buy a locally produced alternative to shop-bought baskets, conspicuously designed in New Ireland style using local plant resources harvested from the land and to reflect individual style and taste, and so present themselves in ways that assert their local identity. The fact that it is not mass produced but made to order creates a personal attachment between maker and buyer and so enables it to compete against imported ready-made baskets. Thus, by putting the surface of objects under scrutiny, to reveal, as Bruno (2014: 3) states, ‘the surface condition, the textural manifestation, and the support of a work as well as the way in which it is sited’, is to understand how the materiality of the surface is constituted with subjects and between objects and environments.

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Conclusion This analysis of surfaces – articulated through the emergence of a distinctive wrap for a basket – has served to demonstrate how surfaces create the conditions for the circulation of objects, the mediation of ideas and the formation of social worlds and so operate as the actual fabric of images through the material conditions they conjure. Re-appearing as something novel and desirable, the identities of surfaces are constantly shifting as they extend connections to the social, political and technical dimensions of New Ireland life – a field of forces beyond the maker/ material interrelation. I have shown how for a surface like kapiak to emerge and be successful, it has to navigate the external world for it to thrive. Such an understanding is developed by placing surfaces beyond the vicinity of maker/material relations: to consider their substance and competing materials and products; cultural, economic and political forces; technical knowledge and availability of natural resources. In this way, surfaces can be understood as sites of mediation and projection – for creating contexts anew and thereby re-making local worlds – and so allow women to exert new forms of personhood and agency in the world through articulation and material and symbolic means of self-making (Strathern 1979; Amato 2013). Much like the other chapters in this volume, this case study also emphasises how surfaces are transformative in Melanesia. I have traced how the emergence of colonial relations and modernity led to a new economy in materials in the form of cloth, metals, plastics and synthetics and how ‘old’ materials are reframed as new and desirable surfaces as they are placed in relation to existing ideas of performance (i.e. kastom) and product. Shifting material identities and forms of agency are central to understanding this process. In this respect, we could say that the continual positioning and foregrounding of surfaces as a form of articulation in Melanesia provides an important mechanism for innovation and change in a region. As we have seen in Nalik society, self-fashioning quite often involves the process of reimagining and reclaiming ‘old’ materials (which are transformed into surfaces), much in the same way that architects and product designers have reframed the identity of Formica as something sleek and contemporary. Transforming surfaces into something fashionable and desirable involves thought and effort, overcoming natural and cultural forces and the reshaping of memory. Thus, this serves to demonstrate how surfaces are continually coming into existence around us as new materials are selected and used in design. To emphasise this process of continual change and conclude, I return to New Ireland: during my visits from 2012 onwards, the use of kapiak as a surface has slowed (possibly because of a lack of natural resources, as outlined previously). Its production has been superseded by the introduction of another new plant material, mulai, now used in the manufacture of the aruaai. This type of barkcloth – once used in the production of headpieces for malanggan masks before trade cloth replaced its use – is sourced from trees inside the forest. Mulai resembles kapiak, but, as Nalik women told me, it has the superior benefits of producing smoother, softer and whiter surfaces. As the crafting endeavours of my Nalik colleagues demonstrate, this further transformation demonstrates how surfaces are

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continually shifting in the changing environment: surfaces that possess the qualities of strength and aesthetics but also can be worked in ways to evoke place, difference and identity and empower women.

Notes 1 The German priest and ethnobotanist Father Gerhard Peekel entered a description of the basket in his 1920s survey of New Ireland plants after spending nearly 50 years in New Guinea from the early 1900s onwards (Peekel 1984), thus suggesting that these baskets have endured for decades in New Ireland. 2 This material, as I later found out, was called by the tok pisin term kapiak, and was extracted from the breadfruit tree (Artocarpus altilis), which grows in the interior forests of New Ireland. Kapiak is used to refer to both the breadfruit tree and the processed barkcloth material extracted from it, and Peekel’s (1984) survey makes explicit reference to the material (as he was no doubt interested in it for economic botany reasons) after noticing kapiak used then for making the wall, handle and fastenings of the basket. 3 This is not an easy task, however: mature breadfruit trees from which the kapiak is harvested do not grow abundantly like they once did; as Peekel (1984) observed in the 1920s, branches rather than saplings were used for kapiak. Indeed, on the neighbouring island of Lihir – located off the east coast of New Ireland – Kabariu (2013) describes how breadfruit feasting ceremonies once took place on the islands to celebrate harvesting of the breadfruit. He notes how the seeds were planted and mature trees were managed; however, due to wholesale felling of breadfruit trees for canoe-making and timber, mature trees are now scarce. 4 This sap was described in Peekel’s (1984) ethnobotanical survey and was used, according to Naliks, as a type of glue.

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Keesing, R.M. 1982. Kastom and anti-colonialism on Malaita: ‘Culture’ as political symbol. Mankind 13(4): 357–373. Küchler, S. 2002. Malanggan: Art, Memory and Sacrifice. Oxford: Berg. Lave, J. 1988. Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, P.H. 1969. The social context of art in northern New Ireland. Fieldiana: Anthropology 58: 1–186. Lindstrom, L. 1993. Cargo cult culture: Toward a genealogy of Melanesian ‘kastom’. Anthropological Forum 6(4): 495–513. LiPuma, E. 1998. Modernity and forms of personhood in Melanesia. In Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, eds. M. Lambek and A. Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 53–79. Mackenzie, M. 1991. Androgynous Objects: String Bags and Gender in Central New Guinea. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers. Norman, D.A. 1988. The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York, NY: Basic Books. O’Connor, K. 2011. Lycra: How a Fiber Shaped America. Abingdon: Routledge. Peekel, P.G. 1984. Flora of the Bismarck Archipelago for Naturalists, trans. E.E. Henty. Lae: Office of Forests, Division of Botany, Papua New Guinea [originally written as Illustrierte Flora des Bismarck-Archipels für Naturfreunde, Vunapope, 1947]. Shove, E., M. Watson, M. Hand and J. Ingram. 2007. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Strathern, M. 1979. The self in self-decoration. Oceania 49(4): 241–257. Sykes, K. 2007. Interrogating individuals: The theory of possessive individualism in the Western Pacific. Anthropological Forum 17(3): 213–224. Thomas, N. 1999. The case of the misplaced ponchos: Speculations concerning the history of cloth in Polynesia. Journal of Material Culture 4(1): 5–20. Tolia-Kelly, D.P. 2013. The geographies of cultural geography III: Material geographies, vibrant matters and risking surface geographies. Progress in Human Geography 37(1): 153–160. Weiner, A.B. 1989. Why cloth? Wealth, gender, and power in Oceania. In Cloth and Human Experience, eds. A.B. Weiner and J. Schneider. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 33–72. Were, G. 2005. Pattern, efficacy and enterprise: On the fabrication of connections in Melanesia. In Clothing as Material Culture, eds. S. Küchler and D. Miller. Oxford: Berg, pp. 159–174. Were, G. 2010. Lines That Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Were, G. 2013. On the materials of mats: Thinking through design in a Melanesian society. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 581–599.

10 On knitted surfaces-in-the-making Lydia Maria Arantes

One winter’s day, during my fieldwork in the westernmost province of Austria, my mother and I decided to go to a yarn shop in a town nearby in order to seek advice on what kind of yarn to buy for a cardigan I wanted to knit for my husband. At the time we arrived, the shop was practically empty. Kathrin, a very experienced employee, agreed with me that the yarn recommended in the magazine was not ideal for knitting the type of cardigan I chose to make. Therefore, we started looking for an alternative. While Kathrin turned to another customer for a few minutes, my mother and I strolled around the shop and opened ourselves to the wide range of colours and tactile qualities on the walls. Suddenly, my mother stumbled across a dark blue yarn. I was not looking for dark blue at all, but I could imagine that it would look nice on my husband. A shimmering thread was woven into this yarn, though, which initially made me feel unsure. A slightly shimmering cardigan for a man? I knew that my husband was generally quite open towards ‘different’ things, but what if he did not like this slight lustre at all? Kathrin suggested that this yarn would only appear subtly shining when knitted and confidently recommended it for a man’s cardigan. I trusted her and bought the yarn.

Framing knitting As Ingold (2007) points out in his book Lines, textile threads and surfaces have not received the academic attention they deserve. Textile surfaces and their transformation differ fundamentally from other types of surfaces and their manipulation, such as stone, wood, metal and so on. In order to gain a fuller understanding of what surfaces are, what their creation and transformation entail and how all this is interlocked with human societies and (social) craft practices, it is essential to also draw attention to textile materials and their entangling into surfaces. My own research on hand-knitting in Austria will serve as a case study from which to develop my argument that (the making of ) textile surfaces contest(s) conventional notions of surfaces.

On knitted surfaces-in-the-making 153 Within western ‘depth ontology’ (Miller 2010: 16), surfaces are seen as a cover over the essential; ‘[t]he assumption is that being – what we truly are – is located deep inside ourselves and is in direct opposition of the surface’ (ibid., original emphasis). Surfaces are ‘superficial’; a fear of superficiality equals in many cases a fear of being betrayed or deceived. Instead of considering them as covers which hide a ‘real’ depth, distinguishing and separating internal and external realms, I aim to show that surfaces traverse across mind, body and world, disrupting and transcending the very convention of internality vs. externality. In this sense, I will develop an idea of surfaces which shows how rich and deep they are. My contribution will thus feed into the surface-debate advocated by Ingold (2000, 2007, 2011) throughout his work. Knitting proves a valid example for scrutinising surfaces for at least two reasons. First, this craft technique has been notably marginalised in European ethnology and social anthropology, although in recent years a growing interest in knitting in everyday life as well as in (feminist) art practices is undeniable. Something as mundane and banal as knitting should have caught anthropology’s eye far earlier, considering its strong intertwining with (mostly) women’s everyday lives and their creating as well as maintaining relationships throughout the past decades and continuing presently. Similar to Weiner’s (1994) complaint that women’s (textile) work and their role in gift economies and social reproduction has been overlooked in studies of material culture in Pacific societies, I claim here that looking at the manual entanglement of threads into knitted surfaces and their social implication from an anthropological vantage point is long overdue. This brings me to my second reason: having neglected this craft technique in anthropology, we have no understanding of the peculiarities of hand-knitted surfaces. My account of knitted surfaces will therefore bring an additional perspective, as knitting entails a wholly different way of dealing with surfaces since knitting is about the creation of a surface instead of its manipulation. Complementing Ingold’s (2007) work on knotting and weaving in his chapter on traces, threads and surfaces, my chapter will suggest different ways of conceptualising and understanding surfaces by looking at techniques and materials hitherto rather ignored. In order to illustrate my arguments and conclusions more intelligibly and vividly, I will entangle a single ethnographic narrative1 sliced up like a serialised novel with theoretical-reflexive passages. By enmeshing field experiences and anthropological reasoning, I wish to create a fabric which allows for an understanding of craft practices such as knitting and their unique contribution to surface studies in the context of the diffusely shaped processuality of lived everyday life into which they are embedded. Although the reflexive passages never explicitly make reference to a concrete corresponding part in the juxtaposed ethnographic narrative, connections are there, nevertheless. Both are independent texts, and at the same time, they are each other’s subject. I will develop my thoughts and arguments taking up two aspects in the course of the chapter that pervade the ethnographic narrative: those are surface creation 1) as form creation and 2) as relational practice.

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Kathrin then helped me calculate the correct measurements by reconciling my husband’s dress size and the knitting pattern with this specific yarn quality and drew a sketch including the stated measurements and numbers of stitches (to be cast on). Meanwhile she explained what I was supposed to do and rounded off by letting me know I should call her at the shop as soon as I would reach the sleeve cap. Depending on how many stitches would be left, she would then calculate how the sleeve cap ought to be knitted. She also said that I should tackle the shoulder seams different than usually and explained to me how to sew the parts together best. I was pleased and wanted to start knitting immediately as soon as we got home. Then I realised that the pattern instruction in the magazine was wrong. The graphic representation of the instruction did not correspond to the pattern featured in the garment on the photograph. I remembered that there was another garment with a different cut, made with the same kind of pattern and decided to stick to the pattern instructions of garment number two and cut instructions of the originally chosen garment. How could something like this happen? There were wrong specifications about where the stitch repeat began and ended. Once I realised this, I also understood that I needed to recalculate how many stitches I needed to cast on because Kathrin relied on different specifications. I was quite angry about the mistake in the magazine and pleased at the same time because I had obviously reached a stage where my knowledge of knitting allowed me to critically assess and consequently adjust the featured instructions. Nonetheless, somewhat disenchanted and discouraged as well as insecure because I was not sure my calculations would eventually turn out correctly, I started calculating the necessary adjustments.

(Cor)relating and moving Hand-knitting something mostly means knitting a garment, that is: something to wrap the body with. Therefore, it is unquestionably linked to fashion, social conventions and ideas of taste. However, knitting is not only about the finished garment ready to be appropriated by the body or the style and meanings it seems to symbolically represent. We are, in fact, confronted with the emergence of a garment. More specifically, in the knitting process, the trajectory of the threadbecoming-a-surface and the biography of the knitter interweave with and imbue each other in a continuous process of joint growth. Knitting implies an extraordinary intimacy between the knitter and the surfacein-the-making and lends a concrete and sensuous experience to an ephemeral idea, to a creative and/or emotional impetus. The moving hands, the gripping fingers and the feeling skin – jointly holding and guiding needles and yarn – the inspecting eyes, the imagining, anticipating, calculating and directing mind, the thread uncoiling from the ball of wool; all join in the process of creating and shaping a surface from scratch, of transforming a thread into a garment.

On knitted surfaces-in-the-making 155 Form, according to Ingold (2000: 342, 345), comes into being ‘through the gradual unfolding of that field of forces set up through the active and sensuous engagement of practitioner and material. (. . .) The artefact, in short, is the crystallisation of activity within a relational field.’ Ingold sees making as ‘correspondence between maker and material’ (Ingold 2013: xi); I would like to add, however, that these relationships are not always as untroubled as the term ‘correspondence’ might imply at first glance. As my elaborations on knitting show, making also implies friction, negotiation, conflict, hardship and sometimes a great deal of frustration. Needles and yarns might not ‘work well’ together due to the specific materials they are composed of. Stitches might be dropped without noticing, causing the fabric to undo itself partially. The desired measurements of a piece might not be met despite having chosen yarn and respective needle size carefully and in accordance with one’s own knitting style. Conceptually and practically, knitting means matching (relations of) relations between the yarn, needles, pattern, the cut and the knitting body as well as the body that is destined to wear the resulting knitted piece. Always underpinned by intentions which are themselves grounded in social relations, this form of Gestaltung is an intersubjective, empathetic process (cf. Küchler and Were 2009) in which the myriad possibilities of yarn weight, yarn quality, yarn colour, needle size, pattern (does it stretch or not?), cut (waisted or not?), the knitting and the wearing body are related to each other. Technically speaking, knitted surfaces consist of innumerable, sometimes thousands of, loop stitches. The loop specification of the term ‘stitch’ is, however, usually not included in English-speaking knitting instructions. What distinguishes the loop stitch is its potential to easily go out of existence without deforming the thread. ‘The loop stitch is a nœud coulant: a knot that, if untied, causes the whole system to unravel. It is an element in making stockings, in knitting and crocheting, and the particular way it is formed is dictated by the tools employed and by the use intended’ (Semper 2004: 221, emphasis LMA). Knitting is somehow like walking. Each stitch is a preparation for the next one, horizontally and vertically. Not only does each stitch lay the ground for the next one (horizontally), but each single stitch is also the basis for the stitch emerging from it in the next row (vertically, meaning the needle fetches the yarn through the stitch knitted in the previous row).2 In this sense, a stitch ‘grows rhythmically out of the one before and lays the groundwork for the next’, as Ingold (2000: 347) writes in the context of making as a form of weaving. What is being created by simply poking the needle into an existing stitch and pulling the yarn through is a whole surface of interdependent stitches. While knitters are aware of the number of stitches one stitch repeat3 or even one row contains, as they have to translate body or garment measurements into multiples of stitch repeats, they usually do not calculate how many stitches the garment is eventually composed of. Numbers are important for the practical creation of the surface and not for the quantification of its elements into numbers abstracting from the practice. Knitting is a technique whose practice is dictated by numbers – numbers of stitches one stitch repeat contains, numbers of rows one stitch repeat encompasses,

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the quantity of stitches correlating to specific body and desired clothes measurements. Knitting therefore entails mathematical (i.e. arithmetic) operations such as the rule of three in order to individually relate yarn (weight and quality), pattern, needle size, desired texture and so on to each other and bring about a piece which corresponds in size, taste and feel. While knitting stitch after stitch is certainly a continuous, rhythmic activity (see subsequently), it being governed by numbers (of stitches, rows, stitch repeats, measurements) also allows for interrupting the rhythm and resuming later on – as long as the book keeping of knitted stitches and rows is continuously kept up to date by counting and taking notes. This possibility of introducing breaks, of disrupting and resuming the (continuous character of the) practice lays in the specific – in relative terms – atemporal quality of the materials used. Yarn does not go dry like potter’s clay, it does not lose its mouldability due to a lower supply of heat as is the case with metal. Its material qualities are preserved even in the moments when it is not being processed. Being a numerically grounded activity, knitting implies a type of form creation governed by sequences, numbers and counting, standing in marked contrast to form as delineated by diagrammatic drawing.4 Different from industrial mass production, where arbitrarily manipulable materials break with the mutuality of form, material and tool, in the case of knitting, form creation and/or transformation is bound to movement- and tool-grounded counting (cf. Leroi-Gourhan 1993; Urton 1997). Realising the simplicity underlying the emergence of knitted things was a startling experience for Janaina, my then-30-year-old sister-in-law, when I taught her how to knit. As she was hitherto unfamiliar with the technique, knitted things had seemed to point back to a technically complex origination process for her. What stunned her most, therefore, was the fact that by merely moving the needle through the stitch and back she would eventually create a slipper. She could hardly believe that a knitted piece merely consists of those tiny units, the stitches, and that something real would eventually emerge from these petite actions. For her to be able to focus on knitting as movement was ultimately only possible because I had done the calculations of stitches per row and so on – relating the size of her feet, yarn weight, needle size and her particular knitting style (loose or tight) to each other – beforehand.5 Since she was a complete beginner, it seemed more rewarding to start with the ‘technicalities’ of the practice. Ultimately, acquiring manual technique and dexterity is not enough if one wants to knit, say, a bespoke jumper. Knitting entails a specific way of thinking, imagining and mathematical reasoning which itself grows out of years or sometimes decades of practical involvement and experience. Janaina’s experience nicely illustrates Ingold’s (2000: 345) idea of ‘making as a way of weaving’ which for him entails seeing movement (and not the idea) ‘as truly generative of the object’. Form does not only evolve from (tiny) movements, it stems from rhythmical movements. Rhythms, according to Leroi-Gourhan (1993), do not only create space and time for the individual, they also create form.

On knitted surfaces-in-the-making 157 This idea has been further elaborated by Ingold in referring to ‘recurrent manual gestures’ when sawing a plank: Indeed this kind of back-and-forth or ‘reciprocating’ movement comes naturally to the living body. In a fluent performance, it has a rhythmic quality (Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 309–310). This quality does not, however, lie in the repetitiveness of the movement itself. For there to be rhythm, movement must be felt. And feeling lies in the coupling of movement and perception that, as we have seen, is the key to skilled practice. (. . .) Thus any task, itself a movement, unfolds within the ‘network of movements’ in which the existence of every living being, animal or human, is suspended (ibid.: 282). An operation like sawing a plank, for example, comprises not one movement but an ensemble of concurrent movements, both within and without the body. Ingold (2011: 60, original emphasis) Teaching my sister-in-law how to knit presented me with the unique opportunity to observe how bodily routine – acquired through repetition coupled with deliberately felt movements and consciously guided perception – eventually results in sequences of separate hand-arm movements and in-pressure-varying finger grips blending into each other and turning into one smooth stretch of movement, tension and release. Although I prefer to use doing words when referring to knitting and the technical actions it entails whenever linguistically possible and stylistically appropriate, here I chose ‘movement’ over ‘moving’ and ‘grips’ over ‘gripping’, deliberately abandoning its processual and hence smooth-appearing character. The reason is simple. Janaina literally moved from one small movement – may it be poking the needle through a stitch, getting the right grip of the needle or adjusting the yarn length on the left-hand index finger – to the next. Observing her being a novice was like seeing knitting happening through a spatio-temporal magnifying glass. It offered a view into something which in the case of more experienced knitters is usually concealed in and by the smoothness of the process. The movements were not only carried out more slowly and with tiny breaks in between; they were also larger, her moving arms requiring more space than more experienced knitters’ arms usually do. When teaching and observing my sister-in-law, I was not only able to witness the tiny elements of what constitutes knitting as a skilled practice but was also offered an insight into the tool-and-movement-grounded character of knitted surfaces. Unlike surfaces which are applied to objects such as technological devices, furniture, cars and so on as thin layers designed to create sensory – especially visual – effects, knitted surfaces are material concretisations grown out of tiny repeated movements. They do not hide, cover up or conceal; much to the contrary: they reveal.6 They reveal technical knowledge, skill and dexterity, they reveal an empathetic understanding of materials and patterns. And, as will arise in the course of this chapter, they reveal social relations, as they always point to the maker and the recipient addressed in the thing.

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I calculated and took the measurements again and again, called my husband (who was not with me at that time) about five times, asked him to measure himself in front of me via Skype in order for me to explain to him exactly where he needed to measure himself. All this just in order to (hopefully) make sure that I would be able to knit a fitting cardigan. Also, I was afraid that the garment was going to turn out too loose and baggy, at the same time attempting not to make it too tight. It should simply cling to his body in a perfect way. How could I achieve that? I not knitted a gauge for the last piece I made, which is why I had to improvise. On top of that, I had knitted too tightly because of the cable stitch. I did not want this to happen with this cardigan; I was overcautious because I really wanted this cardigan to fit well. It was most unpleasant that I would only know for sure once the garment was already finished. That is a very annoying part of knitting. It probably also has to do with my intermediate knitting skills. I am (still) not capable to ‘look into the piece’s future’. I am not able to anticipate if it will fit eventually and what alterations have to be made en route in case I get the feeling it might not fit in the end. After having made gauges both with size 5 and 5.5 needles, I went for the first size, as I preferred the feel of the textural surface knitted with them. Also, the gauge – counted up to the final size – seemed to correspond better to the eventually required dimensions. I was content and started to knit the back of the cardigan.

Unfolding intimacy Knitting and knitted things are intimately proximate for a number of reasons. Knitting is a highly tactile practice; adept knitters even manage to do without vision for some time since the moving and feeling fingers know what to do themselves. Not only does the craft practice involve the sense of touch and tactile-kinaesthetic knowledge to a great extent; the final destination of knitted pieces is the human body itself and its largest and most sensitive organ: the skin. We are touched by our clothes, knitted or not, throughout our lives. They envelop us, they protect us, they warm us. To put in Turney’s (2012: 307) words: ‘[t]he essence is of closeness, either through the tactility of making or the nature of the knitted object’. Turney goes on to say that knitted gifts are especially indicative of an embrace, and to that I would add that this particular textile embrace is a disembodied embrace, an embrace absent of co-presence, an embrace defying the confines of time and space. This (extension of) intimacy is well illustrated in the following story that was recounted to me at a workshop after I had made the exact previous statement. The commenter, a woman in her 50s, informed me that she had ‘a nice and a not so nice grandmother’. The latter kept sending her knitted things which the then-young grandchild disliked for their scratchiness. The grandmother, however, kept expanding her presence into her granddaughter’s world by sending scratchy knitted things. In so doing, the granddaughter was involuntarily forced to constantly be reminded

On knitted surfaces-in-the-making 159 of her not so nice grandmother because of these knitted things that continued to populate her environment. At that time, she could not evade this enforced intimacy. In this sense, knitters cast a textile net into their social environment – wanted or unwanted. In a way, they knit-cocoon their environment and by doing so continuously entangle themselves with their social surroundings via the processed threads. In German-speaking countries, knitting is sometimes referred to as Liebesarbeit (labour of love). This means that hand-knitted things circulate in gift economies and are mostly excluded from commercial market relations.7 Although this historically grounded Liebesarbeit character of knitting is still present to some degree, the motivation to make something for a specific person is often complemented or even superseded by other reasons such as relaxation and having time to oneself. Due to the fact that knitting does not (only) happen out of economic necessity, as it did in the decades after WWII, knitters have developed a new selfimage. Not only do they strongly identify with their craft; frantic knitters, in particular, effectively define themselves through it. This in turn means that knitters of the present day choose whom they gift their work to very carefully, to be sure that recipients will appreciate the knitter’s (aesthetic and bodily) effort and time. As has become clear, knitting usually results in textiles made for a specific person, be it the knitters themselves or – as is most often the case – for the knitter’s close relatives and friends. Thus, I speak of knitting as a relational practice and of knitted things as relational things. From the moment the wish to knit something specific arises, the creative process set in motion is owned by the particular recipient-to-be; the emerging knitted thing is theirs from the first moment. Knitted things, thus, do not only point to the making itself, but also to the maker and his or her connection to the recipient. At least, this is what conversations around and about knitted things are usually concerned with. Who made it for whom and for what occasion? Although it is not always the things themselves which clearly point to the maker (through a particular style, use of pattern etc.), the stories the things come wrapped into certainly make sure that the maker will always be seen in the thing. Knitted things are thus not only about their materiality but also – and perhaps to a greater extent – about the social and communicative context they are embedded in. These things invite us to trace their relations to and in the world; they stimulate us to comprehend them socially, as nodes in a particular web of relations. Thus, knitted surfaces, in this reading, can be thought of as social canvases. Knitters are thus not only present where their physical bodies are located. By continuously unfolding themselves through the processes of knitting, knitters are present wherever their creations are. Distinct from the western depth ontology, already discussed at the start of this chapter and according to which the real self is located deep inside and is surrounded by a concealing superficial surface, the case of knitting is radically different in that the internal core is intrinsic to the surface. From this perspective, psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu raises an interesting issue. Based on neurophysiological and embryological findings, he argues that the human brain and the sensory organs develop from the so-called ectoderm and, neurologically speaking, have the same origin. Both the brain and the skin are surface entities. Therefore, he asks: what if the Ego conceptualised as Skin Ego had the structure of an envelope (or surface, in our case)? Arguing that the locus

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of thought – the centre of reason – actually lies in the periphery of the brain – the cortex – he wonders furthermore: ‘What if thought were as much an affair of the skin as of the brain?’ (Anzieu 1989: 9). Transferring these ideas to the case of knitting fortifies once more the notion of the internal being on (or in?) the surface. Thought, intention, love unfold via the emerging knitted surface to be wrapped around the chosen recipient. Across brain, body, skin, movement, fabric and world, a continuous (un)folding takes place. In these processes, the knitter and the surface grow relationally, unfolding, manifolding the multifarious relations they are embedded in and that they transform. Knitting is not only about the creation of surfaces; it also makes use of one very important surface, namely the skin. As the surface of the human body and ‘locus of encounter’ (Heimerdinger 2013: 19), the skin, and more specifically the Skin Ego (Anzieu 1989) developed in early childhood, suggest that the body is separate from the environment. This perceived separation is, however, what allows for the body to relate to its surroundings and to actively appropriate them. Far from limiting the body or it being considered a hermetic boundary, the skin enables the body to join in a tactile-kinaesthetic process of production. It enables a tactile reflexivity which, according to Anzieu, is crucial for the development of a reflexivity of thought. Furthermore, Anzieu argues in a chapter in his book that creative work allows for the reactivation of the need to touch – continually suppressed in line with the so-called ‘double prohibition on touching’ (ibid.: 136) – and ‘echotactile communication’ as the ‘original source of semiosis’ (ibid.: 153), renounced as a result of this prohibition. In the act of knitting, mind, body and materials are merged and brought together (Bunn 2011; Coupaye 2013) as each phenomenon extends and reaches into one another in a shared fabric-in-the-making. Thus, the division between body and environment, between the so-called subject and object, is blurred. In the continuous dialogue between what we usually conceive of as internal and external unfolds a continuum, or likewise, a creative entanglement of mind, body and materials. Challenging the mind/body divide, Bateson (2000) argues in favour of such a continuum when he says that ‘[t]he mental world – the mind – the world of information processing – is not limited by the skin. (. . .) The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body’ (ibid: 460, 467). In a similar vein, the mind is immanent in the environment, as much as the environment is immanent in the mind.

I was almost done with the back part of the cardigan when I was suddenly struck by a hunch. I had a strong feeling that despite the preceding calculations and gauges knitted, the back part had turned out too narrow. Laying it onto my husband’s back (after I had returned to our home in Graz), I saw it right there – it had turned out too tight. Aligning the edges of the knitted piece with the corresponding body areas, I could see what I had intuitively known before. The stitches were stretched to such an extent that

On knitted surfaces-in-the-making 161 the whole stretch potential was already being exhausted by him merely standing there. He would have a hard time moving his torso and especially his arms. I unravelled the whole back part and decided to add an extra 9-stitch-repeat.

Growing thick surfaces For a knitter, nothing is set in stone. Whereas a sculptor cannot put carved-out material back into the sculpture, the knitter, by contrast, can undo and redo his or her knitting – completely if necessary. Due to the ephemeral quality of a loop stitch, a knitted surface – whatever its size, shape and texture – can be unravelled again. In other words: a thread can become a textural surface. This surface can lose its shape and become a mere thread again, which in turn can become a surface shaped and textured differently. Particularly in times of economic necessity (e.g. post-WWII period), it was common to unravel knitted things that no longer fitted and to reuse the threads to knit something new, as is illustrated in the following example: The fact that a hand-knitted fabric may be undone enabled us to unravel a jumper that had become too small – looking for the sutured yarn ends, untangling the fabric and undoing the whole oeuvre [Arbeit] – back then. Coiling the crimped yarn into the shape of balls again. After that, we wrapped them around the back of a chair, divided the skeins with different-coloured yarns every now and then and tied the yarn. Subsequently, we washed these skeins of yarn in mild soap water, stretched them, dried them, coiled them in the shape of balls and eventually knitted a different garment with them. If it had to turn out bigger than the original, an additional, different-coloured yarn was used in order to create the new garment. Lorenzetti (2010, translation by the author) Inherent to a thread is the possibility to be transformed into myriad textures and shapes. A thread is pure potential, a kind of possibility space for bringing any kind of (knitted) surface about – within the limits of the thread’s textile qualities. In knitting, we are thus working with a continually reconfigurable creativity. A thread of yarn becomes a surface, becomes a garment, becomes an expression of one’s skills, becomes a source of pride, becomes part of one’s wardrobe, becomes appropriated by the body, becomes part of one’s biography, becomes integrated into social interactions, becomes inherited into the next generation, or due to changes in fashion or body size, becomes a thread again that becomes another surface again and so on. The point of departure in the chain of transformations listed previously and in this chapter in general is not the textile fibre but the thread of yarn. This kind of ‘raw’ material has already undergone considerable processing prior to being knitted: wool has been sheared off the respective animal or harvested from plants and then processed by hand or machine to become a knittable yarn. As the most popular way to knit among my research participants in Austria is by drawing on wool-already-made-yarn, my point of departure is also

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that of humans and already-made yarns, themselves already being ‘processesmade-things’ (Coupaye 2013: 13). Thus, the outcome of a knitting process is not an endpoint. The textile continues to grow, in an Ingoldian sense. Wearing a hand-knitted garment means enshrouding one’s body with the materiality of a whole process of becoming, feeling a materialised (hi)story of emergence on one’s skin and thus continuing to be part of the surface’s trajectory. Knitting is at once guided towards a goal that ought to be accomplished and at the same time full of potential for improvisation and variation. As nothing ever comes to an end, nothing ever is. Everything is always in the continuous process of becoming. Knitting exemplifies this never-ending, ongoing story very well in that it reveals how temporary endings or endpoints may turn into new beginnings themselves. In knitting, yarn is not only entangled and transformed into any textile surface of interdependent stitches. What distinguishes knitted surfaces, say, from woven ones is that they have to be brought into the final shape from the very beginning (auf Form stricken). One cannot retroactively ‘add’ a specific cut with a pair of scissors, as the surface would practically undo itself before one’s eyes. Therefore, the knitter needs to envision the final cut from the beginning and knit accordingly, by way of, for example, instructions, calculations, real-size cut templates. The cut is knitted into the surface; it is present from the beginning. The cut co-evolves (forward) with the surface-in-the-making rather than being separated from and merely ‘attached’ to it at the end (backward). Put boldly: belated form imposition is not possible; the form needs to grow with the surface continuously. The same holds for patterns: one cannot ‘impress’ a pattern retrospectively either. In this sense, both the cut and the texture resulting from the chosen pattern are part of the surface-in-the-making from the very beginning. Both of these examples illustrate how knitting goes beyond the technicalities of bodily practice itself. Patterns are literally more than meets the eye and are enmeshed in a number of (mutually dependent) entanglements themselves: they materialise and visualise the knitter’s knowledge and in that sense afford recognition and admiration, both by fellow knitters and non-knitters. Aside from being a visual pleasure and puzzling the observer who tries to abduct the underlying generative processes (Gell 1998), patterns in combination with a given yarn (fine, chunky, ribbon, etc.) and a chosen needle size (thin, thick) make for a garment’s specific feel (holey, stiff, light, heavy, etc.). Using a thick needle will result in the pattern becoming holeyer and thus the garment being lighter. Knitting a garment in a fisherman’s rib pattern will result in it turning out heavier than if the garment is knitted in a plain stocking stitch, as the former requires more yarn – due to frequently stitching into stitches of the row before the previous, instead of into stitches of the previous row. Knitted patterns in this sense do not only provide textile ornamentations – they are textile substance; they are the stuff that knitted textiles are made of (Kraft 2001), or, as Semper (2004: 211, original emphasis) states: ‘They [knitted products, LMA] carry the elements of their richest ornaments in themselves in their construction’. Patterns and cuts are thus never only about design but, to a much greater extent, about the technicalities entailed in the emergence of the garment. They are not

On knitted surfaces-in-the-making 163 design elements situated on the textile surface but rather technically constitutive elements. Knitted things do not have a surface, they are a surface. Hence, the knitted fabric is not only a surface or an interface between two materials (Ingold 2011: 24, paraphrasing Gibson) but a solid substance with a fractal surface.8 Consequently, the surface emerges from a gradual building up of form-and-substance at once instead of the imposition of form and pattern onto materials. A knitted surface is at the same time a textile substance. Hence, it not only questions the opposition of form and substance already critiqued by Ingold (2000, 2011) but rather transcends the distinction of form and substance, pointing to an altogether different ontology of form (see also Anusas and Ingold 2013). Not just due to the fractal character of knitted surfaces but also due to the various ways of building them up through using different types of stitches and patterns, knitted things are far from being flat, two-dimensional phenomena, even if the term surface – particularly in an elementary mathematical sense – might imply such a geometric state. Knitted surface textures present us with a whole textile landscape in and of themselves. With dents and cambers, holes and twists, allowing the circulation of air, textile surfaces separate the wearing body from the environment less than they serve as a permeable mediating zone between the body and the air which surrounds it. That knitted things are deliberately air-permeable is further highlighted in the selection of yarn, which itself must afford such physical qualities. In this regard, knitters point out with great emphasis that they select 100% natural yarns (e.g. cotton or wool), or at least yarns with a high percentage of natural fibres (minimum 50%), over acrylic yarns in order for the wearing bodies and knitting fingers not to sweat. Knitted surfaces thus do not create a hermetically sealed wall of separation between wearer and surrounds, as the idea of a knitted garment providing protection against cold weather might suggest. Rather, they constitute a well-organised mediating zone in which the body extends into its surroundings and the aerial environment touches on the (nevertheless clothed) body. At the same time, hand-knitted garments usually weigh heavy on the wearer – being much heavier than those produced by the thinner yarns of knitting machinery – and thus bring the textile, as well as the knitter and their intertwined relationship, into a felt consciousness. As I have shown throughout this chapter, knitted surfaces have depth; they are deep, thick and dense in textural, cultural and social terms. Knitting entails continuous trajectories of relational growth, shared by knitters, materials and their (social) environments. It points to a form of sociality where intention, movement and making emerge out of and entangle with the world around. As the thread is continuously looped into a fabric, relationships continually grow and emanate. As steps of transformation merge into one another, drawing boundaries between what is internal and external turns out to be an irrelevant task. Looking at a technique hitherto largely overlooked in anthropological literature allows surfaces and their creation to be seen from a wholly different perspective. It is thus important to keep thinking through new techniques and new materials. They can offer fresh views on the (social and cultural) specificities of the resulting surfaces and thus enrich our understanding of surfaces altogether.

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Adding one 9-stitch-repeat seemed to be working out fine. Within a few hours, I knitted up to the top of the back part. Its dimensions appeared to be corresponding to the required size. Once all the parts would be finished, the cardigan would turn out right. My frustration was gone, I still made it work. It is probably exactly this non-provisional and improvisational character of knitting (intermediate knitters such as me have to grapple with) which makes it so fascinating for me, making decisions and adjustments along the way. It is the continuous going-with-the-flow – a flow of materials, inspiration and imagination, skills and movements, as well as technical knowledge – and to some degree a feeling of uncertainty while simultaneously aiming at a nice outcome which makes joining in so addictive. As the surface grows, I also grow. We touch each other, literally as much as metaphorically speaking. In this dialectical process of joint growth, we transform each other and the environment surrounding us.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter to Susanne Küchler, Tim Ingold and of course the very dedicated editors Mike Anusas and Cristián Simonetti. I specifically thank the editors for their inspiring and insightful remarks during the revision process and also for being receptive to the rather unconventional conceptualisation of this chapter. Last but not least, I thank my husband for (still) patiently waiting for the cardigan.

Notes 1 This narrative is composed of a fieldnote from 20th February 2013 and an email to my principal research participant from 8th April 2013. 2 This is, by the way, also reflected in the twofold ways of correcting wrong stitches, namely by unravelling stitches horizontally and/or vertically. 3 A ‘stitch repeat’ is the smallest unit of pattern width. Some stitch repeats encompass a specific amount of rows. In this sense, the term ‘stitch repeat’ also refers to the pattern height. 4 This numerically grounded form creation is similar to what has come to be known as parametric or algorithmic design (I thank Mike Anusas for this observation). Changing one parameter – for example, yarn weight, needle size, knitting style (loose, tight, etc.) – influences the structure and feel of the garment. 5 This process is outsourced when knitters work according to knitting instructions in magazines and so on. However, as the parallel narrative shows, and as knitters of different levels of experience and expertise have let me know during my research, instructions are not flawless. This means that calculation cannot be skipped altogether. 6 For a similar argument with respect to a logic of form in industrialised design, see Anusas and Ingold (2013). 7 Regrettably, a discussion of the crucially important issue of how knitting is (still) tied to persistent stereotypes of femininity, domesticity, reproduction and so on is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that textile craft practices and especially knitting – though being an integral part of (proto-)industrial production in the 18th and 19th century

On knitted surfaces-in-the-making 165 carried out by both genders, young and old – have become strongly associated with specific social spaces (the private home) at least ever since this time. Particularly in the bourgeoisie, knitting was intended to happen within the context of the private home and was not allowed to bear any monetary value. It was relegated from a craft organised in guilds and carried out by men to the ‘worthless’ context of female, feminine, monotonous, continuous, demonstrative and unpaid labour of love. Though it is technically a mode of production, dominant collective cultural memories link knitting with the reproductive, emotionally stable and intimate sphere of the private home. For more on this, see Chapter 3 of Arantes (2017). 8 Fractal dimensions are non-integer spatial dimensions. For further details, refer to the mathematician Mandelbrot (1983) or to Eglash (1999), who traces fractals in African computing and design.

References Anusas, M. and T. Ingold. 2013. Designing environmental relations: From opacity to textility. Design Issues 29(4): 58–69. Anzieu, D. 1989. The Skin Ego. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Arantes, L.M. 2017. Verstrickungen: Kulturanthropologische Perspektiven auf Stricken und Handarbeit. Berlin: Panama Verlag. Bateson, G. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press [originally published in 1972]. Bunn, S. 2011. Materials in making. In Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines, ed. T. Ingold. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 21–32. Coupaye, L. 2013. Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships: Yams, Art and Technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea. New York, NY: Berghahn. Eglash, R. 1999. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heimerdinger, T. 2013. Europäische Ethnologie als Oberflächenwissenschaft: Zur Einführung in Provozierender Absicht. In Äußerungen: Die Oberfläche als Gegenstand und Perspektive der Europäischen Ethnologie, eds. T. Heimerdinger and S. Meyer. Wien: Selbstverlag des Vereins für Volkskunde, pp. 5–19. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. Kraft, K. 2001. Muster ohne Wert: Zur Funktionalisierung und Marginalisierung des Musters. Unpublished PhD thesis, Dortmund University of Technology. Küchler, S. and G. Were. 2009. Empathie avec la matière: comment repenser la nature de l’action technique. Techniques & Culture 52–53: 190–211. Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1993. Gesture and Speech. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [originally published in 1964]. Lorenzetti, R. 2010. Textatelier Hess von Biberstein: Stricken war einmal sehr populär. Meine Erinnerungen. URL: www.textatelier.com/index.php?id=996&blognr=3245 [Accessed: 18 November 2014]. Mandelbrot, B.B. 1983. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company.

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Miller, D. 2010. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity. Semper, G. 2004. Style: Style in the Technical Tectonic Arts, Or, Practical Aesthetics. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute [originally published in 1860]. Turney, J. 2012. Making love with needles: Knitted objects as signs of love? Textile: Cloth and Culture 10(3): 302–311. Urton, G. 1997. The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Weiner, A. 1994. Cultural difference and the density of objects. American Ethnologist 21(2): 391–403.

11 A life surficial Design and beyond Mike Anusas

A surficial practice In this chapter, I address observations made during a period of fieldwork where I participated in the working lives of a group of product designers working out of a design studio and engineering workshop on the periphery of the city centre of Glasgow, Scotland. For the reader unfamiliar with product design, it is a practice of work where people design, prototype and specify material forms and technologies. Usually this work is practiced in an economic context of global supply chains and mass-manufacturing systems, but it also involves more geographically bounded activities and single-item or batch manufacture. The form of what is produced is usually akin to that of an object: a specific, discernible material form with a designated objective.1 I have a close relationship to product design because I trained in the discipline before going on to practice it within industry and then later teach it for many years within higher education.2 Despite this, my sense of self never settled within product design, and this became increasingly so as I retrained as a social anthropologist, but nevertheless, being a product designer remains an important part of my identity and instructive to how I perceive, think and act in the world. Like the majority of my peers in product design, my training taught me not only the skilled practices of designing and making but also the industrial strategies and economics of mass-manufacturing. What has become notable in my anthropological reflections on my past career in design and on my more recent period of fieldwork is the prominent role that surfaces play within practice of product design. So much so, that it could be said that product design is fundamentally a surficial practice. In education and practice, product designers learn to apprehend and observe the world through account of its surfaces, specifically, the material surfaces that form and activate the objects and spaces of industrial modernity. Product designers learn to closely attend to the surface qualities of objects – from watches to phones to vacuum cleaners – and to recognise and identify the according material properties, textures, compliances and resistances. They also learn how surfaces can perform acts of occlusion, revelation and attraction, depending on their opacity, shape, orientation and responsiveness to surrounding environmental conditions. Furthermore, product designers learn to predict and influence the touching and

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merging of surfaces in states of adjacency, friction, coherence and adherence. And in being drawn to the intricacies and details of materials, they develop a keen ability to observe, conceptualise and formulate further variations of surface through a range of knowledges, media and tools.3 However, a product designer’s rich attention to surfaces only goes so far. In the studios and workshops where product designers work, their experience of materials is typically with a stock supply of sheets, panels, blocks, coils and extrusions and ready-made elements of fixings, components and wiring. Here there is a homogeneity to the particulate composition of these supplies; their derivation from messier earthly ores and crude fluids has been processed into even, consistent and definitive metals, polymers and fibreboards. These supply materials are more so objects, in that they have been designed for specific objectives and procured via a market of nomenclature and brand names, such as ‘stainless steel’, ‘MDF’ or Perspex.4 Thus, a studio or workshop encounter with these ‘materials’ is actually an encounter with a designed entity and a designed set of surfaces incorporated with preconceived ideas of usage, value and techniques of work. In this encounter, these materials are notably distinct from the organic compositions and earthly matters from which they have emerged. This working life in intimate attention to a world of designed surfaces leads to a sense that design inhabits a sort of synthetic world and so is correspondingly distinct from the workings of a more fundamental, distant and supposedly organic world. In this realm of being, the designer’s attention becomes foreclosed on this sense of a world of synthesis and consequently largely ignorant of how materials manifest through the labours and machinations of the extractive industries. Correspondingly, product design has traditionally been focused on the creation of commodity objects at the expense of being concerned with what happens to these objects – and their associated effluents – after their social objectives have been exhausted. Thus, design’s concern with surface is intimate in its attention to a material synthetic featuring surfaces of settled clarity and incorporated utility, but it is rarely concerned with surfaces as they are present in the fleshiness of organic life, the granularities of ores or the complexities and chaos that results in the meeting, intersection and disruption of many types of earthly surface. This chapter thus works to extend design and anthropological understandings of surfaces beyond a material synthetic. A more encompassing notion of surfaces has the potential to reveal how life, bodies, practices, materials and earthly matters are constituted in the mutual shaping of one another. This may lead design to a practice which more readily recognises how the formation of things relates to practices of the body and that made things are always emergent from – and intrinsically intertwined with – the substances and atmospheres of the earth. Furthermore, it is proposed that to lead anthropological fieldwork through an attention to surfaces can better incline the anthropologist to observe bodies and matters in the world as they are in exchange, transfer, communication, absorption and transformation and to thus disincline a categorisation and separation of the world into dualistic notions of material vs immaterial, substantial vs fluid, processual vs resultant, organic vs synthetic and so on. Thus, observing surfically, for

A life surficial 169 the designer and anthropologist, might afford a recognition that the forms of the world are never fully contained and fixed, but nor are they ever fully open and fluid; rather, different conditions of form result from different interferences and coherences of surface and transformation is always in occurrence, even if tricky to observe when change is markedly gradual, diffuse or fleeting. This shift to observing and imagining the world by way of surfaces extends from my work on perception and formation (Anusas and Ingold 2013, 2015; Anusas 2017) and is also influenced by a growing academic attention to surfaces – as discussed in Chapter 1 – but, notably for this chapter, the work of Amato (2013), Bruno (2014) and Ingold (2015). Gibson’s (1979) work is of course an underpinning to thought on surfaces, and his observation that surfaces are ‘where most of the action is’ (ibid. 1979: 23) remains a resonant cue for where the anthropologist might look to understand more about social phenomena as they are active surficially rather than how they might appear settled in substance or conveyed through media.

A musical interlude with surfaces However, of more notable influence to my thinking on surfaces has been a particular music track, one which I have known for many years, only for it to have inadvertently made itself manifest in my mind every time I have worked on this chapter. Initially dismissed as extraneous to supposedly serious anthropological thought, I now consider the track central to this discussion on surfaces. The track is Insects Are All Around Us (Ramos Nishita 1995), and I invite you to pause reading and to listen to it in full.5 Having heard the track, you will note it is composed around a theme concerning insects – namely crickets and their chirps – and I wish to draw your attention to the introductory voiceover, which states: Insects are all around us. They produce many sounds at many frequencies and volume levels. We are so accustomed to hearing insect sounds that we seldom listen to them. Crickets produce their chirps by rubbing their wings together. Rough spots on the cricket’s wings produce the chirping vibrations which we hear. What eventually struck me about these words is that they give a vitality and expansiveness to thinking about surfaces. Where it is said that insects are all around us, so then we can consider that surfaces are all around us. And, going further, we can consider, then, that surfaces are not only all around us, but they also course through and are constitutive to us if we think – from inside-to-out – through the surface folds of our cerebrum, flesh, skin, fabric, materials, spaces and the micro-surfaces which form airborne particulates. For insect sounds being so manifold in frequencies and volume levels, so too can we think of surfaces in this way. Surfaces can be diverse in volume: from those fleshly, bloated and full to others dense and solid and yet others light, slight

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and shifting. Or surfaces can be considered wide-ranging in frequencies, if we acknowledge that all states of matter and existence persist in realms of vibration and excitation.6 As insect sounds are ubiquitous, so too are surfaces; we take them for granted as implicitly part of our bodies, our adornments and clothing and the world that we move through. Requiring less imaginative interpretation, the rubbing of the cricket’s wings to create stridulation prompts an awareness that the meeting and movement of surfaces is intrinsic to the manifestation of sound and consequently to communication and communality. For humans, the lungs and the vocal folds within the larynx are a collection of moving, shifting and rubbing surfaces, producing speech and song, fundamental to the formation of sociality. Thus, this short musical interlude prompts a consideration of life and formation as a continuous enfolding and unfolding of surfaces which, by their varying qualities and interactions, give rise to coherences of matter and sensoria which go on to create wider communal effect. Through this approach, it matters less where the boundary of the organism or body is drawn or where entities are thought to end and environments begin. Rather, what becomes meaningful is to attend to surfaces as thresholds, where one layer of life can be seen to exchange with another and consequent fluctuations of matter enable one type of coherence to transform into another.7

Siting surfaces With these ideas on surfaces in mind, I now turn to the site of fieldwork where I spent eight months as a full-time in-house product designer and social anthropologist participating in and observing everyday working life across 2013–14. In this section, I start with observations of the site of work, to turn to the events of a specific design project in the following sections. To start with a discussion of site is important, as when one journeys to this studio and workshop, it is through a landscape with specific qualities. Usually myself or the other practitioners would approach the location of the studio and workshop from the city centre, by foot, bicycle or car. In doing so, we would move through a built-up, bustling and occupied city centre, to then become conscious of crossing a threshold and out onto an open, elevated, empty space, hotchpotch with buildings and elements of infrastructure jutting out from the ground. The sense of a threshold is enhanced by a series of interlacing motorways and the curving path of a largely disused canal which stretches out and terminates as a splayed-out pool. Considering the existence of the canal, the emptiness of the space, the patchwork of industrial buildings and the scathed areas of land cordoned off by worn fences, the landscape has the character of being once industrious but now forgotten. It is a landscape of surfaces quintessential to the post-industrial city with its sprawling fringes of ‘diffused urbanity’, as termed in Gospodini’s (2006: 311) account of the morphology of post-industrial cities. From this elevated position, the city is in full view, but it is remarkably quiet, except for the sound of cars on the motorway, with most of their individual notes

A life surficial 171 lost to the air in a continually coursing sonic ambience. The elevation also clarifies a sense of the city as a cohesive form, and as well as being conscious of the surrounding surfaces of rough grass, tarmac and water, I am also conscious that this threshold feels like the outer surface of the city. However, this surface is less like a clarified line which might indicate a boundary on a map and more like a thick membrane of varying density and mottled distribution. Either way, it is clear that the site being travelled to is on the periphery of the city centre. Through this journey, one arrives at a large yard of terraced offices and workspaces. The practitioners work across two distinct areas: a ground-floor engineering workshop and an upper-floor design studio. The workshop is open-plan, squarish and windowless and largely an environment of hard, impermeable surfaces. There are stretches of rendered ceilings and walls and a concrete floor, and the solid forms of machines, workbenches, storage systems and tools. Across the ceilings, walls and flooring run surface-mounted cables and conduits which then run into machines, lighting and power points. There are also storage systems for the practitioners’ bicycles, materials, tools, components and fixings. Further, most of the surfaces of the workshop are strewn with an innumerable miscellany of things – for example, rolls of adhesive tape, half-drunk cups of tea, wires, canisters, tools and bottles of IRN-BRU8 – which wind their way through and around the many electronic and mechanical objects, parts, prototypes and models that are being worked on. In being windowless, the workshop is lit by fluorescent strip lighting with a scattering of angle-poise lamps. This casts a hard, direct artificial light upon the many, mostly matt surfaces which are thus well and evenly lit, with their surface textures clear to view. Occasionally, a large roller shutter at one end of the workshop is fully opened, casting sunlight across the workshop, giving variations of hue and clarity. Upstairs, the studio’s surfaces are notably different to those of the workshop. It is an open-plan space, elongated in proportion. At one end is a large bank of windows, giving a strong bright cast, which gradates to a softer dampened light towards the other end. In contrast to the workshop, the studio is much more colourful and variant in surface textures. White walls and ceilings, carpeted floors, wood veneer desks and an array of colours across lever arch files, posters, books and many objects all convey a lighter and more energetic sense of space. Akin to the workshop, there are things everywhere; notebooks, sketchpads, stationery, computers with their monitors and keyboards, phones, audio speakers, clothes and many components, models and prototypes related to design projects. Across the studio, surface textures change from the matt or glossy hardness of polymers and metals to the smooth flexibility of paper and card, then to the soft yield of clothing, chairs and sofas. The properties of sound also have a notable contrast between workshop and studio. Down in the workshop, the practitioners invoke a heightened energy through the organs and flesh of their bodies to express their vocals loudly, which then amplify sharper and louder again as they reverberate across the hard surfaces. These voluminous vocals are necessary to be heard over the whirring of tools and machines, which are variant in pitch and volume and whose sound results from

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many material surfaces in forceful movement and friction, made possible through the action of the practitioners’ bodies and muscular tissues or the transmission and transformation of electricity through windings of wire. However, vocal exertion and excited sonic states are also part of workshop life: whether cursing loudly due to the non-compliance of materials, tools and machines; gathering to jest, joke and laugh loudly or streaming radio music at loud volumes through large speakers with wide conic surface diaphragms. By contrast, sounds in the upstairs studio are more restrained and specific. The ongoing sounds are those of voices and computer fans, interspersed with quieter background music. Voices are often in correspondence with computers, as practitioners murmur through thoughts in the course of digital modelling, writing or calculation, with the occasional grunt or exclamation of frustration. Or voices are present in telephone conversations, with varying pitch. Conversations also occur one-to-one or in small groups, focused on a specific work matter. Sounds liven up a little when the practitioners feel like playing music louder or when discussions become more energised over lunch through humour or playful argument. Whether sounds emanate from the soft fleshy surfaces of vocal cords or the hard metallic surfaces of computer fan blades, they reverberate across the room to then be suppressed by the softness of furnishings and the many pliable materials distributed across the desks. The surrounding landscape also affects the presence of sound and the attributes of space. Being a boundary place, neither densely populated nor residential, means there is a sense of permissiveness concerning the range of sounds one might wish to make. Pumped sound from an audio speaker diaphragm, or the screeching of a powered cutting-tool across a metallic surface, are acceptable because these sound waves dissipate through the resistance of the air and the adjacent fields of rough grass and shrubbery. For the upstairs studio, such relaxed acoustic constraints are unnecessary; however, the sense of space in the studio – and the workshop – evolves in reference to the surrounding landscape. Studios and workshops like these require a liberal roominess for the large machines, computers, workbenches and desks and the plethora of stationery, tools, materials, parts, samples, models and prototypes. This periphery landscape affords such roominess, because the square metre cost of land is lower than that of the city centre and so a more fluid and less imposing economy of space evolves, ideal for this community of practitioners.

Suggestive surfaces As the landscape and spaces foster and afford specific possibilities, so too do the materials and projects to hand suggest particular manifestations of form. As mentioned previously, the stock supply of materials are themselves objects – they have been previously researched, considered, designed, processed and formed with specific uses in mind; they have been shaped via industrial practices and are never ‘raw’ (see Figure 11.1). However, they are not fully prescriptive either and are open to interpretation as to what to make of them. The materials – whether sheets of paper or extrusions of aluminium – have a range of ways in which they

Figure 11.1 Suggestive surfaces – materials in the workshop. Source: Mike Anusas

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might be shaped, inscribed, cut or deformed. They suggest various permutations of form and are also the medium by which further possibilities of form are suggested or proposed. These surfaces are thus suggestive and suggestions are also given to them and discovered with them, through practice. Therefore, a designer never starts from a blank page or empty origin but rather works in a continuous dialogue within a matrix of ongoing intentions and formations. In the words of the design critic Rob Walker (2009): ‘form begets form’. These characteristics of materials and their surficial proclivities are most observable when immersed in ongoing participative work with practitioners. It is significantly more difficult to observe these characteristics in looking at the socalled ‘final’ designs that are projected off mass-production lines, set into retail packaging, and whose stories of generation and formation are largely obscured by their ‘logic of form’ (Anusas and Ingold 2013: 62). Thus, to continue this discussion, I now delve into a specific project that these practitioners worked on: the design of the ‘Queen’s Baton’ for the XX Commonwealth Games Glasgow 2014.9 On one hand, this project was typical of the sort of projects that the designers usually worked on in that the client wished them to design a coherent object based on an assemblage of industrial materials and technologies. However, on the other hand, the project was also atypical in that it would result in a one-off object to be conveyed through the many hands and nations of a global tour, all whilst being gazed on with interest and scrutiny by an international media. Therefore, from the outset, whilst the project brief was reasonably open with room for creative interpretation, the very notion of a ‘baton’ already suggested a sense of form and scale. A sense of form was also informed by the long history of the Commonwealth Games, which provided a legacy of nineteen previous baton designs to refer to. Again, the possibility that design ever starts from a ‘blank sheet’ is contested; even before any design work begins, there is always a constellation of suggestive ideas, materials and expectations. The project was also charged by a sense of energy and excitation – expressed as a conflicting mix of eagerness or anxiety – due to the international profile of the project, as well as its pending and rigid deadlines.

Gesturing surfaces As I once was, the directors of this design practice were educated at art schools and universities during the 1990s when a methodological model-based approach to product design was particularly emphasised.10 Such an approach has become influential in international design and is usually led by an ‘ideation’ phase which aims to explore all the possibilities that a design brief might offer. Ideation attempts to decouple design from the constraint of any specific material practice or technical capacity and alternatively pursues an open, often playful, ‘blue sky’ agenda, intent on discovering the limits of a brief. Within this project, the ideation phase was conducted via a series of half-day and all-day events where the practitioners gathered together en masse and also invited in external consultants to form a diverse mix of outlooks, interests and perspectives. It is with an attention

A life surficial 175 to specific activities and moments of this ideation phase that I now discuss how bodies, materials, media and space worked together to make manifest the principal form of the XX Commonwealth Games baton. In observing an ideation event, there is a cornucopia of surfaces at play. The manifestation of a possible object and the many ideas that contribute require many forms of expression which all rely on different senses and possibilities of surface. Given the suggestiveness of space, materials and project, it becomes difficult to identify a definitive starting point for where design begins or any sort of finishing point for where it is completely settled. Rather, there are no specific points such as these but more so many merging phases of transformation. The most meagre and subtle of bodily gestures, such as an inquisitive furrowing of the facial brow, a sparkle of delight in the retinae of the eye or the slow casting of a torso-arm-wrist-and-hand, tracing a curvature in the air, are perhaps the most nascent moments of design expression which lead to the manifestation of a designed form. The skin expresses so much. When hands stretch and display palms open to possibility, or eyebrows raise and crumple facial skin with humour, form can take many avenues and turns. Wrapped around skin is the practitioners’ clothing, and differences in clothing amongst the group were playfully used as a method to divide the group of practitioners into two smaller ideation groups: those with checked shirts and those without checked shirts. This was done without precedence and by chance and so I – one of those inadvertently wearing a checked shirt that day – found myself in a discussion concerning checked patterns and lattice structures and this influencing the shaping of the baton. Gestures of the body to express feeling, form and possibility, whilst often traced ‘in the air’, are also regularly expressed with a pencil, pen or marker in hand. Such an inscriptive action is key aspect of design and, through this activity, gestures take hold on surfaces, giving form a material presence and temporal persistence. Thus, when a gesture is traced through the air, it certainly has influence and effect, but the low resistance and transparency of the air afford little opportunity to delineate form and allow it to become steadfast enough to be considered, evaluated and worked with. Thus, in taking gesture into resistant materials, the winds and folds of cerebral sentience perform a knotted concert with the muscles and tissues of the body, whereby a marking tool is grasped and brought into a forceful encounter with a coherent surface, where a form is traced and a clear chord of material resonance is struck. As the body gestures in drawing, so media is expressed into an absorbent or adherent surface and thus with a sketch, a squirt,11 what might otherwise have been fleeting becomes a sustained note of form which opens up further possibilities of sensing, reflecting and creating. Sketching in this way is performed with a variety of surfaces. There are the hard, smooth, slippery surfaces of white-boards, coherent and bright under the cast of natural and artificial light. To retain a gestured trace, these surfaces require a media expressed in the form of a specific ink chemistry, whereby a line emerges in a surface tension between ink and board. There are paper surfaces aplenty in the studio: blocks upon blocks of Post-It12 notes in a variety of bright colours;, sheets upon sheets of white loose-leaf paper in A4 and A3 size and paper

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bound across many note- and sketchbooks. These papers, matt, monochrome and even, accept many varieties of graphite and ink to form fused compositions of alcohol, ethylene glycol mono-butyl ether and wood fibre, retaining gestures as marked memories. During an ideation event, surfaces proliferate and change quickly. In a matter of minutes, a blank table or wall is now a collection of marks on board or paper. The marks are notably bold, the majority of them drawn with a marker and indicating a principal form or statement of words. The properties of the surfaces script this performance. That is, the hard slipperiness of the white-board resists accepting the graphite or type of ink expressed from the fine hard nib of pencil or pen and is instead receptive to another type of ink expressed by a soft felt-tip. Thus, the white-board is a stage for the performance of thicker lines and grosser gestures; it encourages a correspondence of directness, boldness and clarity and the formation of depictions to be viewed at a distance. Most of the papers used are Post-It notes, which, with a small three-inch-square size, offer a compact area for inscription. While such note papers willingly receive many types of media, they encourage use of single words or simple drawings, and their adhesive backing indicates that they will be stuck to a wall for viewing. Thus, the Post-It encourages a similar type of inscriptive communication to that of the white-board. That surfaces script communicative performance is known to the practitioners as they conduct a creative process that is consciously managed to prioritise the quantity of ideas over their quality of depiction and to achieve a coherence and clarity of communication which overrides complexity.13 This approach to inscription makes sense within an industry that lauds material forms with a clear, coherent and objective quality and which perceives good design as that which is iconographic and quick to visually comprehend. Indeed, through inherited histories of education and training, designers acquire a way of perceiving which conflates good design with material forms that are sensorially honed and specific. The surfaces of the white-board and the Post-It – and their respective tools and mediums – are the result of, and constitutive to, a ‘matrix of practice’ (Anusas 2017: 301) which regenerates bold, eye-catching forms suited to commodification (see Figure 11.2). Thus, as the ideation phase continues, a structured sense of form for the baton emerges and gestures of drawing open to movements of making.

Moments coming to surface Drawings have a distinct value for many types of designers, but for product designers, their primary interest is directed towards more graspable and substantial material forms. Product designers aspire to manipulate surfaces – with their bodies, tools and machines – in order to produce a material form with a degree of presence such that it ‘gets in the way’ (Flusser 1999: 58) – positioning itself coherently in the course of everyday life. Here, both drawing and making rely on surfaces as substrata – that is, surfaces that are relatively stable, flattened and underlying – but whereas drawing tends to work with media across such surfaces,

Figure 11.2 Gesturing surfaces – Post-It sketches in the ideation phase. Source: Mike Anusas

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making works against these surfaces, using substrata as a resistant base to deform surfaces in hand. The ‘gesture of making’ (Flusser 2014: 32) thus has a force and a decisive power in manipulating and shaping the world. This gesture sees the surfaces of the hands reach for many other surfaces, to puncture, tear and distort them in a practice of working towards coherence, ‘[f]or to work also always means disturbing and destroying’ (ibid.: 59). Making is thus a gesture that is surficially transformational. Within design, such gestures can evoke a strong and resonant sense of a moment where ‘it is as if the lid has come off and everything is possible’ (quoted in Binder 2016: 267). Here, moments are events in time but also the emergence of a force which turns and orientates projects in a particular direction. Such a salient moment occurred during the ideation phase of the Queen’s Baton project, when gestures were being traced through the air, to then be expressed onto paper and into the substance of pliable materials. A conversation between designers – in the studio, littered with paper, card, polymer sheets and odds and ends of engineering components – saw a series of verbal utterances and gestures then finding orientation through the hands and marking a distinct sense of form. In this moment, a group of designers working together passed materials to the hands of one designer, who gestured a form with a rolled-up piece of paper and an industrial coil spring – see Figure 11.3. This improvised making provided a notable sense of direction to the project, but it was not so much prescriptive as rather strongly suggestive of what the design of the baton would turn out to be. This specific formation had no definitive origin point; there was no preceding drawn or written exact specification. However, nor did the form appear out of nowhere. Rather, it unfolded out of circumstances to then become formed through the enfolding of many surfaces; surfaces of minds, bodies and materials in dialogue with the surfaces of the site. Notably, this moment of making occurred beside a lively and diverse collection of materials and things on one of the desks, the ‘messiness’ of this desk being an ongoing talking point in the studio – see Figure 11.4. This moment, which involved many hands working together and passing along materials, to culminate in one set of hands gesturing a form, was an event where a strong sense of progress and transformation was felt amongst the group. As the surfaces of the designer’s hands curved the paper and spring into a coherent sense of form, so immediately did a collective focus of attention occur and a communal grasping of the material possibility of the project, which, until then, had been difficult to ascertain. In an interview I held with one of the designers, after the event, he expressed: Yes, that was a lovely very quick illustration using a piece of rolled up paper with script on it. Uh, a couple of large springs that James14 had on his desk. And, a head lamp from a bike James had on his desk. Something to be said for his desk, which is usually not the case, but this was brilliant. Mocked it up within minutes and everybody loved it.

Figure 11.3 A moment of making. Rolled-up paper, coil spring and bodily gesture. The scripted paper represents the Queen’s message, which the baton carries. Source: Michael Aldridge, 4c Design

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Figure 11.4 James’ desk. In its typical condition with many diverse material things, in this case e.g. a pair of headphones, a plastic syringe, packets of sweets, a pair of digital callipers, a piece of bike chain, a trade magazine, a glass and a packet of monkey nuts. Source: Mike Anusas

In this moment, however, the form only existed as it was carefully held together by the designer. It had no cohesion of its own accord, and its presence required the orchestration of bodily forces. Only through photography was the form captured as a coherent arrangement and thus held in place via image. It is unclear then whether this gestured form is principally one of the body or of materials, given that the hands and materials are in such close attendance. It is also notable that the designer is wearing a checked shirt, an observation which would seem inconsequential were it not for the fact that Scottish lattice patterns – in textiles, crafts and engineering – became such a prevalent theme in the continuation of the project and in the formation of the resultant design.15

A life surficial 181

A life surficial In considering design surficially, I have endeavoured to make a close observation of how the different coherences of a site touch, cross over, interfere, transfer and exchange in the continuation of particular coherences – bodies, things, places – and in the emergence of further coherences born out of surficial transformation. I have found that observing surficially encourages an attention to both how life occurs in the making as well as how it continues on through phases of settlement and senses of clarity. This approach therefore recognises that life does indeed take hold in coherent senses of form but that these forms are always in-formation – matter that is in a process of becoming – or trans-forming – coherences undergoing radical change. Thus, what might at first sight appear to be a subtle matter or an incremental shift can – through surficial dynamics and associated exchanges of agency, matter and energy – grow, cohere and condense, often in unpredictable ways, to gather influence and produce forms of notable clarity and effect. Indeed, the moment of improvised making – caught via photography in Figure 11.3 – within the baton project was characteristic of these dynamics, whereby many small activities of work – talking, thinking, debating, drawing and experimenting – over a sustained period of time, gathered a sense of momentum, whereby a form emerged, then took hold in memory and image and went on to have a marked effect on the direction of the project. Considering design in this way – anthropologically and surficially – challenges the idea of design as a model, as has been characterised in analyses and representations of design in engineering management, innovation studies and in commercial cultures of design. Whether in managerial guides, academic textbooks or commercial online media,13 the written descriptions and diagrammatic depictions of how to (cognitively) think like a designer or procedurally carry out design in a step-by-step manner have historically overlooked the intricacies of place, the vitality of materials and the nuanced habits of bodily practice, all of which are more adequately considered by science and technology studies and design anthropology (Vinck 2003; Farías and Wilkie 2015; Smith et al. 2016). In following the course of this latter scholarship, a surficial attention to fieldwork draws closer attention to how mind, body, matter and site are intertwined in mutualities of formation and also highlights the ways by which coherences of life resonate, inform and transform through and with one another. Indeed, the designers of this study knew well the significant limitation of abstracting design practice to be represented as a model. For their purposes, to depict design as a model – via some sort of diagram or a written methodology – had a utility, namely in communicating design to people not educated in design or with limited practical experience of studio and workshop life. Thus, presenting design as a model was useful for teaching design students, introducing services to new clients or presenting their work to academics or government officials who might be trying to comprehend their practice. Much more so than being preoccupied with a model, what was crucially important to these designers in the

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sustainment of their livelihood was a skilled capacity to maintain and continually re-establish specific qualities of space, ensure the provision of a diverse range of materials, acquire specific tools and fabrication equipment and retain and grow a collective of people who could work well together. Notably, this collective of people, whilst having shared sensibilities in wishing to inhabit a studio and workshop environment together, were marked by significant differences in their individual techniques of work, as well as in their personal ideas and beliefs about the cultural, political or economic purposes of design. Thus, whilst projects always required some agreement, shared moments of clarity and collective senses of achievement, studio and workshop life was just as marked with disagreement, confusion and frustration. Indeed, it was necessary to collective work to have some grit and contrast in order to bring people together, invoke reflection and spark creativity, such that traction on projects only seemed possible with an element of friction. In sustaining a livelihood together and knowing where to locate a studio and workshop, how to curate and furnish it and who to bring into the collective, the designers had developed this learning through their collective inherited histories. Most of them had been drawn to design in childhood, to then find this more fully explored through education – typically in art schools – and then having acquired experiences through working in other companies. Collectively, this led to a layered and dense history of orientations, rituals and habits relating to design, and thus their existence as designers seemed largely due to them having developed a particular ‘education of attention’ (Gibson 1979: 254) to everything concerning design. Thus, whilst design education can be characterised by the learning of specific processes, skills and abilities, it is also about learning a particular way of being in, perceiving and attending to the world. This way of being, perceiving and attending lends an attention to surfaces, by way of what they might afford or what they might mean to the continual manipulation and shaping of the world. It is by way of surfaces – across bodies, materials and landscapes – touching, meeting and exchanging that communication takes form and life carries on. This is what I observed when a collective creative attention converged on a coil spring and a rolled-up piece of paper and a moment of formative clarity arose to give direction to a design project. It is also what I hear when the needle of my record player touches Insects Are All Around Us and the meeting of surfaces opens to possibilities of life beyond which I currently know.

Acknowledgements The fieldwork for this chapter was supported via a grant from the Royal Academy of Engineering and the development of the ideas supported by the European Research Council (ERC) project Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design (323677–KFI). Thank you to the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, for their feedback on an earlier version of this chapter, which was presented at a department seminar and accompanied by the playing of the record Insects Are All Around Us. An expressed gratitude

A life surficial 183 to 4c Design, Glasgow, for making me a welcome member of their design team, 2013–14.

Notes 1 See the documentary Objectified (Hustwit 2009) for an account of these sorts of objects and the people that make them. For more on my critique of objects, see Anusas and Ingold (2013). 2 As a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art (2003–04), the University of Strathclyde (2004–2017) and University of Edinburgh (2017–present). 3 For a further anthropological discussion of how product designers work with materials in practice, see Sundwall (2017). 4 MDF is an initialism of medium-density fibreboard. Perspex (Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings) is one of the registered trademarks for the transparent thermoplastic poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA). 5 To listen to the track, access https://moneymark.com/mark-s-keyboard-repair/ and select ‘7: Insects Are All Around Us’. 6 As expressed in contemporary scientific thought – whereby ‘[c]haracteristic modes of vibration are persistent in everything around us’ (Berti, Cardoso and Starinets 2009: 3) – and in established religious belief systems – for example, spanda (vibration) is ‘a key component in the theology of Kashmiri Śaivism, where spanda refers to the subtle, creative vibration of the Absolute consciousness’ (Johnson 2009, spanda entry). 7 Here I am indebted to Ray Lucas for encouraging me to think of surfaces as thresholds, as he elaborates on in Chapter 7. 8 IRN-BRU is a carbonated drink produced by A. G. Barr, Glasgow and which is popular in Scotland to the extent that it is referred to as ‘Scotland’s other national drink’ (after whisky). 9 Information on Glasgow 2014 is available on the Commonwealth Games Federation’s website: https://thecgf.com/games/glasgow-2014 10 A notable example is Ulrich and Eppinger’s (1995) Product Design and Development, published in five editions from 1995 to present. However, there are a multitude of textbooks and detailed webpages on design models, and the UK Design Council (2019) attempted a consolidation of these through their ‘Double Diamond’ model. 11 My association of the word squirt with sketch is derived from the Italian word schizzo, which means both sketch and squirt, and I make this association to emphasise the energetic properties of sketching. This expressed energy also causes the tools of sketching – pencils, pens and markers – to expend their own form in the process of making another form manifest. 12 Post-it is a registered trademark of 3M Company. 13 Across mainstream product design practice, there is belief in maximising the quantity of ideas early in the design process. This belief is notably expounded upon in the online media and publications of the international design company IDEO, with instructive phrases such as ‘Go for Quantity’ (Kelley 2008: 151). 14 Pseudonym. 15 Images of the resultant design, as well as further media showing the development of the baton, can be viewed at: www.4cdesign.co.uk/work/queens-baton-2014/

References Amato, J.A. 2013. Surfaces: A History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Anusas, M. 2017. Beyond Objects: An Anthropological Dialogue with Design. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen.

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Anusas, M. and T. Ingold. 2013. Designing environmental relations: From opacity to textility. Design Issues 29(4): 58–69. Anusas, M. and T. Ingold. 2015. The charge against electricity. Cultural Anthropology 30(4): 540–554. Berti, E., V. Cardoso and A.O. Starinets. 2009. Quasinormal modes of black holes and black branes. Classical and Quantum Gravity 26(16): 1–108. Binder, T. 2016. The things we do: Encountering the possible. In Designing Anthropological Futures, eds. R.C. Smith, K.T. Vangkilde, M.G. Kjærsgaard, T. Otto, J. Halse and T. Binder. London: Bloomsbury Press, pp. 265–281. Bruno, G. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Design Council. 2019. The Design Process: What Is the Double Diamond? URL: www. designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/design-process-what-double-diamond [Accessed: 19 May 2019]. Farías, I. and A. Wilkie (eds.) 2015. Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies & Displacements. Abingdon: Routledge. Flusser, V. 1999. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. London: Reaktion Books. Flusser, V. 2014. Gestures. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson, J.J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Gospodini, A. 2006. Portraying, classifying and understanding the emerging landscapes in the post-industrial city. Cities 23(5): 311–330. Ingold, T. 2015. The Life of Lines. Abingdon: Routledge. Johnson, W.H. 2009. A Dictionary of Hinduism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelley, T. 2008. The Ten Faces of Innovation: Strategies for Heightening Creativity. London: Profile Books. Ramos Nishita, M. 1995. Insects Are All Around Us. London: Mo’ Wax Recordings. Smith, R.C., K.T. Vangkilde, M.G. Kjærsgaard, T. Otto, J. Halse and T. Binder (eds.) 2016. Designing Anthropological Futures. London: Bloomsbury Press. Sundwall, C. 2017. Miracles and crushed dreams: Material disillusions in the design industry. In The Material Culture of Failure: When Things Do Wrong, eds. T. Carroll, D. Jeevendrampillai, A. Parkhurst and J. Shackelford. London: Bloomsbury Press, pp. 21–37. Ulrich, K.T. and S.D. Eppinger. 1995. Product Design and Development. New York City, NY: McGraw-Hill College. Vinck, D. (ed.) 2003. Everyday Engineering: An Ethnography of Design and Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Walker, R. 2009. Interview with Rob Walker. In Objectified, dir. G. Hustwit. London: Swiss Dots.

12 Epilogue Susanne Küchler

There is no doubting that we live today in a world defined by an excess of surface, the recognition and understanding of which bind us together more intimately than the genetic composition of our bodies. To underscore its material, sensual and conceptual efficaciousness, the exploration of the surface undertaken in this volume points out an ending, of course not of surface itself, but of our assumptions guiding our misrecognition of its folds in an age of information still driven by language-based modes of communication. The ending reminds one of Emily Martin’s (1992) wise recollection of Walter Benjamin’s and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s insight that phenomena always attract heightened attention when they, in this case notions of body developed in relation to a Fordist mode of production, are in the process of ending (Thrift 2005; Coole and Frost 2010; Amato 2013; Bruno 2014). The philosopher Walter Benjamin (1969: 83) captured the attention devoted to endings with reference to ‘The Storyteller’, whose societal role as agent of cultural transmission began to fade with the introduction of radio, with the storyteller appearing as beautiful as the sun setting behind the horizon to people who lived through this period of its ending. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1961), recalling Benjamin’s remarks, pointed out the cross-disciplinary fascination with primitivism to mark the ending of the notion of the primitive in an age defined by the end of colonialism. With this in mind, we may wonder whether the attention devoted to surface is similarly marking an ending and what it is that is being referenced in this case. Ending, I will argue, in dialogue with the chapters in this volume, is a conception of knowledge that requires visualisation for it to be acted on or used as evidence in the pursuit of scientific or social causes, one that privileges the subjectivity of Man over non-human agency and the generic applicability of bodily derived metaphors. It is, I am adding in haste, not the first time in the history of social and historical sciences born out of this conception of knowledge that surface is called upon to be engaged with for itself rather than in relation to real or imagined subjectivities. This time, however, the question of the significance of the aesthetics of surface for theory and method is edging toward a paradigm shift that may well come to define the future of the way we do science. Writing on the fundamental change in the conception of knowledge that defined the eighteenth century, the art historian Barbara Maria Stafford (1993) points to the adoption of a somatic technology invented for and shared by the medical

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and the visual arts. Technologies and technological metaphors that enabled practices of knowledge based on revealing, uncovering and excavating of interior and invisible states so as to enable them to be ontologised, transcendentalised and verbalised came rapidly to fill an epistemic vacuum, allowing images to join a textual didactic in search of connections, egalitarian ideals and democratic pursuits. Surfaces henceforth had become merely indexes of relations and events unfolding elsewhere, reference tools for knowledge and evidence for a logic that plays itself out beyond the surface. The distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal understanding of the nature of knowledge that came to define the disciplines and institutions of knowledge were, in the terms set out by Foucault (1973), defined by modalities of engagement that privileged Man, not the objects of knowledge themselves. Surfaces henceforth became quasi bodies, reduced to by-products of knowledge production, to fleeting and largely inconsequential traces of actions precipitated by Man. The artifice of the surface and the embedding of the social in this the most profoundly artificial medium, brought to the fore in this collection of chapters, provide us with a provocative reflection of the relation between the aesthetics of surface and the understanding we derive from it. We are reminded of Georg Simmel’s allusion to the relation between ‘the art of social forms and the social forms of art’ (de la Fuente 2008: 344) made in his essay on Rembrandt, the nature of which he argued to offer up an understanding of sociability that invites imagination and inter-subjective and intuitive recognition (Simmel 2005). And this, we may say, is the crux of the matter, namely that the understanding we gain from contemplating surfaces is critical to the sense of sociability, of an inner sense of empathy derived from attention to an outer surface, the undulating texture and shape of which is not seen so much as it is intuited and deduced. Surfaces are thus not so much known because they fit neatly into received categories but because they resonate with the workings of operational systems, the sequences of which surfaces make manifest and quite literally graspable. The incantatory capacity of the surface lies in stark contrast to the received interpretative approach to surfaces that assumes surfaces serve functions they themselves serve to hide. The interpretative approach to surface assumes that the conventional use of surface for the fleeting and movable projections of media shows a logic of communication that makes use of surfaces as abductive metaphor and as vehicle for information located elsewhere (Thrift 2005). Surface here is subservient to communication and a system of knowledge that makes use of it and yet operates independently of it. And yet, as the chapters in this volume show, the surface captures imagination in ways that draw out a kind of contemplation that is unconcerned about what is seen while fully attentive to what is shown. This distinction between seeing and showing, present in James J. Gibson’s (1986) work The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, is pivotal to the reappraisal of the surface as set out within the chapters assembled here. Surface, we notice when reading the chapters in this volume, appears no longer as a correlate and by-product of informational processes that are themselves ‘an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active,

Epilogue 187 self-creative, productive and unpredictable’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 9) but arguably manifests such informational processes in profoundly new and yet surprisingly familiar ways. This is because, in showing off the qualities inhabited in its folds, surface asserts spatial relations of neighbourhood, insideness and outsideness, disjunction and connection, unleashing sequential actions of folding, stretching and squeezing. Surface, with relations immanent within its folds, is a manifold that unfolds not in a linear series of metrical forms but as a sequenced topological view of the same geometric object. A surface conceived as manifold does not stand in or substitute for a person, thereby crucially forcing us to depart from one of the cornerstones of a theory of objectification that has dominated much of twentieth-century social theory. Instead, the contemplation of surface as site of action and action representation, of sequences and their connections, forces us to connect an ‘inner’ and imagined (imaged) rotation of a geometrically conceived surface with the relational nature of action. Attention drawn to the external shape of a surface is an interlacing of image, surface and relational action, as described long ago in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Faltentheorie (Bredekamp 2008; Deleuze 1993; c.f. Gallese 2000). The attention to surface and the understanding its contemplation delivers is, in other words, peculiarly a spatial one, or one that allows the idea of relation to be conceived as an inherently geometric one. This idea that surface is a medium for thought, defined by an intuitively recognised and inherently memorable and inter-subjectively shared coordinate system and by a mental model of a geometric object that is independent of one’s imagined position in it, brings to life the work of Stephen Levinson on spatial cognition and language (1997, 2003). It is the independence of the geometric object that in fact enables us to ‘hold multiple levels of action in view at once’ (Riles 1998: 379) in ways beautifully illustrated in the chapter on knitting by Lydia Maria Arantes in this volume. The geometry of the knitted surface takes on a life of its own, standing in for the time dedicated to knitting and at the same time allowing the mapping of temporal processes that come to be associated with the geometry of the knitted surface. The knitted surface is the start and endpoint of recursively recounted biographical narratives. Again, Gottfried Leibniz’s thoughts on the simple knitted garter worn by men to hold up their socks as containing and referencing a whole world come to mind as referencing a relation between the mind and the surface of objects of daily use (c.f. Bredekamp 2008). The surface as substance in Graeme Were’s chapter allows us to reflect on the informational content of surfaces via their materiality. The exploration of what this substance is and how it works allows us to tackle head-on the assumption of an anthropomorphic, relative and subject-centred definition of communication that has, from the start, inhibited relationally driven thinking in the engineering and design of connectivity. What is exciting here is a shift of attention to the relational propensities of surface, with ideas of mathematics and the ‘physical real’ as expressed by Albert Lautman (2011). We can thus return to J.J. Gibson’s (1986) call for a study of surface as the basis of behaviour and of action, as recounted in the introduction to this volume by Mike Anusas and Cristián Simonetti.

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The close-up description of surfaces, attentive to how they work and what they do, has suddenly become a project capable of unleashing a post-interpretative aesthetic theory that will undo the shackles of communication-driven social theory. Tim Ingold’s incisive chapter on the making of a book notes that the task of writing commenced with the preparation of parchment and that the act of writing itself is in close analogy to the weaving of textiles. His chapter is a beautiful reminder that our concern with communication and information has failed to grapple with why surfaces matter even if the worlds they contain are not accessible to us. When reading the text on the surface of a page, we hear the pitch of the sounds, and their rhythm offers up clues from which myriad insights are deduced, even in silence. The richness of life and the intensity of understanding gained from complex sequences of un-articulated operational systems when surfaces are attended to is one of the most forceful conclusions reached from this book. The attending to surfaces when surfaces are thresholds between the visible and the invisible and outer and inner worlds is perfectly captured by chapters that show this attention across a range of practices that assert connections by turning boundaries (in Gibson’s terms, ‘planes’) into passages that are thinkable as surfaces. Surfaces, we can conclude, are accentuated whenever such connections are at risk and allow for the contemplation of relations immanent in the surface and thus for connectivity to be shown off for all that is worth. I want to conclude my dialogue with the chapters in this volume to reflect on the differing ways in which surfaces are recorded and described by drawing on the distinction made by Alfred Gell (1985) between non-token-indexical versus tokenindexical spatial propositions. In reflecting on methodological imperatives and their theoretical counterparts, I will return to my argument that the attention to the surface, which this volume both postulates and sets into motion, has had important parallels in the nineteenth century from which we can gain inspiration. Gell asks the question of what makes a map different from an image of landscape in his Remarks on the Practical Logic of Navigation, observing that while an image of a landscape is always sensory, a map never is. A map exudes spatial knowledge and beliefs encoded graphically and based on propositions that are true, independent of one’s position in the spatial coordinates set out by the map. Non-token indexical spatial propositions, setting out relations between landmarks, have primacy in coordinate systems, and this – as Stephen Levinson (1997) reminds us – is because the geometric model of relations of points-in-space, upon which they are based, is independent of any particular actor consulting the map. Non-token indexical spatial maps are of the type we know as topographical relief maps, invented by Blanther in 1892 using a layering method which consisted of impressing topographical contour lines onto a series of wax plates, cutting the wax along the contour lines and then stacking and smoothing the wax sections. This produced a surface of positive and negative forms which when printed created a raised relief map. Topological relief maps show what may appear to be linear as curved space and allow points-in-space to be conceived as heterogeneous in relation to one another while still forming a single whole. Arguably giving

Epilogue 189 rise to the desire to create a map reflecting curved space accurately had been the discovery that curved space could be comprehended mathematically, as proven by what we know today as differential geometry. Gell observes in his essay that topological relief maps have very little practical use and that they would need to be translated into an image that would correspond to the way we see the pointsin-space captured in the map. The question is how this can be done while still maintaining the drawing together of a multiplicity of points and their heterogeneous relation to one another within a single image. Attempts at doing that arguably inspired two developments in the nineteenth century. First, it led to what is known as photosculpture, involving the inverse translation of an image onto an object and into a three-dimensional object with its undulating surface (Gall 1997). In 1860, Francoise Willème achieved the best realisation of this technique (which was further developed by others in 1904 and 1924) using an additive process of photography in the round, cardboard mounting and photosensitive gelatine, which expands when mixed with water to transpose the three-dimensional image onto object form. Second, it involved the development of cinematography, connecting a multiplicity of images via an underpinning assemblage of a multiplicity of points-in-space. This is reflected in the writings of Giles Deleuze, who was intimately familiar with the possibilities that differential geometry opened up to projecting a series of images connected via the non-token indexical nature of the spatial relations brought to the fore (Duffy 2013). The point of this nineteenth-century example concerning how the contemplation of the aesthetics of surface inspired innovations in how to visualise and to narrate navigations is that they were made possible by an engagement with the mathematical properties of the geometry of surface. Going forward from the present volume, which inspires us to resurrect the theoretical potential that lies herein, the question of the methodological training that will be required for a solid description and translation of surface into equally captivating images is of paramount importance.

References Amato, J.A. 2013. Surfaces: A History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Benjamin, W. 1969. Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, ed. H. Arendt. New York, NY: Schocken Books [originally published in 1936]. Bredekamp, H. 2008. Die Fenster der Monade: Gottfired Wilhelm Leibniz’ Theater der Nature un Kunst. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Bruno, G. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Coole, D. and S. Frost. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Amherst, MA: Duke University Press. de la Fuente, E. 2008. The art of social forms and the social forms of art: The sociologyaesthetics nexus in Georg Simmel’s thought. Sociological Theory 26(4): 344–362. Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press [originally published as Le pli. Leibniz et le baroque, Paris: Minuit, 1988].

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Duffy, S.B. 2013. Bergson and Riemann on qualitative multiplicity. In Deleuze and the History of Mathematics, ed. S.B. Duffy. London: Bloomsbury Press, pp. 89–117. Foucault, M. 1973. The Order of Things. New York, NY: Vintage. Gall, J.-L. 1997. Photo/sculpture: l’invention de Francois Willeme. Etudes Photographiques 3: 1–10. Gallese, V. 2000. The inner sense of action: Agency and motor representation. Journal of Consciousness Studies 7(10): 23–40. Gell, A. 1985. How to read a map: Remarks on the practical logic of navigation. Man (N.S.) 20(2): 271–286. Gibson, J.J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Newhaven, CT: Psychology Press. Lautmann, A. 2011. Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, trans. S. Duffy of Lautmann 2006. London: Continuum [originally published as Les Mathématiques, les Idées et le Réel Physique, Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2006]. Levinson, S.C. 1997. From outer to inner space: Linguistic categories and non-linguistic thinking. In Language and Conceptualization, eds. J. Nuyts and E. Pederson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13–45. Levinson, S.C. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1961. Tristes Tropiques, trans. J. Russell. London: Hutchinson & Co. [originally published as Tristes Tropiques, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1955]. Martin, E. 1992. The end of the body? American Ethnologist 19(1): 121–140. Riles, A. 1998. Infinity within the brackets. American Ethnologist 25(3): 378–398. Simmel, G. 2005. Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art, trans. and ed. A. Scott and H. Staubmann. New York, NY: Routledge [originally published by Kurt Wolf, Leibzig, 1916]. Stafford, B.M. 1993. Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thrift, N. 2005. Beyond mediation: Three new material registers and their consequences. In Materiality, ed. D. Miller. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 231–256.

Index

accretion 100, 106–8, 109 aesthetics 63, 71, 74–5, 77, 150 Africa (continent) see Madagascar agency 29, 42, 142, 147–9 air 32, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 175, 178 ajayus (Aymara protective spirits) 38 Alberti, L.B. 19, 100 Aloi, G. 64, 77 Amato, J.A. 2, 8–9, 92, 116, 140, 142–3, 149, 169, 185 ancestors see dead ancestral: past 143–4; power 141; see also singsing Andean 30–1, 34, 43 animation: illusion of 76; of surface 62–3, 70, 72, 74, 78; and taxidermy 63–4 animism 63 anticipation 154, 158 Anzieu, D. 159–60 Appadurai, A. 98–9 appropriation 100, 108–9 archaeology 83–5, 88–9, 92–3 Archigram 111, 114n3 architecture(s) 63, 72, 117, 125; Australian 117, 125–35; Renaissance 122–3 art 63, 77–9; contemporary 64, 72–5, 77n3, 77n4; gallery and museum 64, 67; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century 74 aruaai (Nalik basket) 144–5, 149 Asia see South Korea Australia 125; see also Melbourne Austria 152, 161; see also Graz Aymara culture 29 basket(s) 5, 139–40, 142–9 Bateson, G. 6, 160 becoming 3–7, 10 Bennett, J. 29–30, 34

Bergson, H. 6–7 Bezanozano (West) 46 black hole 19, 20, 22–3 bleaching 147 Bloch, M. 56 body 29, 31, 34, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43, 140; and anatomy 74; animal 62–4, 66, 77; artificial 65; and clothing corpses 46, 52–3; as coherences 181; and garments 145, 154, 158; image 141; in knitting 155–6; 162–3; with materials, media and space 175, 182; with minds and materials 178; organs and flesh 171–2; and posture 75; in sculpture 74; skinned 64–5; techniques of wrapping the 142–3; with tools and machines 176; vocals 170–2; see also gestures; hand(s); matter; skin book: vs. box 14, 24; etymology 16; history of 15; of nature 15; opening 21; printed 18 Bouroncle-Carrion, A. 37 Bouten, M. 68–9, 71–2 brain 89–92, 169, 175 Bruno, G. 63, 71, 76, 139–42, 148, 169, 185 burial 50–54; and soil 51–5 Burman, A. 38 Canillo (Mapuche myth) 39 Carlyle, T. 117, 121, 124–5, 134 Cartesian coordinates 99, 113–14 chicha (drink) 39 cigarettes 36, 38–9 city 170–1 cladding 100–1 clan 141–2, 144, 146–8 cloth 142–3, 148–9; see also materials

192

Index

clothing 7, 24, 47, 111, 117, 121, 134, 142–3, 156, 158, 170, 175; garment 154–5, 161–3 coherence 4, 7–8, 168, 169–70, 178, 181 community 141, 170 conatus (Spinozan) 29, 34, 42 consciousness 29, 42 cosmology and ecology 46–50 Damasio, A. 89–90 Daegu 97, 106 Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren 72–3, 75, 77 dead: and ancestors 46–7, 50–4; and living 54–5 decorum 126 Deleuze, G. 22–3, 27n14, 29, 66, 92, 94n5, 121, 187, 189 depth(s) 1–2, 63, 68, 70, 72, 76, 80–1, 85–9, 92, 94, 117–18, 123, 134, 159, 163; and deep psychology 84; ontology 141, 153, 159; and past 84 Derbyshire 68 descanso (Mapuche shrine) 38 design: algorithmic 164n4; and anthropology 168–9; basket 139, 144–5; designer’s attention 168; and gestures 178–9; individualised 147; industrialised 141, 164n6; origins of 174–5; practice 174–5, 181; product 140, 149, 167–8, 176; technicality in knitting 162–3; see also education dichotomies 1–4 disciplinary knowledge 89–92 disruption 156 Dongdaemun Design Plaza 108 Dongdaemun Market (Seoul) 97, 99, 108–9, 110–11 drawing 145, 171, 175–6, 177, 181, 183n11; axonometric projection 98, 105; cross-section 98, 110; plan drawing 98, 107 earth 1, 3–7; see also burial; matter; soil; substance; weather Edgeworth, M. 88 education 167, 176, 182 entanglement 1–2, 7; in knitting 159–60, 162–3 ethnography 62, 64, 76, 80, 139–40, 153 Europe (continent) see Austria; Netherlands; UK

evanescence 32–3, 35, 37, 42 event 33, 127–8, 134 fabric 71, 73 face 21–2, 175; vs. head 22–3; see also interface famadihana (Malagasy ancestry ritual) 47, 53–8 fieldwork 168 fire: divinatory power 36; manipulation 33; metabolism 34; product of 32; sacred 31; and smoke 37; and spiritual realm 36 fluidity: and organisms 5; of thought 2; in world 168–9; see also solidity Flusser, V. 5, 10, 23–5, 176, 178 fold(s) 169–70, 175, 178 form(s) 5, 7–10; barkcloth 145; conditions of 169, 175–6; creation of 174–5; as deformation 174, 178; emergence of 140; and gesture 178–80; in knitting 155–6, 162–3; material 167, 176; in mathematics and geometry 9; morphology 63, 64, 67, 76–8; and numbers 154–6; of personhood 149; of power 143; self-fashioning 142, 148; vs. substance 162–3; as transformation 3, 5–7, 9–10, 140–3, 148–9, 168–70, 175, 178, 181; womb-like 145 Foucault, M. 85–6 frequencies: sound 169; surfaces 170 Freud, S. 83–9, 91–4 friction 6–7, 168, 172, 182 Fuller, E. 64, 71–2, 74, 77 gender 141, 164n7 geometric: model 188; object 187 gestures 8, 10, 175–6, 178–80 Gibson, J.J. 3–4, 8–9, 30, 88, 92–4, 99–102, 104, 114, 116, 120, 140, 169 Glasgow (UK) 167, 174 Goethean science 46, 56–7 Gothic architecture 119, 122 Graeber, D. 56, 60 graphic anthropology 98 Graz 160 Grebe, M.E. 31 Green, R. 53 ground 1, 3–8, 15–17, 19; and time 83–5; and walking 84, 92; see also skin growth 5–7 Guattari, F. 22–3, 27n14, 29, 92 Guevara, T. 31

Index Haarlem 72 Hacking, I. 89 hand(s): 174–5, 178–80; see also writing haptic vs. optical attention 25 hardness 171–2, 175, 176 Heidegger, M. 6, 88 Hugh of St. Victor 15 human and non-human: altering events 29–30; experiences that confound 35; linking 41; and medium 31; mutual phagocity 37; transformation 34; vitalities 33 Husserl, E. 88 Huxley, T.H. 94 identity 22, 53, 101, 128, 144, 147–50, 167 illusion: of animation 72, 76; of life 62, 64, 66–7, 71; superficiality of 63, 66, 68 image 180–1 imagination 152, 154, 156, 164 improvisation 158, 162, 164 information 181 infrastructure 23 Ingold, T. 30, 48, 57, 92, 93, 98, 153, 155–7, 162–3, 169; and becoming 4–5; field of forces 140–1, 145, 149; on form 140, 155; and ground 5; and hylomorphism 10; and mesh 7; and surface 7–8; and weather 6; and western perception 2, 8 inhabitation 29–30 ink 16 insects 169 intentionality 155, 160, 163 interface 23–6; see also face intimacy 154, 158–9 John Wardle Architects 133–4 Kahn, L. 120 kastom (Nalik practices emanating from ancestral past) 143–4, 148–9 knitted things: as disembodied embrace 158–9; as garments 154–5, 158, 161–3, 164n4; as relational things 159; trajectories of 161–2 knitting: calculation 154–6, 163, 164n4, 158, 160, 162, 164n5; as fractal surface 163, 165n8; as relational 155, 157, 159; and relational growth 154, 160, 163–4; 158; rhythm 155–7; as sensuous 154–5; teaching 156–7; technical knowledge 154, 157, 164

193

Kohn, E. 33 Kuma, K. 31, 98 labour of love see Liebesarbeit landscape 35, 42, 43, 163, 170, 172 Lange-Berndt, P. 64, 67, 77n4, 78 Latour, B. 29 Le Corbusier 120 Leatherbarrow, D. 99–102 Lévi-Strauss, C. 85–7 Liebesarbeit 159 lifelike 62–3, 66, 70, 72, 78; illusion 67–8; as natural 71; poses 64 light 171 line: on screen 25; scribal 15–18; of sight 19; vs. surface 20 Loos, A. 120 Lyons Architects 128, 131, 132 machine: 171–2; see also body machipurrún (initiation ritual dance of the machi) 42 Madagascar (Central East) 46–7, 50 making 155–6, 159, 163, 176, 178–9, 181 Malagasy 46, 58 malanggan (Nalik mortuary ritual) 142, 144, 149 Manchester (UK) 63 Mapuche culture 29 market 97–114; see also Dongdaemun Market; Namdaemun Market; Seomun Market; vendor material(s) 153, 155–6, 157, 160, 163–4; with bodies and earth 1, 3, 5, 168, 178–9; coconut leaves 144–7; co-opting 41; dispersed as aerial and volatile substances 31; empathy with 155–7; evanescent 30; form(s) 167, 176; and formation 5, 8, 10; and the immaterial 4, 9, 168; kapiak (Nalik type of bark cloth) 145, 147–9; knitting and knowledge 162; and materiality 63–4, 67, 76–8; mulai (Nalik type of bark cloth) 149; as objects 172–3; plant-based 143, 149; properties 167–8, 172, 175; substances are manipulated to shift 40; synthetic 141, 148–9, 168; and things 2, 6 mathematics 9–10; see also knitting calculation matter: and bodies 168; and depth 2; earthly 168; and flow and friction 7; vs. form 10; and life 9; as mattering 3; and mind 3, 181; and mingling 6, 10; and

194

Index

sensing 3; and substance and medium 4; and thresholds 4 McBride Charles Ryan Architects 128, 129, 130 medium: air 3; composition 32; conveying 169; expression 175; and evil spirits 39; gaseous to liquid transformation 40; injecting substance into 40; microsurfaces becoming subsumed into 35; mingling 5; pervasiveness 33; sky 4, 5; space 4; transitions 32; water 3, 7, 32; see also body Melanesia see Nalik people Melbourne (Australia) 126, 128–9, 131–4 memory 6–7, 9, 63, 70, 72, 74–6, 83–5; and palaeontology 89, 94 Merleau-Ponty, M. 85–9, 94 Metabolist Group 111, 114n3 metals 168, 171–3 Miller, D. 153 mind 153–4, 160; with bodies and materials 178; distributed 92; embodied 92; extended 92; occurring in 169–70, 172; stratified 83; see also matter; body mingling 5–6 mirrors 22–3, 25 mobility 111–12, 114 Möbius strip 58 moment 178–18 Mostafavi, M. 99–102 Moulian, R. 31 movement 63, 70, 74–6, 78, 156–7, 160, 163 music 169–70, 172 Nalik people 139 Namdaemun Market (Seoul) 97, 101–2, 112–13 nature 8 Neisser, U. 89 Netherlands 62; see also Haarlem; Venlo neuroscience see brain New Ireland see Nalik people nguillatún (Mapuche ritual ceremony) 41 object(s) 1, 4–6, 8, 9, 139–40, 142–4, 148–9, 167–8, 171–2, 182n1 occlusion 1–2, 80–1, 86, 92–4, 167 Oceania see Nalik people odours: ajayus (or protective spirits) feeding on 37, 40; death, sickness and the spiritual world 36; exchanging properties between persons and things 35; frankincense and myrrh 34;

incense 37; sahumerios (incense) 38, 43n2; smells 37–8; ‘sweet smell of Sanctity’ 34 Olivares, J.C. 39 Olivier, L. 81 ontology 81, 92; see also depth organic 168; see also synthetic pachamama 37 page 14–21, 23–6 palimpsest 16 Palladio, A. 127 Papapetros, S. 63, 72, 74, 78 Papua New Guinea see Nalik people parchment 15–17 patterns 154–7, 169, 162–3, 164n3 perceptions 31, 33, 35–6 performance 7–8, 17–18, 67, 127, 141, 144, 148–9, 157, 167, 175–6 permeability 100, 109–11 perspective 19–20 phenomenology vs. structuralism 85–9 Pierce, C. 33 pipes 31 Piro people of the Peruvian Amazon 21–2 plane 100–1, 104, 113 polarities 46, 51, 56–8 polymers 168, 171, 178 posture 66, 72, 74–6 potentiality 125 power: divinatory 33; empowerment 141, 150; of insight 2; relations 7–8, 9, 139, 141–3; thing-power 29, 30 practice(s): cultural 30, 33, 42; divinatory 43; indigenous 35–6; ritual 30–1, 35, 38, 42; skilled 157; see also design precedent (in architecture) 97 pressure 20 Price, C. 111, 114n3 printing press 15, 17–18, 20–1 psychoanalysis 83–5 püllü (Mapuche spirit) 38 Quiroz, D. 39 reading 15, 18, 20 reconfigurable creativity 161 relational: relationality 153, 159–60, 163; growth 154, 160, 163–4; practice 159; things 159 rewe (ceremonial pole among the Mapuche) 42 ritual(s): of communication 35, 37, 38; to feed the ajayus 28; instrumental symbol

Index 34; mortuary rites 36; protection 31; life 41; shamanic 41; use of smoke 31, 34, 35; see also practices Rossi, A. 101 Ruskin, J. 17, 25, 116, 117, 119, 121–5 Schmarsow, A. 119, 120 science 1–3 Scotland see Glasgow screens 23–6 sculpting 70; manikins 65–6, 72, 74; taxidermy as 62, 64–6, 72, 76 sculpture: contrapposto in 74; Renaissance 63 semiology: metaphorical substitution 33; semiosis 33, 34; sign 33 Semper, G. 24, 155 senses 1–3; see also body; knitting; odours; vision; vocals Seomun Market (Daegu) 97, 106–8 Seoul 97, 99, 104 Serres, M. 19–20, 22 Seven Lamps 12–13 shaman: 21 machi (Mapuche shaman) 37, 39, 41–2 Simmel, G. 186 singsing (Nalik ancestral dance) 144 site 170–1 sketching see drawing skill 6–7, 9, 62, 65–6, 68, 74, 77, 81, 93; anthropology of 67; set 65, 74; see also practice(s) skin: adornment of 142; animal 62–3, 68, 77n1; arranging 65; and burial 52; and clothing 175; as constraint 72, 74–6; as cover 66–7, 69–70; -deep 64; detached 76; expression by 175; and face 175; and ground 81; and memory 74–6; second 139; Skin Ego 159–60; and volume 63 sky 3–6 Sloterdijk, P. 22, 46, 48 smoke: blowing 37; constitution 40; life giving 35; and machi 41; semiotic process 30; substance into medium 40; as threshold 40; see also medium; odours solidity: and buildings 4, 8; vs. fluidity 2–4; and objects 5–6 sound see frequencies; volume South America see Andean South Korea 97; see also Daegu; market; Seoul space: 167, 170–2, 181; see also body; medium

195

Spinoza, B. 29 spirits: beings 35; evil 39, 43; feeding on smells and smoke 38; link with species 40; of the wind 36 Spuybroek, L. 17 St. Augustine 83 Steno, N. 81 stitch 154–8, 160–4 Stones of Venice 122, 124 studio 167–8, 170–2, 181–2 substance(s): aerial and volatile 31; and earth 4, 5; effect on medium 32; and ephemerality 4; evanescent 31, 33; exchanges between 30; and interior 3, 9; and medium 3–6; and mingling 10; particles 32, 33, 35; particulate 30, 37, 39, 40; pervasiveness 33; preferred 34; solid 37; and surface 120–1; water 32 superficial 1–2, 9; see also surficial supernatural 33, 34 surface studies 3, 116, 120, 134, 140, 142 surficial 9–10; observing 168, 181; practice 167; vs. superficial 58, 81, 93 synthetic: vs. organic 168; see also material tactility 62, 71, 158, 160 taxidermy: as artifice 67; artistic 75, 77n3, 77n4; commercial 68, 74; literature on 77–8; naturalistic 68, 70–1; renewed interest in 63–4; 68; see also sculpting technique 153, 155–6, 163 tectonic 121, 123, 135 territory 104–6, 109, 113, 127 textile 16, 25 texture(s) 4, 6–7, 171 theatricality 127–8 thread 152–5, 159, 161, 163; as potential 161; see also yarn threshold 3–4, 40, 98–9, 113–14, 117, 125, 134–5, 141, 170 time 1–2, 7, 80–1, 83, 88–9 tobacco 31, 37, 42 tools 171–2, 176, 183n11; see also body trace 175 transformation see form trees 16, 35, 43, 59, 104, 146, 149, 150n3 truth 116, 117–18, 121–5 Tuan, Y.F. 92 Turner, V. 94 Uexküll, J. 88 de Unamuno, M. 29–30

196

Index

United Kingdom (UK): 139; Britain 62, 64; Guild of Taxidermists 68–9; see also Derbyshire; Glasgow; Manchester urban 126, 128 van Kessel, J. 34 veil 15–17, 19, 25, 117, 121–4 vendor 102, 104–5, 111–13, 118 Venlo 68 Venturi, R. 127–8 vision 2, 23–5, 117–18 visual 3, 7, 117–18, 120, 139, 142, 146, 147, 176, 185, 189 volume 14, 62–3, 68, 70, 72, 76; manikin as 74–5; sculpting of 65–6, 76; sound 169

Wal, J. 46, 56–7 weather 48–9, 58 wekufe (Mapuche malignant spirit) 39–40 wind 35, 36, 37, 40, 41; vintur cussi (wind) 40 windows 19, 23, 25–6 women: makers 146; women’s work 153 workshop 167–8, 170–2, 182 writing: by hand 20; practices of 15, 17; and weaving 16 yarn 152, 154–7, 161–3 Zaha Hadid Architects see Dongdaemun Design Plaza zone 5–7, 10