Surface Turns

Recent methodological innovations in the humanities call on us to turn our attention toward the surface. Instead of looking for meaning beyond the objects under analysis we are asked to work with their textual and visual surfaces, thus eschewing symptomatic readings or critical exegesis. But this turn to the surface is not new. It does not even constitute a case of methodology catching up to theoretical trends of the past several decades where one of the foci was—time and again—an attention to surfaces: from poststructuralist obsessions with marked and textured surfaces to swan songs to complexity and opacity in the age of digital superficiality. When Donna Haraway diagnosed the turn from depth to surface as one of the traits of a paradigm shift from old hierarchies toward new networks of information and domination in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” she showed how surface turns are synchronized with changes in mediascapes and material imaginaries. By the same token, how “surface” is defined, imagined, and conceptualized in each instantiation of these turns differs widely. And each plea for work with the surface, often tied to claims of demystification, comes with its own agenda. In the face of repeated injunctions to turn toward the surface, we have either never been superficial enough or we have never been deep to begin with. And as the power of surface turns remains implicitly beholden to dichotomies (such as surface and depth), they do not do justice to the surface themselves, as they reduce and police a multiplicity of surface imaginaries. This essay proposes a new type of surface reading, not a reading of a textual surface, but a reading of surface figures; not a plea for defining a surface turn (or surface turns), but a reflection on how surface figures and claims for theoretical innovation can be thought together. After scrutinizing several turns to surfaces in theory, the essay turns to instances in which figures of the surface and of circularity intersect as a way of rethinking the binary between surface and depth and as a conduit for analyzing the force of the figure of the turn.