Sur Face

Spurious: 'Nothing mysterious about the otherness of the other, I think to myself, it's all there on the surface'

Yeah, but.. this ‘surface’ on which everything about me is visible is available to the Other but not to me. The look of the Other embodies this lost knowledge. And this lost knowledge remains inscrutably other because I can never by definition acquire it, this precious secret thing which is yet freely & indiscriminately available to everyone else.

Of course, this only works, presumably, inside a determinate culture. If I encounter someone from a remote culture – not only with a different language but with, perhaps, different affects, then there is, on the surface, only hieroglyphs. Suddenly we are like a child again who knows only that these shapes and sounds carry a significance from which he/she is excluded.

Here the ‘surface’ seems to be a veil covering secret depths and truths so important they have to be padlocked in riddles. To have access to this language, this culture, would be to speak this mysterious tongue, to trade in secret treasure. Except this sense of encrypted depths - of 'mystery' - is an optical illusion produced by one’s exclusion. For those on the inside, everything is on the surface.