Behind his hulking figure lurks the blackness of a space which has never seen light: it is the blackness of undifferentiated depth. He seems to be emerging, his corpuscular heft sloughing its way to light. But this is no birth, no revelation. His weight maintains his position, perched more or less comfortably between the darkness of depth and the exposure of the surface.

This play of depth and surface pervades the painting: in every crease of the flesh, something is revealed just as something else remains hidden. His ample body repeats this same gesture; its magnitude no doubt allows more light to happen upon him, but it also provides a greater wealth of secrecy. What genius, what pain, what sublimity resides in that great whale of a belly? In a sense, Rembrandt's posture, while certainly individual, is the posture of Man: our bodies reveal while our souls conceal. Just as Rembrandt remains partially obscured by the depths of the soul, all men house a divinity which cloaks them in shadows, even as their bodies persist in their crass tactility. This is a familiar formulation with echoes throughout our language. Beauty, after all, is only skin deep.
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Compare this to Matisse's "La dessert."

		The woman appears to be two-dimensional. Far from the blackness which surrounds Rembrandt, this woman is housed in the relentlessly revelatory hues of red. There is of course a depth to the bloods of red, but that is not what Matisse gives us. This red is rich but overt; it is not fluorescent but neither does it recede into itself.
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Rather, as the painting's alternate name suggests--"Harmony in Red"--this is a harmonious red, ready if not eager to participate with its surroundings. Blues, yellows, greens forge an expressive chorus amidst the resonant red. This is not Rembrandt's monologue or soliloquy; this is an outwardly directed communication, a veritable harmony in red.

Matisse's world is a world of more or less pure surface. There is no recessive depth: as the red sprawls seamlessly from table to wall--there is no shadowing to suggest the discontinuity of surface becoming depth--the motif of the table seamlessly becomes the motif of the wall. The pots of flowers on the table and walls belie three-dimensional perspective: are they motifs? or are they objects? The line between surface and depth vanishes as we are left with a world of swirling shapes, fabrics, textures.

Now do not think that the "surface" is a pejorative, as if the surface were equivalent to all that is artificial, temporary, false. For while one no doubt claims to aspire to the heights and depths of life -- to be a deep person, a deep thinker, to go below the mere surface of things to get to what's real -- the surface should not be dismissed so easily or readily. The surface offers experience, truths, pleasures which remain forever exiled from the depths.

Skin, for instance, proffers pleasures few would deny; even if it doesn't offer truth, it certainly offers essential aspects of life. The tender caress of a mother or lover; the salient kiss of romance rekindled; a slap of horror or admonition or disgust: these are the attending experiences of the body's surface.

While sex may ultimately be defined by penetration, where would we be without the stroke, the lick, without cunnilingus, without the gentle tug and grope of hand on breast or nipple on nipple or lips on belly? These are not superfluous to so-called real sex; they as constitutive of sex, as essential as penetration

The surface is not a mere supplement to reality: it offers truths -- different from the truths of depth, but truths nevertheless. Friedrich Nietzsche tells us he can smell truth and lies; he can recognize a "well turned-out man" by his scent, by his gait. For Nietzsche, virtue reveals itself precisely because the world reveals itself. Hence, when critiquing Socrates, Nietzsche can say: Socrates is ugly, and for the Greeks that was enough of a refutation. Ugliness is the sign of a "thwarted development," of degeneration, of an ill constituted soul. Nietzsche doesn¹t seek the hidden foundations of Socratic philosophy because the foundation stands together with its manifestation. If something smells bad, it is bad.

Nietzsche in fact argues that claims to depth are always suspicious, suggesting a lack of strength, of virtue. Principles, concepts, morality are fixed, stable structures; they prevent the flux of the material world, the flow and ebb of desire and attraction "I won't eat that delicious hamburger because it¹s wrong to kill animals!" These decisions are based in a rule which exists outside of life happening now. Nietzsche therefore refers to morality as nihilistic: it lives according to that which doesn¹t exist. Indeed, principles and morality stop life, prevent it from actually taking place: the moral man seeks the blackness of depth, the abyss which ominously yet nobly cloaks Rembrandt. For Nietzsche, this darkness is death; or perhaps not even death but non-existence, nothing.

Pop, as a surface phenomena, is never moral. In Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Renton finds himself in an ardent discussion of pop music: "The Simple Minds have been pure shite since they jumped on the committed, passion-rock bandwagon of U2. Ah've never trusted them since..." (136). He's never trusted them precisely because they've made claims to depth; it casts dispersions on everything they do. Pop is not concerned with depth, with haughty claims -- to morality, to self-expression, to truth. Compare Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's ardent folk-rock to the Beatles' crafty ditties: while CSNY decry the atrocities at Kent State, the Beatles hold a benefit for Mr. Kite. The Beatles don't disdain moral claims; they are simply indifferent. (Let's ignore, for the moment, John Lennon's later righteousness.) Pop flourishes in the fluctuations of the surface, its swirling and entwining, its folds, pleats, and knots. Moral claims would only hinder its freedom to twist and twirl.

Pop hence finds its complexity not in the throws of the depths but in the permutations of the surface. For the surface is not necessarily flat, homogeneous, or banal. In Matisse's painting, despite the fact that the table and wall share a continuous modulation of motif and color, they nevertheless remain differentiated: the table is still the table, the chair the chair. We can see this even more explicitly in another painting by Matisse, "Still Life with Magnolia." Here, the flowers, shell, vase, and mirror are suspended in a space which perpetually turns out. The red is brighter than that of "Harmony in Red," and there's neither motifs nor a window to suggest any possibility of depth. Here there is no escape: the world is suspended in a shimmering of revelation. And what is revealed is differentiation, each thing in its place, forging a more or less complex system with each other.

The surface is in fact capable of incredibly complex permutations. The Mobius strip, for instance, reveals to us that the surface can be folded, twisted, and turned in such a way so as to belie immediate consumption. To remain on the surface within a Mobius strip is to follow a path into the unknown, into places not immediately accessible--but which nevertheless are of the surface.

	Example New York is a city of heights and depths. As you ramble through its corridors, you feel the belly of the beast quite literally grumble to unimaginable depths while the buildings soar past the heavens, a hubris of stone and steel and glass. The unimaginable is relentlessly indulged in basements bereft of light, in penthouses frolicking -- teetering -- amidst the clouds, in tinted limousines, in the labyrinths of the subways and sewers. In Manhattan, something is always out of reach, out of sight, beyond the imagination.   Indeed, this is one of the more striking aspects of the documentary, Paris Is Burning: odd, elaborate and passionate events take place in unheard of places, at every hour of day and night, according to laws of their own making. New York is a city of obscured jurisdictions. It is a city of the Old World: Eastern European Jews, a little herring on their lips and breath, roam the streets with faces born of the earth. Jews are the inventors of depth, of an invisible god who delivers justice according to obscured laws. The Talmud drips from the bagels, can be tasted in the onions and lox and rye. Along with Socrates -- whom Nietzsche considers a Jew -- the Jews invented irony, the trope of depth, of the surface denied. Irony negates the surface because it is too small to house the infinitude of the soul. The ironist can¹t fit in his skin, is too much for this world. But he is condemned to this world and so his every word, every mortal breath, points away from the here and now and towards the invisible and expansive depths. Irony allows the speaker to slip away from the inevitable banality of the surface. San Francisco is a city of the surface, a crumpled piece of paper tossing this way and that in the wind. All is revealed; perversion celebrates itself in the light of day. Nothing obscured: the crystalline sun denies the secrets of shadows, alleys, basements. San Francisco swells like the tides, rising and falling but only in relative position to itself.