ABSTRACT
We become aware of skin as a visible surface through memory. If someone touching our skin brings us immediately into the present, the look of our skin – both to others and to ourselves – brings to its surface a remembered past. It is a phenomenological function of skin to record. Skin re-members, both literally in its material surface and metaphorically in resignifying on this surface, not only race, sex and age, but the quite detailed specificities of life histories. In its colour, texture, accumulated marks and blemishes, it remembers something of our class, labour/leisure activities, even (in the use of cosmetic surgery and/or skincare products) our most intimate psychic relation to our bodies. Skin is the body’s memory of our lives. But if skin constitutes a visual biographical record, by no means is this record historically accurate. As the vicissitudes of the inheritance of race in skin colour show, skin’s memory is as much a fabrication of what didn’t happen as a record of what did, as much fiction as fact. Indeed, the fact that we continue to invest the legibility of identity in the skin in spite of knowing its unreliability suggests skin to be a fantasmatic surface, a canvas for what we wish were true – or for what we cannot acknowledge to be true. Skin’s memory is burdened with the unconscious.
