Noise, ecological crises, and the posthuman sensibility of Michel Serres in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin

ABSTRACT This article revisits Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi film Under the Skin, ten years on from its release in 2013, to re-read it through Michel Serres’s posthuman philosophy as an allegorical warning about the ongoing ecological crises. Making this argument involves recognizing, through Serres, the crucial role of artistic practice in questioning our current neglect of sensible modes of being. Focusing upon the importance of ‘noise’ within Serres’s posthuman thinking, this article considers the alignment between the sensibility of ‘The Female’ in Under the Skin – an alien in human form (portrayed by Scarlett Johansson) – and the virtue of sensibility advocated by Serres of being ‘on the cusp of sense in the making’ (Webb 2018): a dynamic position situated between the chaotic noise of the world and the limitations of human language (Serres 2016). In combination with Glazer’s direction, the original musical score by Mica Levi and innovative sound design by Johnnie Burn are central to the argument. An additional aim of the article is to show the significance of Serres’s thinking within cultural studies, where this philosophy is currently undervalued.


Introduction
This article revisits Jonathan Glazer's science fiction film Under the Skin (2013), ten years after its initial release, to re-read it through Michel Serres's posthuman philosophy as an allegorical warning about the ecological crises exacerbated by neoliberalism.To make this argument, which includes recognizing the role of artistic practice in questioning our neglect of sensible modes of being, the article is arranged into a series of five subtitled sections and a conclusion.The first section positions Serres's posthuman philosophy through 'noise' and his contention that the origin of language lies in nature, with reference to the relationship between atoms and letters that follows Lucretius.The second section articulates the position Serres advocates of being 'on the cusp of sense in the making' (Webb 2018, 28): a dynamic position situated between the chaos of 'noise' and the anthropocentric limitations of human language.The third section introduces the alignment between Serres and Glazer, through intuition (rather than direct influence), whereby both value the importance of feeling through music, sound, and experience to convey a bodily sensibility that prefigures linguistic explanation.The fourth section focuses upon Johnnie Burn's sound design and Mica Levi's original score, which help produce the sensibility Glazer aimed to create, aligned with the Serresian notion of being on the cusp of sense in the making.The fifth section acknowledges the importance of topology in Serres's philosophy, influenced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and how a topological way of thinking applies to the 'sonic skins' and ontological understanding of bodiliness within Under the Skin.The conclusion situates the article in relation to Serres's goal of generating intuitive knowledge(s), and the role of artistic practice in (re)positioning contemporary discourse around sensible modes of being.

A world of noise: Michel Serres's posthumanism and atomism
In works such as The Parasite ([1980] 2007), The Five Senses ([1985] 2016), The Natural Contract ([1990] 1995), Hominescence ([2001] 2019) and Biogea ([2010] 2012), Serres develops a posthuman philosophy that takes a distinct position on the value of 'noise' set against the limitations of language as a form of 'linguistic anthropocentrism' (Watkin 2020, 217).Serres's posthumanism is complex, retaining a positive approach towards humans and humanism (with the intention of purposefully reintegrating humanity with nature, including through technology, so that environmental needs are prioritized over human wants).As Cary Wolfe explains, Serres's posthumanism is not determined by historical succession, whereby 'the human is transformed and finally eclipsed by various technological, informatic, and bioengineering developments ' (2021, 273).Rather, Serres's posthumanism is intertwined with his proposal for a new natural contract resituating human life as one element within a de-anthropocentric environment.The emergence of this new natural contract is, in part, predicated upon reintegrating the previously excluded value of 'noise', where noise includes and encapsulates the 'other of knowledge' (Wolfe 2021, 275;Serres and Schehr 1983;Serres [1980Serres [ ] 2007)).
Within the Western philosophical canon, noise is typically sacrificed to an anthropocentric model of being that defines 'information' (in contrast to noise) through abstract linearity, delimiting rationality, and/or various forms of conceptual orderliness that downplay the contingent and chaotic qualities of being and materiality.Serres identifies Rene Descartes's influence as a significant example of sacrifice, which has precursors in other exclusionary motions dating back to the classical age ([1980] 2007], 180).Serres's posthumanism is therefore not a historically linear outcome following the modern idea of being 'human' (Latour 1993); instead, for Serres, the posthuman 'precedes and subtends the human, both ontologically and epistemologically' (Wolfe 2021, 274).In keeping with Serres's embrace of noise -reintegrating the previously excluded 'knowledge of other'his understanding of history, time, and space is inherently topological (Assad 1999;Connor 2002;Wolfe 2021).Serres's topological way of thinking is embodied within his writing style, which draws upon the prepositional, the relational, and the non-linear.In short, Serres's posthumanism involves reconfiguring human knowledge, and being, by fundamentally changing our relationship with the natural world.Because human society has become so powerful and globally destructive Serres proposes, asserts, insists, and pleas that we step back from the anthropocentric drive to dominate the environment by instead acknowledging different (ignored and repressed) forms of understanding, otherwise disregarded as 'noise', which will enable us to resituate ourselves in collaboration with nature.
For Serres, Western philosophy's anthropocentric focus upon language -as a means of communicating and understanding that foregrounds cognition over sensoriality -undermines human society's willingness and ability to fully engage with our senses and the sensory information our bodies receive from the material world.As a result, human thinking has become trapped within an 'impoverished idiom' due to the unintended constraints of language (Webb 2018, 23).As Serres contends, overreliance upon language contributes to the increasingly evident ecological crises unfolding on a global scale, whereby the same things are said repeatedly but human society collectively lacks the richness of sensorial engagement needed to feel (and therefore think) differently in ways that would redefine our natural contract with the Earth (Serres [1990(Serres [ ] 1995(Serres [ , 2012(Serres [ , 2016;;Johnson 2021).The political rhetoric around climate change, for example, involves repeated acknowledgements of the need to act; however, the content of any resulting agreements or treaties appear nonbinding and/or (re)negotiable within a global capitalist economy that positions carbon emissions (and other pollution) as quotas to potentially trade within the marketplace.Christopher Watkin's monograph Michel Serres: Figures of Thought ( 2020) dedicates a chapter to language, including discussion of Serres's 'radically naturalized account of language' originating from 'the rhythms and patterns of the natural world' (217).For Serres, language is first and foremost about rhythm and musicality born out of noise: Before making sense, language makes noise: you can have the latter without the former, but not the other way around.After noise, and with the passage of time, a sort of rhythm can develop, an almost recurring movement woven through the fabric of chance.(2016,120) As Watkin observes (2020, 229), for Serres the primary and often the most important message of human language (the quality that makes a listener attentive) is coded not in words (as a structural form, given meaning through difference) but through the implicit rhythm and music of a voice: 'It is through the voice that the first act of seduction passes between interlocutors, sotto voce, a tension that is rhythmic and musical' (Serres 2016, 120).Rhythm and music -including the voice as instrument, making patterns of sound emerging from noise -inform Serres's poetic writing style.He warns against written and spoken language that is overly rational (such as dry academic writing) because there is 'not enough rhythm, no melody at all' and advises a reader to '[t]hrow out any book that fails to grab you with these [qualities of rhythm and music] from the start' (120).
Serres's account of the origin of language is embedded within a larger ontology of background noise; this ontology draws heavily upon Lucretian and Epicurean atomism that roots language in the natural world (Watkin 2020, 234).Within Serres's 'reconstruction of the Epicurean ontology of atoms falling in the void' (from which the material patterns of life begin to emerge through the dynamic impact of the clinamen 1 ), he places 'great stress on the Lucretian equation of atoms with letters' (234).In The Birth of Physics ([1997] 2000), Serres follows Lucretius to emphasize an equivalence between atoms and letters that is both metaphorical and material: Atoms, as we know, are letters, or are like letters.Their interconnection constitutes the tissue of the body, in the same way as letters form words, empty spaces, sentences and texts [. ..]The analogy of behaviour is perfectly apt.It is a metaphor and it is not [a metaphor . ..] (2000, 141) Serres is not an atomist in the reductionist sense (whereby the essence of materiality leads back to underlying, potentially meaningless, atomic structures).Instead, his equivalency between atoms and letters makes an ontological claim for two different (but related) forms of code born out of nature: the universe is written in atoms; the noise of the universe -from the background noise of the Big Bang through all other natural manifestations -creates sound, patterns, and rhythm from which music, human language, and poetry emerge.Atoms and letters are forms of energy and code fundamental to life.As such, a sensibility that engages extensively with the noise, sound, and patterns of the natural world can become intuitively aligned with the environment.However, for Serres, the modern world has forgotten the origins of language as emerging from noise (coming out of nature), or tries to hide/muffle those noises, so that humans no longer relate directly to the natural world and the variegated range of information around them (Watkin 2020, 217).Instead, humans are preoccupied with a linguistic anthropocentrism that privileges thinking through language (mainly about ourselves) rather than listening to and learning from nature through our senses: 'The Biogea 2 rustles; it shouts on the nether side of our languages; without them; below them; outside them; beneath these lines, before the meaning of what I am saying gushes forth.' (Serres 2012, 42).

Being 'on the cusp of sense in the making'
Serres understands sense as 'emerging through the integration of tiny perceptions' from the world around us (Webb 2018, 24), strongly influenced by Leibniz's belief that: at every moment there is an infinity of perceptions in us, but without apperception and without reflection [. ..] which we do not consciously perceive, because these impressions are too small or too numerous, or too homogenous [. ..] but combined with others, they do have their effect and make themselves felt in the assemblage.(1989 [1703-05], 295) Drawing upon Leibniz's discussion of the sound made by a wave crashing on the shore and how (to form the crashing sound) we hear countless minute perceptions that we do not sense individually (Leibniz 1989, 295), Serres uses his pivotal work The Five Senses to present a sustained plea for humans to 'reverse this integration, to differentiate and to lower the threshold at which we become conscious of the tiny perceptions that flood our senses' (Webb 2018, 24).Serresian 'noise' begins with the unfiltered information transmitted by the natural world, whereby everything is formed and reformed through the dynamism of the clinamen (creating ongoing topological and isomorphic patterns).This noise, which is entangled both metaphorically and materially with atoms, is as potentially endless as the material universe.At the opposing end of a spectrum that, at one end, recognizes the limitations of anthropocentric language as an 'impoverished idiom' we therefore find 'chaotic noise' (Webb 2018, 23), which could be defined as full exposure to the infinite sensations of the world: 'The noisy, anarchic, clamoring, mottled, striped, streaked, variegated, mixed, crossed, piebald multiplicity [. . . of] possibility itself' (Serres and Schehr 1983, 56).Serres advocates finding a dynamic equilibrium somewhere between the two: a sensibility open to the sensations (the noise) of the world, without being so open as to be lost within chaos, while also accepting the 'gift' of language (Serres 2016, 98), without excessively prioritizing linguistic cognition over the sensory knowledge transmitted by nature.In 'The Virtue of Sensibility ' Webb (2018) provides a selective overview of the virtue ethics within Serres's philosophy of the senses, concluding that: 'in the end, for Serres, the virtue of sensibility lies in being able to stand there, between noise and language, on the cusp of sense in the making' (28, emphasis added).
For Serres, language is a gift; however, the conventions of language -particularly overreliance upon language as an expression of rationality -can limit how human society tends to think because language filters understanding through a culturated process.As a determinant of this filtering process, Serres argues the anthropocentrism of human society limits how we sense and value the natural world.Webb (2018) explains Serres's position using Henri Canguilhem's philosophy of the healthy/unhealthy body as a parallel example.Canguilhem considers the relationship between bodily needs and the surrounding environment (the milieu) and observes that because a body has specific needs to remain healthy it focuses only upon select information being provided by the environment (to prioritize those bodily needs).This means the Earth is not just a source of nourishment and shelter; instead, because the living body 'picks out signals that enable it to meet its needs', the Earth also becomes the basis for how that body determines 'sense and value' (Webb 2018, 16).Put another way, the needs (and wants) of human society have determined which information from the natural world we have sought out (sensed) and paid attention to (valued); in effect, human society has selectively edited out or ignored crucial knowledge about the wellbeing of the environment that did not align with immediate human requirements.Anthropocentric needs therefore shape the kind of understanding and communication that occur 'between the living being and the material world' ( 16), so that the needs of human society are sensed and valued while the wider range of possibilities inherent in the material world, offered by nature, are disregarded and overlooked (excluded as a form of noise).
How we value and sense is therefore limited by the system human society has created.In our current time of crises the core problems we face are exacerbated by neoliberalism, which drives our global decision making.Paraphrasing Serres (1995), over time human society has expanded to become coextensive with the Earth so that our actions now impact the world on a global scale.The dominant approach to how natural resources are sensed and valued is determined by the economic needs of the marketplace.As such, the contemporary crises of ongoing ecological disaster have been created by an anthropocentric model of sense and value that prioritizes financial gain, leading to the contemporary situation where global politics are dominated by neoliberalism.This approach to the Earth is intrinsically exploitative, sensing and valuing Earth's resources primarily (and almost exclusively) to serve short term economic gains.Serres (1995Serres ( , 2016Serres ( , 2019) ) advocates a fundamental reworking of human society's relationship with the Earth by opening up our senses and recognizing that homo sapiens, as a lifeform, is part of the ecology of the planet -not the pinnacle of life for the planet to serve -and the insights we will gain through more open sensibilities will enable humans to collaborate with (rather than exploit) the Earth.
Serres's philosophy prioritizes bodily learning through the senses, configured in terms of 'energy and information, the hard and the soft' (Webb 2018, 22).Hard energies relate predominantly to empiricism and the physicality of the material world; soft energies relate to socio-cultural responses to the world through forms of interpretation, including the energy of signs (Serres 2016, 113-4).Language, for example, is a form of soft energy.For Serres, the mingling point between the 'hard forces that are preconceptual and the softness of their expression in language is sensibility' (Webb 2018, 22).Our bodies 'live in the world of hardware, whereas [. ..] language is composed of software', so the senses provide a bridge, within the body, through which the hard and soft energies form a 'mingled given' (Serres 2016, 113-4).Our contemporary crises have arisen due to 'the [global] saturation of the Earth' by a human-centred model of sense and value (Webb 2018, 22).One of the core problems is that the hard energies of the Earth (our material experiences of natural resources and the environment) are all too quickly 'converted into language, images, [and other forms of] information' ( 22) based upon our limited (anthropocentric) model of sense and value.For example, ecological disasters are typically framed within neoliberal societies as taking place 'elsewhere' and/or as environmental issues for ongoing political debate (producing repetitive discussion without meaningful action: an 'impoverished idiom').The neoliberal cultural sensibility positions human life, particularly within the West, as somehow elevated above the environmental crises (underpinned by the false belief that global markets can determine how human society should best make use of natural resources).Serres's plea is for humanity is to embrace a posthuman de-anthropocentric position where we: [. ..] edge back through language from well-defined [anthropocentric] sense towards the noise and confusion that lies before it: an anamnesis [recollection] that returns not to unity but to multiplicity, that does not leave sensibility behind [by moving all too quickly from open sensibility to culturated meanings] so much as makes its home there.(Webb 2018, 23) Serres proposes moving towards an open sensibility 'not so much beyond language as through it' (Webb 2018, 22).Language remains important as a means of conveying sensibility through synthesis and feeling (open to the noise and patterns of nature), rather than through analysis and anatomizing rationality (limited by the conventions of anthropocentrism).For Serres, this includes incorporating visual metaphors and allegories into his writing to help communicate his thinking: he uses storytelling, from personal anecdotes and tales from popular culture to classical mythology, to create a feeling, or an 'intuition', rather than offering a conventionally rationalized intellectual argument. 3 Serres's later philosophy, including The Five Senses, is often referred to as 'poetic' (Watkin 2020, 16), sometimes pejoratively, sometimes through positive recognition of his philosophical goal: We must write as close as possible to this moving dense proliferation, to the full capacity of the senses which is opened up in this place and given to us by the sensible.By this I mean the sensible that is given to us by the infinite capacity of sense [inclusive of noise].(Serres 2016, 118) Getting Under the Skin . . .Jonathan Glazer developed the science fiction film Under the Skin for over a decade before its release, in 2013, to a combination of widespread critical acclaim and audiences split between frustration at the unconventional stripped-back, narrative and admiration for a masterpiece of 'experimentalism and raw sensuality' (Leigh 2014).In addition to directing, Glazer co-wrote the film with Walter Campbell based loosely upon Michel Faber's (2000) novel of the same name.Under the Skin leads and features upon an array of 'film of the year' and 'film of the decade' critical review lists, receiving accolades for best film, cinematography, direction, and acting.In particular, Mica Levi's original musical score picked up a number of awards, including Levi being named 'Breakthrough Composer of the Year' for 2014 by the International Film Music Critics Association (IMFCA 2015).The significance of Levi's score provides context for reappraising Under the Skin, which resonates with Serres's philosophy of language and noise whereby sound, rhythm, pattern, and music communicate a bodily sensibility rather than a linguistic rationality.
Serres's philosophical goal is to show how an intuition, or intuitions, can change our sensibilities, thereby inspiring new ways of being (potentially on a global scale); Glazer's aim, as a director, aligns with the same fundamental idea of intuiting a sensibility, whereby he directs his films to be 'something more felt than thought' (Glazer in Adams 2014).Under the Skin prioritizes its central premise -of experiencing the world through an alien sensibility -above narrative and linguistic clarity.What Glazer wanted 'was to make a film representing, as purely as possible, an alien view of the world' (Leigh 2014), stating: 'I liked having it in my head.Finding the logic, the images.It's like learning an alphabet, then a language, then writing in it, then trying to write poetry in it' (Glazer in Leigh 2014).Glazer considers the film an invitation for the audience 'to be [conceptually] up there with you', primarily feeling the experience rather than understanding the story on an intellectual level (Glazer in Adams 2014).Under the Skin communicates ideas that are inferred or implicit (as sensorial and bodily intuitions) rather than definitive or explicit (as rationalized and cognitive processes).Glazer asks the audience to immerse themselves within the experience of the film, which eschews conventional narrative exposition and signposting.Under the Skin invites the audience to empathize with the position advocated by Serres of a body (in this case, an alien body presented in human form) situated between the breadth of noise in the world and the established order of human society.From this position, situated between noise/chaos and established/anthropocentric order, the existing systems of socio-cultural interpretation do not dominate or determine how an alien body makes sense of the world.In other words, the alien protagonist whose sensibility is at the heart of the film experiences Earth as a humanoid lifeform positioned 'on the cusp of sense in the making'.
Under the Skin is based upon the inherently posthuman scenario of technologically advanced alien life visiting Earth.The protagonist is an alien lifeform portrayed by Scarlett Johansson, credited only as 'The Female', which has taken on an unnamed human identity by wearing a synthetic skin to disguise itself in the form of a young woman.The Female's mission, undertaken by driving around Glasgow and the surrounding area in a white van, is to lure single men (without companions or dependents) to an abandoned house where alien technology submerges the victim within a black tar-like substance, removes their skin (with similar results to ecdysis, but without a living body emerging), and transports their meat to another planet.Human life on Earth is regarded by the aliens as providing a resource, in the form of human bodies, for them to (literally) consume, thereby offering a dark mirror to the way contemporary human society regards the resources of the Earth.In the opening sequence to the film, language is acknowledged as an arbitrary sign system developed for human communication.We hear The Female learning phonemes to construct human speech, sometimes practicing sounds ('Tuh, Vuh, Huh, Tuh, Duh [. ..]Ga-gaga, Da-da-da . . .') and sometimes combining sounds together to formulate words ('Fuh, Feel, Field . . . Film, Filmed, Films . . . '). 4 In addition to framing human language and society as alien -viewed from an extra-terrestrial perspective -the opening sequence of fractured language prefigures the limited role speech plays throughout the film.Under the Skin has a stripped back script in which The Female speaks very little.In the first half of the film, she uses language almost exclusively to identify or seduce potential victims; in the second half, she barely speaks at all after going off mission by embracing her slow burning sensorial fascination with life on Earth.
Glazer's film is not directly influenced by Serresian philosophy.However, the intuitive integration between Under the Skin and Serres's posthuman sensibility (sensing the world without placing anthropocentric needs above the needs of the environment) provides an allegorical reading of the film that is both aligned with Serresian thinking and in keeping with Serres's poetic use of allegory to communicate ideas.The Female initially views Earth as a resource from which humans can be harvested without consequence (an attitude of exploitation, mirroring the current human position towards natural resources).As her story progresses, The Female's ongoing exposure to life on Earth (as an alien experiencing the planet for the first time) reflects a Serresian posthuman sensibility that becomes increasingly drawn into sensory engagement with life on the planet.This broad fascination with life on Earth, from a de-anthropocentric perspective, is subtly indicated early in the film, when The Female strips the body of an unknown woman to steal her clothes and -despite the apparent disregard for human life -picks up a live ant to admire its movement on the tip of her finger.As The Female progressively takes on the role of a (post)human with an open sensibility (the position advocated by Serres) -whereby sensory interest in the world gets 'under the skin'she becomes increasingly vulnerable.While The Female tries to move beyond an exploitative way of being (having lost interest in seducing and killing victims as a form of consumption), the world of human society has not; so where The Female was initially exploitative and predatory, she now becomes more aligned with the natural world as a target of exploitation and as a form of prey.Attacked and then murdered, left to burn to death alone on the edge of a forest, the implication is that human society is not yet ready or willing to embrace a new, posthuman, de-anthropocentric understanding of the world.Under the Skin holds up a mirror to human society, ultimately inviting us to look at ourselves -or at least our current way of being -as limited, reductive, and destructive of life on planet Earth.
Other details throughout Under the Skin feed into this Serresian allegorical warning.Locations Manager for the film, Eugene Strange, describes the agricultural-industrial site where the alien burns to death as depicting a stark, unnaturally demarcated, line between standing trees at the edge of a forest and the denuded land in the adjacent open space, where the cleared land attests to the brutality of the industrial economic process (Strange 2014).The murder of the vulnerable alien lifeform -mutilated (in her humanoid form) as part of an attempted rape, and then set on fire through fear and lack of understanding (when her alien form is revealed) -takes place within a landscape chosen as a site/sight that infers a wilful lack of human insight, violent disregard for life, and the impulse within contemporary human society to destroy without fully acknowledging or accounting for the consequences of our actions.In Serresian terms, the fate of the alien is the consequence of an anthropocentric world willing to sacrifice the sustainability of all forms of flora and fauna (including humans) for shortterm economic gains.The industrial forester who is economically rewarded for raping the land also attempts to rape The Female before killing her, embodying a negative cycle of exploitative behaviour that reflects the self-defeating imperatives of neoliberal economics.
Near the start of the film, shortly after stealing clothes to wear, The Female's first experience of a busy public space conveys her alien sensibility with disconcerting effectiveness.As The Female walks through a Glasgow shopping centre -a site that makes wry thematic links to the idea of human consumption -she is hit by startling waves of noise that are loud, varied, overlapping, individualistic, babbling, echoey, incoherent and confusing.Both distant and immediate at the same time (due to the way noise echoes and reverberates through the shopping centre interior), the impact of those sounds can perhaps only start to be captured in a Serresian 'variegated list' (Connor in Serres 2016, 5) where language is more aptly (and poetically) applied through multiplicity, including paradox, than through selection of just the right singular word.The Female does not react in any overt way to the confusion of activity around her and the noise washing over her, which the audience is simultaneously subjected to as they start to internalize her alien perception of the human world.The scene is unnerving because it conveys a subtle but profound sense of distanciation.Film critic Danny Leigh shared with Glazer that, in this scene, 'the human environment looks so unshakeably weird, it became one of the most disturbing moments I've had in a cinema' (2014).What is striking about Leigh's observation, which Glazer infers is the feeling he intended, is that the scene relies significantly upon everyday realism for its impact.It is not that the imagery itself has been manipulated for the film (in fact the opposite is true), it is that a subtle but meaningful shift in sensibility is being introduced whereby the conventions and codes of human society are revealed as arbitrary and therefore unnatural.
Under the Skin was shot to include numerous improvised scenes, captured using an array of skilfully hidden cameras, which feature non-actors unaware they are being filmed (at least at the initial point of engagement with Johansson's alien); these scenes are then interwoven with alien scenes of minimalist otherworldly imagery -developed from Glazer's sharp eye for audacious visuals -thereby blending everyday realism, or 'the very concrete real' (Romney 2014), with the surreal.The 'vivid quasi-documentary dimension' to Under the Skin, informed by 'surveillance cinema' (Romney 2014), is part of the reason why the shopping centre scene (and the human environment throughout the film) is unsettling, channelling aspects of the uncanny.The Female's entry into the shopping centre is a moment when the systems and structures that formulate a certain way of living and being -the world of neoliberal late capital -appear unfathomably arbitrary.The movements of the people, unfiltered and authentic, unaware of the cameras, unfolding within the fluid buzz of noise with its pitched laughs and other peaks of fragmented sound, captures the incongruousness of human activity.Assumed meanings and immediate interpretations are disrupted (filtered through The Female's sensibility) rather than being automatically or comfortably made, so a mundane reality takes on a surreal, quasifamiliar, quality: the perspective of an alien that has studied aspects of human society from a distance and is now immersed in experiencing it first-hand.The 'unshakable weirdness' of the shopping centre reflects an ontological moment when the world is seen (but not understood) as the consequence of choices made and imposed by a geopolitical economic system that humans designed for themselves: a system for living, which is predominant in Western society but globally impactful, that did not have to evolve in this way or formulate this particular outcome or result. 5In more prosaic terms, which are no less profound in their implications, the question prompted by the shopping centre scene is: why did humans end up like this, living in this way?
The sensibility of sound: something very 'felt' The most significant elements mediating The Female's sensibility are the sound design and the integrated musical score.Johnnie Burn, a long-term collaborator with Glazer, developed the sound design for Under the Skin working alongside the picture edit, which included figuring out ways to tell the story through sound based upon 'how you would experience the world when hearing it for the first time' (Burn in Hough 2016, 378).Reflecting on the highly limited dialogue, Burn discusses the distinct challenges placed upon sound design to help convey the story; one key decision was to retain (rather than filter out) 'the crappy sounds that you tend to ignore, like background conversations or airplanes' (378).In Burn's words, this enables real world sounds to provide a 'rich tapestry of honesty' that 'in itself sounds alien' (378).Similar to the use of everyday realism within the imagery of the human environment, the sound design utilizes an unfiltered (or much less filtered) approach to sound than is typical in mainstream cinema.As Burn explains, 'there's a lot of mush, a lot of noises as there [... are] in real life, and in typical movies that's removed' (379).The standard conventions of filmic sound focus upon conveying the experience of each scene within the context of the narrative; by contrast, allowing the realism of the actual world into the diegesis -regardless of whether it has narrative significance for the scene or not -is an 'alien' concept.Burn's sound design draws upon the 'honesty' of real world sound to actively further a sense of the alien, describing the high level of detail involved in a process that includes using sync sound where the source is distinct from the action it is synchronized with on screen.In keeping with Serres's Leibnizian-informed idea of lowering the threshold 'at which we become conscious of the tiny perceptions that flood our senses', Burn created 'little lattices of sound' -intricate networks of noise -that were recorded as sync sound and then, in the shopping centre scene, applied individually to 'every single person that walked past' (378).The Female's sensibility, mediated through film, picks up all of these conflicting, contradictory, overlapping but differentiated sounds in a rich tapestry of real world noise.Combined with the sense of unfiltered authenticity in the imagery, the audience is invited to feel the immersive sensory experience of an open sensibility.
Burn's sound design applies this level of detail throughout Under the Skin.In a particularly insightful statement, which again channels Serresian thinking, Burn reflects that: 'what's important is [that] the sound we chose isn't particularly like a language as you [the audience] know it' (Burn in Hough 2016, 378).In other words, the sound design deliberately steps back from a familiar sensibility of cinematic sound -avoiding the culturated 'language' of mainstream cinema -to embrace the noise of the world through its inherent multiplicity.The intention is to open up the viewer's sensibility to the richness of experience provided by an alien perspective: a posthuman perspective that is not concerned with interpreting (and thereby reducing) the information into existing sociocultural, anthropocentric, codes of meaning.Burn's process was informed by Glazer's input as director, Peter Raeburn's insight as music supervisor, and Mica Levi's work on the soundtrack, which created a 'tight weave' (Burn in Hough 2016, 381) of ongoing creative dialogue.
Levi's soundtrack adds to the unconventional experientiality of Under the Skin as a form of 'sonic membrane' that creates a 'syncretic and synesthetic entanglement' (Redmond 2016).Levi has discussed their instincts as a film composer in relation to two schools of thought: one approach is to write 'an articulate score that uses the variety of the orchestra and moves very fast to picture'; the other is 'about doing something new and different, something very "felt"' (Levi in Beauman 2017).Approaching sound through a new and different sensibility -as something that is 'felt' -enables a film score to move beyond skilfully accompanying the narrative (whereby sound and music are a companion to the images) to become something more elemental within the storytelling.Randall Poster (music supervisor for Wes Anderson) recognizes this distinctive quality in Levi's scores, describing the music as so integrated it becomes 'the [bone] marrow of the narrative' (Beauman 2017).Serres, similarly, enthuses about the evocative qualities of music as sound (situated between noise and language) that can channel the energies of the world into a form of order.Where language is used, Serres encourages lyricism, poetry, and other inherently musical patterns within the flow of words so that the form invokes the feeling.In Serres's words: 'the meaning dissolves into the story, the threnody sustains the sound' (Serres 2016, 118).

The topological body and sonic skins
Levi discusses developing the score for Under the Skin to 'situate' the audience within the 'point-of-view' of The Female (Levi in Lattanzio 2014).In an appropriately bodily metaphor, Levi describes the music -aside from the music within the black void -as coming from The Female's 'alien stomach', implying it is based upon gut instinct (2014).Within the black void, where victims are seduced into stripping before sinking into the black tar (while The Female walks away on the surface), Levi describes the music as being like The Female's 'makeup that she's put on' and an aural equivalent to wearing an 'outfit' or 'perfume' for purposes of human seduction; Levi understands the music 'as something fake that she's [The Female] not really feeling' (2014).Each of these sonic metaphors -of makeup, clothing, and perfume -position music and rhythm as a kind of skin being worn by the alien to perform 'humanness'.As such, the feelings come from The Female but in the black void are not implicitly her own feelings, offering instead a projection (or mirror) of humanity from an alien point of view.These relational qualities, with their topological layers of meaning, become incorporated into the music and sound design through awareness of The Female's 'sonic skins' and how she chooses to wear them.Levi arranges the score in terms of five musical themes, each coming from The Female's sensibility: 'her makeup, the cosmos, the aliens, her job music, and her feelings' (2014).
Towards the end of the film, Levi describes certain musical themes as becoming 'worn out' as though 'the makeup is old'; The Female's sonic skins become 'tired' and 'not as strong'.By contrast, the music from the beginning and middle of the film uses cymbals to represent The Female's alien character, conveying 'the energies of her world and the warmth of her planet', which also combine with fast string-playing to convey 'her life form ' and alienness (2014).The Female's 'job music' relates to hunting targets for consumption, but other notes start to establish themselves as she begins to make sense of the world in her own way -what Levi describes as a 'manual process', shaped by The Female's sensory experiences, 'as she's breaking through her humanity' -which is musically based around a synth string chord that is held onto for an extended period of time (2014).As Levi explains, the film starts with darker chords (reflective of the 'hunger' the alien brings to her job/mission), which change as her deeper sensory engagement with life on Earth starts to emerge, 'ending up at this very pure, very simple kind of chord' (Levi in Lattanzio 2014).The unconventional approach towards music and sound design in Under the Skin -intuitively developed to be distinct from the sound effects and soundtracks that typically accompany narrative cinema -aligns with Serres's thinking about music and patterns of sound providing a sensorial 'third way' between a confusion of noise and the limitations of conventional language.
Serres identifies the interwoven sensations of the body as 'the buried origins of topology ' (2016, 304) whereby the senses evolve through adaptations of the skin, such as light sensitive cells formulating the eye and the way the tympanic membrane (as a layer of skin) vibrates to enable hearing through the ear.Serres's topological thinking, influenced by Leibniz, is fundamental to his philosophy.Topology provides an 'account of transformations' (Watkin 2020, 100) because it is inherently concerned with spatial relations such as 'continuity, neighbourhood, insideness and outsideness, disjunction and connection' (Connor 2002).Skin, for example, is not just topologically inside and outside the body.As a potentially diaphanous membrane, capable of blurring the relationship between the body and its environment, skin can lend itself, both literally and metaphorically, to a wide range of topological interpretations that can be bodily and/or cultural (Connor 2004).The rolling mist at the edge of the sea in Under the Skin is a form of membrane or skin, in and of itself, which The Female then experiences as cool damp air on her synthetic skin as she stands on the beach, blurring qualities of the exterior world with the internal senses of her humanoid body (assuming her skin has similarities to human sensoriality).Furthermore, the idiom 'under the skin' draws upon inherently topological relationships.It is used to express embodied notions of authenticity, irritation, and/or obsession while drawing attention to the (sometimes contradictory) relationship between external appearances and internal sentiments.
In Under the Skin the unknowable interiority of The Female presents an open question and an unresolved paradox.The Female's alien sensibility remains always a mystery (always unknowable as something non-human), even though Under the Skin focuses upon mediating her alien experiences (within a human-like body) through sound design, the soundtrack, and the imagery.Glazer's film therefore plays with ontology in a topological way: the unknowable interiority of The Female is presented as an open (human-like) sensibility, inviting the audience to engage with her perspective of learning from first time experiences on Earth; however, the audience cannot ever really know what is going on inside her because she is an alien in a humanoid form.The audience is topologically (relationally) invited to empathize with The Female by drawing upon human sentiments and sensibility to 'make sense' of her unknowable (internal) alien experiences.A Serresian response to this conundrum is contained within the allegorical qualities of Under the Skin, whereby the film's embrace of a topological (relational) ontology invites the viewer inside a posthuman sensibility that enables a profound perspective on human society.In other words, Under the Skin complicates the conventional inside/outside relationship by intuiting an alien perspective from within human society to enable us to see ourselves more clearly.

Conclusion: intuition, artistic practice, and sensible modes of being
Intuition is the primary goal of Serres's philosophy, referring to something felt and sensed rather than something dispassionately reasoned.As Watkin elaborates, Serresian intuition is that which 'generates the initial hypothesis that is to be tested, or the initial way of seeing the world that is to be explored ' (2020, 27).Intuition 'need not be instantaneous' (although it can be) and 'is also distinct from understanding'; it is 'not something that can exhaustively be explained [through language], because it explains everything else' (27).Intuition is therefore 'in an important sense pre-rational, but it is not anti-rational or arbitrary' (27); it is 'not exclusively intellectual' and is essentially corporeal (28).Quoting Serres, from Variations of the Body ([1999] 2001): 'Whatever activity you're involved in, the body remains the medium of intuition, memory, knowing, working and above all invention' (34).In a statement that goes to the heart of the matter, aligned with Serres's virtue of sensibility (Webb 2018), Watkin asserts that Serresian intuition: [is] not a concept but a sensibility, and not a way of thinking but a way of living in the world.It is also profound and sensible in the sense that it is a pre-theoretical sensitivity to what Serres calls the rhythms and sounds of existence [. ..] out of which meaning and language emerges.(Watkin 2020, 28) Intuition, for Serres, aims to be global -including moving from the local to the global as the influence of an intuition grows -and is primarily a 'way of looking at and making sense of everything we experience in the world: a how, not a what' (Watkin 2020, 29).
This article draws upon Serres's posthuman sensibility to 'make sense' of Glazer's Under the Skin as an allegorical warning about the limitations of human society driven by neoliberalism.It revisits Glazer's film to show the significance of Serres's philosophy in relation to arts and culture, as well as presenting Under the Skin as a means of explaining and exploring Serres's notion of sensibility and the importance of noise within a case study of film.In addition to specific insights about Under the Skin a further aim is to recognize, as Serres does, the role played by the arts in resisting 'the urge to rush from sensibility to meaning' (Webb 2018, 26).One of the foremost qualities of the creative arts, across all media, is the ability to push back against, or otherwise avoid embracing, existing codes of meaning that convert sensory experience into already determined interpretations of 'language, images and information' (Webb 2018, 22).The potential to expand contemporary thinking into new territory is especially valuable when current discussions around economic and ecological crises appear trapped within the 'impoverished idiom' identified by Serres.That is not to say simply watching a film will provide a catalyst for change or offer a specific solution; instead, it is to recognize that the arts should be a significant part of the dialogue because of their capability to challenge and potentially reframe ontological thought, including through sensoriality.A principal value of the arts is to ask questions, prompt debate, and open up new possibilities and different approaches, rather than repeating existing sentiments or narrowing ongoing dialogues into familiar territory.Originality and creativity within the arts is aligned with Serres's aim of producing intuition(s), not by analysing, describing, and reducing things to familiar language but by creating and incarnating a new or distinct sensibility.Under the Skin provides a pre-eminent example of a contemporary film intuiting a sensibility that challenges our way of being under neoliberalism.Understood through Serres's philosophy, Glazer's film provides a compelling case study for the crucial role of artistic practice in questioning our current neglect of sensible modes of being.

Notes
1.The clinamen refers to the deviation of a single atom that 'inclines' and, within The Birth of Physics (Serres 2000), following Lucretius, sets in motion the fundamental and dynamical qualities of materiality and being.The clinamen is an important influence within Serres's philosophy.For Serres, it is 'not a postulate, a necessary inference or an axiom: it is an everyday observation.Everything leans (Watkin 2020, 243).As Serres states: 'There is no such thing as balanced indifference.There is no center or axis; it cannot be found, or it is absent.Orientation can thus be said to be originary, invariable, irreducible, so constantly physical that it becomes metaphysical' ([1991] 1997, 15). 2. Serres created the term 'Biogea' to refer to 'the entirety of the Earth and the living species ' (2012, 23); Johnson contextualizes the term as referencing: 'the earth (gea) and all living things, including humans (bio)' (2021, 460).3.An important body of work links intuition and feminism, including the historical and contemporary significance of feminist theory challenging the false binary of rationalism, framed as a historically masculine and patriarchal endeavour, and intuition, framed as an emotional and predominantly feminine and bodily process.Fee Mozeley and Kathleen McPhillips, informed by a range of existing scholarship in the field, advocate 're-orientating intuition as a socially produced form of more-than-rational knowledge' and argue that 'redefining intuition as relational, embodied and integrative validates the lived realities it produces' (2019, 844).4. The opening sequence adds to the blurring of real world and diegetic sounds by making direct use of Johansson's speech training for her role as The Female.Glazer's decision to select segments that include words like 'film' and 'feel', given the film's focus on conveying an alien feeling/sensibility, is wryly knowing. 5.The discourse around neoliberalism is complex and wide-ranging.Donna Haraway's argument for 'situated knowledges' and the importance of 'positioning' challenges the capitalist and patriarchal ideological bias inherent within the Western tradition of (so-called) objective science and reason, recognizing that under the current system: 'Nature is only the raw material of culture, appropriated, preserved, enslaved, exalted, or otherwise made flexible for disposal by culture in the logic of late capitalism ' (1988, 592).Haraway's position argues for 'politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard [. ..it is] the view from a body, [which is] always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body' (589).In particular, Haraway emphasizes the need to embrace bodily perspectives that are overlooked 'for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible' (590).Related to this need for (re)positioning, Mozeley and McPhillips discuss 'the gendered devaluing of intuition' within late-modern neoliberal societies, which has been reductively 'sequestered into a self-improvement narrative that renders it passive, private, and feminine ' (2019, 846).Within the ongoing contemporary debates around decolonization and reparation, which are also central to these debates around (re)positioning, Suely Rolnik discusses decolonization of the senses (including challenging the hierarchy and weaponization of the Western five senses model) and, akin to intuition (but avoiding this term through awareness of how it has historically been devalued), the need to appreciate '"body-knowing" or, better yet, "ecoethological knowing" -the kind of knowing proper to any living being' ([2018] 2023, 20).The relationship between Serres's philosophy and the urgent need for alternate ways of being that move beyond neoliberalism requires ongoing attention, including connections with aspects of feminist, eco-feminist, and eco-ethological theory.