We, Cosmos: Laura U. Marks’s Text as Soul Assemblage

In The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro writes that: 

[In cinema t]here is no structuring lack, no primordial division, but a continuity between the physiological and affective responses of my own body and the appearances and disappearances, the mutations and perdurances, of the bodies and images of screen. The important distinction is not the hierarchical, binary one between bodies and images, or between the real and its representations. It is rather a question of discerning multiple and continually varying interactions among what can be defined indifferently as bodies and as images: degrees of stillness and motion, of action and passion, of clutter and emptiness, of light and dark.¹ 

A monograph, too, is a field of such interactions – a series of folds. It is a site where matter and thought intermingle. At its simplest, it is a stack of folded paper: pliable leaves bound by glue, held together by pressure, touch, and time. Reading is itself a tactile, kinetic, foldy act; pages are turned, creased, annotated, flexed, and within each gesture is a small choreography between reader and object. Yet the folds that constitute a book extend beyond the material. Language, citation, and theory also fold into one another, and authors, concepts, and affects become entangled in continuous variation. Laura U. Marks’ The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos itself heightens this awareness of the book as a living surface, thick with material and affective layers. Like Shaviro’s description of cinema as a continuum between bodies and images, The Fold dissolves the binary between thought and matter, suggesting that philosophy, media, and the cosmos all participate in the same enfolding process. To read Marks, then, is to enter a zone where the monograph itself pulses with ontological life; a space of “continually varying interactions” between our own embodied attention and the ensouled matter of the text. This review takes up that invitation. It approaches The Fold as both object and organism: a soul-assemblage composed of heterogeneous yet interconnected parts. Through this lens, the following sections trace how Marks’ book itself enacts the very processes it describes – dispersing and reassembling thought, generating membranes of relation, and, with luck, creating new folds in the ongoing texture of thought. Just as film, for Marks, is a medium that both reveals and generates sensation, The Fold performs a cinematic gesture on the page by splicing philosophy, physics, and affect into a moving image of the cosmos. In reading, as in viewing, we find ourselves folded into this motion, participants in the filmic rhythm of perception that animates her work.

Readers who are familiar with Laura U. Marks might be struck by the expansive and experimental nature of her newest monograph, which serves more as a reflection on our infinitely connected everyday lives than it does as a text that centres analyses of aesthetic media. In The Fold, Marks is more concerned with a broader aesthetics and philosophy of connectivity than she is with the affective and material dimensions of film productions (as are more evident in her other writings), but film analysis still makes up a large majority of her later chapters as aesthetic texts inflect the theories she puts forth in her meditations on Bohm, Deleuze, Glissant, or Leibniz. An analysis of Tali Yankelevich’s 2019 film, Meu Querido Supermercado (My Darling Supermarket), opens up the monograph with the detailed and affectively careful eye that Marks has demonstrated throughout her career. She describes characters’ movements, bodies, and dispositions in a touching way that serves as a template in her offering towards our considerations of lived experience. Through the film-as-object, Marks shows how the supermarket stands not as a matrix, “but a multiverse… in which every being has its own world that somehow intersects everyone else’s. Every being in the film is individuated, precious, and ready to meet everything else” (p. 5). 

(p. 39)²

In asking we readers to place ourselves into the broader space that is the cosmos, Marks’ analytical object is in fact our own lived reality. Reading The Fold requires our turning-inwards, the cognizance of connectedness, the knowledge of our touching the book, and a care for the particles in its ink, the air, the gaps between words, and that which is so plainly visible that we rarely stop to consider its vitality in our experience of reading, seeing, feeling, or being. If Marks’ works have so far been concerned with the textures and affects that emerge from media, her new monograph is newly concerned with the physics that mediate our greatest mise-en-scène: lived experience. Film, media, and aesthetic productions are no longer objects of further analysis, but instead objects that within themselves have an ontology in our quotidian, ourselves media, ourselves object. Much of her work might remind one of fellow affect theorist Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, wherein Bennett explores “the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other,” and, as a critical conclusion, “[how o]ne moral of the story is that we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world.”³ In a way, this book becomes the most embodied text Marks has produced, the latest in an already-impressive oeuvre of texts concerning the body, ways of reading the body, and the ways in which bodies are affected in visual and multi-sensory media. For Marks, in a departure from Bennett and in conversation with Leibniz, we are not just vital matter, but ensouled matter (she defines the soul as, “anything that is bounded and therefore alive,” and suggests that, “the cosmos, and all of us, consists of ensouled matter” (p. 8)).

Marks’ monograph has no introduction, and she instead immediately ushers readers into chapter one by unfolding the philosophical cosmos that she has stitched together via Leibniz, from whom Marks extrapolates the notion of the monad and its in-itself connectedness (ibid); David Bohm and Basil Hiley, whose scientific works both speak to Marks’ care of material science, as well as call for the subversion of conventions and a “scientific caution against dogma” (pp. 27-28); and Édouard Glissant, whose literature sketches out ethics of enfoldment that illuminate Marks’ theory within-and-against the all-encompassing folds that are borne from history, such as capitalism and colonialism/coloniality (p. 32). Unsurprisingly, she also displays her strength as a scholar of Deleuze, calling into account Deleuzian understandings of immanence, singularity, and the body, whilst also inflecting and holding Deleuzian theory through-and-alongside theories such as David Carr’s metaphysics, which she succinctly (and beautifully) describes as one where, “each monad’s experience constitutes the virtual for the other monad” (p.23).

The chapters that follow this “top-down” analysis of the fold are similarly complex and all-encompassing. They explore a thorough philosophical and aesthetic study of the cosmos, the soul, and the processes of folding and unfolding that shape existence. Beginning with “Soul-Assemblages,” Marks turns to the microscopic scale of being, following Leibniz’s notion of monads – embodied souls that make up the cosmos. Souls are defined as bounded, living entities, and when gathered by shared purpose, they form soul-assemblages. The Fold suggests that freeing each monad to thrive may require “snipping open” Leibniz’s cosmology, allowing new and radical configurations of life and matter to emerge. This discussion is accompanied by contemporary artistic references, such as the Otolith Collective’s Infinity Minus Infinity (2019), which examines race and capitalism within a folded, interconnected universe.

The next set of chapters introduces enfolding-unfolding aesthetics, a triadic model that sees the cosmos as a cycle between infinity, information, and image. This framework serves as both a metaphysical and practical method for examining how knowledge, art, and politics shape what can be revealed (or kept hidden) in the world. Marks links this to the “information fold,” a critique of surveillance capitalism and the energy demands of digital life, while still maintaining a cautious optimism about creative resistance through media arts. Later, “affective analysis” is proposed as a method for cultivating openness and connection, enabling resistance to the ideological control of the information fold. When direct analysis fails, fabulation – creative, collective storytelling – steps in as a revolutionary act capable of reimagining reality itself.

In its concluding chapters, the book grounds these abstract ideas in case studies such as John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (1996), which exemplifies Afrofuturist ways of unfolding lost diasporic histories through remix and fabulation. And in her final move, “The Monad Next Door” and “Recognizing Other Edges” return to the individual soul as both a private space and a deeply interconnected being, folded within social and material networks. The monograph closes with a reflection on resisting imposed boundaries –political, digital, and ecological – and on embracing the shimmering, shifting edges of existence that defy categorization.

(p. 66)

As mentioned, The Fold is one part of the broader cosmos that is Marks’ oeuvre. Readers of Marks might remember how the very theoretical textures and pliés in The Fold are present from the beginning of her scholarly career. In my own re-reading, the first instance of the “fold” as a metaphysical condition occurs in the third chapter of her first monograph, The Skin of the Film, where a citation of Marcel Merleau-Ponty’s La phénomeologie de la perception results in her reading that, “Our perceptions fold us into this thick world at the same time that they demarcate us from it.”⁴ Moreover, I would argue that the argument for The Fold was crystallized two years later, in the early introduction of her seminal Touch, wherein the fold reemerges when she says that she “search[es] the image[s under study] for a trace of the ordinary, physical event. The image is connective tissue; it’s that fold in the universal strudel. I want it to reveal to me a continuity I had not foreseen, and in turn reveal that to you. No need to interpret, only to unfold, to increase the surface area of experience.” She continues, “This is why, along with descriptions of art and ideas, you will read findings from science and from my own dreams in these essays. They’re all real, and all intertwined.”⁵ A fold of many parts, many readings, and many years, The Fold can thus be understood as the culmination – and renewal – of Marks’ career-long inquiry into how perception binds matter, image, and affect. What first appeared in The Skin of the Film as an embodied phenomenology of viewing, and later in Touch as a sensuous theory of media, now expands to a cosmological scale. Across these works, Marks’ thinking performs its own folding and unfolding: theory thickens into matter; the aesthetic becomes ethical; the image becomes a mode of relation. The Fold gathers these earlier threads into a single, pulsating system of thought, one in which the spectator’s body, the cinematic image, and the universe itself share a continuous topology. 

It feels right, then, to engage with this review as though The Fold is its own soul-assemblage, a set of heterogeneous but related ensouled entities that make something happen. For Marks, “Soul-assemblages disperse and reassemble yet maintain consistency, their constituents ever modulating. They are not necessarily ‘progressive.’ Some are conservative, maintaining the status quo, groups of beings that are stuck in place serving an imposed order, like a refrigerator or an academic senate, or, of course, a body” (p. 23). As a soul-assemblage, Marks’ Fold gathers together bodies of thought – Leibniz’s monads, Bohm’s enfolding physics, Glissant’s poetics, Deleuze’s immanence – into a living, shifting structure that holds together while constantly reconfiguring. The text’s constituents (philosophy, science, art, ethics) modulate rather than resolve. Reading it, we become part of this modulation: each reader folds into the work’s rhythm, embodying the principle that the cosmos – and our own cognition – persist through continual dispersal and reassembly.

(p. 57)

In her definition of a soul-assemblage, Marks continues that, “when a soul-assemblage comes together it creates a membrane, a provisional collective skin” (p. 46). If I may (and inspired by Laura U. Marks’ work on affects such as hapticity), I would argue that the “membrane” in The Fold is the very surface of reading, of the book’s existence and contact with the world through readership and spectatorship of the object. Marks, even if implicitly, invites tactile awareness – our fingers on the page, the air in the room, the ink and gaps between words, as mentioned. The book’s first chapters function as a collective skin, a thin, porous boundary between thinker and thought. Within this membrane, philosophical and material inquiries press against one another: media and matter, cosmos and consciousness. The reader becomes a cell in this living tissue of theory, part of the book’s own embodied surface. Moreover, reading The Fold in both its physical and digital forms only heightened this awareness. On paper, the haptic qualities of the page reinforced Marks’ insistence that thought is sensuous and material. (Yet on the screen, a different kind of touch emerges: light, flickering, mediated through glass, the swipe and scroll replacing the fold. The eBook transforms this membrane into a luminous surface, more ephemeral and virtual but no less alive, reminding us that even digital reading carries an embodied charge. Moving between formats, I found myself newly conscious of the thresholds that connect text and reader, body and medium – precisely the kinds of folds Marks asks us to feel as much as to think.)

Marks moves onwards with her definition of the soul-assemblage, as it “looks like the uncanny surface boundary of a murmuration of starlings, expanding, involuting, unfolding, transforming” (ibid). Across its middle chapters – wherein a reader would encounter “Soul-Assemblages,” the triadic model of infinity-information-image, and the critiques of the information fold – The Fold performs this murmuration. Ideas expand, involute, and transform: cosmic physics swoops into aesthetic politics, then curves back into affective method. The movement is mesmerizing rather than linear, like the shifting shape of a flock whose coherence is felt more than mapped. The book itself becomes a dynamic field where thought, art, and resistance move in collective motion. And, by the conclusion, be it through Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History and Marks’ return to “The Monad Next Door,” the assemblage seeks its line of flight. Here The Fold resists being tamed by academic system or disciplinary fixity; it opens into a speculative ethics of coexistence. This is what makes this review somewhat difficult to write, but not due to any syntactic clumsiness nor lack of clarity – it is because the book, folded in on itself in many dimensions, is as dense in thought as it is in form. The soul-assemblage of the book, and of its readers, carves a new fold in thought; one that reimagines relationality as continual transformation rather than containment. Taken together, these four constituents of the soul-assemblage as cited by Marks reveal The Fold itself as one: dispersed yet coherent, embodied yet cosmic, a murmuring membrane of ensouled matter that invites us to inhabit philosophy as lived practice. 

In the end, The Fold is a generous and novel contribution to film and media theory, as well as to our understanding of everyday life alongside aesthetic productions – the monograph is one that manages to be both rigorously philosophical and particulate, but nevertheless deeply felt. Marks writes with the precision of a physicist and the attentiveness of an artist, expanding the concerns of her earlier work into a cosmic register without ever losing touch with the embodied viewer or reader that has always existed at the core of her theories. Her prose, while quite dense (and while it may require a few re-reads), moves with an intuitive rhythm: at once theoretical and tactile, at once grounded and speculative. Reading The Fold feels akin to watching an object that thinks – its sequences of argument, image, and sensation unfold in time, calling us into participation. Marks’s monograph is a rare kind of text. It is intellectually audacious yet emotionally resonant, capable of reminding us that the cosmos is not a distant abstraction but something that passes through our senses, that holds us, and that folds us in with all that surrounds us. In our hands, through the physics of our scopic existence, in the binds, in the fold, Marks has a knack for describing and writing all that we can’t understand until we see its ridges, until we feel it thus.

(p. 67)

Laura U. Marks, The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024).

Endnotes