Joseph A. Amato. Surfaces

In 1967, Jacques Derrida declared that there was nothing beyond the text. Now, fifty years later, the historian Joseph A. Amato has made a cognate claim that there is nothing beyond the surface. Human experience, he maintains, can be summarized through the myriad worldly surfaces—exterior and interior, material and metaphorical, made and found—with which it engages. Ostensibly, Amato's book presents a history of human-surface interaction from prehistory to the modern day as a way to understand mankind's evolving relations to the surrounding world. Ambient surfaces, he contends, unproblematically, if also unremarkably, are both manmade and man-making, a characteristic of the world they clothe as well. As Amato puts it in a chapter title, “We are surfaces and surfaces are us” (p. 17). Given its global and transhistorical breadth, Surfaces: A History is really a speculative anthropology paired with a metahistory of the modern West—not an analytic history of materials, technology, perception, or other themes suggested by the title. The enormous sweep of this enterprise should require equally rigorous theoretical and historical boundaries in order to restrain the urge to analytic overreach or impressionistic detour. Unfortunately, Amato's Neolithic-to-now survey of the visible and tactile traverses such a boggling array of phenomena—from skin and walls to roads and buildings, nylons and plastics to atoms and genomes—that it stretches the definition of its titular subject beyond all bounds.

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