Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor (review)

Though perhaps most widely known as the controversial public intellectual who called for the abolition of tenure and the end of the university as we know it, declaring that “graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning” in a 2009 op-ed for the New York Times, Mark C. Taylor owes his scholarly reputation to his early work in a/theology: bringing the poststructuralist revolution to religious studies in works like Erring (1984) and Altarity (1987). Since then, Taylor has applied the lessons of deconstruction—a disruptive mode of reading and corresponding ethic of radical openness that attends to the ways in which the consistency and coherence of any system of thought depend on certain foundational exclusions—to a variety of “texts” in areas as diverse as art, literature, philosophy, architecture, new media, and even finance. Guided by the insight that “religion is most interesting where it is least obvious,” his wide-ranging investigations have radicalized his home discipline while also revealing that even the most secular of advances are driven by a sublimated spirituality—that “technological innovation expresses desires and aspirations once deemed religious” (2, 6).

In Rewiring the Real, Taylor asks how writers such as William Gaddis, Mark Danielewski, Richard Powers, and Don DeLillo have made sense of a world reshaped by the revolution in information and communications technology, one that presumes as a matter of course that much of our experience is mediated through screens. Gaddis serves as a totemic figure for Taylor in works like The Recognitions (1955) and JR. (1975) that anticipate the vertiginous feeling occasioned by representations run amok. “The world Gaddis foresees in these two novels,” Taylor explains, “is the world Powers, Danielewski, and DeLillo know as their own” (7). It is one where “everything is connected,” as DeLillo puts it in Underworld (1997), but in ways that are profoundly disorienting. Absent the structuring antagonism of the Cold War that once divided the Earth into “worlds” (the Second World of international communism, for example, is mostly gone), the planet has been englobed by the market. The process of globalization is paralleled by the development of cyberspace, which is similarly horizonless. It is everywhere and nowhere, all at once, all the time. Taylor suggests that literature can help us get our bearings by restoring a sense of perspective to a world where distinctions like inside/outside don’t mean what they used to and where reality itself is increasingly difficult to distinguish from its technological overlay.

Taylor’s close reading of these four authors in Rewiring the Real is intended as a companion piece to his 2012 book Refiguring the Spiritual, a study of four contemporary artists: Joseph Beuys, Matthew Barney, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy. Intellectually, both follow in the wake of Taylor’s major works from the last decade, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (2004) and After God (2007), which represent the culmination of Taylor’s career-long project: undoing the opposition between art and science that fractures modern thought. Taylor dates this conflict back to the 1790s with the publication of Kant’s third critique and the subsequent rise of Romanticism, where individual experience came to supplant traditional authority as the privileged locus of truth. In a secularized world, culture and economics displace religion as the expression of value, but religion never really goes away. Taylor is particularly alert to faith’s afterlife, not only in seemingly obvious manifestations like the rise of the religious right, but submerged within science and art itself. Confidence Games, for example, demonstrates how the theory of complexity that underpins the contemporary orthodoxy of the self-regulating market shares certain parallels or “isomorphisms”—a recurrent term in his work—with both postmodern literature and theological proofs for the existence of God.

Rewiring the Real celebrates those writers whom Taylor sees as sharing his decidedly catholic approach...