Hiding (Religion and Postmodernism Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)A positive alternative to Baudrillard's dim view of the postmodern condition can be found in Mark C. Taylor's 1997 book HIDING--a philosophical re-visoning of our contemporary Western society that insteadof clinging to vestigial epistemic notions of depth and foundationalism,embraces a holistic, worldwide web view of social structures.By way of anextended, elaborate metaphor that describes our ontological condition asbeing intimately related to our embryonic development (we are nothing morethan layers of skin upon layers of skin, ad infinitum), Taylor suggests anew epistemic outlook that no longer makes an issue of depths, but ratherfocuses upon the complex relationship of interactive, interactingphenomena--in his phrase, "the profundity of surface."Emergent, virtualtechnologies retroactively point to our own socially constructed "reality"as always-already virtual itself, and to get caught up in the trap ofdefining contemporary phenomena in terms of outdated analytical models willonly succeed in an inescapably circular logic; as he puts it, "After (the)all has been said and done, the question that remains is not `What isvirtual reality?' but `What is not virtual reality?' (267).This shift infocus allows us to give our undivided attention to the realm of practice,to aesthetics, to surface; like Slavoj Zizek in TARRYING WITH THE NEGATIVE,Taylor would have us interface with things-in-themselves, allowing us tobecome aware of our positioning within a complex web of relations betweenphenomena, as well as what that positioning will allow us to do.

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