Hiding
Author | : Mark C. Taylor |
Publisher | : University of Chicago Press |
Total Pages | : 374 |
Release | : 1997 |
ISBN-10 | : 0226791599 |
ISBN-13 | : 9780226791593 |
Rating | : 4/5 (99 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: For Mark C. Taylor, the disappearance of depth we sense all around us is a change full of creative possibility. Taylor introduces us to a popular culture in which detectives - the postmodern heroes of Paul Auster and Dennis Potter - lift surfaces only to find more surfaces, and in which fashion advertising plays transparency against hiding. He looks at the current preoccupation with body piercing and tattooing and asks whether these practices actually reveal or conceal. The limitless spread of computer networks, the history of phrenology, the "religious" architecture of Las Vegas - all are brought within the scope of Taylor's brilliant analysis. Postmodernism, he shows, has given us a new sense of the superficial, one in which the issue is not the absence of meaning but its uncontrollable, ecstatic proliferation.