Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don Delillo

neχus is the name of a multifaceted art complex that I am creating in the Berkshire Mountains. This will be the subject of my next work, which will not be only a book.

1. See Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Grave Matters (London: Reaktion, 2002); Mystic Bones (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Motel Real: Las Vegas Nevada (Williamstown: Williams Museum of Contemporary Art and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997). The art exhibition was Grave Matters, October 2001–March 2002, http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=51.

2. Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 8.

3. For further discussion of this point, see Taylor, Disfiguring, especially chapter 1.

4. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 97.

5. See Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

6. See Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

7. See Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” trans. John Leavy, Semeia 23 (1982): 63–97.

8. See Paul Tillich, The Theology of Culture, ed. Roger Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

9. For a more detailed discussion of this essay, see Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chapter 1.

10. Heidegger offers this comment in the notorious Der Spiegel interview (May 31, 1976) in which he addresses his involvement with National Socialism. In anticipation of my analysis of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, a rarely noted detail in this interview is worth stressing. In the course of his remarks, Heidegger says that he, too, thinks art has lost its way. In the following exchange, he expresses surprising agreement with Horkheimer and Adorno’s criticism of the “culture industry.”

Spiegel: The artist, too, lacks commitment to tradition. He might find it beautiful, and he can say: Yes, that is the way one could paint six hundred years ago or three hundred years ago or even thirty years ago. But he can no longer do it. Even if he wanted to, he could not. The greatest artist would then be the ingenious forger Hans van Meegeren, who would then paint “better” than the others. But it just does not work any more. Therefore the artist, writer, poet is in a similar situation to the thinker. How often we must say: Close your eyes.

Heidegger: If the “culture industry” is taken as the framework for the classification of art and poetry and philosophy, then the parity is justified. However, if not only the industry but also what is called culture becomes questionable, then the contemplation of this questionableness also belongs to thinking’s realm of responsibility, and thinking’s plight is barely imaginable. But thinking’s greatest affliction is that today, as far as I can see, no thinker yet speaks who is great enough to place thinking, directly and formatively, before its subject matter and therefore on its path. The greatness of what is to be thought is too great for us today. Perhaps we can struggle with building narrow and not very far-reaching footbridges for a crossing.

Han van Meergeren was the pseudonym for the Dutch painter and portraitist Henricus Antonius van Meegeren (1889–1947). When his work did not receive the critical acclaim he thought it deserved, van Meergeren started forging paintings of some of the most important artists in the Western tradition—Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch, and Johannes Vermeer. During the Second World War, wealthy Dutch collectors attempting to prevent the Nazis from confiscating their artistic heritage purchased van Meergeren’s fakes, thinking they were original. After the war, one of his forgeries was discovered in the collection of Hermann Göring, and Dutch authorities assumed that von Meergeren had sold works of art to the Nazis. To avoid the charge of treason, he confessed to forgery and was sentenced to one year in prison but died before he served his term. The von Meergeren case was much in the news during the years Gaddis was working on The Recognitions, and he used the Dutch forger as the model for the main character of his novel, Wyatt Gwyon.

1. William Gaddis, The Recognitions (New York: Penguin, 1993), 343. Throughout this chapter, citations to this work are given in the text.

2. See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon, 1963). More recent scholarship has raised questions about the accuracy of characterizing Gnosticism as dualistic. See, inter alia, Karen King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Michael Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

3. Goethe, Faust II, lines 6834–6835. Stephen Moore, “A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions,” http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/index. This is a superb resource, providing detailed notes for many of Gaddis’s notoriously obscure references. Throughout this chapter, I have made use of material provided by this site.

4. For an elaboration of these points, see my book Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

5. Gaddis is obviously also thinking about Richard Wagner, whose music echoes at critical points in the novel. No less important than Wagner’s opera is his tangled relation to Nietzsche, whose work, we shall see, is never far from Gaddis’s mind.

6. See Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

7. William Gaddis, interview, Paris Review, no. 105 (Winter 1987): 78.

8. Ibid., 64.

9. Many of the names in the novel are selected to suggest mythological precursors. Camilla, Moore explains, was “the virgin queen of the Volscians who helped Turnus against Aeneas… and of whom Vergil says, ‘over the mid sea, hung upon the swelling billow, she would keep on her way, nor wet her nimble soles on the surface of the water’…. Camilla was a devotee of Diana (in her capacity as goddess of the moon) and is the first woman mentioned in Dante’s Inferno.” Gwyon, “according to de Rougemont, ‘was a Celtic divinity whose name… means the Fuhrer, who has in his custody the secret initiation into the way of divinization.’ Also relevant are Gawain from the Grail romances and Gwion, a semi-legendary bard whose poetry hides ‘an ancient religious mystery—a blasphemous one from the Church’s point of view—under the cloak of buffoonery.’” Moore, “A Reader’s Guide.”

10. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Meredith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 1:168–169, 181.

11. A chancre is a red, insensitive lesion that is the first manifestation of syphilis.

12. “Perdu” is the past participle of the French perdre, which means inter alia to lose, waste, ruin, destroy, undo, corrupt, deprave, disgrace, or dishonor. Purdue Victory, therefore, suggests a lost, ruined, wasted, or wrecked victory.

13. Leonard Primiano, “Halloween,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 6:176–177.

14. Gaddis makes frequent allusions to Melville’s The Confidence-Man. It is possible to read The Recognitions as a rewriting of both The Confidence-Man and Moby-Dick. One of the names of Melville’s confidence man is Frank Goodman, who is neither frank nor good. Frank Sinisterra is, of course, both sinful and sinister. It is difficult to know where to stop because Gaddis might always be joking. Perhaps Frank Sinisterra is a con man like Frank Sinatra.

15. Arius, who was the leader of the post-Nicean opposition to the doctrine of Homoousios, insisted that Christ was a creature who was fully human but in no way divine. The strength of his following led to the convening of the Council of Constantinople for the purpose of reaffirming the principal tenets of the Nicean Creed. Radical Arians were known as “Dissimiliarians” because they espoused the view that the two natures of Christ are completely unlike each other. Gaddis dubs this alternative Heteroousian.

16. There is a colony of Barbary apes on the Rock of Gibraltar. According to legend, British domination of Gibraltar will end when the apes disappear.

17. For a consideration of how these issues play out in today’s finance capitalism, see my book Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

18. Gaddis, interview, 61.

19. Ibid., 65–66.

20. These divisions are mine and not Gaddis’s. In fact, what I describe as the second section does not begin until page 700.

21. Gherardo Gnoli, “Mithra,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 9:579.

22. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 289–293. Gaddis refers to this section of Frazer’s work on p. 23.

23. Here, as elsewhere, the novel folds back on itself. The charges listed on p. 701 repeat charges made on p. 9.

24. The paper bearing these calculations has a picture and report of a young Spanish girl whom the Catholic church is canonizing. This is, of course, the child buried next to Camilla in San Zwingli. In most Gnostic mythology, there are seven heavens. However, Basilides of Alexander, who used the word “abraxas” as a symbolic term before it became the name of the highest deity, insisted that there were 365 heavens. Moore, “A Reader’s Guide.”

25. Here, as in so many other places, Gaddis is astonishingly prescient. In the early 1950s, he already anticipated the world of televangelism, simulated news, and reality TV.

26. John Baldovin, “Easter,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 4:557.

27. Moore, “A Reader’s Guide.”

28. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 27.

29. The devil’s interval, according to Moore, is “the tritone, the interval of the augmented fourth. Its use was prohibited by early theorists.” In a certain sense, The Recognitions itself is suspended in the devil’s interval where mimicry and duplicity dissemble what once seemed real.

30. For a discussion of “about,” see “About About,” in my About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–6.

31. It is possible that Gaddis borrows this name from J. D. Salinger’s story, “For Esme, With Love and Squalor.” Wyatt surely offered Esme more squalor than love.

32. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), 98.

33. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Anti-Christ,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1980), 616.

34. The most telling reference to Dionysus occurs in the hilarious account of a masquerade ball for drag queens: “There was, in fact, a religious aura about this festival, religious that is in the sense of devotion, adoration, celebration or deity, before religion became confused with systems of ethics and morality, to become a sore affliction upon the very things it had once exalted. Quite as festive, these halls, as the Dionysian processions in which Greek boys dressed as women carried the ithyphalli through the streets, amid sounds of rejoicing from all sexes present, and all were” (311).

35. Gaddis, interview, 64–65.

1. Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995), 141.

2. All quotations in this section are from Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 221, 222. http://www.mit.edu/~allanmc/freud1.pdf.

3. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 11. Hereafter, page numbers to this work are given in the text.

4. Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), 215. All remaining intertextual citations are to this work.

5. Richard Powers, “The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review 175: 5.

6. John Leonard, “Mind Painting,” New York Review of Books (January 11, 2001): 42.

7. Ibid., 43.

8. I have borrowed most of the elements in this list from ibid., 42–48.

9. Jeffrey Williams, “The Last Generalist: An Interview with Richard Powers,” 17. http://clogic.eserver.org/2-2/williams.html.

10. Georges Bataille, Lascaux; or, The Birth of Art (Switzerland: SKIRA, n.d.), 11, 27.

11. Robert Reid, Architects of the Web: One Thousand Days That Built the Future of Business (New York: John Wiley, 1997), xxv.

12. Powers, “The Art of Fiction,” 60.

13. Ibid., 6, 8.

14. See my book The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

15. Herman Hollerith (1860–1929), a statistician, used punched cards to develop a mechanical calculator. This invention eventually led him to found IBM.

16. Douglas Hubbard explains: “Monte Carlo methods are a class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to compute their results. Monte Carlo methods are often used when simulating physical and mathematical systems. Because of their reliance on repeated computation and random or pseudo-random numbers, Monte Carlo methods are most suited to calculation by a computer. Monte Carlo methods tend to be used when it is unfeasible or impossible to compute an exact result with a deterministic algorithm.” This method is often used to model situations in which there are multiple inputs and a high degree of uncertainty, like the degree of risk in business transactions. Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 46.

17. Ray Kurtzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005).

18. George Bataille, Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 220.

19. Powers, “The Art of Fiction,” 13.

20. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of the Simulacrum,” in Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 8–9.

1. For an account of the founding of Global Education Network and the philosophy behind it, see Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 233–270.

2. Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves (New York: Random House, 2000), 3. Hereafter, citations are given in the text. Though I taught this book for the first time in Real Fakes (spring 2004), I used the book in my seminar Architectures of Meaning, offered at the School of Architecture at Columbia in the fall of 2003. For their final project, I asked the students to read the book and design the House of Leaves.

3. For an analysis of what I describe as “network culture,” see my The Moment of Complexity.

4. Larry McCaffery and Sida Gregory, “Haunted House—An Interview with Mark Danielewski,” Critique 44, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 106.

5. References elsewhere in the text make it clear that Danielewski’s comments about crack are a parody of Heidegger’s analysis of the Riss in his influential essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Derrida explores this text by Heidegger in his book The Truth in Painting.

6. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 221, 224–225. http://www.mit.edu/∼allanmc/freud1.pdf.

7. This reference is to Melisa Tao Janis, “Hollow Newel Ruminations,” in The Anti-Present Trunk, ed. Philippa Frake (Oxford: Phaidon, 1995), 293 (122). “Frake” is, of course, an almost homonym of “fake.” If you search for The Anti-Present Trunk on Amazon.com, you get House of Leaves. At one point, Johnny describes the trunk holding Zampanò’s manuscript, which was becoming overwhelming, as a thing.

All those books, sketches, collages, reams and reams of paper, measuring tapes nailed from corner to floor, and of course that big black trunk right there in the center of everything, all of it just another way to finally say: no-no, no junk at all.

“Throw it away, hoss,” Lude said and started to cross to my desk for a closer look. I sprung forward, ordered by instinct, like some animal defending its pride, interposing myself between him and my work, those papers, this thing.

(324)

8. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Language, Poetry, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). The texts cited in this section are all from pages 165–169 of this work.

9. Edgar Allan Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” in Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 189–199.

10. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

11. Sous rature—under erasure—is a term Derrida uses repeatedly to describe his practice of crossing out words in his printed works. By preserving the words he nonetheless erases, Derrida enacts the Freudian practice of denegation, through which something is affirmed by a process of negating or repressing. Heidegger also crosses out the word Sein (Being) in his essay “On the Question of Being.” See Pathmakers, ed. William McNeil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

12. Jacques Derrida, “Tympan,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), x.

13. For an analysis of Glas, see my book Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chapter 9.

14. I have considered Auster’s City of Glass in my Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chapter 1, “Skinsc(r)apes.”

15. Ribbons is a pseudonym Auster uses.

16. John Leavey and Richard Rand are the English translators of Glas. Elsewhere, I have considered the theme of the bastard in Glas. See Altarity, 255–303.

17. Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 17.

18. I always tell students that if they can read a book while lying in the sun, it’s not worth reading.

19. Helen Selonick.

20. Analia Sorribas.

21. Robin Hwang.

22. Adam Grogg.

23. Hello was Poe’s first CD. Danielewski took the name Johnny for Johnny Truant from his sister’s song “Angry Johnny.”

24. Douglas Hoftstadter is, of course, the author of the influential Gődel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). I have considered the importance of Hoftstadter’s work for understanding complex adaptive systems in The Moment of Complexity.

25. This inconspicuous clue points to Danielewski’s next book: Only Revolutions: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006). Once again, graphic design is integral to the work. The novel is 360 pages long and is divided into two equal parts, one of which recount a cross-country joyride from the point of view of a young man named Sam and the other from the point of view of a young woman named Hailey. The two tales read front to back and back to front and meet precisely in the middle—page 180. This book is also color coded. Just as the word “house” is printed in blue in House of Leaves, so every “o,” “O,” and “0” is in green or gold throughout Only Revolutions. The interplay of gold and green suggests an alchemical process that once again might be a confidence game. See my Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

JR, the kid who is the main character in Gaddis’s novel with the same title, constantly uses the expression I take as this chapter’s title.

1. A. R. Ammons, Garbage (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 8, 55, 27–29.

2. DeLillo’s most recent novel, Point Omega, tells the story of James Elster, a “defense intellectual” who had worked for the military until he became disillusioned and retreated to the desert to reflect on his life. Like Danielewski, DeLillo uses film as a framing device. The narrative is suspended between two sections, “Anonymity” and “Anonymity 2,” dated September 3 and September 4, respectively. In the first scene, an anonymous man is in a dark room at an art exhibition watching a conceptual work entitled 24 Hour Psycho that is based on Alfred Hitchcock’s influential film Psycho. The man returns day after day, but nothing happens. With everything moving in slow motion, the opening section concludes with the lines, “Light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the things that’s not the movies.” In the concluding episode, the anonymous man meets Elster’s daughter at the exhibition. Jessie lives in Manhattan and frequents uptown and downtown museums. After a brief conversation, she gives him her phone number but not her name. By the end of the story, it seems there is nothing “that’s not the movies.” In the closing pages, DeLillo writes, “Real time is meaningless. The phrase is meaningless. There’s no such thing.”

The story proper begins on a philosophical note: “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreaming, self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.” Elster had retreated to the desert to find what might remain real in his life, when his meditations are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Jessie, whose mother had sent her to stay with her father to get away from her boyfriend. The rest of the novella records the complex relationship between father and daughter. When tensions reach the breaking point, Jessie disappears in the desert without leaving a trace. In spite of the efforts of Elster and a young documentary filmmaker, Jim Finley, who is making a documentary about Elster’s experience with the defense department, they never find Jessie. The narrative in this section begins where DeLillo ends by telling the story of what happened to Jessie Elster.

DeLillo borrows the title of this work from Teilhard Pierre de Chardin, a Jesuit trained as a paleontologist and geologist and who is best known for his participation in the expedition that discovered both Piltdown man and Peking man. His book, The Phenomenon of Man, presents a comprehensive account of the history of the cosmos from the time of creation to what he calls the Omega Point. The cosmic process culminates in what Teilhard calls the “Noosphere,” where human consciousness becomes completely unified. For Teilhard, the evolutionary process ends with the material becoming immaterial and the real becoming virtual to create a planetary psychic unity. Elster, we will see, traces the reverse trajectory. At Point Omega, he declares, “We pass completely out of being. Stones.” Might this be what Roger Caillois described as the “mysticism of matter”? What if Meister Eckhart were right: “The stone is God, but it does not know it, and it is the not knowing that makes it a stone.” See Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985), xiv, xvi.

My fictional narrative in the first section of this essay picks up where DeLillo leaves off in Point Omega. All lines with single quotation marks in this section are from Don DeLillo, Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010). Though some of the names in this section are real, the events and conversations are fictitious unless otherwise indicated.

3. Quotations about Salton Lake are from Jeff Springer, Plagues and Pleasures of Salton Sea, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhB2ZvHVFls.

4. In 2009, the Obama administration declared that Yucca Mountain is no longer an option for the disposal of nuclear waste and eliminated all funding for the site. No alternative site has been identified, and nuclear waste continues to accumulate at loosely guarded and unprotected locations throughout the country.

5. Quoted in Michael Kimmelman, “Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy,” New York Times (February 6, 2005).

6. Derrida lifts this phrase from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and makes it the focus of his argument in “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology.” “A path, which we will follow, leads from this night pit, silent as death and resonating with all the powers of the voice which it holds in reserve, to a pyramid brought back from the Egyptian desert which soon will be raised over the sober and abstract weave of the Hegelian text, there composing the stature and status of the sign.” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 77. For other examples of a pyramid with its tip knocked off, see the backside of the dollar bill and my Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), cover, 262; and Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 229, 231.

7. Kimmelman, “Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy.”

8. Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1981), 203.

9. For an elaboration of this point, see Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987). LeClair’s book was published ten years before Underworld appeared and is based largely on the theoretical work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory (1968) and Talcott Parsons’s sociology. LeClair’s insightful analysis draws useful connections between DeLillo’s novels and the work of Pynchon and Gaddis.

10. Containment was the strategy the United States used to counter the spread of communism in the years following the Second World War. The doctrine was first defined by George F. Kennan in 1946 and is most closely associated with President Harry Truman, but it was supported by every president down to Jimmy Carter.

11. The other game that DeLillo mentions in connection with the Cold War is chess, which Nick’s brother Matt learned when he was young. During the Cold War, most game theorists used chess to develop models for military strategies. DeLillo stresses the political stakes of chess when he recalls the highly charged match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. Sister Edgar, who had taught Nick and Matt when they were young, knew things about chess and much else that others did not. She adds a telling detail to the story of Cold War chess. “She knew that Bobby Fischer had all the fillings removed from his teeth when he played Boris Spassky in 1972—it made perfect sense to her—so the KGB could not control him through broadcasts made into the amalgam units packed in his molars” (251).

12. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 73.

13. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 17.

14. Don DeLillo, “Baseball and the Cold War,” in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 146.

15. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), 143.

16. Ibid., 131, 314, 317–318.

17. The notions of entropy and negentropy, which originally were developed in thermodynamic theory and later appropriated in information theory, have proved fascinating for novelists and writers. Thomas Pynchon, for example, is obsessed with the idea of entropy, and Robert Smithson’s work is a sustained exploration of entropy. As we will see below, since the end of the Second World War many visual artists have devised different ways of making art from trash.

18. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and Amedee Ozenfant, Aprés le cubisme (Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1975), 27, 32–33, 60. Not all modernists share Le Corbusier’s purism. Joseph Itten, for example, admonished artists “to keep [their] eyes open, while out walking, for rubbish heaps, refuse dumps, garbage buckets, and scrap deposits as sources of material by means of which to make images (sculptures) which would bring out unequivocally the essential and antagonistic properties of individual materials.” Cubists, surrealists, and Dadaists all used discarded found objects to create works of art. Quoted in Mira Engler, Designing America’s Waste Landscapes (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 154.

19. In 1940, Hitler used the term Neue Ordnung to define the new political, economic, and social order that he sought to impose on Europe.

20. Quoted in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1967), 191. Le Corbusier had fascist proclivities. He edited the journal Prelude, whose board included several well-known fascists. He wrote in the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti’s profascist publication, Stile futurista, “The present spectacle of Italy, the state of her spiritual powers, announces the imminent dawn of the modern spirit. Her shining purity and force illumine the paths which had been obscured by the cowardly and the profiteers.” Quoted in Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 240.

21. Engler, Designing America’s Waste Landscapes, 36.

22. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 6–7.

23. For an elaboration of the distinction between God and the sacred, see “Denegating God,” in Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

24. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrI7dVj90zs. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_Heard_%27Round_the_World_(baseball)#Russ_Hodges.

25. See Joshua Prager, The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thompson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World (New York: Vintage, 2008).

26. DeLillo, Point Omega, 18.

27. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1988), 1:28–29. Hereafter citations are given in the body of the text as AS.

28. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl Lovitt, and Donald Leslie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 128. Hereafter citations are given in the body of the text as VE.

29. Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 12.

30. I consider this issue in more detail in “The Financialization of Art,” which is the first chapter of Refiguring the Spiritual (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

31. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1989), 29. Hereafter citations are given in the body of the text as TR.

32. Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York: The New Press, 2005), 112.

33. Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York: David McKay Company, 1960), 89.

34. Quoted in ibid., 25.

35. Ibid., 232.

36. For an extensive analysis of this development, see my book Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

37. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1975), 92.

38. Underworld was published in 1997.

39. Maria Moss, “‘Writing as a Deeper Form of Concentration’: An Interview with Don DeLillo,” in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 156–157.

40. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (New York: Scribners, 2003), 89. Hereafter citations are given in the body of the text as C.

41. http://www.fintools.com/docs/Warren%20Buffet%20on%20Derivatives.pdf.

42. For a discussion of JR, see my Confidence Games.

43. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, Mich.: Red and Black Press, 1967).

44. See http://www.spencertunick.com.

45. See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2006); Ashlee Vance, “Merely Human? So Yesterday,” New York Times (June 13, 2010).

46. Stevens, Collected Poems, 203.

47. For my effort to make sense of this project, see “Cure of Ground,” in Refiguring the Spiritual (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

48. See Grave Matters (London: Reaktion, 2002). This book of 150 photographs of modern writers, artists, and philosophers became the basis for an art exhibition I did at Mass MOCA from October to March in 2002–2003.

49. Other words that can be traced to this root are also suggestive: humble, humiliate, exhume, and homunculus.

1. Paul Tillich, “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” in Theology and Culture, ed. Robert Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 10. Though Tillich associates the ontological type with Augustine and the cosmological type with Thomas Aquinas, these categories are roughly parallel to Whitehead’s distinction between Plato and Aristotle, respectively. Throughout this section, references to this essay are given in the text.

2. For an elaboration of this point, see my After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chap. 2.

3. In what follows it will become clear that some artists and architects have insisted that to be effective in the modern world, art must become scientific. This point of view has inspired utopian fantasies that in some cases had devastating consequences.

4. Though Heidegger and Carnap were writing shortly after Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and others developed quantum theory and Einstein proposed his general theory of relativity, their work was not significantly influenced by these revolutionary scientific developments. The baffling world described in quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and string theory is in many ways more similar to Heidegger’s philosophical and aesthetic vision than Carnap’s logical positivism.

5. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, trans. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 96.

6. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John Leavey (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicholas Hays, 1978), 33–34, 47–48. Derrida’s first book-length work, written for his diplome d’études superieures in 1953–1954, was also on Husserl and has now been published: The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

7. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 127.

8. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 27.

9. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” 97–98.

10. Ibid., 103.

11. Ibid., 105.

12. Rudolf Carnap et al., “The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle,” in The Emergence of Logical Empiricism from 1900 to the Vienna Circle, ed. Sahotra Sarkar (New York: Garland, 1996), 306–307.

13. A. J. Ayre, introduction to Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayre (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959), 13, 17.

14. Ibid., 11.

15. Again, it is important to stress that this line of argument is at odds with most contemporary scientific theories.

16. Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayre (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959), 77.

17. Ayre, introduction to Logical Positivism, 19.

18. Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” 62–63.

19. Carnap, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 317.

20. Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” 66.

21. Ibid., 67.

22. Ibid., 69.

23. Ibid., 79.

24. Carnap, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 317–318.

25. Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections on Natural History (New York: Norton, 1983), 367.

26. Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Random House, 1979), 339.

27. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 16.

28. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Meredith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), part 2, 21.

29. Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. David Pacini (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 287.

30. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 54.

31. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 314.

32. Rodolphe Gasché, “Ideality in Fragmentation,” foreword to Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1991), xix–xx.

33. Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. Kenley Dove (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 48–49.

34. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press), 162.

35. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), 143.

36. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 86.

37. Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, 13.

38. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 118.

39. G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 162.

40. Rodolph Gasché, The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 206–207.

41. Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 71.

42. Though Heidegger does not make the point, his interpretation of language suggests an artistic and even aesthetic aspect of scientific discourse that Carnap overlooks.

43. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Row, 1971), 53.

44. Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1981), 10.

45. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 118.

46. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 315–316.

47. Taylor, After God, 12.

48. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 1:202.

49. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), 36.

50. Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffling (New York: Doubleday, 1956) 9, 22, 42, 56, 65.

51. Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1981), 486.

52. Heidegger, Der Spiegel interview. See note 10 of the introduction to this book.

53. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Stanley Morse (New York: Vintage, 1990), 178.