8 July
1532 death of Andrea Briosco
1906 birth of Philip Johnson
feelings
1999.07.08
1999.07.08
Re: more architectural photography: that which was staples
2002.07.08 09:24
2002.07.08 12:20
9/11 at Dl
2002.07.08 13:01
Re: Orwellian Image
2002.07.08 18:44
040708a.db Villa Skeleton, model
Bastille Day at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia
2004.07.08 15:41
what's with the anti-semitism
2004.07.08 17:08
06070801.db Romaphilia, Philadelphia, plan
hiltons in hawaii
2007.07.08 11:15
8 July
2007.07.08 12:52
2007.07.08 15:16
2007.07.08 17:14
Confessions of an Architect
2007.07.08 16:10
Miers Fisher's Retirement plus ultra
again?
2007.07.08
| |
Re: Orwellian Image
2002.07.08 18:44
An interesting inversion of Bentham's Panopticon design, is Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia (c. 1828, slightly post Bentham's Panopticon ideas/drawings). Eastern State is often hailed as the first modern prison. It's original radial cell block design accommodated many rows of individual cells where inmates were held in solitary confinement to commune with God (according to Quaker principles). Each cell had a small oculus in its vault ceiling for natural light, indoor plumbing (unlike most houses at that time), and an outdoor courtyard for daily, although still completely private, exercise. Meals were delivered to the inmates via a slot in the cell door.
The solitary confinement "experiment" failed miserably, and Eastern State soon became just like all the other prisons we know today. Seems that even when it is only God watching, it still doesn't do much good.
One could say that Freud created a whole other kind of human surveillance. I for long have thought that what really bothered Freud was knowing that his mother was not still a virgin after Freud was born. Had she remained post-natally virginal, Freud would surely have been the true Jewish Messiah. Alas, Freud never did know his mother as a virgin, so he played Almighty creator instead by dividing man into three parts, ego, id, and super-ego, just like the Christian God, Freud's real nemesis, is divided into three persons.
Inspiration for the above idea came about 20 years ago when I read an essay by Schorske in the book Fin-De-Siecle Vienna. (I don't have the book anymore because a drunk, sleepwalking friend of mine took a middle of the night piss on it back in 1987. I'm not kidding, and the next sentence will tell you why I want you to believe I'm not kidding.) The essay focused on a particular/peculiar relationship between Freud and his father--I remember something about Freud having a recurring dream where he is holding up a urinal for his father to pee in. After reading several pages of father-son, father-son, father-son, I found myself asking, "So where is the Holy Ghost?" That's when it hit that there was no Holy Ghost in Freud. My first instinct was to try and figure out how to make some good intellectual joke out of all this, and in that process is where I came up with the post-natal-virginity-envy idea. A few years later I read "Italian Freud" in October 28, within which I learned of Freud visceral 'fear' of Rome when he first went gen Italia, to Italy that it. It's only when I remember stories like this that I kind of wish I was young again.]
|