Second contradiction: the future. Usually this kind of mirror reflects the past; it says to us, "This is what you used to be, where you came from, who made you." Here it's just the opposite: a mirror that, to use a well-known title, lends us the image not of our past history but of scenes of future life as American anticipation allows us to imagine them. "This is what you will be," it tells us; "this is where you're going and what kind of world you'll give birth to." If the journey to America is, like all journeys, a journey in time as much as in space, the time is not that of our dreamt, nostalgic, or reinvented memory but of a future that, according to your taste, according to each person's temperament, threatens us or is promised to us—a machine not to descend but to mount the chutes of time.
And then, one last contradiction—a third trail that complicates the preceding one, and makes it more specific: America is skyscrapers, but it is also wide-open spaces and deserts; it is scenes of future life but also (I've seen enough of them, written and talked about them enough!) landscapes of the dawn of the world that are certainly not (see the preceding point) "our" European dawn but that, from Audubon to Baudrillard (along with all those movie westerns), are a kind of reminiscence of it, or a reminder. So there it is; perhaps this journey has the peculiarity, finally, of giving us a taste of both. Perhaps it's one of those very rare experiences capable of offering, in one single bundle of sensations, a whiff of the ultra-modern and another of the extremely archaic. And perhaps the love we feel for the journey stems from the obscure conviction that here, and here alone, the possibility is offered to a human being to see concentrated the materialization of these two dreams, pre- and post-historical, both equally powerful, but which usually we can think of only as separated by thousands of kilometers and, even more, by millennia. The American journey, in one single space (a country), in one short period of time (scarcely three centuries, maybe four), in the scarcely one hundred years, for instance, that sufficed for the first American pioneers who entered the territory of Death Valley and the Grand Canyon to invent the hideous Las Vegas (and, by doing so, to leap from the pre-biblical to the postmodern): the American journey, then, or the endless passage from Eden to Gehenna, the permanent short-circuit of the Bible and science fiction, the journey across humanity's golden age and age of lead …
A Blindness on Tocqueville's Part?
Philadelphia. Eastern State Penitentiary. Probably my last prison, but one of the most important ones, along with the one in Auburn, New York, that Tocqueville and his companion, Beaumont, studied. Everything is the same as it was, Sean Kelly tells me. He is the program director of the office that, since the establishment closed, more than thirty years ago, has been in charge of maintaining it, arranging tours, and every year, for Halloween, opening the site to groups of children short on ghosts and vivid emotions. Everything is exactly as our two missionaries found it on that day in October of 1831, when they were welcomed by James J. Barclay, George Washington Smith, and Roberts Vaux, leaders of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of the Public Prisons, an association of Quakers, human-rights advocates, defenders of the Cherokee Indians, and early opponents of slavery, who conceived, created, and, from 1829, managed this new kind of penitentiary, which was not meant to punish the criminal or repair the damage caused to society by crime, or even, like Alcatraz, Angola, and, later on, Rikers Island, put the criminal in quarantine, get rid of him like trash and banish him. Instead it was to help him, through silence and solitude, to redeem himself, repent, and, in the pure Quaker tradition, elevate his soul, which had been led astray by the devil. The same high walls. The same crenellated towers flanked by fake machicolations. The same moats, drawbridges, dungeons, arrow slits. The same Piranesi architecture, which the prisoner, arriving hooded, couldn't possibly see, but the mere idea of which—whatever was told him—was enough, Tocqueville said, to inspire in him the beginning of a religious terror and of a horror for his crime. And finally, inside this desolate setting, flooded by rain at night, resembling a haunted castle more than anything, the same prison complex, made up of a central tower from which seven galleries of individual cells radiate in perfect geometry, each one with a tiny garden, all of which lie open to the view of the guards. Had Tocqueville read Jeremy Bentham's opus, published forty years earlier, at the height of the prison debates initiated by Beccaria and the French revolutionaries? Did he realize, when he marveled at this system, in which, as he wrote, they "translated the intelligence of discipline into stone," that he was in the first detention center in the world that applied the famous "panopticon" schema that the nineteenth century would use not just for prisons, but as the principle of organization for its schools, hospitals, barracks, and factories? As far as I know, Tocqueville never cited either the book or its author. But it is certain that he perceived this system's stroke of genius. He understood that because it gives guards the ability to see without being seen; because it establishes a surveillance that is at once uninterrupted, invisible, and virtual; because no prisoner ever knows, in other words, whether the eye of power is at any given instant actually directed at him, it has the ability to throw souls into "a deeper terror than chains and blows." And above all, he appreciated this other peculiarity of the system, which is directly linked to the ideology of its Quaker promoters: in order to be absolutely certain of making the prisoners face their villainy; urging them to genuine repentance, which was the goal of their imprisonment; and hastening the intellectual and moral reform for which prison, according to the Quakers, should be the opportunity and the setting, they organized everything so as to isolate prisoners both day and night, and cut off any kind of contact—not just with their fellow prisoners but with the outer world and even the guards. Visits were forbidden; the slightest attempt at speech was punished; any reading other than the holy Scriptures was prohibited. Thus were they put in the situation of caring only about God …