Beauty imprisoned

This weekend I was struck by irony and a contrast between beauty and sterility, celebration and punishment at two local attractions. First, I visited the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. With some guilt, I was overwhelmed by the aesthetic qualities of this semi-ruin. Its peeling, paint-covered walls, the geometrical arrangements of square doors and arch ceilings, both marked by sun's rays escaping in from the outside through slit skylights. Just a few blocks from the Penitentiary is the recently open Perelman building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which (after lunch) we visited next. It was when I was watching a video from a fashion show by Kansai Yamamoto that the contrast struck me. The Penitentiary was finally closed in 1971. Its at-the-time revolutionary model of making people see their own inner good by penance and self-reflection by that time had long been abandoned as the facility became an antiquated, overcrowded prison. The life for many of its occupants was rather miserable. Also during the 1970s, Kansai Yamamoto was designing his exuberant, boutique-bound clothing. He along with many other artist were trying to break out not from the physical constraints of a prison, but from some abstract, cultural conceptions about what makes a good looking or provoking suit or a chair. Yet, in this temple to high art, the aesthetic object seemed like inmates affixed to monotone walls or behind glass cases, in isolation from each other, removed from the context of their creation, watched over by guards. The contrast, then, between the two places was of seeing artifacts of a human life on the one hand reduced to mere existence in isolation, sustained by one meal of bread and water with a life of creative, luxury, high fashion on the other. Yet it were the ruins of the prison that seamed beautiful and the celebration of creativity---sterile. In the end, I remember that my Moroccan eggs and coffee were really good at Figs.

See also: online book on the history of the E.S.P.; more of my photos from the trip

Technological control

The text of this sign in Susquehanna State Park, MD informs us that human's control over nature is not permanent. The sign itself, forgotten and mutilated, suggests that much of our attempts to communicate what I-the-individual (the author of the text) find important, is not met by an audience anticipating this lesson at a given place and time.

About

Just like everyone else, I am unique. My experience--my history--is one of a kind. The world in which I live is one which only I know. However, there is something I share with the others: I know that the other also is a unique individual, that she or he too is living in their unique world and struggles to understand it just as I do.

My broad project is the investigation of people as individuals attempting to understand the world in which they live. This is a very broad project, and in my professional job I deal with a small aspect of it as a historian of science. This blog is dedicated to exploring this topic outside the conventions of an academic discourse.

The main thesis underlying science studies is a claim that science is social. I agree with that thesis, but I explore a parallel claim that science provides understanding of the world for the individual. What interests me is not how groups interact to make science, but how individuals use science to understand the world in which each one us lives. For me then, studying science is studying one of the ways in which individuals understand the world.

The second question that interests me is how some ways of understanding survive outside of the time and place of their origin and continue to exist in the different places and times of their creation. That is, individual understanding of the world always applies to the exact time and place occupied by the individual, yet each individual takes from much more global systems of knowledge and tries to contribute to them as well. What happens during this transition from here and now to there and then and vice versa? And again, I am less interested in how those transitions happen in societies, and more interested in what are the consequences for the individual who tries to understand the word from his or her unique position.

To those broad questions, very loosely interpreted, this forum is devoted. It is a scrapbook of thoughts presented in public so they might be useful to others before they are presented in a more organized manner, and so that my thinking about them might become clearer as a result of public discussion.