The Alcatraz Effect: Belief and Postmodernity

Abstract

Visitors to Alcatraz Island, former Federal Penitentiary, know what to expect. To make the excursion worthwhile, however, demands a certain state of mind; their knowledge must be left hanging in the balance of a suspension of disbelief. Seeing, after all, is believing, which is no less than the commodity fetish of a tourist industry, content to trade in forms (as the phrase goes) of organized escapism. If that is so, then the trip out to Alcatraz should be impossible, a false re-staging of a prisoner's impossible escape, except in reverse. We go there, however, as guests of the liberal authorities to see an object-lesson of the law at work, and in splendid isolation, cut off from the social and geographical body and thus fetishized for our comfort and curiosity as the flipside of the desert island of imaginary pleasure. Our interest, then, in learning about the exacting conditions of incarceration firsthand, is not self-contained, but is predicated upon its very obverse accession to the belief that escape is possible all the same, despite being repeatedly reminded that is not. What thus came as a revelation to Ken Kesey, the very contours of a parable of modernity, may have been little more than quotidian logic to the scholastic rule of thumb: credo ut intellegam, under which rubric doubt was always already a conventional province of belief, a desert for an oasis, but containing too. Hence the surprise of another tourist, Freud in Athens for the first time, discovering, as he cast his eyes around the terrain of the Acropolis, that it really does exist, an equivocal response in the light of his confidential desire that turn out to be too good to be true, that the glamorous spell cast by the classical education of his childhood might still be preserved intact, tucked into the memory of his original landscape of desire and the heroic feats performed there upon his mother's body. The truth of this revelation would never be found to reside in any purely empirical setting, like the real scandal of coming across the Loch Ness monster stranded upon the