I started off the morning with a quick
Google search for more information about viewing Jeremy Bentham's mummified corpse at
University College London, which my philosophy professor, in his lectures on
Utilitarianism, has strongly urged all of us to do, should we ever be so fortunate as to visit London.
Naturally, this search led me to
ol' Jeremy's Wikipedia entry, but it also turned up
this charming set of photos chronicling a visit to view Mr. Bentham in his current resting place. To my dismay, I learned that, while most of dear Jeremy is on everlasting display (to provide the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people, of course), the head accompanying his corpse in the glass case is not his real head, but a wax replica. Apparently, the college had numerous problems over the years with student pranksters stealing the head, so it is now kept in the College safe.
While reading his Wikipedia entry, I realized that, while I'd heard of his
Panopticon before, I really had no idea what that was all about. So, I clicked over to
its Wikipedia entry and hey, that's a fairly ingenious idea (clearly so, as its continued relevance to our increasingly scrutinized and voyeuristic society shows).
Within the Panopticon wiki, there's mention of a term which caught my eye: "
sousveillance" (in contrast to "
surveillance"). Another click, and what a fascinating concept! It brings up not only the responsibility of every idividual member in contemporary society to monitor those who monitor us and how our increased technological ability to do so changes the power dynamic in relationships between subordinate and authority, but also how the fusion of performance art and technology once again pushes the boundaries of our understanding of ethical behavior. Or something like that.
Anyway, within the sousveillance article, among many other rockin' links, there was a link to
this site on performance art, which collects and links to tons of examples of interesting ways people are responding to our current way of life (including
the Surveillance Camera Players,
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping and
these kids who threw a rave/fashion show in a Wal-Mart in Georgia a couple years ago). My favorite is the
story about the guy at Amherst College who, to comment on the "War on Drugs," got his school to ban coffee from campus for a day. He even had friends set up a black market for coffee beans! And he did it all with the approval of the administration, under the guise of a performance art project! Brilliant. As his professor put it, "I suspect if he had come to the administration as an activist, there would have been much stronger resistance. It shows us how art has this kind of peculiar permission." Yes!
And that's how you get from Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism to
jigging on Ronald Reagan's grave. It's the most mind-expanding hour and a half I've managed to waste on the internet in quite some time.
