Abstract
Our world is filled with objects that we can see—among which there are some that purposefully invite us to see through the transparent primary surfaces that we can see as-these-are. The dialogue—seeing X in relation to seeing through of X—is the location where the real and the imaginary become unified in the complex of potential reality. The latter—seeing through of X—gives a new, distance-focused meaning to the X. That distance is fluctuating—as we see through a transparent layer, we see far(ther), yet as we see that we are seeing through, we see closer. Transparent layers of coverage are seductive—they create a possibility for the sublime. Aesthetic phenomena are characterized by the personal “disinterested interest.” It is a tensional state of dynamic kind—it can move into aesthetic (upward synthesis) or return to mundane (downward semiotic regulation of the ordinary life). The “divine beauty” of the stained glass windows in churches leads us to appreciate them even if we have no personal linkages with the religious scenes depicted in them. The idea of breaking these windows would let ourselves shiver with horror—how could any human being even think of such attack on beauty! In contrast—if we convert to the ideology of some iconoclastic ideology—we not only accept the task of breaking these windows as our duty, but do it with full personal satisfaction of fighting the “wrong” ideas exemplified by these color images. The distance from appreciation of beauty to its ideologized destruction is interestingly very short and fully dependent on the processes on the borders of the semiotic mediation system.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course that depends on the meaning system of the viewer who can attribute to the magnified views all kinds of characteristics.
- 2.
Which was well known in European cases—the efforts of lower-class women to dress in upper class clothing has been widespread in history. It is through clothing that social class differences are both maintained (strict clothing rules) or overcome (new dressing styles in revolutions).
- 3.
This asymmetry is reversed in the case of outsiders trying to “peep in” through the windows into inside. Most often such reversal is normatively disallowed—it is not “polite” to “peep into” windows of the private houses while walking in streets. The countermeasure to such reversals—use of window coverages that eliminate the dialogue with the unwanted outsiders using their possibility to “peep in”—indicates the relevance of the need for such regulation.
- 4.
The allusion here at first may seem to be to Adolf Hitler’s treatise of this title, but I use it as a veil to partially cover the contemporary personal versions of similar kinds—those of ever-increasing examples of suicide bombers.
References
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J. Devika, The aesthetic woman: Re-forming female bodies and minds in early Twentieth-century Keralam. Mod. Asian Stud. 39(2), 461–487 (2005)
R.L. Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1969)
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Valsiner, J. (2020). Sensuality in Seeing Through. In: Sensuality in Human Living. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7_4
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