self-alienation

What happens to the beholder in the encounter. Aesthetic semblance is deployed knowingly: an artist works with it precisely because the immediacy of subjective expression is impossible, so the work never delivers an unmediated interior. When that knowingly-constructed semblance meets an individual's experience, a paradox opens — the work's independence is realised only in its dependence on someone attending to it — and the dynamic transforms both terms. The object is transformed by opening onto its own event-character, becoming something that happens rather than something that is — a term that arrives independently from literary theory too, where representation acquires event-character precisely once it is understood as play rather than as delivery of a content. The subject is transformed by encountering their own imagination, their own cultural formation, as alien: the very apparatus doing the perceiving shows up as foreign, not the beholder's own.

This is where the encounter meets self/world. The felt boundary between a subject and its surroundings dissolving under a temptation by space, and a beholder's own formation appearing to them as foreign in front of an object that withdraws, are two descriptions of the same event at different distances. Neither is an injury inflicted from outside. Both are what happens when a competently maintained boundary — around a self, around a faculty — goes on operating correctly in the presence of something it cannot appropriate. Which is why not delight is the accurate affect rather than a mood chosen for its atmosphere.