Distance Reading, Question # 1

1. What are the political implications of defining "distance" as an essential component of the aesthetic experience?

Epiphanal moments under a star-studded midnight sky is an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experience is characterized as a "separation of thought from reality that was essential for the creation and appreciation of art" (Long, 1). Further, the pleasure and awe that individuals derive from art comes from the "physical processes constituting the aesthetic impression" (Long, 1). This detachment necessary to understand art was also characterized by the synchronous separation and involvement, a term called distance.

Distance cannot be an essential component of the aesthetic experience. Distance only limits the self from understanding. Distance, characterized as simultaneous separation and involvement, does not necessarily permit itself to work well within the aesthetic experience. If aesthetic is defined as a" critical analysis of art, culture, and nature", distancing the self seems harmful. That is, to have a practical detachment from the said experience would actually limit the self from complete experience, as everything is subjective. The individual rarely understands the world through a lens that is not their own. The negotiation of self within the larger context of society is made possible by the individual experience. Lived experiences always seems to be reflective of art. Art seems to be an extension, a temporal experience of the self. Perhaps this quality could be characterized as a form of distance, but with this distance, individual subjectivity is always present. Even with distance characterized as imaginative, the imagination still functions through self and the experiences of the self. As Long stated, " Readers do not present an imaginative world...they maintain their own identity in the same world of reality as that of the listener, inviting an audience to to participate imaginatively in the fictive world of the text, a participation guided by clear and vivid reading" (4). Distance is not attainable.

In fact, "distancing became of little assistance to the interpreter who major objective was to know the dymanics of the literature by performing it" (Long, 7). Distance, requiring multiple distinctions, started to become a problem during the mid-20th century when a paradigmatic shift from modernism to postmodernism characterized our culture. These distinctions "could become a problem when one aimed to study experientally a literary text that made its point precisely by ignoring, overlapping, shifting, or confusing those distinctions" (Long, 8). These four qualities are inherent of postmodern society. Art becomes nothing more than art.