It is about the secluded and a distance. It is about the next before the eyes and strategies to approach this strange territory that spreads there, which closes around the body, which is the body, which is also the eyes and what looks like, and what extends as an image of the imagination, unites, collapses, refracts and resembles, brings together to a point, and makes it impossible.

It is about strategies of location and the awareness of the strange possibility that there is something out there that is no image, no metaphor, no reference, not virtual, not medial, non-digitalizable is not aesthetic. It’s about »[…]

the perception that the world is ‘tight’, the idea of how alien a stone is intrusive to us, and with what intensity nature or landscape denies us. […] For a second, we no longer understand the world: for centuries, we have seen in it only the images and figures that we had previously put into it, and now we no longer have the power to make use of this trick of art. The world slips away from us: it will become it itself again. The habitual masked backdrops are returning what they really are. They are moving away from us.” (2)

Of course, it is a matter of faith whether the world, if one feels it is alienated, becomes it itself again, whether it actually becomes what it really is. Within an epistemological discourse, one will probably leave this question open at best, or not even ask it. On the other hand, however, things sometimes actually get something foreign, familiar actions and ways of seeing are no longer comprehensible, and this state has something of a falling out of the habitable world. It may not be so important where one falls than the fact that one is coming, that one does not alleviate all attempts at explanation, be it scientific, psychological or philosophical.

I see this as no sensitivity problem, no current illness or disorder, but the short-term flash of a very fundamental, albeit severely bearable, sense. It is the idea that the reality that one has made oneself habitable consists of quite something else than the sum of the images, descriptions, metaphors and experiences that one has made of it, about it or with it. This idea can come spontaneously, fearful and attack-like, or, much more mild, after a long intensive viewing, give back to the objects some of their primocular autonomy, namely, when all concepts are thought, remember all memories, all links and references have been drawn, all explanations are called in. It depends on the perspective and on the duration and in what relationship one relates to the objects, in which form they show:

“The monstrous thing about these things, or to put it more uncannily: the not quite whores, however, is covered by thick layers of habituation and usually only comes to light at the effort to remove these layers.” (3)

Basically, the territory of the not entirely attendee already begins where one speaks of a counterpart. Opposite is a concept that refers to a spatial situation: an observer stands in a space contrast to an object that he considers. The counterpart is outside, even if all explanatory models, images, words, insights, etc. are possibly functional components of the perception of reality, instruments for the construction of reality, thus apparently belonging to the territory of the observer. But even this instrument can become observed and an outside, thus again to become a counterpart, part of the world in which one is accustomed to locate oneself. The habit of getting used to, also inhabiting, thus also calling and giving content with constructions of reality, the not quite helper away behind the limit of the ordinary and the labelle drives away. This creates a controllable space, such as through the walls of a city:

“[…] Before the city walls became military sites, they were a magical defense, because they surrounded a space populated by demons and larvae, an enclave, an organized, ‘cosmized’ space, that is, an area with a centre.”

Today this magical line of defense is strangely moved. The point of view of the observer (and this is actually a point whose spatial and temporal extent is zero, because everything that expands into space and time can become objects of viewing) forms the center of this cosmic area. The border to the territory of the not entirely visiting encloses every single thing like a second skin, a endlessly folded and branched city wall, which is even deeper into the level of atoms and even deeper down.

1 Witold Gombrowicz, Kosmos, Munich 1985
2 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Hamburg 1959
3 Vilém Flusser, Dinge and Undinge, Munich 1998
4 Mircea Eliade, Religions and the Holy, Frankfurt 1986