Aesthetic Mediation

We shift now from focusing on the artistic medium as the bridge to dimensions of experience that exceed rational forms of understanding to focusing on experience itself as a medial condition. There is no longer a need to posit the materiality of a medium to vouchsafe our relation to the lived world – to support it precisely through a necessary alienation. We have made the alienation intimate. We can do without prosthetics. Walking, seeing, touching, imagining, remembering, etc. all reveal dimensions of mediation themselves. Presence is never truth, nor is it simply self-present. There are always layers, tensions, complications, abrasions. The aesthetic is not simply about art, nor about beauty, it is about the play of lived mediation. Art and beauty are simply codified instances – and, if anything, they distract from the genuine potential of aesthetics, which draws upon and is enmeshed within confusion and uncertainty.