Display glass created the distance that made goods into objects for a gaze

Evidence

The Egyptian accounts of Europe contain several descriptions of these mechanical worlds-in-miniature, where the real world, as at the exhibition, was something created in the representation of its commodities. The department stores were described as ‘large and well organised’, with their merchandise ‘arranged in perfect order, set in rows on shelves with everything symmetrical and precisely positioned’. Non-European visitors would remark especially on the panes of glass, inside the stores and along the gas-lit arcades, which separated the observer from the goods on display. ‘The merchandise is all arranged behind sheets of clear glass, in the most remarkable order … Its dazzling appearance draws thousands of onlookers.’ The glass panes inserted themselves between the visitors and the goods on display, making the former into mere onlookers and endowing the goods with the distance that is the source of their objectness. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 77 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

For this knowledge does not emerge from a new formation of this subject–object gap; instead it arrives in the suspension of that gap. Hence that gap, emerging when the subject separates itself from all its determinations in order to ‘see them coming’ (les voir venir), is neither definitive nor fundamental. Consequently, the end of the gap obviously does not mean the closure of all perspective. On the contrary: this end reveals, in the process of becoming-fluid, a more fundamental mode of occurrence (structure de l’advenir plus originaire) than the rigid and fixed way in which the subject distanced itself from its own determinations, its own accidents. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1081 (#complicates, via linked claim)

An observer who is inclined to make distinctions can treat even what is distant as if it were near at hand, and abandons the contemplated image in favour of a series of points that can be measured one by one, and therefore separately. Instead, the gaze of someone who is lost in contemplation, even of a nearby object, is freed from any ulterior purpose, and can thus be dominated by the image of the object. At the very least, this will mean being dominated by a form which is contained not within set limits but within a whole formed by the neighbouring images which frame it. It is not so much the distance from the object as the quality of its observation which decides whether it has the characteristic of being near at hand or far off; and no one can deny the reality of nearness or the vividness of distance. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 817 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Spectacle is money that can only be looked at — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 62; Seeing an object in its original place delivers a thrill no specimen can match — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 710; Display glass in department stores created the modern distance between onlooker and object — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 77 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Display glass in department stores created the modern distance between onlooker and object #corroborates (1.00) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 77
• Ending the seeing-gap reveals a more original mode of occurrence than subject-object distance #complicates (0.76) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1081
• Observation quality, not physical distance, determines whether an object feels near or far #complicates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 817