Aestheticism

I have been thinking a lot about the way that people experience the world and the way in which everything that we know and understand is mediated and translated through things such as language and artistic representation among other things. Peter B. Hales' "Atomic Sublime" as well as our class discussions concerning the alienation inherent in aesthetics. I began to wonder as I was thinking how we can understand the atomic bomb without such aesthetics due to the fact that we will (hopefully) always be alienated from the bomb and its blast. The very nature of what we are doing I think speaks to this very directly. We are sitting in a literature classroom using texts and films to mediate out understanding of an object and an event of which we do not and cannot directly know. A discussion of aesthetics will almost always accompany discussions of text and film even when we are not attempting to make value judgments. This is because as subjective beings encountering subjective objects, forms of subjective valuation are virtually inevitable no matter how hard we try.

As Hales discusses, Life magazine attempts to introduce an "alternative mythology" to the sublime aesthetic of the atomic bomb through in "gothic horror" which is, itself, simply a different aesthetic lens with which to examine the atomic bomb (Hales 24). Even when trying to change the perceptions of the bomb, the aesthetic aspect to understanding something beyond us manifests itself because it seems the only way to reduce something so imposing to a level that humanity can understand. It would seem to me that this is the reason that many survivors of the atomic bomb also choose to express themselves through aesthetic mediums. We simply cannot stand close enough to the atomic bomb to accept it as is.