KleinGeld Phenomenology: Sides, Aspects and Profiles.

Breaking News. Copyright 2009: Knut Skjærven.

Here is yet another cluster of notions that needs to be mentioned as important for phenomenological understanding and activity. Since I am still in front of my imac, I will continue describing it. No reason to make this more complicated.

What do I see? Well, as of right now I see the front of the screen, the display or whatever you may choose to call it. The window of the imac.

Further more: The imac is placed on the top of a table in front of a window. It blocks some of the light from entering the room. If I crawl under the table and look up I will not see anything of my imac,  apart from cables attached to it. It does not really matter because I know it is there. If I, however,  get up on the table and look down on the screen from above, I can see it, but this time from another perspective than when I was sitting a little while ago. As I gaze on it from above it looks like a thin piece of metal. I cannot see the glass in front, but I make a note that the metal frame is about 2,5 cm thick. The imacs carry no rucksack these days. And no suitcase either.

I can look at the screen from all the sides of it, and I can image that it looks “the same” from beneath. I am pretty sure about this.

I make a summary note here: My imac screen has 6 different sides. But these sides differs as I view them. They do not look the same from above, from the sides of the screen, from in front, from the back. As I move around I get different aspects of the screen. While the sides are 6 in number, the aspects cannot be numbered. There are simply too many.

Then again: When I, at any moment, view a particular side of the screen though an aspect of it, I get the screen’s profile. The profile is what I have in view here and now, in this very moment. I am now back on my chair writing, and what is see is the screen in profile. In fact everything that I see (not only the imac) , and observe, is always a profile of the thing, the subject, the theme in question. This is the way the world works for me, and so does is work for you. No escaping here.

Phenomenology then, works with three layers of content in viewing my screen : 1) the sides of it, 2) the aspects involved in viewing, and the profile that is the actual here end now grasp of it.

Remember that we talked about pieces and moments in a recent post?  Sides, aspects and profiles, what are they? Hardly pieces because they cannot be taken apart: They are moments, you are quite right. They are nonindependent parts.

What’s in it for communication?

I will ask the same questions as in the recent post. What’s in it for communication? What’s in it for barebones? What’s in it for advertising, for instance? What’s in it for photography? You don’t want to do the mistake of treating a side for an aspect or for a profile when you address people, do you? Or vice versa, do you?

Before, however, we get to know the full implications of this, let us gather a bit more Geld. Small Coins. We don’t want to spend the money yet.

Stay tuned for more change to come your way.

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