The member of the mob, right at the heart of the confusion, who participates in the killing, in its acts and its cries, and who receives its sounds and smells in the liberation of the Dionysiac impulses of the crowd, does not visually analyse the picture; unlike the spectator, he experiences the events through the senses 'of proximity' -touch and smell - but he could not describe the spoliation of bodies and scenes of horror, which he does not experience in this way (Corbin [1990] 1992). The pathetic, so common at the end of the eighteenth century, like the picturesque, implies a mechanics of the gaze and the use of a socially restricted sensory hierarchy

Indeed, we have come to acknowledge the mediation of the two in such a way that it has become increasingly difficult to isolate one entirely from the other. Meaning comes to a great extent through the senses, while the senses filter the world through the prior cultural meanings in which we are immersed. It is not for nothing that the Greeks could employ “common sense” ( koina aisthe
tika , which in Latin became sensus communis ) as a synonym both for doxa , or common opinion, and for the faculty that allows the different senses to subsume a singular object under universal categories