Playing with Language Games

Abstract

What gives the work of art its relative autonomy from ideology, even though in any given case it may remain intricately involved with it, is just what Sidney argued: it neither affirms nor denies but addresses imagination. Yet the imaginative freedom offered by narrative art arises, paradoxically, from its formal boundedness (Aquinas’s integritas). It is the bounded form of a story, its illusion of creating a self-contained virtual world designed for contemplation, that allows socially disruptive structures of feeling to be encoded as art, disseminated, read, and reread, even though they may threaten, sooner or later, to sneak back into the practical world. The imaginative freedom offered by the hypothetical is both experienced as affective and suffused with active thought, not merely agreeable, but offering an intellectual tussle, sometimes hard won.¹ I will connect that active thinking with Wittgenstein’s language games and the Gadamerian hermeneutic tradition.

the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited; Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light, for the law of writ and the liberty: these are the only men.

Polonius in Hamlet

It seems to me that form involves the conversion of matter, so far as possible, to spirit. At the moment of conversion, form and beauty seem to be one and the same.

Denis Donoghue, Speaking of Beauty