Aesthetic and Linguistic Practices

The reflection on the relationship between Aesthetics and Philosophy of Language is often confronted with a double commonplace. On the one hand, aesthetic experience seems to be reducible to its sensual and perceptual side and therefore its nature appears to be entirely pre-linguistic. On the other hand, this reduction is often based on the idea that language is entirely equivalent to the propositional form. In order to overcome this double commonplace, or rather, shortcoming, it may be useful to approach the aesthetic and linguistic import of experience from the point of view of practices. In fact, the aesthetic, which cannot be reduced to the realm of art, is actually and more extensively carried out in the wider framework of everyday practices, so much so that everydayness, in particular from the 1990s onwards, has become an explicit and crucial aspect for many aesthetics’ sub-disciplines. In this view language, which from Wittgenstein onwards has been considered as an open set of language games, equally presents itself as a constellation of practices. In this framework, of particular importance is the role played by those hybrid phenomena in which the two elements find themselves connected and harmonized in many respects. For example, one can observe a kind of chiasmus between aesthetics and language, in all those aesthetic experiences that presuppose the faculty of language and, conversely, in those linguistic practices that are conducive to aesthetic experiences. In order to develop this comparison, it is useful to identify three, not mutually exclusive, privileged points of view. The stance of the producer (project, composition, ideation, design, etc.), that of the user (judgment, evaluation, recognition, understanding, engagement, etc.) and that of a recent figure referred to as the prosumer (new use, remediation, cooperation, etc.). In fact, in all these three cases, some sort of competence is at stake, and it is apparent how this competence entails both aesthetic and linguistic aspects learned and carried out in practices, according to a sort of circularity where the aesthetic and the linguistic are nourished by each other. The idea of being competent aesthetically and linguistically, in fact, affords the possibility to prove how both the aesthetic and the linguistic possess an effective component which can make a difference in our current life context, especially when they fully become tools to manage and make sense of experience. In the contributions here collected, the topic at the center of this issue of RIFL has been addressed in rather heterogeneous manners spanning different perspectives, traditions and testbeds, by showing how the relationship between aesthetic and linguistic practices, especially today, proves to be a philosophically productive theme and problem.