I encounter a problem right at the beginning. You quote Hagberg suggesting that artistic meaning might be beyond the sayable. Then you ask what it might be for something material to lie beyond the sayable. Meaning, though, surely isn`t material. I`m sure the apparent conflation of the meaning and the materiality of a work of art is a trivial matter in the context in which you use it. I does seem to highlight a general problem though. When we talk about art or Art or use a dozen similar terms we are in a semiotic sea before we start. You seem to be able to dive in and enjoy the discourse about the ambiguities within. I`m hesitating on the sidelines wondering whether I could ever know where were I was without the dry land of Popper`s epistemology and the probabilities of physics. Of course I could and perhaps do dive in and simply swim without knowing where I am but then I could never say anything very intelligent about the experience. I`ve a feeling however, that your discourse is about a different quality of unsayables. Perhaps we need a whole new set of words with rather more narrow associations.

I take it that "meaning" is provoked through the material object such as a painting, say, or a book or an essay - words being material. A baby crying (and so on ad infinitum) has "meaning" for us, but, I don`t think that Hagberg`s blindness to his own way of writing is a "trivial" matter but quite the reverse: That is what I am talking about here - Hagberg (for instance, and its a good instance since his book on Wittgenstein is a published tome of some importance) "underplays the fact that his research is happening in language while asking questions such as the following, for instance" (..."beyond the sayable") when in fact by bringing up "the unsayable" he is indicating a metaphysical realm about which humans can know nothing save "the unsayable" - there is a great deal to think about in this proposition that even Wittgenstein (hence the choice of Hagberg on Wittgenstein) would later call a "language game" - in this case a "metaphysical language game". Hagberg has not been, as it were, "creative" with Wittgenstein`s work seen as whole. There is no certain conclusion to such a problem concerning aesthetics even though the early Wittgenstein who wrote the Tractatus thought there must be a conclusion and that such a conclusion would be brought about through the logical processes of thought, but that this could not be achieved in the practices of aesthetics and art. He thought we had to "stay silent" on such matters. In the Investigations he reversed his position entirely but with great subtlety and there is an interesting passage from Sam Slote`s essay on Ulysses for the Cornell University Joyce Conference (2005) from which I quote below regarding this:

The particular grammatical quirks trademark to Eumaean style [chapter in Ulysses] can be characterised as a language game. A basic definition of a language game from Wittgenstein`s Philosophical Investigations is that it is a delimited set of learned or created protocols not always susceptible to codification. The protocols for "Eumaeus" involve distortion of grammatical norms, often for humorous effect, and "with apologies to Lindley Murray" (U 16.1475). For Wittgenstein, language games are eminently labile and fungible and cannot be reduced to a calculus, or a single over-arching grammar, such as he had essayed in the Tractatus (an argument can be made that Wittgenstein caricatured the Tractatus in the Investigations, but that`s another story).

Clearly enough, features of thought that occur around objects of "art", say, are features that can be learnt, and around which words cluster as to a magnet as in other kinds of language games such as ten-pin bowling, cricket, saying hello and Hi, and Gardening (again ad infinitum). I am trying to counter desires people have in terms of Literature and Art to eschew the material in which they are working, and I think for a very good reason. If we are thinking more broadly and if we are able to engage more interestedly with the world of the work of art - get to know and understand something of it`s "language game possibilities", the world itself must become a richer place to live in. Jackson Pollock for instance, from this viewpoint, could be described as a chap who was caught, as it were, in the "language games and contexts of his day" via various art historians, but without this backup language we could say he was merely dancing around on canvases, probably half-pissed, dripping paint about in his shed.

The "game" of finding out what happens when we think we are doing art is an endless phenomenon for many reasons that can be treated within rich or dull "Language Games. This is why Joyce and Duchamp take issue with Art that does not understand the context in which it is being created: thus Duchamp`s double ironies and Joyce`s uses of Pastiche in the Eumaeus chapter of Ulysses - "quirky" because Joyce is ironising several authors and their styles / uses of grammar simultaneously - in many layers. Hence Duchamp`s use of the printed picture to which he added a touch or two of paint called Pharmacie.

danke

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