feeling (and then further embodying attention and response in a work) are
things that situated individual agents do by drawing on and developing
learned patterns of attention that are necessarily shared to some extent.
“Working-through”theories
Yet it is not clear that even a sophisticated theory of historically enabled
expressive action will quite wholly capture either the nature of artistic
expression or our interest in attending to it. InThe Brown Book, Wittgenstein
distinguishes between what he calls the“transitive”and“intransitive”uses
of the termspeculiarandparticular.^87 In the first, transitive use, there is
something more that one is prepared to say about what it is that is peculiar
or particular. For example, in elaboration of the remark“this soap has a
peculiar smell,”one might add:“it is the kind we used as children.”^88 Here
the termpeculiarserves transitively to introduce a further comparison or
specification. In contrast, we might also use the termpeculiarintransitively,
simply to highlight the fact that there is something–one cannot quite say
what–that is“out of the ordinary”“uncommon,”or“striking”^89 about what
is experienced.
Drawing on Wittgenstein’s distinction, Richard Wollheim^90 and Garry
Hagberg^91 have each argued thatexpressivecan also be used in an intransitive
sense. In this usage, to say that a work is expressive is not to relate it to any
independent or distinctly identifiable emotion or feeling. It is rather to say
that the work is striking, out of the ordinary, uncommon, and uncommonly
successful in its arrangement of its materials. Our interest in expressiveness
is then an interest in following out such a striking, uncommon, and success-
ful arrangement of materials, as itself a piece of virtuosity. Hence this
construal of expressiveness can be termed theworking of materialsview.
Drawing on work by Benedetto Croce, Colin Lyas has argued that what is
expressed in a work need not be an emotion at all.“One can,”Lyas writes,“as
well seek to express one’s ideas of how, say, a requiem should sound, or how
(^87) Ludwig Wittgenstein,The Brown Book, in Wittgenstein,The Blue and Brown Books(New
York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 158.
(^88) Ibid. (^89) Ibid.
(^90) See Wollheim,Art and its Objects, pp. 93–96.
(^91) See G. L. Hagberg,Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory(Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 103–09.
Expression 103