Michael Fix

Drawing on a Wittgensteinian account of emotional expression, this paper addresses the question of how works of art can be expressive in the absence of a directly accessible expressing subject. It argues that answering this question requires distinguishing between expression on the one hand, as a determinate communicative act through which a subject makes their affective state available to others, and expressivity on the other, as the structural property of a form that makes it apt for such acts. The paper first demonstrates that expression is essentially oriented towards communication. At the same time, it is not confined to a narrow class of deliberate expressive actions and affective states, but pervades our intentional and affective life as a whole, relying on recognizable structures that are neither arbitrary nor naturally fixed. It then argues that these structures possess a layer of significance, their expressivity, that is prior to their full meaning in any particular use and analogous to word meaning rather than propositional sentence meaning. Applied to the aesthetic domain, this framework explains how artworks, encountered sub specie aeternitatis and detached from any determinate act of expression, can nonetheless be deeply expressive. Their expressivity is constituted not by the intentions behind them, but by what their structure can successfully express within the broader tapestry of our artistic and non-artistic practices. The paper concludes that aesthetic expressivity does not say anything propositional, but shows potentially revelatory ways of seeing and feeling that can be imaginatively taken up, modified, or resisted.