Daniel Barbiero
Toward an Idiolectical Aesthetic
1 Gianni Vattimo, “The Ontological Vocation in Twentieth Century Poetics,” in Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. Santiago Zabala, tr. Luca D’Isanto (NY: Columbia U Press, 2008).
Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. His music is based on the complex interrelationship between pitch and timbre in the context of free improvisation and the interpretation of indeterminate compositions. His album In/Completion (2020) presents his realizations of graphic and open-form scores by contemporary composers from Greece, Italy, Japan and the US. As a composer, he creates verbal, graphic and other scores using non-standard notation for soloists and small ensembles; his scores have been realized by performers in Europe, Asia, and the US. As an instrumentalist, he has performed at venues throughout the Washington-Baltimore area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary works for various online journals, and is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published in October, 2021.
In his essay “The Ontological Vocation in Twentieth Century Poetics,”1 Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo declares that “[i]f the world...is basically a system of meanings into which we are always already thrown, the artwork founds a world insofar as it founds a new system of meanings...it represents a new perspective, a proposal to arrange the world in a different manner...since the world is entirely [a] system of meanings, the work is tout court a world.” What I want to suggest is that to the extent that the world consists in a network of meanings, the artwork does in fact represent the refounding of the world. It does this insofar as it entails the imaginative recasting of the given meanings of the world. I want to suggest that this recasting is accomplished through the artist’s assimilation of the world as koiné—that is, as something held in common by a human group however constituted—and its consequent transfiguration into something uniquely individuated by virtue of its having been integrated into, and thus having taken on the shadings and particularities of, the artist’s own network of meanings. I want to suggest, in other words, that what Vattimo describes as an ontological art is, or at the very least can be, an idiolectical art.
On this view, an artwork is more than an artifact of some sort, whether physical, performative, conceptual or virtual. It is instead an opening through which it discloses the existential structures of the artist’s world, which is to say what he or she asserts or projects about him/herself into the worlds of overlapping and interlocking social groups to which he or she belongs. I accept as given Vattimo’s assertion that a world in this sense is more than a milieu or collection of people; it is a complex of meanings grounded in the concepts, assumptions and principles, practices and habits, and so forth, through which a group understands itself and through which its environment, social, natural and cultural, is made intelligible to itself and to its individual adherents.
A world is above all an interpretive framework that functions as a koiné, or common language, that individuals assimilate in necessarily unique ways, in the process forming what are, in effect, idiolectical variations. The finer-grained or more personal one’s understanding, tacit or explicit, of one’s koiné, the more idiolectical that understanding reveals itself to be. Understanding is in effect interpretation; to find one’s way around the world as koiné is to engage in a hermeneutic of the everyday, which consists as much in affective experience as in moments of intellectual engagement.
And imagination. Imagination is an important if often overlooked faculty of interpretation, a way of deriving as well as creating meaning. Imagination derives meaning by reframing and rearranging what’s already known or thought to be known; it creates meaning by positing the as-yet non-existent over against the existent, negating the existent in order to bring about a new existent or to refigure the old existent. Imagination not only interprets and assimilates the world, but in the process transforms and translates it into the vocabulary of the idiolect. Imagination may in fact represent idiolectical interpretation at its purest and when given its freest rein and widest scope of play.
The artwork speaks in this idiolect; idiolect is its native language. It is the language of the opening through which the artist interprets the world and concretizes that opening through the specific gestures and choices which, reflecting the artist’s background, competence, judgments, aims, vision, and so forth, synthesize past experience and future possibilities in the present moment of the work’s coming into being. These gestures and choices, memorialized in the artwork, are the legible traces of the artist’s idiolectical appropriation, and hence transformation, of the koiné. And it is precisely by opening up a view to the artist’s idiolectical appropriation of the world of meanings held in common that the artwork discloses the existential structures both shaping and shaped by the artist’s world. In doing so, it takes on an idiolectical bearing.
The artwork’s idiolectical bearing consists in the fact that to the extent that the world is made up of a network of meanings—conceptual, practical, affective, significative, and so forth—the artwork represents a transfiguration, or refounding, of the world insofar as it entails the imaginative recasting of the meanings of the world-as-given. This recasting is accomplished through the artist’s assimilation of the world as koiné—the world as something held in common by a human group however constituted—and his or her consequent putting that world on a new foundation world by virtue of its having been integrated into, and thus having taken on the shadings and particularities of, the artist’s own network of meanings.
And yet for the artwork to be truly disclosive and not simply arbitrary, something of the koiné must be recognizable within it in the same way that a dialect, even through its distortions of pronunciation, orthography, grammar and so forth, contains recognizable traces of the parent language. In the present era, the legible trace of the koiné may very well express itself through the forms, materials, and methods of the digital world, which constitute so much of the koiné of contemporary life.
Vattimo, writing in the 1960s, posited the ontological aesthetic as being an aesthetic for the twentieth century. I believe that an ontological aesthetic, understood in terms of idiolect and constituted as it is by contemporary forms and media of communication, is one for the twenty-first century as well and, in principle, beyond.
On this view, an artwork is more than an artifact of some sort, whether physical, performative, conceptual or virtual. It is instead an opening through which it discloses the existential structures of the artist’s world, which is to say what he or she asserts or projects about him/herself into the worlds of overlapping and interlocking social groups to which he or she belongs. I accept as given Vattimo’s assertion that a world in this sense is more than a milieu or collection of people; it is a complex of meanings grounded in the concepts, assumptions and principles, practices and habits, and so forth, through which a group understands itself and through which its environment, social, natural and cultural, is made intelligible to itself and to its individual adherents.
A world is above all an interpretive framework that functions as a koiné, or common language, that individuals assimilate in necessarily unique ways, in the process forming what are, in effect, idiolectical variations. The finer-grained or more personal one’s understanding, tacit or explicit, of one’s koiné, the more idiolectical that understanding reveals itself to be. Understanding is in effect interpretation; to find one’s way around the world as koiné is to engage in a hermeneutic of the everyday, which consists as much in affective experience as in moments of intellectual engagement.
And imagination. Imagination is an important if often overlooked faculty of interpretation, a way of deriving as well as creating meaning. Imagination derives meaning by reframing and rearranging what’s already known or thought to be known; it creates meaning by positing the as-yet non-existent over against the existent, negating the existent in order to bring about a new existent or to refigure the old existent. Imagination not only interprets and assimilates the world, but in the process transforms and translates it into the vocabulary of the idiolect. Imagination may in fact represent idiolectical interpretation at its purest and when given its freest rein and widest scope of play.
The artwork speaks in this idiolect; idiolect is its native language. It is the language of the opening through which the artist interprets the world and concretizes that opening through the specific gestures and choices which, reflecting the artist’s background, competence, judgments, aims, vision, and so forth, synthesize past experience and future possibilities in the present moment of the work’s coming into being. These gestures and choices, memorialized in the artwork, are the legible traces of the artist’s idiolectical appropriation, and hence transformation, of the koiné. And it is precisely by opening up a view to the artist’s idiolectical appropriation of the world of meanings held in common that the artwork discloses the existential structures both shaping and shaped by the artist’s world. In doing so, it takes on an idiolectical bearing.
The artwork’s idiolectical bearing consists in the fact that to the extent that the world is made up of a network of meanings—conceptual, practical, affective, significative, and so forth—the artwork represents a transfiguration, or refounding, of the world insofar as it entails the imaginative recasting of the meanings of the world-as-given. This recasting is accomplished through the artist’s assimilation of the world as koiné—the world as something held in common by a human group however constituted—and his or her consequent putting that world on a new foundation world by virtue of its having been integrated into, and thus having taken on the shadings and particularities of, the artist’s own network of meanings.
And yet for the artwork to be truly disclosive and not simply arbitrary, something of the koiné must be recognizable within it in the same way that a dialect, even through its distortions of pronunciation, orthography, grammar and so forth, contains recognizable traces of the parent language. In the present era, the legible trace of the koiné may very well express itself through the forms, materials, and methods of the digital world, which constitute so much of the koiné of contemporary life.
Vattimo, writing in the 1960s, posited the ontological aesthetic as being an aesthetic for the twentieth century. I believe that an ontological aesthetic, understood in terms of idiolect and constituted as it is by contemporary forms and media of communication, is one for the twenty-first century as well and, in principle, beyond.
1 Gianni Vattimo, “The Ontological Vocation in Twentieth Century Poetics,” in Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. Santiago Zabala, tr. Luca D’Isanto (NY: Columbia U Press, 2008).
Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. His music is based on the complex interrelationship between pitch and timbre in the context of free improvisation and the interpretation of indeterminate compositions. His album In/Completion (2020) presents his realizations of graphic and open-form scores by contemporary composers from Greece, Italy, Japan and the US. As a composer, he creates verbal, graphic and other scores using non-standard notation for soloists and small ensembles; his scores have been realized by performers in Europe, Asia, and the US. As an instrumentalist, he has performed at venues throughout the Washington-Baltimore area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary works for various online journals, and is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published in October, 2021.
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