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| As a Kind of Relationalism's Ontology of Art Works |
| Guo Yongjian |
| College of Humanities, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China |
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Abstract The paradigm shift from essentialism to relationalism in modern philosophy has foreshadowed a relationalist model and its concept of “work” in reformulating the ontology of artworks, showing its theoretical superiority over the traditional essentialist model and its notion of “text” in grasping the fundamental way of being artworks regarding their synchronic and diachronic structures. Relationalism adopts a distinct ontological outlook from that of essentialism in conceiving existence as “a relational being”, in removing the essentialist distinction of “external phenomenon” and “internal essence”, and, rather than seeing things in isolation and in one side as having singular essence according to the essentialist doctrine, in attempting to understand things relationally and multi-perspectively with a pluralist notion of “relation”.Relationalism was inaugurated by phenomenology in the 20th Century and enjoyed a broader philosophical interest amongst Dewey, Wittgenstein, Martin Buber and Bakhtin, etc. This philosophical trend has attracted attention from Chinese academics to the experiential dimension of relation, but Chinese scholars, up to now, have not yet widely taken into account the metaphysics of relationalism. The relationalist theory of artworks here endorses a phenomenological concept of a moderate relationalism which lends to its methodology and definition of artworks. Instead of defining artwork as a sort of Spinozan “substance”, this relationalist theory characterizes artworks as a three-fold connection constituted by a subject-object relation, an intersubjective relation, and an interrelation between works, which enclose an artwork in terms of all the possible relations it could have.The relationalist theory shows its edge on properly capturing all these three folds that have not been fully addressed altogether by any single aesthetic thesis in the past. Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblance” has been an inspiration in understanding the interrelation between artworks with respect to their similarities, but it missed out the relation between artworks and their viewers along with the underlying intersubjective relation of the authors and the viewers. Gadamer’s hermeneutics shed light on the subject-object relation within the intentional framework but left out the interrelation of artworks. Nevertheless, these relationalist theses in the history of philosophy contributed to the formation of the relationlist theory of art articulated here.The relationalist characterization of artworks consists of three crucial ontological points. One is that it defines artworks from the “exterior”, which echoes the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty’s criticism toward the philosophical concept of “interiority” from the perspective of “exteriority”. Another is that it comprehends an artwork as a historical being which embodies the ontological proposition of “being is becoming”. The last point introduces a distinction of this relationalist art theory from M. H. Abrams’ thesis of four elements in literature. Abrams provides this toolkit mainly for making sense of the history of literary theory rather than formulating an interpretation or ontology of artworks. In other words, the three relations between the four elements involved in the row picture mapped out by Abrams are exclusively confined to temporal/historical relations, whereas the relationalist model that theorizes a three-fold connection in artworks, albeit being able to accommodate the historical being of artworks in an ontological sense, is in the first place aiming at revealing the logical/synchronic structures of the relations that associate artworks.
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Received: 23 January 2021
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2021, Vol. 51 
