Playing with the Rules of the Game Imagination, Normativity, and Address in Aesthetics

Cortázar’s provocative short story “Instructions on How to Understand Three Famous Paintings” unsettles norms of address governing our relations with artworks: three canvases make extraordinary callings and propel unusual aesthetic experiences and readings. The tale plays with the unstated rules fueling imagination and perception. It satirizes interpretive protocols that elide historical violence and support unjust forms of power. This chapter takes up the decolonial challenge the story poses for the concept of aesthetic normativity. Drawing on Winnicott, it shows how play undergirds a notion of cultural agency that combines the freedom to play with the norms informing artistic traditions and a meaningful interpretive responsiveness to those traditions. Complicating Kendall Walton’s view of the normative and regulatory aspects of the aesthetic and the relations between imagination and play, and foregrounding the workings of norms, forms, structures, scenes, and scripts of address, the essay sketches a view of the aesthetic agent as a recipient and originator of modes of address who participates in the antagonisms that is culture. This subject exercises a constructive role in forging categories of experience, premises of cultural interaction, and cultural values. A multiple grounding of normativity in address reveals unacknowledged possibilities for aesthetic critique, freedom, and connectedness.