The Seminar as an Aesthetic-Linguistic Practice
Abstract
According to Michel de Certeau, Wittgenstein’s notion of language game provides a specific tool to understand everyday practices. In this paper I will focus on a specific linguistic practice, the seminar, addressed by Certeau in a short article in 1978. In doing so, I will use the Wittgensteinian reflection on language games as a theoretic framework – recommended for the investigation of cultural practices by Certeau himself – and I will apply some key concepts from the later The Practice of Everyday Life to clarify the nature of this practice typical of philosophical discussion (and of researchers’ ‘everyday life’). Finally, I will focus on the aesthetic and linguistic aspects of the seminar in order to show its proper nature: neither the mere ‘vertical’ communication of intellectual contents, nor a fusional, ‘horizontal’ and collective experience, the seminar represents a specific linguistic and tactical game in which participants shape a new ‘sense’, a way out of institutional and disciplinary fixed knowledge.
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