Aesthetic Family Resemblances between Wittgenstein and Paolozzi

This essay offers a comparison between Wittgenstein’ philosophy and Paolozzi’s collages by considering both as gestures and processes belonging to the family of the aesthetic works. The resemblances are identifiable in two aspects: producing a new way of seeing; showing the link between the new way of seeing and the background. On the one hand, Wittgenstein conceives philosophy as the aesthetic understanding of meaning, that is as the capacity of showing new aspects of meaning by means of the übersichtliche Darstellung and by making them emerge contrastively from occult nonsense. On the other, Paolozzi conceives the collage as a creative process and at the same time as a destructive act realized by means of techniques of cut-up and repositioning that creates vital new contexts against the background of an initial formlessness