The boundaries of the concrete utterance: Disappearing Limit/Disappeared Limit?

Abstract

From a dialogic perspective, this paper addresses an utterance related to aesthetic activity to investigate the relevance of the author’s speech plan in establishing the utterance’s boundaries. We analyse an artwork by Cildo Meireles for the exhibition Documenta 11, Disappearing Element/Disappeared Element (imminent past) (2002), as a concrete utterance which answers (responsibly) to its present context. For a general audience, the intervention consists of selling ice lollies made of pure water around Kassel, the city of the exhibition. However, taking into consideration other utterances of this discursive chain, the absolute enunciative boundaries of the artwork turned out to be more than buying-and-selling ice lollies. Through Bakhtin and the Circle’s ideas, such as subjects’ alternance and the specific conclusibility of an utterance, it is possible to consider that the author’s speech plan is fundamental to establish its enunciative boundaries. It demonstrates that it is necessary to understand the “speaker will” in order to identify those boundaries properly. Based on that, we delimited the initial and final boundaries of the concrete utterance. In conclusion, such boundaries are more dilated than what can be supposed to its general audience.