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Style, expression and narrative are three fundamental categories of aesthetics and art history. These categories have spanned the entire history of these disciplines, from their early origins to contemporary times, often in renewed and reinterpreted forms. While each category can be seen as a distinct concept with its own specificity, they frequently intertwine and sometimes even become codependent.

The category of style, rooted in the Latin elocution, entered common usage in the 18th century – a period when art history, criticism and aesthetics emerged as disciplines. It denoted then the distinctive mark of a people, a historical period, or even an artist. Its relationship to Antiquity is largely due to a translation choice: the treatise Περὶ ἑρμηνείας – De elocutione attributed to Demetrius, though likely written in the 1st century BC, came to be translated as On Style. In this text, four types of style or elocution in speech are outlined: grand, elegant, plain and forceful. This rhetorical division, which was dear to the early movements toward an art history, significantly influenced efforts to understand the artistic past, and became a basic element in major historical undertakings such as those by Winckelmann in the 18th century and Wölfflin in the 19th century.

In contemporary times, style is directly linked to the various visual features, techniques, and methods employed by artists to define their work. Broadly speaking, style serves to place a work within an art movement or artistic school, thereby allowing to situate the author within a universal concept of art history. For example, Picasso is commonly regarded as a cubist artist, and Marcel Ducham as a dadaist. Yet, the category of style also addresses the unique qualities of a particular work or trend, preventing an artist from being mechanically associated with it. Therefore, it is style that marks the originality of an artist or a specific artistic trend, distinguishing it from other works that might fall under the same school.

Furthermore, the concept of style extends beyond the realm of arts, as seen in Foucault’s notion of aesthetic existence. In this framework, style not only refers to the production of artistic objects but also to the production of subjectivities and ways of living. In his search for a philosophy that bridges thought and life – a point which Foucault already recognized in the Cynics and was also touched upon by Nietzsche – Deleuze draws attention to the importance of style in philosophical writing. This should not only concern the handling of language, but also the creation of new ways of thinking, seeing and feeling.

At first glance, the category of expression could be taken as a variant of style, since it is through expression that a work’s style comes to the forefront. However, expression carries its own definitions as well, being decisively called forth at the moment aesthetics emerges as an autonomous discipline. Kant notoriously linked the work of genius to the production of aesthetic ideas – ideas capable of granting art an experience akin to that of natural beauty. In §51 of the Critique of Judgment, he concludes that “beauty (whether it be of nature or of art) may in general be termed the expression of aesthetic ideas”.

One might also consider the (classical) opposition between expression and construction, as postulated by Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory. While expression belongs to a more spontaneous aspect of art, construction refers to a preconceived structure the artist seeks to formally realize. Even when an artist has a preconceived plan, the expression of the work often diverges from it, taking on a life of its own. This happens, for instance, in the relationship between expression and mimesis: the imitation of models does not always manage to be faithful to its original. Hence, productive imagination acquires a creative role in the production of the work. Expression, as such, is inherently tied to the individual and particular – what is born and formed from an inimitable particularity – thus averse to all kinds of objectification.

To some extent, the arts can be thought of as manifestations of the body’s expressive power. This is more easily perceived in art forms involving the presence of the body, such as dance, theater, performance, and related forms. In these cases, the body becomes both the creator and the raw material, by means of its expressive and stylistic variations, which are not necessarily associated with representation or figuration, especially in contemporary modalities.

The category of narrative has garnered increasing attention in recent decades, notably due to French philosopher François Lyotard. In The Postmodern Condition, he defines postmodernity as the “end of grand narratives”, an era characterized by the noticeable loss of totalising historical views of ethical nature, such as those found in Enlightenment thought and Marxism. This theory has also become known as the “end of metanarratives”. In a much similar sense, Hans Belting’s The End the History of Art remarks upon the mistake of universalisms in art history, particularly its inability to address the chaos of 20th-century art.

Many of these meanings of “narrative” can be traced back to Walter Benjamin’s fundamental essay, The Storyteller (or The Narrator), where he examines the modern causes of the decline of the art of narrating or storytelling. Benjamin attributes this shift to the establishment of the capitalist mode of production and the development of technique. In contrast to oral narration, the literature of the novel and the newspaper, enabled by the invention of printing techniques, testifies to the solitary condition of the writer and the anonymous public-reader. By breaking the bond of orality, written stories lose their ability to transmit experiences, while confining the subject within the realm of lived experience, which hints at the decline of the communal sense present in epic forms.

In connection with Benjamin’s investigations, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was one of the most important thinkers on the theme of “narrative”, particularly in Time and Narrative. Ricoeur examines how narrative relates to time, arguing that it is through narration that time becomes properly human, turning narrative into a specific mode of temporal articulation while giving form to a human experience. This conception of narrative challenges unitary views of time and history: time is inscrutable and indefinable, thus overcoming the distinction between “historiography” and “fiction”. By narrating their actions and sufferings as something that cannot be simply explained, human beings rearrange their temporal experience, making time a properly human attribute.
Aiming to foster the debate on issues concerning these three fundamental concepts of philosophical tradition, the 17th International Congress of Aesthetics-Brazil invites researchers to address some of the relevant questions within this vast field of theoretical investigation or possible dialogues between them.