 Collingwood begins his account of the relation between artist and spectator by saying that a spectator understands a given work just insofar as his imaginative experience is identical with that had by the artist in creating it. This can never be known with certainty, but so it is with all understanding of language (remember that ‘language’ in Collingwood’s usage means all expressive behaviour). It is also piecemeal: ‘Understanding … is a complex business, consisting of many phases, each complete in itself but each leading on to the next’ (311). Collingwood does speak of identity of understanding, but really his real account is more fluid. First, he accepts that any utterance is endlessly interpretable; there no such thing as ‘the’ meaning of a work (ibid.). Second, the audience’s role is collaborative, in the sense that the artist is concerned to express emotions that are mutually held; failure in this may rightly cause the artist to doubt whether he expressed anything, and suffers instead from a ‘corruption of consciousness’ as explained earlier. The audience, then, actively participates in re-creating the imaginative experience. This second point flows from his conception of art as a language: