  Instrumentalist conceptions of language persuade us that the spoken and written word are but communicative tools, but for Gadamer participation in language acknowledges that an individual is located within a substantive horizon of meanings which transcends subjective consciousness. Pragmatic concerns encourage the forgetting of such interconnectedness but when such individualism is suspended by the festival or, indeed, by the adoption of an aesthetic attitude, the re-discovery of oneself as belonging to an extensive community of shared meanings and involvements becomes possible. The artwork’s communicative capacity awakens the realisation that in as much as I understand myself as being addressed, I must acknowledge that I already belong to something larger than myself. The artwork festivises: it reveals our personal indebtedness to past and future communities of meaning. The thesis that we belong to a hermeneutic collective which is the effective underpinning of art’s ability to communicate is further elaborated in Gadamer’s discussion of the symbol.