These observations are surely correct. We do not see recognizable objectsin
many abstract paintings or hear theminworks of music. But these observa-
tions are somewhat sideways to the wide sense ofimitation(mimesis) in which
Aristotle claims that works of art areimitations(mimemata). According to the
wide sense ofimitationthat Aristotle has in mind, all that is required for being
an imitation is presentation of a subject matter as a focus for thought, fused to
perceptual experience of the work. It is for this reason that, as Paul Shorey
notes, both Plato and Aristotle regard music as“the most imitative of the
arts.”^10 Works of pure instrumental music do not normally visually or audibly
depictparticular sensible objects, scenes, or even emotions, but they do invite
us to think aboutaction, in particular about abstract patterns of resistance,
development, multiple attention, and closure that are present in actions, and
they invite us to these thoughts in and through perceptual experience of the
musical work itself. Centrally, this invitation to thought occurs in abstract
musical works through the presentation of musical motifs and sound surfaces
that are then subjected to repetition and variation for the sake of musical
attention. For example, as John Spackman usefully notes,“the descending
G-major motif [and] the high crescendos of the violin”in the opening of
Brahms’Sextet for Strings, No. 2 (Op. 36)“can be grasped by demonstratives”
(“that motif,”“that crescendo”).^11 As motifs and surfaces are then subjected to
musical repetition and variation, the audience is both invited and enabled to
recognize development-as-content.^12 In inviting and sustaining thoughts,
fused to the perceptual experience of the work, about (abstract patterns in)
action, music, as Lawrence Kramer puts it,“participates actively in the con-
struction of subjectivity”^13 in presenting abstractly a sense of its plights and
possibilities. We do hear this kind of presentationinthe work. It may have
(^10) Paul Shorey, notes to Plato,Republic I, trans. Paul Shorey (London: Heinemann [Loeb
Classical Library], 1930), p. 224, note c.
(^11) John Spackman,“Expressiveness, Ineffability, and Nonconceptuality,”Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism70, 3 (summer 2012), pp. 311B, 3312A. Berys Gaut similiarly notes that
emotions and attitudes can be directed toward individual contours and abstract shapes
(Art, Emotion and Ethics[Oxford University Press, 2007], pp. 68, 186).
(^12) For an account of development-as-content as a function of“cadenced interjection”that
“exist[s] for [the inner subjective] life alone,”as Hegel develops this account hisAesthetics,
see Richard Eldridge,“Hegel on Music,”inHegel and the Arts, ed. Stephen Houlgate
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 119–45.
(^13) Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge(Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), p. 21.
Representation, imitation, and resemblance 29