112 music, philosophy, and modernity
looks at transcriptions of jazz solos, norms of harmony are, of course,
regularly transgressed. As Thelonius Monk said: ‘Wrong’s right’, but
that does not imply mere licence: any note can be made ‘legitimate’ if
the context is right, and sometimes the rightness comes about because,
in order to avoid a convention, one deliberately plays a ‘wrong’ note.
Such phenomena might seem, though, to take us much too far from
what really concerns Brandom. His main aim in the essay on Hegel is
to get away from the idea that Hegel thinks ‘our concept using activity’
is necessary ‘toproduce,asopposed tomake intelligible, the conceptu-
ally structured world’ (ibid.: 208 ). However, the implication that the
world itself is conceptually structured indicates how his approach may
find music hard to digest. In the light of the ideas about rhythm that
we considered in thelast chapter,itcan make sense to talk of music
making intelligible a rhythmically structured world. The inferential-
ist structure based on ‘material exclusion’ is instantiated on both the
somatic and the intellectual levels in the constitution of rhythm, which
comes about by beats not being other beats and being linked with each
other in significant ways which are not fully explained just by the differ-
ential constitution of the rhythm. As we saw, rhythm can even be seen
as in certain respects prior to, and as informing, conceptual thinking,
because it involves structures of identity and difference in ways which do
not need to be conceptualised, such that knowing how becomes know-
ing that. One might also say that music makes an affectively structured
world intelligible: affects may not be adequately articulated by what we
say about them, and may be better articulated in music as a ‘language
of gestures’.
Brandom’s conception ‘gives pride of place to practices of giving
and asking for reasons’ (Brandom 2000 : 11 ), and he regards this as
the prior activity, without which other kinds of practice would not be
intelligible. However, the role given to ‘the game of giving and asking
for reasons’ (ibid.: 14 ) does not leave space for the ways in which this
game can in turn depend upon other sorts of intelligibility, of the kind
suggested by rhythm, which resist complete conversion from knowing
how into knowing that. As we shall see in thenext chapter, Hegel does
make a link between rhythm and self-consciousness, but he does not
interpret the consequences of the link in the manner that some of
the Romantics do. What is at issue in the Romantic stance offers ways
of understanding why some major figures in modern philosophy and
art come to mistrust how language sometimes functions in modernity.
If such suspicion is voiced in discursive claims it necessarily involves
the performative contradiction of using language to reveal language’s