MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

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conclusion 391

indescribable in human language or unknowable by human minds’
cannot be made coherent. Rather than this something being the world
‘in itself’ – in this respect Schopenhauer can be said to have thought
that music fulfils the metaphysical realist demand – what cannot be
conveyed by human language has to do with ways of being in the world
which may be obscured by the attempt to use concepts to characterise
them. We need now to make it clearer why the discussion of Austin
should lead in the direction of music at all.
Cavell hints at a link between music and his discussion of Austin.
This link connects to his recent reflections on aesthetics which develop
his remarks, cited in previous chapters, about the lack of an explicable
ground in aesthetic discussion. His reflections are formulated in a way
which relates directly to his concern with passionate utterance as ‘an
invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire’, which he contrasts
with performative utterance as ‘an offer of participation in the order
of law’. The former involves ‘the rights of desire’; the latter brings with
it ‘the responsibilities of implication’ (ibid.: 185 ), so taking one into
the realm of Brandom’s inferential commitments. Cavell regards an
‘aesthetic claim’ ‘as a kind of compulsion to share a pleasure, hence as
tinged with an anxiety that the claim stands to be rebuked’, and argues
that ‘It is a condition of, or threat to, that relation to things called
aesthetic, that something I know and cannot make intelligible stands
to be lost to me’ (ibid.: 9 ). There is therefore a correlation between
the uncertainty attached to an aesthetic claim addressed to another
and the contingency of perlocution as ‘improvisation in the disorders
of desire’: in both cases convention is disempowered, and the idea
of expression which is not based on knowledge of anticipated effects
becomes central. The same risks are inherent in musical performance –
musical improvisation, for example, may not best be achieved just in
terms of the existing rules and it arrives at new kinds of order at the risk
of being unintelligible. Cavell’s assertion that ‘my idea of passionate
utterance turns out to be a concern with performance after all’ (ibid.:
187 ) suggests how this connection to music can be made.
The most important implication of the idea of passionate utterance
lies for Cavell in the centrality of expression for the philosophy of lan-
guage. He cites Crispin Wright’s doubts that ‘expression could ground
or sustain a theory of language’ because ‘human beings have so few
natural expressions’ (ibid.: 186 ). In contrast, Cavell argues that ‘when
creatures of a certain species fall into the possession of language and
become humans... they have become (always already) victims of

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