conclusion 395the actual relationship to a subject’ (Dahlhaus 1988 : 331 ). That ‘actual
relationship’ involves contingency of the kind that we have been consid-
ering. However, the relationship is not merely arbitrary: it requires the
musical ‘object’. This has, in turn, to be related to its potential perlocu-
tionary effects on the subjects experiencing it, without which it would
not be significant in the first place. In any specific case these effects
relate to a wider series of cultural contexts, and therefore will some-
times not occur, but – which is too often forgotten – this is the case
for any articulation, verbal, pictorial, or acoustic. Once we get away
from representationalist assumptions it makes no sense to think that
the dependency of a piece of cultural expression on a dynamic web of
background assumptions, feelings, attitudes, etc., is a deficiency.
If the contingency of communication resulting from our being ‘read-
able in every sound and gesture’ – and therefore also liable to be
misread – is ignored, our grasp of the conditions that make human
understanding possible is, as Cavell argues, essentially lacking. What is
at issue here is not the difficulty that we encounter in conveying the
‘semantic content’ of our utterances and in understanding the con-
tent of our interlocutor’s utterances. Putting it in those terms – which
is, of course, valid for some purposes – abstracts from the concrete
reality of communication, where the conveying of semantic content is
only one aspect of what occurs, and is necessarily entangled with the
other conscious and unconscious investments of the interlocutors in
what they express. Concern with these other aspects of communication
is the point of Cavell’s development of what Austin neglects. From a
purely semantic perspective, this might just seem like a psychologisa-
tion of meaning, which would miss the point of semantics. However, if
one conceives of meaning holistically, all our ways of being in the world
affect what we mean and what we understand. For some purposes, such
as in the natural sciences, the aim may be to circumscribe what can
be meant, so that the investment in what is said is kept within certain
parameters. But this limitation cannot form the model for communi-
cation in general, where we seek to move people in all sorts of ways
nearly all the time, directly in speech, and sometimes, but only some-
times, less directly in writing. The question is how exactly music relates
to Cavell’s conception. Is music just an echo of what takes place in pas-
sionate utterance, or is it rather itself a source of possibilities for such
utterance?
It should be clear that there must be a constant interplay between
the gestural, the passionate, and the rhythmic, and this connects verbal