MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

406 music, philosophy, and modernity

by explicit ideas, and is in fact the horizon within which explicit ideas,

which articulate things that already pre-conceptually engage people,

become possible in the first place. In consequence, the practical world,

where the possibility of the ethical is first generated, is the locus of forms

of communication which are not subject to the exclusions generated

by the identifications characteristic of verbal language.^25

Barenboim’s remark on the importance of what does not ‘have to

do with explicit ideas’ can be used to examine some related issues for

those directions of recent theory in the humanities which have been

concerned to emphasise the particularity and incommensurability of

cultures. Such theory often does so in the name of overcoming the

repression of the minority cultural ‘other’ by a dominant culture –

female by male, black by white, gay by straight, etc. These approaches

have often been theorised from an explicitly philosophical perspec-

tive, in the name of a questioning of ‘Western metaphysics’, which

comes to stand for an underlying paradigm of modernity as the locus

of the forcible reduction of difference to identity. (We encountered

Adorno’s related, but different version of such an approach in thelast

chapter.) Clearly there are many situations, especially in a post-colonial

world, where repressed and marginalised cultures must seek to assert

their particular identity against the dominant other, and very significant

political advances have resulted as a consequence of such self-assertion.

However, the point of such assertion – which is in danger of being par-

asitic on the same notions of identity as it is used to oppose – must

also be to enable others to understand and engage with what has been

marginalised or oppressed. Otherwise it will reinforce a sense of irre-

ducible difference from those outside the repressed culture. Without

the possibility of such understanding the impasse symbolised by the

initial stance of the two cellists, who can both cite repression of and

threats to their culture as a reason for the refusal of communication,

becomes total. Said talks of the way in which cultural differences these

days tend to end either in homogenisation or in paranoia, and this

seems to me to be reflected in some theoretical approaches to these

matters. The question is, as Said insists, how to avoid the fatal alternative

between wholesale absorption of the other and exclusion of the other

as a threat, and music may, as Barenboim’s example suggests, help to

avoid this alternative.

25 This approach seems to me compatible with some aspects of Levinas’ assumptions about
the need for communication that is prior to ethical precepts to give those precepts any
motivating force. See below.