120 music, philosophy, and modernity
noises inferentially become signs. However, it is at this level that what
Habermas terms Brandom’s ‘remarkably objectivistic understanding of
discursive behaviour’ becomes apparent in relation to music. Forms
of articulation like music, or dance, which show something intelligible
that resists translation into discursivity, seem for Brandom necessarily
to have to be translated in the last analysis into something which must
be cashed out in discursive claims, on pain of being regarded as mere
immediacy.
The attempt to respond to music in the form of discursive claims is
evidently a vital aspect of the social practice of music: I am not con-
cerned to question Brandom and Hegel at this level. However, we also
need a philosophical approach to the ways in which musical content
cannot be finally rendered in the form of claims. A verbal account of
music can only ever make one hear and understand the music bet-
ter (or worse) by extending the contexts to which it can be related; it
cannot replace it by revealing what it refers to or ‘represents’. This is
admittedly the case for all objects in the world, because they are also
never reducible to the ways in which we talk about them. The differ-
ence is, though, that music would not be music if it were just the noises
of which it consists, noises which, like any other object in the world,
also transcend all the ways we talk about them. It is the possession of
intentional content of the kind that makes a noise a linguistic sign or
a note that distinguishes both music and language. This means that
they have to be understood in terms of their world-disclosive nature,
which is not the case for objects in general, and this depends on how
the elements of music and language are related to other linguistic and
musical elements, and to contexts in the world.
Music does not, then, seem to be straightforwardly either a ‘text’ or
a ‘thing’ in the sense of these terms proposed by Brandom. How the
functioning of signs in visual art relates to music in this respect is too big
a topic to deal with here, though there are important parallels between
what makes something into music and aspects of visual art connected
to questions of rhythm. As Schn ̈adelbach suggests, visual forms also
have a linguistic aspect: ‘contemplation of pictures or listening to music
always includes a seeing and hearing as.. .’ (Schn ̈adelbach 2002 : 94 ).
However, music’s peculiar proximity to language and its largely non-
representational nature make it in some respects a special case, and
much turns on whether its non-representationalism is regarded as a
decisive lack, or as the source of its unique possibilities, or whether one
seeks a mediation between these two extremes. Adorno characterises