adorno 329But in order to carry out this conversion one must first understand
the meaning of the phrase’ (Adorno 2001 : 159 ). One way of account-
ing for the understanding of linguistic utterances is that it depends on
knowing what it is for an utterance to be true, which has to do with
the contexts of its appropriate use. This suggests a continuity with what
Adorno demands for playing ‘in a meaningful manner’, which is also
about relating a phrase to its harmonic, rhythmic, and other contexts
in an appropriate way. This conception can be elucidated if we return
to Brandom’s ideas that we looked at in chapter 4.
Brandom says of the thermometer which reliably measures temper-
ature and of the parrot which can say that something is red – thereby,
in Adorno’s terms, fulfilling ‘technical correlates’ – that they are not
using the concepts of temperature and colour in question, and so ‘do
notunderstandwhat they are “saying”’ (Brandom 1994 a: 897 ), because
‘thebeliefcondition on knowledge implicitly contains anunderstanding
condition’ (ibid.). In Adorno’s example of playing a phrase something
similar applies, but this cannot, for the reasons we saw in chapter 4 ,be
thought of in solely conceptual terms. Crudely, beliefs require ‘knowing
that’, musical understanding requires ‘knowing how’, which is not sim-
ply cognitive and propositional, but not merely behavioural either. The
musical equivalent of using a concept is playing what may in one respect
be able to be done by a machine, but playing it in a manner which makes
the kind of non-mechanical connections that fulfilling inferential and
other normative commitments achieves in language. InStyle and Idea
Schoenberg develops the notion, Adorno observes, that ‘great music
consists in the fulfilling of “obligations” which the composer, as it were,
enters into with the first note’ ( 11 , 122 – 3 ), and Adorno also talks of
such obligations in performance (Adorno 2001 : 100 ). There are, more-
over, as Wittgenstein suggested in his remark that ‘the feeling gives the
words “meaning”’ (Wittgenstein 1984 : 444 ), dimensions of the musical
which affect the kind of normativity appropriate to full understanding
in language.^15
Considering this parallel between musical and linguistic interpreta-
tion in art can both highlight what happens in extra-artistic contexts,15 Brandom, as we saw, sometimes restricts his conception too much to the inferential
dimension: the affective dimension and the aesthetic dimension are not fully charac-
terisable in these terms. If we are interested in understanding what real people say and
write, these dimensions cannot be consigned to the realm of mere psychology, not least
because that realm itself is informed by objective social factors inherent in language
both at the semantic and the expressive levels.