338 music, philosophy, and modernity
idea of similarity can, of course, easily be mere subjective projection,
a kind of pathetic fallacy, but Adorno’s claim is that it also points to
ways of relating to things which do not just involve dominating them.
The musical score illustrates what he means. As a physically describ-
able object, the score has nothing directly to do with music, but the
object is also what makes possible music as something which is neither
merely subjective, nor wholly objective. There are echoes here of a non-
metaphysical version of Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘logical form’, which was
used to account for how differing forms of intelligibility – score, per-
formance, gramophone record, etc. – are connected, but which can-
not itself be analysed. Wittgenstein claimed that ‘Whatcanbe shown,
cannot be said’ ( 4. 1212 , ibid.: 34 ), and showing can involve some of
what Adorno means by mimesis. Imitation of the other, which is closer
to showing than to saying, is one of the ways in which we act in relation
to the world’s responding to us. Pursuing this parallel via Wittgenstein’s
remark, with regard to the idea of showing, that ‘Musical themes are
in a certain sense propositions (‘S ̈atze’)’, will take us to an important
aspect of the philosophy/music relationship in Adorno.
Adorno talks of the ‘historical dual character of music as mime and
language. As mimetic it is not purely readable, and is not purely imitable
as language. For this reason it splits itself into the ideal of sound and
into script, and needs ever-renewed exertion to reconcile the divergent
elements’ (Adorno 2001 : 238 ). This exertion cannot be described in
conceptual terms because it has to do with the kinds of mimetic rela-
tions to the world which discursive forms cannot capture, and which
have, using Besseler’s term, to be ‘vollzogen’, ‘achieved’/‘carried out’,
in making music. However, Adorno always thinks of mimesis as in a
dialectic with rationality: art is ‘mimesis which has been driven to con-
sciousness of itself’ ( 7 : 385 ). Art involves critical reflection, not mere
regression to a previous, unreflective condition, and this is what makes
it appropriate to call music a kind of language. Musical texts, even as
they become ever more specific, still always involve a ‘zone of indeter-
minacy’, but this ‘is not just an inadequacy of the notation, but rather
the consequence of a sign system for the intentionless’ (Adorno 2001 :
239 ).
The notion of music as an intentionless – a non-referential, non-
classifying – language makes the connection to Wittgenstein’s notion
of showing clearer, as do Adorno’s remarks on the tension between the
gestural aspect of music and what can be notated. Adorno discusses the
notion of an intentionless language in terms of art in general, but music