388 music, philosophy, and modernity
way round: music, both vocal and instrumental, was understood as an
expression of affect even before opera existed. Moreover, in modernity,
the affinities of language as expression to music become, as we have
seen, a powerful philosophical and aesthetic theme. Novalis talks, for
example, of ‘Poems, just pleasant sounding and full of beautiful words,
but also without any meaning or context... like fragments of the most
diverse things. True poetry can at the most have an allegorical meaning
as a whole and an indirect effect, like music etc.’ (Novalis 1978 : 769 ).
Despite Cavell’s touch of logocentrism – why can each notional side not
have priority in differing situations, as the debates over the priority of
music and text in the history of opera itself suggest that they do? – what
he addresses is germane to our concerns.
Cavell’s interest is in the ‘relation of passion to speech’ as what
is neglected in Austin’s theory of performative utterance. Passion is
both something that one undergoes, and something which drives one’s
stance towards others and the world. The link to music is clear: music
can be engaged with both in a predominantly receptive manner, and
in a productive manner. Cavell’s concern with the exclusion of the
topic of passion and speech from the ‘tradition of analytical philoso-
phy’ (Cavell 2005 : 156 ) relates to the questions that we have seen music
posing for philosophy. According to Cavell, Austin’s ‘aim in his study
of performatives is at once to lift the non-descriptive or non-assertional
or non-constative gestures of speech to renewed philosophical interest
and respectability, and to bring, or prepare the ground on which to
bring, the philosophical concern with truth down to size’ (ibid.: 159 ).
He remarks that this aim finds little echo these days in the dominant
analytical traditions, and is taken up rather by literary theorists and con-
tinental philosophers. The phrase ‘non-descriptive or non-assertional
or non-constative gestures’ closely echoes both elements of the later
Wittgenstein, and Adorno’s characterisations of music as ‘judgement-
less synthesis’, as a ‘language sedimented from gestures’, and as ‘inten-
tionless’. Once gesture in the sense intended here is admitted as essen-
tial to language, the gestures which music alone can enact take on the
kind of philosophical importance that Cavell largely restricts to poetic
utterance.
The initial problem which Cavell finds in Austin can be summed up
in the idea that verbal performance, doing by saying, is not adequately
understood just in terms of the obvious illocutionary verbs like ‘name’,
‘assent to’, ‘promise’, etc. Austin would, as Cavell admits, no doubt
agree with this. However, the consequences of a crucial logical point that