MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

390 music, philosophy, and modernity

the issue of perlocution apparent.^13 Unlike illocutionary effects, per-

locutionary effects cannot, then, be construed in terms of ‘an accepted

conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect’ (ibid.:

180 ). At the same time – and this is the crux – it is essential to human

communication that I can still ‘rationally expect’ to have perlocutionary

effects on you, such as inspiring you, or irritating you, because other-

wise ‘I would lack the capacity to make myself intelligible to you. And

what you would lack is not some information I might impart to you’

(ibid.). Making oneself intelligible, then, involves a fundamental con-

tingency, but it also involves rational expectation. Both the contingency

and the rational expectation are based on the knowledge that language

does things to people. In this sense the refusal to give priority to the

representational aspects of language can itself be regarded as having

an ethical significance.

It is not hard to relate some of this to music, which cannot achieve its

effects simply by convention, and which would in many circumstances

not be music at all if one could not expect that it will have effects on

those who hear it. Music admittedly cannot be described as ‘perlocu-

tionary’ in a literal sense, because it is not achieving effects through

the speaking or writing of words. However, Cavell’s remarks on the

role of gesture in speech make the translation from language to music

unproblematic in this context. The vital factor here is thecombination

in both language and music of a potential for having effects which can

be anything from dangerous to life-enhancing, with the possibility that

the same expression that gives rise to such effects could also amount

to nothing, because it elicits no response. I shall consider in a moment

what follows from the fact that some perlocutionary verbs can and some

cannot be applied to music.^14 The significance of music here derives

not least from the fact that many ‘perlocutionary’ effects, in the sense

of what results from human expressions which engage and affect their

recipients in emotional and ethical ways – or indeed proto-cognitive

ways, as when one senses, by the way they play music, the particular

emotional state of someone who is reserved – cannot be achieved by

words at all. These considerations about what language and music can

do which is not primarily descriptive or cognitive can put in question

one aspect of Rorty’s conviction that ‘the notion of something real but

13 Fears about demonic musical virtuosity in the nineteenth century can be interpreted in
the light of the nature of perlocution.
14 In the case of those that can be applied it is important that there is no necessary identity
between what the word conveys and what the music may actually do.