MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

408 music, philosophy, and modernity

be resolved and what is irreconcilable... I think it’s useful, at times,

to think of the aesthetic as an indictment of the political and that it’s

a stark contrast, forcefully made, to inhumanity, to injustice. And I

think that’s what people respond to in Beethoven’ (Barenboim and

Said 2004 : 168 ). The musical communication between the Syrian and

the Israeli cellist should not in these terms be thought of as immediately

politically relevant. It should rather be seen as showing a dimension of

human existence which cannot be subsumed into the determinate ways

of speaking required for political argument, a dimension where the very

lackof verbalised ideas enables things to happen which such ideas can

obstruct. Instead of irreconcilable differences being considered solely

in philosophical and political terms, they may, then, be partially tran-

scended, though not finally overcome, by something not locatable in

those terms. This may seem rather vague, as does anything which has to

do with what ‘cannot be said’, but if the substance of human commu-

nication also has to do with the issues we considered via Cavell, music,

and perlocution, the importance of this other way of approaching com-

munication should be beyond question.

Clearly, music’s resistance to conceptual determination and simulta-

neous perlocutionary potential do also involve the danger of misuse.

This brings it into the domain of ‘the political’ in Said’s sense, and

refusals and failures of musical understanding are inevitable, as are

those of verbal understanding. However, focusing attention too exclu-

sively on what can be problematic about music risks obscuring its capac-

ity to embody contradiction, negativity, etc., in a form which shows ways

beyond them.^27 When this capacity is located in successful practical con-

texts, as it is in Barenboim and Said’s orchestra, its real-life potential

becomes more apparent. The Romantic association of music with the

‘longing’ occasioned by the suspension of human existence between

finitude and a sense of what is beyond finitude, that we considered in

chapter 3 , already suggested how modernity needed new ways of deal-

ing with the irreconcilable. The essential tension that underlies many

philosophical responses to music after the Romantics can, in the light

of the present discussion, be seen to have to do with whether, as Niet-

zsche and Adorno sometimes claim, music offers a deceptive illusion

27 Musical disagreements often echo tensions of the kind generated by identity politics,
when people’s adherence to particular music becomes a kind of self-assertion against
a perceived other. This sort of identification can betray the important possibilities that
music offers, because music is being used like any other commodity that supposedly
individualises its possessor.