After words
Whereof we can no longer speak, thereof we must not stop talking. We have to keep pressing speech, language, and discourse against this body, whose contact is uncertain, intermittent, hidden, and yet insistent.1
Jean-Luc Nancy’s playful but urgent inversion of Wittgenstein makes a good epigraph for any aesthetics of music. It is echoed by all the writers I have drawn on –writers who explore the gap between language and our embodied, sensuous experience of the world, neither to close it nor to declare writing futile. Wittgenstein himself, one of the most important thinkers on language in the history of philosophy, published only one short book during his lifetime (the Tractatus) and periodically quit academic life for a different kind of experience of the world – as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, as a teacher in a remote village primary school in the Austrian alps, as a gardener in a monastery, and as a hospital porter in London. But his famous retreats, like his time in the remote Norwegian village of Skjolden, were part of a rhythm that we might, retrospectively, understand as a flickering between two different ways of being – one deeply embedded in language, the other at its margins.
Wittgenstein’s work on language nevertheless marks a definitive break in the history of western modernity. George Steiner, reflecting on the moment of aesthetic modernism around 1900, talks of a ‘break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself’.2 To come afterwards, he suggests, is to live in a time of ‘epilogue’, shaped by ‘the logic of the “afterword” ’. The embodiment of such a moment, we might suggest, is less the philosopher who works on language, than the poet who chooses silence over writing – witness Arthur Rimbaud who, in 1875, at the age of just 21, gave up poetry. One of the most important poets in the French language, Rimbaud seems to have quite literally written himself into silence. His entire oeuvre was written in a mere four years, between the ages of 16 and 20, after which he was utterly silent as a writer. For the remainder of his short life he led an itinerant and precarious existence, eventually working in the coffee trade in Ethiopia before his early death from cancer in 1891, aged 37.
But Steiner’s observation about coming late, ‘in a time of epilogue’, is almost as old as modernity itself; Nietzsche had identified that ‘we moderns’ live as epigones as early as 1873. Schlegel expressed a definitive sense of modernity as coming too late in 1803.3 There is, it seems, a recurrent fascination with the melancholia of declaring, again and again, our own epigonal and epilogical status. We might recall Georg Lukács’s trenchant quip about the critical thinkers of the Frankfurt School, taking up residence in the Grand Hotel Abyss – ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity [where] the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered’.4 To continue writing about the abyss of language in Mallarmé or Derrida, Debussy or Boulez, endlessly theorising the ‘time of epilogue’, might suggest something similar. One might easily picture the guests aboard the cruise-ship ‘Abîme’, dining in style between seminars on the shipwreck of language in Un coup de dés or the siren calls of Debussy’s musique informelle, while all the while floating precariously above the depths of a cold, dark, and wordless ocean.
The ideas explored in the preceding chapters suggest a different model, unconstrained by a demand for a point of historical or discursive closure. There are two versions of the post-historical, post-subjective time of the epi-logos – one essentially empty, the other essentially fulfilled. Both are perpetually available. Indeed, self-awareness of their dual presence and the vertiginous divide between them is definitive of the modern condition, precariously perched between ‘coming after’ and being on the brink of fulfilment.5 Music has richly and multifariously explored both and has done so in counterpoint with language and the ordering of the world according to language. But music ‘after Debussy’ parallels Bergson’s attempt to articulate a temporality outside the logic of division imposed by language: the concept of the durée is precisely such an idea, a fluid continuity of Being unbroken by language. The aesthetic attitude, as a way of being in the world, is not itself determined by the logic of history, however much the material production of artworks takes place in history.6 Indeed, art’s distance from the merely historical and the merely factual and contingent is a condition for its critical function. As George Steiner insists: ‘All serious art, music and literature is a critical act [ . . . ] the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world [ . . . ] It says that things might be (have been, shall be) otherwise.’7
For Jean-Luc Nancy, music meets philosophy across the threshold between sense (as discursive meaning and signification) and sense (as an embodied being in the world). Hence his formulation that we now witness the end of philosophy and the end of the world it has fashioned (the world as an object of knowledge in the Cartesian sense). In its place, he suggests, we attend to ‘how the end of the world of sense opens the praxis of the sense of the world’ – that is, a move from abstract systems of signification to ‘the concreteness or praxis of sense’.8 In music we are surely afforded a rich and embodied example of such a praxis: a way of knowing the world through aesthetic play that is, thereby, a way of being in the world. As a mode of knowing the world, of thinking the world sensually, music’s inverse relation to language has hardly begun to be explored. Music provokes the rational mind with a logic of sensual particularity that quietly resists that of conceptual and abstract thought. Music is not only a writing of the body, an enacting of sensible relations, but also a way of thinking the particular. This is why it is the counterpoint of a philosophical language which can only think the general. It is also why music has so often been made secondary by a certain kind of linguistic culture; it has been understood as ‘weak’ (and thus ‘feminine’ to a spectacularly damaged masculine mindset), because unable to think in abstract ‘truths’. This is an odd situation: given that we are particular creatures who deal with the world in particular ways and with other particulars (people, places, memories, feelings), we generally have far more need of a language of the particular than the abstract generality of philosophical language. Particularity is the palpable material and embodied place of our lives. After the collapse of the grand claims of language, and the distorted masculinity it articulated, the quiet presence of the musically feminine returns like a gently incoming tide.9
All the musical works I have explored are acts of dispersion volatile, works that free themselves, and us who (momentarily) go with them, from the gravitational pull of language to fixed things. But the space of music’s ‘saying nothing’ is not a negation of language so much as an opening up of the definitive gap between linguistic thinking and embodied experience. It is not a regression from thinking or saying (as Adorno feared), because it is itself a thinking and saying of great eloquence, a dialogue that opens between linguistic culture and a material being in the world. The temptation to decipher the musical act, to collapse it back into (linguistic) meanings is constantly present – even for the listener, let alone the commentator, the theorist, or philosopher. To resist such a collapse requires the cultivation of a particular mind-set – to allow the fullness of presence without rushing to ‘convert’ it into words and meanings. This is surely the space onto which artworks open, and the condition to which listening gives access. It is part of the paradoxical condition of language that pointing to such a simple phenomenon produces such a welter of words. Since art fosters an amazement with the world, allowing us ‘to be amazed to the point of not understanding’10 (as Heidegger has it), it necessarily bewilders the mind by exceeding and deranging its habitual linguistic certainties (what Heidegger calls our ‘inauthentic everydayness’).11
My argument has been that music ‘after Debussy’ might be understood, in part, as a critique of a musical tradition that had allowed itself to become discursive rather than phatic, linguistic rather than sonorous. By foregrounding music’s elemental act of appearing, this repertoire repositions and re-emphasises that function of art which Jean-Luc Nancy singles out as definitive:
Art disengages the senses from signification, or rather, it disengages the world from signification, and that is what we call ‘the senses’ when we give to the (sensible, sensuous) senses the sense of being external to signification. But it is what one might just as correctly name the ‘sense of the world’. The sense of the world as suspension of signification.12
Before any idea of representation or mimesis, expression or content, art appears. The fait (deed and fact) of art is that it takes place. It presents, makes present, becomes present. Music, whose medium is time above all else (music works without sound but not without time), foregrounds this act of appearing like no other. But music’s elemental act of appearing becomes occluded, in a discursive culture, by a linguistic model of saying. The paradox at the heart of ‘absolute music’ is that, for all its freedom from language, it claims to speak a language of its own.13 With this, the physicality of musical material becomes a vehicle for its geistliche (spiritual/intellectual) content; the embodied experience of sound becomes valued for the contemplation of the forms it sets in motion, as a vehicle for a content that might be thought separately. Hegel’s idea of the historical development of art, as the expression of the increasing inadequacy of material form to spiritual content, is the paradigmatic expression of this idea. Music, of course, resists such a reduction of its sonorous being, even in its most abstract forms. Nevertheless, the historical eruption of musical modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century may be understood, in part, as a ‘return of the repressed’ – a rude reassertion of the primacy of sound.14
Such a reassertion of the sonorous challenges, with renewed force, our habits of collapsing music into the kinds of ‘sense’ afforded by language. Music ‘after Debussy’ provokes once more the question: Why speak about music at all? Writers have often replied that thereby we bring the mute content of music into the articulate realm of language. But a musician (and even a musicologist) might answer the other way round: we speak about music in order to open up language. By enlarging its spaces through the resonance of music, language becomes more open to the (non-linguistic) world. Its enclosure gives way to moments of unbounded space. To assert that music is also a way of knowing the world is to say that music writes a space in relation to language and thus rewrites our being in the world. So there is no rejection of language. On the contrary, speaking about music offers a particular kind of working on language – bringing towards language the mute appearing of music, not to make it articulate (let alone to explain or translate it), but rather to allow its highly meaningful muteness to resonate within language. Language needs music. In order to hear its own limits, its tendency to close down the sense of the world, language needs music’s resistance, its mute refusal of the categories of language.
Of course, this risks being naïve. To step sideways from sanctioned modes of language, especially those that define professional or scholarly discourses, is necessarily to provoke the charge of naïvety. And yet, isn’t that the primary instinct of philosophy itself? In her introduction to Lyotard’s Why Philosophize?, Corinne Enaudeau asks: ‘What reason was there, is there still, to philosophize, to plunge back down into the depths of the gaps in meaning – each time anew, in a re-found naivety that will be judged childish?’.15 The answer, as Lyotard sets out in the first of these four lectures, is because of lack. We philosophise to ‘attest to the presence of lack by our speech’. And that means, as Husserl once remarked, that the philosopher is an eternal beginner.16 Many artists have said the same, often towards the end of a successful life’s work: one begins again. ‘I am working on things which will only be understood by little children of the twentieth century’, wrote Debussy to his friend Pierre Louÿs in 1895, signalling a definitively childlike character that runs throughout his work.17
Jacques Derrida, who was at pains not to sound naïve, spun a vast web of words in order to traverse language and to make gaps within it, to insist through erasure and différance that language, cut free from signifieds, gives access to an open space, the blanc between the words towards which Mallarmé’s entire output was shaped. Michel Serres, who is not afraid to sound naïve, comes at the problem from the opposite direction. ‘Some of us have never doubted, their whole lives, that there exists a world beyond the sign’, he asserts in Les cinq sens, a book of nearly five hundred pages that evokes, through the sheer richness of its language, an experience of the world outside, before, and after the word. A book that richly embodies Nancy’s call (‘thereof we must not stop talking’), it epitomises a current of literature that parallels the broad sweep of music ‘after Debussy’. Like Jankélévitch, insisting across the course of several books that there is nothing to say about music, Serres repeatedly tells us, in a flood of words, that ‘language makes you sick, like a drug. Like an anaesthetic, it desensitizes you.’18
Nor is this paradoxical mode of writing confined to philosophy. Witness the resurgence, over the last few decades, of a kind of nature writing that attempts to open up language by bringing it into closer relation with a vividly sensuous experience of the world. As Robert Macfarlane underlines, in his introduction to Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, such writing is itself a way of presenting the ‘unmappable surplus’ of landscape, a surplus in relation to anything language brings to bear upon it.19 In Landmarks, Macfarlane explores the interaction of language and landscape such that the intensity of certain kinds of contact with nature (re)shapes language. Discussing Roger Deakin’s account of swimming through the waterways of Britain (Waterlog), Macfarlane writes: ‘To enter water is, of course, to cross a border. You pass the lake’s edge, the sea’s shore, the river’s brink – and in so doing you arrive at a different realm, in which you are differently minded because differently bodied.’20
Unfinished at his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible explores this central problem of language and its relation to Nature. A sketched outline from March 1959 has the work in three parts: I. Being and World; II. Nature [later, ‘Wild Being’]; III. Logos.21 As the editors put it, his concern with the question of language was, in particular, to rethink the relationship between language and an experience that it does not master: speech ‘gives expression to an experience that is mute and ignorant of its own meaning, but only in order to make that experience appear in its purity’.22 They continue: ‘the greatest merit of expression is to disclose this continuous passage from the word to being and from being to the word, or this double openness of the one upon the other. To think through this exchange is no doubt what The Visible and the Invisible was to devote itself to at the end.’23 Death intervened in this late work of Merleau-Ponty, not unlike the way Adorno understood the presence of death to intervene in Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony; both point to an unresolvable tension within themselves that the interruption of death merely highlights.
Merleau-Ponty proposes a philosophical relation to the world that is more musical, one that stands against the world in a questioning or interrogative mode but does not expect an answer.24 It is odd, therefore, that musicology generally shies away from ‘phenomenological naiveté’25 even though, as Merleau-Ponty insists, what is most needed is precisely the sophistication of such naïvety, since ‘true philosophy is to learn again to see the world’.26 It is doubly strange in that a corpus of music ‘after Debussy’ has itself richly explored this idea – witness Fauré’s La Chanson d’Ève, for example, a work centred on stepping outside of an old language to feel the world as if for the first time. A tradition of music since has afforded exactly this learning again to see the world, enacting the relation at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s project – the ‘intertwining’ of the embodied mind that perceives and the world that is perceived. In ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’, Merleau-Ponty uses the same metaphor as Kierkegaard – that of the coastline or sea-shore, something between us and the (visible) world that is ‘an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand’, or else a connective tissue between perception and the perceived, the world and my body.27 We might also remember Derrida’s idea of the hinge (brisure) or Mallarmé’s wing (aile), when Merleau-Ponty writes that ‘our body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees them and touches them.’28 Except, as he goes on: ‘There are not in it [the body] two leaves or two layers; fundamentally it is neither thing seen only nor seer only, it is Visibility sometimes wandering and sometimes reassembled [ . . . ] Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?’.29
The sense of two hands grazing each other, of the hinged movement between two parts, the spark across the gap/overlap, is explored again and again by the writers I have drawn on. In Discourse, Figure, Lyotard joins philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as much as poets like Mallarmé, in insisting that we have to work on language: ‘one must begin where one is, namely, from within words’.30 We do not step out of language and its discursive webs but, on the other hand, we live in a figural world in which ‘the given is not a text, it possesses an inherent thickness, or rather a difference, which is not to be read, but rather seen’. But it is precisely this difference that gets lost, that ‘continually fall[s] into oblivion in the process of signification’.31 Lyotard’s approach is to show that language is never transparent, and always tangled with the figural. The signifying function of language and the sensuous appearing of (poetic) artworks are not utterly cut off from each other, unrelated and unrelatable; rather, one is a kind of inverse of the other. Poetry thus offers a radical reversal of language-use in the discourse of knowledge (or ‘science’, as Bergson has it). On the one hand, science attempts to force the particularity of a designated object into the invariant structural relations of language, on the other, there is ‘expressive speech striving to open itself up to the space of vision and desire and to produce figurality within the signified’. In both cases, he goes on, ‘language [is] fascinated by what it is not’: where science attempts to possess this other, art wants to be it.32
How might we keep open and explore this gap between discourse and figure, to attend to the space between linguistic practices and embodied ones? Art provides us with a particularly rich site for such an exploration – art whose (discursive) silence is ‘a refutation of the position of discourse’,33 whose writing traces itself in the materiality of ‘bodies, colors, sounds, in words too’ but only ‘to give them back their silence, which makes so much noise in the human body’.34 Since this figural world of art is mute, and will not speak in the language of discourse, we have to work on language instead.
Must one therefore keep silent in order to bring it to light? But the silence of the beautiful, of perception – a silence that precedes speech, an innermost silence – is impossible: there is simply no way to go to the other side of discourse. Only from within language can one get to and enter the figure.35
Such a move is possible, Lyotard argues, because the body (and thus the figural) is already in language (thus Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Barthes, and many others). For Lyotard, ‘discourse is always thick’, it always has the sensible body caught within it. And the apparently inscrutable silence of art, its mute refusal of discursive speech, is by the same token already in language too: ‘silence is the very condition of discourse since it is also on the side of the thing of which one must speak, that one must express’. Put another way, this silence or muteness of the figural (in nature as in art) marks the gap that makes language possible and initiates it:
silence is the result of the ripping-apart that allows discourse and its object to stand vis-à-vis each other, and the work of signification to begin; it is the result of the tear, integral to language, where the work of expression occurs. [ . . . ] Such violence belongs to the depth of language. It is its starting point, since one speaks in separation and the object must first be constituted as lost for it to have to be signified.36
The figural provokes us to rethink a mode of knowing the world shaped overwhelmingly by language. As Lyotard has it, paraphrasing Paul Klee, painting ‘is not something to be read, as contemporary semiologists would have it’, but rather ‘makes visible seeing itself’.37 The frame of the painting, allows us properly to look by protecting us from the excess of the visible that ‘lays siege to us’ all around.38 Attending to the act of seeing or listening itself is central to aesthetic engagement (Seel, Serres). In its particularity, it is necessarily resistant to the conceptual apparatus of philosophy:
The philosopher, of course, has no trouble demonstrating in his discourse that the unique status claimed by sensory certainty is unthinkable and unsayable, and that if it needs to be established, then it has to be said, and therefore embedded in a semantic field that ushers it into universality. But what he cannot incorporate is the showing, manifestation itself. Diadeictics is not a dialectics in Hegel’s sense, primarily because the latter operates on the surface of a semantic grid, while the former presupposes the empty interval, the depth that separates the showing from the showed.39
Put another way, ‘the result of sensory activity is a Dasein, not a Sinn’40 – a kind of being not a signification, meaning, concept, or idea. It is this that marks out the different task of philosophy in which Lyotard is interested and why it necessarily results in ‘working on language’. He quotes Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that ‘words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon Being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our historical evidences vibrate until they disjoin’.41 Encounters with the sensuous have the capacity to produce this derangement, this gap, this vibration in our discursive logic that (momentarily) breaks it apart. This is the critical work that art and music performs upon (philosophical) language. And this is the task of a musicology worthy of its name: to allow encounters with music to rearrange linguistic habits of mind, to provoke a re-writing that opens on to a more musical understanding of the world. The encounter between discourse and figure, language and music, deranges the opposition of terms upon which the system depends and offers an access out of language that is otherwise closed. This is the real value of the bringing together of mousike and logos.
Lyotard draws on the idea of the mirror to explore the relation between the two: the figures of discourse, he says, act as ‘a chain or switch between the intelligible discursive order and the sensory spatiotemporal order’. This crossing of the intelligible and the sensory, as in Freud’s conception of the dreamwork, is what ‘gives discourse access to what is alien to it’. But like the offset symmetry of the reflection in impressionist painting, the reflection is not an exact reproduction: ‘this reflection is a hyper-reflection insofar as it does not consist in reflecting the designated in the signified, but that on the contrary some element of the space of reference, as it comes to lodge itself in discourse, produces anomalies there, thereby making itself visible’.42 As in Monet’s Sur les bords de Seine à Bennecourt (Figure 5.2) where the surface of the water breaks up the image of the opposite shoreline and gives access to part of the view not seen ‘in reality’, what is invisible comes into view as a reflection through another medium.
Lyotard’s model, of this ‘hyper-reflection’ between the signification of discourse and the sense of the figural, of one creating a new space in which the other can resonate, is foregrounded by art as a remaking of space, loosening the signifying conventions of representation in order to open up a new space. Of course, we see the reflection in the water, it is not imagined, just as we hear the resonance of the chord across the silence in Debussy. But both give us sensible access to the aesthetic reconfiguration of the real; both open up a space that our everyday seeing explains away. And very soon, it was this space that was, quite literally, to fill the entire canvas – witness the case of Monet’s huge water lily paintings, explorations of the space between knowing discursively (these are paintings of water lilies) and figurally (these are whorls of colour, light, and refraction). Or again, witness the way in which the arabesque that begins as a decoration of the melodic line, a detour that complements the functional direction of the grammatical unit, but then displaces the discourse to become itself the musical space – such is the change from the early Debussy to the self-sufficient space of the late Études.
Before words
I wondered whether music were not the sole example of the form which might have served – had language never been invented – for the communication of souls. Music is like a possibility which has never been developed, humanity having taken different paths, those of language.43
We might think that Proust, writing around the time of Debussy’s death, merely echoes an impossibly romantic notion of the nineteenth century, but recently his poetic insight has begun to receive some unlikely support. In the last two decades there has been an astonishing convergence of interest in questions of music and language from scientific disciplines as diverse as evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, neuroscience, cognitive and social psychology, cognitive biology, linguistics, human evolution, child development, and education. Undoubtedly, different disciplines are shaped by different questions as well as different methodologies, but at the heart of this convergence there seems to be a shared interest ‘in the comparative study of language and music as cognitive systems’.44 A central idea in evolutionary approaches to language is that of a proto-language – in Steven Mithen’s terms, ‘a single precursor for both music and language: a communication system that had the characteristics that are now shared by music and language, but that split into two systems at some date in our evolutionary history’.45 Proust, it seems, was not so wide of the mark.
The shared history of what we have come to regard as two quite separate modalities has been taken up by Gary Tomlinson, in a remarkable study from 2015.46 Like Mithen, Tomlinson is interested in getting beyond the usual accounts of the relation between music and language that tend to look for one being derived from the other. Proceeding by a kind of ‘cognitive archaeology’, Tomlinson proposes a ‘co-evolutionary’ theory of music and language.47 Tracing this process across a million years of hominin development, he argues that, far from being peripheral or relatively trivial to evolution, ‘the set of capacities that enables musicking is a principal marker of modern humanity’.48 And it is in the differences between these capacities and those of language that Tomlinson locates the huge significance of ‘musicking’ in the development of modern humans. Key to this is the idea of entrainment, which for most of the period in question has to do with the ‘taskscapes’ of toolmaking and finding food. But ‘among the most precise forms of human social entrainment are musical ones, especially entrainment in musical meters’.49
Both Mithen and Tomlinson propose an evolutionary view in which music is not merely the manifestation of capacities already established elsewhere in cognitive and social development, but in which ‘musicking’ is a key practice through which such capacities are developed in the first place. Music, from such a view, is not a late addition to the cognitive skill set of early modern man, a pleasant and diversionary pastime acquired after the serious business of evolutionary tasks; on the contrary, the ‘co-evolutionary’ approach suggests that the modalities of musical tasks were integral to the development of the individual and collective mind. Tomlinson’s primary concern is to argue that ‘musicking’ is overlooked in the usual accounts of symbolic cognition as central to human development, and that making language ‘preeminent’ obscures other behaviours. But the widely shared idea of a proto-language, understood in relation to a vast evolutionary time-scale, begs a question about the relation between music and language in contemporary life. Mithen is particularly interested in an aspect of intellectual development common to us all, the infant acquisition of language, and thus ‘a source of evidence that suggest that music has a developmental, if not evolutionary, priority over language’. So-called infant-directed speech (IDS), the highly musicalised kind of speech used to address infants, would seem to be a universal of language use. Its proximity to proto-language is certainly thought provoking, given that Mithen summarises proto-language as either ‘compositional’ (using distinct words but with very limited or no grammatical ordering) or ‘holistic’ (a system in which the whole utterance is the message which cannot be separated out into individual words),50 and Tomlinson suggests proto-language is ‘in effect a lexicon without grammar’, a ‘sequenced communicative behaviour’ that is gestural and bodily as well as vocal.51
Tomlinson’s model of ‘musicking’ has nothing to do with representation or referential sign systems: ‘Musicking in its modern guises structures acoustical information in complex ways without necessary reference beyond itself; it is arguably the most intricate self-conscious human organizing of information of any sort with such pervasive, immanent nonreferentiality.’52 It sounds very much like Kant’s characterisation of what takes place in the mind when it is engaged aesthetically – a free play of the cognitive faculties without being bound to a concept and thus, to an external referent. And, for Tomlinson, the non-referential and musical aspects of protolanguage represents a very significant achievement of the human mind: the ‘abstracting of pitch from meaning represents a momentous swerve in communicative means as, for the first time in the long development of human communication, a new ingredient appeared in vocalised gesture that attenuated meaning and referentiality rather than bolstering and specifying them’.53 ‘Musicking’, in other words, embodied the achievement of a sophisticated non-referential communication. Tomlinson points to ‘far-reaching consequences of this swerve in a new kind of sociality, a transcendental sociality that could sponsor both ritual and religion – and tightly bind musicking to them’.54
Why was it so momentous that ‘musicking’ should bring with it a kind of behaviour distant from referential meaning? Because in this way, Tomlinson argues, music embodied and developed a definitive and highly-valued human capacity for a kind of abstract thinking that was ‘resistant to signification’.55 It represented a key moment in humans’ increasing capacity ‘to think at a distance’56 as opposed to requiring a copresence with the object of discourse. Music, in other words, is both the product of, but also the training ground for, the definitive human capacity to think that which is not physically present, the basic premise of the ‘vast expanse of the human imaginarium’ and the very possibility of a metaphysics – of thinking a world not immediately present. From the earliest beginnings, then, musicking was not a means of reflecting or expressing aspects of human life but rather of enabling and developing ‘the structural aspects of cognition’.57 Without them, Tomlinson argues, with the resources of language alone, we could never have developed in the way that we did:
Language does not offer, except in league with musicking, modes of entrainment precise and hierarchized; its intonational structures remain analog in nature and even in tonal languages, offering no developed hierarchies such as discrete-pitch combinatoriality; and its timbral limitations do not afford the boundless explorations of the soundscape available through musical tools. These are the features that constrained the role of language in the coalescence of human modernity. They are the musical absence at the heart of language.58
Such considerations are of a quite different order to the concern of my own book. Compared to the vast evolutionary timescale of Tomlinson’s project, the musical repertoire on which I have focused is no more than the blink of an eye. But with this idea – ‘the musical absence at the heart of language’ – they find a point of overlap. I cite these studies not to prove an argument but as an example of the radical way we might rethink what music is and what music does. In the scheme of things, music ‘after Debussy’ may indeed be no more than the briefest of historical moments, but Tomlinson’s closing thoughts suggest a way of connecting this historical particular to a much larger perspective:
It is not that ancient humans anticipated modern musical formalism, but that all the formalist conceptions of musical effect generated in Western discourse over the last two centuries – and in many other times and places as well – have been groping their way toward basic, ancient truths about musicking and its difference from language.59
The scientific accuracy or theoretical plausibility of the accounts of Tomlinson, Mithen, and other recent writers, are not my concern here. My interest is with our present understanding of what music might be. From that perspective, Proust’s moment of speculation about music’s potential has a historical ‘truth’ to it. George Steiner, who knew nothing of such recent enquiries into the paleolithic record, came to a similar point of view from a quite different starting point:
I believe the matter of music to be central to that of the meanings of man, of man’s access to or abstention from metaphysical experience. Our capacities to compose and to respond to musical form and sense directly implicate the mystery of the human condition. To ask “what is music?” may well be one way of asking “what is man?”.60
What sounds like poetic speculation, in Proust or Steiner, meets recent evolutionary theory half way. As Tomlinson has it, there is ‘a close kinship between the beginnings of music and those of humanly-enacted meaning itself’ such that ‘a world without music . . . would be explicitly inhuman’.61
But the idea of a pre-linguistic mode of understanding, in terms of early hominin development, finds a parallel in the pre-conceptual moment of all perception. Making sense of the world is prior to language not simply in terms of human evolution, or the development of infants’ cognition, but in the space kept open by aesthetic experience. It may be that the moment of perception, prior to language rushing in, is less than a micro-second – perhaps a merely virtual or theoretical gap – but it is also true that we deliberately cultivate certain kinds of experience to foster the opposite, to keep open the field of apperception by holding off conceptual determination (witness Kant’s understanding of contemplating ‘the beautiful’ in both nature and art). The contemplation of nature and art have in common that both afford a space for an embodied and non-linguistic experience of the world – an experience, moreover, we actively seek to cultivate. But an idea of art, or nature, as communication, symbol, or representation, obscures this more fundamental capacity.
By contrast, approaches to art that foreground the act of appearing also foreground the act of perception itself and thus a certain kind of being in the world. At odds with the attitude that divides self and world – an instrumental relationship necessary for hunting or land development, say – aesthetic perception has to do with a kind of knowledge that ‘intertwines’ (Merleau-Ponty) the viewer and the viewed. The hinge between these two modes of seeing the world is the same as that which joins and separates music and language. We cannot rewind the process of language acquisition, neither that of human evolution as a whole nor that of our own individual cognitive development, but we can deploy language in different ways or choose, momentarily, to silence it. Aesthetic practice is precisely that: cultivating a sense of the world that appears when we make spaces in language. For Michel Serres, as for Derrida or Nancy, this is the space of writing, conceived in the broadest sense. Music, for Serres, is precisely the ‘space before meaning’ towards which the writer works, in contradistinction to the philosopher:
The writer descends from meaning [sens] towards music because what he writes designates silently that which he can never say; he writes meaning in order to blindly sign towards a space before meaning; he therefore under-writes with music in order that, in words, he can say thousands of varied things. For his part, the philosopher instead haunts the totality of meaning and tries to speak in many voices [ . . . ].62
Of course, in a linguistic world, this desire to return to an experience of things ‘before’ and ‘without’ language will always looks ‘naïve’, a term whose pejorative tone masks something which is the object of profound longing – the nativus, the place of origin, the childhood state we spend a lifetime trying to refind, as in Proust’s rewriting of a lifetime. Serres muses on the apparent impossibility of the task:
Hoping for a return to things themselves, we have naively desired to hear, to see and to visit, to taste, to caress, to feel, to open ourselves to the donné [given]. How can this be done without speech? To unpick ourselves from a flesh which has spoken for millennia? Does there exist a single donné independent of language? If yes, how could it be apprehended? The discussion closes before it begins: nothing is known of language for saying the donné independent of language.63
In a world ‘filled up without gap by propositions and categories’, is it not the case, Serres asks, that ‘language and language alone give the donné?’.64 But his answer, to the contrary, is that there nevertheless remains a space ‘which resists being assigned by language and which is still without concept’, and that space is the space of the body.65 The body is the place where word and world intertwine, not as an opposition but as an interface. For Serres, this mixing [alliage] of sense [sens] and signification [sens] is heard in the sound [son] of the voice, a sound that is heard through the body, by means of the generalised tympanum of the skin (which is to say, as touch).66 The sense that lies within and beneath the voice before it speaks any words, is for Serres a kind of proto-linguistic music he likens to the voice of the sirens – one that Ulysses refuses but which Orpheus turns into music. ‘Music, beneath language, universally beneath languages, its physical support and condition, resides beneath and before sense. Sense supposes and would not emerge without it.’67 The voice of the sirens thus joins with the proto-language of the earliest stages of human sense-making; both still resonate within music.
Which brings us back to the kind of listening we considered in the Prologue. The ‘givenness’ of the world (le donné du monde) appears not in the noise of language but only through patient listening, not in acts of saying but in transparent acts of appearing and taking place. In order for the donné to appear, one needs space, distance, and solitude – above all, distance from the ‘enclosure’ of language that ‘prohibits one seeing that its noise obfuscates and disturbs the things of the world and makes them flee’.68 In a nod to Mallarmé, Serres pictures the philosopher who contemplates the apple tree in blossom through his window. What follows? ‘Long dissertation on the tree, the design which makes possible the image which he has of it or the word he writes which is found in his language, on the absence of all orchards.’69 The actual tree, outside, is quite another thing. Philosophy forgets that it looks through the window of language, from inside the house. Or, if it doesn’t forget, it denies the possibility of stepping outside. The philosopher sees only the discourse, the words, not the world, because the words are precisely what keeps the world from him. Which is where philosophy might learn from art, and precisely why philosophers have perennially turned to art.
Compare, for example, the presenting of presence that takes place in the painting of a tree in blossom, such as Van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms (1890) (see Figure 10.1). The representation of actual blossom seen in an orchard gives way to the epiphanic intensity of the act of appearing itself (hence the lack of any interest here in the rest of the tree or its location). Or consider the famous scene in Proust’s Du Côté de chez Swann in which, while out on a family walk, the young Marcel catches his first glimpse of Gilberte through a mass of hawthorn bushes laden with blossom. In Proust’s account, the linear progress of the walk gives way to a quite different temporality of inward experience, arrested and suspended by the searing intensity of colour, scent, and light. The effect is described as having an effect like music which, Marcel recalls, ‘offered me the same charm endlessly and with an inexhaustible profusion’.70
Figure 10.1 Vincent van Gogh, Almond Blossom (1890)
Merleau-Ponty may well have been thinking of Proust when, in a rare comment on music, he collapses the presumed connection of language to the world back into a merely self-referential system:
If it still seems to us that language is more transparent than music, it is because we remain for the most part within constituted language, we provide ourselves with available signification, and we limit ourselves – like the dictionary – to indicating equivalences between our definitions [ . . . ]. In music, however, no vocabulary is presupposed: the sense appears tied to the empirical presence of sounds, and this is why music seems unable to speak. But as we have said, the clarity of language is in fact established against an obscure background, and, if we push the research far enough, we find that language itself, in the end, says nothing other than itself, or that its sense is not separate from it.71
Adorno, thinking about music in relation to philosophy, similarly drew out the quality of self-referentiality common to both:
Beethoven’s music is immanent in the same way as is philosophy, bringing forth itself. Hegel, who has no concepts outside philosophy, is, in that sense, likewise concept-less in face of the ‘heterogeneous continuum’. That is to say, his ideas, like those of music, are explained only by each other.72
It is an old idea that goes back to the age of Beethoven and Hegel themselves, and thus to the origins of the crisis of language in modernity that was underscored by the extraordinary rise in the status of instrumental music around 1800. Hegel himself states, in the Logic (1812–16), the impossibility of translating a philosophical notion into other terms (‘The fact is that in a notion there is nothing further to be thought than the notion itself’)73 and a similar idea is found among several of Hegel’s contemporaries. Novalis, in the Monologue (1798), similarly insists that words are not about anything but themselves.74 A century later, as Debussy and his contemporaries asserted the self-sufficiency of musical sense unregulated by linguistic sense, philosophers of language were already approaching the same point from the opposite direction. Fritz Mauthner, in his astonishing Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–02) outlined a project for delimiting the limits of language: ‘Once philosophy becomes a critique of language, the critique, in turn, becomes the self-liberation of philosophy.’ More than that: ‘Critique of language must teach liberation from language as the highest aim of self-liberation.’75
All of this is, perhaps, true. But, as Nancy insists, we go on speaking. We may acknowledge the uncomfortable gap between the self-presence of music and the infinite deferral of language, but we still bring them together. We may admit that, placed in close proximity, the self-sufficient sense of music quietly refuses the impotent babble of words that follow, but we still speak about music, from the casual nonsense of words after a concert to the neologisms of music theory and philosophy. We may even concede that, in the presence of music, the urge to keep speaking is a kind of deferral of experience, the product of anxiety in the face of a wordless experience, and yet we continually rush to fill that gap. So what would a more productive coming together of words and music look like? The discourse with music I have in mind is necessarily subjective because, in the absence of the particularity of a subjective engagement, no art takes place. But such a discourse is certainly not without rigour; it may be closer to the writing of literature than to legal reports, historical chronicles, or inventories of goods, but the writing of literature demands absolute rigour in the choice of every word and the balancing of every phrase.
Music itself displays, at every turn, such rigorous particularity – witness the infinite care in every nuance of the tone, timing, and spacing of sounds in any musical performance worth the name. The disparity between such musical precision and the careless language that follows is breath-taking. So much care within music (in every detail of its writing, its preparation, and its performance); so little care with the words that rush in to fill the vacuum of silence before and after (from programme notes to radio presenters, lectures to post-concert interviews, conference papers to musicological articles). Like diffèrance, what is imagined here ‘is not a “concept” or “idea” that is “truer” than presence. It can only be a process of textual work, a strategy of writing’.76 We might add, also a strategy of listening, of reading, of analysis, and of criticism, and thus something that emerges only in the ‘doing’ of musicology. To paraphrase Nancy, we do not speak about music in order, one day, to arrive at some hitherto elusive understanding or knowledge of the content of music, but precisely the opposite. We speak about music because its sonorous (linguistic) silence opens a space within our language use and, thereby, upon the world we construct through language and the way we live in it through language.
The margins of music
We no longer know what music is. Its boundaries have been constantly challenged for over a century – from an avant garde that blurs the distinction between music and sound and between the agency of composers and that of listeners; from the perspective of an anthropology that locates music in embodied social practices rather than textual or sonic objects; from an ecological view that understands music within a broader biological view of the sonic environment. One might begin to talk less about music as such, than simply being musical – a kind of being in the world that embodies an aesthetic attentiveness to ourselves and our environment. But such a condition of musical being-in-the-world brings us not only to the margins of music, but also to the margins of philosophy, and quite possibly of ecology or even theology, since it has to do with relations between things and a way of perceiving oneself as part of a wider whole. Music is not self-contained; the edges of its mute seas ebb against the shorelines of linguistic thought.
Such a broad conception of a musical being-in-the-world might blur with the special kind of attentiveness afforded by an aesthetic attitude in general – ‘a form of awareness’, Martin Seel suggests, ‘that is constitutive of the human form of life’, without which, ‘human beings would have a vastly diminished sense of their life’s presence’.77 It is not that aesthetic perception replaces conceptual determination of the world but that it may temporarily suspend the latter. ‘Whoever can perceive something that is determined can also disregard this determination, or to be more precise can disregard the fixation on this determination.’78 This would be the value of an aesthetic way of knowing the world – that it suspends the fixation of a conceptual, instrumental, thing-based way of knowing and thus reconnects us.
In aesthetic intuition, we desist from the exclusively determining and affecting orientation. We liberate ourselves from its determinations. We abstain for the sake of presence. We allow ourselves to be abducted to presence. Aesthetic intuition is a radical form of residency in the here and now.79
And yet, the musical object remains. More than that, in the very particular culture of musical écriture on which I have focused, the musical work remains. The writing of sound – its self-reflective, self-critical, self-aware reconfiguring of the world – partakes in this aesthetic attentiveness to the world but is, at the same time, something quite distinct. After John Cage, after attending to the sounds of the world, after listening for the music of birdsong and whalesong, after immersing ourselves in the ambient and acousmatic sounds of the world, urban and natural, we still make musical works. Why? What is it that they do that the natural world does not? What is it to write sound?
Having opened out the bounded idea of music (as texted artwork) to the unbounded idea of a musical being-in-the-world, I return, by way of conclusion, to the nature of works of musical écriture. But in drawing back to the specificity of these (eccentric, peculiar, and particular) musical texts there is no closing of the gap that has been opened. The end of the enquiry is hardly to conclude by making a closure; quite the opposite, it is to have opened a space the better to hear the resonance between two things. If there were any conclusion, it would be that the gap is precisely where we think, write and live. If such music partakes in, and gives us access to, a way of being in the world, it also remains – as art – a bounded object.
My conclusion also returns to the question of musicology, understood less in a narrowly professional, disciplinary sense and more as the much wider field of language-use that surrounds music. It may be that ‘to do musicology’ in a way that keeps open the gap between music and language is hardly to do musicology at all anymore, just as many of the philosophers I have drawn upon found themselves at the margins of their own discipline. But a musicology, or a philosophy of music, that treats music as an object to be subsumed under a concept, carries none of its critical capacity into the realm of discourse. The problem far exceeds some ‘merely academic’ issue of professional musicology; on the contrary, it highlights a central question of philosophy and a central question of human lives lived largely in language: How can one speak of the particular? How can one speak at all, without losing the particularity of the world?
How can musicology be more self-reflective of the gap-overlap, the tidal reconfiguring of two spaces that border each other closely but remain quite different? In the words of Peter Szendy, this would be a musicology that ‘does not come after the fact, in the more or less scholarly belatedness of a logos (discourse, speech, or reason) that would tell and establish what the music was or what it meant’, but rather one that begins ‘from within the music: in the gap that opens between the music and its quest for itself as music’.80 One answer surely lies in the traditional focus of musicology on the specificity of the musical object as an act of writing, making, and thinking, rather than simply as the mute occasion for listeners’ experience. Such a focus resists collapsing the essential dialogue of aesthetic encounter into a solipsistic focus on the self (the opposite of the opening out to which aesthetic experience might give access). By the same token, such a focus accords a voice to music within a dialogical relation. It listens to music. By allowing the musical object to stand over and against us, by being open to its particularity rather than occluding it by the projection of ourselves, we are able to receive its gift (Marion). Only then can music rewrite us. Otherwise it merely sways us from side to side and leaves us where we were before.
For Debussy, the very term ‘musicologist’ must have sounded like a suspicious neologism. He was in his early twenties when Guido Adler sketched an outline for the historical and systematic study of music, published in the inaugural issue of the Vierteljahrsschrift für Müsikwissenschaft in 1885.81 The synchronicity is striking: just as music and poetry foregrounded the idea of the unsayable and, across the arts and philosophy, the common-sense equivalence of word and world was being undone, musicology was founded on quite different models drawn from the empirical sciences.82 At this critical historical moment, in the face of the infinite mise en abîme opened up between music and language, musicology opted for firmer ground. Of course, a systematic and ‘scientific’ approach to music was partly a consequence of the wider philosophical crisis and its aesthetic parallels. As music became more problematic, musicology responded by a turn to the certainties of historical and scientific methods. But it remains striking, at the very least, that the work of Mallarmé, Debussy, and their contemporaries, inaugurated an aesthetic attitude that is wholly at odds with the worldview of Musikwissenschaft.
Contemporary with the foundational moments of musicology, Debussy’s music questions the way in which the neologism formed of mousikē and logos disguises a closing of the very gap it should reveal. Perhaps musicology might be served better by a different orthography, one that draws attention to its own internal disjunction – Music//ology, or Music≠ology, or even, Musicology – in other words, a discourse that would open up the gaps between music and language and thereby open up the gaps within language itself. That would be the task of a musicology which allowed itself to be shaped by the music to which it listened – a musicology neither directed at rendering into language the ‘content’ of music nor seduced by the ‘nothing’ that it says, but insisting on presenting the non-identity of what is said and is not said, of sound and silence, sense and signification. Such a discourse would have as its task to bring music continually into the realm of words not to explain music, to render it articulate through words, but rather to better define the edges of words, to reveal the spaces carved out in language by music. This takes us further than simply repeating the mantra of music’s ineffability, while avoiding the tendency of all musicology to become like Golaud, bitter and bewildered, dragging Mélisande around by the hair and demanding that she speak ‘la verité’.
Far from bringing us to linguistic silence, as Nancy underlines, ‘we have to keep pressing speech, language, and discourse’ against the ‘body’ of a music that both relates to such approaches and resists them at the same time. A century after Debussy’s death, there are belated signs that we may be rethinking how we speak about music. Key to such a move is reversing the way in which musicology, from its inception, has massively undervalued its own object. Because musicology deferred to the assumed priority of a model of knowledge drawn from the human sciences, based on empirical, positivist, and linguistic frameworks, it largely ignored the different logic of musical thought – the aesthetic modes of knowledge and critical reflection that music affords – and turned a deaf ear to the specific nature of music’s mute but sonorous articulation. It has taken a century or so of linguistic self-reflection on language (from Mallarmé to Derrida, Fritz Mauthner to Albrecht Wellmer) to challenge this assumption of linguistic priority. In that same century, the difference has been explored within musical écriture itself, in richly sonorous works whose refined reflections on knowing the world sensuously have largely been ignored by academic musicology. To be sure, musicology has catalogued, analysed, annotated, and curated this music, exhaustively recorded the provenance and reception of musical works and detailed the lives of their composers, but without knowing what these objects are or what encounters they might occasion.
So how could it be different? How could speaking about music be built around the gap between music and language, sense and signification, listening and understanding? How could musicology open up this vertiginous gap within its own discursive language, rather than using the latter to close it down? One answer is that musicology might learn something from the art that is meant to be its object. Rather than rendering the volatile art of music into the solid categories of language, a reversed hermeneutics might allow music to open up (critique, question, explore, enlarge) the gaps within language. Such an approach would bring to the discourses of language the critically different modes of embodied thought that music enacts. But how do we speak about music precisely to open up the gap which defines these two constitutive modalities of the mind, the highly charged space across which sparks the tension between like and not-like?
By definition, any possible answer lies not in the abstractions of theory but in individual encounters between music and language, the only approach that remains faithful to art’s logic of material particularity and one I have insisted on throughout this book. In the Prologue, I suggested that the plural branches of musicology today were plurally fragmented around an absent centre. This is that absent centre: the refusal, fuelled by professional and institutional anxieties, to allow musical encounter to resonate with and be engaged by the discourses of musicology. A refusal of music. More serious still, a refusal of oneself and a refusal of the kinds of being in the world that musical encounter affords. The musicologist is not alone in this, in reserving a certain way of being for the unspoken realm of private experience while strictly expunging it from professional activity. This, after all, is the default position of all professional discourse, from philosophy to politics, which is why all professional discourse excludes the very thing it most needs. But those who write about art and music have a particular responsibility, because the purported object of our practice is a special kind of access to this special kind of being in the world. Our refusal of it, our silencing of it within our own discourses, is thus a special kind of betrayal.
I am not suggesting that we be any less rigorous; there are other kinds of rigour than the empirical facticity of contextual music history or the scholarly performance of current theoretical orthodoxy. But the writing about music I am interested in here has to do with what is not historical in music, nor political, nor philosophical. Lyotard puts it like this:
It is a grave and common error to impose a classification by periods or schools on works of art. In reality, you’re only classifying cultural products, which belong in effect to observable phenomenon of historical reality, like political events, demographical mutations, and economic changes. But what there is that is art in works of art is independent of these contexts, even if art shows itself only within those contexts and on their occasion.83
It is not that we cannot, or should not, study music as a ‘cultural product’; understanding the mute art of music as part of a wider social, political and cultural history remains a powerful contribution of musicology to the wider study of the Humanities. But we should also acknowledge that when we study music in this way it ceases to function as art and becomes like any other ‘observable phenomenon of historical reality’ – objects (newspapers, clocks, wigs, steam engines, phonographs), ideas (freedom, dialectics, truth, self-expression), techniques (counterpoint, sonata form, developing variation, coloratura), people (Mozart, Rossini, Schenker, Karajan), events (the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring). It is, of course, not so simple as to recast musicology into two branches: the contextual study of objects and social practices associated with music on the one hand, and the study of aesthetic encounter on the other. I exaggerate the difference between them simply to make a point. Proust does it better when, in Time Regained, he scorns the musicologist, who, refusing sensuous immediacy in the name of erudite commentary, ‘spends his life going from one concert to the next, embittered and unsatisfied as his hair turns grey and he enters an unfruitful old age, the celibate bachelor of art’.84
Anyone who tries to write on music knows this gap. There is no kind of writing on music that does not have to wrestle with the tension between whatever ‘music’ may be and the discourse we bring to it. I confess to beginning this project with the idea that music was divided from language by an unbridgeable gap and that the relation of words and music was defined by their incommensurability. If music had some kind of compensatory function, in a modernity dominated by instrumental language and a postmodernity dominated by digital information, then this would be characterised by a schism between two different orders of being, thinking, and knowing. The central challenge of my project would thus be how to delineate in words that which refuses words. But as I progressed I realised that such an absolute dichotomy is false. One is of course bound into the other, takes place across the boundaries of the other: they are co-present in our evolution (as a species), in the development of every (a-linguistic) infant to (articulate) adulthood, in the flickering between experience and speaking, the wrestling between grammar and the body. Writing about music is therefore less bridging a gap between two apparent opposites (fire and water, say) than thinking through the intimate non-identity of two parts of the same mind – like the relationship between the solid material of the stream bed and the water that flows through it, one shaped by the other at every turn.
The temptation to collapse music back into ineffability does not go away, because ineffability is what we call one part of this process. Taken in isolation, there are plenty of passages in the writings of Jankélévitch that seem to do just this, and even Marcel Proust, one of the greatest writers on music, sometimes appears to fall into the same trap. It is not that the idea is completely false, but that music is, at one and the same time, both outside of language and also always in relation to it.85 Proust and Jankélévitch knew this perfectly well, which is why music occupies such an important role in their own literary and philosophical language-work. Jankélévitch wrote several books on music and often referred to music in his others – books on death, irony, and time. At the heart of all of them, to borrow the title of one of the shortest, is the idea of the ‘Je-ne-sais-quoi’ and the ‘presque rien’. What is this thing, he asks, which is the bad conscience of a rationalism which imagines it can say exactly what things are, something which does not exist but yet is the most important thing, the only thing worth trying to say but the one thing one cannot say, whose presence fulfils us and whose absence leaves us anxious? How can one explain the irony of this paradox, this pathos of incompleteness which haunts the margins of philosophy?86
Only the part is sayable; such is the nature of language. What cannot be said is the whole, which in this respect, is the same as nothing. Saying nothing, as we have seen, is art’s way of presenting the whole. It is the paradox of all philosophy, which tries through saying to build a whole, that saying always makes un-whole. There is nothing mystical about Jankélévitch’s insistence on the unsayable (indicible), the mystery that cannot be spoken; it is simply a way of designating this whole that always eludes the saying of language. Music, on the other hand, which does not say, nevertheless embodies, ‘while the music lasts’, an unsayable whole – provisional, particular, and evanescent, but a whole nevertheless. This is why music is so strongly allied with the idea of love, because it has the capacity to make present the plenitude of the whole while remaining utterly particular. It is also, perhaps, why music makes us weep, because it momentarily restores a fullness of being that is lost in all the saying of language.