Music, metaphor and metaphysics

Musical Times, Autumn 2004 by Kramer, Lawrence

Third, what do metaphors about music do or say? The exact wording of this question is important. Earlier I said that the sceptics' critique of metaphor and metaphysics was based on a misconception of language. The idea that we're bound to say too much or too little whenever we try to describe musical meaning is true enough, if only because it's true of any description or interpretation whatever. But the idea that it is disablingly true is at best a mistake and at worst a pretext for an ideological preference. This idea depends on the assumption that statements about musical meaning are required to represent a content that is objectively coded into the music - precisely what such statements virtually never do. (Not even literary interpretations do that, the presence of unambiguous sentences in the literary text notwithstanding. Criticising an interpretation for failing to correspond with some preexisting meaning is always right - and always beside the point.) This mistaken assumption may be overtly disclaimed, but it cannot be escaped as long as the criterion of representation is allowed to stand. Interpretations do not represent. They comment, transform, and reticulate; they reveal; they complicate and refine. In short, they act.

That action is what the sceptics' scepticism forgets, even if the sceptics themselves remember it. The representational view of interpretation overlooks the understanding of language as a means of communicative action, arguably the most important recognition about language of the past century. The basic principle was formulated most memorably by Ludwig Wittgenstein in just three words: 'Wörter sind Taten', 'Words are deeds'.8 The implications of this principle have become widely known in recent years via the mid-century work of Jürgen Habermas and JL Austin, especially through the latter's concept of the performative speech act.9 This is clearly not the place for an exposition of speech act theory. Suffice it to say, loosely following Austin, that words do things, accomplish things, in the course of being uttered or written, and that what they do or fail to do is important independent of our assessment of them as true or false, assuming that the assessment, in the given case, is possible at all.

What, then, do metaphors do? The short answer, or at least one short answer, is that metaphors generate the metaphysics of everyday life. A metaphor typically conjoins a term drawn from the physical world with a term belonging to a 'higher', non-material domain. Thoughts are winged; truth enlightens; a melody laments. The result is a mutual transfer - metaphor is classical Greek for transfer - of values, concepts, and associations between the conjoined terms. This interplay has been recognised at least since Aristotle, for whom, 'midway between the unintelligible and the commonplace, it is metaphor that most produces knowledge ' (Rhetoric III, 14job). The most recent version of this idea is George Lakoff & Mark Johnson's theory that we organise the world conceptually through metaphors derived from our bodily experience.10