The music of the "je ne sais quoi" by Jacques Delaruelle

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it…[i] 

In the phenomenological description of the activity, art is usually defined in explicit reference to a
production whose object only comes into being once its viewer has assumed an imaginative stance or
find himself engaged in an actively guided rêverie. And because a work of (visual) art is not merely
what we see, but also what there is about it which lures our gaze and makes us respond to its worth, it
cannot be fully appreciated in terms of its material existence only. Its worth must be understood as the
product of a complex experience, one that is simultaneously active and passive, subjective and
objective, social and private, in other words, trans or inter-subjective. The reason why the attention
produced by art can only received as a gift to begin with -the object must be perceived before it can be
viewed- is that a feeling of pleasure corresponds to its existence. A pleasure which, no sooner felt,
becomes generative of unpredictable thoughts and inconclusive ideas. One wonders about the source of
this power... but it is neither the price of the object, nor its place in the social discourse that validates it
as ‘art’ and triggers our enjoyment. Not even its aura triggers the special interest of the community of
singular viewers to which works of art address themselves. What, then, causes our pleasure and beyond
it, the judgement which our intelligence may later try to articulate into more definite propositions? 
To answer the above, it may initially be useful to recall Kandinsky's conviction that form and colour
are the most complete and the most powerful of all the visual means of visual communication. One can
also go further back and remember why theologians warn their respective audiences against the
emotive charge of colour and the erotic elan it generates. But like Goethe, Kandinsky believed "the
relationships of art not to be necessarily of outward forms", but based rather "on inner sympathy and
meaning"; he thought that the essence of the visual arts was the music of colour. 

The soul being one with the body, the former may well experience a psychic shock caused by
association acting on the latter. For example red may cause a sensation analogous to that caused by
flame, because red is the colour of the flame. A warm red will prove exciting , another shade of red
will cause pain or through association with running blood. In these cases colour awakens a
corresponding physical sensation which undoubtedly works upon the soul.

Of course there are cases where colours refuse to be classified in this analogical manner. And
Kandinsky, like Baudelaire before, believed that the power of art is not so much to evoke this world as,
by means of its communicative force, to suggest other worlds through a blissful rupture with the reality
principle. His conviction was that art should not intend to reproduce anything, but to re-endow
coloured marks with their proper value. It was because of its separateness from nameable reality that
music was deemed more appropriate than painting in this sort of endeavour. It was from music that
Kandinsky wanted to learn how to reach beyond the everyday sphere and lift the viewers above the
ground of their trivial preoccupations. And in a comparable manner, Nietzsche also was also convinced
that only music allowed for the sublime experience of an understanding without word. He wrote that
"as the vehicle of man's transformation of existential pain into ecstatic celebration of appearance, music
proves superior to words and reason, image and concept". Music unifies pleasure and pain, and only
the rhythm of art can transport us beyond the limits of the self. Music like colour vies to an ecstatic
unity affirming the illusory nature of sensuous boundaries. To the philosopher of the Eternal
Return, music was the active principle of all communication. It was the gift of a musical ear, or that of
an innate musical sense, which made possible the spontaneous understanding of the artistic sensibility.
Yet even if it were true that the re-education of sensibility by theoretical and practical reason led to an
impoverished conception of the artistic language, might it not be indulgent to return to Walter Pater's
conviction that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music". One ought perhaps to read
Pater's whole passage again before deciding...

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is
possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this
distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for
instance, its subject, namely its given incidents or situation, -that the mere matter of a picture, the
actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of landscape- should be nothing without the
form, the spirit of the handling, that this form this mode of handling, should become an end in itself,
should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieve in
different degree. 

Such a lofty definition was, even when Pater wrote it in 1873, an unoriginal statement. Both Novalis
and Schopenhauer had already described music as a universal language that could overcome the basic
deficiency of all verbal pronouncements. And in a similar vein Verlaine (almost at the same time) was
asking, on behalf of Poetry itself, de la musique avant toute chose, thus returning to the venerable
conception of music as harmonia mundi that implies the presence of a musical core at the heart of all
signification. But what if such a core were in fact simply a node of relationships and music nothing but
a system of regulated differences with no positive terms, where notes become what they are by relation
to other notes within a given tonality. Here Novalis' definition of the musical spirit of language as
mathematical spirit springs to mind.

If one could only make people understand that language is like mathematical formulae -they constitute
a world for themselves- they only play with themselves, express nothing but their wonderful nature,
and that is why they are so expressive- that is the strange game of relationship of things, reflect itself
in them [ii]. 

The meaning of musical Beauty

that emerges from the this conception of harmony also echoes a grand metaphysical postulation
reminiscent of the Pythagoriacal mode. It suggests that the enjoyment of art rests upon an organisation,
all the more fascinating, that it remains hidden, or is visible only by the eye of the mind. Since nothing
material can be deemed beautiful in itself, what must be seen, and this is the role of theory in the
ancient acceptance of the term, is the place of the parts in the system, or the work's formal organisation.
Which sends us back, once again, to the idea of the beautiful (as formosus) depending entirely on the
existence of a formal relationship between the parts of the work. Naturally such an agreement of the
parts (harmony) also requires a conformity with the place and the moment during which the work is
experienced, and more generally, what used to be known as convenance (in French) or in
English, decorum. But this once cardinal notion can also be understood in different ways. First, it can
be grasped in terms of the relation between the parts and the whole, whose unity is created by the
dynamics of the parts. In that sense convenance must intuited by the beholder or the listener who can
then refer his/her perception to an intention (authorship), or even to the deus ex machina having
devised the interaction of the forms within the composition. Aristotle is the most illustrious exponent of
the theory which sees structural integrity as the main quality of a work of art, but the same fundamental
thought recurs time and time again in the history of ideas. Descartes, for instance, states that "beauty is
an agreement (of part to part), a perfect harmony of all the parts together, and that none of the parts
could have precedence". Because it is formal, the agreement of the parts is to be grasped by the eye as
well as the intelligence. It is experienced during a response to it that can best be described as belonging
simultaneously to the sense of sight/hearing and the intellect. In its most elementary form, convenance
or proportion connotes regularity. It makes one aware of the presence of rule and the repetition of a
single element suffices to distinguish the order of a work of art from chaos or chance. Symmetry
constitutes a more complex kind of convenance. It organises different elements according to a
reference, be it a point in space, a straight line, or even a plane which imposes an organisation
reflecting the fundamental orientation of the body. All this suggests the supernatural presence of a
mathematical beauty, or more precisely of a mathematical essence of beauty. It would be difficult at
this point no to mention again the early Greek philosopher for whom being came to mean the being of
mathematical objects. Numbers and figures were thought by him to be the essence of all things. All that
existed was an imitation of mathematical objects and Pythagoras believed numbers to be the things
themselves. Numbers were deemed changeless and eternal, radically different from all worldly things
that are variable and transitory. To them correspond special properties and strange analogies between
measures, numbers and sounds and here we might recall the mathematical theory of music in which the
relationships between the length of the strings of instruments and the corresponding note was used to
carry out a quantitative study of everything musical. Even the distance of the planets from the earth
was thought to correspond to the musical intervals and this led the Pythagoreans to suppose that every
star emitted a note and that all the notes together comprised the harmony of the spheres. Such a divine
music could not be heard by the naked ear because it was constant and without variation, but it could
still be grasped by means of philosophical contemplation (theoria).

 Much more than a

scheme or a method to compose works of art, harmony, from times immemorial, was understood as a
heuristic instrument. But at the turn of the past century a new element came to disrupt the sovereign
edifice of classical harmony and reintroduce the demonic presence of music, the passion of its body. If
music in itself represents nothing, but a purely relational formation of sounds, it can then be construed
as no more than a constructed mirage. But if this assumption flies in the face of the first realisation one
comes across in relation to music, the brute fact of its active presence. There is something about music
which is not merely a quality, but a reality, even if this reality is infinitely difficult to grasp
conceptually, and probably not meant to be grasped at all in this way. For it is impossible to
distinguish, as one talks about music or art, between form and content, or to get back to the linguistic
paradigm, to separate the musical (the poetic) and the referential.

For if according to Saussure -a language only consists of differences, and if, furthermore, the
differences are unsayable, then one can justifiably claim that the unsayable is the ground of the
sayable [iii] .
Though cryptic, the formula points towards a fundamental realisation. Language is not merely a a
nexus of formal relationships, but a phenomenon to which a musical intelligibility corresponds. Never
a matter of pure semantic understanding, the music of language co-exists with its logical indications.
Similalry perhaps the musical intelligibility of a musical performance echoes a partial and often
passionate interpretation of homological signs as well as the various nuances schematically indicated
by the composer (with such terms as presto agitato, molto adagio, allegretto moderato, etc...). All such
indications connote types of feelings that must be rendered by the interpreter of the composition. Here,
of course, the difficulty is to read an indication of feeling without producing it to a cliche?  So the task
of the interpreter of a score is not simply the deciphering of conventionally notated sounds, but rather
the translation of their original meaning within the performance, as an expression of its origin or the re-
creation in a creative moment. To read a work of art is to remake its making which is why all great
readings of works of art (and not only music) are works of art. At work, the artist does not only
produces a copy or a quotation of antecedents, but he also reveals that the significance of a composition
is necessarily in excess of its constituent parts. This supplement of meaning is the artistic performance
proper. 
As one seeks, no doubt clumsily, to define what music and more generally still, the music of art is, one
often finds oneself reduced to engage in an elimination process. But then one is left with the banality
that there is something in music which is neither the voice of the singer, nor the melody, nor the
orchestra, nor the poetry of words, nor the harmony, nor even the performance, but the suggestion of a
different order of signification. Even the existential presentness of a performed work cannot be
adequately defined as the material assemblage of all its signifying elements. One feels, after a concert,
that there was something else, a something which can be neither axiomatised, nor fully explained.
Claude Lévi Strauss once wrote that musicality was "language minus meaning", and here it is unlikely
that he only just meant to reiterate that harmony was the mystère par excellence, a mystery which
nobody so far has been able to resolve on an objective basis (e.g. acoustically). Instead, what he may
have intended to suggest was that nobody except the interpreters themselves have access to "the
energies that can transform" what George Steiner termed "the fabric of our consciousness".
Historically, this dimension of the communication process has for a long time been ignored in the
philosophical understanding of language. The main philosophers of the Viennese Circle disregarded it
and argued that it was only necessary to understand the logic of language to understand what it said.
The logician Rudolf Carnap went so far as to suggest that the sphere of subjective experience could be
reduced to a series of symptoms in the forms of metaphysical belief or aesthetic constructions. Art, he
thought was but a symptomatology whose study belonged to the domain of experimental psychology.
And he went so far (in Philosophy and Logical Syntax) as to assimilate poetry to a series of expressive
onomatopoeia that did not really belong to the domain of articulate languages. 

Many linguistic utterances are analogous to laughing in that they have only an expressive function.
Examples of this are cries like 'Oh, Oh,' or, on a higher level, lyrical verses. The aim of a Iyrical poem
in which occur the words 'sunshine' and 'clouds,' is not to inform us of certain meteorological facts but
to express certain feelings of the poet and to excite similar feelings in us.... Metaphysical propositions
—like lyrical verses (or music)—have only an expressive function, but no representative function.
Metaphysical propositions are neither true nor false, because they assert nothing.... But they are, like
laughing, Iyrics and music, expressive... 

Analytical philosophers were once united in the belief that it is this incapacity to understand language
logically which keeps on interposing between thinkers and clear thought, a set of veils that are
constantly mistaken for naked reality. Thus the difficulty largely consists in recognising the disguise
and then recover the thought it had concealed. As if humanity had literally been cursed by language, or
perhaps by that which in language cannot be captured by logical thought… But to the question of
knowing what music actually is, there can be no answer other than music itself. And though most of us
know (have actually experienced) its power, from the moment we seek to explain it, it ceases to mean
anything. There is no way to paraphrase it, or to find images, even, with which we could give another
person the idea of what we go through. It is notoriously difficult to provide an intelligent response to
the question of knowing what music is or means. Within ourselves, we may know that something is
there, like a memory, a truncated melody that might recur in our dreams, at any time at all, as an
indication that cannot otherwise be phrased. But when music moves into us, there is (in George
Steiner's words) "at once an obviousness and an impalpability which needs to be re-formed and
expressed time and time again". And once again we discover that aspect of both language and music
which is not semantically determinable and which relates only to the deeper layers of our complete
mind. In a discussion on music, language and literature, Andrew Bowie quotes a fascinating passage by
Proust in which the narrator, after hearing the Vinteuil sextet, makes the following hypothesis :
And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has
discarded, I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been -if the
intervention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened- the means
of communication between souls. It is like a possibility that has come to nothing; humanity has
developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language.

To which Bowie adds this illuminating comment:

Proust echoes ideas originating in German Romanticism which lead the Symbolists at the end of the
(19th) century to write 'absolute poetry' as a means of renewing language which is seen as
increasingly inadequate to what the poet wishes to express 
(...) 
The key issue is the rise of aesthetic autonomy. The fact is that the idea of the autonomous work of art
comes about via the rise of absolute music. Both involves a change of attention, away from semantic
determinacy in language, to the sense that what is really important is unsayable.

The earliest occurrence of absolute music (or music without word) coincided with the rise of the
autonomous work of art and immediately attracted the reproach of hermeticism and obscurity that was
to plague the whole modern movement. Again the question was whether pure sound (or colour) would
blur the communication process by preventing the formation of thoughts translatable in a verbal idiom,
or on the contrary enhance the work's expressiveness. Classical art theorists considered colour as the
sensuous element of a painting which had to be controlled by the economy of the lines and the
academic principles of composition. Music without words was primarily a divertissement, but the
object of classical art was principally the telling of a story. It is therefore crucial to understand the shift
in value from ‘art’ understood as a narration to a conception of the activity redefined as an end in itself.
The conception of art as a controlled activity belonged to the Stoic ideal and to the ambition of self-
mastery that is characteristic of the Classical age. And within this ethical dimension, it was reasonable
to attempt a description of aesthetic phenomena by means of theoretical apparatuses meant to analyse
the kind of perfection proper to their object. When perception was thought to be a lower level of
cognition, the dichotomy between the intellect and the senses led philosophers to attempt a definition
of aesthetics as the science of sensory perception. And though philosophers had always thought that art,
and more particularly music, does give us an idea of truth, the task for modern philosophers, from
Descartes onwards, was to distinguish what this truth was with the greatest possible clarity. But
since the Cartesian criteria of truth could not really be applied to aesthetic phenomena, it became
necessary to distinguish between two very different kinds of discourse. On the one hand, discourse
proper, made of words designating connected representations, and on the other, "sensate discourse",
that is a discourse involving representations or sensuous, corporeal and therefore unclear ideas. As a
method of investigation, a new philosophical discipline was devised to deal with unclear (sensuous)
ideas, whose practical brief was to help artists learn how to produce "a perfect sensate discourse", or a
discourse whose sensate parts would effectively directed towards the apprehension of sensate
representations. A perfect sensate discourse could be a musical composition or an painted image
perfectly designed to make a viewer feel whatever intended sentiments (i.e. religious piety, awe before
royal authority, etc...). And it was the function of art to render and realise sense experience as sharply
as it was possible for specific ends, though of course, not only... Good music had to be legible and bad
music, conversely, referred to a chaos of sonorous impressions (un tintamarre). To avoid the perennial
confusion between what we feel and think, the theorist needed to act as an objective witness. He had to
confine himself to investigating "the causes of that feeling (beauty) which has the force to surprise our
heart by the sweetness of its impression upon us". Which meant that such a witness would not let
himself be swayed by such a sweetness or that he would keep "his mind distant to all the impressions
received in order to withdraw into himself and reduce his ideas to the most simple and indubitable
notions" (Crousaz, Traité du Beau, 1715).
It was, of course, Kant who first identified and conceptualised the inevitably subjective nature of the
aesthetic experience and opened the way for his successors to fully understand that in art, and not just
in music, form is content and content, form. From a conception of art that implied that Beauty (that
which make a music or a painting be beautiful) was but an ensemble of objective and formal qualities,
philosophers moved to a more mysterious conception of 'art' linked to the specifically human faculty of
judgement and the utopia of community of taste. In the process of reading a book, readers enjoy the
rhythm of its sentences, their intonation, their harmony, a preference for certain type of images, the
recurrence of themes, and the many different aspects of a singular worldliness registered in the very
fabric of the text. They are swayed and no longer concerned with the rules aiming at fixing a world of
stable (and verifiable) qualities. If practical language establishes a general framework within which all
things can take place in a predictable manner, the modern musician, poets or artists are mostly
preoccupied with the truth and complete determinacy of a singular expressive mode. Hence the focus
on 'style' redefined as the mark of an individual separateness from a specific norm, and the concomitant
conviction that what really matters about creative artists cannot be reduced to what they have in
common. For instance, Louis Ferdinand Céline's petite musique, the je ne sais quoi which makes his
sentences so absolutely recognisable and endow them with the unique power of conveying "similar
ideas in different minds" (Baudelaire).

[i] Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, act I, scene 1. 

[ii] Andrew Bowie, Aesthetic and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche, Manchester Uni Press, 1990, p 203. 
[iii] Manfred Frank is quoted by Andrew Bowie, op cit p 192. 
[iv] Steiner George, Real Presences, Faber and Faber, London 1989, p 217