I Deep refrains

Michael Gallope’s book Deep Refrains is an in-depth study of the ineffable core of musical experience.Footnote ⁴ But it engages ineffability without eliminating the pragmatic material of music’s economic, technological and even ethical mediations; and it posits a synergistic relationship between these realms. Gallope casts equal doubt on the determinism that construes music’s ineffability as wholly absorbed in mediation and on the vitalism that construes it as radically open. Framed by and theoretically grounded in the thinking of four twentieth-century philosophers (Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Gilles Deleuze), the book deftly steers between the Scylla of music’s irreducible sensuous materiality (and its attendant invitation to decipherment) and the Charybdis of its elusive ineffability (and its attendant vanishing act in the face of decipherment). The book begins by reflecting on the fascinations and prohibitions of the harmoniaia in ancient Greek philosophy. Already here, Gallope revises the standard interpretation of these founding texts, demonstrating the ways in which Socrates, Glaucon, Aristotle and others in fact consider music as at once deeply mysterious and also strictly rule-governed. This conception of music’s perplexing precision is shown to be shared in ‘global’ contexts less available to music history, including (for example) the Ikhwan Al-Safa, an eleventh-century priesthood of Islamic scholars. At the same time, Gallope draws attention to the continuity between simplified taxonomies of the ancients and the instrumentalization of their axioms for contemporary engagements with affect, so rampant in the era of emerging neuromedia. Instead of recoiling from music’s indeterminacy (retreating to silence, say, or insisting on music’s unspeakable mystery), Gallope attempts to unpack the critical potential at the heart of auditory experience. On the other hand, he argues, such potential is not harnessed by marking the movements of music’s conceptual nomenclatures alone. Noting that music ‘never speaks like a language, nor is it entirely nonlinguistic’, Gallope seeks to account for the specificity of its ‘vague impact’.Footnote ⁵ In other words, while there is a residue of conceptual mediation at work in all sonic encounter, music’s ‘sensory impact’ cannot be subsumed by that residue.

Music’s mediated immediacy – its non-signifying materiality – becomes the central object of investigation in Deep Refrains. In four nuanced and lucid chapters, Gallope elaborates how music’s formally precise but semantically vague sensuousness weighs upon the thinking of four philosophers. In Chapter 1, he outlines Bloch’s dialectical engagement with music’s sublimated history in sound as an avenue to an unforeseen future. Bloch, of course, detects in the musical tone a figure of hope, which is described in detail in the chapter. Gallope is able not only to draw attention to the thought of a lesser-known figure in music philosophy, but also to demonstrate his impact on other writers in his milieu, including Adorno. Chapter 2 explores Adorno’s engagement with music’s ‘material tendencies’ – especially in relation to Schoenberg’s atonality – with said deference to Bloch. This chapter also includes a significant section on Versprachlichung in the works of Gustav Mahler – in particular, the way in which Mahler’s music reaches liberally into literary, visual and olfactory registers of the vernacular – without succumbing to ‘regressive forms of identification’.Footnote ⁶ The latter engagement with Adorno stands as a useful supplement, if not corrective, to the standard grasp of Adorno’s dialectical engagement with music in the academic literature of the 1990s and 2000s. Above all, Gallope is able to harness Adorno’s attention to vernacular detail (its involuntary repetition in Mahler is a case in point), as well as the irreducibility of music’s technological mediation (its phonographic and radiophonic transmission), as productive sites for considering the possibility of musical disruption. The third chapter, framed by an exquisite, if peripheral, interlude on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflection on schweigen in the experience/rendition of melody, explores the work of Jankélévitch. Gallope unpacks the indeterminacy that mediates Jankélévitch’s opposition between music’s ineffability on the one hand and its excessive enjoinment to signification and significance on the other. He contextualizes Jankélévitch’s philosophy of music in relation to the thought of Henri Bergson, arguing that Jankélévitch’s position is less anti-dialectical than it seems (he calls the Jankélévitchean dialectic ‘unwoven’); and that, instead, it engages a kind of ‘speculative multiplicity’ in the face of music’s non-linguistic foundation. Gallope’s close reading of Jankélévitch serves as a useful supplement to the discussions of the ‘drastic’ in music, popularized by the musicologist Carolyn Abbate a decade earlier.Footnote ⁷ Finally, in Chapter 4, Gallope engages Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari, in whose work the writer probably finds his closest philosophical allies. However, this is no ordinary valorization of the philosophers’ thinking, but rather a modification of their argument in relation to insights garnered from previous chapters. The fourth chapter therefore offers a reliable account of the philosophers’ deployments of music for a postmodern philosophy of becoming, on the one hand; but it also makes some striking observations about their latent Pythagorianism, on the other. The latter observations throw the contemporary currency of Deleuze and Guattari into some much-needed historical relief. It is important to note that linkages of this sort would not be possible, or plausible, in the context of a book that cast a narrower net than does Deep Refrains.

Why does a book like this matter? What are the stakes of this project? I would submit that – while seemingly concerned with but a single sensory engagement within the context of a single (and ephemeral) medium – the book actually reaches into questions that are relevant to much wider circulations of affect within sociotechnical systems today. To grasp the complex interplay between the semiotic and the affective within contemporary computing in the era of biotechnification, for example, it behoves us to pay close attention not only to the way in which sonic encounter engages worldly force and signification but also, and more importantly perhaps, to the degree to which it gives it the slip. It is true that Gallope’s attention is primarily focused on the affirmative, productive and, above all, critical potential that is opened up in this space between sense and signification, but the mode of engagement he both describes and practices could be similarly valuable in contexts that focus on the dangerous, unproductive, negative potential opened up within that same sensory space. For example, as recent critical studies have shown, identifications of difference (race, gender, sexuality, etc.), whether registered by human (or machinic) ears (or eyes), require, as a condition for their efficient ideological functioning, a non-signifying substrate. Gallope has not yet turned his attention to this more ideological dimension attendant on his central philosophical engagement, but his model provides us with useful tools for engaging this discursively slippery terrain.

I would further claim that this attentive account of music’s various philosophical valencies has a role to play in the emerging field of sound studies, no less than for the sensory turn in more established fields such as anthropology, media studies and (perhaps surprisingly to the outsider) even musicology and music theory. In what sense? First, Gallope deftly rehabilitates certain deconstructive analytics (emblematic of the linguistic turn; and apparently made anachronistic by the affective one) and furthermore broadens their philosophical reach to include phenomena outside their semiotic remit – the non-signifying force of sonic encounter itself. The rejection of music’s sociolinguistic determinations was dramatized in extremis by the recent interest in the humanities in affect, presence, sensuous knowledge, perceptual deixis, immediacy, intensity and so on. Gallope’s intellectual trajectory was cultivated within this philosophical milieu, which is perhaps why we do not find an outright rejection (or embrace) of theories validating and valorizing presence and affect. Instead, Gallope rectifies the ensuing imbalance wrought by the turn to affect, aspiring (with success) to grasp the fundamental insights of theories of affect, but without thereby recoiling in alarm from the sociohistorical mediations, forms, discourses and, above all, technics that also condition sonic encounter. As a result, across the terrain of four philosophical interlocutors, Gallope elaborates nuances of the dialectical play of a co-dependent dyad (‘a stubborn amalgam of form and sensation’Footnote ⁸), thereby simultaneously detecting the resonance between these philosophical positions.

Secondly, the conceptual base that undergirds Gallope’s defence of enquiries into music’s ineffability involves his recuperation of the emancipatory impulse behind musical experience. With a hint neither of romantic excess on the one hand nor of sociological closure on the other, Gallope both acknowledges the forces of reflex habit (and habituation) and nonetheless detects a kind of productive ‘critical potential’ lodged in the ‘stunning force’ of sound.Footnote ⁹ Thirdly, while he does not elaborate on his evident commitments in a reflexive manner, Gallope in fact promotes a musicology without borders. Paradoxically, the temporary suspension of contextual concerns that might foreclose musical insights (gained through the kind of granular phenomenological analysis we find in Gallope’s listening and writing practice) brings to the ear a richer sense of the multiple networks that constitute the contexts of music’s formation. Above all, without losing analytical rigour, Gallope’s listening strategies can transcend disciplinary and cultural boundaries. He simply disregards the disciplinary stratifications that make of Western music a historical and theoretical object, when non-Western music (or philosophy for that matter), no less than popular music, is held in the grip of anthropological methods alone. He claims as a central cultural referent the ‘avant-garde’, but in fact his musical (and even philosophical) reach extends much further – from the German late-Romantic composer and conductor Mahler and the Greek ancients Cicero, Ptolemy and Boethius to the Bronzeville-based soul band Tridia Brown and the Majestic Arrows; from Fela Kuti, EDM and hip hop to the Islamic Ikhwan Al-Safa priesthood and the Persian poet Rudaki. In short, one might say that for Gallope today’s musical world is, or should at least (to invoke a Deleuzeanism) have avenues that are, ontologically flat. Gallope hereby unmasks some unexamined axioms of academia, which all too often espouses the notion that all musics are created equal, but treats them differently all the same. This fact alone – which is increasingly considered an essential foundation for future musical scholarship and sound studies – distinguishes the theoretical terrain of Deep Refrains from many analogous music-philosophical projects today.

It is important to recognize that one of the primary inflection points of Deep Refrains draws on previous aspects of Gallope’s thought. First, as his chapter in Eric Clarke and David Clarke’s collection Music and Consciousness attests, Gallope in no way subscribes to either unfettered vitalism or unfettered perceptual presence in medio musicorum. Footnote ¹⁰ In fact, ‘Technics, Consciousness, and Musical Objects’ basically reads like a lesson in technics or technicity – a term that combines the concepts of technology and technique – to argue for an overdetermined encounter with musical objects: instruments, interfaces and technologies. Following the thought of Jacques Derrida, Richard Dawkins, Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler, Gallope situates a kind of musical listening that is always already mediated by prosthetics and programmability; or, in Gallope’s words, is caught in the grip of a ‘constitutive technicity’.Footnote ¹¹ This emphasis considerably revises and inflects the philosophical emphasis on music’s perplexing sensuous particularity explored in earlier work on the subject. The results of Gallope’s mixed methodology are put on prominent display in his articles on a scene of improvisation (‘Is Improvisation Present?’) and on the music analysis of a studio rehearsal (‘On Close Reading and Sound Recording’).Footnote ¹² In both articles, Gallope combines the insights wrought of music philosophy with those of post-structuralism on the one hand and recent strains in media studies on the other. For Gallope, the possibility of improvisation, for example, lies at the intersection of formal inscription and real presence, construed as creative action ensnared in the ‘brute “fact of doing”’.Footnote ¹³ Likewise, the close reading of Tridia Brown’s vocal escalations leads Gallope to all manner of discerning intuition about the sociotechnical resonances residing in the music’s elusive memory spaces (from melismas that signal the distress of past incarceration to finger-plucking techniques that echo the world of soul balladeering), thereby drawing back into musical presence an element of semiosis. These are the structuring practices of sound production, which in turn weigh upon the content of immediate perception. Importantly, however, Gallope is not advancing a strict model of technological determinism. Music is both ‘quite systematic’ and ‘irrational and lawless’.Footnote ¹⁴ Ever vigilant to the foundational contingency of musical listening (including cases where we hear a thing and then drift into a memory – or find triggered an association – of another thing, however tenuous the link), Gallope nonetheless distils certain qualities and attributes of music’s sound that cannot be spirited out of (signifying) earshot. His is a speculation of degrees. Having arrived at a tentative reconciliation of presence and technicity, Gallope advances a paradoxically rigorous position that is as attentive to the material details of vanishing sound as it is to the interfaces of the technical instrumentarium and the sociopolitical worlds towards which they scale.

There are, of course, several points of contention and debate internal to his overall position that could be amplified here. For example, Heidegger’s thinking on the question concerning technology, as well as his reflection on the historical ontology of tools, is recruited to serve a project concerning music, which – from the perspective of use – is less purposive than the kinds of activities Heidegger had in mind. The assumed resonance between general technics and what might be called a distinctly musical technics is, therefore, not as evident as Gallope’s argument seems to suggest. In other words, the technical attributes of music’s mediatic transmission (Gallope speaks of amplification, mixing, rhythmic radiations and so on) are of a very different sort from those found in Heidegger (or for that matter in Derrida, who notoriously drew back from an engagement with music). While the lesson we learn from Gallope’s article is, in my view, broadly speaking correct (perception is imbricated in mediation and inscription), the reliance on previous philosophies of technology to clinch the argument is (at times) too thoroughgoing for a genuinely immanent account of sound and music. In general, these are not intellectual weaknesses as much as they are points for genuine discussion, dialogue and debate. In other words, the clarity of Gallope’s prose actually provides a proper platform for substantive engagement and argument. This is work with which one can actually work.

II The legacy of the drastic (soft hermeneutic redux?)

And yet, could it be that exactly the opposite methodological approach is needed today? Following an account of the variable ethics – hope, resistance, restraint, multiplicity, etc. – implicit in the musical thought of Bloch, Adorno, Jankélévitch and Deleuze, we find in Deep Refrains itself a curious ethics that draws music into one of two default positions: on the one hand a validation of music’s capacity for critical and transformative creation, and on the other a calibrated call for refraining from propositional hermeneutics in the experience of music’s ineffability. Not only are these positions in tension with one another, but – framed as a theoretical amalgam – they inflect the question concerning technicity in a disarming way.

Let me begin with the latter ethical mandate, the call for engaged restraint – the deep refrain. In the very last section of the last chapter of Deep Refrains, Gallope distinguishes the specificity of such philosophical refraining from ‘pious refusal’ or ‘austere silence’. Instead, the ‘specificity of musical intensity’ can be taken as a peculiar ‘injunction to be perplexed […] a productive puzzlement’.Footnote ¹⁵ When the ‘semantic meaning’ of music is stipulated too precisely, argues Gallope, it draws a strange ‘blank’; and hence he seeks out the ‘weight of import’, the ‘diffuse meaning’ and the ‘philosophical resonance’ that elude the overwrought grip of strict formalism on the one hand and sign-based hermeneutics on the other.Footnote ¹⁶ At this juncture, Gallope’s position recapitulates the basic dichotomy between music’s ‘drastic’ and ‘gnostic’ aspects in Abbate’s exposition of Jankélévitch’s philosophy of music in her earlier influential essay ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’ Indeed, in a co-authored essay, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, Abbate and Gallope double down on Jankélévitch’s call to ‘address the sensuous inconsistency of musical experience point blank’ with a degree of ‘inconsistent unknowing’.Footnote ¹⁷ As in Deep Refrains, the authors recognize the legitimacy of the philosopher’s respect for ‘silence, modesty, restraint, or respect for what remains stubbornly unknowable’.Footnote ¹⁸ This is the legacy of Jankélévitch’s ethics in Gallope’s work – the legacy of the drastic.

To grasp the full ambiguity of this position, I turn now to a discussion of this kind of ethics of withdrawal as we find it in Abbate’s ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’ Here Abbate suggests that due deference to the drastic may likewise entail a kind of silence. On the one hand she seeks to expand the limits of ‘remain[ing] mute’ in the experience of musical performance, while on the other she resists the ‘loquacity’ of music scholarship (a ‘professional deformation’), suggesting that in the final analysis this ‘might even mean falling silent’.Footnote ¹⁹ Mostly, however, the essay is a critical story about the gnostic arrogation of meanings and forms beyond music’s remit. As we find in Gallope’s Deep Refrains, Abbate argues that hermeneutics and formalism summon authority by way of clandestine mysticism, an institutionally sanctioned proffering of ‘messages’, ‘cultural facts’, ‘associations’ and ‘constructed objects’ across the terrain of music’s sounding.Footnote ²⁰ Abbate, in contrast, calls for reticence, abeyance, abstinence (‘leaving open or withdrawing’), resisting the rush to meaning.Footnote ²¹ Given music’s subsistence in a state of ‘unresolved and subservient alterity’, it is frequently ‘used or exploited’ to commercial ends, a temptation that responsible scholarship should resist.Footnote ²² Music’s very capacity for unleashing ‘potential meanings in high multiples’ is therefore, following Jankélévitch, linked to an ethics of restraint; it is music’s ‘ineffability’ and ‘mutability’ that ultimately ‘frees us’.Footnote ²³ This is the freedom that should not be repaid by ensnaring the ‘gift-giver in the cage’ of gnostic coercion. Instead of ‘taking advantage of’ music (by pinning to it a determinate meaning or form), Abbate advances ‘hesitating before articulating a terminus’ and ‘perhaps drawing back’.Footnote ²⁴ In the essay, an appropriate ethical stance towards music gathers into a thematic refrain – characterized by ‘grace’, ‘humility’, ‘drawing back’, ‘reticence’and so on.Footnote ²⁵ And the closing lesson of the essay elevates such withdrawal to a kind of principle, grounded in the acknowledgement that ‘our own labor is ephemeral as well and will not endure’.Footnote ²⁶ Resisting the temptation to lay bare a ‘cryptic truth’ concealed in the performance and ‘accepting its mortality’ instead may itself amount to a ‘form of wisdom’.Footnote ²⁷ This basic characterization is recapitulated in Abbate and Gallope’s call in ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’ for ‘reticence, diffidence, and another order of thought within and against prefabricated critiques’,Footnote ²⁸ and furthermore casts light on the authors’ recruitment of Susanne Langer’s injunction in her book Feeling and Form of ‘showing rather than saying’,Footnote ²⁹ as well as Gallope’s brief interlude on Wittgenstein in Deep Refrains. Footnote ³⁰ Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Of course, the question of music’s unspeakability – set adrift from propositional nomenclatures – rehearses an ever-recurring figure of ineffability that I have elsewhere called philosophical sonotropism, particularly characteristic of idealist thought.Footnote ³¹ Sonotropism has an ancient history that recalls the Platonic critique of writing (as opposed to speech) no less than the Jewish tradition of a God who could only be heard (not seen). Ranging from the nineteenth-century philosophers of the Will (Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and others) to the twentieth-century philosophers we find in Deep Refrains (Bloch, Adorno, Jankélévitch and Deleuze), this philosophical tradition likewise situates music beyond the usual mediators of history, culture and above all language. Strikingly, the turn against the primacy of language for philosophical thought extended to theories not attuned to the specificity of music, such as those of Bergson and Wittgenstein. ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language,’ Wittgenstein wrote, indicating a faith in the weakness of words for philosophy.Footnote ³² This is why Gallope’s seemingly counter-intuitive recruitment of Wittgenstein for pondering music’s ineffability is in fact resonantly consistent with his overarching argument. The question is whether this bewitchment – Hannah Arendt speaks analogously of a ‘kind of witchcraft’ – signals the necessary accessory of language or a call for communicative restraint.Footnote ³³

What is fascinating about the kind of ethics of hesitation and humility described by Abbate, and later by Abbate and Gallope, is the way in which a gesture of abstaining (from ‘coercion’, ‘authoritative conjuring’, ‘taking advantage’, etc.) produces an ethical position that is as simple and eloquent as it is complex and incoherent.Footnote ³⁴ First, the simple act of refraining recapitulates a kind of postmodern hesitation in the experience of impossibility/undecidability. This is a curious return to a quasi-deconstructive interest in troubling the certainty of embedded significations, placing prevalent concept-metaphors under erasure and so on. In apparent contrast to this alliance, Abbate regards postmodernism as soft hermeneutics (with ‘trickle-downs from skepticism’), substituting notions like ‘embedded or encoded’ meaning for ‘trace or mark’ of meaning.Footnote ³⁵ Despite the softening of the metaphorical attribution of meaning, both hermeneutic modes (she argues) read cultural data as inscription. Likewise, Abbate and Gallope later read Adorno’s promise of meaning by way of its ultimate withholding as a ‘hieroglyph’, which ‘suggests that what is withheld will, eventually, be disclosed’.Footnote ³⁶ Adorno’s quiet ‘certainty’ not only tolerates a degree of ineffability, but paradoxically also requires it for its own ‘legerdemain’.Footnote ³⁷ Adorno thereby assaults the ‘Jankélévitch-like fidelity to music’s inconsistency’, proffering instead a language that functions as ‘a sort of transcendental signified, a seductive but disavowed “real” inconsistency’.Footnote ³⁸ In other words, Adorno’s negative dialectics (in ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’), like deconstruction (in ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’), is read here as a kind of cloaked gnostic operation. Abbate also dismisses the deconstructive approach directly, associating it with masculinity and, by extension, with a differently formulated coercion that denies materiality and presence. She writes:

To support her anti-deconstructive claims, Abbate recruits Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s philosophical turn to presence. Against the ‘metaphysical’ project associated with the insights of ‘Saussurean linguistics’, she advocates a discourse of ‘movement, immediacy, and violence’ associated with events ‘born to presence’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Meaning culture, she argues, is above all anathema to the presence of performed music.

Given Gumbrecht’s argumentative centrality at this juncture, it is instructive to compare the ethics of his position with those of Abbate, and later also those of Gallope. Gumbrecht, too, takes great interest in the materiality of musical experience (‘I can hear the tones of the oboe on my skin’, he asserts in the context of an example of the production of presence), but his ethics are in stark contrast to the reticence advocated by Abbate.Footnote ⁴¹ In Gumbrecht’s universe, there simply are no ethics to be found in moments of presence, deixis or epiphany. He writes: ‘There is nothing edifying in such moments, no message that we could really learn from them’ – which is why he refers to them as no more than ‘moments of intensity’.Footnote ⁴² These moments depart from all scripting (‘there is no reliable, no guaranteed way of producing moments of intensity’); they simply veer away from the taxonomies of signification, including ethical ones. In sum, there is simply no ‘convergence between such experience and ethical norms’.Footnote ⁴³ Not only is presence empty of ethical content or significance for Gumbrecht, but – in stark contrast to the invitation to reticence or withdrawal – presence is actually perceived as a kind of brutal assault. Indeed, the reason we should be drawn to presence at all – given its lack of edification, ethics or meaning – is, for Gumbrecht, something of an enigma: ‘How is it possible that we long for such moments of intensity although they have no edifying contents or effects to offer?’Footnote ⁴⁴ For Gumbrecht, the fascination lies in the fact that they transcend the everyday – which is so ‘insuperably consciousness-centered/mediated by clouds and cushions of meaning’.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is this insight that leads Gumbrecht to link moments of intensity and presence to power and violence (the violence of ‘blocking spaces with bodies’), which turns out to be ‘irresistibly fascinating for us’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Again, the contrast between these writers could not be more stark. For Gallope, the reification of music disavows its irreducible ineffability. Likewise, for Abbate, the gnostic impulse is the brutal play of authority – ‘taking advantage’ of music’s indeterminacy, arrogating and foreclosing the drastic and so on. But for Gumbrecht, to transpose the dichotomous terms momentarily, it is in fact the drastic that arrogates and forecloses all remnants of the gnostic. It is presence that overwhelms us (‘occupying and thus blocking our bodies’), producing a kind of drastic fascination with ‘losing control over oneself’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Gumbrecht’s is a story of the assault of presence, not the assault on presence. Finally, in a neo-Schopenhauerian twist, Gumbrecht actually describes the material assault of presence in terms that resist even a residual sense of reticence towards the gnostic impulse – the wisdom of the momentary or the ethics of withdrawal. For Gumbrecht, instead, presence ultimately signals our desire for integration into the world of things; our desire to yield to ‘an existential longing for pre-conceptual thingness’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Given Abbate’s recruitment of Gumbrecht to oust the masculinist impulse of deconstruction, it is perplexing to ponder the extreme difference in their respective ethical stances. Again, for Gumbrecht, the intensity of presence is violent and agnostic of all ethics, while for Abbate the drastic is open-ended and actually grounds an ethics of humility and grace. Gumbrecht’s position is consistent with his rejection of the linguistic turn in the humanities, while (curiously) Abbate’s position resonates with the very linguistic (deconstructive) paradigm it seeks to avert. Symptomatically, we therefore witness an uneasy account of the role of so-called non-conscious embodiments in Abbate’s text. For Gumbrecht, the assaultive character of presence lies outside all conscious intention. For Abbate, the matter is more complicated. Here we read that a scholarly appeal to non-conscious responses is a form of clandestine mysticism, attendant on all manner of Romantic gnostic chicanery. Richard Taruskin’s assertion, for example, that composers respond to circumstances ‘below the threshold of their conscious intending’ is denounced as ‘Freudian romanticism’, in which political circumstances are mystically said to ‘speak directly through the unconscious to the musical imagination’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Abbate allies this manoeuvre with a ‘rich history’ that associates music with the unconscious, and the unconscious in turn with ‘occulted truth’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Addressing the workings of clandestine mysticism directly, Abbate detects how references to cryptic, non-conscious, oblique, hidden and secretive contents and meanings assist in paradoxically adducing objectivist authority. She writes:

In other words, in a context where laundering meanings, forms and contents functions as a cipher of a buried truth, the appeal to non-conscious operations stands as a useful alibi.

The puzzle inherent in this formulation is first that it contradicts the dimension of Gumbrecht’s argument upon which Abbate seems to rely, and second that it contradicts itself. Music’s immediate aural presence is paradoxically construed as both event and ephemeron. On the one hand, its vanishing act – characterized as ‘not enduring past the moment’, ‘ephemeral phenomenal being’, ‘perpetually absent object’, ‘subject to instantaneous loss’, etc. – assures its fundamental resistance to gnostic over-reach.Footnote ⁵² In other words, the atemporal character of gnostic investigation – ‘under the aspect of eternity’ – such as we find in formalism and hermeneutics is, practically by definition, a categorical distortion of music’s reality – a kind of ‘professional deformation’ or ‘illicit relocation’ to a fixed space outside the flow of time.Footnote ⁵³ It is this aspect of music’s ontological status – its ephemerality – to which Abbate’s ethics most prominently respond. On the other hand, music’s irreducible presence – characterized as ‘physical force and sensual power’, ‘material presence and carnality’, ‘the event itself’, ‘exceptional phenomenal reality’, etc. – assures its voluminous being-there for arresting embodiment.Footnote ⁵⁴ In other words, music’s almost ballistic materiality, in stark contrast to its ephemerality, endows it with the physical force of an external object.Footnote ⁵⁵ With this information about music’s ontological status in mind (its event-ness), Abbate’s ethics take an interesting turn. Far from being annexed by acts of gnostic arrogation, immediate aural presence now annexes the receptive body and even alters its state. In an act of drastic arrogation (momentarily in sync with Gumbrecht’s conception of presence), it now ‘acts upon us and changes us’.Footnote ⁵⁶

What is vexing about this reversal of fortune for ethics as it is weighed upon by the event (instead of released by the ineffability) is that it indulges, fleetingly but tellingly, the very clandestine mysticism associated with the cryptographic sublime. Let me explain. Non-conscious sonorous objects now promise embodiments that are as much a ‘hidden […] secret beyond their surface’ as any gnostic seismograph.Footnote ⁵⁷ In other words, presence effects, like their gnostic arrogations, are tandem flights towards a threshold below conscious intending: ‘When it is present, [music] can ban logos or move our bodies,’ Abbate writes, before adding: ‘without our conscious will’.Footnote ⁵⁸ But whence this drastic unconscious? It is not only that drastic encounter now shares with gnostic interpretation the ‘Freudian romanticism’ the writer hopes to eject, but that this very mode of Romanticism secures the principal ethical import of Abbate’s position. How so? On close inspection, the simple ethics of withdrawal described above metamorphose, as the argument unfolds, into something new – an ethics of incorporation. Far from mere schweigen (falling silent, leaving open, etc.), the ethics of the drastic in its material and carnal moment introduce a moral confrontation with alterity.Footnote ⁵⁹ The gnostic now forecloses the value of the quasi-ballistic force of the drastic – the ‘value’, that is, ‘both intellectually and morally, in encountering a present other at point-blank range’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This encounter with a present other expands into an ethics of the Other that is given voice throughout the essay. Recall, for example, the gnostic enjoinment to ‘articulate a terminus, or restrict music to any determinate meaning within any declarative sentence’, to which Abbate responds with an appeal to freedom. The appropriate engagement with this encounter involves ‘not taking advantage’, ‘hesitating’ and ‘drawing back’ from the (gift-giving) musical experience.Footnote ⁶¹ Anthropomorphism aside, Abbate argues, this kind of abstinence resembles ‘an ethical position’.Footnote ⁶² Musical works are not living things, ‘but the way we cope with them may reflect choices about how to cope with real human others or how not to’.Footnote ⁶³ It is instructive to note that this fundamental argumentative gesture remains unrevised in Abbate and Gallope’s ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’. They write:

While drawn from the writing of others, the ethics of human listening are here brought into an alliance with actual human interaction. Could this simply reflect the social terms of a musical performance, or could it be an exemplary case of what the authors elsewhere call ‘salvation-by-analogy’?Footnote ⁶⁵

If it is a case of the latter, this ethical position subtly recapitulates the clandestine mysticism of gnostic interpretation, which too operates on the logic of resemblance, reflection and revelation. Gnostic arrogation occurs when some configuration detected in beautiful sounds (an oblique enharmonic modulation, say) is said to resemble or reflect something alien to it (a certain subjectivity or a political regime, for example). By what inscription may the reticent attitude, hesitating before the call of gnostic reflection, come suddenly to reflect forms of social interaction (with real human others) after all?Footnote ⁶⁶ By what clandestine metamorphosis did abstinence become a seismographic reflection of socially mediated ethical encounter? Or does the encounter with real human others at stake here operate more by way of non-reflective immediacy – at point-blank range and so on? It is unclear. Indeed, perhaps my counter-point is overdrawn, for, in the practical context of improvisation at least, the terms by which musical sounds become analogous to human behaviour are far removed from the inflated claims about connections (forged by resemblance or reflection) between music and politics (or subjectivity) that characterized a certain brand of new musicology in the 1990s. Arendt’s reminder that even speculative resemblances or reflections across domains of activity and thought introduce an element of systemic inertia – a dogmatism that cannot be resisted by the activity rendered by such speculation – should suffice to cast terminal doubt on the latter musicological method.Footnote ⁶⁷ In this respect, Abbate’s insistence on something ‘ineffable’ behind the hermeneutic metaphors that pin down musical experience remains insightful, if not irreducible. Against my critique, then, the affirmative ethics in ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’ generally recede as the essay resumes its primary task of critically curtailing the excesses of gnostic mysticism. Towards the end of the argument, however, Abbate actually ups the ante on this construal of ethics by spiritualizing the physicality of music in performance. Following Jankélévitch, she claims that music’s ‘physical action can engender spiritual conditions, grace, humility, reticence’.Footnote ⁶⁸ With reference to Neoplatonic philosophy and apophatic theology, Abbate articulates acts of ‘understatement and silence’ to a kind of ‘social reality’ with ethical implications.Footnote ⁶⁹ She advances the idea that ‘engagement with music [is] tantamount to an engagement with the phenomenal world and its inhabitants’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The encounter with the other that emerges, first by way of point-blank immediacy and secondly by the logic of reflection does so in this third articulation by way of a grammar of equivalence. The ethical consequences of all three modalities of engagement seem to be the same. In a scenario where social engagement is considered as alike to musical engagement, for instance, we take away the following moral lesson: ‘Playing or hearing music can produce a state where resisting the flaw of loquaciousness represents a moral ideal, marking human subjects who have been remade in an encounter with an other.’Footnote ⁷¹ Here we find – in the paradoxical name of an ethics of abstinence – a tangible encounter with a human/musical other that leaves on its subjects a kind of (deconstructive?) mark. Is this a kind of soft hermeneutics redux? Perhaps. The larger points, however, are first that these are clandestine rubrics – rubrics that deploy drastic musical encounter as a cipher for an ethics in the social world; and secondly that the diversity of rhetorical rubrics (reflection, immediacy and equivalence) that lead to the same goal in the context of the drastic encounter probably mark a site of desire – a wish for social relevance in the silence of withdrawal.

In the final analysis, the ethics of drastic encounter, however tangibly arrested by presence, resemble less the agnosticism we find in the starkly unedifying productions of presence in Gumbrecht’s formulation than they do the deconstructive abeyance we find in the thought of Derrida or the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Deconstruction of course rejects the self-uttering claims of presence, and marks instead the differential mediations attendant to our very hold on presence. In Abbate’s text, presence is at once embraced and denied the violence of such claims. Far from the violence implied by Gumbrecht’s arrested bodies, that is, presence in the context of the drastic is held at arm’s length, kept unsullied by gnostic determination, set free. Herein lies one of the conundrums faced by simultaneously tethering presence to the event on the one hand and to the ephemeron on the other. Caught in the crosshairs of this riddle-like suspension, we now find a noteworthy reversal of fortune for ethics in the context of theories of presence. Of the strained claim to social relevance (gnostic abstinence in the face of drastic experience), one might say its value resides in the proximity of deconstruction. However, where a deconstructive operation such as différance nonetheless engages the nominal accretions and attendant effects of presence (via the internal structures of differing and deferring, etc.), the ethics of drastic encounter – at risk of ensnaring them in gnostic determination – disengage from them. The political and social relevance of deconstruction is contested and in doubt, of course, even as Derrida (in his final years) insisted on the importance of the decision in the experience of the undecidable. For the purposes of this argument, however, it is important to note first that Abbate’s ethical abeyance is more allied with Derrida’s deconstructive manoeuvres (which is perhaps why Gallope recruits Derrida more affirmatively in Deep Refrains) than it is with Gumbrecht’s story about presence; and secondly that even the (minimal) social relevance of deconstructive undecidability withers in the context of drastic withdrawal.

III The legacy of cultural critique (Dionysian sobriety?)

The deeper puzzle with the ethics implied by refraining from propositional assertions about music is that it runs aground of the second ethical injunction we find in a book such as Deep Refrains. In the final chapter of the book, for example, Gallope casts doubt on the narrowly formalist ethics of Adorno and others, drawing attention instead to the ‘multitude of different musical forms, practices, idioms, and traditions’, the ‘multitude of musical practices’, the ‘multiplicities of style’ and the way in which ‘modes of musical literacy have multiplied’, thereby ‘transforming and expanding the ethics and politics’ of the musically sensible today.Footnote ⁷² The point is recapitulated in ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’. For Abbate and Gallope, an appropriately directed consideration of the ineffable ‘lend[s] itself to an overarching virtue that is both ethical and political’ in so far as it encourages ‘pluralism and the unconditional principle of inclusion it presupposes’.Footnote ⁷³ In contrast to considerations of ineffability within a multitude of pluralist practices, Abbate and Gallope situate the narrowness of Adorno’s analytics in the a priori ‘steadiness of the formal domain’ – a ‘stringent formalism’ – which paradoxically relies on music’s ‘broad shoulders’ to perform a kind of ‘legerdemain’.Footnote ⁷⁴ This is the stage of the argument where Adorno is said to deploy ineffability as ‘a sort of transcendental signified, a seductive but disavowed “real” inconsistency’.Footnote ⁷⁵ To evaluate the pertinence of a dialectical engagement with music, Gallope argues, its ‘formal criteria’ would need to be set adrift from eternal referents – such as the ‘breakdown of tonality’ – and historicized in more flexible social terms.Footnote ⁷⁶ Herein lies the author’s imperative to ‘loosen the rules’.Footnote ⁷⁷ To be clear, Gallope maintains that mediation is irreducible, but he casts its philosophical import in terms of a condition that is ‘general and ontological, not historical or Geist-mediated’.Footnote ⁷⁸ He thereby advances Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terms against those of Adorno on the grounds that the former terms accommodate a broader swathe of the world’s music than do the latter ones (even if the philosophers never actually addressed vernacular musics in their many references to music and musicians). Given Deleuze’s and Guattari’s more ‘promising, open-ended’ alternative to Adorno, Gallope then suggests a kind of DIY ‘intuition as method’ to assess how ‘virtual forces’ are made ‘sonorous and sensible’ or how ‘intermedial blocks of sensation’ are created.Footnote ⁷⁹

What are we to make of this ethical turn – the sidelining of a philosophy too beholden to notions of Geist in service of a philosophy that accommodates the world’s musical multiplicity, with an attendant appeal to a ‘naïve’ method grounded in ‘intuition’?Footnote ⁸⁰ At first glance, the emphasis on ‘intuition’ (referenced also in connection with Adorno’s apparently more flexible treatment of ‘vernacular idioms in Mahler’) resonates with the wisdom of interpretative ‘reticence’ and ‘diffidence’ in musical encounter outlined by both Abbate and Gallope.Footnote ⁸¹ Under this reading, ‘intuition’ thereby supplements the gap left by the gnostic certitude of propositional nomenclatures. Without taking up a critique of this basic psychological model for sensing sound, Gallope’s allegiance is symptomatic of a general turn away from philosophical enquiry grounded in consciousness (or Geist) and towards one grounded in affect and materialism. Indeed, Gallope lists a host of additional methods that are consistent with his position. These include ‘realist metaphysics’, ‘scientific materialism’, ‘interdisciplinary cognitivism’, ‘speculative realism’ and ‘actor-network theory’ – an embrace, in addition to Deleuze and Guattari, of everyone from Alfred North Whitehead and Alain Badiou to Quentin Meillasoux and Bruno Latour.Footnote ⁸² Gallope suggests that music – particularly its paradox of the ineffable – might share ‘common cause’ with these various new methodologies.Footnote ⁸³ For Gallope, the turn to intuition additionally entails a capacious attitude towards music’s multitude of practices, and thereby buttresses a philosophical interest in vernacular musics. (This is why it is not surprising that the first reference to intuition appears in connection with Adorno’s apparently more flexible treatment of ‘vernacular idioms in Mahler’.Footnote ⁸⁴) At first glance, this too is consistent with the multiple planes of engagement that characterize the philosophical milieu with which Gallope seeks to find common cause: ‘the great outdoors of the thing-itself’, ‘actor-networks’ and so on.Footnote ⁸⁵

It is striking that the common thread connecting the various arguments in this philosophical milieu is the displacement of the human subject as a central referent in service of a new kind of materiality. Gallope directs us to the type of materiality he has in mind: ‘New ontologies based in the “beyond” of representation have emerged, finding fascination in the hyperchaos of the cosmos, or the dark untranslatable core of materiality.’Footnote ⁸⁶ The first thing to note about the relationship between considerations of music’s ineffability and the philosophical displacement of the human subject is that of all human endeavours music is perhaps the most anthropogenic (species-specific, domain-specific, auto-generative, etc.). And even if the opposite claim holds (that music is best theorized as somehow substantively outside human consciousness), why is (human) ‘intuition’ the best method to capture this non-human aspect? Indeed, most of the examples adduced to support the central argument in Deep Refrains revel precisely in living vernacular forms. Gallope speaks of ‘groups of musicians’ engaged in everything from ‘parameter-bending electroacoustic music’ to ‘DIY practices that present vernacular fractures of […] musical expectations’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Likewise, in ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, Abbate and Gallope call for an ‘openly practical conception of philosophy, in which forms of wisdom also come from musicians, engineers, problem-solvers’ ostensibly ‘far from the centers of power’.Footnote ⁸⁸ This repeated emphasis on the quotidian human practice of music-making in largely vernacular contexts tarries awkwardly with a philosophical milieu that displaces the human subject as the object of philosophical enquiry. To state it as a question: What are we to make of Abbate and Gallope’s claims, for example, that ‘improvisation’ casts perspectives on ‘the act of making moral and ethical choices’ – doing ‘the just thing in the face of uncertainty’ – and so on if the human subject has been dislodged as the central referent?Footnote ⁸⁹ If a virtuoso improvisation – ‘when the vibe is just right’ – actually taps into the ‘actions and rhythms of such a decision’ (thereby even indicating a kind of ‘heroic verve’), how does such music find common cause with a resolutely post-anthropological materialism?Footnote ⁹⁰ Polemically stated as a question: Can human heroism plausibly take up residency within a Latourian actor-network?Footnote ⁹¹ Inversely, is it desirable to decentre the human on the altar of materialism in a discourse on music in particular? At a minimum, the common cause shared by the matters of the milieu and the matter of music’s ineffability requires considerable explication.

More importantly, however, the emphasis on materiality itself – whether it is construed as the ‘great outdoors’ of ancestrality (Meillasoux) or the non-human agents at work in ‘actor-network theory’ (Latour) – actually betrays an allegiance to a limited kind of anti-formalism.Footnote ⁹² Ostensibly reaching into the ‘hyperchaos of the cosmos’, this is the new branch of materialism – catalysed primarily by the figure of Deleuze (without Marx) – that emphasizes ontological criteria over sociopolitical ones. Gallope’s rejection of Adorno hinges on just this difference – mediation, he says, must be understood as ‘general and ontological, not historical or Geist-mediated’.Footnote ⁹³ Consistent again with the milieu, this construal of mediation resists all forms of metaphysics, thereby recapitulating a broader shift away from critical and conceptual studies and towards ontological and material ones. This brand of contemporary materialism emphasizes real things, physical life and objects, no less than their contingent and fluid connections and interactions within mutable rhizomic constellations. What this position assumes is that a very thick description of the world in all its polyvalent becomings is somehow adequate to it; and, furthermore, that describing the world in terms of this teeming multiplicity (beyond all dualisms) can under some or other conditions be construed as a critique or diagnosis of it. Without recounting the full extent of the pushback, the latter idea has been hotly contested in recent times. In a world where aleatory matter subsists beyond human meanings and uses, where agency is distributed across networks of objects and humans, where an ontology situates the being of things on a consistent plane with that of humans, and where temporality itself is suspended by a geological time outside the ‘Anthropocene’, the space for critique is withering.Footnote ⁹⁴ Speaking broadly, this is the kind of materialism that falters in the diagnosis of various scientific impasses, institutional inertia and, above all, economic inequalities that beset the contemporary world. This is the expansive materialism that exuberantly engages the far reaches of the ‘hyperchaos of the cosmos’, but may simultaneously withdraw from the simpler quotidian project of music’s pragmatic social engagement (let alone political engagement). Agency, in this materialist milieu, has been outsourced to an external non-human source. Against human consciousness, agency has relocated to the generative chaos of the ‘cosmos’, the godlike fecundity of nature itself. The milieu, in sum, marks the reign of every materialism but for dialectical materialism.

Why would considerations of music’s ineffability want to share ‘common cause’ with this kind of materialist withdrawal from critique, diagnosis and politics? The answer is not easily retrieved from ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, Deep Refrains or ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’. Abbate and (especially) Gallope’s analytics are here precariously suspended between on the one hand music’s incapacity to freight political meaning and on the other its strident capacity for critical resistance. In fact, Deep Refrains extols the ample powers of ‘creativity and resistance’ in vernacular musics.Footnote ⁹⁵ These musics ‘scramble the code’ in ways that exceed previously articulated versions of musical critique; they ‘change rules unpredictably’; they ‘resist normative criteria’; and they ‘transfigure [traditional music] into forms of jazz and electronic dance music’. They ‘present vernacular fractures’; and they ‘relentlessly probe for new directions beyond the reified and established’. In short, when it comes to music’s ‘teeming’ multiplicity, ‘rage against the norms does not end’.Footnote ⁹⁶ At the same time, the almost Dionysian abundance of music’s critical potential is simultaneously neutralized by the strident call for interpretative sobriety when it comes to making positive critical claims. The authors issue all manner of warnings when, instead of making room for ‘reticence, diffidence’ and so on, music scholars ‘present music’s social and political meaning too conveniently’.Footnote ⁹⁷ For it is precisely the paradox of music’s ineffability that ultimately refuses to conform to a scholar’s ‘(favorite) fracture as the authorized resistance to injustice’ or ‘a scholar’s ideals for social change’ or, for that matter, any other ‘scholarly fantasy of salvation-by-analogy’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Instead of recruiting music to any social or political cause, the authors argue, ‘it may be more important to grasp and attend to an injustice for what it is’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The realm of politics, the authors seem to suggest, should be vividly separated from that of music.

This mode of argument appears as a sobering account of music’s constitutive incapacity to engage with critical social and political matters. At this argumentative juncture, it seems the Dionysianism is withdrawn, and the authors forge an uncanny alliance with a European tradition that construes music as autonomous. In a further twist on this alliance, the authors also appear to argue that music’s incapacity to freight political meaning is its critical potential. Against ‘salvation-by-analogy’, the ineffable should be construed as ‘consonant with a sober attentiveness to all music […] including […] sound at the outer limits of audibility’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Could it be that these outer limits actually represent the critical impulse of the ineffable? Gallope suggests as much when he writes that the ‘search for non-normative resistance open to a multiplicity of idioms’ is ‘closely paralleled, even exacerbated by the paradox of music’s ineffability’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Likewise, in their joint essay, Abbate and Gallope contend that music’s ‘medium-specific resistance’ is of such a sort that it resists precisely being transformed into a ‘dragon-slayer of injustices’.Footnote ¹⁰² In short, music’s resistance is of the sort that resists this kind of resistance to injustice. Does the ineffable afford but a peculiarly constrained Dionysian sobriety? This is not to say, of course, that Abbate and Gallope are unconcerned with injustice: on the contrary, they state on the one hand that it should be called out ‘for what it is’, but on the other that recruiting music to the cause lies beyond its remit.Footnote ¹⁰³ In sync with Jankélévitch, the authors (in no uncertain terms) undo any ‘grandiose notions that musical works or institutions legibly enact an abstract form of political resistance’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Music’s incapacity for such legible enactments of political resistance is, in some fundamental paradoxical sense, its foundational act of resistance. This sets the project apart from the materialism it sometimes claims to recruit and affirm, for the argument actually hinges, in the final analysis, on a twenty-first-century incarnation of an older semiotic model associated with negative dialectics and deconstruction: music’s ineffability recruited for critique per negationem.

IV The legacy of deterritorialization (semiophobic technicity?)

Abbate and Gallope’s theory casts sobering light on the narrowing aperture of music’s claimed transformative and critical potential even if it is affirmed elsewhere in their arguments. What strains credulity, then, is that the authors do in fact narrate matters of (in)justice in the musical realm – recall that a virtuosic improvisation amounts to doing ‘the just thing in the face of uncertainty’, for example, rather than the ‘malevolent or ill-tempered’ thing – without explicating precisely how this is different from reading into music a kind of ‘legible enact[ment]’ of (in)justice.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ More importantly – given the insistent hermeneutic constraints – what kind of ‘creativity and resistance’ do vernacular musics in fact afford?Footnote ¹⁰⁶ What are the codes that are scrambled, the rules changed, the norms resisted, the traditions transfigured and the norms raged against, to invoke Gallope’s list of transformative endeavour? By all appearances, this kind of scrambling of codes and transfiguration of commonplaces appears to be confined to some kind of autonomous order, lest it slip into falsely legible enactments of a ‘favorite fracture’ of idealized resistance, a kind of ‘salvation-by-analogy’ – so many semiotic artefacts of false witness. In other words, the radically disruptive potential of music is thereby liberated from politics, expressing itself primarily in an ineffable aesthetic realm. Music’s ‘constant imperative to loosen the rules’ notwithstanding, the irreducibility of its ineffability, in the final analysis, effectively neutralizes its political valencies.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

What is puzzling about this construal of the relationship between music and politics is less the fact that it does not ring a bell of truth than that it cannot fully bear the weight of its own insight. As mentioned at the outset, we find in Deep Refrains little or no analysis of music’s critically agnostic character; nor of its domesticating, coercive and constraining proclivities, which effectively neutralize its disruptive political character. Furthermore, of its dangerous, compliant, unproductive and negative potential the arguments of Deep Refrains do not speak. In contrast, Gallope primarily examines the ‘critical potential’ lodged in the ‘stunning force’ of ineffable sound.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But this stunning force is ultimately subdued in the context of actual political work, for the ineffable character of music ‘subverts fantasies of precision hermeneutics’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, Abbate and Gallope remain committed to subduing this force, and make it a central theme of the essay. Music cannot ‘deliver precise social results’, it cannot ‘deliver precise semiotic meanings’, it cannot ‘perform political work’, it cannot ‘wake us […] to the continued scarring left by colonialism’, it cannot ‘slay the dragon of neoliberalism’, and so on.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Questions emerge: Why has the bar on communicative delivery systems been lifted to this great height here? Would one not be hard pressed to identify any communicative medium that can deliver precise social results or semiotic meanings, let alone enlighten us about colonialism or destroy neoliberalism? Why is music’s mediatic specificity adduced apart from this general communicative condition? But a further, more serious, question emerges: Given the inherent constraints on its messaging system (always already ‘transient and contingent’), why is music’s material force narrated, in this text, in terms of both its critical potential and its transformative decoding at all?Footnote ¹¹¹ What residual figure of critique and transformation can give music’s ineffability the slip (apart from the simple suggestion that, as a sine qua non, music’s ineffability is a figure of critique)? Is this not the figure of creative deterritorialization that phantasmically cathects with, but necessarily fails to ‘legibly enact’, political resistance?Footnote ¹¹² Could this be the very definition of the aestheticization of politics? The authors actually suggest as much, warning that any hope of promoting a social cause by means of music actually risks, in the ‘flux of impact’, the ‘erasure’ of that cause.Footnote ¹¹³ In other words, by placing undue demands on it, music risks morphing into an ideological disavowal of the very cause it purports to serve. But this necessarily means that music’s apparently unabated ‘rage against the norms’ – to invoke a central motif in Deep Refrains – remains just that: rage alone.

Perhaps this is precisely the point about music’s ineffability. It is not that music has ‘no politics’ – it can shoulder the ‘power of a slogan’ or ‘trigger […] an association’, after all; but it cannot directly deliver on those slogans and associations.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This is music’s foundational precariousness. Although this position usefully curtails the more ambitious claims of a certain strain of 1990s new musicology, its own appeals to the transformative powers of music need similarly to be held in check. This is why Gallope’s reliance on a brand of new materialism serves as the very ideological alibi the authors so deftly detect in others. A central feature of today’s materialism, for example, is its unchecked valorization of deterritorialization (as if territorialization were an inherent vice), and then it frames this precariousness as a virtue of flexibility, mobility, fluidity, multiplicity and even transgression. On the one hand, Gallope seeks to supplement the limits of this kind of ‘broad material turn in the humanities’ – its engagement with ‘details of social and cultural networks as well as media apparatuses’ and so on – when he writes in his introduction: ‘Does not the ascription of such powerful and diffuse meanings […] remain testimony to the fact that music can and does have extraordinarily complex significance, which is often not exhausted by historical and material evidence’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Yet, on the other, the author’s ample appeals to music’s code-scrambling, unpredictable rule-changing, resistance to norms, transfiguration of traditions, resistance to reifications, rage against norms and so on are cast in an affirmative Deleuzean light – as if ineffability could morph into a placeholder for deterritorialization itself.

It is not only that the totalizing anti-essentialism (an essentialist essentialism?) of this brand of materialism undermines differently construed relations between music and politics, but that the validation and valorization of deterritorialization – contingency, decoding, resistance – is itself deeply in sync with the ideological demands of capitalism today. As I have argued in ‘Enforced Deterritorialization, or the Trouble with Musical Politics’ and elsewhere, the enjoinment to deterritorialization is perhaps the most distinct feature of contemporary capitalist subjectivity itself.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This critique concerned itself with the then contemporary cultures of computing and consumption, which required desublimated energies as a condition for the possibility of widespread data capture. In other words, the neo-liberal surveillance economy required deterritorialized subjects (behavioural surplus) for its efficient functioning.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In contrast, Gallope affirms the critical dimension of this kind of deterritorialized subject. For example, in his article on improvisation, the reliance on the poetics of Fred Moten clinches an argument about deterritorialized creativity at the crossroads of inscription and presence. Here we find strong overtones of a uniquely Americanized brand of creative individualism (associated readily with aesthetic transgression and repurposing) that can only awkwardly be aligned with the global aspirations of Gallope’s greater project.

How so? Take Gallope’s critique of Adorno’s ‘narrow ethics’. Gallope deploys ‘the history of the world’s musical cultures’ to throw into relief Adorno’s narrow focus on the ‘breakdown of tonality’ as the ‘privileged locus of resistance’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Interestingly, Gallope uses music from across the globe to underscore a kind of ‘ethics without criteria’ (an ethics where the medium itself ‘wears its mediations in unpredictable ways’), apparently unaware of the numerous critiques of the violent part played by tonality as a colonizing force.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The book’s determined disinterest in global political economy steers attention away from diagnoses of cultural hegemony (or the way dominant representation schemes for music came to enjoy a world monopoly today), despite deferential gestures towards global musical practices. Indeed, Gallope dismisses political economy as a subset of an outdated linguistic turn – where ‘everything is structured like a language […] there is no outside the text and its system of relations […] everything is a sign in a grand political economy’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Apart from the fact that the postmodern prohibition on meta-narratives actually pitted the central modus operandi of post-structuralism against those of political economy, Gallope reads them as allied, and furthermore as lacking the capacity to deal with music. He writes: ‘One can empirically describe political economy underlying a given reification of music’, but ultimately, ‘Jankélévitch’s cool philosophy of the ineffable subverts fantasies of precision hermeneutics.’Footnote ¹²¹ As an antidote to these fantasies, Gallope advances a modified, moderated dialectics: ‘Made sober, one’s dialectics would have to chill out.’Footnote ¹²²

But how sober is this chill-out? Ten years after ‘Enforced Deterritorialization’ (and now in the age of Trumpism), we see how this kind of chilled-out dialectics – the politicized subversion of precision hermeneutics, indeed a rampant rage against norms characterized by heterogeneous rhizomic flows, decontextualized affects, networked disinformation, anarcho-vitalism and the evident disregard of a palatable middle-ground of political principles and institutions – underwrites the rise of authoritarian tendencies at least as much as it does progressive, democratic ones. Is not a rage against norms today a central feature of the (profitable) new normal? And does not a politics (or even an ethics) that venerates deterritorialization – critical potential at a general and ontological analytic level, instead of a specific and conceptual one – risk undue ‘reticence’ and ‘diffidence’ towards this new normal?Footnote ¹²³ Perhaps not – but only if the relationship between music and politics is reconstrued along more pragmatic lines than is imagined in musings about music’s ineffability.

Examples of a tactically orientated political analysis of music today abound. These could include a critical (not ontological!) analysis of labour precarity incubated within the laboratories of music’s current consumer-industrial complex; or a critical analysis of the way in which contemporary software designed to model human musical perception in fact reshapes, in ideological terms, the human sensorium it purports merely to represent; or a critical analysis of the way political economy unevenly shapes intellectual property rights for music’s stakeholders across borders of drastic inequality; or even guidelines for crafting canonic music scholarship (and textbooks) that properly acknowledge the role played by the global south in musical thought (and are furthermore suitable for productive circulation in the Global South). The list goes on. It might be argued that these matters are of a more general political sort; that they do not address the matter of music qua music. But what is noteworthy about such a riposte is that musical creativity and experience today – precisely because of their affective indeterminacy – are in many respects at the vanguard of contemporary reconfigurations of labour power, models of machine listening, surveillance and data capture, paradigms guiding intellectual property of information objects, and so on. But the politics of the ineffable (as construed by Abbate and Gallope) can never venture into this kind of material world. Again, perhaps this stands to reason, given that the focus of the enquiry is not politics, but resolutely the caprice of musical listening – its drastic, ineffable precariousness – which usefully tempers the claims of a certain outdated hermeneutic brand of politicized thought in music.

Nonetheless, given the claimed interest in technicity, the refrain from offering a critical diagnosis of musical listening in relation to contemporary media today is deafening. In the context of the meteoric emergence of machine learning and artificial intelligence in musical production and distribution today (a terrain that increasingly colonizes precisely the ineffable territory of the musical listener), the call to resist semiotic precision is, in fact, ideologically symptomatic. The fear of hermeneutic over-reach is a luxury those at the mercy of the semiotic-symbolic order (commanded by a tightly guarded digital infrastructure) cannot necessarily afford. What is paradoxical about Gallope and (to a lesser extent) Abbate’s materialist swerve (again, in the non-dialectical sense of the term) is the striking extent to which it is fundamentally at odds with the contemporary consumer-electronics model of the world – the material infrastructures of digitality – characterized by discretization, abstraction, statistical and symbolic orders, and the modelling of formal systems directly. For Abbate and Gallope, in contrast, music’s ‘materiality’ is ‘fluid and non-discrete’, practically by definition.Footnote ¹²⁴ And yet, the apparently ineffable affective alliances attendant on musical vernaculars are today increasingly legible to digital tools – incrementally measured by the protocols of machine learning and artificial intelligence – and tethered to predictive apps and services underwritten by proprietary infrastructures.Footnote ¹²⁵ Digital technologies today are undertaking a granular mapping precisely of this capricious nano-chronemic arena on an unprecedented scale. With access to billions of statistical data points, music’s new generation of application software has effectively devised algorithmic models not only for generating playlists, connecting users, tracking rights management, facilitating browsing and curating musical tastes, as one might expect, but also increasingly for modelling fundamental musical experiences and sensations by simulating affective human cognition itself. Far from the humility of a deep refrain, what is needed today more than ever is a deep investigation of the precise formal analytics underwriting the digital ineffable.

Abbate and Gallope’s theoretical reflections on the ineffable share ‘common cause’ with a free market of disciplines (ranging from scientific materialism and interdisciplinary cognitivism to speculative realism and actor-network theory), but their final coalescence around a new materialist position is fundamentally delinked from the primary modus of its own technological age: statistical analysis, formal modelling, digital abstraction and so on. It is as if the ineffability phenomenon inherently resists assimilation into what Alexander Galloway might call a digital paradigm.Footnote ¹²⁶ In the heyday of the digital, we paradoxically witness a semiophobic technicity – a fear of signs, symbols and forms – and the privileging of embodiment and materiality, exemplified in the innards of music’s ineffability.Footnote ¹²⁷ By trusting material perception above semiotic abstraction, ineffability theory thereby generally misses the discretized aspects of sound that, more often than not, are the conditioning ground for most of the world’s actual sensuous musical experience today. Could it be that the analogue paradigm asserted by this branch of materialism has become a kind of nostalgic resistance to digitality itself? Could music’s ostensible resistance to any rule-governed system of thought – its resistance to a digital paradigm – inhabit an ecology of ineffable materiality? Beyond the symbolic order and economy, beyond data regimes and infrastructure, beyond method and critique, we find the safe space of direct sensation.