Expression and Truth by Kramer Lawrence;

Author:Kramer, Lawrence;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Underlying this account is the proposal that meaning is a local effect or a scattering or series of local effects that, once established, once perceived, assumes the force of generality and radiates or ripples in multiple directions. “Force” here means primarily illocutionary force, understood as a property not just of words but also of all expressive utterance, gesture, and action. The localization of meaning depends on the occurrence of the semantic performatives that, like speech acts, do in their occurring just what their name announces: they install or release or effectuate meaning.

They do this, moreover, in two senses that always occur together. They install a specific meaning, and in doing that they also install meaning or meaningfulness in general. More exactly, in their general function, semantic performatives reinstall meaning and meaningfulness, or vice versa—neither term comes first—because they have always already been installed, and installed long since; their prior installation is the condition of possibility for the semantic performative itself.

Insofar as the result of setting these forces in motion is aesthetic, the immediate result is the emergence of numinous particles. This does not happen metaphorically (a denial we have met with often: No disrespect to metaphor, that trope of tropes, but we actually enhance its role by narrowing its field). Each half of the term “numinous particles” needs to be taken literally.

The particles are pieces: little bits that exceed or envelop wholes. Their numinousness is not linked to any definite sphere beyond the empirical but it nonetheless constitutes the presence of such a beyond; it is not a sign but a phenomenon.

The particles are material: materialized flecks of meaning. They are not signs, not signifiers; although they draw music into the symbolic order, they are not symbols. They are, as experienced, actions, yet they are also presences, palpable stuff—one could perhaps call them “things” in a semi-Heideggerian sense (in which the vividly resonant thing is opposed to the neutral object), but they lack the generic identity of things (the famous jug for Heidegger, as later for Lacan, a shape that enfolds an emptiness so that fullness becomes possible).37

In both respects, numinous particles escape the standard categories and configurations of meaningfulness. They even escape the standard modes of perception. They are not identifiable with any of the forms in which they appear, musical or otherwise, but let’s stick with music: They are not melodic reiterations, motivic shapes, rhythmic contours, instrumental textures, or the like, though they may appear as, and need to be described (albeit “under erasure”) as particular and particulate occurrences of these things. When they occur, they precipitate themselves out of the categorical field from which they emerge; they are events, singularities, or intensities that are neither in the operative category nor outside of it. Recall the “interview chords” from Britten’s Billy Budd, which can stand as the example par excellence: each chord with its own orchestration, its own timbre and texture, each, as it happens, incorporating a note of the F-major triad but in such harmonies (does the word harmonies even apply?) that the triad is disembodied as the series unfolds.

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