Music instead of language

What matters in the context of Trump’s musical dance performance here is the self-reference of a self-contained system of pure superficiality without depth, as Baudrillard attested to simulacricity. It is a revenant of one of the most famous definitions of music. In his book On the Musically Beautiful. A Contribution to the Revision of the Aesthetics of Musical Art, the Viennese music critic and theorist Eduard Hanslick writes: “Tonally moving forms are the sole content and object of music.” Hanslick is opposed to a “rotten emotional aesthetic”⁴⁹ and for this reason alone is a vehement opponent of Richard Wagner’s music, which aims to emotionally overpower its audience. For Hanslick, music, especially absolute music, is about nothing other than “beautiful forms without the content of a specific affect”. In the tradition of Kantian aesthetics, Hanslick has the ornament and the arabesque in mind as models taken from the visual arts;⁵⁰ “language-like” (Adorno)⁵¹ musical processes such as Wagner’s leitmotifs are rigorously rejected by Hanslick.

Baudrillard’s concept of simulacricity and Hanslick’s definition of music both aim to reduce the referential function of language or linguisticity in Danto’s sense to zero. Thus, Baudrillard’s language loses “truth”, “reference” and “meaning”, while Hanslick’s music loses “content” (which is now only “form” and no longer “drama”, “action” or “program”), “expression” and “affect.”⁵²

The Spiegel article already cited here also follows this trend. According to the article, Trump only creates sound, whereas the issue here should rather be about “conveying information”. The accusation is therefore that Trump is retreating into speechlessness; at best, he simulates language when he speaks. Haberman makes a similar point when she insinuates that Trump does not actually have “meaning and depth” behind his “action[s]”, but that these are merely “read into” them: and this despite, or because, Trump’s actions are in fact – in the spirit of Nietzsche’s “there is no ‘being’ behind doing” – nothing but pure surface.

Notes

1. ⁴⁹Eduard Hanslick: Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Aesthetik der Tonkunst, Leipzig 1854, pp. 41 and V. Cf. fundamentally Carl Dahlhaus: Eduard Hanslick und der musikalische Formbegriff, in: Die Musikforschung 20,2 (April/June 1967), pp. 145-153.
2. ⁵⁰Eduard Hanslick: Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst, Leipzig 13-15/1922, p. 59. “The way in which music can bring us beautiful forms without the content of a particular affect is shown to us quite aptly by a branch of ornamentation in the visual arts: the arabesque.” Ibid.—When Hanslick writes “The independent beauty of sound forms here and the absolute dominance of thought over sound as a mere means of expression there are so mutually exclusive that a mixture of the two principles is a logical impossibility” and “everything can be traced back to purely musical determinations, without recourse to puzzling feeling” (ibid., pp. 88f. and 68), he is taking one of the extreme positions mentioned by Danto; cf. footnote 36.
3. ⁵¹Theodor W. Adorno: Fragment über Musik und Sprache, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16, Frankfurt a.M. 1978, pp. 251-256, p. 251.
4. ⁵²Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1922), p. 12.