This essay's main purpose has been to authorize trespassing beyond the various warning signs that a modernist music criticism has placed between us and the work of art—“Begriffe untersagt.” “Mimèsis interdit.” “Transcendence Not Allowed.” It could therefore appear a fatal failure of self-awareness to propose a different prohibition: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The last aphorism from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has commonly been taken to enshroud in silence the very topics discussed here, namely, ethics and aesthetics. It can, however, encourage a different kind of restraint and bring about a more exhilarating opportunity. Despair about what we can know about and expect from art settles in when asking language to do things it was not designed to do, like treat abstractions as if they were substances, or to submit language to an impossible standard whereby, if something is not absolutely true, then it cannot be true at all.

Or, perhaps the objection to the modernist critiques evaluated throughout has credence, if anywhere, only at their far end, where is has turned into ought, where the call for a clear-eyed description of the empirical world about us has become a utopian prescription for a future we cannot know. But that approach is hobbled right from the start, because it demands that, for each concept, there be a corresponding ostensive object, a thing you can point to. Wittgenstein recognized that such thinking produced nothing more than “mental cramps” (Blue Book, 4), relief from which comes not by taking in more empirical data but by rescinding the inordinate demand placed on words. And that is where the real reward comes. The big deal is not the attainment of selfsatisfaction with one's command of language and logic; it is a fuller recognition of the import of a human gesture. You can acknowledge more things. But the “je refuse” of modernist criticism turns down the opportunity for connection, however difficult to achieve.

Obviously, all kinds of objections or amendments come to mind. Even if the diagnosis and cure are misguided, however, agreement might still hold in one area: good or bad, something has changed in, is different about, the more recent critical landscape.