Differences

John Rahn


In this age of difference, a "postmodern" era which (on the surface) 
proclaims its difference from the Modern with all the naive 
historicizing fervor of any past avant-garde, this fin-de-siecle which 
hysterically celebrates the centrifugal as it sees increasing global 
dominion and concentration of capital and (not coincidentally) an 
increasingly
Americanized world pop "culture," dancing out its fatal anxiety in a 
purgative tarantella, Panic evacuating its every essence -- in such 
surroundings, stepping carefully in counterpoint, do we dare make a 
difference? For every act of difference is power. Power flows like sap 
in the humble reeds that whisper in our ear, a thousand things. When 
we then act to make a difference, power draws the line: the line in the 
sand, the cut in the throat of the sacrifice, the boundary within which is 
one thing, and without which is an other. After we have acted to make 
a difference, Power turns its maned head in our direction. A work of art 
is an act of power.  

If we were to ask Difference what its essence was, it would be 
embarrassed. In fact, Difference could not bear it. If Difference thought 
it had a nature, it would get carried away in all directions. We can 
instead ask each difference simple questions, such as: Where does it 
draw the line? How, and why, does it draw the line? Does it draw more 
than one? Of what shape? Of what function? To what end? In what 
relations? And perhaps the answers to such questioning will form 
individual differences into regions, packs, swarms, congeries, 
ethnicities, or modes of differences, which in turn will inform thought 
about art.  

Gerardo's Latino Rap act -- as in the music video "Rico. Suave." -- 
draws a circle named Gerardo, and another circle around Gerardo's 
genitals. The genital circle depends, interlinked, from Gerardo's; but in 
two other senses, Gerardo's circle contains the genital, and the genital 
circle contains Gerardo's. There is very little difference between the 
two circles. Only in the first of these senses does Gerardo open at all, 
but only to himself: the interlinked circles of Gerardo and genitals are 
each other's other (with a small "o"), where neither is inside the other. 
But in the two other senses, Gerardo and his genitals are each other's 
content, each both the inside and the outside: stasis. The image of a 
sphere, or hypersphere, a milkily opaque globe into which comes no 
intrusion from the world, and from which comes no minutest 
excrescence. The image of a Christmas-tree ornament, or an 
unfertilized egg, ornamental and monoecious. The kind of object it is 
safe to play with. It can have no consequences. It is an object designed 
for mass consumption, neither nourishing nor obviously poisonous.  

Gerardo's Egg typifies an identity which is not an identity. Because it 
is its own outside, it is inaccessible and empty. There is little to 
differentiate it; it has no features. It is not an individual (though 
undivided) because it does not actively participate in an individuating 
web of relations. It is not a person, because it has neither a culture nor 
a will. How could it have a culture, without participation in a culture? 
How could it have a will, when there is no field of play in which a will 
could operate? It is a mere toy tossed in the surf of a cultural 
environment that can never penetrate it (or it would sink). It is a 
subject made object. But it is not a complex object. Though its 
existence reflects its constituting society, it is not Lacan's specular 
other-with-a-small-o, not alien, not ego, because it is not even a 
(convincing) simulacrum of subjectivity.  

Madonna, corporate package that she is, offers another kind of I-deal. 
Each of Madonna's music videos engages its own nexus of social and 
ideological issues. The series of music videos gives the impression of 
an artist, a person, working her way through themes offered her by her 
life experience: her father, her familial religion, racism, 
environmentalism, prisons, and always, of course, sexuality. There is a 
development from work to work. Each work internally is not inert, but 
active in a way that is sufficiently polysemous to bear interpretation, or 
active reception. The line Madonna draws is a "ligne de fuite," a line of 
flight or vanishing-line, always escaping to another plane. The one 
semiotic constant is her femininity, or at least, her sexuality, which she 
wears like a mask -- like a guest at a masquerade party who wears her 
own face.  

In her music videos, there is a counterpoint between the musical and 
the visual developments. The music, which itself is neither complex 
nor innovative, provides continuity for the fragmented, rapid-cut video 
montage which primarily conveys Madonna's papier-machİ shell of 
personae, the technique by which she achieves her "lignes de fuite." 
Each screen shows a plane of consistency; each of Madonna's lines of 
flight escapes to a new one. Her work exemplifies a difference always 
in flux and always at the surface. The line is drawn not in the sand, that 
would be too stable, but on the screen, and redrawn.... Which is her 
side, our side, the other side? <1>  

And yet there is a Madonna discernible behind this fretwork screen. 
The saturated surface of pop-culture intertextuality is gathered up, 
enfolded, enveloped. The n-dimensional construct of planes of 
consistency created by her lines of flight is packaged in an n+1-th 
dimension, the artist's persona behind the papier-machİ shell, and this 
in turn intersects a plane in a higher dimension, which is the native 
emblemicity, the ethnicity of her work. This multiple capture of the 
fluttering bird threatens to trivialize its subject. Can the bird fly free?  

An artwork can draw a line between two groups of people. It can do 
this intentionally, as in certain political or racist productions; it can fall 
"naturally" into this role, as in, say, Country and Western music or any 
folk music; or it can be objectified and used as a tool for drawing a 
line, like a national anthem. Almost any music can fall prey to such 
divisional instrumentality. The motives for drawing the line may be 
characterized as positive (pride in nationality, race, class, ethnicity, or 
education) or negative (to help enforce the exclusion of people on the 
other side). The music can then be regarded as representing these 
divisions and identifications, these nuances of social and cultural 
structure.  

Music criticism (of the academic, intellectual sort) is just beginning to 
be fascinated by such semeiosis, spurred on by the criticism of 
literature and art, the perspective of ethnomusicology, and the example 
of Continental thinkers such as Barthes, Eco, and Foucault, to name 
only a few. The play of signifiers within any of Madonna's music 
videos is the very stuff of that art, the material internal to it in terms of 
which it structures itself, so that such criticism is both appropriate and 
inevitable. But to package even a Madonna work in an extra dimension 
as itself (as a whole) a signifier, that is the birdcage. To view an 
artwork in this way is to alienate it from itself.  

As soon as any artwork is taken as representing a group of people, or 
as a sign of something other than the artwork, a circle has been drawn 
in an extra plane which is not among the dimensions of the artwork. 
The focus is no longer on the work's dynamic interactions, the 
multidimensional movement of moments in the understanding of the 
artwork, its internal open-ness to itself and to the world. It feels good 
to step back and "put the work into perspective." It seems to open 
wider horizons and a more comprehensive understanding, producing a 
kind of pleasure which motivates the diastolic movement of thought 
toward breadth, as opposed to its systolic movement toward depth. 
Depth nowadays is so out of fashion that it can seem comic: the half-
mad scholar peering intently through bubble-lensed glasses at some 
object which is, because it is always part of a more comprehensive 
landscape, tainted with insignificance. If Modernism is a movement 
toward depth, Postmodernism flees outward. The price of this diastole 
is a loss of focus that entails loss of being.  

Once the artwork is packaged, wrapped in a dimension external to it, 
we can attach a handle and carry it around. We can put it on a shelf or 
in a bin. We can judge it by its wrapper: This is Monie Love the Nice 
Afro-American Female Rapper; this is Gerardo the Egg; this is 
Madonna the sex symbol, Madonna the money machine, Madonna the 
feminist, Madonna the Bird. The wrapper can be complex, and can 
package an object in contradictory ways. Hostile hands have wrapped 
Milton Babbitt as the serial blight, the phallo-centric repressive power; 
people who know him (as I do) clothe him in the garments of a 
dedicated and caring mentor, the inspiration of generations of 
composers and theorists, the one who freed us to think, opening a 
space in what had been a musical environment even more stiflingly 
anti-intellectual than it is now. To some, Babbitt's music is "elitist," 
coldly cerebral, incomprehensible, and static, yet for others it is 
bubbling with energy, a non-hierarchical multidimensional network in 
which each element is highly polysemic, links stretching out in all 
directions: <2> Babbitt the Bouncing Bubi (his own term for 
serialism), exuberantly exemplifying in his music structures which are 
in fact incompatible with those of elitism and phallo-centric control.  

Wrappers come in a variety of albedos, a continuum from opaque to 
nearly transparent. The more a wrapper points outward, packaging its 
object as representing something outside the object, the more opaque 
the wrapper is. At the extreme, our gaze does not penetrate the 
wrapper, and no information escapes from within it -- a sort of Black 
Whole. Madonna the Hot, Babbitt the Cold, Beethoven the Great, all 
can be such opacities. Sometimes opacity inheres in the object, which 
is its own wrapper: Gerardo's Egg. A wrapper becomes translucent to 
the extent that it turns toward representing its inside, the artwork, and 
becomes a description of it. It "writes from" its content for us to read. 
In this category, to various degrees, fall my brief characterizations of 
Babbitt's Bouncing Bubi (the polysemic network), Madonna's Bird 
(the always disappearing lines of flight); and also Heinrich Schenker's 
analysis of Beethoven's Eroica, Richard Toop's analysis of Brian 
Ferneyhough's Lemma-Icon-Epigram, <3> and so on.  

No wrapping is transparent. Works of art, like people, are never 
adequately represented. They must be experienced in life-time, in the 
flux of moments that makes up their being. Every circumscription is 
reductive; representation is not presentation. Even if a wrapper were 
perfectly transparent, it would still seal off the artwork from us like 
cellophane around a pear. We can see the pear, but can't smell it or 
taste it. Music in particular, that non-visual art, is as intimate and 
immediate as the maternal breast. In an unusual passage, Lacan says 
about suckling: 
The proprioceptive sensations of sucking and grasping obviously form 
the basis of this experience's ambivalence, which arises from the 
[following] situation: the being who is absorbing is completely 
absorbed .... <4> 
And a little earlier in Lacan's essay: 
Traumatic or not, weaning leaves in the human psyche the permanent 
trace of the biological relation it interrupts. Indeed, that vital crisis is 
replicated in a crisis of the psyche, undoubtedly the first whose 
resolution will have a dialectical structure. For the first time, it would 
seem, a vital tension is resolved in a mental intention. <5> 
Thus we have moved from life engaged with itself, absorbing and 
being absorbed, through the weaning crisis to a mental intention.  
Intention as a model of understanding holds within its metaphor the 
arrow of sight, directed to a distant and distinct object. Lacan tries to 
work through the consequent dichotomy of ego and other in explicitly 
optical terms. The sovereignty of sight informs notions of 
understanding at even more basic levels, maintaining (for perhaps 
psychologically necessary reasons) the separation from the maternal 
breast. Lacan's master was Hegel, mediated by Kojeve, as Mikkel 
Borch-Jacobsen has shown; the rift appears in Hegel early on in the 
"education of the spirit": 
It is as a universal too that we utter what the sensuous [content] is. 
What we say is: 'This', i.e. the universal This; or, 'it is', i.e. Being in 
general. Of course we do not envisage the universal This or Being in 
general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly 
say what in this sense-certainty we mean to say. But language, as we 
see, is the more truthful; in it, we ourselves directly refute what we 
mean to say, and since the universal is the true [content] of sense-
certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not 
possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that 
we mean. <6> 
Hegel puns on the German "Meinung" to underline the private, and 
therefore incommunicable, nature of meaning in relation to "sense-
certainty": what's mine cannot be yours. The optical separation is 
projected onto language by Hegel in a way that will reverberate 
through twentieth-century philosophy (recall only Wittgenstein!). 
Indeed, as we have seen, to signify is to be circumscribed, cut off from 
the world by a higher-dimensional agency, wrapped up for use. But art, 
and music in particular, is not the kind of entity that should expect such 
"to-handed" treatment, or that can survive it. Music shows a way out of 
the hall of mirrors, but only if we listen to it. <7>  

In order to see our way clear we should, before listening to what the 
audible has to say, get in touch with touch. Touch is the most 
reciprocal of the senses. To touch is to be touched. Separation is 
impossible. Touch has location, but is always immediate. Moreover, 
touch is the medium of agency: it is ultimately through touch that we 
act on the world, and the world acts on us.  Merleau-Ponty, in his 
sympathetic posthumous book Le visible et l'invisible, tries to work his 
way through and out of and around the optical conundrums of subject 
and object, reflection and intuition. <8> The primary tools he develops 
for digging us out are, firstly, a validation of "la foi perceptive," a faith 
of and in perception which is related to the problem of Hegel's 
discarded unutterable unintelligible sensuous; and secondly, a method 
of philosophical interrogation: 
...philosophy interrogates perceptive faith -- but neither expects nor 
receives an answer in the ordinary sense, because its question would 
not be satisfied by the unveiling of an unknown variable or invariant, 
and because the existing world exists in the interrogative mode. 
Philosophy is perceptive faith asking itself about itself.<9>  
For Merleau-Ponty, interrogation is the mode not only of philosophy, 
but of life, replacing the pure subjective negativity that drives 
existentialism from some early moments of Hegel through Sartre. 
If we are ourselves in question in the very course of our life, it is not 
because a central non-being threatens at each moment to withdraw its 
consent from being; it is because we ourselves are a single continuous 
question...a perpetual enterprise of putting ourselves back in place 
among the constellations of the world, and putting things [in the world] 
into place within our dimensions. <10>  
Inevitably, Merleau-Ponty is led to touch, describing at last 
...a true touch of touch, when my right hand touches my left hand 
while feeling things, [a touch] by which the "touching subject" passes 
over to the rank of the touched, descends among things, so that touch 
constitutes itself from the midst of the world and as in things. <11> 
This leads Merleau-Ponty, towards the end of his book, to characterize 
the world-that-includes-us as flesh ("chair"), neither matter, spirit, nor 
substance, but an "element," a "general thing, half-way between the 
spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a kind of incarnated principle 
that imports a style of being everywhere it is part of being." <12> 
Instead of the intersubjective, we have "intercorporeality" 
("intercorporeite"). <13> 
If my left hand can touch my right hand while it feels tangibles, ...can 
turn back on my right hand its [own] palpation, why, touching the hand 
of an other, wouldn't I touch in it the same power of marrying things 
that I touched in my own? <14>  

We have to ask music some very intimate questions. How does music 
feel when it entwines with its listener like two bodies sliding over and 
around each other? Exactly what is involved in this sensuous act, and 
what does time have to do with it? Does music think while it feels?  

Not all sound is music. Sound is naturally musical but may be turned to 
other uses. Speech packages sounds in opaque wrappers in order to 
make signifiers out of them, introducing the optical separation into 
sound. To the extent that texted music is speech, it is a mixed-realm art 
form like the mixed-media music video. The properly musical 
component is mixed with a semiotic component which is visual, either 
explicitly so in the case of the music video, or indirectly through the 
optical separation induced on sound by speech.  If I wet my finger, I 
can rub a clear spot on the opaque wrapper of some speech-sound, such 
as "I." By rubbing hard enough, I can make a hole in the wrapper. 
Through this hole, the signifiance of "I" can leak out, its wrapper 
dissolved, and I find myself surrounded by and surrounding the music 
of "I." Ah -- eh -- eee. Around me, when I really get to know "I," are 
several pitched components moving in independent rhythms. These are 
physically caused by, and their rhythms are related to, the movements 
of the tongue, jaw, and lips in a mouth producing this sound. At first 
blush, "I" may seem only a sequence of two sound-qualities, ah and 
eee, with a hint of a middle sound, eh, at least implicit. By living with 
this sound long enough and attending to it carefully, it is possible to 
hear a counterpoint of at least two areas of pitch in motion. The 
changing relation of the two, when combined with an underlying, 
relatively static sound, composes an overall trajectory that can be 
chunked into the simplistic sequence of the ah, eh, eee. Even the 
underlying sound changes and reveals its own complexity: its 
shocking, explosive beginning and evaporative end, and the steady 
granularity that sustains it. Even more: the shocking beginning 
hesitates as it explodes, the steady granularity has blemishes and 
wavers, and so on. "I" is a musical composition. Its decomposition and 
reconstitution are a matter of everyday technique -- both musical and 
technological -- for composers of computer music. "I" is a relatively 
simple composition, and can be part of much more complex 
compositions such as "silent" and "time," which in turn may be 
composed into more complex music. For example, my composition 
Miranda might be described as the music of "time" embedded in the 
music of "silent."  

It is possible to compose sound in its musical nature and in its 
symbolic aspect at the same time, and in the same sounds. The two 
realms coexist in the same medium. The structure of musical sounds is 
musical, and the structure of the play of these same sounds as sonic 
signifiers can also be musical, though it may hover between poetry and 
music. It can be interesting to counterpoint the two structures of 
sounds-as-signifiers and sounds-as-musical-sounds, and a number of 
contemporary composers have been doing this, including (to mention 
only a few) John Cage, Kenneth Gaburo, Benjamin Boretz, Charles 
Dodge, Paul Lansky, and myself. Poetry is of course concerned with 
sound and rhythm as well as meaning. There is an intricate rhythm of 
alliteration and assonance overwebbing the words in the quantitatively 
metric elegiac distichs of Propertius, for example. Contemporary sound 
poetry goes a long way toward music. Perhaps the early twentieth-
century French "lettriste" poets reached an extreme in the 
deconstruction of the semeiotic, though they generally had tin ears and 
remained fixed in the visual. <15> The nonlinear printed verbal 
productions of contemporary composer J. K. Randall look like poetry 
on the page, but feel like music when read, even though their 
nonlinearity often makes it impracticable to read them aloud. <16>  

If it is possible to make a structure of signifying sounds that is musical, 
how can we locate the distinction between music and poetry, or are 
they indifferent? The answer to this question lies in time.  The time in 
music is an intimate time, a lived time, a "real" time. I have described 
musical time more fully elsewhere, telling the story of how a listener, 
Mary, lives herself alongside of the music. <17> Human life and music 
listened to by that life do not run parallel in straight lines never 
meeting, but rather intertwine closely, touching each other all over, 
each penetrating and being penetrated by the other, so that while they 
touch they almost fuse into one entity, one life-music or music-life. All 
the complexities of human being-in-time are there for music's being-
in-life and life's being-in-music. Afterwards, when the music is over, 
we can step back and look at it, establishing that optical separation 
which is needed for one mode of understanding. We can then talk 
about the music with each other. I can hold a monologue in myself 
about the music, revolving its image, polishing and refining its facets, 
adjusting its balance. I can take out my rock collection and play with it, 
comparing one musicolith with others, sorting and arranging. I can 
even join a society of musicolithologists.  

But during the time I am coupled with the music, there is little or no 
semeiosis going on. The music and I are too involved with one another 
for a space to open up between us at any time, so that I could constitute 
a separate it as a sign. I am, so to speak, rapt, but not wrapping. Nor 
am I rapping. There is in music-time no monologue in me about the 
music which is linguistic, no logos in mousike. Those who sat upon the 
Delphic tripod over a Gaea cleft for Apollo were trained to speak 
during the divine afflatus, but they never made sense. It was the priests 
of Apollo who, like latter-day psychomusicometricians, stood apart 
watching the Pythoness in her trance: it was they who pretended to 
make sense of her protocol report of her experience.  

The experience of music affords a person the chance to think without 
language, without snipping the experience into discrete "segments" 
wrapped up into "signifiers," and free of the consequent machinery of 
negation, polar oppositions such as subject/object, and the whole 
permutational heap of linguistic gravel whose constant grinding can be 
music to nobody's ears. Language is all very well if one wishes to 
communicate. Music theory is about communicating about music, 
using some kind of language. But music itself is not "about" 
communication; the whole category of "being about" does not apply 
within it, except in ancillary ways (such as music composed partly out 
of ready-made signifiers, the music poetry discussed above).  

The connections between this moment of music and other moments of 
music, between this move in the music and that move in my life now 
or at some other time, such connections are immediate and intimate, 
like touch. They are not mediated by semeiosis. What some analyst 
might later (after the music) describe as a repetition of a motive such 
that the second instance makes a reference to the first, wrapping each 
instance in an opacity that points or receives -- this experience feels 
quite different in music-time. <18> Neither "instance of the motive" is 
wrapped, even in cellophane; both are experienced fully, and when I 
taste that other motive, its juices run down my chin. My mouth waters 
all the more during the second bite. I am not even sure when the first 
bite leaves off and the second begins; the taste lingers in my mouth so 
that the first mouthful is, in a way, still present during the second. This 
is not to say that the two experiences are not discriminated. On the 
contrary, the analysis of "I" showed how much discrimination lives in 
even a musical micro-composition. However, it is a discrimination that 
does not wrap, but leaves each discriminable open in as many ways as 
can be discriminated. Boundaries shift and overlap. All sorts of 
discriminables combine freely, promiscuously, polymorphically, not 
bound to respect presets, naked to each other. This is not the 
Kleiderphilosophie of semeiosis.  

What a strange new world! Is it really possible to live and think in 
music without negation and the polarities? Wilson Coker, a music 
theorist and aesthetician, tried to construct a Peircian semiotics for 
music. <19> He saw clearly that his premises entailed that music be 
internally a linguistic discourse, including the logic that underlies 
language. His attempts to provide interpretations of logical relations 
within music founder on the rock of negation. Tchaikovski's crashing 
orchestral chord does not musically negate, or contradict, the 
pianissimo descending bassoon solo that immediately precedes it. It is 
not the case that one is true and the other, false. <20> They coexist, 
elements of each circulating freely in the other; yet they are distinct, 
and their qualities are specifically determinate to a high degree. It is 
worth noting that musical qualities, unlike qualities of painting or 
sculpture or dance or theater or literature, have found many fruitful 
mathematical models to fit their structures. They are quantitatively 
discriminable. The authority of Boethius and Cassiodorus handed 
down to the Middle Ages this perception, that there is a difference 
between the realms of number (music, arithmetic, geometry, 
astronomy) and those of language and meaning, the "triviales artes 
verborum" (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic). The reasoning-within-music 
that goes on is precise and elaborate, a sensuous mathematics, a 
calculus of life.  

We value the complex richness of that musical reasoning and the 
stimulating strangeness of the encounters it provides. Because the 
music and my life are entwined like two strands of genetic material, 
each serves as a template for the other, so that in a real sense the 
quality of my life is the quality of the music, and the quality of the 
music is the quality of my life. If the music cannot support a complex 
adventure, it is my life that becomes banal. If I do not perceive the 
surrounding maze of cultural limitations constructed out of the lines 
drawn by the judgments of Minos, I will be content with a music that 
contents itself with musical convention. No doubt this is the more 
comfortable position for all concerned. The half-beast at the heart of 
the maze, with its well-known affinity for human flesh, only becomes 
dangerous if it shuts its eyes and tries to feel its way out of the maze, 
living the sensuous mathematics of music, thinking its way musically 
past the lines drawn by a discrimination that erects walls. For this the 
half-beast requires a music of great complexity, depth, and the power 
of originality.  

Discrimination without negation is a different kind of difference. It is a 
difference that does not draw the line, that does not step back in order 
to point, to throw out an ob-ject and put it in its place, in perspective. It 
does not point at all -- within music there can be no "j'accuse." The 
world of thought within music is not divided into truths and untruths, 
sheep and goats, the permitted and the forbidden. <21> There is no 
logical entailment enforcing its iron law in music-time. Instead there is 
a dance of molecular and molar reconstitution, a continual intimate 
renegotiation of what is, a spirit reaching eagerly forward to whatever 
the next moment may bring, like a happy child waking to each new 
day. The music may be sombre, tragic, agonized, but the underlying 
compact is pleasure, the sensuous pleasure of life in a richly diverse 
environment. After surrounding music with so many metaphors, dare I 
evert the metaphors to suggest that the individual person in modern, or 
postmodern, social and political life might benefit from thinking in 
ways that are not linguistic, but musical? <22>























Notes 

1. Readers will recognize that the terms of this discussion of Madonna 
are drawn from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1987).  
2. Thanks to a conversation with Marion Guck for this image.  
3. Perspectives of New Music 28/2 (Summer 1990): 52-101.  
4. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, translated by 
Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 67. The 
original reference is Jacques Lacan, Les complexes familiaux dans la 
formation de l'individu (Paris: Navarin Editeur, 1984), 29-30. 
5. Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, 68. The original reference is Lacan, Les 
complexes familiaux, 27-28.  
6. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, translated by A. 
V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 60.  
7. Richard Rorty has explored the wider history of opticalism and 
representation and has advocated a "philosophy without mirrors" in 
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University 
Press, 1979). 
 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible, ed. Claude Lefort 
(Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1964). Translated by A. Lingis, (Evanston: 
Northwestern University Press, 1968). 
9. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible, 139. (Translations here 
from this book are my own.)  
10. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible, 140.  
11. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible, 170.  
12. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible, 184.  
13. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible, 185.  
14. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible, 185. The unfinished, 
posthumous Le Visible et l'invisible, which began in vision, ends with 
a brave but, for me, unconvincing attempt to constitute the world by 
reconstructing the realm of the visible along the lines of touch. The 
book pays virtually no attention to sound.  
15. Jean-Paul Curtay, La poİsie lettriste (Paris: Editions Seghers, 
1979).  
16. There is a sample analysis and a bibliography of these J. K. Randall 
pieces in my article "Aspects of Musical Explanation," Perspectives of 
New Music 17/2 (Spring 1979): 204-224. 
17. "Repetition," Contemporary Music Review, forthcoming.  
18. There are all sorts of problems with such an analysis. The 
resemblance of the two motives does not entail a reference of one to 
the other, and even in this context of discourse about music it seems 
superfluous to invoke reference. Furthermore, the underlying idea of 
what repetition is is devastatingly naive (see "Repetition").  
19. Wilson Coker, Music and Meaning: A Theoretical Introduction to 
Musical Aesthetics (NY: The Free Press, 1972). See also my review in 
Perspectives of New Music 11/1 (Fall 1972): 255-258.  
20. Coker, Music and Meaning, 122. 
21. On logical segregation's inappropriateness for music, see my 
"Notes on Methodology in Music Theory," Journal of Music Theory 
33/1 (1989): 143-154.
22. The ideas presented in the later part of this paper resonate strongly 
with those of the brilliant earlier writings of Julia Kristeva, as 
expressed in her work such as ªLa sİmiologie: Science critique et/ou 
critique de la scienceº (in Thİorie d'ensemble, Paris, 1968), La 
rİvolution du langage poİtique (Paris: ‰ditions du seuil, 1974), and 
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 1982, translated by Leon Roudiez). However, I did 
not wish to adapt her commitment in these writings to a triple braid of 
Marxism, Freudianism, and semiotics whose machinery, while 
impressive, seems to work too smoothly, and whose implications I 
cannot entirely share. I do share her focus on the semiotics of creative 
İnonciation rather than the packaged İnoncİ, and my model of music 
as asignifying ªpre-positº quantitative touch parallels her Platonic 
ªchora.º





Seattle, April 1991