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Ingrid Monson Hearing, Seeing, and Perceptual AgencyI’ll begin by declaring my sensory solidarity with W. J. T. Mitchell. In asking, What do pictures want? he offered an explanation that is easily transposable to music: Vision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, to the “sign,” or to discourse. Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language. They want neither to be leveled into a “history of images” nor elevated into a “history of art,” but to be seen as complex individuals occupying multiple subject positions and identities.Musical sounds are complex individuals, too, and tired of being pushed around by a language—which has presumptuously thought of itself as the ultimate model of signification and mediation! The linguistic turn, after all, seemed to colonize ever-larger spheres of human activity under its sign: culture as text; the body as text; music as text; image as text. The antiphenomenology of Derrida, arguing that the difference between différence and différance is not audible, only writable (surely a disaster for music), had the audacity to find the very “possibility of conceptuality” to lie in “writing”— his metaphor for a system of relations. It is as though the other senses are presumed incapable of the play of difference and, thus, inherently more essentialist. Ingrid Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music at Harvard University. She is the author of, among other works, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996) and Freedom Sounds: Jazz, Civil Rights, and Africa, 1950–1967 (2005). Critical Inquiry Volume 34, Number S2, Winter© 2008 by The University of Chicago.
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