The degradation of music’s object: Deleuze and Guattari’s diagrammatics and musical semiotics

Abstract

This article explores what the music theorist Raymond Monelle called a “certain degradation of the object” in the semiotic analysis of music, that is, the notion that an object or reference seems to be ultimately absent from musical semiotics. Monelle takes his brief and undeveloped theorization of this idea to be a departure from some of the Peircean perspectives prominent in musical semiotics and in his own work, and turns to the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a means to deal with this feature of the semiotic study of music. This article pursues Monelle’s suggestion further. It begins by outlining the adoption and adaptation of the thought of Charles S. Peirce in musical semiotics, before turning to Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement with and departure from Peirce in the development of their own diagrammatic theory. It then considers applications of this theory to musical semiotics, suggesting that Deleuze and Guattari’s diagrammatics shows that the object of music is not something to be found, but something to be created.