Deleuze, Music, and Modernist Mimesis Eric Prieto, Santa Barbara This essay focuses on the role of music in Thousand Plateaus, which was written by two of the most radical exponents of the antirepresentational doctrine that became a hallmark of French postmodern theory in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. They use music to reflect upon the means and ends of their ‘nomadic’, philosophical project, which involves nothing less than overturning the entire edifice of representational thought in the Aristotelian tradition. For them music is an exemplary art, and they initially intend to propose it as a model for the other arts – and indeed for all forms of human inquiry, including philosophy and science – that would eventually supersede all forms of thought in the representational tradition. Surprisingly, however, their analyses of music actually end up having the opposite effect, leading them to reintroduce representation into the heart of their philosophy. It is this surprising reversal – in which music, paradoxically, provokes a return to representational values – that interests me here. Of all the arts, it is no doubt music that provides the most interesting test case for understanding the role of representation in aesthetic communication. The lack of any stable, codifiable referential mechanism of the kinds found in language and pictorial representation has created a number of well-known but intractable problems for artists and aestheticians interested in understanding how music makes meaning and whether or not it can, or should be able to, teach us anything useful about the extra-musical world. Some, seizing on this referential instability, have gone so far as to claim that music is incapable of making reference to the outside world (as in Igor Stravinsky’s often quoted dictum about music being “by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,” 53-54) or that that any attempt to make it do so betrays a grave misunderstanding of music’s fundamental nature (as in Eduard Hanslick’s anti-Wagnerian treatise On the Musically Beautiful). But even for those of us who are unwilling to go to such extremes, it seems clear that music poses the question of referential meaning in a particularly acute form. It is for this reason, no doubt, that references to music often surface in discussions about the various roles allotted to representation in the other arts, including literature.