ABSTRACT
Jonathon Crary argues that the dominance of vision in Western culture is a problem that is often assumed and adopted uncritically. The privileged status of vision within the context of the history of Western art music has been scrutinised in the last three decades by musicologists. The act of writing music for the purpose of communicating musical ideas from composer to performer is also an act of power and, as Taruskin explains, reinforces the elevated status of the composer, thereby rendering the status of the performer to slave. The Freudian conception of desire is Oedipal and fundamentally relies upon a relationship which ensures that subjects define themselves according to 'lack'. Therefore, one of the aims of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is to demonstrate that this model of desire is restrictive primarily because of its negative and unproductive relationship with 'lack'.
