Frank Kogan

You're moving way too fast for me at the end there. If by "text" you mean "transcendent self-revealing text that everyone can examine so as to resolve any and all possible disagreements about what is being said," then indeed there is no text, in music or anywhere else, and if we substitute the word "reality" for "text" we get the same result, that there is no reality.

But those are bad notions of "text" and "reality," as things that are unproblematically and unchangingly there. Is it your opinion that in the world of semipopular music there are just too many things, from hairstyle to song lyrics, to pick one out as the "text"? Nonetheless there's still a difference between having an opinion of the Paris Hilton album based on having heard the album as opposed to having an opinion of the Paris Hilton album while not having heard the album, and there's a difference between having an opinion of the lyrics to "Oxford Comma" based on knowing the lyrics to "Oxford Comma" and having an opinion without knowing the lyrics. (I give a fuck about an Oxford comma, by the way. I think we need it, to avoid unnecessary ambiguity.) And there's a difference between knowing what Ashlee's voice sounds like and not knowing what it sounds like, and knowing her various hairstyles and colors and not knowing them. And there's a difference between basing a reading of an article on all of what the article says, and basing a reading of an article on only some of what the article says, while ignoring the lines that contradict one's reading, and so forth.

Now, what Thomas Kuhn pointed out is true: we can't just look at, say, Aristotle's Physics and understand it, since Aristotle doesn't have the same concept of "motion" that we have, and if we read the word with our own concept in mind, the man's ideas come out incoherent and stupid. But the way Kuhn managed to figure out Aristotle's concept - that it was different from Kuhn's own, and what it was - was by paying close attention to the text, by not giving up until he came up with a reading that showed the text as coherent and smart. I don't see what the phrase "there is no text to interrogate" tells us here.* What else is there to interrogate? And if one is interrogating one's own preconceptions about "motion," it's still by way of the text that one is doing so. It's true that Kuhn has to approach the text with some concept of motion - without a culture around it, the text is nothing. But that a text can't stand alone doesn't mean it's nothing.

(I have no idea if I'm addressing what was on your mind. Every text has two worlds, the world that produced it and the world that receives it, and the text can't instruct us what to do with it, what its latent possibilities are for fanfic or for extrapolation or who knows what. That's up to us. But in my experience the better I know a text the better I'll be able to use it.)

You don't have to be privileged to engage in erasure. I'd assume it's hard not to engage in erasure at some point, wherever you sit. But it's probably easier to avoid the negative repercussions of erasing someone if you're more powerful than the people you've erased. But privileged people like you and me - privileged in that we've had high-powered educations - might have also developed at least some skill in how to avoid erasing others, how to notice counter-evidence etc.

(Btw, the reason I haven't jumped into the world of fanfic isn't that I'm indifferent, but just that I don't have time, at least not yet.)

*I can't see from your context whether you or someone else is the person making this claim, that there is no text to interrogate.