Stutters and snorts are meaningful but not usually referential.
The postmodernist critique of representation undermines the referential status of visual imagery, its claim to represent reality as it really is - either the appearance of things or some ideal order behind or beyond appearance.
An axiomatic system comprises axioms and theorems and requires a certain amount of hand-eye coordination before it works. A formal system comprises an explicit list of symbols, an explicit set of rules governing their cohabitation, an explicit list of axioms, and, above all, an explicit list of rules explicitly governing the steps that the mathematician may take in going from assumptions to conclusions. No appeal to meaning nor to intuition. Symbols lose their referential powers; inferences become mechanical.
I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.
Someone once said that "The Waste Land" was a scum of poetry floating on a sea of footnotes. That resonated with me, because that's kind of what I was doing lyrically for a while. I was being very referential in a way. I would drop in these little phrases or ideas that were sort of portholes into a whole bigger realm of thought or whatever, that would work within the song, but that you could also poke through into a bigger discussion.
