MUSICAGE. John Cage

the conflict is between tribalism and nationalism, which “we” look at as an advance. Tribalism being oriented toward issues of blood and—

      JC: Blood and earth and such things.

      JR: Yes, and “kin,” so that it’s very hard to recognize and respect the “other.”

      JC: The artificial one, the seemingly artificial.

      JR: Yes. In the New York Times a few Sundays ago there was an article that talked about the “new cultural tribalism” in this country—that at this point we feel our audiences are so split, there has to be a women’s art, a black art, an Arab art, a Latino art…

      JC: Very, very pluralistic. I think that’s the nature of everything though. That’s much better than having everybody a bunch of sheep.

      JR: The point the writer in the Times was making was that this does not necessarily further understanding. If the only audience is the one reflected in the piece it becomes a kind of cultural solipsism.

      JC: I don’t think that’s true.

      JR: So you think the availability of multiple perspectives will be—

      JC: Yes. There’s always someone coming in from the street, into a situation where they don’t belong, (laughter) I mean, it’s not pure. What we’re basically in, it seems to me, is a greater population than the earth has ever experienced before, and we just don’t know what’s happening or how to deal with it yet.² We’re inexperienced, we’re uneducated, and so forth, about the reality of the present circumstance. This article sounds as though they know something. Whereas I think we don’t know much about what we’re doing. But I do believe that we’re on one earth and I think more and more people realize this. And if we could give up this silliness of the difference of nations and concern ourselves with problems that affect all of us, we would make a great step forward…. And, on a less Utopian level now, if President Bush’s tactic of making an economic war before making a militaristic one … if it works, it will be really a boost for optimism—following the Russian, what you could call, erasure of politics, hmm? If we could now have an erasure of militarism through economics. The Japanese, for instance … they actually think they need the oil. Actually, we don’t need the oil. Fuller has told us long ago we should quickly not use it anymore.

      JR: Solar energy and—

      JC: All those things. We need the oil in order to do the things that really must be done, rather than the things that needn’t be done, like driving for no reason at all from one place to another in all the cities of the earth. If you just imagine from the sky any metropolis, you see all this vast waste of oil.

      JR: That’s true, and so I wonder about the basis for optimism.

      JC: Fuller said we would need that oil in order to start the necessary pumps of the future to solve the giving of food and utilities and whatnot to everyone on earth rather than just the few.

      JR: What do you think of the role of the artist who is developing ideas similar to Fuller’s, and other ideas that might be called pragmatically optimistic, in relation to the fare on television that is retreading old-style ways of thinking about ourselves as fragmented—that presents the earth only as the scene of continual conflicts? Adorno, for instance, was very pessimistic about the effects of mass culture—he felt its power to shape the consciousness of people in ways that would be socially destructive.

      JC: I do think that if we walk along Sixth Avenue now and look at the people we see on the street … you don’t have a feeling of culture. You really don’t, as you see the people in the street. And now, I think one of the striking things about our awareness of, say, the United States—and that probably extends to other countries—is that we have certainly not a sense of mass culture, but of individuals who have culture. We have the feeling that many people pay no attention to culture. And that they also don’t pay any attention to anything else that is connected with spirituality or with things other than physical necessity. And that they, furthermore, now … that so many people escape from all of that through drugs. I have no objection to their using the drugs, but I do miss what one might lump together under the word “spirituality.”

      JR: Spirituality seems to exist—at least partly—in the realm of desire … something you don’t get to if you’re totally preoccupied with need.

      JC: Right.

      JR: And I wonder if, to the extent that we have a culture, we’ve left ourselves too needy. Too needy to shift attention away from terrible anxieties about survival, and things that close people in on their fears.

      JC: I think that the hope, any hope, any future in fact, has to be viewed from the viewpoint, not of the masses, but from the viewpoint of the individuals. And I don’t mean to separate the masses from the individuals. We need to approach the mass as though it were as many individuals as there are in the mass, hmm? If the masses are going to get any culture that is really useful to them, they will get it individually rather than as a group.

      JR: How? They get it “individually” sitting in front of a video box in their house.

      JC: We don’t know how. Because no individual knows how his life is going to change, hmm? Even the cultured ones (laughter), let alone the uncultivated ones. But even the uncultivated ones, the hopeless ones, the homeless ones—all of those—can in the next ten minutes change their lives. And we don’t know why, or what will have stimulated them to do that. But they do do it. And that is how life is … don’t you think?

      JR: I’m not sure, actually, I—

      JC: But you certainly don’t think that five people, because they’re in a group, are all going to agree upon some change in culture and take it—

      JR: I think groups can be much less than the sum of their parts, rather than more … I suppose my state of mind at the moment is that both my optimism and my pessimism are on hold and I’m not sure what that leaves me with. (laughter) I do worry when critics and people who think about a postmodern era as a possibility—and I think thinking of it as an empty category which has yet to be filled, where we have the opportunity to look back and say to ourselves, we don’t want to do this anymore, let’s try that—makes the idea of a postmodern era rather exciting, thinking of it as a threshold (that’s how those labels are useful, as thresholds)—then I worry about the critics who say one of the problems with modernism was that it ignored mass culture; it ignored whatever it was that all those people out on Sixth Avenue, with the exception of perhaps one or two, were responding to and having their consciousnesses shaped by. At the moment that seems to be television, certain radio stations … mass media. There is the tension between the fact that these are of course individuals, and yet the input is very homogenized, is very uniform if you believe things like Nielsen ratings.

      JC: You mean many people respond the same way?

      JR: Not necessarily. I hope not. But many people are responding positively or negatively to the same things.

      JC: They’re being stimulated by the same things, going in slightly different directions probably.

      JR: Yes, perhaps so.

      JC: I think that the media—they will get more and more boring.

      JR: Could that possibly happen? Even more boring? (laughter)

      JC: I think so. I don’t use it anymore and I know many people who don’t. One of the arguments in optimistic support of radio goes to the effect that television is so boring that people are going back to radio, hmm? Isn’t that true?

      JR: Well I think people I know and you know may be …

      JC: But I don’t even do that. I don’t really listen to the radio either. Neither did Marcel [Duchamp]. He listened to WINS and he called it LULLABY. And the reason he called it LULLABY was that it repeated itself, over and over; and he used to use it, perhaps, to go to sleep … I don’t know.

      JR: Well some sort of anesthesia is probably a good deal of what people are after. I suppose the scary part is that it isn’t anesthesia