MUSICAGE. John Cage

allows one to notice relationships between disparate elements minus the compulsion to absorb them into a progressively homogenizing system. I read the following passage from Jung’s foreword—knowing nothing about Cage’s use of the I Ching in his music—as having somehow to do with Cage’s account of Cunningham’s movement away from story ballets to the coincidences of sound and movement that structured the performances I had seen:

      The causal point of view tells us a dramatic story about how D came into existence: it took its origin from C, which existed before D, and C in its turn had a father, B, etc. The synchronistic view on the other hand tries to produce an equally meaningful picture of coincidence. How does it happen that A′, B′, C′, D′, etc., appear all in the same moment and in the same place? It happens in the first place because the physical events A′ and B′ are of the same quality as the psychic events C′ and D′, and further because all are the exponents of one and the same momentary situation. The situation is assumed to represent a legible or understandable picture. —(Jung, pp. xxiv-xxv)

      Of course what is “understood” will not meet criteria of traditional Western logics of discovery and understanding unless the conceptual framework within which those logics operate expands to include psychic phenomena, or forms of spirituality, or ecological or environmental views, or the kind of modeling of complex systems (like turbulent fluids and gases and the weather) that goes under the rubric of “deterministic chaos.” Going back to the Jung foreword now, I am, despite its dated assumption of absolutes and essences, startled that he wrote it in 1949. Another mind that had managed in certain very interesting respects the difficult trait of being “on time.” In the twentieth century, bogged down by enduring nineteenth-century forms, the present has always looked downright futuristic.

      Cage and I continued to talk the next day, about “ordinary language philosophy,” art, and “ordinary life.” I told Cage I thought he should give Wittgenstein another chance, particularly after reading the Jung. And I don’t clearly remember the relevance I thought I saw then, but it had something to do with Wittgenstein’s connecting meaning and use within active forms of life, which I probably visualized as a series of contexts radiating out from the linguistic event like a series of synchronic concentric circles. Focus on any moment and you would have synchronic, concentric contextuality…. Whatever it was that I said, Cage looked doubtful, smiled, and probably changed the subject. He told me the art that he valued was not separated from the rest of life. (I think he may have mentioned Duchamp’s readymades.) The so-called gap between art and life didn’t have to exist. And (here he began to laugh heartily) an artist friend (Robert Rauschenberg?) had written a play for three characters—called Art, Life, and Gap.

      This conversation was for me like a spring of fresh water opening up in the midst of centuries of conceptual rubble. Similar to my encounter with Wittgenstein’s work on the heels of Hegel and Heidegger, a few years before. Though I had been reading Gertrude Stein and Pound, and had loved as a teenager “living in” the porous and mysterious, nonlinear structure of The Waste Land, I still revered crystalline logic and the transcendence theories of art that pervaded the academy in the guise of “the sublime.” Even Wittgenstein, I later realized, had retained this etherealized view of art despite his rejection of metaphysics. It wasn’t until I read John Dewey’s Art as Experience that I discovered a spiritually rich, aesthetic pragmatics of everyday life that corresponded to Wittgenstein’s use theory of meaning—meaning as “form of life”—and Cage’s imitation of nature’s processes.⁸

      So, this is how I met the Master of Nonintention at a time when I happened to be in a seminar conducted by the British analytic philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe, who might well have been called the Mater of Intention. Elizabeth Anscombe was the author of what was at the time a quite influential book called just that—Intention—though she was then, as now, best known as Wittgenstein’s friend and colleague and the translator of the Philosophical Investigations. The title of her seminar that fall was Wanting. Cage of course had been engaged for years, as he would continue to be, in a spiritual and aesthetic practice of not-wanting. The collision of these two figures, entering my life at the same time, produced a crisis with a long series of aftershocks. As the only female professor I ever had, and easily the most brilliant, male or female, Anscombe was a powerful model for me. I greatly admired the quirkily inventive, entirely lucid character of Anscombe’s reason. And I envied what seemed to be her intellectual immunity to messiness, to the morass of the emotions. But, to my dismay, she seemed to think, along with her “ordinary language” colleague, the philosopher J. L. Austin, that if you were going to do sensible things with words you simply couldn’t be engaging in humor or writing poetry.

      In fact, Wittgenstein—whose writing has always seemed to me to be a form of poetry, and later came to strike Cage similarly, but who was taken at the time to be entirely, prosaically, rationalist in his enterprise—had also relegated poetry to a zone outside philosophy, somewhere near the place where Kant had stashed religion. There was so much that could not be talked (reasoned) about by philosophers. Now, here was Cage, who had certainly managed to escape sentimentality, but who was warm and friendly and did what he did out of a need for poetry!⁹ Silence turned out to be a startling intermixture of the conceptual and commonplace, experimental forms and straightforward anecdotes, passionate seriousness and humor, philosophy and poetry—with much breathing space in the interstices, as in conversation. At that point, Cage was the only person I had ever met who did not experience intellectual (or artistic) transgression in entertaining all these things at once.

      My next meeting with Cage came about after I had left both Chicago and the pursuit of a Ph.D. It was a result of the sort of coincidental chain of events that is nonetheless surprising for making up the everyday fabric of everyone’s life. I had become active in the civil rights and anti-war movements in Washington, D.C., working with a theater and film group sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies. There I met a cultural anthropologist named Robert Emrich. He was acting deputy director of a newly formed interdisciplinary institute at the Department of Justice with the mission of developing a social value framework for policies that were to be instrumental in bringing about “The Great Society.” This institute had been started under the guidance of a Lyndon Johnson appointee named R. G. H. Siu, who was, surprisingly enough, the author of a book called The Tao of Science.¹⁰

      In 1968 Emrich proposed that Siu meet with me as a potential consultant in social philosophy. To my surprise (and alarm) I was hired, as Siu said, because of my “alternative” experience, which he thought might bring a fresh perspective. Siu assured me carte blanche in deciding what I would do, saying only that he hoped I would bring ideas to the institute that it would not have been exposed to otherwise. I took this quite seriously and immediately made arrangements to interview a variety of people involved with issues of social justice, including John Cage and one of his mentors, Buckminster Fuller, as the basis for seminars I would conduct for the institute staff.

      Both Fuller and Cage were surprised and pleased by this opportunity to think aloud about issues of social justice in a context that might conceivably have some effect on government policy. Fuller was interested in both the conceptual and physical framework of “correctional institutions.” (He had, in fact, been corresponding with an inmate.) Cage had recently published the first three installments of his “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” 1965, 1966, and 1967. In 1967 Cage was at the height of his optimism. There was the triumph of Fuller’s immense geodesic dome housing the U. S. exhibition at Expo ’67 in Montreal, in which the art of Cage’s close friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as well as that of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine was on display. It seemed as though the socioaesthetic project that Cage saw himself collaborating in was finally being valued by the society at large, and was thus coming into a position to have transformative consequences.

      “Diary … Continued, 1967” is full of an awareness of the high incidence of pain in the world (the war in Indochina, world-wide hunger, lack of adequate shelter, etc.). Cage thought at that time that art was in pretty good shape; what was in urgent distress was not art but society. And what needed to be done was “Not fixing it but changing it so it works.” The Diary ends with “We cry because anyone’s / head was struck.) Tears: a global /