meaning. Cage’s lifelong project was one of dislodging cultural authoritarianism (and gridlock), inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes. (I think it’s not really a paradox, though it’s something we tend to forget, that we experience freedom only within structuring contexts.) He hoped the sense of possibility this engendered would be helpful, specifically within the tradition of the art form, but also more generally within the society. He once said with great passion—responding to a goading inquiry about skeptical and hostile reactions to his work (as though Cage himself wanted his music to be inaccessible) — “Everything I do is available for use in the society.” For Cage, like Wittgenstein, meaning was determined by use, not by intention—at least not by intention seen as a picture in the artist’s mind to be faithfully replicated in the object or event. Cage wanted his art to introduce us to the pleasures of nature and everyday life undistorted by domineering ego. His motive, like John Dewey’s, was fundamentally environmental: if creature and environment become separated, both die. Almost all of Cage’s work, if actively engaged within the terms its structures suggest, directs audience attention to the ambient context in which it takes its time and place. Engaging with it is enacting a very particular form of life, one of attentive conversation—turning toward, turning with. Cage took his work—an invitation to the aesthetic pleasures of everyday life—to be no more, no less than a contribution to the global conversation among those who care about the future of the planet. But, just as importantly, a conversation with the processes of nature itself.
The use of what Cage called “chance operations” was a way of escaping the trap of ego, emotions, habit—inviting nature to have its “other” say in art. He explained this in a preface to be read at the start of each performance of one of his most overtly political pieces, Lecture on the Weather, commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the American bicentennial year of 1976. Cage used the opportunity of this commission to honor the revolutionary spirit still very much alive in the nineteenth-century work of Henry David Thoreau, as well as in the position of the American draft resisters who had fled to Canada during the U.S. war in Vietnam. But most of all he wished to honor by these means the possibility of a world in which we finally realize the meaning of “world us”—the extent to which we are all in this wonderful/awful mess together. Cage wrote:
I have wanted in this work to give another opportunity for us, whether of one nation or another, to examine again, as Thoreau continually did, ourselves, both as individuals and as members of society, and the world in which we live: whether it be Concord in Massachusetts or Discord in the world…. It may seem to some that through the use of chance operations I run counter to the spirit of Thoreau (and ’76, and revolution for that matter). The fifth paragraph of Walden speaks against blind obedience to a blundering oracle. However, chance operations are not mysterious sources of “the right answers.” They are a means of locating a single one among a multiplicity of answers, and, at the same time, of freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for profit and power, of silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has a chance to enter into the ego’s own experience…. Rome, Britain, Hitler’s Germany. Those were not chance operations. We would do well to give up the notion that we alone can keep the world in line, that only we can solve its problems. More than anything else we need communion with everyone. Struggles for power have nothing to do with communion. Communion extends beyond borders: it is with one’s enemies also. Thoreau said: “The best communion men [sic] have is in silence.”18
Silence for Cage was the point of entry of “the rest of the world” into audibility. And it was by means of his “chance operations” that silence was invited into the conversation. (There are detailed explanations of how he used chance operations in all three sections of this book.) With this means he was able to probe the undiscovered field that lies outside the direction of our attention, a direction always very precisely charted in his work so that chance occurrences can be construed as meaningful events (alternative “voices”) within a designated range of sources, materials, and instrumental processes. Cage truly loved alterity, the existence of what Charles Sanders Peirce called “real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them.”19 This sums up a usefully chastened view of nature, one in constructive contrast to both nostalgic and techno-scientific views. We may be coming to realize that Baconian sci-tech prediction and control (nature as extension of our will) is in its clumsiest forms as pathetically fallacious as romantic nature nostalgia (nature as extension of our emotions). The “weather” in Lecture on the Weather is an atmospheric political climate composed of many interpenetrating voices, not the sympathetic resonance of a few leading characters.
During a performance of Lecture on the Weather, political climate and (simulated) meteorological climate collide in such a way that the political climate is experienced as meteorological—as the complex chaotic condition of interpenetration and obstruction in which we live, a fragile balance of order and disorder, clarity and cacophony. How we orient our attention in this situation, how we identify significant patterns, construe meaning, how we act in relation to our values, is an index to the difference between forms of political order—between, for example, consumerism and environmentalism, authoritarianism and anarchic harmony. Either side of both of these sets of choices (and there are certainly many more alternatives) can characterize the relationship between audience and performance. But finally, Cage’s work promotes an environmental dispersal and refraction of what there is to see and hear to such an extent that the participatory engagement of performers and audience can only be anarchic.
For that part of mass culture and philosophy (both Disney and Baudrillard come to mind) which operates as if we have the god-like capacity to entirely construct the universe in our own image, nature that is not “imagineered” (a la Disney World) into entertainment commodity or into the conceptual construct that is its parallel in academia, nature as truly other than our intentions has become almost unimaginable except as source of skepticism, deconstruction (locate a contradiction in the construct), economic irritation, or terror. A “terrortory” to be tamed into landscape reflecting only the desiring eye of the beholder—consuming all that falls prey to its gaze. This is, in perhaps a more positive construction, the civilizing impulse. But don’t we ignore what lies outside the fragile currency of our images and constructs, our tightly constructed and self-repeating rhythms, our descriptive colonizing, at our (and the world’s) peril? It may be that Lacan was right (about at least one thing)—that always lurking in the margins is “the revenge of the real.”
JOHN CAGE: COMPLEX REALIST, I.E., UTOPIAN AVANT-PRAGMATIST
Cage’s work attempts to move us beyond skepticism, beyond irony, beyond commodification, beyond idealization to a realm of complex realism that shifts the scene of the aesthetic outside the swath of the culture’s self-reflecting gaze. It brings together natural, aesthetic, and social processes in an exploration (a conversation composed largely of questions) of possibilities we, in our infatuation with image-making, might otherwise overlook. Cage worked in service of principles and values derived from what in lifelong study he took to be the best, the most practically and spiritually relevant, of Eastern and Western thought, hoping that someday global humanity might live with pleasure in anarchic harmony—in mutually consensual, non-hierarchical enterprise. This vision was utopian in the best sense of the word—that is, within the pragmatics of real-world modeling that distinguishes utopian constructs from dreams, fantasy, and wishful thinking.20 Utopianism for Cage was a carefully designed function built into his working aesthetic, and into the realization of his scores. From the late ’50s on, his musical compositions modeled forms of anarchic harmony in the relations between musician and composer, musician and music, musician and other performers, as well as among composer, performers and audience. It was in this quite concrete way that everything Cage did was poethical—making or implying connections between aesthetic structures and habits of mind and living—and, in the way it combined the spiritual and the political, steadfastly utopian.
Cage’s idea of a utopia characterized by anarchic harmony directly informed his composing (with parallels in his language texts and visual art). He envisioned, and
