an orchestra in which each musician is, in the Buddhist manner, a unique center in interpenetrating and nonobstructive harmony with every other musician. When asked at one of the seminars he gave at Harvard (1988-89) in conjunction with his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures whether he thought his music had political content, Cage replied:
I think one of the things that distinguishes music from the other arts is that music often requires other people. The performance of music is a public occasion or a social occasion. This brings it about that the performance of a piece of music can be a metaphor of society, of how we want society to be. Though we are not now living in a society which we consider good, we could make a piece of music in which we would be willing to live. I don’t mean that literally, I mean it metaphorically. You can think of the piece of music as a representation of a society in which you would be willing to live.21
There was a time during the sixties when John Cage liked to remark that he was gifted with a sunny disposition, a tendency toward optimism and humor.22 Humor, which can accommodate the good … bad, beautiful … ugly, sacred … profane, continued to come easily. Spontaneous optimism was, not surprisingly, an effort to maintain.
Personal, professional and political crises in the 1940s precipitated in Cage a major spiritual and intellectual reorientation.23 In its wake he came to mistrust all emotional content in the arts, believing that it was properly the business of members of the audience to supply—in relation to their own experience—the emotional dimension. Both spiritually and aesthetically, Cage longed for the serenity of Buddhist detachment. But as he and the twentieth century aged together, he could not ignore the terrible degradation of its early utopian dreams. That is, he could not ignore all the work that still needed to be done. Visionary turn-of-the-century movements—communist, supremacist, constructivist, and futurist—had pinned their hopes on scientific and technological advance to move us beyond historical injustice and despair, but despite an enduring sense of being on the threshold of unprecedented social possibility, this century has been depressingly persistent in its production of horror—wars, poverty, institutionalized cruelty, ruinous greed. Cage found that in order to be a contributing world citizen, he had, with artifice and discipline, to continually reinvent the “gift” that life’s brutality always threatens to eradicate, the gift of good-humored openness to constructive possibility. Cage’s optimism had to be transformed from a feeling of confidence in the inevitability of progress to a complex modus operandi posited on the belief that we are responsible for the construction of our social world as well as on respect for the natural world. (This is a position in which it is not useful to view nature as a social construct.) The chief goal of his aesthetic became a pragmatic, though still visionary, utopianism: temperamental optimism transformed into utopian method. In the late 1940s Cage quoted Meister Eckhart, “But one must achieve this unselfconsciousness by means of transformed knowledge,” followed by a self-described (by Cage) “random thought”: “If the mind is disciplined, the heart turns quickly from fear towards love.”24 For Cage this meant a quest to quiet the mind and the emotions while contributing something of use to the society. Cage’s utopianism became the working solution to the tension between hope and despair.25
Utopianism has historically differed from wishful thinking, science fiction, and fantasy to the extent that it has been rooted in the hope and possibility of enactment—it is a material rather than transcendental idealism. From thought experiments like Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and More’s Utopia26 to the Epicurean community known as “The Garden”; from the Enlightenment philosophies that were the source of the French and American revolutions to experiments like Oneida and other intentional communities in America; from Marxism/Communism in Europe, Asia, Cuba and Nicaragua to Socialist Democracy in Scandinavia, Kibbutzim in Israel, Martin Luther King’s civil rights “Dream,” and the Poor People’s Campaign—there have for millennia been forms of utopianism connected to real social experiment and real historical consequences. In this way utopian visionaries have been an ongoing source of both disappointment and inspiration. All of this belies the vaguely pejorative, casual usage of the adjective “utopian” connoting impractical or impracticable—not having to do with practice. In so far as utopian thinking engages the imagination, it is entirely about the interaction, in praxis, between creative vision and real-world contingencies—an active engagement with potentially useful implications.27 The pragmatic value of the visionary imagination is startlingly revealed when we think of the alternative—a human future in its absence.
Utopianism, along with a belief in large-scale human progress, is currently on the postmodern list of banned (Enlightenment and Modernist) ideas. Cage’s work and thought help us ask whether we might need to restore and renovate rather than abandon them. Certainly the mono-rational Enlightenment vision deserves to be in serious trouble. The purist clarity of its one-way directional beacon leads to suffocating visions (see, e.g., Foucault’s “Panopticism”) of Reason’s centralized control. Might there be more complexly realistic ways to think about a global hopefulness? Whatever one may think of Cage’s decentralized vision of anarchic harmony,28 it certainly suggests that there can be other models. That there may be a way into a post-skeptical poetics of public language, a post-ironic socioaesthetic modeling without denial or naiveté—a complex, not naive, realism.
If, that is, to imagine democracy in monarchist France or in colonial America was utopian, to imagine socialism in Czarist Russia was utopian, to imagine children’s rights in early industrial Europe and America was utopian, to imagine Feminism in the nineteenth century was utopian (some say it still is), to imagine integration in the pre-civil rights South was utopian, to imagine a world without consumer aggression, nationalism, and war is utopian, to imagine a world without racial and ethnic conflict is utopian—then, Viva Utopia! In these globally desperate times, it may be utopian in the best sense to invent ways of constructively working on (“solutions” can be hoped for but are as much a matter of chance as intention) the most grotesque, self-inflicted problems of our species.
JOHN CAGE : BEYOND IRONY : RE:SOURCERER
I-VI continues an ongoing series, of which Themes and Variations was the first, and Anarchy is the most recent, to explore a way of writing which though coming from ideas is not about them, or is not about ideas but produces them. For Anarchy the source material was thirty quotations, all of them related to anarchy. For these lectures four hundred and eighty-seven disparate quotations have been put into fifteen files corresponding to the fifteen parts of Composition in Retrospect…. —JOHN CAGE29
In his transfiguration of sources at hand, Cage was, like his friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp, a sourcerer. But Cage’s complex realist model of resourcefulness goes beyond the irony of a Duchamp toward a model of a constructively usable past. History, in the form of ideas, texts, cultural artifacts—history as ambient cultural silence—is an object of neither irony (distancing fascination) nor reverence (distancing respect) but is a visionary pragmatics undertaking a constructive recycling and reorienting—a benign and (paradoxically) conservative radical practice which invites us to enjoy new forms of attention.
Søren Kierkegaard, an avowedly addicted ironist, thought that, though irony was essential in starting the motion away from a deeply entrenched undesirable state of affairs, one had really not gotten very far until one had gotten beyond irony as well. The ironic mode is so heavily parasitic on the object of its critique that it is, if anything, a sign of the robust life of its host. So, for Kierkegaard, who saw life as a progress through stages of spiritual development, the road from the aesthetic to the ethical to the religious is one where irony first creates distance but must then be abandoned in order to traverse that distance to the next stage. (I think Cage, with help from the East, moves outside Kierkegaard’s model by accommodating all three “stages” simultaneously.30) Irony places us crucially on the threshold of movement beyond the position it critiques but is not itself an alternative. Its energy, ironically, derives from reference to a state of affairs it simultaneously honors and disavows.
The
