The Process That Is the World

Cage/Deleuze/Events/Performances

Joe Panzner

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628925739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

The Process That Is the World grapples with John Cage not just as a composer, but as a philosopher advocating for an ontology of difference in keeping with the kind posited by Gilles Deleuze. Cage's philosophy is not simply a novel method for composition, but an extensive argument about the nature of reality itself, the construction of subjects within that reality, and the manner in which subjectivity and a self-creative world exist in productive tension with one another. Over the course of the study, these themes are developed in the realms of the ontology of a musical work, performance practices, ethics, and eventually a study of Cagean politics and the connection between aesthetic experience and the generation of new forms of collective becoming-together. The vision of Cage that emerges through this study is not simply that of the maverick composer or the "inventor of genius, " but of a thinker and artist responding to insights about the world-as-process as it extends through the philosophical, artistic, and ethical registers: the world as potential for variance, reinvention, and permanent revolution.

1

“The Process That Is the World” (Introduction)

The business of the great things from the past is a question of preservation and the use of things that have been preserved. I don’t quarrel with that activity, and I know that it will continue. But there is another activity, one to which I am devoted, and it is the bringing of new things into being.¹

I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained, and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).²

The story is familiar. In 1951, John Cage visits the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. For years, he has been deeply concerned with the opposition of sound and silence, whose sole shared parameter is duration. In the anechoic chamber, Cage expects to hear silence, an absolute silence, a silence with only duration. Cage hears something else—“two sounds: one high, one low.” The former, according to the engineer at Harvard, is the sound of Cage’s nervous system in operation. The latter is the sound of blood coursing through his veins. The famous lesson, as mythologized by Cage himself, is that there is “no such thing as silence,” and that what we commonly accept as silence is actually the presence of unintended sound. The experience of the anechoic chamber is an important turning point for Cage—arguably the turning point in Cage’s compositional life—and it marks the transition toward his experiments with chance and indeterminacy.³

This telling of the story is classic biography, and much has been made of its significance for Cage as a composer. But, there is an inexhaustible richness to the tale of the anechoic chamber, one that far exceeds Cage’s own telling or the recent attempts to challenge the veracity of his account. Cage’s recounting of the anechoic chamber experience is a parable, a parable about events—the appearances of difference. After the anechoic chamber, Cage is a new man. The events of the chamber have changed him; they have refashioned the way in which he can approach the world. Two sounds, insistent and agitating: a surprise. Something that could only be sensed, not recognized, not recollected. Something that provoked a thought. An encounter.

The scene is far more complicated than it first seems. A man establishes a plan. There is nothing unintentional or absent-minded about the plan. He has carefully chosen his location and approach. It is sober and considered—it requires planning and discipline, it requires being in the right place at the right time. Moreover, it involves much more than just his will. There’s a room that makes the event possible. There are hints of expectation and shards of memory surrounding the action, circuits of anticipation and reaction that borrow from countless previous encounters made possible by a vast array of people, places, and things. There’s a body in continuous and un-thought motion, filled with fluctuations and constant variations (blood expanding and contracting veins, nerves in vibration). No longer just a man entering a room, but a complex situation that enfolds complex material and immaterial factors. A situation deliberately rigged but exceeding any individual intention. The man doesn’t cause the event himself, though from his perspective it may seem that way. He occupies the event, he is a part of it, both materially and experientially—a component, not an exclusive actor. Viewed from a certain perspective, we could say the room itself was the “subject” of the encounter—without this special room, this special encounter couldn’t have happened. And yet, without the man’s actions, the special encounter couldn’t have happened. Or perhaps it’s best to split the difference—neither man nor room was the subject of the encounter. The situation in its complex interaction and unfolding is its own subject, making possible an encounter only by the mutual interaction of its components.

Two sounds emerge, unexpected and unrecognized. Involuntary. Something present but previously unaccounted for within the situation, something to which the senses could not be attuned under any other circumstance. The room forces the ears to become attuned to a sound that couldn’t be heard without them, a sensation that emerges between the listener and the room. Before any conscious act, the man’s mind goes to racing—what was that? A stall in the cycle of anticipation and reaction. The unconscious spur to thought when unrecognized sensation grapples with yet-unformed memory. In their discord, a thought is produced. The thought isn’t a recognition. Not yet, at least. It’s a problem—a violent reorientation of anticipation and reaction, one whose resolution is indeterminate but actively in formation. The problem isn’t simply a failure of recognition (though it is that at first), but instead requires a new way of acting to accommodate it. Moreover, it doesn’t go away, even after it’s temporarily domesticated with the palliative of recognition (“it’s just your ears ringing”). It persists as the potential for future iterations of itself, future variations and deviations. The emergence of the problem is an event, and a powerful one—it changes the man’s entire approach to the world.

If he had heard what he intended, there would still be an event, but the response would be of an entirely different order. The event as we know it was special, singular, a point of inflection. The event that would have occurred if all went according to plan would have been thoroughly ordinary. The difference that would have emerged would have been quelled by its degree of similarity to previous experiences. A reinforcement of the loop between anticipation and reaction. A confirmation of habit. A cliché. An intention carried through to its logical tested end, a new barely noticed memory stacked alongside others before it. Dull surprise, or no surprise at all.

Cage’s famous story isn’t just self-mythologizing or an attempt at aesthetic valorization (the moral of the story isn’t “just” that there is no such thing as silence). It’s a parable for how to will a singular event—how to coax something new from the closed loop of intentionality. It’s a story about impersonal creativity, or the creativity proper to situations themselves. It’s a story about rigging processes such that they create accidents, gaps in intentions, even affirmations of stupidity. Most importantly, it’s a parable about performance as creation rather than reproduction. The anechoic chamber story is a compact, resonant example of Cagean performance practice. It isn’t a model—returning to the anechoic chamber and hearing the functions of our bodies will result in little more than a lifeless event of the confirmation variety, as all copies from models tend to do. It’s an example proper, as Brian Massumi would say, and is therefore “neither general (as a system of concepts) nor particular (as is the material to which a system is applied).”⁴ In order to serve its purpose, it must be reinjected into the world as practice, or repeated with difference—it works when it spurs a new encounter with the unforeseen. The story of the anechoic chamber details the willing of an event, the process of incarnating a new experience, the leap beyond the limits of intentional action, even beyond the limits of imagination. We are called not to imitate Cage’s actions, but to extend this process into a new complex situation, to force a connection between the process diagramed in this story and new contexts. To follow up on the example is not a matter of imitation. It’s a matter of invention. We are called to discover new ways of creating difference and new ways of willing this event.

* * *

The story of the anechoic chamber is a story about Cagean performance—a story about the cooperation of the material and the immaterial, the natural and the technical, and the intentional and the unintentional. It is an unusual approach to performance, one that de-centers the familiar image of agency (human intentions) and affirms something altogether stranger: the impersonal activity of things coming together, acting together with a will greater than any single individual can contain. It is a story of chance encounters, unthought actors, and unconscious creativity. The tale is a far cry from our commonsense, humanistic views of musical production, and its resonance has shaped the development of all music in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.

This project will attempt a sustained rapprochement between Cage and a contemporary thinker with whom he has only occasionally been linked—Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher whose individually authored works and collaborations with Félix Guattari and Claire Parnet can be read in productive counterpoint to Cage’s own. Although Cage never mentions Deleuze or his collaborators, their approach to a materialist ontology of difference, their insistence on the explication and understanding of individuating processes, and especially their assertions about micropolitics and power (both institutional and habitual) provide a powerful toolkit for understanding and expanding on crucial Cagean concepts. This project aspires to flesh out a Cagean conception of music through a speculative construction of his world. The similarities between the composer and the philosopher on the subject of affirming life (a phrase commonly employed by both men), the nonhierarchical and nonteleological production of variation, will provide a foundation for understanding performance as the creation of the new rather than the reproduction of the predetermined and pre-existent. Alongside Cage, Deleuze offers a philosophy that is adequate to the world as understood in our present time, a world that physics has shown to be continually inflected by chance, a world not of determinism and seamless communication but of constant variation, productive misunderstanding, and fundamental dynamism—a world that often doesn’t accord with conventional categories and defies the linearity of our commonsense instincts.

For his part, Cage aligned himself with many of Deleuze’s predecessors, philosophers of becoming and open-ended futures—some of which Cage discussed directly, others with which he has an uncanny resonance. Nietzsche, with his insistence on the aleatoric “throw of the dice” underpinning the eternal return, is a recurring Cage favorite. Henri Bergson, a favorite philosopher among many of the New York School, receives mention in Cage’s book Silence, and his world of ceaseless invention and variation seems to be perfectly in accord with Cage’s insistence on imitating “nature in the manner of her operation.” In this light, it is possible to see Cage as the music-world equivalent of a traumatic figure such as Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution revealed a world in revolt against stable categories, continually driven by a productive motor of chance. In place of stable types and essences, the apparent stability of species (or musical works) was merely a product of the restriction of this variation—and that even the most stable of structures would eventually submit to the flow of chance. With Cage, the ongoing demotion of the intentional self and humanism enters into the realm of musical composition and performance.

This volume takes as its starting point a particularly intense site of overlap in Cage and Deleuze’s thought—a series of interviews conducted by Daniel Charles in 1968 and collected in the volume For the Birds. Charles serves as a sympathetic interlocutor between the worlds of Cage and Deleuze, and the interviews, filled with slightly leading questions and inferences, seem custom-designed to pull the two thinkers into the same orbit. Charles, a musicologist and philosopher, founded the Department of Music of the University of Paris VIII and studied philosophy with Jean Wahl, Mikel Dufrenne, and Gilles Deleuze himself. For years, Charles functioned as a crucial intercessor between the worlds of French theory and American experimental art practices, merging the rising school of Nietzsche-influenced poststructuralists with a field of artistic practice that gave the philosophy a body in sensation. In its own right, For the Birds exists as a creative intermingling of Charles’ background in Continental philosophy and Cage’s anarchic-pragmatic voice. The interviews were first published in French translation in La Revue d’esthétique (Vol. XXI. Nos. 2, 3, and: April–December 1968), and republished as a single volume by Editions Belfond in 1976. When Semiotext(e) and Marion Boyars Publishers arranged for the English publication of the series, the authors and publishers hoped to recover the tapes of the English-language interviews, only to discover that they had gone missing. The result is a creative retranslation of a translation—not at all a “record of actual conversations,” but a “further intermingling of categories that makes John Cage very happy.”⁵ According to Cage, Charles’ contribution to For the Birds consisted of editing, condensing, and occasionally bolstering Cage’s remarks with supplementary materials from Cage’s other writings and lectures. In addition to material pulled from texts, letters, and recorded lectures, Cage suggests that Charles infused his statements with “the writings of others”; whereas a connection to Deleuze is never made explicit in the text, many of Cage’s remarks inspire an uncanny resonance with Charles’ philosophical counterparts.⁶

It is difficult to ascertain any specific influence that Deleuze might have exerted on Cage. According to Charles, he had spoken with Cage about Deleuze’s 1962 work Nietzsche and Philosophy, although Cage, ever concerned with the emergence of the new, expressed hesitance about the doctrine of the “eternal return” and its vague threat that the already-constructed existing world might recur for those who self-consciously willed it.⁷ Curiously, the alternative that Cage proposes in For the Birds—not the eternal return of the same, only renewal or the eternal return of the different—rings with a patently Deleuzian echo.⁸ The effect of Cage on Deleuze and Guattari was considerably more transparent. Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, referenced Charles’s commentaries (particularly his 1971 lecture “Musique et Anarchie”),⁹ and the authors cited “all of Cage’s work, and his book Silence” as a prime example of artistic practice that would disrupt and scramble social and perceptual hierarchies: an art whose value was “no longer measured except in terms of the decoded and deterritorialized flows it causes to circulate beneath a signifier reduced to silence, beneath the conditions of identity of the parameters, across structures reduced to impotence.”¹⁰ Subsequent references appeared in Deleuze’s 1977 collaborations with Claire Parnet,¹¹ in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus in 1980,¹² and in the 1991 volume What is Philosophy?¹³

The actual face-to-face encounter between Cage and his distant philosophical relations would take place on the weekend of November 16–17, 1975, at Columbia University as part of the Schizo-Culture conference arranged by Sylvère Lotringer—editor for radical art and philosophy journal Semiotext(e) and the eventual publisher and translator of For the Birds. The conference marked the first American appearance by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who appeared alongside an impressive French cohort including Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Lotringer, noting the absence of American philosophical counterparts, found complementary and sympathetic voices in the arts, experimental psychiatry or antipsychiatry, and radical politics. According to Lotringer, what had existed as theoretical utopianism in French theory existed as praxis in a New York avant-garde that embodied a pragmatic, nonreactive, and experimental “American Reality.”¹⁴ “John Cage had been one of my inspirations for the conference,” Lotringer writes of the event: “It was Cage that made me realize that one could be a philosopher in a different way, drawing from a multiplicity of sources from I Ching to Nietzsche, transcendentalism, Chance and dance, and Zen Buddhism. Deleuze once said that he wanted to exit philosophy, but as a philosopher. Cage had done it with music. He was the bridge I’d been looking for between the two cultures.”¹⁵

The conference was a fraught and often inadvertently experimental affair that reveled in the clash between the loftier regi...