For this brief essay, I suggest running a simple thought experiment. As suggested in the header, it will concern one avant-garde composer, about whom one biographical fact will be substituted. In the first part of the essay, I’ll explain my interest in Cage’s practice and its reception — after that, the experiment itself takes place. Hopefully, by the end we’ll be able to recognize a central aesthetic notion, i.e., indeterminacy, in a more rationalist manner.
Why Cage
There is a particular reason why John Cage got my attention. An immense influence on the American artistic avant-garde of the 1960s, Cage also impacted avant-garde musicians who pioneered the so-called postmodern aesthetics in another region of the world and around the end of the century — the Leningrad artists of the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The whole scene, consisting of artists, musicians, poets, and philosophers, is often referred to not by exploring the exact art practices produced at the time, but through descriptions of those times’ political settings: rebuilding, reformatting, openness, political novelty. In fact, those expressions were even used as official slogans by the leader of the Soviet system’s progression into decay, Mikhail Gorbachev: perestroika (rebuilding), glasnost (openness), uskoreniye (acceleration), and new political thinking were designators of his democratic reforms. Nowadays, in a world that rather stagnates than changes, ought we still to use the perestroika language and force ourselves into a state of dull cognitive dissonance? Or should we come up with another dictionary for explaining experimental activity? That is the question with which I’d like to begin here.
One of the primary personas operating in the Leningrad art scene of the 1980s was an avant-garde composer Sergey Kuryokhin, whose experimental activity in music, on the radio, in movie production, and on television still impacts what we take to be experimentation per se. (Think of the television program Lenin, The Mushroom, or “Lecture on Chemistry by Professor Gandelbach” from Diminished Responsibility Complex as examples.) While Kuryokhin’s work is multilayered and crosses disciplinary borders, he was first and foremost a composer inspired by minimalism, whose last recorded album, written in collaboration with US multi-instrumentalist Keshvan Maslak, is dedicated to John Cage. The two actually met during Cage’s visit to Leningrad in 1988. They made a performance together with a bunch of Kuryokhin’s friends and collaborators that was later to be called A Water Symphony. In the documentation[1] of this encounter, one of its participants, artist Timur Novikov, describes Cage as a man whose “pleasant smile” made him retrace “his old love of Chan-Buddhism again”. With Cage, “A human being could feel,” he continues:
the undergoing exchange of information as if it was happening on a non-verbal level. And yet, this exchange was actually materialized in a performative act.
On the one hand, what we see here is just a casual, jokingly-put description of some kind of sympathy between the gathered ones – a compassion and friendship that allowed them to act together. On the other hand, however, it’s also an artist’s statement about what is going on in the process of developing an artwork, what its supposed causes are, and what is the material of which it is made.
In order to not step aside from Novikov’s kind words, but rather to unfold their subject, let’s address Cage’s theory of this ‘non-verbal’ behavior that lies at the heart of musical experimentation. In his lecture “Indeterminacy” (the second part of the “Composition as Process” text in Silence[2]), Cage suggests that generally there are two ways of approaching the causal fabric of the development of a musical piece, one of which is subjective to analysis and the other is not. He then proposes a list of seven types of the latter, thus providing us with a typology of a piece’s impossible – and yet accomplished by him – analysis. The composer can be programmatically directed in his or her manner of operating, according to Cage, by these constitutions:
Ego
Subconscious (Dream)
Unconscious (Jung)
No Matter What Eventuality (Indian Buddhism)
Taste (Senses)
Numbers or Theory (Science, almost)
No Matter What Eventuality (Chance)
So, instead of having a poorly described instance of novelty, we now have a set of types that determine it: 3 of them Cage claims to be inward, and 3 outward. This differentiation might be related to contemporary interpretations of aesthetics as something which connects one’s untrafficable inward contents (beyond the reach of understanding) with his-or-her-or-its outward senses.[3] Although, this approximation remains pretty rough since Cage includes science of numbers — almost mathematics — and science of chance — almost probability theory — into his list of outward-directed causes of action. The reason why those sciences do not take the forms of mathematics and probability theory in the full sense can be followed through the examination of what makes all the cause candidates participants of the same list. The first type, the ego — although it can be intuitively thought of as inward — is not described anywhere this way by Cage; instead, he only slaps the attribute arbitrary to it. The proximity of arbitrary, inward, and outward — their being the classificatory elements in Cage’s typology — points us towards a realization of their commonality: inward and outward are similarly arbitrary as the arbitrary itself. All the seven types can indeed be subsumed under one category, only insofar as they stand for equally stranger, for the time being, undefinable constitutions. Two important points can be derived from this:
(a) Cagean analysis had to stop here at the almost mathematical level because otherwise, it wouldn’t fall under the category of causes ‘non-subjective to analysis’.
(b) A weird similarity becomes apparent between the list types and the object of aesthetics understanding in contemporary art. Both are necessarily uncontrollable: out of map, out of mind, imposing what we shall call the compulsion of the unknown – the apparatus described by Suhail Malik[4] – on the artist’s world picture. The problem with this type of indeterminacy is that it leaves the artwork’s reason or core outside of it.
While in the first case, indeterminacy presents itself formally as a categorical need (it is needed to support the whole of Cage’s theoretical construction), in the second case, this form acquires a distinct quality: it’s now an indeterminacy of thought, unknownness. Let us stick to the belief that Cagean analysis is formally valid and embrace indeterminacy in the first sense, but interrogate its given qualitative description. To rephrase point (b) more formally, we’ll get this:
(b’) Something in the process of art construction is outside of the map. It may be applied to the map, or may not be if it consists of elements of a different nature.
How can we now refine the given notion of indeterminacy so that it would address the element that is out of the map, but not smuggle in the compulsion of the unknown on the artist’s world picture? Well, a Cagean exchange with Stoicism can help.
The Experiment
John Cage famously described his ideal of musical composition as following nature in its manner of operation. This observation is obviously a reference to the philosophers of the Stoic School, who famously declared that the goal or telos of life is to live in accordance with nature. The Stoics fascinatingly made numerous reformulations of their claim, from time to time leveling nature with different concepts. Yet, this wasn’t the case of theoretical wandering; on the contrary, the Stoics had the most developed and sophisticated logic among the ancient schools and were very determined by it. In fact, the best way of picturing a Stoic would be to imagine a highly intelligent computation system that acts; for the Stoics, an act is a result of forcing all the actions possible for the given moment and choosing the one that matches the established purpose best. This computational result is precisely that act that the Stoics would classify as natural, and this nature is what he or she should preserve in their lives.
Let’s take a more detailed look at the notion of nature. It is no surprise that Cage was captivated by it: we can see how deeply complex it is. For example, in another passage of the “Indeterminacy” text, Cage identifies the types of non-verbal behavior at the core of musical composition with natural seasons. The identification can’t flow directly and is instead supplied by mediatory operational concepts excavated from a bygone tradition. For the Stoics, nature was not at all a simple notion: it is simultaneously defined as a principle of perfection, as a universal connective force, as a structure that develops out of itself and through itself, and so forth. To come up with an integrative picture of what this multiplicity of definitions means, the leading Stoicism researchers insist that it should be viewed as a system that explains an available transition between different states – namely, two natures of a divergent kind. Our goal is to live in accordance with nature, but this nature is both human nature and nature as such. The former is defined as action of self-preservation, the latter as action of liberation from social and biological human nature (according to Epictetus, the ultimate task of the human is to become a god). But you can’t become a god if you’re not human, and you can’t become any worse than human. To achieve the goal – supersession of the default nature by nature itself – the Stoic must follow nature in its manner of operation, that is, to engage in human practice, with all its vicissitudes. And there, he must step carefully, following the operative precision of the chosen course, meaning that he should know what his practice consists of. This kind of knowledge or knowing-as is the only way of achieving nature itself and executing the Stoic program, a program for developing that which a mundane human has no possession of.
Therefore, Stoic doctrine allows us to recognize nature as a two-level concept that unfolds both on the operational level and on the level of knowledge. This nature has nothing to do with some vague primordial nature. It doesn’t contain or refer to some unknowable element either. On the contrary, it allows us to recognize our art practice – and by art, I basically mean the practice which we take seriously – as a process of self-refinement that has an epistemological quality to it. The out-of-map knowledge exists, as yet indeterminate, but it’s not some ‘unconscious causal fabric’ – it is simply practical knowledge. Whether or not this knowledge will be realized depends on the level of our engagement in the given practice, i.e. our willingness to suspend[5] our own given nature and replace it with the nature of our practical course-in-determination. A most critical substitution indeed.
Notes
1. See https://timurnovikov.ru/storage/images/stories/intercontacts.pdf
2. John Cage, Silence: Lecture and Writings (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
3. An interpretation of this type can be found in Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009). Objects like orchids are referred to as something that conducts an aesthetic feeling that is both below the human capacity of reason (“affective, rather than cognitive”) and is “informing” us about “the world outside”.
4. See https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/21173/1/RMA-malik.pdf
5. See https://tripleampersand.org/art-suspension-subjectivity/