Marjorie Perloff and the 50th Anniversary of John Cage's Silence

Marjorie Perloff looks at John Cage's Silence for the Los Angeles Review of Books; LARB has included some bonus material on their blog (picked up from WFMU's Beware of the Blog): a "remarkable 1960 appearance by Cage on CBS-TV's I've Got a Secret." Silence celebrates its 50th anniversary this year (wow) with a new edition from Wesleyan University Press (they also hold his papers in their Special Collections library, if you're interested). The piece is a good follow-up to Perloff's 1981 Poetics of Indeterminacy, which she relates to the first piece in Silence, "The Future of Music":

Form, for Cage, meant generic and tonal juxtaposition, in the manner of cinematic montage. Grand proclamations...are regularly undercut by narrative in the form of short stories based on the Zen koan. Here is the first one, following “The Future of Music: Credo”:

It was a Wednesday. I was in the sixth grade. I overheard Dad saying to Mother, “Get ready: we’re going to New Zealand Saturday.” I got ready. I read everything I could find in the school library about New Zealand. Saturday came. Nothing happened. The project was not even mentioned, that day or any succeeding day.

When I first encountered this story, I was impressed with how the simple, matter-of-fact anecdote becomes, what John Ashbery once called, with reference to Gertrude Stein, an “open field of narrative possibilities.” In my 1981 book, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, I wrote:

Perhaps the child must learn that his father’s statements are not to be taken literally, that it is just a manner of speaking. On the other hand, perhaps the child is right: people should mean what they say … [Or] is the father perhaps speaking in code, referring to a secret between himself and his wife? Does “going to New Zealand” mean making love?

What I didn’t note, however — and this is how Silence seems different in the more dystopian world of the present — is that, no matter how we construe the “facts” in question, there is something very sad about Cage’s little revelation. Communication with his parents seems minimal, and young John, an only child, never seems to know what they are thinking.

Perloff reads the stories in the context of such pieces as "Lecture on Nothing" (1959); and moves on to consider Cage as "guru of 'purposeless play,'" and "conscious aesthete," looking in particular at his essay on Robert Rauschenberg:

The careful dissection of Rauschenberg’s work testifies to the paradox at the heart of Cage’s aesthetic: “Permission granted, but not to do whatever you want.” Or again, “One does not then make just any experiment but does what must be done. … One does something else. What else?” These words, later echoed by Jasper Johns (“Take a canvas. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”) have often been misunderstood. The latest collection of essays on Cage’s work, for MIT’s October Files series, is a case in point. In an essay called “Chance and Ideology,” originally published in 1967, the German music critic Konrad Boehmer produced a blistering Adornoan critique of Cage’s use of chance operations, declaring that “nothing in Cage’s work lends itself to analysis — chance producing nothing that can sustain musical scrutiny.” Indeed: “The confusion between nature as the purely objective, and freedom, which in Cage’s music assumes the shape of sheer arbitrariness, positions this author, at least according to his philosophy, in the proximity of those social ideologies” that come dangerously close, Boehmer warned, to Fascism.

This critique of what is taken to be Cagean indeterminacy and lack of principle is still common enough today, but it is based on a small subset of the composer’s statements, taken out of context. Similar criticism has been leveled at Duchamp, who is often declared to have held the view that anyone can be an artist, that “anything goes.” In the case of both artists, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. To study Cage’s writings or analyze his chance-generated works is to learn that he was always in control.

Perloff also considers another new publication, John Cage (October Files 12), edited by Julia Robinson. She's pretty pragmatic about this one, noting that the volume attempts to use "Marxist and Freudian theory [to] help us draw out 'the implications of the Cagean abdication of principles for assigning importance and significance,"" as a 1981 essay by Yvonne Rainer suggested would be useful for meaningful critique, but that:

The best essays in the MIT collection — Branden W. Joseph’s on Cage’s complex and compromised relation to Modernist glass architecture, and Liz Kotz’s detailed and informative study of the derivation of Fluxus event scores from Cagean aesthetic — are important critical studies. But given that these and three of the remaining essays (i.e., five out of eight) are reprints from the journal October and hence readily available, the collection seems oddly redundant, its 200-plus pages less useful than Gann’s masterful, revisionary, 28-page foreword to the anniversary edition of Silence.

Read the full thing here, and definitely check out the video. Above, left to right: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg; ca. 1960s.