One of the most remarkable things about John Cage’s musical praxis is his ability to locate and resolve impasses – only to hesitate afterward about his resolutions, as if unable to relinquish the uncertainty they carried. Instead of tracing the multivalent paths of Cage’s resolutions, this article reframes them as dialectical and temporary responses to unformalized impasses. The most significant of these was, of course, silence. Upon exiting the anechoic chamber, in 1951, this question – what, if even possible, is absolute silence? – found a response: ‘there is no such thing as silence’ and, instead, only ‘what exists, that is, sounds’.Footnote 1
I will discuss a major, and yet overlooked, example of how the impasse of absolute silence was not actually resolved in the anechoic chamber, but rather symptomatically repeated, mutating, throughout the rest of his life – namely, within the development of a politics of silence. I suggest, too, that the impasse of politics in Cage’s musical thought reflects, more broadly, the historical function of politics as an impasse within the Western avant-garde since its nineteenth-century birth in the wake of the French Revolution.Footnote 2 This was never successfully integrated by Cage, nor the avant-garde, into a unified artistic system, however multiplicitous, endlessly sounding, and self-differentiating it may have become. It remained lodged, instead, as an irreducible, materialist incursion of an immanent null point: a stubborn ‘no such thing’ (or, nothing) that remains, still, ‘impossible’. That is, following Cage, absolute silence and the politics of such a music has proven impossible to include as well as, against Cage, impossible to exclude.
The mutated incursion of absolute silence that will be the focus of this article takes place between 1971 and 1974, at the height of Cage’s turn to the subjectivity and political implications of his philosophy of silence. His engagement with social and political thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s, dominated by Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and Norman O. Brown (with D.T. Suzuki shifting to the background), is generally viewed as an expansion of his philosophy of silence – landmarked by his second silent piece, 0’00” (4’33” No. 2) (1962).Footnote 3 And yet, these three years in the early 1970s mark a sharp turn toward a different kind of politics: Cage enthusiastically and confusingly embraced Mao’s Marxism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Strikingly overlooked in Cagean scholarship, his main project became reconciling Maoism with Fuller’s social philosophy.Footnote 4 This odd Maoist period, in turn, proves key to understanding the limitations of his philosophy of silence. Whereas Fuller’s philosophy aligns with Cage’s musical thought after 4’33” (1952), encouraging its expansion into other domains, Maoism diverges from it. Its presence makes visible something lacking within Cage’s praxis, a core insufficiency that the Maoist revolutionary subject seems to address. Politics, in this way, marks a contested site of justification for Cage’s originary exclusion of absolute silence and his ensuing musical works. Indeed, while many scholars, including Julia Robinson, Branden Joseph, and G. Douglas Barrett, have remarked upon Cage’s shift from music to the social and political after 0’00” (4’33” No. 2), the intricate link between this Maoist impasse and his silent pieces remains largely unexplored.Footnote 5 This article, ultimately grounded in Cage’s silent music, primarily attends to the twists and turns of his politics of silence at a key inflection site in his life – a period, no less, when he weighed the value of composing music at all.Footnote 6 His writings, letters, and readings – fraught and contradictory – prove essential pieces in his attempt to justify music. This site opens, therefore, with a public proclamation of his new musical-political project, within which the word ‘listening’, tied to silence, is intentional: ‘I began to search for a common denominator between Mao and Fuller, and, when I came across seemingly irreconcilable differences between the two, I decided to listen to both.’Footnote 7 Three years later, in 1974, it abruptly closed – Maoism appeared subsumed within Cage’s thought and Fuller’s philosophy became startlingly absolute.
Frames: Marxism and psychoanalysis
The intriguing lack of scholarly attention to Cage’s brief commitment to Mao suggests two historical stakes. First, it reflects the murky relation between Chinese and US cultural politics from the revolutionary founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to its fall and transformation into Deng Xiaoping’s superficially communist Chinese Communist Party in 1976.Footnote 8 Overlooking Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, however challenging to address, is incongruous with the fact that they were a major influence on Cage, no less his artistic milieu, in the 1970s. The popular uptake of Mao’s writings within the 1960s and 1970s US avant-garde is a rich historical phenomenon that offers insight into the integral roles played by orientalism, Western cultural imperialism, and revolutionary theory in the avant-garde’s post-war formation. In short, the political aspirations and limits of the post-war Western avant-garde reside, at least in part, in the engagement and erasure of the history of twentieth-century China.
This dovetails with the second stake, that is, the intersection between (Mao’s) Marxism and the avant-garde. Politics, after all, represents a central impasse in the latter’s history. As theorists and historians of the avant-garde have outlined, it was born most notably in nineteenth-century France as a reaction to the political tension between the internally warring ruling classes (the bourgeois republicans and the royalist aristocrats) and the proletariat.Footnote 9 After the historic but brief rise of the latter to power in the 1871 Paris Commune, followed by their massacre by the soon-to-be Third Republic, the notion of a political and militaristic avant-garde (the elite tip of the spear headed into the unknown) shifted, sublimated, into culture.Footnote 10 The artistic avant-garde fulfilled a lack, made undeniable by the Commune, within a destabilized ruling class. It was born irreducibly alongside the declaration and defeat of political revolution and thus, as Adorno thematizes in Aesthetic Theory, was itself irreducibly contradictory.Footnote 11 The avant-garde was framed by the ruling class as necessarily political but allowed only, per Walter Benjamin, the means of expression (not production), cursed with a ‘double character’ that at once proclaimed its utopian autonomy while railing against its undeniable commodification.Footnote 12 By situating Cage and silence within this history, I hope to expand the understanding of how the relation between the artistic avant-garde and politics transformed in the post-war period. In short, the Marxist vantage I am employing orients us not toward a version of Cage as for or against Maoism, nor Cage as a rigorous or amateurish political thinker, but rather toward the fact that there is an irreducible gap sustaining the ‘double character’ of Cage’s music and philosophy as well as the avant-garde. This gap arises alongside a compulsive (re)turn to politics alongside the question of why musical-political frameworks, like Cage’s, have not aged particularly well in spite of their utopian aims.Footnote 13 What I am suggesting, more positively, is that through this gap there arises a possible link between absolute silence repressed within the Cagean avant-garde in the USA and the revolutionary subjectivity repressed after the Chinese Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976.
My analytic-interpretative frame that draws together these two stakes is grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Specifically, I argue that Cage’s embrace and abandonment of Maoism is strikingly well-mapped by Octave Mannoni’s 1969 theory of disavowal – informed by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan – as well as Alenka Zupančič’s recent political extension of it.Footnote 14 This approach, too, builds on the Frankfurt School’s use – especially in Adorno’s aesthetics – of Freudian psychoanalysis to help think through the limitations of the subject under capitalism as well as the revolutionary potential of art.Footnote 15 In this way, it is indebted to Yvonne Rainer’s incisive call in the early 1980s to critique Cage’s philosophy of silence through ‘the framework’ of ‘Freudian and Marxist theory’.Footnote 16 What is uniquely applicable to his project of ‘reconciling’ the contradictions in Mao and Fuller is that disavowal schematizes how a belief (e.g., in Fuller) and knowledge critical (e.g., Mao’s Marxism) of that same belief can be coextensive. This is best expressed in Mannoni’s phrase for disavowal: ‘I know well, but all the same …’
It will be helpful to summarize a cursory sense of how this works as well as its basis in Freudian psychoanalysis. Knowledge within the process of disavowal neither subverts nor simply coexists with belief, as might be expected; rather, it conditions belief. In this case, Cage’s critical knowledge of Maoism paradoxically conditions and, indeed, strengthens his belief in Fuller’s oppositional philosophy. Belief and knowledge are not necessarily conflictual. They operate within the structural field of the subject’s ego. This is simple enough to imagine in a phrase often uttered when an unnoticed presupposition (belief) is subjected to critique. ‘I know, I know, I know …’ comes the compulsory response. This is not in service of genuine critique – their presupposition inevitably does not change – but rather to shore up the structural knowledge maintaining the ego by integrating that critique: ‘all the same …’. Disavowal allows for a traumatic event – a critical gap immanent to knowledge, or the effaced presence of non-knowledge – to persist while no longer representing an immediate danger to the ego. It is a defence (albeit partial and insufficient) against the possibility that the subject’s structural reality might radically change. The position of belief, in sum, is one of confident – that is, naïve – knowing.
In Freud’s theorization, the formation of an ego defence through the entanglement of belief and knowledge was primarily sustained through a fetish and alongside a ‘split[ting]’ of the ego.Footnote 17 The fetish helps clarify this strange process in which a subject, ‘under the dominance of the unconscious’, ‘retain[s] … belief’ while ‘giv[ing] it up’ – ‘in the same breath’.Footnote 18 As Freud outlines, a child’s discovery of their mother’s genitalia is traumatic: their father must have castrated her, the child surmises, and thus poses a broader threat of castration. The subject’s knowledge divides as ‘wish’ and ‘reality’, that is, their belief (or wish) that castration did not (and will not) happen and their critical knowledge of castration (or reality).Footnote 19 Fetishistic disavowal creatively stabilizes the subject’s reality by maintaining – an early version of Mannoni’s ‘I know well, but all the same’ – ‘two mutually incompatible assertions: the woman has still got a penis and my father has castrated the woman’. The fetish, a libido-invested object, is ‘a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it’. Indeed, it is a displaced symbol – a fact Lacan will emphasize – or a structural-linguistic ‘token’ that unlocks special ‘access’ to a plenitude that the subject knows is denied and, even more, lacking. Certainly resonant with Cage’s silence (as sound) and revolutionary subjectivity (as enlightened) capable of reconciling Fuller and Mao, Freud defines his ‘token of triumph’ as a pseudo-mystical defence of the ego: ‘the meaning of the fetish is not known to other people, so the fetish is not withheld from him [the subject]’.Footnote 20 That is, the subject’s critical knowledge conditions that very access to the plenitude of belief, or their naïve knowledge.
For Lacan, alongside Mannoni, fetishization concerns a ‘token’ that buttresses what is, in fact, an insufficient structural reality.Footnote 21 It is not simply about a missing penis nor the (Law of the) Father’s threat to the child. The danger that must be disavowed is that the subject’s structural and symbolic reality is inherently lacking.Footnote 22 The fetish – especially one, as with Cage’s politics, expanded to account for ‘world improvement’ – plugs up this gap.Footnote 23 As Freud implied in 1938, this fetish is most radically the (perverse) subject himself faced, ‘distressed’, with a ‘demand’ from (i.e., a lack or loss within) the ‘external world’ (i.e., structural reality).Footnote 24 As Stephanie Swales explains in her analysis of perversion, the fetish-object initially takes the place of the subject such that their ‘sacrifice’ – or subjugation – to their structural situation is not altogether total. Without full sacrifice, though, instability remains; thus, that ‘object’ becomes the infinitely sacrificing ‘[subject] himself’.Footnote 25 While this has the appearance of ego-loss or selflessness, Freud underscores that it is in service of a defence of the ego and its structural situation.
This is clear, in brief, in Cage’s shift after his anechoic chamber visit in 1951: ego-dissolution or sacrifice (in appearance) is tied to the plenitude of endless sound which, fetishized, plugs up and stabilizes a radical musical lack, or absolute silence. Unintentional sound takes on the symbolic ‘token’ silence (per Cage: ‘[absolute] silence does not exist’).Footnote 26 Cage radicalizes and extends – the focus of this article – this musical disavowal in the social and political, or subjective, realm: the subject, as Swales says, becomes objectified as the fetish tasked with securing the totality of structural reality. On one hand, the disavowing subject genuinely perceives a structural gap in knowledge: Cage recognizes the ‘irreconcilability’ of Maoism within his politics of silence and, prior, the ‘impossibility’ of absolute silence in his music. On the other hand, he must ‘continuously work’ to ‘control’ and retain his position as the hinge of that situation, ‘translat[ing]’ and ‘relocat[ing]’ traumatic knowledge of this gap.Footnote 27 The post-war avant-garde, after, per Adorno, its ‘culture-critical turn that cast off the illusion of its purely spiritual being’, in part appears to follow this very pattern.Footnote 28 To maintain itself – and, indeed, that illusion – critique must not be suppressed; it must be displaced, managed, and transformed.
Within the process of disavowal, finally, there arises the spectral presence that something might be outside of the subject’s ability to know. In colloquial terms, per Zupančič, this would mean the subject might be a ‘dupe’, and so too, therefore, the structure itself might not fully exist because they do not know.Footnote 29 What is exciting and hopeful about this failure to know is that it persists within that structure as contradiction: as Freud says, ‘[disavowal] is achieved at the price of a rift in the ego which never heals but which increases…the two contrary reactions to the conflict [trauma] persist as the centre-point of a splitting of the ego’.Footnote 30 The ‘translation[s]’ and ‘relocation[s]’ of this ‘rift’, ‘split’, or non-knowledge are its trace, and occupy the centre of my discussion. Disavowal does not take place without dialectically embracing its potential undoing. Drawing on Zupančič and Mannoni’s extensions of Freud and Lacan, I have schematized three stages of disavowal: 1) naïve belief, 2) critical, traumatic knowledge, and 3) non-naïve belief. In what follows, I will analyse how these structure Cage’s project of ‘listening to both’ Mao and Fuller.Footnote 31
A Maoist exception
Cage’s sources, following his indeterminate method, were wide-ranging and shifted throughout his life, often appearing aphoristically and productively out of context. It is important, nonetheless, to make clear that Mao’s appearance was exceptional – and thus truly critical. In fact, amid the morass of indeterminate references, it is quite possible to identify Cage’s key figures and, even more, to suggest that Fuller’s idealism occupies an outsized role. It is also possible to see that Mao’s materialism does not fit at all, arising symptomatically at the climax of Fuller’s rising influence and as a distinctly oppositional figure.
Cage had a helpful tendency to name his key references as ‘teachers’ in the beginnings of his collections of writings. Focusing only (for our purposes) on the non-musical references, between Silence (1961) and A Year From Monday (1967) he shifted from Suzuki to Brown, McLuhan, and Fuller; in M (1973), Thoreau appeared alongside Fuller and Mao; in Empty Words (1978) there was still Thoreau, although Fuller became central; in X (1983), it is again Fuller, this time back alongside Suzuki.Footnote 32 Fuller is unique in this mix. Thoreau was not alive, Mao was not a correspondent of Cage’s, and Cage met Suzuki in 1951, and again in 1962, but only as a devoted student. Brown, McLuhan, and Fuller, in contrast, all knew, regularly corresponded with, and respected Cage. They guided him from Suzuki in the 1950s and into what Laura Kuhn calls ‘a new phase’ in Cage’s ‘intellectual life’ focused on ‘topics of mutual social and political concern’ – or, what I call his turn to the subject of silence.Footnote 33 And – reflected in his numerous letters to all three – while Brown and Cage were colleagues and dear friends, he considered McLuhan and Fuller gurus. Their utopian philosophical positions and calls for a techno-unified world were resonant with Cage’s developing philosophy of music. As Cage understood it, they converged in their emphasis that humanity is ‘one-mind’ and ought to be transformed into a ‘Global Village’ (McLuhan) or ‘Whole Earth’ (Fuller).Footnote 34 It was Fuller, however, who held a prized place in Cage’s writings, a lodestar, whereas McLuhan (not unlike Suzuki) became dispersed throughout.
From 1948 to 1970, Fuller’s apolitical and idealist call for global unity in service of a single, natural truth would become increasingly totalizing for Cage. Their friendship began when faculty at Black Mountain College.Footnote 35 In his late 1950s ‘Lecture on Something’ and ‘History of Experimental Music’, Cage positioned Fuller as a prophetic thinker of the enlightened subject, drawing a connection between Fuller’s global-design approach to politics and Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism.Footnote 36 By the time of A Year From Monday, Cage was dedicating his writings to Fuller and quoting him consistently. His attention was on the ethics and politics of the subject and, adopting a phrase from Fuller and Lao Tzu, that subject’s participation in ‘world improvement’. Cage thought that ‘were a musician to give the example in public of doing the impossible that it would inspire someone who was struck by that performance to change the world, to improve it, following, for example, the clearly outlined projects of Buckminster Fuller’.Footnote 37 Fuller was, to be sure, his guide: ‘more than any other…[Fuller] sees the world situation – all of it – clearly’.Footnote 38 No political struggle needed; only, as Cage defines ‘revolution’ via Fuller, ‘world enlightenment’ or ‘rolling off a log’.Footnote 39 The ‘goofy naïveté’ – as Rainer says – of his ‘adherence to the messianic ideas of Bucky Fuller’ authorized Cage to deepen his claim that his own ‘pieces of music [could] be taken as models for human behavior’.Footnote 40 This, notably, continues the nineteenth-century liberal tradition in which the artistic avant-garde located itself as the spiritual leaders of a progressive humanity – which, ironically, required a conservative return to a lost origin or, as Cage says, ‘identification with nature in her manner of operation, complete mystery’.Footnote 41 In his writings between 1967 and 1970 in M (1973), Fuller becomes nearly absolute – not fully, just yet; this will require disavowal – as the answer to the question of revolution: ‘there’s no alternative to Fuller’s realization’.Footnote 42 And, responding to Charles during the same period: ‘[Fuller’s] is an absolutely elementary and fundamental thought for the survival of the human race … I see no other possibility [than Fuller].’Footnote 43
Fuller’s ideology, derived from modernist architecture, was an example of the spiritualized techno-libertarianism that enthralled much of the US popular imaginary in the post-war period. Fuller had a pseudo-cult following, due in part to his rigorous worldwide lecture schedule, his prolific publication of books, and the combination of an everyman’s tone with creative neologisms in his writings and lectures. As those introducing his books were fond of pointing out, the reader must ‘assume a committed earnestness … [and] share his [Fuller’s] concern for what is basic in society and cosmology, and that in the nature of things microcosm and macrocosm are inseparable’.Footnote 44 The social appeal to Cage, who thought of his music in the same way when he met Fuller, must have been strong. This introduction continues, positioning Fuller as a prophet: ‘follow closely the implications of each line in this book; to reread, if necessary, and discern the subtle intent of lines that seem difficult…Bucky is the one man in this age who … [can] see the world whole and keep the vision constant’. It is no coincidence that this book, Ideas and Integrities, was important for Cage and that he subsequently adopts the credulous tone of this introduction, ‘I see no other possibility.’
The conclusion to Fuller’s Earth, Inc (1973) – fittingly titled ‘Ten Proposals for Improving the World’ – offers a summary of his ideological position during this period, especially as it applies to Cage.Footnote 45 It should be said, to Fuller’s credit, that he recognized the intertwining of globalism, politics, and technology earlier than most – something that has become, today, fundamental to political theory and reconceiving revolution globally.Footnote 46 The difficulty is that Fuller’s solution was a radicalization of counter-revolutionary liberalism. For him, the human is a unique and ‘metaphysically advantaged problem solver’ who ought to dedicate themselves to ‘discovering’ the hierarchical and ‘eternal laws operating in the total Universe’.Footnote 47 The ‘inherently inviolable integrity of [human] individual[ity]’ required for this ‘problem solving’ was being debased by a society in decline. His aim, therefore, was to ‘emancipate … individuality’ through the purificatory ‘elimination [of] … slave mentality’ (communist class struggle was a prime example of the latter).Footnote 48 As he outlines, this means ‘work must be considered the greatest human privilege’, people must become ‘world citizens’, and everyone must be engaged in ‘lifelong research’ for humanity in groups divided up by merit.Footnote 49 This is not the mutual-aid anarchism one might expect from Cage, but a pseudo-religious global state, a ‘world democracy’ by no means antagonistic to capitalism. Individuals’ thoughts would be ‘subconsciously [and] telepathic[ally]’ traced by this total state such that ‘feedback’ could be constantly collected for ‘specific propositions coping with evolutionary problems’.Footnote 50 These suggestions, prescient of our data-driven global capitalist and so-called democratic period, alert us not to the fact that bourgeois capitalism ought to be combatted with revolution but rather that it is not being properly carried out.Footnote 51 This is precisely the area in which fascism – as Konrad Boehmer already pointed out in his 1967 political critique of Cagean indeterminacy and silence – has long taken root as the so-called stronger, corporatizing, and nationalist-expansionist hand of capitalism.Footnote 52 It is telling, finally, that these proposals come from a book titled Earth, Inc, or Earth incorporated – corporatization having been an interest of Fuller’s since, at least, 4D Timelock (1928).Footnote 53 As Branden Joseph writes, Fuller’s apparently utopian thought has, per Ernst Bloch, a ‘counter-utopian’ ‘dark side’.Footnote 54
While I am not saying Cage was on board with total corporatization – he was not – it also is hard to claim that his own totalizing philosophy of silence held any ideological resistance. The basic takeaway to highlight is that Cage’s adherence to Fuller, until 1970, was, as Rainer describes, naïve. It is important to understand this term etymologically: it was uncritically natural to Cage that Fuller ought to be a guiding star. Both Cage and Fuller operated within their dominant structural positions governed by US liberal capitalism and the contradictions of the post-war Western avant-garde. Mao’s Marxism, then, irrupted in 1971 as an unexpected and dialectical exception to this totality. Indeed, in their 1971 correspondence, Brown and Cage were discussing Fuller – referred to admiringly as ‘more than just an inventor … he’s a mystic’ – while, spurred by Brown, trying to shore up his possible ‘defects’ through the techno-philosophy of Jacques Ellul.Footnote 55 And yet, amid their back-and-forth, Brown changed suddenly direction: he wrote earnestly to Cage to stop, abandon Ellul, and immediately read Mao: ‘Dear John, the situation is changing rapidly. Don’t read Ellul … What we need is a Great Cultural Revolution … Choose Redness.’Footnote 56 Fuller’s individualistic bourgeois idealism was undermined by the concrete and, per Brown, ‘collective’ reality of Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.Footnote 57 Mao’s China was an example of a practical revolution, with positive consequences for the masses, that upended their presuppositions: per their conversations, China had ‘stepped into the future’ and now awkwardly occupied the same position Fuller had dominated.Footnote 58 Cage’s M reflects this, replete with uncertainty about action versus inaction, intention versus non-intention, determinacy versus indeterminacy, his confident 1962 call for an enlightened action – and thus, too, his new silent piece, 0’00” (4’33” No. 2) – critically untethered. Mao’s Marxism arrives as a formal exception, a crack within Cage’s conviction that the avant-garde could operate as a global model for revolutionary politics.Footnote 59
In 1972, this fracture came publicly to the surface. Footnoted underneath the grandiose 1967 claim that ‘I see no other possibility [than Fuller]’, Cage revised his position: ‘Today, without hesitation, I would say that, for the moment, Maoism is our greatest reason for optimism. We must welcome its lessons with great attentiveness.’Footnote 60 A ‘seldom discussed’ change in his trajectory, Cage began reading Mao after receiving Brown’s letter in 1971.Footnote 61 Between 1971 and 1972, in M, Cage outlined his project of theorizing a subjectivity in line with silence by bringing Mao and Fuller together:
Fuller and Mao … Forget yourself. Blur the distinction between Fuller and Mao. Change the environment and at the same time change man. There is no line to be drawn between the two.Footnote 62
Patterson, the only commentator to clearly (if briefly) address Cage’s revisionism of Mao, also notes its exceptionality: Cage ‘reworks [Mao] outright … deliberately re-writing them in order to erase any incongruities with his on aesthetic’, employing ‘aggressive trimming that essentially reorients the meaning of the texts’. It is ‘the most audacious treatment to which any of his rhetorical sources were ever subjected’.Footnote 63 This can be extended, I argue, to disavowal: while Cage certainly reworks Mao, it does not result, per Patterson, in a ‘congruous’ fit with Cage’s method or ideology. Maoism retains its criticality. Cage’s reworkings paradoxically allow him to strengthen his belief in Fuller – while an incongruous ‘rift’, per Freud, persists.
Cage’s project of blurring Mao and Fuller marks the increasing difficulty for the avant-garde to promote, as politically revolutionary, a liberated and individualist return to nature (Fuller). It was becoming undeniable that a collectively constructed emancipatory movement was taking place in China (Mao), no less in communist uprisings around the world. Within this, the cross-cultural exchange of the avant-garde – exploding, for instance, between the USA and Japan – hit a block with China. While Maoism proliferated among certain groups in the West, Chinese revolutionary culture proved (exotically) undigestible for most of the Western avant-garde. The Cultural Revolution brought this block to the surface. Namely, embracing communist revolution from the vantage of the avant-garde would require their self-overcoming through the creation of a novel, unknown proletarian subjectivity and culture. Disavowal, in contrast, offers a way for the avant-garde to conservatively sustain itself in the post-war period, beyond its paralysis or ‘double character’. This follows the process by which belief (i.e., the avant-garde as politically revolutionary) can be sustained alongside critical knowledge (i.e., the avant-garde as politically conservative). In the analysis below, I will outline three key instances of this in Cage’s treatment of Maoism.
To preface my critique, I want to briefly note a little-known essay by Cage, ‘Re and Not Re Fuller and Mao’ (1972).Footnote 64 It formally presents the block Cage faced when reconciling Fuller and Mao. In the essay, Fuller and Mao are split visually (right and left), irreconcilable, and Cage, with his diary-like passages adhering to his indeterminate method, is the unifying term in the middle – ‘listening to both’. And yet, Cage inexplicably opts not to include this in M. It seems that he intuited the insufficiency of his own musical-political project – and, curiously, hesitated. Indeed, this hesitation is, in part, borne out in debates around Cage’s philosophy of silence and its political stakes. These tend to be divided between identifications of an obscured loss incurred by Cage’s prohibition of absolute silence and an embrace of the political possibilities gained from this exclusion. On one hand, theorists like Rainer, Boehmer, and Douglas Kahn push back on Cage’s idealism: his method and music does not, in the above example, adequately ‘listen to both’ (unify opposites into one). They remind us that his ‘noisy silence’, per Rainer, took shape on ‘the notion’, as Boehmer identifies, ‘that absolute silence cannot exist’.Footnote 65 This led Cage to, in Kahn’s analysis, ‘fill up music’ based on material repressions – of sociality (Kahn), history (Boehmer), desire and the unconscious (Rainer) – in favour of special access to a ‘reservoir of untouched sound’.Footnote 66 They agree, with varying conclusions, that there is a hidden ‘silencing’ in Cage’s silence.Footnote 67 On the other hand, theorists like G. Douglas Barrett and Jonathan Katz, among others, view what Kahn derides as the (artificial, for him) musical-historical ‘opening’ caused by Cagean silence as, instead, engaging a resistance to power. In their view, the unifying middle space of ‘listening to both’ is, in fact, full of meaning and potential. While for Barrett it set the stage for an explicitly political and self-reflexive ‘critical music’ grounded not in sound but – extending Cage’s silence – historically specific ‘languages’ (e.g., Ultra-Red’s novel realization of 4’33”), for Katz Cage’s silence was already involved in a queer Foucauldian ‘resistance’ that superseded ‘oppositional’ thinking by ‘escaping’ instead of ‘challenging power’.Footnote 68 Cage’s ‘noisy silence’, from this non-Marxist vantage, certainly passes through loss – but it indirectly proliferates, or gains, anti-authoritative discursive positions that engage listeners as ‘maker[s] of [sonic] meaning’.Footnote 69 Nonetheless, in my view, it seems that Cage vacillates between these positions – perceiving, within silence, a deeper loss; embracing, through silence, a proliferating gain – precisely according to the structure of disavowal. As I hope to show, disavowal works simultaneously in these two directions: it ‘splits the ego’ (loss) and obscures, in defence, this splitting (gain).Footnote 70 Cage’s hesitation regarding his forgotten essay makes this tension obvious in its visual form, content, and partial disappearance. That is, it makes obvious the avant-garde and Cage’s internal splitting and instability that I aim to draw out – and, from it, the potential for a more radical musical indeterminacy, silence, and subjectivity.
Disavowing Maoism: three revisions
Fight self
The first revision concerns Mao’s 11 June 1967 Directive: ‘The basic ideological programme of the great proletarian Cultural Revolution is “to combat [alternatively “fight”] selfishness and criticize revisionism.”’Footnote 71 Highlighting as ‘revolutionary’ the element that allows Mao to be reconcilable with Fuller, Cage reduces the latter part of the directive to ‘fight self’.Footnote 72 He excludes the phrase ‘criticize revisionism’ and aligns ‘fight’ with his commitment to a Suzuki and Fuller-derived non-violent and individualistic discipline of enlightenment. This is not simply an alteration, nor a defanging of Mao’s Marxism, but part of the perversity of disavowal, part of the process through which Maoism becomes objectified as a kind of ‘magical’ knowledge-fetish.Footnote 73 Cage does not simply erase ‘criticize revisionism’. He occupies its critical absence as a hinge-point, thus ‘putting’ meaning under his ‘control’. What I am presenting as a ‘trace’ of disavowal – his revised quotation – is, for Cage, required to shift Maoism from a position of irreconcilability to reconcilability. As Zupančič describes, ‘what may appear to others as a problem is not experienced as a problem or a difficulty [for the perverse subject]: [quoting Freud] “For though no doubt a fetish is recognized by its adherents as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by them as a symptom … usually they are quite satisfied with it, or even praise [it].”’Footnote 74
Mao’s Directive is ‘relocated’ in favour of mass enlightenment via Fuller’s global (in)corporation. ‘Revisionism’, a term essential to the Cultural Revolution, indicates the slow reassertion of bourgeois power over the proletarian state through the weakening and re-writing of communist principles. At its core, it engages a politics of history against unified class struggle.Footnote 75 Revisionism is discarded by Cage even though, during the Cultural Revolution, it was perhaps the central theoretical teaching of Maoism. Namely, Mao’s insistence on criticizing revisionism concretely addresses the Marxist dialectic playing out in China between the determinacy of the Communist State and the indeterminacy of the revolutionary masses. His concern was that the determinacy of the State – its institutionalization – would make it a site for revisionist history to take root against the new forms of political experimentation oriented, core to Marxism, beyond the state. Cage’s distortion and objectification of this situation mirrors his distortion and objectification – that is, fetishization – of silence into sound. The artistic danger is that the purported indeterminacy of Cagean sound is a revisionist form of the more radical indeterminacy of absolute silence. Indeterminacy becomes, then, institutionalized within an idealist and unspoken determinacy (Cage’s ‘nature … complete mystery’). Revisionism is the traumatic kernel of Cage’s quotation – a gap that, according to disavowal, must be filled without denying the criticality of Maoism. Representing ‘knowledge’ against naïveté, it takes the ‘structural place of the fetish as that via which we can keep doing, enjoying, or simply ignoring things that this knowledge would seem to contradict’.Footnote 76 Mao’s ‘criticize revisionism’ persists as ‘the cut off part’, ‘a trace’ of ego-splitting in the form of an obscured ‘gap’.Footnote 77
There is a tangled web of sources at work in Cage’s seemingly straightforward reduction. I want to show how collective class struggle shifts to the terrain of morality and the individual, eliding not only the history of Chinese revolutionaries from 1966 to 1968 but how that historical moment might critically apply to Cagean silence. Cage’s quotation in M reads:
‘In what does the old ideology of the exploiting classes lie? It lies essentially in self-interest—the natural soil for the growing of capitalism. That is why in the course of revolution,’ Mao tells us, ‘we must fight self.’ That’s why the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would be done by) turned green in the USA.Footnote 78
At the core is Cage’s vitiation of materialist class struggle to an internal, universal battle with greed and narcissism. ‘Revolution’ against capitalism becomes a process of moral reform, that is, a desire to return to a lost, idealized – or ‘Golden’ – past. Not only does this follow the mandate given to the avant-garde during its liberal birth in the nineteenth century – to be humanity’s moral leaders, sublimating leftist class critique – but morality, as Marxists argue, is non-antagonistic to capital. Cage mimes Mao’s ‘that is why’ with his own ‘that’s why’, only to claim precisely the opposite – a claim structured around not the presence of ‘fight self’ in his quotation but the absence of ‘criticize revisionism’.
Part of the ‘continuous’ unconscious ‘work’ of disavowal, Cage’s centralization of morality does not come from Mao himself. His chief source was E.L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane’s The Chinese Road to Socialism (1970). The passage in question is from their reference to a ‘key article’ within the Cultural Revolution. It reads (Cage’s erasures struck):
In what does the old ideology of the exploiting classes lie? It lies essentially in self-interest—the natural soil for the growing of capitalism. This explains why it is necessary to start a great political and ideological revolution. It is a revolution to remould people to their very souls, to revolutionize their thinking. That is why in the course of this revolution we must ‘fight self.’Footnote 79
Without the first excised sentence, Cage’s ‘revolution’ is ideological not political. Politics, defined by Cage as the ‘exercise of power’ and governance, was disallowed due to its inherent relation to ‘self’, or desire.Footnote 80 This adheres to Fuller’s dismissal of politics and directly opposes Maoism, which allies revolutionary politics with subjective intervention.Footnote 81 And yet Cage knew well that Maoism was irrevocably political. Thus, it was not about making Maoism appear apolitical like Fuller, but instead ‘knowing very well’ about the (political) gap Maoism marked – and then managing it, subjugating the ‘fight’ to that which is based in the ‘self’ instead of ‘class’.
The concrete conundrum for the People’s Republic of China, as Alessandro Russo describes, was how to dialectally support and criticize the proletarian seizure of power – reopening it to change beyond the state. As above, this is about the Marxist problem of how the subjectivity or ‘political existence of workers’ might be ‘reinvented’.Footnote 82 The 1967 editorial, edited by Mao, ‘On the Proletarian Revolutionaries’ Struggle to Seize Power’, centres this thesis. It states that fighting ‘selfish ideas’ must ‘proceed from’ the ‘interests of the proletariat’ – interests that entail a struggle against revisionism, or ‘the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas in the minds of certain comrades’. The crux of this political contradiction was what happens after ‘the revolutionary mass organizations have seized power’. Mao’s important insight was that the proletarian subjective ‘position alters’ in unpredictable ways that must be attended to and supported – with this alteration is the hope that an egalitarian society beyond the state would come into view.Footnote 83 This is the opposite of the ahistorical self-emptying enlightenment called for by Fuller and modelled musically by Cage. It is, in fact, formally disallowed by Cage’s exclusion of absolute silence. Nothing, according to this, can proceed from a fundamental musical contradiction or negativity. Instead, there can only be sonic, relational differences. In this way, there can be no true ‘alter[ation]’ of ‘position’ in music.
Finally, it is important to note that Wheelwright and McFarlane’s quotation, like Cage’s, does not include a reference to ‘revisionism’. This is because it derives from another source unnamed and uncited – and altered – by the authors: a 1968 collection of articles from the Party newspaper, Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily).Footnote 84 Although the overt focus in the original is on revisionism, Wheelwright and MacFarlane’s extensive erasures explicitly obscure its role. To take one small example (excisions struck): ‘the selfishness of the exploiting classes is natural soil for the growth of capitalism, an important factor that generates revisionism, an ideological virus…the most concentrated representative and most stubborn defender of the old ideology of the bourgeoisie …’. Cage’s decision to primarily use Wheelwright and MacFarlane’s liberalized account of the Cultural Revolution operates, in view of this, as a redoubled form of ‘translation’ and ‘relocation’ – at once textual and formal – of Mao’s Marxist criticality.Footnote 85
An ‘indelible mark’ is left by these disavowed losses, the consequences of which are the ‘eradication [of] memory’, that is to say, history.Footnote 86 The history produced by disavowal is conditioned by knowledge, at the cost of gaps left by, and as, non-knowledge. Wheelwright and McFarlane’s institutional authority provides Cage the ‘knowing well’ that allows his subjugation of criticizing revisionism to the moral fight against the self. Thus, Fuller’s apolitical ‘world revolution’ and call for incorporated selflessness can exist, mediated by Cage’s musical-political model of silence, alongside Mao’s politics.
Deconstruction, construction
The second major revision concerns the relationship between destruction and construction. Extracting it from its historical moment in the Cultural Revolution (the publication of the ‘Circular’ in 1966), Cage translates Mao’s materialist position regarding these dialectical concepts to support fourth-century Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu’s idealist dialectics of Daoism.
Mao: Destruction means criticism and repudiation; it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which is construction. Put destruction first, and in the process you have construction.Footnote 87
Cage takes this from Wheelwright and McFarlane’s inclusion of Mao’s ‘Latest Instructions’ in their appendix – aphorisms which, outside of their context in China, lose considerable meaning. At stake is the traumatic role of negativity, that is, the meaning of ‘destruction’. Cage alters Mao’s position, in which negativity is essential, and fills it with an idealist redefinition that fits Fuller’s concept of revolution. This results in a kind of construction happening all the time and everywhere; per Cage, ‘a courageous seeing of things in movement, life as revolution … revolution is going on this moment’.Footnote 88 Cage admits destruction, but only insofar as its radically negative, materialist bite is enveloped in the primary constructivity of nature. This follows from Cage’s presumption that absolute silence is impossible: its formulation of a constitutive musical negativity is enveloped in the endlessly constructive presence of sound. Finally, this follows the basic avant-garde tradition of blurring art with life: revolution is to become one with the primarily constructive processes of life itself, or ‘life as revolution’.
Wheelwright and McFarlane’s quote is the same as Cage’s except – and this is no small exception – the first sentence (Cage’s erasures struck):
There is no construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation; it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which is construction. Put destruction first, and in the process you have construction.Footnote 89
Cage was attracted to this ‘instruction’ because it appears to collapse destruction and construction, opposites, into the same process. A significant reader of Chuang-Tzu’s writings, Cage tries to position Mao’s theory of contradiction alongside Chuang-tzu’s idealist non-dualism (more on this in the third revision). In For the Birds, for instance, Cage says, ‘people sometimes think that all my Fuller and McLuhan ideas have definitively “liberated” me from my youthful passion for the East and the Far East. But…I feel closer to Chuang-tze [sic] today than ever before!’Footnote 90 This comparison makes sense: Fuller and Chuang-tzu, no less McLuhan, are aligned in their commitment to global unification. Cage’s next logical step, however, does not: in a 1972 footnote to this quote from 1967, Cage writes, ‘in 1971 I began a methodical study of the writings of Mao Tse-Tung … I realized that his theses are perfectly compatible (cf. especially his text On Contradiction) with those of Zen and Chuang-tze [sic].’Footnote 91 Mao’s Marxist dialectics and embrace of contradiction appear – erroneously – in accordance with Chuang-tzu’s dialectical but idealist embrace of the natural unity of existence. This comes to bear on ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ in a key quotation from Chuang-tzu’s writings, in a chapter aptly titled ‘Identity of Contraries’.Footnote 92 Chuang-tzu writes: ‘separation is the same as construction: construction is the same as destruction. Nothing is subject either to construction or to destruction, for these conditions are brought together into One.’Footnote 93 For Cage, Mao’s statement ‘put destruction first, and in the process you have construction’ echoes this. Mao remains a source of critical credibility while becoming tacitly compatible, mediated by Chuang-tzu, with Fuller’s apolitical metaphysics. There seems to be nothing negative about revolution because Cage occupies the gap of its erasure – that is to say, as I will explain, Cage occupies the gap marked out by the absent first sentence.
When Mao writes ‘destruction means criticism and repudiation’ he is saying that destruction means the subversion of revisionism. At this point in China, this is what ‘revolution’ ‘means’. The People’s Republic was trying to work through revisionism by ‘arguing one’s own point’, instead of (a primarily) armed struggle. The Chinese communists had entered a principally non-violent stage and construction means the dialectical creation (‘arguing’) of something from a subjectivized (‘one’s own’) ‘point’ of negativity.Footnote 94 Essentially: construction is not happening all the time. It only takes place, so to speak, from the not or non-knowledge immanent to what is happening all the time. This is the basis of proletarian, materialist dialectics. Destruction is not at all the same as construction – it is ‘first’, a critical upsurge, a pointed refusal of what exists. Cage’s view can be squared with Mao’s only as long as the first sentence in the quoted passage above is, to use Zupančič’s phrase, ‘cut off’ alongside the potentiality of what does not exist.
The quote comes from Point Six of Mao’s ‘May 16 Circular’ published by the Central Committee of the Communist Party (omissions by Wheelwright and McFarlane struck; Cage’s italicized):
Chairman Mao often says that there is no construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation; it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which is construction. Put destruction first, and in the process you have construction. Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung’s thought, was founded and has constantly developed in the course of the struggle to destroy bourgeois ideology. This outline, however, emphasizes that “without construction, there can be no real and thorough destruction”. This amounts to prohibiting the destruction of bourgeois ideology and prohibiting the construction of proletarian ideology. It is diametrically opposed to Chairman Mao’s thought. It runs counter to the revolutionary struggle we have been waging on the cultural front for the vigorous destruction of bourgeois ideology. And it amounts to prohibiting the proletariat from making any revolution.Footnote 95
When Mao and the Central Committee write ‘there is no construction without destruction’ it is in direct response to Peng Zhen’s ‘Outline’ and his statement, ‘without construction, there can be no…destruction’.Footnote 96 In sum: Mao says, no construction without destruction; Zhen says, no destruction without construction. Their contradiction is fundamental and places in sharp contrast the Maoists and Chinese revisionists.Footnote 97 Zhen represents the ossification of the Party and State apparatus, admitting a difference in the formulas, but ‘prohibit[ing]’ the destruction of bourgeois ideology and so, too, the unforeseeable and experimental ‘construction’ of proletarian thought. This is a conservative turn within communism: construction is fundamental and first. Maoism represents the experimental position that begins from contradictions in what exists. This is an attempt to invent a new communist subjectivity: destruction is fundamental and first.
The critical kernel Cage disavows by removing the Maoist phrase ‘no construction without destruction’ is that the uncertain nature of experimental construction (necessity) is constituted by negativity or destruction (contingency). Even more, he removes the historical debate, which itself carries a negative force, around this phrase. With Chuang-tzu’s ‘One’ filling the gap left by Cage’s removal of the first sentence, ‘knowledge’ of Maoist revolution remains while nonetheless based on a form of negativity compatible with Fuller. Cage’s attempts at a Fuller–Mao reconciliation reveal, moreover, a subjective block within the avant-garde – linked to Cagean silence – that he is trying to sidestep through this project. With each avant-garde gesture toward political efficacy – in this case, regarding negativity – the genuinely desired emancipatory political orientation (e.g., Mao’s communism) buttresses, disavowed, the historically hegemonic position (e.g., Zhen’s revisionist liberalism).
The unity of opposites
Both the danger of revisionism to the invention of Chinese communism and the conflict within the dialectics of destruction and construction are underwritten by Mao’s best-known essay, ‘On Contradiction’ (1937).Footnote 98 Cage identifies this and positions his interpretation as a main thesis in the Foreword to M:
Reading Mao’s text On Contradiction, I think of it as a 20th century expression of nondualistic thought.Footnote 99
Cage emphasizes the core of Mao’s philosophy – absolute contradiction, the splitting of totalities as the ground of political truth – as that which cannot be reconciled with Fuller’s. He then moves to retain the term, contradiction, while claiming that in his view it can be ‘translated’ or ‘relocated’ as its opposite – non-dualism, or the unification of opposites. Significantly, this is not simply an error of innocence or ignorance: Cage relayed this idea to Brown during their reading of ‘On Contradiction’ and received a clear response (and gentle reprimand): ‘I do not think Mao’s writing on contradiction can be called non-dualistic’, followed by a parenthetical note at the bottom of the letter, as if trying to drive the point home – ‘(metaphysical is bad, and is the opposite of dialectical materialism)’.Footnote 100 Cage’s project of ‘listening to both’ Fuller and Mao was conditioned by disavowing this. If contradiction reigned instead of unity – in the form of a ‘listening to neither’ or the gap between the figures – then ‘the conditions of the [Cage’s] objectively true knowledge as such’ would be at stake.Footnote 101 Albeit not as literally as the textual erasures previously, Cage disavows this critical possibility in two linked, and arguably even more profound, ways.
First, he frames Mao’s essay by placing it within the domain of Fuller’s concept of revolution, buttressed by comparisons to the metaphysics of D.T. Suzuki and Chuang-Tzu. Cage centres this around a revolutionary subjective figure held in common by Mao and Fuller: the student.
The revolution in China was therefore to begin with them [the peasant and worker masses] and in relation to their needs. This looking to the masses made me think of Fuller, his vision of a world society in which all people, no matter their age, are properly students. The good life is a university, different from those we now have, from which while living we never graduate. The World Revolution to come (‘the greatest of them all’), apolitical, nonviolent, intelligent because comprehensively and regeneratively problem solving (cf. Mao: We must learn to look at problems all-sidedly, seeing the reverse as well as the obverse side of things) is a ‘Student Revolution.’Footnote 102
The Chinese masses (workers, peasants, students) resemble Fuller’s supposed world-masses (classless students). ‘Begin[ning] with them’ – the exploited classes, the colonized, the oppressed – is dissolved into an anomalous neutral figure, almost machinic in its ability to ‘comprehensively and regeneratively problem solve’ (Cage takes this from Fuller). The Maoist revolutionary, not at all a neutral figure, ends up as a lifelong metaphysical problem solver seeking enlightenment. Three ‘translations’ govern this shift: ‘The [communist] revolution in China’ becomes ‘The World Revolution to come’, which becomes the ‘Student Revolution’. Cage arrives at a version of the ‘good life’ in which everyone enters Fuller’s world-university. And Fuller’s idealized students ‘have no political motives. They have no formal organization…they are not supported by any political organization. Their activities converge as spontaneously as skiers converge on the world’s best snow slopes.’Footnote 103 Mao is not denied outright by Cage; ‘the revolution in China’ remains the impetus for this passage. And, no doubt, one of Mao’s most intriguing programmes was the re-creation of the university and his support, even to a fault, of the Chinese students.Footnote 104 But whereas Fuller’s students are a mirage of skiers intertwining according to nature, Mao’s materialist approach was based around the subjectivation, self-guided education, and creativity of the students and workers according to the proletarian factory space.
To secure this proto-enlightened subjectivity Cage grounds the Maoist figure of the revolutionary student in Suzuki and Chuang-tzu’s non-dualist metaphysics. In the case of Suzuki, he brings Mao within the field of Buddhism:
Suzuki often pointed out that Zen’s nondualism arose in China as a result of problems encountered in translating India’s Buddhist texts…concepts in opposition to one another did not exist in Chinese. Fixity became mountain-mountain; flexibility became springweather-springweather…Looking for an Indian precedent, Chinese patriarchs chose the Flower Sermon of the Buddha, a sermon in which no word was spoken. Reading Mao’s text On Contradiction, I think of it as [a] twentieth-century expression of nondualistic thought.Footnote 105
Cage compares Mao’s ‘On Contradiction’ to a ‘sermon in which no word was spoken’. It is telling how close – only to turn away – Cage brings Maoism to silence in these moments. During the Flower Sermon, there is a form of silent communication between student and master. This does not lead to a subjectivity grounded in the immanent negativity of absolute silence, or contradiction. Instead, a mystical communication beyond the restrictions of language takes place, allowing access to the non-dualist continuum of reality. Cage links the latter to Maoism by way of Chuang-tzu:
I felt very close to Mao when I read … he had studied … anarchism. And his admonitions to the people during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, including the very young, admonitions to revolt against authority, including his own authority, were ones with which I wholeheartedly concur … Observed from a Western distance, Mao often seemed to be leading China into chaos. But it was to Chaos himself, in Kwang-tse’s [Chuang-tzu’s] writings, that the Spirit of the Clouds put his questions when he felt the need to improve the world.Footnote 106
Mao becomes the ‘Spirit of the Clouds’ addressing a metaphysically anarchistic ‘Chaos’: a student with nature itself as his teacher. He no longer serves the revolution but Fuller’s generalized ‘improvement of the world’ outside of all ‘government’ and politics. Objectified and, recalling Freud, turned into a mystical ‘token’ affording Cage special ‘access’ (to that very nature or metaphysical ‘Chaos’), Mao retains his position as a political leader but is grounded in an idealist ontology contrary to his materialism.Footnote 107
What is left out from this flanking of Maoism constitutes the second part of Cage’s disavowal, and its hinge-point. Namely, it served as a key historical text underwriting the ‘one divides into two’ controversy: the phrase central to the essay, ‘the unity of opposites’, was up for debate along class lines. Beginning in 1964, the Chinese press would call it a class struggle in philosophy.Footnote 108 In one view, the formula reads ‘the one divides into two’; in the other, the formula reads, ‘the two fuse into one’. The sheer number of articles addressing this by workers, students, academics, and party members is impressive. Cage’s position in favour of fusion fits within the conservative faction. Regardless of whether Cage knew about it, or should have, my point is that, first, Mao’s Marxism upholds contradiction not fusion and, second, it installs a traumatic crack within Fuller’s metaphysics which Cage occupies by brandishing the very text, ‘On Contradiction’, that made that crack.
During the Cultural Revolution the question arose: what is the essence of materialist dialectics – and with it, communist subjectivity? In an apparently sophistic formulation, both sides held that dialectics was a synthesis of opposites, but for Maoists this meant the one divides into two and for revisionists that the two fuses into one. As Alain Badiou says – for whom ‘the one divides in two’ is essential – ‘what is really at stake is the identification of revolutionary subjectivity, of its constituent desire’.Footnote 109 The subject is constituted either by contradiction – desire that does not deny lack, and thus persists without ground – or fusion – desire that covers over lack, artificially totalizing its own operation. Desire is never satisfied; there is no total satisfaction nor indifference, no full nor empty subject, no pure intention nor non-intention. These fantasies trip over themselves reaching for truth. Rainer, in fact, succinctly points out that Cagean indeterminacy – purportedly enervating desire – displays a covert desire to maintain the unchangeable stability of our horrific ‘society’ instead of ‘contesting’ it. She writes: ‘we can’t have it both ways: no desire and no God. To have no desire … is necessarily coequal to having no quarrel with – God-given – manifestations of reality’.Footnote 110 This, however, does not mean truth is impossible; rather, as I have been suggesting, it is in this tripping, in the gap structuring desire’s insatiability. This is why non-dualist metaphysics, in which there is only what exists, must empty desire. And yet, this too entails a kind of unintended tripping, precisely because an empty subject or desire lacks lack – per Badiou, they harbour a ‘conservative’ ‘desire’ ‘for the old One’.Footnote 111
‘On Contradiction’ makes the distinction between the unity of opposites (the old One) and the unity of opposites (the split two).Footnote 112 In Cage’s metaphysical and non-dualist view, unity is emphasized – this is why a return to what exists is fundamental for Cage. Its prohibited opposite is what does not exist: the incessant and revolutionary splitting of terms, unified in their opposition. This kind of logic was relevant to the Chinese revolutionaries’ construction of a prohibited proletarian subjectivity. Likewise, it was essential to Cage’s musical excision of absolute silence, and thus, in relief, forms the basis for a prohibited musical subjectivity within the avant-garde. Affirming this prohibition means that it is not the structure of reality that is, per Mao, ‘universal and absolute’ but rather its inherent ontological self-contradiction, Mao’s ‘law of contradiction in things’ – that is to say, the materialist dialectic of non-knowledge.
Conclusion: losing not gaining
Artists in the post-war avant-garde occupied a contradictory, double role. They were presumed political-moral leaders guiding (a purportedly) universal humanity into a globalized future, while also tasked with absorbing critical subversions of that future. This attitude, exemplified by Fuller, holds belief in a better world alongside (disavowed) critical knowledge that the role of the avant-garde was historically compromised in this aim. Critical of its prior claims to artistic autonomy, as well as the interventionism of the early twentieth century, Cage’s avant-garde tried to translate artistic methods into a praxis of everyday life. This inevitably meant the subsumption of revolution in that praxis. And yet, all three modes – autonomy, intervention, blurring – were simply variants on the liberal attempt to return to an originary state of individual freedom. The history of the avant-garde is the repetition of this double logic. Disavowal has become, I suggest, a key artistic strategy in this process.
The ironic blockage that Cage’s disavowed Maoism brings to light is that if the avant-garde succeeds in creating a new artistic form and subjectivity, then it must divorce itself from politics – which is to say, divorce itself from its originary, sufficient reason defined by the hegemonic rise of the bourgeoisie. A new form of art would arise from the crack that originary, sufficient reason obscures. This art form would necessarily be open to unthought modalities of relating to a politics beyond liberalism and thus be non-intentionally political in its refusal of (bourgeois) politics as well as idealized artistic autonomy. When Cage’s project of reconciling Mao and Fuller is understood as an impasse linked to the musical impasse of absolute silence, then this intriguing future comes into view.
A passage from a 1974 letter from Cage to Christian Wolff summarizes Cage’s entry into the final stage of disavowal, non-naïve belief, and thus too the eclipse of this impasse:
What is right action? You write of politics and power and of the adding of these to music by means of words. Are then the words alone insufficient? Wasn’t Mao right (being interested in power) to let music go and add guns to his words? Yes and no … Music is not necessary. But you “are best at it [music] and enjoy it the most.” I have thought … since my practice of music changed my mind, that it might change the minds of some other people (that seems to be the case) and further that since society is like [a] mind that it too might change through music’s practices. And this too seems to be the case, though insufficiently. Not enough people take revolutionary music seriously, that is, not enough to change the society. Or are we impatient?Footnote 113
The criticality of Mao’s revolutionary politics is displaced and sustained. Cage correctly notices a crossroads within the relation between avant-garde music and politics as well as within his own thought. His insecurity is palpable. The fact Cage ‘knows well’ the Fuller-based view of revolution is ‘insufficient’ – that Maoism de-masked that ‘ultimate reality’ – means that, in his view, his philosophy of silence and an enlightened subjectivity needs to expand and secure its scope. This desire for expansion is a fundamental limitation of Cagean silence. Knowledge (of ‘all of it’) remains the goal. Instead of changing his view through the gap of non-knowledge that Maoism formulates, he creates a more impenetrable view. As the letter continues, Cage expresses a desire to ‘move towards wilderness’, or natural unity, as opposed to the city, or contradiction and struggle; to shift from the ‘transfer of Chinese politics to our situation’ toward, per Fuller, ‘hope for a world that will work for everyone’. He concludes, ‘so I return to the utilities rather than to power politics. And [I return] to Fuller.’ Maoism is enveloped in ‘wilderness’, ‘a world … for everyone’, and ‘utilities’. This is how Cage can say, ‘Wasn’t Mao right … ? Yes and no’. Thus, from Empty Words onward, Mao’s concept of revolution becomes incorporated and Fuller absolute: a ‘prophet of Utopia’ and a ‘Jeremiah’.Footnote 114
To conclude, I want to return to a moment in Cage’s interviews with Charles in the late 1960s, just prior to his Maoist period.Footnote 115 Cage begins by confirming what silence means:
‘JC: [Silence] is already sound …
DC: There are never any silences … silence does not exist … sound and silence are at once opposites and the same.
JC: Yes, the sound no longer comprises an obstacle to silence … we come back to what exists; to sounds…’
There are certain illuminating moments in which Charles pushes back in these interviews. In this case:
‘DC: But don’t you lose something?
JC: What?
DC: Silence, nothingness …’
Charles suggests that Cage’s denial of non-being might have lost something along the way: silence. Cage responds, ‘it is not a question of losing, but of gaining’! And yet: ‘gaining’ oneness (fusion) installs, against itself, a spectral split that mutates and repeats in unforeseen ways. Silence formulates this irreducible musical contradiction: by ‘gaining’ everything Cage ‘lost’, precisely, nothing.
In this article, I attended to what drops away in Cage’s thought in a key moment where he declares a turn in his thought, reassessing what appears to be a ‘gain’ as instead a site of disavowed ‘loss’. I traced how the dialectic between Mao’s Marxism and Fuller’s social philosophy is at the heart of Cage’s musical subjectivity and reflects on his philosophy of silence, revealing key limitations within it. These limitations, finally, suggest consequences beyond Cage’s work as a composer: they are at the crux of whether the avant-garde continues unchanged or is sublated and split, producing unforeseen artistic forms alongside, in that very movement, the irruption of unforeseen political possibilities.
Competing Interests
The author declares none.
Luke Martin is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and an MFA graduate in Music Composition at California Institute of the Arts (2016). His research interests span musicology, political theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy, focusing on the modernist avant-garde and the relation between music, truth, and subjectivity. His dissertation traces silence through the music and writings of Erik Satie, John Cage, and Alice Coltrane, proposing that a post-Cagean philosophy of silence lies at the crux of rethinking the artistic avant-garde’s historical relation to revolutionary politics. He is an active composer, improviser, and organizer based in Minneapolis and often collaborates with the Wandelweiser Collective.
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