Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: RE: Re: Re: Re: Cage's prejudices

Don¹t go too much into the tendency of making analysis according to
³musicology research.² Things are much more complex than any analyzing
inquiry can absorb (remember what Varese said about analysis). The issues
most important cannot be analyzed anyway.

I am thinking about large scale project(s) in connection with Cage¹s 100 in
2012/13. Would be nice to have someone on board who could intelligently
oppose me, not as a result of different opinions, but empirical knowledge.
PK


On 6/22/11 11:00 AM, "Rob Haskins" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Wow, the Silence list remains dormant, almost nonexistent, for months and then
> this burst of activity happens. Lovely. 
> 
> I think there's been a tendency, especially in musicology, to try to keep the
> music value free: to discuss music and music, art for art's sake. That's begun
> to break down (has been for some time, since the 1980s). Cage is ripe for the
> kind of interrogation Ian proposes. And while I sympathize with Stefano's
> view--that he pointed toward the problem in a way that invited people to look
> at it anew with the hope of solving it--I wish he could have been a little
> more proactive about it himself. His beliefs in anarchism prevented him, for
> instance, from signing on to protest anything one way or the other, because (I
> think) he feared that speaking in support for it might have coerced others who
> could not think as clearly or carefully into taking on that belief or cause
> inauthentically.  The subtle power structures that exist today can easily
> appropriate and subvert this kind of thinking.
> 
> best,
> Rob
> 
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 5:10 AM, Stefano Pocci <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>      
>>  On 06/21/2011 07:42 PM, Ian Pace wrote:
>>> Cage spoke and wrote often about his social/political views; it was hardly
>>> as if he was disengaged from debate. And on several occasions he made very
>>> explicit his opposition to active politics and protest movements, as with:
>>>  
>>>  'I am interested in social ends, but not in political ends, because
>>> politics deals with power, and society deals with numbers of individuals;
>>> and I'm interested in both single individuals and large numbers or medium
>>> numbers or any kinds or numbers of individuals. In other words, I'm
>>> interested in society, not for purposes of power, but for purposes of
>>> cooperation and enjoyment. ' (Interview in Source (1969), cited in Richard
>>> Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, second edition (New York and London:
>>> Routledge, 2003), p. 274)
>>>  
>>>  or 
>>>  
>>>  My notion of how to proceed in a society to bring change is not to protest
>>> the thing that is evil, but rather to let it die its own death. And I think
>>> we can state that the power structure is dying because it cannot make any
>>> inspiring statements about what it is doing.
>>>  
>>>  I think that protests about these things, contrary to what has been said,
>>> will give it the kind of life that a fire is given when you fan it, and that
>>> it would be best to ignore it, put your attention elsewhere, take actions of
>>> another kind of positive nature, rather than continue to give life to the
>>> negative by negating it. (Cage, 'Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will
>>> Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1968 (Revised)', in M; Writings '67-'72
>>> (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), p. 12)
>>>  
>>>  or 
>>>  
>>>  'Protest movements could quite easily, ad despite themselves, lead in the
>>> opposite direction, to a reinforcement of law and order. There is in
>>> acceptance and non-violence an underestimated revolutionary force. but
>>> instead, protest is all too often absorbed into the flow of power, because
>>> it limits itself to reaching for the same old mechanisms of power, which is
>>> the worst way to challenge authority! We'll never get away from it that
>>> way!' (Interviewed by Daniel Charles, c. 1970, in For the Birds (London:
>>> Marion Boyars, 1981), p. 236)
>>>  
>>>  The last comment in particular makes a lot of powerful points, but Cage's
>>> resignation (with respect to 'acceptance', non-violence is another matter)
>>> seems particularly casual in light of some of the achievements of protest in
>>> the years leading up to then. How would Rosa Parks have felt about this,
>>> say? The second quote I find actually quite crass when considering the vital
>>> work of human rights organisations or dissident groups in bringing to wider
>>> attention terrible human rights abuses in various regimes, and protesting
>>> these - I am pretty sure many such regimes would prefer Cage's option. With
>>> respect to lynchings, Jim Crow laws, etc., would it have been 'best to
>>> ignore it, put your attention elsewhere'?
>>>  
>>>  If Cage simply had not had much to say about any form of politics, it would
>>> be one thing, but this was far from the case. As he had so much to say on
>>> this subject, it's only fair that these might be interrogated. If it is all
>>> right to cite them positively, as many writers on Cage have done, then it
>>> should be all right to look at them more critically as well.
>>>  
>>>  Best, 
>>>  Ian 
>>>  
>>>  
>>>  
>>>  
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>  Great discussion, thanks a lot to everyone involved.
>>  
>>  
>>  I'd like to quote Satie as Cage did in his lecture for the French composer
>> when the latter says:
>>  
>>  "Personally, I am neither good nor bad. I sway, if one may say that.
>> Actually I have never done anyone any harm - or good either."
>>  
>>  or Buckminster Fuller when he said that "he was working to make the existent
>> system obsolete". (I think) I can see why Cage mentioned these lines or why
>> he was so into Duchamp's works which were not a matter of "being bad or good"
>> but something beyond this uninteresting polar situation. It's the same thread
>> (to me) that ties the anarchy and politics issues and the way he treated
>> them. Or maybe re-treated them:-)
>>  
>>  Ian anticipated me with a couple of appropriate quotations such as:
>> "protesting it's like throwing gas over a fire" or "protest is being absorbed
>> by the power forces". Cage would rather continue without a qualm on his path
>> (emptiness-silence) following his strict principles (which don't imply
>> contradiction with anarchy as I had wrongly thought so far) as that's the way
>> to forge ahead (citing his "living on water" mesostic here). I feel like the
>> reason why these statements still generate this kind of discussions must be
>> found both in a more critical (and fairer) view of Cage's opinions and in his
>> being outside any kind of model we try to place him in.
>>  
>>  Of course the real troubles (racism, poverty, wars, political climate, etc)
>> he was surrounded by remained, which is why his acceptance position was
>> sometimes valued as a retreat/defeat and therefore inserted again in the
>> cause-effect scheme such acceptance refused. But even if we state that his
>> thoughts weren't practical/concrete enough, had the remedies then devised
>> proved to work so far? At least Cage offers a different (I should have said
>> "outside") point of view that (hopefully) compels us to think of a new kind
>> of solution.
>>  
>>  Ian is right when he says that "...With respect to lynchings, Jim Crow laws,
>> etc., would it have been 'best to ignore it, put your attention elsewhere'?".
>> Of course not. But (I think) Cage was pointing at the root of the issue. WHY
>> those things happened and HOW TO prevent them to happen again. We need a
>> long-term solution as well as a immediate one for present troubles, that's
>> the big challenge.
>> 
>>