Sound's Modest Witness: Notes on Cage and Modernism

Abstract

John Cage's work has been interpreted by various critics as representative of both modernism and postmodernism. Although scholars have focused on the aesthetic and historical dimensions of modernism, the subject can also be approached from the perspective of ontology. Specifically, Cage's work was premised on an absolute ontological distinction between an objective natural world and a subjective social world. This modernist worldview led Cage to think that he could eliminate the contingencies of the social in order to become a modest witness of the nature that was revealed through experiment. The Cagean discourse of modest self-abnegation—which we are accustomed to associating with his borrowings from Asian philosophy—reproduces a familiar dynamic of power in the West, in which the cultivation of self-invisibility is the key to epistemological and social power.

Keywords:

• Cage
• Modernism
• Ontology
• Modesty
• Latour
• Haraway
• Actor‐Network
• Science
• Experimental Music

Notes

[1] I draw, in particular, on Haraway (1997); Jay (2004); Latour (1993); Shapin and Schaffer (1985) and Toulmin (1990).

[2] Rainer (1981) makes a similar argument, but in politicized terms: if Cage disrupts signifying practice itself, he also takes away the means to effect change in a discourse that is imperialist and patriarchal.

[3] Barry, Born, and Weszkalnys (2008) have detailed the ways that ontology serves as a critical orientation for emerging modes of interdisciplinary inquiry.

[4] Timothy Morton (2007) makes a similar point, p. 102.

[5] For an extended analysis, see Piekut (in press).