Multi-Agential Situations: A View Through John Cage’s Works for Plant Materials

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Notes

1 Mudd, “Material-Oriented Musical Interactions.” See also Clarke and Doffman, “Introduction and overview.”

2 Mudd, “Material-Oriented Musical Interactions,” 124; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 33.

3 Ibid., 148.

4 See, for a formative example, Lewis, “Too Many Notes.”

5 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 215.

6 See, for example, McLaughlin, “The Material Clarinet”; Lim, “Intervention: Knots and other forms of entanglement.”

7 See Tresch and Dolan, “Toward a New Organology”; Bates, “The Social Life of Musical Instruments”; Bates, “Actor-Network Theory and Organology.”

8 See Born and Barry, “Music, mediation theories and actor-network theory.”

9 Magnusson, “Musical Organics,” 287.

10 See Born, “On Musical Mediation,” 8n1; Prior, “On Vocal Assemblages.”

11 See Clarke with Williams and Reynolds, “Musical events and perceptual ecologies”; see also Valiquet, “Affordance Theory.”

12 An example of this would be Ian Buchanan’s challenge to ‘assemblage theory’ on Deleuze-Guattarian terms – see Buchanan, “Assemblage Theory and Its Discontents” and Buchanan, “Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion.”

13 Cage, John Cage: Writer, 241.

14 See, for example, Cage, Silence, 46, 149.

15 Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 103.

16 Christopher Shultis provides an informative account of the challenges and opportunities that performing Child of Tree presents in “The Process of Discovery.”

17 Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 92.

18 See Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise.

19 Wojnowski, “Capturing the World with Performance,” 47.

20 In the precise sense of being an age still in the wake of developments in cybernetics and information theory in the 1940s and 1950s.

21 Piekut, “Chance and Certainty,” 159n6.

22 Ibid., 136; Piekut, “Sound’s Modest Witness,” 11; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 13.

23 Piekut, “Sound’s Modest Witness,” 11.

24 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 6.

25 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture; see also Latour, Politics of Nature, and Latour, “From Multiculturalism to Multinaturalism.

26 Piekut, “Sound’s Modest Witness,” 13.

27 Cage, Silence, 15.

28 Piekut, “Sound’s Modest Witness” 12.

29 Ibid., 11.

30 Piekut, “Chance and Certainty,” 146.

31 Ibid.; Hacking, The Taming of Chance.

32 Piekut, “Chance and Certainty,” 135, 151.

33 Ibid., 158.

34 Cage, A Year from Monday, 124.

35 Cage, Silence, 12.

36 Cage, For the Birds, 91.

37 Cage, A Year from Monday, 126.

38 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 135.

39 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 120.

40 Barad, What Is the Measure of Nothingness?, 6.

41 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 57-58.

42 Piekut, “Chance and Certainty,” 144.

43 Berliner, Legrain, and van de Port, “Bruno Latour and the anthropology of the moderns,” 443.

44 Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere, 152.

45 Holbraad and Pedersen, The Ontological Turn, 168.

46 Viveiros de Castro, “The Relative Native,” 483-84.

47 See, more recently, Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.

48 Although Latour has also been criticised for his relation to Indigenous thinking – see Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist's Take On The Ontological Turn” and Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World.

49 Cage, For the Birds, 181.

50 See, for example, Hörl, General Ecology and Hui, Recursivity and Contingency.

51 Gibson, “Interview with Michael Marder,” 29.

52 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 8.

53 Ibid., 9.

54 Ibid., 5.

55 Ibid., 10.

56 Cage does, however, express an interest in these processes (Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 93), and utilises them in other pieces, such as his large-scale Variations VII.

57 Gibson, “Interview with Michael Marder,” 27-28.

58 Wojnowski, “Capturing the World with Performance,” 34.

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Iain Campbell

Iain Campbell is a Teaching Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Edinburgh College of Art and a Research Associate at the University of Dundee, where he is working on the project The Future of Indeterminacy: Datafication, Memory, Bio-Politics. He has written on topics across philosophy, music, sound studies, and art theory for publications including Angelaki, Contemporary Music Review, Sound Studies, and Continental Philosophy Review. His current research focuses on experimentation and on the differences and continuities between conceptualisations of this notion in philosophy, art, music, and science. Email: [email protected]