Suspicious Silence: Walking Out on John Cage

Abstract

What we require is / silence; but what silence requires / is that I go on talking --John Cage, Lecture on Nothing Well, shall we / think or listen? Is a addressed / not wholly to ear? --William Carlos Williams, The Orchestra Critical Innocence: 2012 marked what would have been composer and writer John Cage's 100th birthday, offering a nice round numbered moment to commemorate and reevaluate Cage's lasting legacy. And it is a rich and still, astonishingly, controversial legacy, bringing forth bold assessments of Cage that range, as they have for decades, from worshipful acclaim, to ridiculing rejection. It seems with Cage, still, that it's either black or white, love or hate; that he is either a saintly prophet of new sounds, new silences, or a foolish charlatan leading anarchically astray. Of late, however, one reads more and more critical accounts of Cage that, while acknowledging his wide-ranging influence and importance, suggest nonetheless of him a deafening innocence to his own renowned hearing. A new generation of writers and listeners, one that is perhaps more theoretically inclined and less reverential of composer's acclaim, have begun to raise questions about what they perceive as unexamined dimensions of some of Cage's claims about silence, nature of nothing that was thought to have constituted it. Cage, as a consequence, is now often more mystically presented as somewhat naively espousing a kind of zen-like syncing of a scene with a sound, with its immediate moment. Also, this more recent critique asserts of Cage a certain silencing of inconvenient sounds, sounds incompatible with, in particular, his own well-established story of silence; some have even characterized Cage's silence as, politically and ontologically, an antiseptic one exclude[s] world and its cultural noise (Brophy). And how simple, or simple-minded, others say, to seek, as Cage so often said he sought, out of silence, his silence, of sound in itself. Or, how innocent it is to listen for present of such self-present moments of here and For we all now so knowingly know that various mediations of there and then, those continuously compounded intrusions upon immediate thought by thought's own memory and expectation, so certainly prohibit our accessing any such punctually present sound, at any such present site, heard as here, heard as now. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] But, of Cage's listening innocence, what might we make of these many reasoned, even reasonable, suspicions that are directed toward him, of such aspersions onto foundational stories of and silence that Cage so often told? How are we to reconcile Cage's stated desire for sound in itself, heard instantaneously here and now, with what is--in theory--increasingly understood as a more dense and dispersed event of that, temporally spreading-out, is always elsewhere and already other than where we look, where we listen? How are we to hear, one wonders, any such present sounds, silent or otherwise, which (if they are to be heard at all) are often now thoughtfully rendered as acoustically thicker in their very thinking, in their having been thought? Resounding, re-sounding, such sounds now echo absently elsewhere in their rich range of references that, simultaneously superimposed, constitute them. My suspicion (from one who has long admired and learned from Cage) is that many of more recent attributions of a certain critical innocence to Cage, of his being in a kind of deafening denial to his own repressions of sound, have often failed to see, or hear, how cagey Cage could actually be, and how smart his innocence, such that it was, has finally proven to have been. And of such self-present hearing of here and now, it was Jacques Derrida who noted, in his own Husserlian study of mythically sought punctuality of instant, that the present of self-presence is not simple (61). …