John Cage and Anarchism

Notes on Sources and Musical Evocations

As John Cage rose to increasing prominence throughout the long 1960s, his interests widened to include social questions that had been raised by his employment of indeterminacy in composition and performance. Probably the best-known example of this concern appears in an account of the musicians who performed any sounds they wished during early performances of his Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958): "I must find a way to let people be free without their becoming foolish. So that their freedom will make them noble.... My problems have become social rather than musical."1

From this point forward, Cage sought to consider the problems of power with its potential negative effects and the responsibilities of human beings living and working together. Significantly, he found a way to approach both concerns through his understanding of anarchistic thought in both Europe and America. Overt references to anarchism appeared in his writings as early as 1965 and continued throughout his lifetime. Indeed, some statements closely echo classic writers on anarchism. In a symposium on experimental cinema, for instance, a questioner contrasted Cage’s activities with the revolutionary spirit of contemporary youth reflected in the work of Jonas Mekas, asking if it is truly possible to create non-intentional art. Cage’ s response addressed revolution, not intention:

"The change, the revolution that we want will not deprive us of our individuality. This must be increased and intensified. What we want is a change in the means by which we live. At present the controls are coercive, controls having to do with politics and economics, and not at all to do with this intense personalism and individuality which we know we need... the hope is that the present coercive and bureaucratic powers of our society will dwindle, wither, and fall away."2

The quotation resonates with one by Errico Malatesta, part of the source material for Cage’s long mesostic poem Anarchy (1988):

"Revolution is the destruction of all coercive ties; it is the autonomy of groups, of communes, of regions; revolution is the free federation brought about by a desire for brotherhood, by individual and collective interests, by the needs of production and defense; revolution is the constitution of innumerable free groupings based on ideas, wishes and tastes of all-kinds that exist among the people."3

Both men referred to freedom from coercive forces that should disappear in favor of autonomy. Malatesta framed his ideals more explicitly with respect to various groups of people, while Cage stressed individuality; nevertheless, he identified individuality as a shared need that formed an important component of community.

It is a commonplace to describe Cage’s music as anarchistic. However, some writers have not fully traced the sources for his conception of anarchism; in his recent biography, for instance, Kenneth Silverman strongly implies that Cage’s ideas derive principally from Henry David Thoreau.4 Others have oversimplified the anarchistic component of his music by equating anarchism with a dangerous state of chaos and lawlessness, and thereby misconstrued how concepts of anarchism inform the compositions. Arnold Whittall calls attention to what he senses as a paradoxical co-existence of freedom and control in Cage’s music: he claims, for instance, that the qualifications to Cage’s 0′00″ (1962) prevent the work from evoking anarchism as successfully as possible — for example, that the disciplined action chosen by the performer cannot be the performance of a musical work.5 Richard Kostelanetz, who has claimed that Cage’s anarchism is more important to the composer than his oft-cited Zen Buddhism, identifies six elements that make his work specifically anarchistic: (1) the presence of all participants as equals; (2) the absence of a person in charge, such as a conductor; (3) the formal expression of chaos; (4) a tendency toward levity; (5) the acknowledgment that any performance venue is as legitimate as another; and (6) the desire not to hold the audience prisoner, but to give them the opportunity to leave whenever they wish.6 Kostelanetz cites the ambitious and cacophonous HPSCHD (1969) as the best exemplar of anarchism in his work, introducing definitions that can thus apply only to a handful of Cage’s works.7

Matters become complicated, however, when one examines a number of other Cage pieces that the composer thought exemplary of anarchism, pieces which resemble HPSCHD not at all. For example, Cage described Fourteen (1990), a concerto for bowed piano and ensemble, as a specific example of an anarchistic society. The work does not accord with the first, fourth, and sixth of Kostelanetz’s criteria.8 I propose that such works can be understood as evocations of anarchism after becoming familiar with the anarchistic writings that Cage himself knew and also recognizing the anarchistic roots of ideas in the vast network of thought that he appropriated from various sources. This mode of anarchism embraces a number of possible identities and contingent configurations — it even allows for the sort of discipline that Whittall and other critics claim to contradict the anarchistic spirit of Cage’s politics and aesthetics.

Definitions

To begin, I should acknowledge that anarchism is not so much a doctrine as an ensemble of contingent beliefs; it lacks a strong theoretical base, lacks even consensus regarding many of its defining characteristics. In the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, the citation for the word "anarchy" embraces a variety of definitions. The first includes the familiar senses of political disorder and absence of government; the second summarizes the sense in which I will explore it here: "A theoretical social state in which there is no governing person or body of persons, but each individual has absolute liberty (without implication of disorder)."9 The earliest advocates of classical anarchism generally disallowed violence, particularly within the fully realized anarchic community. According to Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist who authored a widely-acclaimed article for the eleventh edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, anarchism involved "a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government," where harmony arises through "free agreements concluded between the various groups."10

The anarchists advocated the rejection of polities because their underlying principles of property ownership, profit, and competition allow a small minority of people to control and exploit the majority. Instead, they proposed the creation of small communities who came together as the result of mutually held beliefs and interests, who voluntarily pooled their resources. Any other kind of system ultimately operated in a coercive manner; as formulated by Victor S. Yarros, a writer of Ukrainian descent associated with the American anarchists, all such systems ultimately aim to enforce their own concept of what is right, removing the individual’s right to determine that for herself.11 Once the individual’s right to make such decisions is curtailed, a governmental system eventually creates a new elite and a new disenfranchised majority.

Another important aspect of anarchism concerns the tension between the individual and the group, which underpins its various developmental lines in Europe and in the United States. Specifically, American anarchism tended toward individualism more than did the European model, which stressed collective action; Cage knew about this distinction through his acquaintance with James Martin’s Men Against the State, a history of American anarchism published in 1953.12

The order of an anarchistic community embodies considerably greater differentiation and flexibility than that of present traditional configurations of society. Kropotkin describes this situation in terms that strongly evoke Cage’s aesthetic: as "an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees." The society would never be fixed in any way, but its harmony would "result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment" of equilibrium between multitudinous forces and influences.13

Sources

We know very little about Cage’s political upbringing and the formation of his political beliefs. Given his parents’ activities and intelligence, and the artists and intellectuals with whom the composer socialized, it may be reasonable to assume that he belonged to a group similar to the one described by David A. Hollinger: a collection of intellectuals including both white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Jews who shared a liberal sensibility and a faith in a cosmopolitan identity resulting from the fusion of individual cultural backgrounds.14

Modest events in Cage’s childhood and early maturity give an indication of his future development. In "Other People Think", a prize-winning entry in a high school oration contest, he criticized American "capitalists" who exploited the Latino countries in which they had invested, hoping that the two cultures could come to understand and value their differences.15 Other early sources offer further suggestions of this development — for instance, his senior high school yearbook, which noted his tendency for being radical.16 During Cage’s tenure at Seattle’s Cornish School, he closely associated with a number of leftist individuals including Bonnie Bird’s husband Ralph Gundlach (who made available the test-tone recordings that he used in Imaginary Landscape No. 1) and Melvin Rader; both men, who taught at the University of Washington, were questioned by Washington State’s Committee on Un-American Activities, and Gundlach eventually lost his tenured position there. Indeed, Leta E. Miller — who has thoroughly documented such interactions during Cage’s Seattle years — observes that the tone of his writings from this time resonate with his friends’ political concerns, as in the remark "Percussion music is revolution."17

His later years coincided with a renewed interest in anarchism that began to appear particularly during the 1960s, aided by the counterculture movements of that era. George Woodcock, who wrote one of the most important early histories of anarchism in English, reviewed the development of the movement in a short article from 1968. To his surprise, he found anarchistic ideas alive and well, particularly among middle-class youth and intellectuals. Although the movement had gained strength as a result of countercultural ideas, it was by no means restricted to them. By and large, these "new radicals" (Woodcock’s term) were more inclined to read a recent author such as Paul Goodman than any of the canonical anarchists, although they understood and applied the movement’s foundational principles.18 Marshall Shatz, the editor of a volume of anarchist writings known to Cage, reiterated Woodcock’s findings, admitting that this newer brand of anarchism naturally allied itself to a more ecologically-minded group of people including intellectuals, students, hippies, and similar groups.19

Cage cited a number of authors as a part of his work. Many of these writers — including Shatz, Martin, and Goodman — were specifically associated with the history or dissemination of anarchism in the United States; still others, including Emma Goldman and Thoreau, counted among either the group of famous nineteenth-century anarchists or those closely related to the movement’s spirit. Example 1 shows selected primary and secondary sources for anarchism that Cage cited. It is not easy to establish a chronology for his reading of these works. He himself said that he did not become aware of Thoreau until 1967, but references to other anarchistic texts began to appear around 1965.

During this resurgence of anarchism, many of its tenets concomitantly appeared in other utopian constructs such as Marshall McLuhan’s global village and Buckminster Fuller’s view of a decentralized world community in which all humanity had its survival needs met. In the formulations of both Kostelanetz and Cage, technology proved indispensable to this new way of living. Significantly, in an essay dedicated to and known by Cage, Kostelanetz coined the term "technoanarchism" to describe a use of technology that widely advances anarchistic ideals.20

Any discussion of Cage’s specific involvement with anarchism, one difficulty concerns the fluid nature of his views on social matters. The composer familiarized himself with a variety of writings by authors who unanimously emphasized the need to improve the world and its caretaking but differed regarding particulars. Because Cage appropriated ideas from many other sources, it is not always easy to separate what he appropriated specifically from, say, McLuhan or Fuller alone, and what of those writers he might have recognized as a reinforcement of specifically anarchistic ideas. Indeed, one can easily find evidence of Cage’s kind of political thinking in the Taoist writers that he read in the late 1940s: One passage in Book XI of Zhuangzi’s writings (Cage’s Kwang-tse) characterizes government as a meddling force that cannot make men good.21 One can also see how certain ideas of Fuller accord with anarchistic principles that I have previously identified. For one, his notion of flexible space that can be used in many different ways mirrors the flexibility of an anarchistic community, whose aims and constitution undergo constant negotiation and transformation. Fuller remained adamant that politicians were totally unnecessary, that their work offered no effective solutions to world problems. Even so, his orientation was not primarily an anarchistic one but, rather, one that merged technology with a utopian worldview.22

Example 1. Sources for anarchism mentioned by Cage in writings or interviews.

Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Portraits. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Berman, Paul, comp. Quotations from the Anarchists. New York: Praeger, 1972.

Comte, Auguste. Système de politique positive; ou, Traité de sociologie instituant la religion de l’humanité. 4 vols. Paris: Carilian-Goeury, 1851–1854.

Goldman, Emma. Living My Life. 2 vols. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1931.

———. Anarchism and Other Essays. With a new introduction by Richard Drinnon. New York: Dover, 1969.

Goodman, Paul. Drawing the Line. New York: Random House, 1962.

Martin, James J. Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827–1908. With a foreword by Harry Elmer Barnes. De Kalb, IL: Adrian Allen Associates, 1953. Reprint, Colorado Springs, CO: Ralph Myles Publisher, Inc., 1970.

Shatz, Marshall S., ed. The Essential Works of Anarchism. New York and Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Edited by Sherman Paul. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.[*]

Torrey, Bradford, and Francis H. Allen, eds. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. With a foreword by Walter Harding. 14 vols. New York: Dover, 1962.

Anarchistic ideas in Cage’s writings

Example 2 lists selected references to anarchistic writers to be found within a number of Cage publications. His most explicit remarks on anarchism occur in the eight published installments of his "Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)", which appeared between 1965 and 1982. Occasionally, he included direct quotations in the Diary, almost always from Thoreau: “Government is a tree. Its fruit are people (Essay on Civil Disobedience).”23 The only definition of anarchism in these pages, however, invites an alliance with aesthetics: the absence of laws or conventions and the individualization of society.24 But a need for change persists as a characteristic call. In his formulation, change assumes more of a revivifying quality than a destructive one.25

Cage also believed that the increasing role of intelligence as a global resource would facilitate the disappearance of political organizations. This image constitutes a reconfiguration or updating of intelligence itself; for instance, in one passage he equated "divisive intelligence" with politics and economics.26 Such intelligence depends upon the pooling of resources and, in the spirit of Fuller and McLuhan, the recognition of a global community that must unite to solve its problems. These resources include not only the common needs argued for by the anarchists, but also others that derive from the specifically technological orientation of Cage’s thought:

"The question is: what are the things everyone needs regardless of likes and dislikes? Beginning of answer: water, food, shelter, clothing, electricity, audio-visual communication, transportation. Form of answer: global utilities network."27

Such statements connect nicely with Kostelanetz’s idea of technoanarchism — that is, the use of technology as a means of multiplying possibilities tailored to individual needs, and its potential to create the leisure time necessary for people to devote themselves to artistic pursuits.28

Cage maintained a commitment to anarchistic ideas even in his final years. He often took great pains to name himself an anarchist and to invoke anarchistic principles to explain his actions, especially in his refusals to those who would enlist him for help to advance their own causes. Responding to a request for support of the Project Gita-Govinda, a multimedia consortium designed to acquaint Western audiences with the fundamental concepts of Indian music, dance, and art, he wrote:

"We cannot help you either materially or spiritually. We do not want the future of music and dance, though holistic, to be directed by Indian culture any more than we want it to be directed by Islamic culture or, say, Chinese culture. We want it to be global, not yet known or suitable for study but something to be discovered and brought into use for all."29

Example 2. Selected Cage citations of anarchistic writers.