Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 1, April 2008
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John Cage’s ‘Chance’ and Richard Foreman’s ‘Consciousness’:
Performing the Sublime
By
University of Minnesota
There is a discussion of the sublime in the last thirty years that owes a great deal to Lyotard’s development of that concept, as his discussion of Kant’s aesthetic category becomes, in part, an account of modern art and the avant-garde. Although Lyotard restricts himself to the discussion of visual art, and to a lesser degree, literature, the discourse has grown to include performed works as well. It is my intent here to examine some of the specific implications of the sublime in performance, as read through a pair of American avant-garde artists’ work.
In Lyotard’s The Postmodern Explained, the sublime work of art is discussed in terms of ‘Ideas’, specifically those ‘unpresentable ideas’ that, in their presentation, occasion the feeling of the sublime. In order to discern something of and about these unpresentable ideas, I would like to begin here by asserting that John Cage’s use and production of chance as well as Richard Foreman’s emphasis on consciousness constitute such unpresentable ideas. This assertion brings about the first difficulty to be addressed: the impossibility of example. If I could present an unequivocal case of such an idea in these artists’ work, doing so would disqualify them from the sublime. Perhaps it is no coincidence that these works themselves tend to resist providing concrete examples in performance. Instead, I propose a more schematic discussion of such ideas in these artists’ works as a means to explore the performed sublime.
Fortune and Chance
In order to consider chance as unpresentable, in Kant’s terms, without ‘a sensible object that would be a case of it’, we must first account for what seems to be the commonplace (re)presentation of chance: a falling pair of dice, the turn of a card, or a coin flipped into the air. These representations are tightly bound to certain institutions and traditional practices. Betting, gambling, lotteries: these all highlight a particular ordered application of chance, one where the odds are typically skewed in the favor of the institution that orders the emergence and significance of that chance. This institutional production and use of chance interpellates those involved as either submitting themselves to the vagaries of chance (the gambler), or operating to restrict chance to the limit of its appearance (the representative of the house). This business requires that the game appear winnable, that chance appear, even if it does not, in some sense, exist: “the house always wins”. This mode of chance production, at its limit, is precisely not the sublime: it gives us the image, but never the experience, of chance, such that the gambler submits to this image while the house subjugates it.
Furthermore, the turn of a card or fall of a die act as moments in the narrative of gambling and gaming, and in this way chance falls into the discourse emerging from the institutional nature of these practices. There are only so many predetermined outcomes available in such closed systems, and chance operates only to decide between them. In this way, chance is made to speak something of the future, but a future in which the possibilities have already been enumerated: this is the ambiguity of probability conflated with the uncertainty of what is to come. This image of the future conflated with chance can be found in the deck of cards that comes to us from the Tarot, or the flipped coin that radiates chance just as it radiates a measure of wealth: it is fortune, and not chance, that is present in all senses.
This is not the application or mode of chance within John Cage’s works. While Konrad Boehmer’s “Chance as Ideology” exposes the romantic and even reactionary character of Cage’s thoughts on freedom, the legibility of chance in 4'33" or Imaginary Landscape No. 4 involves neither the subjugation nor the submission present in a lottery. What is more, Cage’s work lacks predetermined outcomes that are to be decided between in a chance operation. On these two grounds, let us thus reserve the term chance for Cage’s application, as distinct from fortune, as might be found in a gambling hall.
Chance and Intention
With those representations connoting fortune aside, what remains for chance? Let us take the example of Cage’s 4'33". The score for this piece consists of three movements, each of which is composed of a single instruction, ‘tacet’: ‘do not play’. Although first performed on piano, with a total duration of 4 minutes, thirty three seconds, Cage has made it clear that it may be performed on other instruments with other durations. The work’s title is thus taken from its first performance, and not any particular requirement or aspect of the work. In the case of the first performance, the durations of the three movements were previously determined by Cage’s application of chance procedures with the I Ching.
Cage’s work is not the first entirely silent musical performance, as this form can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. Yet it is Cage’s framing of his work in terms of his understanding of silence that makes 4’33” important to a discussion of the sublime. In pursuing silence, 4’33” recasts virtually all elements of a performance. The technical skill of the performer, the quality of the instrument, the acoustic properties of the hall: these and many other facets of our conventional expectations are not simply absented, for they remain, and remain significant, but operate somewhat differently than might be expected. What is common to these elements of performance is that we expect them to be both present and guided by the will of the artist. Cage has not abdicated his authority over these aspects of performance. Rather, he has used the authority given to the artist to show that he is aware of but deliberately avoiding the typical application of these elements. This operates to banish all manifestations of his intent, save the least remnant, which is his intentional restraint, the intentional restraint of his intent in shaping the piece. Cage does so in order that silence might become apparent.
Here Cage’s understanding of silence is foregrounded. Silence is not an absence of sound for Cage, but the minimum condition of sound. Silence is the condition in which what is otherwise lost becomes apparent, rather than existing as an absolute void. The staging and performance of 4'33" gives a particular legibility to the auditory landscape of the location it is performed in, and unlike the idea of fortune, this mode of production does not engage with the future at all, but makes audible what was already occurring, already in the process of becoming.
Cage expounds on the conditions required and results anticipated:
The attitude that I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical. (Cage, 65, italics in original)
The repetition and stressing of ‘when’, the ‘whenness’ of the moment of no intention, both confirms and extends the idea of a non-future oriented chance: a reversal of fortune, so to speak. Of course, 4'33" is not an accident, though it marshals accident as performance. Cage is well aware that gaining awareness of non-intentional life through a work of art necessitates something of intent. When, in an interview, Richard Schechner asks if Cage’s works are not structured in some fashion, Cage’s reply adopts Kant’s ‘purposeful purposelessness’:
You’re aiming now at a purity which we are never going to achieve. When we say “purposelessness” we add “purposeful purposelessness.” (Kirby and Schechner, 69)
We have here the appearance of a seeming contradiction: our intentions must go to zero and they can never do so. In this unpresentable paradox, Cage’s species of chance appears to be suitable for consideration as sublime. Let us pause our discussion of Cage here, in order to consider Foreman’s relation to the sublime.
Consciousness and Impulse
Richard Foreman’s work with the Ontological Hysteric Theatre is unlike John Cage’s performances in many ways. The most obvious differences can be seen in the contrast between the intentional withholding in Cage’s 4'33" and the performance of one of Foreman’s more recent works, such as Permanent Brain Damage or Panic!, with intricate costuming and props, complex set pieces and detailed action. Interestingly, Foreman’s earliest experiments in the theatre, circa 1966-7, were of a ‘minimalist’ bent, using untrained performers and ‘unedited’ texts, with movement onstage ceasing for minutes at a time. However, his more recent creations have tended to move closer to a saturation of imagery and action. In these plays, the activity onstage is tightly scripted and rehearsed for ten weeks: it might be said that little is left to chance.
Let us consider Foreman’s play Panic!, subtitled how to be happy. It was my attendance at this show in Forman’s theatre that led to my interest in Foreman and my attempts to give an account of his work. The difficulty in doing so has, in part, led to the present discussion in terms of the sublime. Speaking in generalities, it might be said that the play deals with a quartet of rag-tag royalty and their efforts to achieve happiness. Yet even this brief schema is inadequate, as the action that moves the play moves through the actors just as surely as through the set pieces and sound effects. The action of the play might be located in the body of a performer, but it is not generated from them in the traditional sense. My overall experience of the show was one of confusion tempered by the feeling that at any moment the solution to the mystery would appear; at any moment, it would all make sense. Of course the show ended without any such resolution; I came to feel that the almost-appearance of meaning and the suspension of closure was the impelling force of the show. In a similar vein, Foreman has spoken of a show of his that was attended by Michel Foucault. According to Foreman, Foucault came to speak with him after the piece, and said “'I found the play very interesting. But what I found especially interesting about it was, I could tell that there was some very rigorous scheme organizing it, but I could not figure out what it was.'”(Ayerza and Foreman) Foreman further identifies this as the greatest compliment he had received.
Given the refusal to offer closure or resolution to his works, it is difficult to establish precisely what Foreman’s theatre takes as its goal. This difficulty is due in part to the longevity and extensive variation in Foreman’s theatrical career, as well as Foreman’s willingness to break with his own thought and previous work. Thus when Kate Davy, in 1974, quotes Foreman with saying “all of my art is concerned with the problem of consciousness, the structure of consciousness, and, specifically, with the problem of making art”, we must at least consider that he may have changed his mind. (Davy, 26) However, in the 2001 collection of plays Paradise Hotel, Foreman emphasizes the most important part:
HERE’S THE MOST IMPORTANT PART: in my plays, the manifestations of impulse are not just narrated, but rather THE SAME IMPULSE THAT PUSHES THE CHARACTER INTO “ACTING OUT” ALSO TWISTS AND CONTROLS THE ARTISTIC STRUCTURE
(Foreman, 8, emphasis in original)
Let us consider how Foreman’s ‘impulse’, the impulse which is capable of introducing “a creative wobble to the straight and narrow of well-disciplined mental life”, operates within the field of consciousness.(Foreman, 8)
It might seem that some facet of consciousness is a less curious candidate for the sublime than chance, perhaps because commonplace representations of consciousness do not seem to appear to mind. However, theatre has been in the business of depicting consciousness for some time now. It is very common to speak of an actor’s intent, or to discuss the conscious and unconscious life of a character in rehearsal or analysis. Perhaps it is this model of consciousness onstage and in dramatic writing that Foreman address when he speaks of the
…pre-programmed dead writing that was only “going through the paces” in order to prove or demonstrate your own passionate, private “flavour-of-the-month” belief. (Foreman, 11)
This is a point Foreman has addressed elsewhere and at length. With a strong resonance to Cage’s lack of pre-determined outcomes, Foreman rejects a theatre that attempts to ‘prove or demonstrate’ prior thoughts or positions. This resolve does not move Foreman’s work closer to improvisational modes, as he finds an ‘anything goes’ approach to be equally suspect. Instead, Foreman’s describes his rehearsals in terms of a particularly rigorous focus on “coherency” and “lucidity”.(Foreman, 9) It should be considered that this process may be meant to expunge the accidental presence of any such pre-determined conclusions.
In such rigorously rehearsed and scripted work that spares no effort to purge itself of pre-decided outcomes, what place does ‘impulse’ hold? On one species of the traditional stage, consciousness, even impulsive thinking, is presented more or less straightforwardly by the persons and objects onstage: Hamlet speaks his mind and we are able to examine its contents and connections, or Hamlet acts mysteriously and later explains himself. However, Foreman’s characters do not appear to be the location of consciousness onstage. This is not to suggest that these characters do not posses an inner life, only that no effort is made to establish the expected continuities within that life and to their actions. These characters do not generate impulses or consciousness, but are rather at the mercy of these. Further, I would hold that a similar analysis applies to the set pieces, music, lighting, props, costumes and the other densely packed images and objects onstage. If impulse ‘twists and controls’ the action onstage without being the ‘pre-programmed’ product of the author’s intent, where does impulse arrive from?
Foreman addresses this in his “Rules”, a preface to Paradise Hotel:
I think now the task is rather to notate the ways in which one’s own mind, in the writing of text, surprises oneself. […] These are not plot jumps or idea jumps, not free association or imagination, but the little voice inside the voice that is doing the writing… in other words, the jumps in language. (Foreman, 10)
Important here is that Foreman identifies these “jumps” on the level of language: these jumps, these discontinuities, are proper to language, and not individual psychology. The emphasis on language here may be a consequence of this quote emerging from a discussion of playwrighting. In order to consider this as a matter of the structure of the work of art, let us extend Foreman’s ‘language’ to include all ‘languages’ that might be found on stage, and consider the entire work as text in the most comprehensive sense: we might consider the possibility of a ‘jump’ in the language of stage movement, or the functioning of a set piece, or any of the conventions from which theatre is shaped. In this way, both the nature and location of impulse become clear. Impulse exists interstitially, and the objects and images onstage, themselves no doubt the product of a consciousness, serve not to contain or produce consciousness, but to present a specifically convoluted mass, intricate and dense, a web with which to make the discontinuities within become visible. Properly speaking, these jumps are not present in any text onstage, but within the language they are written with.
To conclude the contrast with more traditional modes of theatre, Foreman’s work does not present the objects of consciousness for display, interaction, and discussion. Instead, objects and images are presented in order to be animated by the impulses, the discontinuities in the languages that compose them. Due to these impulses being composed of jumps with language, it can be seen that these impulses do not exist as discrete linguistic objects, but yet still require language to become visible. This mode of consciousness, presenting language to discern what is not in language, fits with the understanding of the sublime under discussion here.
Chance and Consciousness
Let us proceed to an analysis of the sublime in performance by reading these ideas of chance and consciousness together. To begin, we might note that neither Cage nor Foreman’s work presents an object of chance or consciousness for contemplation. In Kant’s formulation, the sublime, which “cannot be contained in any sensuous form”, may be “called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation”.(Kant, 92) Inadequacy is a vital term here: it accounts for the similarity in Foreman and Cage’s labor, insofar as they both act to prevent their work from acting in a certain fashion. Cage’s 4’33” strives to eliminate as much of authorial intent as it can, in order to prevent the audience from receiving the products of such intent as the object of presentation in the work. Foreman labors to ensure the absence of easily consumed conclusions, predetermined outcomes, or ‘morals of the story’, again to ensure that these products of authorial intention are not present to the audience. Both artists work to establish this ‘inadequacy’ of their works, producing a deliberate failure to signify as a prerequisite to encountering the sublime.
Those aspects of Foreman’s work that can be identified as intentional, and they are many, are as structurally significant to the work as what ever minimum of intent, the ‘purposeful purposelessness’, as might be found in Cage’s art. Foreman develops this point when he asserts that his work possesses an “isomorphic relationship between form and content”.(Foreman, 8) What must be emphasized here is Foreman’s claim of isomorphism, ‘same-shapedness’, and not identity, as the relation of form and content. Thus in the play Panic!, we can consider the content of the piece to be all the impulses and discontinuities in the languages surrounding the pursuit of happiness. So too, the form of this material will also be composed of impulsive, irruptive ‘jumps’, yet these need not be precisely the same impulses as contort the characters. It is important to note that in discussing this relationship in terms of isomorphism, Foreman asserts a formal similarity between form and content. This is very peculiar, for it suggests that the content of the work possesses both form and content, and so does the form. Let us observe here that the same isomorphism appears to apply to Cage as well: the chance procedures that lead to the score for Music of Changes or Imaginary Landscape No. 4 are not identical to, but only of the same kind, as the chance that is produced in the performance of these works. The proposed isomorphism between form and content comes to render these as incoherent terms of analysis, as it would seem that just as the form of Foreman’s work has itself a form, that form would also posses a form and content. This leads to an infinite regress, failing to provide insight or a stable framework. Perhaps the desire for such a framework might lead us to consider a ‘score’ for Foreman’s works, perhaps very much in the mode of Cage’s scores. Here we would not identify one species of impulse as form, another as content, but rather as a single kind of impulse with differing durations, such that one might last a single moment on stage, another the length of the piece. Yet this presupposes time as a stable background upon which impulse plays out. There are many objections that might be raised against such an understanding: not least is that which might be found in Lyotard’s The Differend, which poses the sublime as outside, that is, without, time. It should not be surprising that these works challenge a Cartesian, or linear, model of time. Cage’s work often explicitly interrogates time and duration: 4’33” provides an excellent case. Foreman has, from the earliest days of his theatre work, identified Gertrude Stein as a major influence: that which has come to be termed Stein’s “continuous present” points directly towards a non-linear temporality.
The Sublime in Performance
This bracketing of time from the analytic of the sublime tends to lead towards Heidegger’s analysis of Being irreducible to time: certainly, this is the path Lyotard pursues. Rodolphe Gasché explicitly explores this in his “The Sublime, Ontologically Speaking”. Gasché finds that Lyotard breaks with the traditional origins of the sublime, such that it does not stem from “the question of the self-preservation of the individual, or the integrity and power of reason”, but rather “implicates the possibility of Being and the concomitant possibility of non-Being”.(Gasché, 122-3) Applying this insight to the work at hand, this ontological questioning directly impacts performances that engage with the sublime on the level of their own existence. This is the second mode of what might be termed ‘inadequacy’ in the sublime performance. Recalling the first ‘inadequacy’ identified, where by authorial intent must demonstrate its inability to offer the sublime for contemplation, the second ‘inadequacy’ is that of the work of art itself. Here Kant’s formulation, the sublime occasioned by ‘that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation’, as discussed above, is moved to the ontological: the sublime work of art, as sensuous presentation, is itself ‘inadequate’ in its existence to encompass or present the sublime. In the moment of performance, the question of the Being/non-Being of the work of art is not a matter of (self-)preservation, for what is at issue is how these works might exist at all. Hence the failure of a traditional mode of analysis such as form and content to offer a grasp upon the sublime work of art: these works do not exist with the certainty or stability presumed by such a discussion. Yet we must note that as before, this inadequacy is a prerequisite for the engagement with the sublime. Indeed, it is only in an ontology presuming and requiring this kind of stability that the negative sense of ‘inadequacy’ or ‘failure’ has any meaning.
The discourse on Lyotard’s sublime retains much of his language, such as referring to the ‘negative’, ‘allusive’ presentation of the sublime, or of the work of art ‘testifying’ to the presence of the sublime. These terms are linked to the analysis of painting and literature stemming from Lyotard’s investigation. However, both Cage and Foreman identify their work as theatre, which appears less as an arrangement of color and texture or written work than as an arrangement of action. Considering Foreman’s emphasis on the jumps in language, these discontinuities do not allude, nor give testimony. Rather, with an understanding of consciousness as discontinuity, this emergence of the sublime ruptures the pattern of action at hand. This type of sublime manifestation operates as the unseen rock upon which the pattern of action founders, breaks, ‘jumps’. Thus it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of an irruptive manifestation of the sublime, requiring the material established by the artist to make its disturbances seen.
It may be that this difference stems from the different phenomenological domains of painting and performance, and simply opens the possibility of multiple means by which to encounter the sublime. Yet to consider a work of art to allude or testify presumes its separation as a proper other to the ‘witness’, as a stable existence outside (a presumably stable) self. Just as time is not a stable background upon which the sublime plays out, a subjectivity encountering the sublime is not capable of passing unquestioned. The sublime does not merely implicate the work of art in the question of Being/non-Being: the subject that encounters the sublime is similarly implicated. The examination of the performance of the sublime thus drives us to consider if the language otherwise assigned to the sublime artwork is a misrecognition based on the framing of the visual or literary work, or as a linguistic screen against appreciating the radical self-questioning produced by the sublime and its analysis: ontological hysteria indeed.
Bibliography
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