John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, by Peter Jaeger. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 186 pp. $34.50 paper.
Peter Jaeger’s account in his new book, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, of Naropa Institute (now University) students in 1974 “throwing objects at the stage, playing the guitar, making bird whistles and screaming” (78) in protest of Cage’s performance from his book Empty Words, and of mainstream literary critics responding to Cage’s work with “ridicule” (149), recalled for me church, state and some Western conservative’s responses to Pussy Riot’s now celebrated/notorious performance at St. Basil’s. The power of avant-garde art is often as much in its disruption of its audience as in its disruption of artistic and social conventions, and in its unsettling ability to be resistant to interpretation while simultaneously offering unconceptualizable clarity of meaning. In both the Cage & Pussy Riot cases the artists also generated site-specific meanings. Enigmatic chanting by a poet with his back to his audience in a site of authoritative knowing. Uncoordinated dancing in a site and state of politically choreographed hierarchy. Fools in the seats of masters. Women seizing the altar of patriarchs -- including of course patriarch Putin. Moments of social anarchism in places – a cathedral, the Moscow Kremlin, the academy – of ceremonial enclosure.
Peter Jaeger’s John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics is itself an especially rich performance because, in not insisting on interpreting or summarizing John Cage, Jaeger also creates resonances of meaning. In a Canadian context, this book by Montreal-born Jaeger, now a leading conceptual poet and head of Creative Writing at the UK’s Roehampton University, can be read as a sustained demolition of thematic criticism. Texts, like other art objects or performances, have meaning mostly if that meaning is respected as irreducible, is left immanent, is not summarized in symbolic language; as Charles Olson quoted the Taoist poet Lao Tzu, “that which exists through itself is what is called meaning” (Muthologos I, 64). It's a principle that Jaeger has invoked and tried to observe throughout.
Despite its very precise title, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics is an ambitious, wide-ranging book – an exercise in radical critical methodology, a denial of the Cartesian cogito, a critique of the lyric poem (especially the lyric as
Peter Jaeger’s account in his new book, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, of Naropa Institute (now University) students in 1974 “throwing objects at the stage, playing the guitar, making bird whistles and screaming” (78) in protest of Cage’s performance from his book Empty Words, and of mainstream literary critics responding to Cage’s work with “ridicule” (149), recalled for me church, state and some Western conservative’s responses to Pussy Riot’s now celebrated/notorious performance at St. Basil’s. The power of avant-garde art is often as much in its disruption of its audience as in its disruption of artistic and social conventions, and in its unsettling ability to be resistant to interpretation while simultaneously offering unconceptualizable clarity of meaning. In both the Cage & Pussy Riot cases the artists also generated site-specific meanings. Enigmatic chanting by a poet with his back to his audience in a site of authoritative knowing. Uncoordinated dancing in a site and state of politically choreographed hierarchy. Fools in the seats of masters. Women seizing the altar of patriarchs -- including of course patriarch Putin. Moments of social anarchism in places – a cathedral, the Moscow Kremlin, the academy – of ceremonial enclosure.
Peter Jaeger’s John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics is itself an especially rich performance because, in not insisting on interpreting or summarizing John Cage, Jaeger also creates resonances of meaning. In a Canadian context, this book by Montreal-born Jaeger, now a leading conceptual poet and head of Creative Writing at the UK’s Roehampton University, can be read as a sustained demolition of thematic criticism. Texts, like other art objects or performances, have meaning mostly if that meaning is respected as irreducible, is left immanent, is not summarized in symbolic language; as Charles Olson quoted the Taoist poet Lao Tzu, “that which exists through itself is what is called meaning” (Muthologos I, 64). It's a principle that Jaeger has invoked and tried to observe throughout.
Despite its very precise title, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics is an ambitious, wide-ranging book – an exercise in radical critical methodology, a denial of the Cartesian cogito, a critique of the lyric poem (especially the lyric as
deployed in pastoral ecopoetry), an explication of Zen Buddhism, a deconstruction of capitalist economics and US nationalist ideology – all accomplished mostly without explanation or analysis. Along the way it delivers some stunningly accurate perceptions, such as this insight into U.S. precoccupations with individualism and national exceptionalism: “from a Buddhist perspective, the largest ‘national handicap’ facing contemporary American society is the notion of a separate self, a notion which Philip Kapleau argues is more securely fixed and vigorously asserted in the United States than anywhere else” (148). And thus newly focused by Jaeger are the US gun lobby, the vastly overreaching National Security Agency, the annexations of Texas and California, the Tea Party, the McCarthy years, “Fifty-four forty or fight,” Fox TV, the current gerrymandering of the House of Representatives, Al Capp’s satirical “What’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA.”
Reminding me again of Olson, this time of his Call Me Ishmael study of Melville’s Moby Dick, is Jaeger’s commitment here to using a critical methodology similar to that used by his subject. In his essays and performances Cage had employed “collage, disjunction, chance operations, and/or unconventional page layout” (3) – so Jaeger too has used collage and non-sequential focuses and employed “an online random integer generator” programmed with values from the I Ching (4-5) to organize the spatial presentation of his text. The text’s somewhat obscured paragraph structure is signalled only by paragraph symbols embedded within lines. “Where American consumer culture was predicated on the success of the individual, Cage’s work refused individualism and self-expression altogether. Perhaps this is why his poetics appeared so scary” (149). Jaeger's book could also scare/scandalize a few.
It consists of two long chapters, one titled “The Imitation of Nature in the Manner of her Operation,” a phrase Jaeger has taken from Cage, and the other “Not Just Self- But Social Realization.” The first dwells on the wordlessness of nature, and argues on the basis of Zen Buddhist practice the futility of using only words and realist conventions to create a ‘natural’ mimesis. “Cage’s ... spatialized nothing performs the impossibility of representing Zen awareness in language; one could say that the nothing of Cage acts out a new mode of non-speaking ...” (28). “Cage’s nothing extends the semiotics of the void toward the social, towards readers who learn about and experience the void through non-semantic and performative indeterminacy” (29). “[A]s Cage repeatedly reminds us, indeterminacy entails giving up personal intention and diminishing authorial control in favour of acknowledging a wider, less containable condition of experience” (30).
“Not Just Self- But Social Realization” re-reads Cage in the context of Jacques Lacan’s theories of language and social organization, particularly his “Four Discourses” theory that contrasted the self-authorizing and controlling discourses of “the master” and “the university” with the doubting discourses of “the hysteric” and “the analyst.” The latter discourses recognize, like Cage, a “fissure” between language and what it pretends to represent – a “what” that is always in excess of both the representation and the university’s “fantasy of a totality-knowledge” (Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis 33). “Cage’s empty words agitate the standard grammatical and nominal formats in which knowledge is transmitted” (135). “... Buddhism regards the notion of a unique and personal identity as delusion – not only in theory but as lived experience. Unlike the capitalist subject who believes he or she is free to choose, the empty subject of Zen Buddhism does not make free choises, in Zen (and Cage) there is nothing to choose, and no one to choose it” (137). “ Cage’s later writing ... provides a singular site for the existence of contradictory positions, without trying to synthesize these positions into a unified whole” (142-3). “[T]he Zen-Cage Real does not hinge on individual essence or a belief in the essentialism of the nation-state. Instead of a ‘Politics of the Real’ we have in Cage a ‘Nothing of the Real,’ a paradoxical desire to speak from a position which escapes speech” (145).
Jaeger’s is a brave book – not as brave as Pussy Riot’s enigmatically speaking its own “Nothing of the Real” to state power in St. Basil’s, but brave nevertheless both methodologically and ideologically. It performs a disruptive discourse to an audience of literary studies. It returns English-language attention to epistemological questions not widely circulated since the 1960s – since Olson’s citation of Lao Tzu and Robert Duncan’s declaration that poetry had reached “the end of mastery and the beginning of testimony.” It’s well worth giving an interactive read.
FD
Reminding me again of Olson, this time of his Call Me Ishmael study of Melville’s Moby Dick, is Jaeger’s commitment here to using a critical methodology similar to that used by his subject. In his essays and performances Cage had employed “collage, disjunction, chance operations, and/or unconventional page layout” (3) – so Jaeger too has used collage and non-sequential focuses and employed “an online random integer generator” programmed with values from the I Ching (4-5) to organize the spatial presentation of his text. The text’s somewhat obscured paragraph structure is signalled only by paragraph symbols embedded within lines. “Where American consumer culture was predicated on the success of the individual, Cage’s work refused individualism and self-expression altogether. Perhaps this is why his poetics appeared so scary” (149). Jaeger's book could also scare/scandalize a few.
It consists of two long chapters, one titled “The Imitation of Nature in the Manner of her Operation,” a phrase Jaeger has taken from Cage, and the other “Not Just Self- But Social Realization.” The first dwells on the wordlessness of nature, and argues on the basis of Zen Buddhist practice the futility of using only words and realist conventions to create a ‘natural’ mimesis. “Cage’s ... spatialized nothing performs the impossibility of representing Zen awareness in language; one could say that the nothing of Cage acts out a new mode of non-speaking ...” (28). “Cage’s nothing extends the semiotics of the void toward the social, towards readers who learn about and experience the void through non-semantic and performative indeterminacy” (29). “[A]s Cage repeatedly reminds us, indeterminacy entails giving up personal intention and diminishing authorial control in favour of acknowledging a wider, less containable condition of experience” (30).
“Not Just Self- But Social Realization” re-reads Cage in the context of Jacques Lacan’s theories of language and social organization, particularly his “Four Discourses” theory that contrasted the self-authorizing and controlling discourses of “the master” and “the university” with the doubting discourses of “the hysteric” and “the analyst.” The latter discourses recognize, like Cage, a “fissure” between language and what it pretends to represent – a “what” that is always in excess of both the representation and the university’s “fantasy of a totality-knowledge” (Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis 33). “Cage’s empty words agitate the standard grammatical and nominal formats in which knowledge is transmitted” (135). “... Buddhism regards the notion of a unique and personal identity as delusion – not only in theory but as lived experience. Unlike the capitalist subject who believes he or she is free to choose, the empty subject of Zen Buddhism does not make free choises, in Zen (and Cage) there is nothing to choose, and no one to choose it” (137). “ Cage’s later writing ... provides a singular site for the existence of contradictory positions, without trying to synthesize these positions into a unified whole” (142-3). “[T]he Zen-Cage Real does not hinge on individual essence or a belief in the essentialism of the nation-state. Instead of a ‘Politics of the Real’ we have in Cage a ‘Nothing of the Real,’ a paradoxical desire to speak from a position which escapes speech” (145).
Jaeger’s is a brave book – not as brave as Pussy Riot’s enigmatically speaking its own “Nothing of the Real” to state power in St. Basil’s, but brave nevertheless both methodologically and ideologically. It performs a disruptive discourse to an audience of literary studies. It returns English-language attention to epistemological questions not widely circulated since the 1960s – since Olson’s citation of Lao Tzu and Robert Duncan’s declaration that poetry had reached “the end of mastery and the beginning of testimony.” It’s well worth giving an interactive read.
FD
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