“It Is Not, It Becomes” (Works)
The world, the real, is not an object. It is a process.1
Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained: there are no such things as universals, there’s nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all the same.2
A Cagean-Deleuzian world
According to one of Cage’s most frequently reiterated aphorisms, the function of art is to “imitate Nature in her manner of operation.”3 Cage was particularly fond of the phrase, and it recurs throughout decades of interviews, lectures, and writings. And while the general tenor of the phrase is correctly surmised—art should reflect the purposeful purposelessness of the “natural” world—the full ramifications of such a statement warrants further examination. Its intuitive clarity notwithstanding, the phrase raises a multitude of challenges. It requires that we situate Cage’s music in a world and that we grasp just how that “purposeful purposelessness” might operate. It calls us to grasp the fit between Cage’s distinctive approach to music-making and the world which we inhabit, to understand how exactly so-called “natural” creativity might operate, what sorts of beings inhabit this world, and how we might grow attentive enough to participate more effectively “in its manner of operation.”
Fortunately, Cage seems to have held rigorous beliefs about how the world functions and what entities exist therein. Despite his occasional insistence to the contrary, Cage’s approach to music-making, his views on the manner in which musical works exist, and the manner in which they should be expressed in performance are intimately connected to his ontological positions. Consider, for example, the following exchange from a 1968 interview with Daniel Charles. Worth quoting in total, Cage’s response to Charles’ admittedly leading questions constitutes about as concise and clear an ontological statement as you will wrest from a composer:
D.C. Then art as you define it is a discipline of adaptation to the real as it is. It doesn’t propose to change the world, it accepts it as it presents itself. By dint of breaking our habits, it habituates us more effectively.
J.C. I don’t think so. There is one term of the problem which you are not taking into account: precisely, the world. The real. You say: the world as it is. But it is not, it becomes … You are getting closer to this reality when you say as it “presents itself;” that it is not there, existing as an object. It is a process. It’s simply that I am not a philosopher … at least, not a Greek one! Before, we wished for logical experiences; nothing was more important to us than stability. Today, we admit instability alongside stability. What we hope for is the experience of that which is. But “what is” is not necessarily the stable, the immutable. We do know quite clearly, in any case, that it is we who bring logic into the picture. It is not laid out before us, waiting for us to discover it. “What is” is not dependent on us, we are dependent on it … And unfortunately for logic, everything we understand under the rubric “logic” represents such a simplification with regard to the event and what really happens that we must learn to keep away from it. The function of art at the present time is to preserve us from all logical minimizations that we are at each instant tempted to apply to the flux of events. To draw us nearer to the process which is the world we live in.4
Cage’s ontological statement leaves us with an imperative—to construct a model of musical works and musical performance in accord with this vision of the world. For if the world is process, and is change and dynamism, we can no longer simply presume that the objects within it are stable, self-identical, whole, and unified. In fact, a world that is process requires us to rethink the object character of its constitutive elements entirely. Or rather, it requires us to think about both stability and instability together, to consider how the apparently static and self-identical objects of the world emerge from, recede into, and often mask the current of constant dynamism underneath. Cage’s insistence that the world is process—that processes have ontological priority over the apparently self-similar being they produce—forces us to think of a world populated by events rather than objects. Cage’s ontology requires us to think of the actualized objects of our world as expressions of processes that have their own ontological status apart from, and bearing no resemblance to, the objects that incarnate them. For Cage, it meant an ongoing project of generating scores that would actively engage with this dynamism, scores that would allow us to develop a sense or a thinking-feeling for the processes that construct reality. Cage would create works that would give us a sense of this current of change as such and the undercurrent of difference fringing a world of apparently stable and readily reproducible objects.
We might be tempted to jettison the notion of a “work” under such circumstances of variability or to surrender to a strict nominalism—the notion that each work or each performance is so individual that it has no relation to any other and hence cannot be compared to anything but itself. But Cage himself doesn’t take this route. His scores still bear titles, signatures, and all other trappings of “the work”—many even hearkening to oddly traditional practices of titling: Atlas Eclipticalis, Etudes Australes, Renga, Branches, Freeman Etudes, Ryoanji, and so forth. Something work-like remains in Cage’s version of composition—an element of specificity, distinction, differentiation—even as he drastically renovates the concept of the musical work. Regardless of their openness or their permeability, Cage’s works, he insists, “retain their individuality” as processes or spaces of potentiality having a definite, distinct form. The form is different from the concreteness and apparent fixity of the form of objects, but no less specific for its abstraction.5
Cage insists that the works have an element of identity—they are distinct, individual—yet are capable of producing wildly varying performances. If they have an identity, they have a special kind of identity, different from the commonplace notion of identity built on the resemblance of forms or a model/copy relationship. If they are repeated, they invoke another kind of repetition apart from the “bare repetition” of similar forms—an essence without resemblance, but an essence all the same. In them inheres an essence in which difference is not rendered subordinate to the primacy of identity; in other words, a stream of continuous variation in which no term, no original, no model, has an ontological superiority to other members of the series. Cage contrasts the repetition of his works with the repetition envisioned by Schoenberg, for whom all repetition was founded on the rock-like solidity of identity and the hierarchy of models and copies.
For [Schoenberg] there was only repetition; he used to say that the principle of variation represented only the repetitions of something identical … But introduced into this opposition … or, beside this Schoenbergian idea of a repetition-variation double, another notion, that of something other which cannot be canceled out … That term is chance … If you accept this point of view, then you are no longer involved with either repetition or variation.6
Schoenberg’s insistence on the primacy of resemblance and identity left him with diversity in repetition and variation: varied copies derived from a common model, differing from one another but linked by an order of internal resemblance to the essence from which they were derived. Behind all Schoenberg’s differences was the figure of the Same, a figure from which repetitions derived or diverged. By contrast, Cage sought not just diversity but difference qua difference—difference without subordination to identity and resemblance, difference as singular power of variation behind which there would be nothing more. Rather than seeking the unchanging Same behind the diversity of appearances, Cage aimed to grasp something of the structure of difference itself, a structure of process different from the infinite series of singular, chance-inflected variations but generative of them—not just diversity, but that from which diversity springs. Cage hoped to construct structures of internal difference that could give rise to series of actualizations linked not by a model, but by the manner in which they differed from themselves. Such a structure of difference wouldn’t be a model, a transcendent yardstick against which diverse productions were gauged, but a generative structure of continuous variation guiding the emergence of new forms without prefiguring them.7
Cage likens this approach to the emergence of continuous variation within the mushrooms sharing similar genetic materials—in other words, each mushroom is an expression of a genetic field of potential which it does not resemble but which structures the potentials of its formation. A mushroom’s genes do not constitute a blueprint for the construction of a mushroom; they are not a prefiguration of a form, but a coding of potentials that cofunction with an environment that envelops its own series of potentials. In the presence of certain environmental factors, such as soil moisture or nutrient availability, certain potentials will be expressed in a mushroom’s features. Under other conditions, the same genetic code could yield a dramatically different set of features unlike those of its genetically identical peer. Between the two mushrooms, the coded potentials in its DNA remain the same—a multiplicity of future expressions and traces of past expressions, a unity of differences, a distinct bundle of potentials enmeshed in and modulated by a broader field of potentials, a bounded set of tendencies from which an infinite variety of mushrooms can emerge and into which they recede.8
It is inappropriate to say that a genetic code or a Cagean score allows anything to happen in any given instance. If this were the case, the world would not be a world of continual variation, but a world of complete undifferentiation—the uniform presence of all possibilities in all of time and space would amount to a cancellation of difference itself. Instead, a genetic code or a Cagean score marks out a particular differentiation within difference itself: it is a specific potential for variability marked out within a continuous heterogeneous field of potentials. Such a region is not arbitrary, and the expression of its potentials in the emergence of an actuality is not completely unpredictable. Rather, it is better to say that every region of potential contains more ways of being actualized than any particular actualization can express: a bounded region of boundless variance, vague but completely structured as potential.
Potential, though exceeding our abilities to think or experience it, retains an element of complete determinacy. Potential defines a specific capacity for the determination of entities in the actual, but is always open-ended with regard to what can emerge. It is a structure of bounded indeterminacy. In Deleuze’s terms, such structures are completely differentiated as modes of possibility, marking out a specific collection of tendencies and inflection points. These modes of possibility are then differentiated by specific processes of actualization that constitute the solution to their tensions or problems that they pose. A mushroom’s genome is its virtual space of differentiation—the set of potentials dictating the emergence of an actual mushroom—while the mushroom itself would be the differentiation of the genome as an instance of a species marked by determinate qualities. Similarly, a Cagean score such as those of the Variations series carves out a space of potential organizations for sounds, a uniquely differentiated region, whereas a specific performance provides a differentiation of that potential in an actual collection of sounded elements. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes the relationship between these two orders—a relationship of linkage without resemblance—in precisely these genetic terms:
[G]enes express differential elements which also characterize an organism in a global manner, and play the role of distinctive points in a double process of reciprocal and complete determination; the doubling aspect of genes involves commanding several characteristics at once, and acting only in relation to other genes; the whole constitutes a virtuality, a potentiality; and this structure is incarnated in actual organisms, as much from the point of view of the determination of species as from that of the differentiation of their parts, according to rhythms that are precisely called ‘differential’, according to comparative speeds or slownesses which measure the movement of actualization.9
For Cage, as for Deleuze, the only way out of the double-bind of representation and identity-thinking and to allow for the emergence of the new is to conceive of this different kind of essence, a kind of multiple-unity that would replace the formal essence and its model-copy distinction. In place of the bare repetition of resemblance, they propose an essence that would be the repetition of difference, a particular mode of differing. In place of external difference and its relation to the primacy of identity—this differs from that—they propose the concept of internal difference, wherein all actual occurrences express specific tendencies for variation and deformation without resembling them. Real objects and real performances do not incarnate an ideal form, but exist as singular expressions of a particular technique of continued existence or style of becoming. Like Cage, Deleuze inverts the standard metaphysical priority of identity over difference, stability over change, and being over becoming. For both thinkers, the appearance of logical and typological unity and persistent self-similarity (for both objects and subjects) masks a flourishing of difference-producing processes that generate endless, directionless change. Against the logical, Newtonian world of being without becoming, Deleuze and Cage propose a world of becoming without being. As Manuel DeLanda describes it, such a world is a “universe where individual beings do exist but only as the outcome of becomings, that is, of irreversible processes of individuation.”10 In a world of constant flux and total difference, what requires explanation is not the appearance of change and deviation, but the production of seemingly stable and transcendent types—what Cage deems the “simplification with regard to the event and what really happens.”
This reality of constant change demands that we think of the independent reality of the event—the event not as an interaction between already-formed objects, but as that which produces the apparently stable things of the world. The world is an expression of events, or, rather, the world is the event-of-all-events: the world itself as a becoming, a network of interlinked, interpenetrating processes. Above all, it is a world without things, without objects, except as the continually mutable products of onto-genetic primary processes. “I have, it’s true, spent a lot of time writing about this notion of event,” Deleuze states, because “I don’t believe in things”11—that is, that the essence of an entity lies not in its actualized features, but in the space of potential which it inventively resolves as determinate form.
All of this stands in stark contrast to most attempts at constructing an ontology of the musical work, as many of these ontologies attempt to define the identity conditions of a musical work or the links that would bind together a unitary work and its disparate incarnations under a common concept. Such a concept would link the work and its manifestations by an order of resemblance, by determining what they held in common: a collection of features, a common form of expression, a capacity for reproduction, resemblance, reference. The composer’s “intention” becomes fixed as a thing, an eternal ideal being, a model; a particularly notable performance becomes the object of reproduction by future generations. Variations from this model are dismissed as external differences—products of error, happenstance, the gap between pure and transcendent concept and muddled reality—rather that productions from some sort of internal difference in the work itself. The dissimilarities between concept and reality appear at worst as faults or mere contingencies, at best as the additions of a particularly virtuous artist whose tolerated indiscretions are permitted because she retains some appreciable order of resemblance to the model. It is this vision of production, with its constant reference to a higher term that would discipline variance into similarity, to which both Cage and Deleuze so rigorously object.
In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Félix Guattari assign the name tracing to the principle of production that references the buzzing, insistent diversification of reality to a realm of fixed, eternal models.12 The logic of tracing is the logic of the possible, the belief that all that can exist can be contained within an intelligible concept. “A tracing overlays the product onto the process, on the assumption that they must be structurally homologous,” thus creating an indissoluble link between process—for every repetition of the process, the emergence of an identical product. “The assumption is that you can conceptually superimpose them to bring out a common logical outline,”13 that the “saying” and the “said” of any particular communicative exchange are sufficiently similar to yield a direct transfer of information. What tracing excludes is any sense of the dynamism of process, the potential for a process to produce something other than a copy. All production guided by the logic of tracing becomes a process of reproduction, suppressing any autonomy of the process itself in favor of the authority of the abstract model. The potential for a product to mutate beyond the boundaries of resemblance is stifled by the power of what supposedly pre-exists, even if just in “empty,” conceptual form. In tracing, there is no potential in the process of emergence that is not contained in the sensible form of the product. The emergence of difference is not treated as the consequence of the differing power of process, but as the emergence of subjective error—a failure of competence:
A genetic axis is like an objective pivotal unity upon which successive stages are organized; a deep structure is more like a base sequence that can be broken down into another, transformational and subjective, dimension … A variation on the oldest form of thought. It is our view that genetic axis and profound structure are above all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing … Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective relations … It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made …[T]he tracing always involves an alleged “competence.”14
In other words, what poses as logical unity between process and product—a logical unity so strong that many ontologies of musical works need not discuss any process of production whatsoever—is not merely a representation of how a work retains its identity throughout time and space. The concept of the abstract model itself is the defining element in the machinery for producing identity. It is a framework for disciplining and refining an order of resemblances between composition, performance, and reception. In the case of art music, the unity between process and product begins by announcing the concept of a fixed, fully determined work that is stable throughout time—it was even forged in a single stroke of creative imagination, so any degree of internal difference can be chalked up to imperfections of notation or a defect of imagination. The work becomes a “schema,” a “blueprint,” with the implicit order that one not deviate too far from the conceptual outline contained therein. The schema, despite patches of inconsequential indeterminacy, is clear from the beginning—its qualitative particularity is assured from the onset. The well-disciplined performer aims to suppress the accidents of her historical and cultural position so as not to over-inflect the work in the process of its concretion. Tolerable modifications are retroactively determined to be new “possibilities” discovered within the pre-existent model, not a facet of any dynamism inherent in the model itself. Listeners are also enlisted in the policing process that assures the logical unity. They are the executors of “intersubjective verification,” a project whose appeal to universality works to inhibit the spread of difference that emerges in each translation of the work into performance, sensation, or thought. Lydia Goehr is correct to describe this work-concept as “regulative” in character.15 What this work-concept lacks in capacity for mutability it makes up for in its capacity for preservation, for better and worse. It provides for a stable transmission of an object across contexts, and it restrains variation within “universally acceptable” bounds; it casts a net over the potential for divergent realizations and erects a standard by which true and false copies can be distinguished.
There is another, coexistent way to think of production that would not rely on the logic of endless static reproduction of the model/copy relationship. Against the tracing, with its conflation of process and product, there are processes that roam wild, unfettered by prescribed objects. Viewed from within the confines of work-object logic, they are strange and elusive machines that defy good and common sense. They undermine the transcendental dignity of the model/copy relation and reject the sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted demands of the tracing and its logic of representation and reproduction. An encounter between one of these monstrosity-making machines and the logic of reproduction can be found in Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art, in which the esteemed logician and art ontologist takes on Figure BB from Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra.16
Goodman’s assessment begins with an assessment of the material evidence of Cage’s composition: on a page, one rectangle, containing twelve randomly placed dots, five intersecting straight lines corresponding to the domains of frequency, duration, timbre, amplitude, and succession. Per the instructions provided, the performer is to determine the sounds indicated by dots by measuring the perpendicular distance to each “parameter line.” With no minimal unit of measure, however, there is no way to determine with any precision the coordinates of any individual dot with respect to the five parameter lines. Furthermore, the composer’s instructions fail to prescribe any distinct extensive boundaries for the parameters themselves—nor would any listener in the audience be able to reconstruct the score from any performance of the work. All potential “realizations” of the work are so strictly bound to the materiality of the score that a change so “musically” mundane as an alteration of the score’s dimensions (expanded on a Xerox machine, shrunk in desert air) could potentially result in radically different performances, even if the performer adopted the same measuring procedure. All the criteria for establishing what Goodman calls a “compliance class” are so immanent in the materials and methods used to realize the performance that they cannot enjoy the otherworldly stability of the transcendent object—and the enforcement power that comes with such transcendence.
With coyness, Goodman declares that he is “neither qualified nor called upon to make a judgment” about whether the composition and performance of such a mobile, variable score is a worthwhile endeavor. However, he betrays an anxiety about the propagation of unidentifiable performances that could surge from this so-called work. They would be odd, parentless performances—performances without the unity of concept between themselves and their work-father. The traditional linkage of product and process—an order of filial resemblance—has collapsed. “What does matter is that the system in question furnishes no means of identifying a work from performance to performance,” he laments. “Nothing can be determined to be a true copy of Cage’s autograph diagram or to be a performance of it.”17 All we devise, therefore, are copies of copies. Or perhaps worse—copies with no model at all. Something other than an abstract standard or a preformed “possibility” precedes these performances, something other than a clear and distinct conceptual mold.
What Goodman misses is the surplus of potential that exists above and beyond the actual, the insensible, abstract field of coming-into-being that becomes thought-felt when the score is left in this objectively indeterminate state. Goodman decries the object’s underdetermined appearance, but he seems most concerned with the fact that there are more potential performances lurking beneath this excerpt from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra than could be bound by any single essence. Rather than being buffered from the variances of the world, this work would be uncommonly sensitive to them—it would enfold the potentials of any reader, any instrument, and produce a series of differences in any context. Unfixed from any denotative mooring, differences would proliferate wildly and the piece itself would undergo a becoming with each new incarnation. Every performance is a modulation of the work, a divergence, a mutation. The musical work is no longer a transcendent essence hovering above and beyond any of its lesser material incarnations, but an immanent operator within a busy world of processes always-already underway. It is no longer an object, but a diagram of a mode of intervention—an intervention whose unfolding can never be fully predicted.
In contradistinction to Goodman’s notion of the transcendent work, we could substitute Daniel Charles’ concept of the score as a vehicle for musical process. Daniel Charles, in his assessment of Goodman’s critique of Cage, reframes the undetermined nature of Cage’s score as a positive production, not a failure to provide a denotative frame that would convey a stable object. Charles recognizes that Cage’s score is not a stable object of communication, but rather a vehicle for a process, a contraction of the past of creative process with the future of its reenactment in another time and place. The score contains a quantum of pure becoming coded within the materials and instructions of the score. Most importantly, it is a transmission of creative process without the presumed homology between product and process that marks the tracing. Cage’s score for his Concert for Piano and Orchestra is a map of process, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation from A Thousand Plateaus: “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real …The map has to do with performance[.]”18 Only by comparison to the tracing-model does the composer “open” a field of possibilities; by generalizing a creative process, the composer delimits a field of potentials from which a form can be individuated. It is broader than a mere collection of foreseeable, traceable possibilities, but not so broad as to constitute an undifferentiated field from which anything can emerge. The process can be reenacted and redramatized in an infinite field of unique historical and geographical situations while retaining its abstract, dynamic unity. Even before the score is assembled for performance, this field of potentials can be felt in action, the possibilities-almost-formed detected at the fringes of the actual materials. “To compose is to prefigure the figurations not yet in existence, not yet available,” writes Charles. “Nothing has been decided, and yet everything is taking shape.”19 The score conveys not a preformation, but the germ of possible forms, the potential from which forms may arise. It renders a quanta of creative potential mobile and transmissible, gives it a potential to act in a variety of new contexts, to produce new and divergent actualization. Importantly, it is completely determinate as potential—as “objective” and concrete and as any preformed tracing-work, but operating on a different plane, a plane of immanent potential rather than a plane of transcendent form.
* * *
The instability alongside stability: A pure capacity for change
In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, his second collaborative work with Félix Guattari, Deleuze asserts that music and musical works have a special relationship with this “being of the event”—that is, they provide us with a sense of becomings-in-themselves as determinate ontological entities. The very first image to appear in A Thousand Plateaus, prior to any text, is Sylvano Bussotti’s Cage-inspired score for Piano Piece for David Tudor 4. A dense tangle of staff lines and suggestive instructions for the combination of sonic parameters such as frequency, timbre, duration, and intensity, Bussotti’s score provides an exemplar for the shared Cagean-Deleuzian notion of multiplicity. Here, multiplicity refers not simply to a compounding of possible forms, but to a singular and determinate style of becoming, a way of producing individuated forms, a collection of forces and tendencies and sensitive points, and a distribution of critical moments of expression. “Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many ‘transformational multiplicities,’” Deleuze and Guattari insist, adding that the multiplicity’s power for divergent products succeeds “even [in] overturning the very codes that structure or arborify it.”20 In musical works, even the most rigidly codified, there is a productive principle or a capacity for change fraying their supposed unity, pushing out from the codes that give them a sensible form and an apparent formal essence.
There is, as Cage would have it, “instability alongside stability.” For Cage and for Deleuze, the grasping of both the actual form and its transformative, processual complement constitutes the full “experience of that which is.” Reality is thus composed of two complementary orders that exist in reciprocal determination—the order of stability and the order of variance. On one hand, there is the appearance of relative solidity, stability, and self-identity to the things of the world. And yet within, inhering alongside, or beneath them, there is a current of turmoil or potential chaos, the feeling of a capacity to diverge from what they presently are. To grasp the nature of the Cagean-Deleuzian world-as-process, it is necessary to investigate both the appearance of stability and identity and the capacity for change.
Considered from this vantage point, composition is not, therefore, simply the construction of an object or prefiguration of a form, but the gathering of potentials, forces, and the production of a style of variation. Composition does not erect a model to be imitated, but instead assembles and captures a multiplicity of forces that can give rise to a stream of continuous variation, constant deformation, all linked by a unity of becoming that allows for no hierarchy of actualized forms—no primary or privileged theme which is subject to variation, but variation as its own theme. It is “drawing the virtual lines of an infinite variation,” constructing a body that suggests an ongoing space of progressive differentiation, the unfolding of a series without beginning or ending. It is also the art of rendering this assemblage of forces sensible, giving it a body where the semblance of pure potentiality can be felt.21 Composition is the means by which a pure event—that is, an event independent of the actual material that gives it a body, an ideal event, a virtual event—can be made sensible, transmissible, and reindividuated in an infinite number of divergent actualizations. Even the most rigorously notated, most thoroughly conceived and coded musical work is fringed by this something more, its own capacity to unfurl a divergent series of dissimilar actualizations—even if most of them will die quiet deaths in a rehearsal space. All composition is the isolation and conjunction of potentials for the product of a series of variation, an infinite chain of dissimilar difference-repetitions.
To admit the persistence of change in the world requires an ontology that systematically accounts for the modification and emergence of forms in the world. Deleuze, in collaboration with Guattari and in his own work, developed a theory of the virtual that would provide definition and causal explanations about the capacity for change. The virtual is “the mode of reality implicated in the emergence of new potentials,” the part of an object or system that is its pure capacity for change.22 It is opposed not to the real, but to the actual—the actual represents one aspect of reality, the aspect possessing determinate qualities and extension, forms and stabilities, while the virtual is the realm of pure becomings, tendencies, and potentials for interaction. The virtual is real insofar as it is virtual: it is an excess over every determinate being that contains past ways of affecting and being affected as well as yet-uncharted ways of changing and relating.23 Unlike the possible, which is marked by its degree of “unreality,” the virtual is a fully positive entity that is real but abstract. Different in kind than the actual, it is inaccessible to the senses—no one has ever seen a process as such, one has only seen the effects of its production, yet something of the structure of a process (its particular patterning of variation) can be intuited sidelong in the formation of its products. The virtual “leaves its traces in the folds of formed and forming matter,” it can be felt in the unfolding of the processes that give rise to stable forms, at the points of inflection or critical thresholds that mark the emergence of actualized forms.24
Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual marks the distinction between empirical (actual) things in the “concrete” world and virtual flux of pre-individual, impersonal differences, becomings, forces, and affects that constitute these subjects and objects while also preceding and exceeding them. Unlike transcendent essences, the virtual is “transcendental” in that it shapes the forces and processes that give rise to the actual objects of experience while remaining outside of immediate experience—a dynamic reframing of the Kantian transcendental. It is transcendental (generating the conditions of emergence), but not transcendent, as it participates directly in the real as experienced—it inheres in matter without separation, it is the aspect of matter that is its potential for self-differing. For Deleuze, there is only, a single plane of being that incorporates the actual as well as the virtual components that actualize or differentiate it in actual forms, rather than a plane of eternal transcendent essences and the lesser beings that imperfectly incarnate them. This unitary plane of being is called the “plane of immanence,” a circuitous relation between the actual and the virtual populated by tendencies and forces in tension that produce distinct entities through “temporary condensations or contractions of forces and materials.”25 The appearance of being is an effect of the unfolding of virtual tendencies in the actual—it is the event of the actualization of virtual multiplicities.
The entirety of the real, therefore, consists of the circuit between the actual and the virtual in mutual determination. The virtual guides processes by abstract points of attraction that shape the flux of real objects, their formation and disintegration. Conversely, the emergent structures of the actual feed back upon the virtual, drawing tendencies and relations into regions of clarity and obscurity. The virtual composes a space of potentials for individuals in the actual, and its reality is felt through the actualization of this space of potential in dynamic forms: the emergence of change. The insensibility of the virtual is related to its difference in kind from the actual; unlike objects in the actual, the virtual is the space of change as such, or a field of pure potentials, independent of particular terms to which they are attached. They are the preconditions of processes, the tensions that shape the interactions of forces and tendencies. The potential of any situation exceeds its actuality: the not-here and the not-now is overfull, crowded with incipient forms, teeming with embryonic actuality. “Possibilities” are a limited subset of virtual potentials, those that are familiar and tested and ready for use. A possibility fed-forward into action is a tracing, a domestication of the productive power of the virtual to practical ends.
Unlike the possible, which is supposedly granted full reality by the addition of substance, the virtual becomes actual by means of a differential process, the extraction, or contraction of a single actuality from a teeming mass of potential actualities. The virtual is an insensible void that generates the processes of coming-into-being—a parallel to Cage’s Zen formulation of potential as the “Nothing” (no-thing) that stands in ontological precedence to the actualized things of the world.26 Moreover, because the potentials in the virtual are fundamentally different in kind than the objects that they generate, every process of actualization poses precisely the kind of copy-without-a-model relation that Nelson Goodman observed in the Concert for Piano and Orchestra. This process of actualization avoids the redundancy of the realization of the possible, in which the possible and its products are different not in kind of reality, but in degree of reality. Deleuze comments upon the creative power, map-like power of the virtual versus the redundant, tracing-like impulse displayed by the possible:
What difference can there be between the existent and the non-existent if the non-existent is already possible, already included in the concept and having all the characteristics that the concept confers upon it as a possibility? … The possible and the virtual are …distinguished by the fact that one refers to the form of identity in the concept, whereas the other designates a pure multiplicity …which radically excludes the identical as a prior condition …to the extent that the possible is open to “realization” it is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible. That is why it is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like …Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. In this sense, actualization or differentiation is always a genuine creation. Actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate … For a potential or virtual object to be actualized is to create divergent lines which correspond to—without resembling—a virtual multiplicity.27
Unlike formal essences—or essence-like concepts, such as “possibilities”—those particular bundles of forces and tensions called virtual multiplicities are not clear and distinct ideas. They are obscure but distinct, differentiated from other fields of potential but not directly sensible. Although they cannot be directly experienced, they are still subject to a kind of empirical investigation—their outlines can be indirectly sensed in the unfolding of processes. The actualization of Cage’s post-1958 indeterminate scores is exemplary models for the unfolding of these tendencies and the way in which spaces of potential can be simultaneously impossible to image and yet distinctive in their boundaries.
Also unlike formal essences, the ideal component of every actualized event is completely immanent to it. The score for Variations II constitutes one actualization of the multiplicity of which it is a sign—it is a product and sign of a set of isolated potentials, it contracts the process of its creation and the capacity for future difference-repetitions into a material form that renders them palpable, felt as potential. It doesn’t represent the ideal event as much as it gives it a body, or a means by which the dynamic unity of an event can be made sensible. The ideal event inheres in the score’s markings, which point to its virtual nature but cannot represent it—it makes felt the contours of the productive principle it embodies. The score constitutes not an object of representation, but what Brian Massumi (putting a Deleuzian spin on Susanne Langer’s concept) calls a semblance: the “experiential reality of the virtual,” or “the manner in which the virtual actually appears,” or “the being of the virtual as lived abstraction.”28 What scores like those in the Variations series make palpable is the twofold nature of all objects. Every actual thing is doubled by its virtual complement, or, rather, the virtual component inheres in what is given to the senses in actuality. Every actual thing—a score, a performance, a person, an instrument—is fringed by a perfectly determinate indeterminacy, a set of potentials for variation and mutation. A well-formed semblance, such as one of Cage’s transparency-scores, provides a heightened sensation of the virtual Idea or ideal event that it incarnates. Deleuze emphasizes the open-ended nature of virtual determinacy and describes this twofold nature of things in a passage from “The Method of Dramatization”:
[T]he Idea is completely undifferentiated. However, it is not at all indeterminate … The Idea in itself, or the thing in the Idea, is not at all differenciated since it lacks necessary qualities and parts. But it is fully and completely differentiated, since it has at its disposal the relations and singularities that will be actualized, without resemblance, in the qualities and parts. It seems, then, that each thing has two ‘halves’—uneven, dissimilar, and unsymmetrical—each of which is divided itself into two: an ideal half, which reaches into the virtual and is constituted by both differential relations and by concomitant singularities; and an actual half, constituted by the qualities that incarnate these relations and by the parts that incarnate those singularities.29
Even the most heavily abstracted scores in Cage’s catalog are only different in degree of the sensation of virtual-actual asymmetry than more conventionally conceived works, which presume an equilibrium between the productive power and its actualized result. Conventional notational practices diminish our feeling for the something more haunting every score. They mask the potential for divergence lurking within even the most rigid codes and schemas, a potential that can only ever be dampened but not extinguished by convention. By carefully under-determining his scores, Cage renders this excess palpable—not with the clarity of a concept traced from an already-actualized form, but with the specific-vagueness of intuition, an oblique glance at a power of formation whose capacity for production exceeds the mind’s capacity to imagine the form of its products.30
In his analysis of Variations II, Thomas DeLio offers an illuminating view of that work’s virtual dimension by providing a means of imagining this something-more inhering in the score’s materials and instructions. Like Figure BB from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Variations II relies on measurements between randomly placed points and intersecting lines. In Variations II, however, the points and lines are mobile, placed on transparencies that are to be overlapped before the measurements concerning sonic parameters are made. As with BB, there is no tracing-object presented, but the semblance of an ideal event, a potential for emergent form conditioned by the tendencies inhering in the score-process. No essence, no link of resemblance, can bind all the sonic actualizations produced from the score, but the score does delimit a space of potential, a range of tensions that can produce a wealth of forms from a common abstract process. As DeLio advises us:
It is, however, important to recognize that [Cage’s] score does not fix any one configuration. Rather, the composer presents the materials by which any such configuration may be fashioned. Thus, the score contains within it the full range of all possible configurations of six lines and five dots and, consequently, the full range of statistical structures to which these configurations give rise. As such, it cannot really be said that any one specific statistical structure is the structure of Variations II. Rather, the structure of Variations II is the complete range of all such statistical complexes made available by the composer through the score.31
DeLio’s description is clear, indeed. Perhaps too clear, however, as it relies heavily on the notion of statistical arrays. In an effort to cleave the productive power of the virtual from the redundancy of possibility, Cage took pains to separate the pure productivity of virtual forces from probability, a mode of imagining potential that traces the contours of the possible from empirical reality rather than grasping it as a capacity for transformation. For Cage, probabilities and stochastic methods were still tethered to the schema-like possibility because they were dependent on preexistent distributions of possibilities. As Brian Massumi asserts, probabilities still obey the logic of the possible, as they “are weightings of possibilities according to the regularity with which they might be expected to appear.”32 While they share some of the vagueness and indistinction of the virtual, they still rely on the forward-projection of already-conceived forms conceived generally, whereas the virtual relies on the differential extraction of a particular event from the open-ended field of potentials.
Therefore, one should see the virtual component of Variations II as the conditions of possibility for the sum of the statistical arrays—including the possibility of divergence or deviation from any foreseen possibility. The virtual component is the space of possibility for the arrangement and translation of the six lines and five dots—an abstract interrelation of all their potential relations. Or perhaps it is better to think of all the states of the system “complicated,” “perplexed,” and infinitely superimposed, into an abstract space marked by tendencies and various points of attraction. Cage perhaps would have liked this formation best—another “central principle” listed in the introduction to Themes and Variations is the “IMPORTANCE OF BEING PERPLEXED—UNPREDICTABILITY.”33 “Perplexed” here should not be interpreted as the state of confusion resulting from too little information, but rather embraced in its fullest original sense of intensely intertwined, confusingly bundled and overfull. Deleuze explicitly cautions readers against assuming that the “corresponding connotation of ‘perplexity’ signifies a coefficient of doubt, hesitation or astonishment, or anything whatsoever incomplete about the Ideas themselves.”34 Instead, this feeling of formal multiplicity or an overabundance of possible forms characterizes the experience of the virtual as viewed from the side of actuality—it is virtuality experienced as multiple possibilities, which can help to trace the virtual tendencies but can never completely exhaust them. DeLio comes close to grasping the virtual half of Variations II, but is restricted by his insistence on likening of the virtual to the actual. Rather than sensing the virtual on its own terms, as an abstract principle of variation, DeLio remains all too concrete—complicated and varied, but still tethered to thinking in the form of the already-actualized.
Cage provides us with an enlightening example of his own encounter with the semblance and its corresponding virtual perplexity in relation to a most surprising source: Mozart. In hearing Don Giovanni, Cage experienced the two-sided nature of being, the coexistence of the virtual and the actual or the “instability alongside stability.” Speaking to Anne Gibson in 1985, Cage attributes his own fixation on making the virtual felt to this peculiar encounter:
And later, fortunately, I had two experiences: one of listening to Mozart and another time a kind of study of Mozart that led me to a view of music that was different than the view that the music of Bach gave. The difference is the difference between everything fitting together, as it does in Bach, and coming out to reassure us about the existence of order. Mozart does another thing. He provides us with a music which is characterized by multiplicity … That he left the doors open to the unknown and the excitement and the affirmation of life, rather than the affirmation of order, is what I love in Mozart.35
Whereas Bach’s music buried its capacity to become other beneath the fixity of complex counterpoint, Mozart’s music provided Cage with the semblance of other possibilities, a felt sense of potentials not realized but still inherent.36 It provided Cage with a sense of the ideal event underlying its construction, a sign of a form-of-process that the music expressed but did not exhaust. It produced in Cage an awareness of the way in which the forms in the actual could be stretched, pulled, and recombined—it pointed toward an underlying principle of production that was at once singular and infinitely open-ended.
The mathematical field of topology, intimately related to the calculus from which Deleuze partially constructed his theory of multiplicity, provides us with a useful way of thinking the dynamic unity of differences that DeLio stops just short of grasping and toward which Cage strove. Unlike Euclidian geometry, which develops types and kinds according to categories of resemblance, topology studies the manner in which forms can be set into deformational variation by processes of twisting, pulling, and folding. Consider a square composed of four critical points (the corners and their function as corners, as places where lines “break” and form angles) and four relations (the lines between sides). A Euclidean geometer would emphasize the static form of the figure and categorize it by determining its formal essence—four sides of equal length and corners forming ninety-degree angles. A topological geometer, however, would emphasize “the dynamisms or adventures the relations between these similarities are able to undergo.”37Although the Euclidean geometer would classify the diamond, the rectangle, and the square as unique figures, the topologist sees them as expressions of the same topological structure—the diamond refolds the corners, the rectangle stretches the sides, all while retaining the same set of structural features. The topologist attempts to grasp the manner in which shapes can be transformed into one another through operations of stretching, pulling, and twisting—without privileging any particular ideal form. For the topologist, there is a structural identity between the diamond, the rectangle, the square, and the infinite variety of intermediary forms between them.
The topological essence is not the total of figures that can be constructed from a given structural configuration, nor does it have a privileged existence in any particular individuation. Instead, it has a properly virtual being that exists alongside and in-between any of its incarnations. The potential deformations have a perfectly objective, determinate being but bear no resemblance to their products; as such, they cannot be experienced directly, but cannot but be felt in their effects. The only way to sense the virtual contours of this space of deformation is by experimentation and by selecting, sampling, reordering, and reconstructing the actualized figures that stem from them. For Deleuze and for Cage, thought was not a process of achieving a unity between a concept-possibility and an object, but the process of accessing this dynamic multiplicity through experimentation and intuition. Such an intuition is not subjective, but is a thoroughly rational method for grasping these objective structures, to understand not only the object before us (itself a passing expression of the virtual) but its potentials for change, its capacity for becoming other than what it is, and the capacity for the same topological relation to be expressed by other terms in other settings. Intuition is the method by which one grasps a style of variation expressed by a thing, a style of variation that inheres in and exceeds any particular actualization.
Goodman’s critique contains a kernel of truth. Cage’s score is under-determined from a certain perspective—it fails to demarcate any particular resemblance-essence, an actualized form to be traced in performance. It is not, however, imprecise or under-determined at the level of the virtual. Rather, its indetermination allows for a precise intuition of the virtual multiplicity’s constitutive vagueness. Though it is “objectively” under-determined, the indeterminate score is an expression of this perfectly determinate dynamic essence—the connective or productive principle guiding future actualizations in other forms, a reservoir of germinal forms, the identity of difference linking things coming-into-formation. Daniel Charles correctly asserts that one can sense the coming-into-form, the virtual multiplicity, but it gathers definition only through the explications of its potentials with each overlay of transparencies and each measurement. Each transparency placement brings it closer to actualization, through potential (there will be a point in time when one can sense what the multiple states of the system might appear as before they are officially decided), and eventually into possibility—the back-tracking that identifies conditions of emergence that could not be seen during assembly but can now be clearly recognized.
Cage’s tendency toward more-indeterminate notational practice, therefore, is not simply a matter of personal preference, but a necessary component toward unchaining process from product. Rather than reproducing an existing statistical array, Cage opts to work at the level that gives rise to statistical arrays and structures the processes that generate a consistent range of outcomes. The actualization of the virtual allows for the rise of new states of a system with their own rules of interaction; probabilities rely on the statistical arrays already present in the actual. Probabilities adhere to preexistent rules of interaction; the actualization of virtualities allows for new rules of interaction to emerge. Cage expressed an implicit preference for true chance distributions over probability distributions as early as “Composition as Process,” where he preferred chance operations to scientific probabilities for inducing willingness for “identifying with no matter what eventuality.”38 A further clarification of the position came ten years later in 1968, again from the interviews with Daniel Charles. Charles contrasts Cage’s “lawless variation” with the stochastic operations of Iannis Xenakis, whose music translated existing statistical distributions within natural phenomenon, such as the dynamism of crowds or weather patterns, into sounding forms. Cage expresses the difference between himself and Xenakis as follows:
What I hope for [compared to Xenakis] is the ability of seeing anything whatsoever arise. No matter what, that is, everything, and not such and such a thing in particular. The problem is that something occurs. But the law governing that something is not yet there. Now, if there were a tendency that controlled the appearance of one particular thing as opposed to some other thing, then that tendency—as statistical tendency—would not itself be immobile. It would not be a law. It would be in a state of mutation which would prohibit describing it as a law. If you are in that state of mutation, you are situated in change and immersed in process. While, if you are dealing with a statistic, then you return to the world of objects …39
This world of the preformed and preexistent fed-forward into reproductive production is identified with the “world of objects,” the realm of transcendent stabilities, rather than the fluctuating and complexifying plane of immanence. The creation of transcendent abstractions or supposedly universal standards establishes regulatory principles or modes of limitation on the divergence of actualization, but Cage and Deleuze assert their secondary emergence from the primary plane of immanence, understood as the world-in-becoming, the process that is the event-of-all-events.“In this situation, the universe within which the action is to take place is not preconceived,” Cage writes. “Furthermore, as we know, sounds are events in a field of possibilities, not only at the discrete points that conventions have favored. The notation of Variations departs from music and imitates the physical reality.”40
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Cage and the simulacrum: Composition without a model
Another portion of Cage’s ontological sketch points toward a revolt against the resemblance between the virtual Idea—the being of an event—and its actualizations: his admonition that he is not a philosopher, or, at least, “not a Greek one!” Here, we find another crucial resonance between Deleuze and Cage: the desire to depart from a tradition that assigned a moral value to resemblance, a moral value that worked to occlude the virtual’s capacity for continuous variation and dull our sensitivity to the world’s inherent dynamism.
Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, Deleuze’s first two original works of philosophy, developed his ontology under a Nietzschean slogan: to overturn Platonism. Like Cage, Deleuze recognized the intrinsic link between typological judgment, transcendent “natural kinds,” and orders of power. The supposed connection between types and their tokens in the world was not a matter of logical necessity, but a means of naturalizing the tracing process, a way to restrict the proliferation of difference that threatens to undermine the authority of the model. The simulacra are precisely this departure from the model, but we must be careful, pace Jean Baudrillard, to distinguish the true simulacrum from the badly degraded copy of the model. As Deleuze notes in his early essay, “The Simulacrum in Ancient Philosophy,” the authentic copy and the simulacrum may resemble one another externally, but there is a crucial internal difference between the two. The copy is a “pretender,” a duplicate that aspires to the transcendent ideal but deviates from it. The simulacrum, by contrast, aims to subvert the model/copy dichotomy entirely by remaining unconcerned about resemblance to a model. “We are now in a better position to define the totality of the Platonic motivation: it has to do with selecting among the pretenders, distinguishing good and bad copies or, rather, copies (always well-founded) and simulacra (always engulfed in dissimilarity),” notes Deleuze. He adds, “It is a question of assuring the triumph of the copies over simulacra, keeping them completely submerged, preventing them from climbing to the surface, and ‘insinuating themselves’ everywhere.”41
To subvert the hierarchical operation performed by essences and typological thought, it is necessary to find a means of supplanting the essences with an ontology that promotes difference as such—difference without mediation by identity. The role of the essence is to establish a transcendent identity that will be used to determine how the particular differs from this higher ontological form. To overturn Platonism requires the replacement of essences with events: bundles of virtual tendencies taken apart from the qualities and extensions of the actual. “Ideal events” replace “ideal essences,” diagrams of force and spaces of potentials replace lists of properties and orders of resemblance. The “ideal event” is the pure structure of an individuating process minus the terms or bodies involved in the process. The ideal event can be incarnated in countless different arrangements of bodies demonstrating no degree of resemblance to one another. The same bundle of potentials can yield dramatically different structures in different states of affairs—an unhinging of process from product, the replacement of the tracing with the diagram of process. The ideal event is open to inflection by accident and chance in its actualization; its inclusive operation accounts for the endless diversity of forms that can be spun out in its unfolding of processes within the actual.
Because actualized entities in no way resemble this field of pure tendencies from which they emerge, it can be said that they have initiated a series of divergent realizations that bear no resemblance to a model. As opposed to the “copies of copies” distinction made by both Goodman and Charles, the truth of their emergence is considerably stranger and antithetical to common sense: they are copies without a model, actualizations that overturn the very validity of the model-copy distinction. Each actualization relates difference to difference without the mediation of a model that could be used to determine a fixed, timeless identity. Without the feeding-forward of a limitative abstract model into the process of their production, the series will continue to generate differences-of-differences as its process unfolds in an endless array of times and places. The members of the series can take on orders of greater or lesser degrees of resemblance (depending upon the relative stability of the processes that form them), but they have no known point of genesis to serve as the transcendent model by which they could be absolutely judged as members of a type.
Cage approves of this kind of “quantitative revolution” that lets difference and experimentation run free without the kind of absolute selection or qualitative decision that appeals to higher ontological forms. Against fears that the emergence of these false-pretenders represents a degradation of creative effort and all its assorted virtues, Cage counters with an assertion that celebrates the reemergence of difference and freedom from transcendent judgment. “By letting ‘bad’ elements proliferate,” he asserts, “you need not expect a general deterioration of quality, but a radical change which makes quality appear as an unacceptable limitation.”42
The critique of the model/copy relationship isn’t simply a Deleuzian or Cagean quirk. It isn’t a matter of personal preference for the simulacrum over the copy, or a perverse desire to upend conventional moral logic. Instead, this insistence on the emergence of simulacra and so-called “bad copies’” points us toward a different mode of thought oriented toward grasping the sources of these divergent productions. As seen in Goodman’s struggle with Figure BB and DeLio’s attempt to grasp the ontological core of Variations II, it is the production of simulacra and atypical expressions—in other words, the genesis of the new and unrecognizable—that points us toward the virtual’s full productive force. Such productions force us to accept one of two options: to depart from our commonsense ontological model founded on resemblance and embrace one that could account for such atypical expressions, or to ignore or suppress such emergences by leaving them simply un-thought or by reducing them to mere errors, personal failings, and other aberrations.
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From ontology to ethics: The process that is the world
A final note about this ontological sketch is necessary. Although the model-and-copy mode of production (tracing) and the production-without-model mode are presented in opposition to one another, they are, in fact, two coexistent operations that occur within the same reality—one works to limit the emergence of difference, and the other works to accelerate and proliferate that same emergence. All process tends toward the uniqueness of the actualized event, the singular emergence of the new, and every actualization embodies the difference qua difference of the simulacrum against the sanctified similarity of the model and copy. Even the most rigidly homologized process/product pairing has the potential to reopen and produce mutant offspring. Cage’s indeterminate scores are not a special case or a unique invention, but an extreme limit-case of production unmoored from the restrictions of the tracing. Tracing has a functional, practical, and tactical purpose. It permits a useful domestication of productive potentials, and its capacity for the preservation and refinement of events is an essential component of living in the world. The model/copy relationship, however, is not a natural or logical property. Nor is it absolutely beneficial—the tracing relationship is the source of repressive juridical power as well as the habitual power that trains us to desire the security of self-similar reproduction. The naturalization of the model/copy hierarchy requires a continual working against the flow and flux of the world, a flow that saves us from ossification and self-suppression even as it undoes the familiar and comfortable. The demand for consistent, self-similar objects of communication and transaction is itself a production, not an ontological truth—it is an active making-the-same in an effort to slow the world’s process of self-differing.
If the goal of art is, as Cage often asserts, to imitate nature in her manner of operation, then it is necessary to abandon aspirations to transcendent judgment. “Right” and “wrong” do not factor into a mode of production that is purely immanent—only tactical, functional judgments of “more successful” or “less successful” can operate without an otherworldly standard of measurement. There are pragmatic applications of the tracing model that can be used tactically to further the project of intensifying nature in its manner of operation. Cage, for example, refused to apply his purely experimental tendencies to the consumption of mushrooms, as the cessation of his life would effectively minimize his capacity to engage in further experiments.43 Performance should be treated in a similar manner—“ethically,” rather than “morally.” Life is a game of dosages, and while it should perhaps tend toward the nonteleological and nonhierarchical, there is no ontological foundation for why it should absolutely do so. Still, the experimental tendency is necessary to resist the tendency toward repressive power, and art represents one of the ideal arenas in which to extend the expression of the event-of-events: the world in its continuous becoming. By devising music nearer to the event, nearer to the reality of pure and directionless process, we are becoming more keenly aware of our own capacity for endless becoming-other and our ability to slip from the bonds of enforced cultural reproduction. As Deleuze and Guattari assert in the final pages of Anti-Oedipus, perhaps their most explicitly “anarchist” text:
It is here that art accedes to its authentic modernity, which simply consists in liberating what was present in art from its beginnings, but was hidden underneath aims and objects, even if aesthetic, and underneath recodings or axiomatics: the pure process that fulfills itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds—art as “experimentation.”44
Experimentation, not reproduction, is the reality of artistic production. Or, more precisely, experimentation is reality, and art puts us in touch with this reality of change. It draws us nearer to the process that is the world, against the reductions and minimizations that would encourage us to think a correspondence between our reductive concepts and the world’s capacity for unpredictable change. What Cage’s music provides us is a heightened sensation of this experimental power; in the performance of music, we gain something greater than mere appreciation for the form of a beautiful object. The encounter with the power for variation gives us feeling for a form of life—as Cage would say, the work itself is not an object but “a way of being in the world”—or a way of conjugating our powers of production with and within the world’s self-varying, a way of moving and making and sensing that could carry us far afield of our prescripted and predetermined ways of engaging with the world. As such, it calls for new means of evaluating our experiments, one capable of addressing the open-ended power of potential rather than referring to the already-constituted and already-judged, a mode of evaluation that leads us far from laws and prescriptions and into a groundless ethics of becoming.
Notes
1 Cage, For the Birds, 80.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia, 1995), 145.
3 This particular phrase, borrowed from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (who most likely borrowed it from Thomas Aquinas), recurs throughout Cage’s writings. Its first appearance is in 1954, in 45ʹ For a Speaker: “The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operation.” For another instance of the phrase, see Silence, 194.
4 Cage, For the Birds, 80–1.
5 Ibid., 135.
6 Ibid., 45. Cage’s description of the Schoenbergian Grundgestalt appropriately highlights its emphasis on identity throughout variation, in that the sense of totality is provided by referencing all variation to a common set of ontologically superior foundational elements—that is to say, differences in motive, harmony, and tonality are recognized by reference to “originary” or thematic elements. By contrast, the Cagean-Deleuzian series of infinite variation has no original term or concluding term—one always enters in media res, regardless of the first actualized term in the series.
7 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 222. “Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse. Difference is not the phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon.”
8 Allusions to plant growth and its relationship to a genetic backdrop abound in Cage’s writings and interviews—perhaps little surprise, as Cage was famously both a mycologist and avid gardener. Consider, for example, the following from a 1980 interview with Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras: “The mechanism by means of which the I Ching works is, I think, the same as that by means of which the DNA—or one of those things in the chemistry of our body—works. It’s a dealing with the number sixty-four, with a binary situation with all of its variations in six lines. I think it’s a rather basic life mechanism. I prefer it to other chance operations. I began using it nearly thirty years ago, and I haven’t stopped” (Cage in conversation with Cole Gagnes and Tracy Caras (1980), Conversing with Cage, 233).
9 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 184–5.
10 DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 106. DeLanda’s explanations of Deleuzian philosophy pertain, by and large, to the domains of biology and physics (and more recently, sociology), but one of the virtues of Deleuzian philosophy is its insistence on the universality of processes underpinning the material foundation of all activity, both “natural” and “cultural.” Therefore, observations from one realm can be effectively translated into the other without resorting to metaphor.
11 Deleuze, Negotiations, 182.
12 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11–14.
13 Brian Massumi, “Like a Thought,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (New York: Routledge, 2002), 8.
14 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12.
15 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 102–3.
16 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 187–90.
17 Ibid., 190.
18 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12–13.
19 Daniel Charles, “Figuration and Pre-Figuration: Notes on Some New Graphic Notions (1991),” in Writings about John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 258.
20 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11–12.
21 Ibid., 95–6: “By placing all its components in continuous variation, music itself becomes a superlinear system, a rhizome instead of a tree, and enters the service of a virtual cosmic continuum of which even holes, silences, ruptures, and breaks are a part … Music is not alone in being art as cosmos and in drawing the virtual lines of an infinite variation.”
22 Brian Massumi, “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible,” in Hypersurface Architecture, ed. Stephen Perrella, Architectural Design 68, no. 5/6 (May–June 1998), 16.
23 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 148–52.
24 Brian Massumi, “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible,” 16.
25 Christoph Cox, “Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the Ontology of Music,” in A Companion To Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 505. Here, Christoph Cox is discussing the Nietzschean strand in Deleuze’s ontology and its relation to music. If music is particularly near to the Deleuzian event, it is because it produces a particularly acute sense of these condensations and contractions in their dynamic unfolding.
26 Cage, For the Birds, 234. “ …it is not a kind of ‘subjectivity,’ but a reference to something which comes before that and which—beyond that—allows that ‘subjectivity’ to be produced.”
27 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 211–12. Quoted in Manuel De Landa, “Deleuzian Ontology: A Sketch,” presented at “New Ontologies: Transdisciplinary Objects,” University of Illinois, March 30, 2002.
28 Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event (Boston: MIT, 2011), 15.
29 Gilles Deleuze, “The Method of Dramatization,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 100.
30 For another discussion of the relation between Cage and the Bergsonian and Deleuzian distinction between the possible and the virtual, see: Branden W. Joseph, “Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity,” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art, ed. Julia Robinson (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 2009), 210–38.
31 DeLio, Circumscribing the Open Universe, 19.
32 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 135.
33 Cage, Composition in Retrospect, 60.
34 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 187.
35 Cage in conversation with Anne Gibson (1985), in Conversing with Cage, 39–40. Cage and Deleuze differ on their opinion of Bach in particular and the Baroque more generally. For Deleuze, the Baroque offers an image of matter in continuous variation—it fulfills a comparable function to Cage’s vision of Mozart—and the roiling chaos of the baroque and the ordered forms of classicism exist in continuity or superimposition with one another. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 338: “What the artist confronts in this way is chaos, the forces of chaos … That is why no one has ever been able to draw a clear line between the baroque and the classical. All of baroque lies teeming beneath classicism[.]”
36 Mozart’s penchant for creating semblances of the virtual is a recurring theme in Cage’s discussions of what he called “open wholes.” Cage elaborates on Mozart’s techniques for semblance-production during a 1972 symposium entitled Biology and the History of the Future: “If one compares, for instance, the music of Bach and Mozart, you can take a small section of Bach and all the voices in the music will be observing the same kind of movement … This brings about a state of ‘wholeness’ or ‘unity.’ Which is in great contrast to Mozart. In Mozart, taking just a small section of the music, you are very apt to see not one scale, but I would myself see three. You would see one of the large steps made by arpeggiation of the chords … then you would see diatonic scales… and you would see chromatic passages, all within a small area sequence. They would generally be going together so that you have differences working together, in Mozart’s case, to produce what you might call harmonious wholeness.” (Biology and the History of the Future, 29.)
37 Levi Bryant, Difference and Givenness (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2008), 68–9. For another discussion of the relation between Deleuzian essences or events and topology, see Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 134: “That is to say, the virtual is best approached topologically. Topology is the science of self-varying deformation. A topological figure is defined as the continuous transformation of one geometrical figure into another … Whatever medium you are operating in, you miss the virtual unless you carry the images constructed in that medium to the point of topological transformation.”
38 Cage, Silence, 35.
39 Cage, For the Birds, 147.
40 John Cage, “Composition as Process,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1961): 28.
41 Gilles Deleuze, “The Simulacrum in Ancient Philosophy,” in The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 246–7.
42 Cage, For the Birds, 236.
43 Cage makes the “mushroom counterbalance” explicit in For The Birds. On page 46, Cage suggests that his interest in mushrooms—and, in particular, the conscious sorting of lethal and nonlethal encounters involved in consuming them—is an attempt to achieve a different kind of discipline than the preference-less discipline of listening or composition.
44 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 371.