John Cage's serial epic "How to Improve the World" (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)" presents a different, arguably better model of a reader-centered linguistic practice than Cage's later aleatoric writings. By foregrounding the experience of a fervent disciple, Cage creates an authorial persona able to engage in advocacy without any stance of mastery; the author is portrayed as a student, a lifelong seeker for and aggregator of knowledge, just as the reader is assumed to be. Cage writes: "Twelve / disciples. One teacher. One too / many." As just another of the disciples, Cage projects a charisma qualitatively different from the mastering charisma of the prophet, professor, or guru. In "How to Improve the World," the ideas of Cage's many great men (and especially of techno-utopian prophet Buckminster Fuller) must be contemplated and integrated; homologies and analogies between their positions must be explored, and the reader is enlisted as Cage's equal in this process. The result differs from traditional notions of being a follower or disciple, emphasizing juxtaposition and comparison rather than correct transmission of one master text or line of thought. This model of advocacy, while preserving some strengths of didactic writing, is collaborative, multi-source, open-ended, and motivated by enthusiasm. The paper also examines the ideas of Buckminster Fuller which led Cage to initiate this type of advocacy.
John Cage's "Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)" is an epic-length serial poem, with a main sequence of seven parts composed from 1965 to 1972, and an eight part abandoned in 1973 and belated finished in the early 80s. The poem is Cage's closest to the sprawling collage genre that Modernists and New American poets called epic; formed out of juxtaposed fragments and brief anecdotes, it incorporates history, gossip, philosophy, and lyricism into an encyclopedic, intuitive whole. It is the poem of an eternal student, who is close friends with most of his professors and offers us the quintessence of their wisdom, as captured in remarks from their conversation or in anecdotes. Or, it is the poem of a career disciple, who has sat at the feet of many prophets and is trying to find the congruence and continuity between their insights. Furthermore, the poem presents a model of political advocacy based on the shared enthusiasm and presumed equality of lifelong learners.
Cage was prolific at discipleship, a great man who enjoyed being the enthusiastic follower of many other great men. Leaving aside the problematic gender politics of this, at least he is not another "self-made" great man, that boring trope. The disciple's greatness is best understood as the aggregated debt to the other great men to whom he frequently alludes. In my opinion, this is charming, and Cage's repeated allusions to McLuhan, Johns, Fuller, Duchamp, Norman O. Brown, Skinner, Mao and others become soothingly ritualistic, as if the subtext of Cage's writing were a liturgical reassurance of the presence of intelligence, as personified by these men. A world is evoked which is organized like a syllabus, in which details radiate outwards from a series of great insights by great people. In Cage's writing, these great insights are what enable us to see. While this world as syllabus has its contradictions (most notably between denunciations of egoism and aggrandizing references to intellectual stars), it is refreshingly different from the usual dramatic descriptions of the world, in which a series of powerful opposed forces impel events and details into being.
The prophet's stance is more traditional; he tells us what to know and do. And if we haven't got it done by 1972, we may be doomed. When 72 rolls in, he gives us another ten years, and that's it— if we can't get done what we should do in ten, then we will be really doomed. And then the final deadline passed: twenty-two years ago. Like editors and hiring committees, prophets induce drama with deadlines, and sometimes deadlines must be adjusted, to maintain credibility and sustain drama. A prophecy should be suspenseful; the chance of doom thrills us, and whatever thrills us might get us invested. Thus the prophet, Buckminster Fuller, found himself driven to make monumental threats.
The disciple, on the other hand, is eager to minimize his exposure to drama. For him, the value of the prophecy is a prediction on which he can rely. For the disciple, the security of anticipation makes time less dramatic. Optimism is what the disciple needs; optimism and confidence in the prophet lead the disciple to speak up on the prophet's behalf, to amplify the prophecy.
The prophet's self-presentation aims to achieve charisma through comprehensiveness and candor, building credibility with long, simple sentences that attempt to explain literally everything. His effort is to build a concise total description of reality; to prove himself by giving us everything in a form that is sincere, accurate, and easily digestible. Buckminster Fuller writes, "To define the everywhere-and-everywhen-transforming cosmic environment of each and every system requires several more intercovarying system dimensions." Fuller's neologisms are clunky and can make us groan, but they have a certain type of charisma, like a loud tie worn confidently. At least they are easy to parse. "Intercovarying": elements of systems vary, gotcha, they covary, meaning different parts vary in different ways at the same time, gotcha, they intercovary, meaning the different parts, as they separately vary, influence each other. The world has been depicted in a single polysyllabic clunker: The world is full of stuff and different parts of this stuff are changing in different ways without ceasing to affect each other. Different strokes for different folks, but everyone else's strokes constitute the environment where I make my strokes. In one word, a paradox is evoked: freedom to initiate new actions within a determined context. The context will not initiate actions for us, but it will totally determine the manner in which the actions are carried out.
We've entered the disciple's territory. The situations staged in John Cage's art depict a world of intercovariation, or, to use another of Fuller's neologisms, an "omniinteraccomodative" world, in which all or any sets of things can exist comfortably together in all or any varieties of relationship. Fuller believed that the goal of science was to allow all people to make full use of Nature's "omniinteraccomodative," potentially cornucopic general laws. Cage's art aims to make its viewer-participants aware of the possibility of "onmiinteraccomodative" social relations, in which a certain set of intentions frames interactions so as to guarantee automatic coercion-free collaboration.
Much of Cage's achievement revolves around imagining a drama-free universe, a universe of unavoidable and automatic collaboration in which powerful forces and coercive demands should not be relevant to what goes on. His works often stage situations in which coercion is made impossible by a stance of acceptance, situations in which any effort at assertion will be assimilated into an accepting stance. If I complain about the piece it is part of the piece and the right way to hear my complaint is as a musical noise to be appreciated free of its dramatic intent. In this sense, it is probably best to think of Cage's various great men as a series of Buddhas, teachers of how to accept the present without accepting the dramatic conflicts embedded in existing discourse.
Fuller's way of rejecting the Cold War drama was to reject its premises. Behind competition is scarcity, and scarcity is Maltus. For Fuller, Malthus's premise of a limited total capacity for life support has been embedded in a line of discourse, and the entire line is corrupted by the seed Malthus planted. Darwin and Marx are spoiled by Malthus, Darwin because his account of natural selection draws on ideas from political economy and goes on to inspire a reaffirmation of those ideas¹, Marx because his account of history as class conflict accepts the assumption of scarcity as the motivating principle of that conflict². Similarly, Fuller asserts that the Greek premise of an infinite plane has been embedded in the discourse of geometry and virtually all geometric models are corrupted and overcomplicated by some relationship to the infinite plane. In his view, the infinite plane does not exist in the universe and therefore never should have entered into descriptions of the universe.
Fuller's ideology rests on the claim that twentieth-century scientific advances had proved Nature to be "100-percent efficient, self-regenerative" and "sustainably abundant," realizations which enable all people, if correctly equipped, to be "completely supplied by our combined harvests of electromagnetic, photosynthetic, chemical, and biological products of the daily energy income initially produced by Sun and gravity." For Fuller, once nature is correctly understood, scarcity cannot exist within it, unless it is enforced by outdated political economies predicated on scarcity as their rationale.
From this view, Fuller's gospel unfolds. Conflict is unnecessary and is primarily a device for ensuring the scarcity of resources. The rivalry of the Cold War ideologies of capitalism and communism was made all the more absurd since both were predicated on the same erroneous traditions. Fuller paraphrased the ideological stance of the Cold War governments in this way: "You may not like our political system, but we are convinced that we have the fairest, most logical, and ingenious method of coping with the inherent inadequacy of terrestrial life support, but since there are others who disagree diametrically about the best method of coping, it can be determined only by force of arms which system is the fittest to survive." Responding to the anxiety of the Cold War, Fuller argued that governments must stop behaving like dramatic entities, like persons in conflict, and should instead focus on giving people the tools to meet their own needs and on teaching them to use and reproduce these tools.
In Fuller's thought, the only mechanism to achieve or promote change in behavior is moral authority. This moral authority flows especially from the danger that humans might become extinct if behavior does not change. In this way, his thought resembles that of the environmental movement, except that the goal Fuller imagines is development rather than sustainability. And yet, Fuller, reasonably enough, attributed bad motives to governments, making the realization of his ideas implausible—thus, his position is essentially a Jeremiad, a stance of impracticable moral authority. Like Jeremiah, Fuller's consolation resides in the fact that he is good, and that the path he advocates is right. Such a position aims to negates the moral authority of the status quo, to reveal hypocrisy and inefficiency, false assumptions and slothful thought. However, for those who already view the status quo as lacking any moral authority, Fuller's position may be no more than a sad corroboration. . . another Jeremiad, sigh.
The most famous recital of Fuller's position comes at the climax of the "Humans in Universe" section in his book Synergetics. This section is a brief preface that aims to recap the entirety of human history and scientific discovery in simplified language appropriate for laypeople. Fuller writes:
"Now in the 1970s we can state an indisputable proposition of abundance of which the world power structures do not yet have dawning awareness. We can state that as a consequence of the myriad of more-with-less, invisible, technological advances of the 20th century, and employing only well-proven technologies and already mined and ever more copiously recirculating materials, it is now technically feasible to retool and redirect world industry in such a manner that within 10 years we can have all of humanity enjoying a sustainably higher standard of living-with vastly increased degrees of freedom than has ever been enjoyed by anyone in all history. . . [Therefore] it follows that all politics and warring are obsolete and invalid. We no longer need to rationalize selfishness. No one need ever again 'earn a living.' Further living for all humanity is all cosmically prepaid."
"Cosmically prepaid" is a charming phrase I think. Fuller continues:
"Why don't we exercise our epochal option? Governments are financed through taxation and would have no way of putting meters between the people and their directly received individual cosmic incomes. So too, private enterprise should no more meter the energy than it meters the air. But all of Earthians' present power structures-political, religious, or capitalist-would find their interests disastrously threatened by total human success. They are founded upon assumption of scarcity; they are organized for and sustained by the problems imposed by the assumption of fundamental inadequacies of life support."
Like most prophets, Fuller evokes an Enemy, those who would be "threatened by total human success," those who would kill all of us for the status quo. For Fuller, these status-quo behaviors include both capitalist efforts to accumulate resources and revolutionary efforts to prevent that accumulation. For him, the status quo consists of the use of weapons to demonstrate fitness to survive.
Fuller advocates that in the future, "Industry, retooled from weapons production to livingry production, will rehouse the deployed phases of world-humans by single-family, air-deliverable, energy harvesting, only-rentable dwelling machines." All this could be accomplished through a "revolution in design science" if only people and governments could be educated to give up out-dated world views. Fuller imagines television as a medium through which people could be educated about their "epochal option," an idea which seems very absurd in the context of what's on TV today.
Persuaded by Fuller's prophecy, Cage began a project to advocate these ideas and ideals, composing "How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)"from 1966 to 1972, until abandoning it in 1973, after Cage became disillusioned with Fuller's escalating doomsday rhetoric. (Interestingly, Cage doesn't seem to have recognized Fuller's prophecy to be a Jeremiad until 1973, when Fuller announced that the world had ten years in which to change course before human extinction became inevitable. Instead, Cage seems to have viewed the optimistic possibilities previewed by Fuller to be likelihoods or even certainties—woulds rather than coulds. It is as if Cage disregarded Fuller's pessimistic statements until 1973—perhaps he read Fuller selectively, much as he would later read Mao selectively, describing his reading as follows: "In Mao's writings I skipped over the texts which are those of a general speaking to his soldiers, though I read carefully the rules he gave them regarding right conduct among persons of occupied land" (M, xii). As a reader, Cage demilitarized Mao, and he may have depessimized Fuller. Bleak possibilities were always an essential ingredient of Fuller's rhetoric, and these bleak possibilities are the basis of Fuller's call to action, a call for innovative work to demonstrate conditions of abundance. And yet, even Fuller's belief that the awareness of conditions of abundance would undermine existing power structures, which can be seen as one of his most utopic views, can also be read pessimistically, because this belief provides existing power struggles with a motivation to suppress any awareness of innovations that might tend radically change social relations. In other words, Fuller believed there might be conspiracy on the part of existing power structures to prevent realization of abundance, because leaders would react to the idea of abundance as a threat. Cage does not seem to have picked up on this element of Fuller's thought, and instead "How to Improve the World" tends to assume that epochal change is in progress and inevitable.³)
Cage's advocacy regularly gestures at his discomfort with the idea of advocacy, as in the subtitle "You Will Only Make Matters Worse," the self-deflation of which dramatizes Cage's mistrust of egoistical assertion. The subtitle seems to imply that is not through the assertions of advocacy, but rather through open-minded perception, acceptance and automatic collaboration that the world will be improved. What will make matters worse is "you," assertion or insistence on your particular subjectivity. Early in "How to Improve the World," Cage allegorizes how the need to assert subjectivity will diminish as the world improves, writing:
Housing
(Fuller) will be, like telephoning, a
service. Only circumstance to stop your
living there: someone's there already
(it's busy). Thus we'll learn to
desire emptiness. Not being able to say,
"This is mine," we'll want when we
inquire to get no response at all.
In an improved world, the presence of another person will be sufficient assertion in itself; person's asserting merely through presence will have no need to assert through subjectivity's ego-tools. Mere presence would the only coercive force, a mild repellence encouraging people to disperse. Desiring emptiness, people will assert their presence by moving farther apart. Egoism will diminish as competitive proximity diminishes.
Cage fuses Fuller's call for a design revolution with other Buddhist and anarchist idealisms. For Cage, the key to achieving a Fullerite revolution in design and governance is to escape from the limits of individual and collective egoism and the competitive scenarios spawned by egoism. Cage writes:
WHAT'LL
HAPPEN WHEN INTELLIGENCE IS RECOGNIZED
AS A GLOBAL RESOURCE (FULLER)?
POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS—GIVING UP
INVOLVEMENT WITH PLAY (PARTNERS,
OPPONENTS), INVOLVEMENT WITH UNATTAINABLE
GOALS (VICTORIES, TRUTHS,
FREEDOMS)—WILL SIMPLY FADE OUT OF THE
PICTURE. IMAGE COMING UP IS THAT OF
THE UTILITIES (GAS, ELECTRICITY,
TELEPHONES): UNQUESTIONABLE, EMOTIONALLY
UNAROUSING.
Obviously, the passage is dated by being written before our own era of deregulated utilities, with their more aggressive (and often infuriating) practices, including price-gouging, strategic service delays, minimal availability of customer service, inaccurate and often inflated billing statements, failure to honor promotional deals as advertised, and other unethical or anti-consumer business practices. I think Cage is imagining free utilities operated by polite and respectful people motivated by a belief in the value of service. Certainly he believes that, when governments renounce territorial conflict (which he perceives as a form of play) all that will be left for governments to do is provide services. By arguing that service is serious and worthwhile, whereas conflict is play, Cage is enlisting something like the Protestant Work Ethic to support his ideals; after all, we must emphasize serious business first and our need for play must wait. Cage also emphasizes the practical, in the form of service, over abstractions like Victory, Truth, and Freedom. What Cage is emphasizing here are changes that could be brought about not through action but through recognition; thus, where Fuller calls for a revolution in design, Cage calls for a recognition of the present, a recognition that conflict and abstraction are unserious activities that waste our productive capacities. To enable this, Cage's epic stages opportunities for the reader to see the many signs that our present is ripe for a revolution in both design and consciousness.
I wrote "our present" just now, to honor Cage's eagerness for the reader to share his epic with him and to share its evocation of a continuous present of radical potentiality. However, it is not really "our present" anymore; any immersion in this continuous present of the 60s and early 70s is to some extent a nostalgic exercise. The present of our decade, the 00s, has none of the sense of ripeness that Cage tries to evoke. Contemporary discourse instead centers around trauma and the belatedness enforced on the individual by traumatic experience, as if, since our institutions have damaged us, we have no choice but to remain damaged (and thereby perpetuate the institutions).
Cage ends the main sequence of "How to Improve the World" with a call to reject coercive institutions, which he associates with syntax in language. Building on Fuller's position that governments should become service utilities, Cage writes:
Syntax, like
government, can only be obeyed. It is
therefore of no use except when you
have something particular to command
such as: Go buy me a bunch of carrots.
The mechanism of the I Ching, on the other
hand, is a utility. Applied to
letters and aggregates of letters, it
brings about a language that can be
enjoyed without being understood.
This critique of syntax as being repressive in character explains why Cage abandoned "How to Improve the World" in 1973; it was too syntactical for his purposes, as his work evolved into the middle seventies and he came more under the influence of Norman O. Brown's Maoism. Of course, the view that the derangement or, as Brown called it "demilitarization" of syntax could produce social change played out in numerous works of the late 70s and early 80s. Such works have, in my opinion, proven to have much less pedagogical effectiveness and liberatory power than was hoped; the assumption that liberating the language would lead to liberating the reader has proven flawed, because it doesn't recognize that text is very easily ignored. Certainly, a text-centered practice is not automatically a reader-centered practice, as has been frequently assumed.
Despite Cage's eventual rejection of its approach, "How to Improve the World" (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)" is a better model of a reader-centered linguistic practice than his later aleatoric writings. By foregrounding the experience of a fervent disciple, Cage creates an authorial persona able to engage in advocacy without any stance of mastery; the author is portrayed as a student, a lifelong seeker for and aggregator of knowledge, just as the reader is assumed to be. As Cage writes in the last part of "How to Improve the World": "Twelve / disciples. One teacher. One too / many." As just another of the disciples, Cage projects a charisma qualitatively different from the mastering charisma of the prophet, professor, or guru. This unusual approach to including the reader as a peer within the text is an alternative model of reader-centered writing, worthy of further consideration, enabling some of the communicative directness of didactic literature to co-exist with a spirit of free play and readerly choice. In the textual world of "How to Improve the World," the ideas of Cage's many great men must be contemplated and integrated, homologies and analogies between their positions must be explored, and the reader is enlisted as Cage's equal in this process. The result differs from traditional notions of being a follower or disciple, emphasizing juxtaposition and comparison rather than correct transmission of one master text or line of thought. This model of advocacy is collaborative, multi-source, open-ended, and motivated by enthusiasm.
¹ A Fullerist critique of Darwin might read something like this: Darwin's work inscribes speculations from political economy into a discourse about the pre-human world, reifying the Hobbesian notion that "a state of nature" is a possible condition of human society, one in which violence is perpetually immanent and security is rarely possible. This paves the way for Herbert Spenser's move to reinscribe Darwin's work back into the present, idealizing marketplace capitalism as a "state of nature" in which immanent violence and lack of security are the price of an optimal realization of productive forces. Spenser's position is barely logically defensible, and was decisively refuted by Thomas Henry Huxley (who compared society to a garden and the government to a gardener—a more traditionally Hobbesian stance, with a leftist spin that assumes authority's rational benevolence). But, we must recognize that Spencer's position has a compelling genealogical logic, reclaiming Darwin's work for the tradition of political economy that inspired many of Darwin's premises. This is why all the dozens of refutations of Spencer fail to dispel his ideas, why "social Darwinism" persists as a seemingly unstoppable subtext of culture, even while valid critiques of it are forgotten. It's because Spencer is reclaiming Darwin's real subtext, the assumption in British political economy that humans have a pre-social nature and that this "natural" behavior is intrinsically acquisitive, destructive, lazy, self-serving, and unempathetic.
In Darwin, these Hobbesian assumptions about "pre-social people" become assumptions about animals, a context in which they make more sense. It seems necessary today to assert that there were no humans without human culture, that humans, human socialization, and the human capacity for socialization arose simultaneously, and that some form of organized social life is intrinsic to everything we recognize as human—therefore, that the "state of nature" could only have been operative before our existence as a species. In other words, all of Darwin's insights, even if they describe pre-human life very accurately, are disturbingly and extremely belated, since they only describe a world that we couldn't possibly be there to observe or comment on. Whereas a human universe is one in which all Darwinian assumptions have been invalidated by our presence—and these assumptions can only ever become valid again once tool-using intelligence disappears.
² Marx offends Fuller because the notion of a necessary class struggle for control of productive power is predicated on the assumption that the total productive capacity of a society is necessarily limited, and must therefore by managed and rationed by a dominant class. Fuller would dispute the necessity of such management, preferring a strategy of proliferating rather than rationing the means of production. For Fuller, it is technical knowhow that enables individuals to expand and utilize their own productive capacity, and the genuinely revolutionary move is to create portable, easily duplicated technologies that grant workers productive autonomy. Why seize the means of production, when it would be less disruptive simply to expand access to those means? Of course, a Marxist could respond that the vicious motivations of the capitalist leadership prevent transformative sharing of technological knowledge—to which Fuller might reply that the assumption of viciousness on the part of an assumed enemy is a model of conflictual thinking that tends to reinforce a pattern of wasteful uses of productive capacity, a pattern which privileges preparations for struggle over innovation. In other words, Marxism is a highly static 19th century worldview which sees social development as a "prize" to be attained by victorious heroic action of a predefined type, rather than as the unavoidable consequence of innovations and their popularization. Rather than hoping for upheaval and victory, Fuller advocates the humbler work of educating and equipping individuals with skills, tools, and the agency to refine those skills and tools.
³ Cage becomes more cynical in the 80s, and the belated 8th part of "How to Improve the World" published in X is tonally very different from the earlier parts. In this section Cage seems to recognize for the first time in the series that precedents may determine the future even if they are invalid and destructive; for instance, the precedent of nationalism has led the world to be "split against / itself. There's no political remedy / for this disease. Power politics was its / cause. . . . A / political structure interrupted by / actions of people outside of it is a / political structure that's not / up-to-date. Holocaust. Survivors, if / any, may finally come to their senses." Here, the idea that recognition or realization might lead to an updating of social structures seems to have lapsed. For this reason, I find the 8th section relatively uninteresting compared to the previous sections; the best that could be said about it is that it is "more realistic," at the price of lacking the confident charm of the main sequence.