Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1998 11:26:41 -0500 (CDT)
From: hijinks-AT-utarlg.uta.edu
Subject: Re: Cage and Nietzsche -- An epic digression


Two contrary quotes (or, at least, they can be thought this way):

"For whatever might appropriately be said about philosophy in a
preface--say a historical statement of the main drift and the point of
view, the general content and results, a string of random assertions and
assurances about truth--none of this can be accepted as the way in which
to expound philosophical truth.  Also, since philosophy moves essentially
in the element of universality, which includes within itself the
particular, it might seem that here more than in any of the other
sciences the subject matter itself, and even in its complete nature, were
expressed in the aim and the final results, the execution being by
contrast really the unessential factor." -- Hegel, Preface, _PoS_.

"The universe is no more reducible to that lazy notion of substance than
it is to outbursts of laughter or kisses.  Outbursts of laughter and
kisses won't produce notions, and they attain 'what is' more truly than
ideas with which objects are manipulated.  What could be more ridiculous
than reducing 'what is'--the universe, if you like--to analogies with
useful objects!  Laughter, lovemaking, even tears of rage and of my own
impotence in knowing, these are means of knowing that can't be located on
a plane of intelligence." -- Bataille, _Guilty_, 16.

Is the doing the excess -- the sacrificial experience, the productive
energy that must be squandered -- necessary for the matter, for what
matters?  Where lies the debt in this economy?  Is it a public or private
debt? What is the mechanism that fills out the ideas that makes these
'performances' resonate aesthetically, the mechanism that must be sundered
from the 'artist' yet connected as well?  

-tjr


 On Sat, 25 Jul 1998, malgosia  askanas wrote:
> 
> What haunts me about these "heroic" pieces is that their meaning seems 
> to be fully contained, if you pardon the expression, in the epic description, 
> and yet these pieces are profoundly "experiential".  How can one say, for
> example, that the meaning of _4'33"_ is contained in its description, when
> the very purpose of the piece is to have people experience, for 4 minutes
> and 33 seconds, a specific "silence" -- the unique non-silent silence of 
> a specific time and place?  How can one say that the meaning of a performance 
> in which the protagonist, for a whole year, punches a clock every hour on 
> the hour, is contained in the one-sentence description which I have just 
> given you?
> 
> Of course, this dichotomy between, on the one hand, the arduousness, or the 
> aching uniqueness, of the experience and, on the other, the possibility of 
> its re-telling, is characteristic of all heroic deeds.  This is perhaps
> simply equivalent to saying that heroic deeds are by definition "exemplary".
> I am bringing this up because it seems to connect to the story of Cage's 
> disrupted concert, and, in a manner far less clear, to the problem of 
> "insistence ".
> 
> -m
> 
> 
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> 
> 



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