Thomas Morgan
Contingency: Art after radical empiricism
A sort of bobtailed scheme of thought
John Cage’s work had an impact on both the visual art and the musical composition that emerged in the United states towards the end of the 1950s. We see it and hear it in work that denied or resisted organising formal structures, such as narrative, and which were grounded in the experience of the here and now, rather than the transcendental, idealist notions through which a previous generation of artists were understood. In discourses around visual art, this re-orientation around experience is registered in writing from the time that emphasises precisely materia. Work of this moment, and of the first half of the 1960s, emerged carried by the language of ‘fact’, ‘surface’, ‘concreteness’, physical power, ‘particularity’ or ‘thatness’.
However, what is less often attributed to this new preoccupation with experience, at least in art history, is the importance of pragmatist philosophy and particularly the writings of William James and John Dewey. Instead, it is structuralist theory, which had begun to be translated in America very slightly after this point, that prevailed as the dominant theoretical framework through which the art of the 1960s has come to be understood. Perhaps art history’s hitherto neglect of pragmatism is reflected in James’ own characterisation of pragmatism: he described how, in the eyes of the ‘deadly respectable type’, pragmatism was a ‘characteristically American movement, a sort of bobtailed scheme of thought, excellently fitted for the man on the street, who naturally hates theory and wants cash returns immediately’. Yet, in the late 1960s, critic Barbara Rose highlighted the significance of pragmatism for a whole sweep of 1960s artists for whom John Cage was the key artistic influence while, earlier in the decade, Allan Kaprow, a student of Cage, indicated a link between materia and this branch of thought when reading the work of Jackson Pollock through Dewey’s Art as Experience. Here Kaprow describes Pollock as ‘involved in the stuff of his art as a group of concrete facts seen for the first time’. Dewey had addressed aesthetics and artistic production and reception in Experience and Nature (1925) and Art as Experience (1934 and these works shaped the state programme of social and community art practices launched under the New Deal, as well as the radical pedagogy at Black Mountain College, where Cage taught.
Returning to James’s analogy, it gives us a sense of what pragmatism might be, philosophically speaking. A cash return means a truth test, the extent to which an idea might find expression in – or have a relationship to – what can be empirically observed. Pragmatism diverts the traditional direction of philosophical thought and leads it back to experience. In ‘The Experience of Activity’ (1905), James warns: ‘You explain your given fact by your “principle,” but the principle itself, when you look clearly at it, turns out to be nothing but a previous little spiritual copy of the fact’. Instead, James advocated ‘the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, “categories,” supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts’. Yet, of equal importance for James was the question of the nature of experience that this new perspective raised, and he called this concern for experience radical empiricism. One of James’s most frequently quoted articulations of radical empiricism comes in the essay ‘A World of Pure Experience’:
I give the name of ‘radical empiricism’ to my Weltanschauung […]. It is essentially a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts, like that of Hume and his descendants, who refer these facts neither to Substances in which they inhere nor to an Absolute Mind that creates them as its objects. But it differs from the Humean type of empiricism in one particular which makes me add the epithet radical. To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.
James is perhaps at his most radical when conceiving the kind of ‘mosaic’ world that could contain experience with no a priori ordering principle or matter. Such a world would be a oneness, in that all experience would be equally real and somehow tied, but at the same time it would be plural insofar as the experience of difference and disjuncture must itself be real. When musicological secondary literature discusses Cage’s links to James, this conception of the ‘mosaic’ world is often described as James’s ‘cosmic’ thought. James’s cosmic thought is a sort-of metaphysics that rejects any abstract structure and points to the chaos of nature, which James believed was suggested by then-recent developments in science.
The fundamentally hazardous character of the world
James’s cosmic philosophy of a universe of connected and disconnected experience is also imbued with the sense that – despite the pragmatic necessity of taking risks – the universe is ‘really dangerous’. The Will to Believe, the 1897 collection of essays in which James first espoused radical empiricism, is full of references to life as a game, a gamble, full of risk. He was sensitive to rationalism’s capacity under modernity to be both a stimulus for terrible new experiences or worries about the world and a means of denying that overwhelming riskiness. In modernity, ‘thousands of innocent magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls’, he wrote. Even at the best of times, the means by which we process the world defends us against the fact that ‘taken as it does appear, our universe is to a large extent chaotic. No one single type of connection runs through all the experiences that compose it’.
In Experience and Nature, Dewey went further. Grounding his philosophical method in James’s radical empiricism, he took some of James’s ideas about the risky and chaotic universe and developed them for the industrial age. Dewey describes ‘a fearful, an awful’, ‘an aleatory’ world: a world in which chaos and contingency are not ‘discoverable’ elements in a nature that is somehow apart from modernity, as Cage would have it, but rather are inextricable from the nature of modernity, no matter how strenuously that chaos is denied. For Dewey, existence is both ‘precarious and stable’:
Our magical safeguard against the uncertain character of the world is to deny the existence of chance, to mumble universal and necessary law, the ubiquity of cause and effect, the uniformity of nature, universal progress, and the inherent rationality of the universe […]. Through science we have secured a degree of power of prediction and of control; through tools, machinery and an accompanying technique we have made the world more conformable to our needs. […] We have heaped up riches and means of comfort between ourselves and the risks of the world. We have professionalized amusement as an agency of escape and forgetfulness. But when all is said and done, the fundamentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified, much less eliminated..
Dewey’s is a profound statement about nature as non-teleological, as simultaneously chaotic and stable, and as fundamentally, ontologically tilted by modernity. In Dewey’s vision, time is not just an inferred presence behind a veil of repetitions and sign-play; instead, it is an agent of chaos. And, while James seems to write from a position of compassion – the magazine readers’ terror is understandable, for him – Dewey, intuiting the role capitalism has to play in producing increasing extremes, chides both the consumer’s blindness and the hellbent cultural industries behind it.
Unlike in art history, in musicology discussions of Cage’s work draw on Jamesian and Deweyan philosophy to describe a nature where all things are related. However, the Deweyan vision above is less emphasised, and this might be down to cues left in Cage’s own work. Drawing on Bruno Latour, Thomas Piekut observes that Cage treats nature as if it were separate and inviolable, ringfenced. And, in comparison with Dewey, this untainted concept of nature, begins to look rather like an American Gauguinism. More generally, if a refusal of teleology, category and generality is recognisable in many of the art practices of the 1960s, and we should reconnect these to their intellectual histories in pragmatism, a cosmic sense of dread is less easily identified. Nonetheless, we might find it in the malign threat of the America envisioned by Andy Warhol’s series of disasters and, certainly, we might see it in our own moment of ecological and economic catastrophe.