The Afterlives of Indeterminacy

This article explores composer John Cage’s turn to practice in the 1960s, placing it in a history of chance that extends into the nineteenth century, when the speculations of finance capitalism, the measurement of norms and their deviations, the statistical analysis of population and disease, and the assessment and management of risk all produced ways of calculating and mitigating risk. Cage and his primary collaborator, the pianist and electronic musician David Tudor, eschewed discrete, individual works and developed shared techniques and materials that flowed from night to night and problematised the notion of individual authorship. This improvisatory mode of action opened Cage up to complexities of indeterminacy that might have escaped him previously, most notably how one narrows the vast range of unforeseen possible outcomes by working with trusted partners and developing shared expectations and desires in a manner congruent with Michel Foucault’s classic definition of power: an action upon possible future or present actions. The article focuses on Cage’s work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and especially Cunningham’s important Event format, as well as Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008), Cage’s Variations IV (1963), and Pauline Oliveros’s In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer (1969).