John Mowitt

Red Assembly: East London Calling

Wedding at Cana, completed in 1563, filled the entire rear wall of the Palladian Refectory of the Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, placing through its formal depiction the architectural space in which the monks and their guests dined en abîme. In 1797, after the occupation of Venice, Napoleon seized the painting as spoils of war. Because of its size, the work was dismantled, cut up and re-assembled for the Louvre, where it still hangs today.

Re(a)d Work

In 1975 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt released a black box of 113 cards designed, at least initially, to help artists overcome expressive impasses. In effect, blocks. Titled, Oblique Strategies, each card contained an aphorism – for example, ‘Honor thy error as a hidden intention’ – and, as if obeying this very suggestion, a box that was ‘erroneously’ intended to aid musicians has since come to be used by people in all walks of life struggling to overcome blocks of various sorts, and to overcome them through a type of lateral, or indirect thinking. What follows, responding to the suggestive obliquity that cuts across and through theory, politics and art, could thus be understood as what happened when, confronted with the challenge of Red, I received and read a card on which appeared the word with which I began, namely, ish. Spoiler alert: this very feint defines, to stick with the fencing metaphor, the thrust of the ‘work’ that is taking place here.

Kafka’s Cage

As the preceding epigraph makes plain, the Cage of my title is John Cage, the US composer, mycologist, and unintentional, certainly reluctant, aesthetician who died in 1992. Although previously linked to Kafka by Deleuze and Guattari,2 this odd pairing calls for more than the passing attention they direct to it, and this despite the fact that the problem of how to enter the burrow (der Bau) of Kafka’s work explicitly concerns them. What justifies this attention is the way the silence that defines the relation between these two monsters of the twentieth century (to my knowledge despite Cage’s interest in Kierkegaard, he had nothing to say of Kafka who, as is well known, was an attentive reader of Kierkegaard), the way this silence can be heard to address heated questions that bear on the sociology of culture in general and the status of music within critical or “new” musicology in particular. At issue is less the matter of “expression” (dear to Deleuze and Guattari) and more what here will be referred to as “inscription,” that is, the process through which music—both as a musicological construct, and as a performance practice—can be said to belong to its moment, to its time and place. Because much of what passes for “new” under the new musicological sun bears precisely on this process—the contention, variously stated, that the extramusical influences the properly musical (and vice versa)—the amplification of Kafka’s Cage promises to agitate these turbulent waters.

Saying Yes, to No

The moment in question occurs midway through the second part of the novel titled, The Golden Age. The scene is a party thrown by Rupert Boyce (an animal management specialist) and his new wife Maia. In attendance are, in addition to notables from across the globe, the couple George Greggson and Jean Morrell, Rashaverak (an Overlord) and Maia’s brother, Jan Rodrick. In the course of the party we learn that Rashaverak is staying at the Boyce’s because of their substantial and impressive library, a library rich in holdings of paranormal literature. It appears that despite the general intellectual superiority of the Overlords, they are deeply curious about the human faculty of paranormal perception. We are also given to understand that Jan is a frustrated (both romantically and intellectually) dreamer. He perhaps more than other humans resents the edict of the Overlords: ‘the stars are not for man’. These narrative threads knot in the final event of the party, an event that centers around a ‘talking board’, a parlor game more typically known by its copyrighted name, ‘Ouija’.

Tune Stuck in the Head

Few progressive commentators on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have overlooked their troubling ironies. On November 17, 2001 Laura Bush preempted her husband, George II, by delivering his weekly radio address. Her topic: the link between terror and Islamic fundamentalism especially as the latter manifested itself in the Taliban’s treatment of women and children in Afghanistan. As she put it, ‘[T]he fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.’ Meanwhile, back at the ranch, her husband’s administration was busily preparing to criminalize so-called partial birth abortions (widely considered to be a first step toward rescinding Roe vs. Wade), and install W. David Hager as head of the Federal Drug Administration’s Commission on Reproductive Health. Dr. Hagar is an outspoken, anti-choice physician who actively promotes faith healing.