The Process That Is the World

Download or read book The Process That Is the World written by Joe Panzner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Process That Is the World grapples with John Cage not just as a composer, but as a philosopher advocating for an ontology of difference in keeping with the kind posited by Gilles Deleuze. Cage's philosophy is not simply a novel method for composition, but an extensive argument about the nature of reality itself, the construction of subjects within that reality, and the manner in which subjectivity and a self-creative world exist in productive tension with one another. Over the course of the study, these themes are developed in the realms of the ontology of a musical work, performance practices, ethics, and eventually a study of Cagean politics and the connection between aesthetic experience and the generation of new forms of collective becoming-together. The vision of Cage that emerges through this study is not simply that of the maverick composer or the “inventor of genius,” but of a thinker and artist responding to insights about the world-as-process as it extends through the philosophical, artistic, and ethical registers: the world as potential for variance, reinvention, and permanent revolution.