Anarchy: New York City-January 1998

By John Cage (Author)
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Product Description
"That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." This quote from Henry David Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience is one of thirty quotations from which John Cage created Anarchy, a book-length lecture comprising twenty mesostic poems. Composed with the aid of a computer program to simulate the coin toss of the I Ching, Anarchy draws on the writings of many serious anarchists including Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, and Mario Malatesta, not so much making arguments for anarchism as "brushing information against information," giving the very words new combinations that de-familiarize and re-energize them. Now widely available of the first time, Anarchy marks the culmination of Cage's work as a poet, composer and as a thinker about contemporary society.





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Item Specifications...

Pages   91
Dimensions:   Length: 11.1" Width: 6.9" Height: 0.5"
Weight:   1.1 lbs.
Binding  Hardcover
Publisher   Wesleyan
ISBN  0819564664  
EAN  9780819564665  


Availability  100 units.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
An unnecessary enterprise  Mar 23, 2002
This book is, I regret to say, more or less an attempt by Wesleyan University Press to artificially expand their catalog of Cage's works. The observant among you will notice that this same text has already been printed once before, in Bucknell Press's _John Cage at 75_ Wesleyan has played an incredibly important role in promoting Cage's writing for forty years now, but unfortunately this addition was just plain unnecessary.

Also note that the text is littered with typographical errors that were not in the original. The layout and overall book design are beautiful however.

 
anarchic seems every bit more escapist, self-indulgent  Jan 24, 2002
John Cage was never an activist,at least not one that had tangible results toward change. His work remains amongst/ within the safe,complaisant corridors of escapist realms. He encouraged throughout his life,gently, cadre's of creators, all brilliant,provocative, interesting, and thought provoking, with a utopian flair to change the world.But to change what? Yet there is a grotesquely large gulf between these realms, opaque boundless chasms of artistic creations, notebooks, concepetual art, performance art, all spawned from the Cage Zen inspired pacifist anarchy.Yet what has this work changed as fascinanting as it remains???
It has been well known that the great anarchist thinkers that Cage utilizes here as Mikail Bakunin, Petr Kroputkin, and Murray Bookhin in the 20th Century hardly proved to mount pathways worth pursuing.They indulged in corrupt opportunists politics as those they criticized, as Kroputkin's affair with double dealings.And Bakunin spent most of his life in the Czar prisons. When he was released this rendered him a humble repenting pacifist inwardly. All their work simply remains as Cage's as fascinating, interesting, arresting probes,improvisations into history the 19th and 20 Centuries as a conceptual canvas, with an unreality for the utopian mind.
But the world still needs reform and correction,and change,there still is poverty, and malnutrition, and genocide, and corruption, and now more than ever with the turn within world politics after September 11 to Rightward magnetic attractions,with the reoccuring collapse of national currencies,(as Argentina, Brazil, South Korea)tied as a tyranny tied to the American Dollar$$ add to that the new face of corporate corruptions, as Enron which are coming more to the surface for the populace in the face of ever more speculative global capital greed within the financial world. In this light the plight and pursuit of anarchy seems infantile, accelerated to even more escapist self-indulgent, realms as Cage encourages.

There are some facinating moments in Cage's "Anarchy" here the very process of "reading" "interpreting" his mesostics, is a sense of the humanly performative, something we haven't lost the capacity for. Yet this is a self-absorbed endeavor, self-referential and need I say deeply masterbatory, hardly emancipatory in content.
We've lived admirably attentively through the revolution of the aesthetic,the conceptual, the Duchamp universe wrought with the carnage of the First World War,the Surrealists and made more transgressive,andirrational with the Second.

The Cage conceptual creative edifice was never one to gaze outward at this negative,odious impalletable world, Cage's creative magnetic fields were always one of a distant opaque, unexplainable future, made ever more distant and unreachable with each new work, further setting the light at the end of the tunnel ever further out of reach of humanity.

 

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