Kafka’s Cage

Abstract

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.