In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

| 55 4 Divination and Its Discontents In March 1982, Symphony Space in New York celebrated the seventieth birthday of the American composer John Cage by holding an event called “Wall-to-Wall Cage,” a fourteen-hour marathon of composers and musicians performing his works and the works of others who admired and emulated him. Cage’s works are well known for what are often called chance operations. One of his most famous pieces is entitled “4’33”,” in which the performer sits at a piano and remains silent for four minutes and thirtythree seconds. In another piece, “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” the performer places twelve radios on the stage and tunes them to different stations all at the same time. The music then is whatever happens to be on the radios at that time. These pieces are not jokes or stunts; Cage wishes to focus the audience ’s attention on the ambient or random sounds that we ordinarily take for granted. Deeply influenced by Eastern philosophies, he wants the audience to cultivate a state of serene awareness of the implicit patterns of everyday sound.1 Cage also used the Yijing (I Ching) as one of several tools to generate the data from which he designed his compositions. During this celebration of Cage’s birthday, a New York radio station interviewed Morton Feldman, another one of America’s great composers and a man given to making oracular pronouncements in a distinctive Brooklyn accent. The interviewer asked Feldman about the role of chance in Cage’s compositions. Feldman questioned the use of the term chance for describing what Cage was after. The following is a reconstruction of his comments:2 I don’t know about the word chance. We say we’re taking a chance on love. But we don’t say, we’re going to have a baby, and we’ll take a chance on whether it’s a boy or a girl. You just have a baby, and—“Oh, it’s a boy,” or “Oh, it’s a girl.” Feldman’s point seems to have been that the joy in Cage’s compositions came not from the randomness that results from the process he used to make 56 | Divination and Its Discontents those compositions but from how we allow ourselves to be receptive to those events or sounds that seem to be random. If we are looking for complex systems of interpretation that rely on physical objects and events instead of texts, we can do no better than to look to divination, that ancient practice of telling the future or gaining information from seemingly random events, procedures, or patterns; from the shape of people’s heads, to tossing dice or a bundle of sticks, or to gazing into a pool of water waiting for a vision. This chapter describes divination traditions in ancient and early medieval Judaism as well as how some of the ancient rabbis dealt with those traditions and some of the conceptions of the word and divine will that they imply. These divinatory procedures rely on what we in the modern world call chance. But different generations and cultures have different approaches to the problem of chance. The idea of pure chance—that is, the idea that something simply happens without a purpose or intention behind it—is not an idea all societies share; indeed, the idea that everything happens for a reason is the premise behind the art of divination. Those conceptions of the world can be illuminated by highlighting some modern approaches to chance operations, how they differ with premodern approaches, and the problems they both share. Dada and Divination John Cage’s attitude toward chance, as interpreted by Feldman, stands in contrast to the approach taken by an earlier generation of artists, the Dada and Surrealist movements of the early twentieth century. The Dadaists relied on chance operations for many of their iconoclastic works, for example, cutting up words from a magazine article and rearranging them randomly to produce a poem. These acts were an aggressive assertion of irrationality during the breakdown of the nineteenth-century moral and social order with World War I. Likewise, the Surrealists were interested in unleashing the irrationality of the unconscious but also took delight in random juxtapositions. “The situation of the surrealist object” was a principle whose motto was “as beautiful as the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table.”3 It is not as easy to generate irrationality as it might...

Share