Process That Is the World

<i>The Process That Is the World </i>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.