JOHN CAGEANARCHY
New York City - january 1998
Wesleyan University Press, 2001
"The poems ... create space for rethinking what anarchy and, more immediately, sovereignty can mean in a fully globalized 21st century ... Cage's methods, intentions and good will are impeccably rendered on a platform that is at once fiercely inventive and deeply concerned for the collective human freedom within its own governance ... [this book] brilliantly highlights the political commitments of his work as a whole."
— Publishers Weekly
A major American thinker of the 20th century muses on anarchism.
"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.
