4:33
“It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”
Fredric Jameson [1]
Stuart Lee in the Royal College of Art's Hangar Space with a Cello
Six years before Mark Fisher's use of the above quote was utilised as a chapter title in the publication Capitalist Realism, Frederick Jameson had already made use of this quote in his essay, Future Cities, for the New Left Review to argue that apocalyptic imagery in literature and film helps escape any such capitalist realism and demonstrates how we can imagine alternative endings. [2] My project at this juncture explores whether an end can be possible, and if so, what markers do we use to quantify our resolution with capitalism’s ending.
Jameson uses the apocalypse as a way to imagine a transformation from the current socio-economic systems that leave us bereft to believe in any alternative to capitalism alone – even if Margaret Thatcher's old worldview assures us that there is none [3]- and thus by generating alternative visions of our future we can discover a re-imagined coda. Yet, what is needed, and I posit, is a resolution to the losses we find in capitalism’s perceived successes. And more so, the space to find them in silence. The worrisomely speculative ways of seeing our end under capitalism need not be the only prescribed future ahead of us. Using John Cage’s 4:33 [4] and contemplating the loss of our future as a speculative tool, I ask - through the use of a cello to perform Cage’s work - that we understand our losses as ours, a way to reclaim capitalism’s fixed epistemological frameworks and find ways to reorder loss. Jameson goes further to critique how the same oversubscription to an "old world" view makes it hard to speculate on any potential to transform -in real terms, through the collapse of capitalism– the positive construction of belief outside of capital into something that acts as an alternative framework of understanding. [5] So, in the act of lament, we can only be given a simulacrum of any real construction of grief. What we try to manifest from our collectivism and belief systems outside of capitalism may never be enough to overturn the losses embedded in its human costs. Even more disconcertingly, any such constructions of reconciliation with the past are lost and embedded in the systems that govern and control how we imagine a future beyond our collective understanding of the real and its losses. Therefore, Using Cage’s invitation to the future via the sheet music to 4:33 as a way to engage with the old world, we can enter a place for conversation, agency, and healing and speak through the performance of lament to the spaces that will generate a new understanding of our losses and the belief systems they are held in.
John Cage wrote his silent movement titled 4:33 in 1952. Ever since this moment, and after its inaugural performance by David Tudor at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock NY silence has never really been considered as just, well, inert. Therefore, through silent performance, can the creation of non-space act as a catalyst toward the individual's agency to critique capitalism's psychic hegemony? What are we to grieve, and in what order before moving forward within a post-capitalist paradigm? What losses go unnoticed in a hyper-mediated age, where the over saturation and pace of capitalism outpace and overshadow the low hum [6] of human fatigue? Can the individual unearth a more prosperous relationship to commodity and consumerism through collectivism, performance, and degrowth paradigms? We are taught in modern occidental thinking that productivity and continual growth are signifiers of good living. Markets and globalism reinforce that accumulation and expansion are synonymous with progress. However, as we grapple with unchecked capitalism's ecological and social consequences, it becomes imperative to challenge these entrenched beliefs. Through the performative act of lament, we confront the hidden costs of capitalist growth, acknowledging the losses obscured by its relentless drive for profit. By questioning the metrics of loss underpinning our current socio-economic systems, which build in repeated modes of necro-political policy advocations and human overload, my project intersects at this point so to reclaim silence and stillness as an act of subversion—a refusal to be complicit in the relentless pursuit of productivity and consumption.
[1] Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review, 21, 2003, pp. 65–79 (p. 76).
[2] Ibid
[3] See ‘Speech to Conservative Women’s Conference | Margaret Thatcher Foundation.’
<https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104368> [accessed 10 July 2024]. Bottom of p. 8
[4] In an age of atomic habits and the slight, imperceptible changes in our behaviour, 4:33 acts as a counter to our current denials and crisis stamina. To use Cage who said, ‘I am trying to change my habits of seeing. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing. We can use this as a framework to find ourselves in the precarity of our future and hear our losses. ‘The Sound of Silence. Cage and Rauschenberg Take On A New Life With MusicArt.’, ARTMUSELONDON, 2018 <https://artmuselondon.com/2018/12/21/the-sound-of-silence-cage-and-rauschenberg-take-on-a-new-life-with-musicart/> [accessed 11 April 2024].
[5] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2007), p. 97. By positioning these narratives in relation to the "old world," Jameson invites us to reflect on the present condition while engaging with speculative visions of possible worlds that transcend the limitations of current socio-economic paradigms. This dialectical approach encourages a critical assessment of our societal trajectory and opens up spaces for 4:33 to envision and strive toward a more desirable speculation of loss in the future.
[6] The term low hum is used by Harris as a way to identify the spectral, indeterminate, and lingering imbalances that manifest as the unspoken injustice of modern political doctrines that too closely mirror the debilitating Neo-liberalism we see in the United States. See John Harris, ‘We Pay a Lot More for a Lot Less, and People Know It. That’s Why Sunak’s Tories Were Thrashed in These Elections’, The Guardian, 5 May 2024, section Opinion <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/05/rishi-sunak-tories-local-elections-thurrock-tory-council> [accessed 6 May 2024] para. 6.