Chance Operations
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"It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I
went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not
expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one
high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my
blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to
hear those two sounds was that they were set into
vibration without any intention on my part. That
experience gave my life direction, the exploration of
nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music. Yes, but how? I gave up making choices. In their place I put the asking of questions.
The answers come from the mechanism, not the wisdom of
the I Ching, the most ancient of all books: tossing
three coins six times yielding numbers between 1 and
64."
John Cage, 1990
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"Everything that issues freely from ourselves represents us" is one thing that Tristan Tzara had to say about chance or spontaneity. Perhaps he was influenced by the current, popular practice of psychotherapy that had come from Freud. But Tristan's peer, Hans Richter, wrote this of Freud in his Dada book:
"We were concerned with chance as a mental phenomenon. It was not until later that I discovered that psychologists, philosophers and scientists were facing the same intractable problem at the same time."
Carl Jung, Freud's student turn competitor, had a view of chance he derived from eastern thought, specifically from the I Ching or The Book of Changes. The I Ching may seem like a Chinese tarot card like system, but it is much more complex, possibly more profound depending on your viewpoint. It is a system for predicting the future that relies on chance placement of tossed coins and based on Zen or Taoist ideas.
Jung wrote of the nature of the I Ching:
"If we leave things to nature [rather than logic or causality], we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception."
We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance. Theoretical considerations of cause and effect often look pale and dusty in comparison to the practical results of chance. It is all very well to say that the crystal of quartz is a hexagonal prism. The statement is quite true in so far as an ideal crystal is envisaged. But in nature on finds no two crystals exactly alike, although all are unmistakably hexagonal. The actual form, however seems to appeal more to the Chinese sage than the ideal one."
"The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed.
Jung's observations state that chance depicts reality more honestly than logic and causality. There are no restrictions while utilizing chance operations. The mind can only invent by using its store of knowledge since we only know what we already know. Chance allows for new possibilities. It frees us from the confinements of what we are conscious of and frees us from the limits of our expectations.
Whether they were aware of it or not (and they were to a certain degree), the eastern mindset that Jung was describing was indirectly adopted by the Dadaists and incorporated into their art and lives. Their thought became transformed. It sounds as if the group went through a Zen enlightenment of sorts. In the following passage from Richter's book, elements can be found that are parallel to the study of Zen {words in italics are my notes and are indicative of parallels to the experience of Zen study}:
Chance, in the form of more of less free association, began to play a part in our conversations. Coincidences of sound or form were the occasion of wide leaps that revealed connections between the most apparently unconnected ideas....
Hans Arp of the Cabaret Voltaire Dada group: "The law of chance, which embraces all other laws and is as unfathomable to us as the depths from which all life arises, can only be comprehended by complete surrender to the Unconscious. I maintain that whoever submits to this law attains perfect life...
What is chance?...Where does it lie within us? This question touched us all the more closely when we realized how big a role chance coincidences had played in our own lives, and also that the role became greater as we became more conscious of it. Carl Gustav Jung speaks of such coincidences as "the power of attraction of the Relative, as if it were the dream of a greater, to us unknowable Consciousness"....He includes chance in his concept of 'synchronicity', which he describes as an 'acausal orderedness'. This order independent of causality is not, according to Jung, to be thought of as a God standing outside the world, but as the momentary pattern formed by a continually-changing order whose shape at any given moment includes every human being, every animal, every blade of grass, every cloud, every star. The duty of man, as distinguished from the animal or the blade of grass, would thus be to be conscious of this order, to become aware of this continuous act of creation, and to achieve, through meditation, intuition and concentration, complete identity with the orderedness which has no cause....
Chance appeared to us as a magical procedure by which one could transcend the barriers of causality and of conscious volition, and by which the inner eye and ear became more acute, so that new sequences of thoughts and experiences made their appearance....This conscious break with rationality may also explain the sudden proliferation of new art-forms and materials in Dada....As the boundaries between the arts became indistinct, painters turned to poetry and poets to painting. The destruction of the boundaries was reflected everywhere. The safety valve was off. However unsafe and unknown the territory into which we now sailed, leapt, drove or tumbled, we were all sure where our path lay...And the paths led in all directions.
Such an absence of boundaries, such a 'jungle of contradictions', cannot be expected to have much in common with the cut and dried herbariums of art history. Compared with all previous 'isms', Dada must have seemed hopelessly anarchic. But for us, who lived through it, this was not so. On the contrary, it was something meaningful, necessary and life-giving. The official belief in the infallibility of reason, logic and causality seemed to us senseless - as senseless as the destruction of the world and the systematic elimination of every particle of human feeling. This was the reason why we were forced to look for something which would re-establish our humanity. What we needed to find was a 'balance between heaven and hell', a new unity combining chance and design. We had adopted chance, the voice of the unconscious - the soul, if you like - as a protest against the rigidity of straight-line thinking. We were ready to embrace, or be embraced by, the unconscious. All this grew out of the true sense of fellowship that existed among us, the climate of the age, and our professional experimentation. It developed as a necessary complement to the apparent and familiar side of our natures and of our conscious actions, and paved the way for a new unity which sprang from the tension between opposites."
Proclaim as we might our liberation from causality and our dedication to anti-art, we could not help involving our whole selves, including our conscious sense or order, in the creative process, so that, in spite of all our anti-art polemics, we produced works of art. Chance could never be liberated from the presence of the conscious artist. This was the reality in which we worked... A situation of conflict. This conflict is in itself an important characteristic of Dada. It did not take the form of a contradiction. One aspect did not cancel out the other; they were complementary. It was in the interplay of opposites, whether ideas or people, that the essence of Dada consisted....The difficulty was semantic rather than real. The 'fault' lies with language, and as language is the tool of thought, the fault lies with our way of thinking. Dada took hold of something that can neither be grasped nor explained within the conventional framework of 'either/or'. It was just this conventional 'yes/no' thinking that Dada was trying to blow sky high. This radical attack on dualistic thought was in the very nature of the movement. The liberation and expansion of thought and feeling was to be followed by the integration of both in verse, in painting, and in musical sound. "Reason is a part of feeling, and feeling is a part of reason" -Arp. As soon as this premise is accepted, the contradictions of Dada resolve themselves and a picture of the world takes shape in which, besides 'causal' experiences, others that were previously unknown and unmentioned find a place. Laws appear which include within themselves the negations of Law. Absolute acceptance of chance brought us into the realm of magic, conjurations, oracles, and divinations 'from the entrails of lambs and birds'.
This was all right for a time....As this tension between mutually necessary opposites vanished - and it ended by vanishing completely in the Paris movement - Dada disintegrated. In the resulting general tumult and chaos personal relationships disintegrated too, and so did the image of Dada in the memories of our contemporaries. We were all fated to live with the paradoxical necessity of entrusting ourselves to chance while at the same time remembering that we were conscious beings working towards conscious goals. This contradiction between rational and irrational opened a bottomless pit over which we had to walk. There was no turning back; gradually this became clear to each of us in his own secret way.
"If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha" ~Lin Chi
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"[Tzara]...cut newspaper articles up into tiny pieces, none of them longer than a word, put the words in a bag, shook them well, and allowed them to flutter on to a table. The arrangement (or lack of it) in which they fell constituted a "poem", a Tzara poem, and was intended to reveal something of the mind and personality of the author"
"Dissatisfied with a drawing he hed been working on for some time, Arp finally tore it up, and let the pieces flutter to the floor of his studio on the Zeltweg. Some time later he happened to notice these same scraps of paper as they lay on the floor, and was struck by the pattern they formed. It had all the expressive power that he had tried in vain to achieve, namely expresson. He accepted this challenge from chance as a decision of fate and carefully pasted the scraps down in the pattern which chance had determined. I was not there, of course, but I have seen the results of similar expreiments of his. Was it the artist's unconscious mind, or a power outside him, that had spoken? Was a mysterious 'collaborator' at work, a power in which one could place one's trust? Was it a part of oneself, or a combination of factors quite beyond anyone's control?"
Jean Arp's 'Arrangement according to Laws of Chance (Collage with Squares)'
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