jean-pierre de la porte on cornelius cardew and after…
Cardew and Christian Wolff both take up questions directly and pragmatically and try to fill and reshape the shadow of Adorno.
I remember when the great american philosopher Hilary Putnam became Maoist and rewrote his own highly technical analytic philosophy as an auto critique- a moment right off the pages of Bellow or Stoppard.
today the problems have shifted- Mao belongs in the history of religion , Marx is now most accurately accessed via Deleuze, the field is neocolonial rather than post imperial -Mbembe and Said replace Castro and Lenin and the enemy is identity and universality - the two weapons in Cardews armory. In this context Mantra looks radical- particulalrly in its mysticism- and Stockhausen joins Kafka, Bacon Artaud and van Gogh as a saint of the mineure while Cardew becomes as quaint as an Orthodox Freudian or a Christian Scientist. Christine Lucia is incubating a new kind of discussion of Cardew that may rescue him from the comic genre of spiteful Stockhausen disciples: Cardew’s polemic and the Neue Einfachkeit are sparks from the same furnace.
Nevertheless musical South Africa ought to read Cardew and this book ought to fly between indignant and enthusiastic readers for a long time. South Africa never had its Malcolm X or Franz Fanon or Leopold Senghor -the closest it came to Genet was Vyfster - and even Adorno remains a kind of mystery cult reserved for postgraduates. The musical right should read Cardew to learn how bankrupt its missionary and patronizing attitudes are and the musical left should read Cardew to be reminded that they are fighting an institutional form – a network with its own cronyism, admins, economy and forms of judgment - and not the dimwitted individuals that fly off its surface – for they too are the victims of their class.
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