WHICH MEANS IT'S BECOME

a staple assumption in the haute demi-monde of theory that epistemology is now nothing more or less than a subset of language theory. We'd better start looking for the outside fast, before all the oxygen gets used up.

This is not to say that it's possible by violent claustrophobic reaction to throw down the goggles of our virtual textualities and wander innocent abroad. It does indeed seem logically impossible (at least by certain well-known principles of noncontradiction) to stand entirely, or even largely, outside the structures of our language. Nothing prevents us, though, from exercising multiple and hyper logics in certain high-risk aesthetic enterprises that create in their disjunctions with our metanarratives, apertures/gaps/grounds-zero, glimpses of other possibilities, other logically improbable worlds. This formal rupture—opening out to a complex reality—characterizes the avant-pragmatism of John Cage's art.