In his critique of Cage, Theodor Adorno wrote:

The risk I am alluding to manifests itself in what I have heretically termed the loss of tension. The real social emasculation of the individual, which everyone feels, does not leave the artist unscathed. It is scarcely imaginable that in an age when the individual is so
diminished and is conscious of his impotence and apathy, he should feel the
same compulsion to produce as did individuals in more heroic epochs. Given the
anthropology of the present age, the call for a non-revisionist music is to
expect too much. Composers tend to react to it by renouncing any control of
their music by their ego. They prefer to drift and to refrain from intervening,
in the hope that, as in Cage's bon mot, it will be not Webern speaking, but the music itself. Their aim is to transform psychological ego weakness into aesthetic strength.

To give some context, we should note that at the time Adorno was deeply interested in what he called the 'authoritarian personality'. Like many thinkers of the time he was engaged with trying to understand how so many people could blindly follow such a malignant leader as Hitler. Borrowing some insights from American behavioral sciences (he was living in LA at the time) and a framework from Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Adorno argued that the objective conditions of contemporary society had so withered the ego that the ordinary individual was led in to the authoritian personality - that is, replacing his own lost ego with the mass ego solidified under one leader.

Adorno seems to have seen Cage failing to resist at this moment, and rather merely transforming the given problem into a supposed aesthetic, without registering the dangers there. My argument throughout is that this kind of critique of Cage fails to register the transformative aspect of his project - in a sense like criticizing a caterpillar for not being able to fly.

So, then, what is this transformation, what is the technological production of global transparency? In his work on Cage, art historian Branden Joseph has argued, quite persuasively, that Cage was influenced by the notion of transparency in Laslo Moholy-Nagy's New Vision. This transparency comes mostly from sculpture and architecture (think Mies van der Rohe or Duchamp's Nude Descending a Stair Case) where the artwork is not entirely separate from the world around it. It is transparent in the sense that, as Cage wrote of Duchamp, it does not force attention to one point or another, but rather allows it move around the various nodes of the sculpture, and even to look through it to the world beyond. The point is not that things become completely transparent, some absolute monism, some God's eye view of everything, but rather that determination of vision gives way to an openness of vision.

There is perhaps another way to think about Cage's notion of transparency, and this comes from Suzuki's Zen and Japanese Culture (which unfortunately I don't have with me, nor can I find a searchable copy on-line). Suzuki there makes the point that both immanence and transcendence have misconceived the subject-object relation, since in both there is either a subject immanent to a world, or transcendent of a world, but in neither cause is there what he calls a transparency between subject and object. This would mean something like what Cage meant about Duchamp's painting - its not that the painting isn't there, or the subject, or the world. Nor is it that all three have specific meanings and determinations that connect. Rather, it would point to the possibility that each of these things could interact in an achieved freedom - that is, by working on one's self(via practices of anonymity, precision, chance)to a space where you could freely interact with objects.

Of course this does sound much lighter than the heavy-hand of Adorno, and we risk a facile old distinction between mysticism and rationality. In discarding terms like immanence and transcendence, it seems Suzuki is interested in getting out of these problems. And he is not trying to do so, explicitly he says this in various texts, in the Hegelian fashion of combining the oppositions and raising them to a higher level. To the contrary, he is trying to dissolve the very oppositions themselves - this also is the work of transparency.

In a famous anecdote from Silence, Cage writes about Suzuki's lecture where he flies all the way from Japan to try to explain a word in Chinese that he cannot in fact explain - and how this is, in a way, the point. We could see here a kind of dull mysticism, but the context of the anecdote is elsewhere. Plane travel is what is key here, and the fact of Suzuki's movements across space and time, the fact of the technological production of new modes of transparency. In the anecdote, this global openness does not mean that things become clear. Rather, it means that we see what is not clear, and learn to work with that.