Rational discourse generates order. For the rational subject, there is a necessary imperative to think in a particular way. The sensual (empirical) self is displaced in favour of an ordered self, the body becomes a useful, servile instrument. The rational community structures individuals in formal terms, as a functional unit of rational discourse. An individual is interchangeable with any other individual. My neighbour is seen in terms of an alter-ego, a parallel self opposed to me. The binary systems of rational discourse set up an opposition where my neighbour is seen as a competitor, an opponent to be defeated. An argument develops. Language orders.

Information technology places top priority on the efficient and effective communication of messages. The "information age" promises a maximization of information transmission, ordered rational discourse freed of unnecessary noise or irrational static. Effectively little more than a redistribution of power, the mass promotion of such clear, clean messages functions to marginalize certain "noisy" elements of the community who "misuse" the codes or channels of communication. Utopian fantasies of an information revolution belie the fact that we are never going to communicate any better than we have always communicated. Perhaps the information revolution is simply a more efficient and effective way of organizing and transmitting orders.

Rather than presenting writing as a mode of communication in the usual sense of transmitting ideas, the texts of the recently late John Cage present writing as a mode of non-communication. While he is known primarily as a composer, Cage composed what he called "Mesostics", language pieces for a single instrument, a human voice. Mesostics are similar to acrostics in that there is text running horizontally across a page, but at the same time there is a word (a proper name, for example) running vertically down the page. Cage capitalised the vertical word while all other letters are lowercase. He composed his mesostics by using chance operations to generate a word pool from source material, then constructing the texts using a series of rules. Writing as composition rather than rational explanation or analysis.

In his mesostics, Cage affirms the sounds, rhythm and timbre of language. In a similar manner to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, pieces of language change by permutation, words resonate with different meanings with each new context and each new (visual/aural) placement. Cage’s method allows words to fall into place rather than forcing them into place according to predetermined rules of syntax and grammar. Rather than writing according to taste, habit or familiarity, Cage proposes questions, reorganising source material within his system. Writing not subordinated to linear order-speech which transmits messages between point A and point B. For Cage, while there are certainly rules and responsibilities, there is no direction. Words vibrate. Language sings.

In his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University in 1989, Cage composed a series of mesostics entitled, method Structure Intention Discipline Notation Indeterminacy Interpenetration Imitation Devotion Cirumstances Variables Structure Nonunderstanding Contingency Inconsistency Performance (more conveniently known as I-IV — lectures one to four). I-IV included source material from a range of texts including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor. Similar to his dispersion of sounds in his earlier musical compositions, in this mesostic, Cage disperses these voices across the visual space of the page and across the aural space of his listeners. The focus is on the emptiness that surrounds each word, the idea that each word "sounds" alone with its own richness while still interacting with the larger collection of words. This is non-communication based on the recognition of the vibrations of intensity that issue forth from the singularity of a voice. To communicate in this sense is to hear "the noise in the message", the excess that escapes rational discourse. In between the words, in the material sound itself, exists another, more profound communication.

It is no longer a question of obtaining a predetermined message but of listening to the materiality of words, the music of language. In these terms, writing serves no useful function. There is no exchange of information from point A to point B. While rational discourse depersonalizes and orders, Cage’s poetics acknowledge the singularity of each word and the singularity of each listener. Resonance without a conclusion. Not self-expression but an expression of self. Words vibrate. Language sings.