Dada 1916 in Theory : Practices of Critical Resistance [1 ed.] 9781781386002, 9781781380208

Citation preview

Value : Art : Politics

Dada 1916 in Theory

Dada is difficult, and the response to Dada is not easy. What emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases for the non-sense that was pitted against a self-proclaimed civilisation, critically and implicitly to propose that what coursed in 1916 continues as vitally today. Given as art-historically identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, this book proposes not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements with the emergencies of 1916–19, from laughter to ‘lautgedichte’, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata, rounding on the permanent Dada that drives against the closure of culture.

Dada 1916 in Theory Practices of Critical Resistance DAFYDD W. JONES

DAFYDD W. JONES

Dafydd W. Jones is faculty associate having lectured in art history, theory and practice at Cardiff School of Art (1995–2010), and is formerly visiting researcher to the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa. He is a contributor to the major corpus Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada (1996–2005), and edited the volume Dada Culture (2006). He is the Editor of the University of Wales Press.

Dada 1916 in Theory

Dada formed in 1916 in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion – in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, at the core of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that art history routinely exhausts by its characterisation as a ‘revolutionary movement’ of anarchic cultural dissent, in order to contest perpetuated assumptions that underlie the popular Dada myths.

www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk Cover image: Hans Arp, cover of Dada 4–5 (Anthologie Dada), 1919 © DACS 2014. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

LUP, D Jones casewrap.indd 1

21/05/2014 15:03:28

Da d a 1916 i n Th e o r y

Jones D, DADA.indd 1

21/05/2014 15:00:02

Value : Art : Politics welcomes proposals for books of all kinds committed to the socio-historical study of the value and meaning of art, past and present. Series editor Jonathan Harris Editorial board members Professor John Barrell Independent scholar

Professor Fred Orton Independent scholar

Professor David Craven University of New Mexico

Professor Griselda Pollock University of Leeds

Professor Albert Boime University of California, Los Angeles

Professor Paul Smith University of Warwick

Professor T. J. Clark Independent scholar

Professor John Tagg Binghamton University, State University of New York

Professor Stephen J. Eisenman Northwestern University

Professor Anne M. Wagner Independent scholar

Professor Jonathan Harris University of Southampton

Professor Alan Wallach College of William and Mary, Williamsburg

Professor Amelia Jones University of Manchester

Jones D, DADA.indd 2

21/05/2014 15:00:02

Dada 1916 in Theory Practices of Critical Resistance Dafydd W. Jones

L i v e r pool U ni v e r sity P r ess

Jones D, DADA.indd 3

21/05/2014 15:00:02

First published 2014 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2014 Dafydd W. Jones The right of Dafydd W. Jones to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78138-020-8 cased Web PDF eISBN 978-1-78138-600-2

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by Booksfactory.co.uk

Jones D, DADA.indd 4

21/05/2014 15:00:02

Dad 1931–2001 mynd a wnaf ar daith i’r sêr, try yr haul yn law, ond dof yn ôl, rhyw ddydd yn ôl, a chaf afael yn dy law

Jones D, DADA.indd 5

21/05/2014 15:00:02

Title page to Richard Huelsenbeck (ed.), Dada: Eine literarische Dokumentation (Hamburg: Rhowohlt, 1964), inscribed by Huelsenbeck.

Jones D, DADA.indd 6

21/05/2014 15:00:02

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction Against the ‘Infamous Thing’ 1 Dada’s Radical Negation The Declamators and Poets of Noise 2 Becoming the Dada Body Masks, Dance and Mime 3 A Disintegrating Culture Dada Violence and Degradation 4 Dadaist Disgust Ideology Theory and the Manifesto Writings 5 Hans Arp Resistance and the Philosophy of Virtual Creation 6 ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’ The Counterpoint and Counterpolitics of Language 7 The Rude Product of Luxury Dada Laughter Conclusion Permanent Dada Appendix: Zurich Dada Chronology Bibliography Index

Jones D, DADA.indd 7

ix xi 1 17 41 73 93 120 152 175 201 210 219 237

21/05/2014 15:00:02

Jones D, DADA.indd 8

21/05/2014 15:00:02

List of Illustrations

Frontispiece: Title page to Richard Huelsenbeck (ed.), Dada: Eine literarische Dokumentation (Hamburg: Rhowohlt, 1964), inscribed by Huelsenbeck. Private collection.

vi

1. Hergé, from Anturiaethau Tintin: Y Seren Wib (Tresaith: Dalen (Llyfrau) Cyf., 2011), p. 29. © Hergé/Moulinsart 2014.

xii

2. F. T. Marinetti, ‘Futurismo, definizione’ handwritten folio, n.d. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. © DACS 2014. 18 3. F. T. Marinetti, parole in libertà, in Zang Tumb Tumb, 1914, p. 105. Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. © DACS 2014. 26 4. Hugo Ball, typeset ‘Karawane’, from the Dada Almanach, 1920, p. 53. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

30

5. Photograph of Hugo Ball reciting ‘Karawane’, 1916. Kunsthaus Zürich. 33 6. Marcel Janco, Cabaret Voltaire (photograph of lost painting), 1916. Kunsthaus Zürich. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014. By kind permission of the Janco family. 42 7. Marcel Janco, Au Cabaret Voltaire, 1916. The Israel Museum. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014. By kind permission of the Janco family. 45 8. Emmy Hennings, Puppen, as reproduced in Cabaret Voltaire, 1916, p. 20. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. © 2014 The Estate of Emmy Hennings. All rights reserved.

Jones D, DADA.indd 9

57

21/05/2014 15:00:02

x

dada 1916 in theory

9. Tristan Tzara, ‘Manifeste Dada 1918’, first page as published in Dada 3, 1918, p. 1. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

94

10. Hans Arp, untitled (Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), 1917. MoMA/Scala Archives. © DACS 2014.

121

11. Hans Arp, woodcut, as reproduced in Dada 1, 1917, p. 15. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. © DACS 2014. 131 12. Hans Arp, woodcut, as reproduced in Tristan Tzara, Vingt-cinq poèmes, 1918, p. 30. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. © DACS 2014. 136 13. Hans Arp, Plant Hammer, relief, as reproduced (untitled) in 391, 8, 1919, p. 2. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. © DACS 2014.

138

14. Hans Arp, untitled painting, as reproduced in Dada 4–5 (Anthologie Dada), 1919, p. 19. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. © DACS 2014.

139

15. Hans Arp, ‘tableau en papier’ (Rectangles According to the Laws of Chance), as reproduced in Dada 2, 1917, p. 3. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. © DACS 2014.

140

16. Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, untitled (Duo-Collage), 1918. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. © DACS 2014.

143

17. Hans Arp, untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), 1916–17. MoMA/Scala Archives. © DACS 2014. 144 18. Score for ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’, as reproduced in Cabaret Voltaire, 1916, pp. 6–7. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

Jones D, DADA.indd 10

153

21/05/2014 15:00:02

Preface

Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance took its initial form in response to the interrogation of Dada in undergraduate seminars at Cardiff School of Art where, for a brief period in the noughties, I was allowed to ramp up the Dada content for art history modules. It was out of deliberate resistance to the idea that Dada amounted to anything significant as given that the documentary residue from the early twentieth century began to yield some sense from the mire of non-sense, where so many had abandoned all hope of finding any. I well remember the students who, at my behest, read and re-read the 1918 manifesto, struggling to find sense, until one day the words peeled away. Reading the manifesto of continuous contradiction on that day were Owen Gower and Beth Greenhalgh – both most suitably engaged students, I firmly believe, to realise that what was left once the words were gone was something that offered a radically new orientation within Dada, happily conceding that all conventional routes to meaning were spent. Chapter 4 of this book is (via two conferences) the direct result of that afternoon’s seminar and, for allowing me the indulgences of Dada in the noughties and for entertaining a supportive art historical community, I will always be indebted to my teaching colleagues at Cardiff – Clive Cazeaux, Jonathan Clarkson and Christopher Short. The startling presence and immediacy of Dada is rarely too far away. During the early drafting of chapter 1, for instance, Talking Heads’ 1979 ‘I Zimbra’ rapidly reconfigured into instant composing and a performance of ‘Gadji Beri Bimba’ by legendary bandleader Sig Hansen in 2010, at Cardiff’s bar and live music house Gwdihw – in the excellent company of Elis Bowen, the man with the world’s biggest knees – and that, by satisfying coincidence, on the same evening of the same month as the first Dada blast rang out and up the Spiegelgasse cobbles to break down Lenin’s door in 1916. Eighteen months later, drafting chapter 7, the resonance of Dada ‘lautgedichte’ burst through again in Captain

Jones D, DADA.indd 11

21/05/2014 15:00:02

xii

dada 1916 in theory

Haddock’s speech bubbles, reaffirming the continuity of primeval strata, ‘untouched and untroubled by logic and by the social apparatus’; before reconfiguring through musical rhythm in the renewed madness and total nothingness of Peter Blake’s emphatic and affirmative oui oui si si ja ja da da.

Amid the ongoing Dada eruptions, some passages and sections of the present work have also made previous public forays: a shorter version of chapter 1 was published in Back to the Futurists: The Avant-Garde and its Legacy (Manchester University Press, 2013) as ‘“La bomba romanzo esplosivo”, or Dada’s Burning Heart’, from a paper presented to the conference Back to the Futurists: Avant-Gardes 1909–2009 (2009) at Queen Mary University of London; the briefest passages of chapter 3 are in continuation of material presented to the conference Modern and Postmodern Avant-Gardes (2003) at Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, Cyprus, and published in collaboration with John Wall in the volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (Rodopi, 2006); parts of chapter 4 and of the conclusion were published in Dada and Beyond, Volume 2: Dada and its Legacies (Rodopi, 2012) in the chapter ‘The Location of Dada Culture: Revising the Cultural Coordinates’, completed from material presented to the conferences Mapping the Neo-Avant-Garde (2005) at the University of Edinburgh (a conference at which I arrived thanks only to the rapid response systems of Heulwen James), and Eggs Laid By Tigers: Dada and Beyond (2006) at Swansea University; a draft of chapter 5 benefited from the comments of the anonymous reader at Deleuze Studies, following the conference Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture (2010) at Cardiff University; passages in chapter 6 continue a discussion introduced in Music, Metamorphosis

Jones D, DADA.indd 12

21/05/2014 15:00:02

preface

xiii

and Capitalism: Self, Poetics and Politics (CSP, 2007) in the chapter ‘The International Language of Screaming’; and parts of chapter 7 were first presented to the conference Ethics and Politics: The Work of Alain Badiou (2002) at Cardiff University. In 2008–9, I was able to trial chapters 1 and 4 thanks to the most elegauntly crafted typesetting of Eira Fenn Gaunt of Pentyrch; and, throughout the period spent working on this book, I have been suffered gladly by Georgina Reese and, in her absence, by Lucie Klimankova at Howard Gardens library, who routinely intervene to save me from falling into arrears. In the meantime, in pursuit and procurement of the images that are here reproduced, my sincerest thanks are due to Valentina Bandelloni and Alan Kirby-Woolmore at Scala (Florence and London); Francesca Barbi; Günter Berghaus at the University of Bristol; Cécile Brunner at Kunsthaus Zürich; Cécile Camberlin at Moulinsart SA, Brussels; June Can and Moira Fitzgerald at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Amy English at DACS; Willy Fadeur at Casterman, Brussels; Lisa Hanstein at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz; Andreas Heese and Anneliese Schäfer-Junker at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Dadi Janco and Michaela Mende-Janco; Alun Ceri Jones, imprimateur at Dalen (Llyfrau) Cyf. (whose parents and mine are, by wonderful coincidence, the same people); Rachel Laufer at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Ute Smetek at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Sébastien Tardy, assistant curator at Fondation Arp; Magnus Wieland at Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek; Raya Zommer, director of the Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod; and, in accruing and lasting debt, to Timothy Shipe, Curator of the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa, who, since my first meeting with him in 1994, has proved to be the most devoted and admirable of Dada documentarians (it was during the same snowbound winter in Iowa, I recall, that Rudolf Kuenzli, subsequently Director of the Dada Archive, gave me unreserved time to speak of Dada proto and proper, and I will not forget his great generosity on that occasion). I am indebted also, in no small measure, to Kari Dahlgren at the University of California Press, and to Alison Welsby and the anonymous manuscript readers at Liverpool University Press, for their wise and deliberate advice in steering this work to its final state. At Liverpool and at Carnegie, Lancaster, I am equally indebted to Patrick Brereton and to Sue Barnes. The lines that follow the book’s dedication are reproduced by kind permission of their author, outlander Meic Mortimer Stevens, to whom I state my gratitude. And all the while, as meaning relentlessly escapes in a world of none, the artistic and intellectual challenge posed by Dada has not diminished

Jones D, DADA.indd 13

21/05/2014 15:00:03

xiv

dada 1916 in theory

in the century since the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire. It has, rather, intensified under proliferating means of engagement. It remains a source of real wonder that the exhaustive documentation of the fleeting years around 1916 continues to provoke thought into still new critical and, at times, radically breathtaking directions. The title Dada 1916, then, is in deliberate appropriation of John Cale’s 1973 masterpiece Paris 1919, one as the other naming the historical moments that shaped the lie of the political (Versailles) and the cultural (Zurich) land for what came after. My Dada initiator in 1983, then colleague in 1995, and now Oxford grandee is Martin Ignatius Gaughan, upon whom I wish perpetual peace in at least part-payment of the enormous debt that I owe; for his patience with and close attention to Dada 1916 in its draft states, I am and will remain in gratitude. The book has responded to much in its environment, and its preparation inevitably acknowledges many: though there are no rights of exclusion, I will make the profoundest submission to Catherine Belsey, Siân Chapman, Stephen C. Foster, Curt Germundson, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Henry Maas, Gareth Rees and Dietrich Scheunemann†, in all of whose thought and conduct I have found constancy beyond a thousand plateaus. At home, I have been observed in almost as many states of absence by those who always deserve more. There is no beginning and no end to what I can say to Denise, my long-suffering inamorata, whose tolerance is the only thing that makes my intolerance tolerable; and to our daughters Lleucu and Gwen who, in their struggle for freedom, daily rewrite the revolution of everyday life. Finally, the book is for my mother, Margaret, and, as the cars fly by, in memory of my father, Arwyn.

Jones D, DADA.indd 14

21/05/2014 15:00:03

Introduction: Against the ‘Infamous Thing’ Do you think this work must be fragmentary because I give it to you (and have to give it to you) in fragments?

– Friedrich Nietzsche, 18781

There is something counterintuitive in thinking too long and hard about Dada. In a cultural formation of immediacy and directness, the philosopher’s words ought to provide us with the pertinent reminder that there is no being behind doing – the deed is everything. Yet the eternal return of Dada’s history makes it repeatedly necessary to consider the parts that make the sum, and what issued from its extraordinary eruption in Zurich in 1916. The laughter, the linguistic dislocation and the aggressive posturing that routinely characterise Dada all force their way out of art-historical anecdote determinedly to rise to the expectations of cultural production that configure the political. Better than their invocation as radical gestures, so espoused in a worn fantasy of the ultimate counterculture, is their critical interrogation against any assumption of radicality. Dada does disorient and confuse, with the consequence that its bearing on present interests and practice will frequently enough appear diffuse. But when Dada disorients, it does so strategically as dissent precipitates political engagement and questions the production and value of subjectivity – and specifically the production of collective subjectivity ‘by which a perception is expressed within the subject, that is, how the subject actively prehends a datum, whether an emotion or consciousness in general’.2 Case by case in its fragmentary residue are rendered affirmations of Dada’s conception in counterintuition and, one might argue, it is in dogged pursuit of counterintuition that Dada will begin productively to yield its real radicality.

Jones D, DADA.indd 1

21/05/2014 15:00:03

2

dada 1916 in theory

I will state at the outset that what we encounter in 1916 is not a movement. It is a formation; more precisely a constellation, between whose objects (the subsequently named ‘Dadaists’) we observe the relations that make them and the greater object (that is, the constellation ‘Dada’) visible. The observed relations, however, are not engendered by the Dadaists themselves – objects don’t engender relations – but the relations are in some sense a phenomenological effect or emission of the contingencies and emergencies of 1916, the ‘environment’ of early twentieth-century avant-gardism. Their presence is read as constitutive: Our experience of the world is meaningful only insofar as we institute relations between perceptions – it is these relations that make experience cohere sufficiently to be called understanding. As such, our construction of the world is an integral aspect of our experience of it; in fact, we experience it as we construct it.3 The impassive nature of perception is well rehearsed, but what we also experience in constructing the world and its singularities (that is, its ‘parts’) is a potentially infinite variety of relations between one and other. The critical point, which will be developed in what follows in this book, is that an insistence on the dissociation of object parts – perceptions, if you will – renders conditions of analysis that challenge the stupefying and maligned (yet not wholly rejected) psychoanalytic interrogation. The latter, for example, has been roundly critiqued for neuroticising as it designates the schizophrenic ‘sick’ and as its emphasis falls on questioning why things happen (what repressed datum made the schizophrenic ‘sick’?) – this being a mode of interrogation that assumes the existence of a pre-social self. From the established critique of psychoanalysis (and of psychoanalysts, of course, who say ‘so many things about the necessity for money in the cure … [but remain] supremely indifferent to the question of who is footing the bill’)4 is developed the project of schizoanalysis that is variously concerned with how things happen (how did we end up branding the schizophrenic ‘sick’?), how we move to internalise subjection (and call it ‘repression’). It is the project named schizoanalysis which ‘schizophrenizes, instead of neuroticizing like psychoanalysis’5 – a refocusing that Dada historian Stephen C. Foster has intimated in the move ‘from what the Dadas’ activities added up to, to how they added up’.6 If everything is indeed process, and if schizophrenia is read as process, then the Deleuzian lexical register follows: The task of schizoanalysis is that of tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions; liberating the prepersonal singularities they

Jones D, DADA.indd 2

21/05/2014 15:00:03

introduction: against the ‘infamous thing’

3

enclose and repress; mobilizing the flows they would be capable of transmitting, receiving, or intercepting; establishing always further and more sharply the schizzes and the breaks well below conditions of identity; and assembling the desiring-machines that countersect everyone and group everyone with others.7 What, if not egos buckling under presuppositions, dominated the formative Dada posturings in the middle years of the First World War? It is to those singularities, those unique points of ‘perpetual recommencement and of variation’8 – Ball, Hennings and the others – that the present study will first orient itself in working towards their liberation as singularities and the mobilisation of their flows, and in negotiating the breaks, ruptures, discontinuities and ‘schizzes’ of the eventual desiring-production of Zurich Dada. Far from the desire that in Western metaphysics can crudely be characterised as wanting something without needing it – the Oedipal fantasy of what we ‘lack’ – the desiring-production of schizoanalysis initiates critical redress to that tradition of metaphysics, conceptually connecting to the Marxian reading of social production. The effect is to affirm the production of what we want, or what we desire, as being the result not only of psychical energy (libido) but equally of corporeal energy (labour-power … okay, labido!). This is one fundament of the critique of Freudian psychoanalysis: The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that is the historically determined product of desire … There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.9 The unstated proposition that relates to this investment is that if society (or, by reduction, the body) wants something, then it must be good. This is to follow Spinoza in reformulation of the same in revolutionary terms, that is to say desire ‘does not “want” revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right … by wanting what it wants’.10 Of course, perhaps the most significant investment in observance of desiring-production is the denial of any mediation or sublimation – the denial of any repression, therefore – between desire and the social field, signalling that any occurrence of psychic repression comes about only as a consequence of social oppression. Transformation of the latter will affect the former; but how to effect transformation remains to this day the most urgent and problematic (because consistently compromised) task of socio-cultural

Jones D, DADA.indd 3

21/05/2014 15:00:03

4

dada 1916 in theory

oppositionality. At the forefront of the activities of Zurich’s Dadaists in 1916 was a deliberate resistance to and counter-engagement with not only what they were nominally ‘opposed’ to but, crucially also, of and with their own disaffected and displaced bourgeois condition. This was never more apparent than in their reactive relation to the daily lives and habits of coexistent others, coexistent but alienated, ‘separated from one another, separated from what they are in others, and separated from themselves’.11 Here it is Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967 situationist treatise, The Revolution of Everyday Life, which comments on the failed processing of sensation in a technologised society, the condition of sensory separation and alienation that stirred Walter Benjamin, somewhere in between Vaneigem and Dada, to demand of avant-garde art the restoration of ‘the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity’s self preservation’.12 Though the oppositionality of Dada is easily assumed, we are alert to any casual invocation of ‘oppositionality’ as being an inherent and significant flaw in the formation’s continued presentation and representation. As soon as the first step had been taken in 1916, there was dissent within the ranks at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Dada soirées, and concerns were very quickly raised over strategic but repeated attempts to stir audiences out of passive-receptive states – and the very repetition of deliberate provocation and shock served only to undermine the gesture of oppositionality. Indeed, after Dada (several decades after Dada) the same concerns, as implied criticism, continued notably among Dada’s elder statesmen in their contestation and dismissal of the so-called Neo-Dada of the young ones, the neo-avant-garde, where a repetition or reappearance of anti-aesthetic gestures was observed in the form of ‘comic strips or as crushed automobile bodies … Uncompromising revolt has been replaced by unconditional adjustment.’13 Repetition will register for us within avant-garde practice alongside its best and most ‘contradictory, mobile, and dialectical, even rhizomatic’ qualities.14 And this sense of ‘unconditional adjustment’, moreover, is both provocative and productive. Intended as a swipe by Hans Richter against the Neo-Dadaism of the early 1960s it, despite itself, potentially now offers a revised and continuously variable mode of productive critical engagement that can be directed back at historical Dada. The nature of such engagement is not to give up on Benjamin’s appeal to self-preservation, but to orient markers for a strategy of survival that will absorb the effect of the breaks and ruptures of life itself in order to cope with ‘the daily shocks of the modern world … [and what is made manifest is that a] response to stimuli without thinking has

Jones D, DADA.indd 4

21/05/2014 15:00:03

introduction: against the ‘infamous thing’

5

become necessary for survival’.15 Responding thus, ‘without thinking’, is to divest the subject of its daily security in its own sovereignty and to grant the ‘thinking subject’ release from such amusing mechanisms as dialectical materialism, conceptual mechanisms that might well only guide us ‘to the opinions we had in the first place’.16 The dialectic itself, however, signals beyond its own operation as it positively denies all sense of the eternal, the final or the sacred, insisting that the introduction of any boundaries is always relative and contingent, never absolute. Getting beyond the dialectic – any dialectic – is one of the first critical junctures as oppositionality undergoes revision, as we negotiate the structure of dualism (dualism, in Fredric Jameson’s words, being ‘the strong form of ideology … [which may] disguise its dual structure under any number of complicated substitutions’).17 Actively to read the way in which the dialectic functions will guide us in moderating the state of ‘process’ or of ‘becoming’ itself. The dialectic requires that positions be in place that are opposable – inside and outside, major and minor (maxima and minima), us and them, state and nomad – and that some alignment between the positions be established before the possibility of any kind of progress emerges. Now, most familiar and most widely invoked are those positions that are ultimately the easiest to assume and of which any responsibility can most easily be absolved: refusal and dissent, two acknowledged positions of negation, which, as negationist, can casually be nailed to the political. It is this casual politicising that we know has been the art-historical case with Dada, and it is a ‘politicising’ that generates its own problems. Unless oppositional stances are read as other than refusal and dissent, they will find themselves blind to ‘the very ontological force that exists prior to that which [they] seek to negate’.18 By themselves, refusal and dissent are reactive positions; even when refusal manifests as resistance in response to the conditions of a repressive state (it is in this sense that resistance to the state is, paradoxically, a product of the state), we are faced with the complex that ‘political art practice will always be reactive and involved in negative critique and in fact [be] determined by that which it critiques’.19 This much suggests an impasse of sorts, an aporia, yet its suggestion prompts us to look further and beyond, towards the production of new modes of thought, towards the necessity of paradoxes and indeed towards the revision of subjectivity itself. The dissenter’s own resistance – in the same manner as the subject’s self-repression – will be termed secondary for as long as it continues to be a response to conditions set out by others and elsewhere (by the state and exercised through the state apparatuses, let’s

Jones D, DADA.indd 5

21/05/2014 15:00:03

6

dada 1916 in theory

say, and under which conditions the subject can always blame somebody else, blame the state, and through projective accusation and recrimination make the state responsible for the world – thus absolving herself of any responsibility). It will be reactive, therefore, and negate creativity. Yet it is precisely through the critique and breakdown of ideological state activity that a new resistance manifests, characterised not as secondary but, crucially, as primary – a development that accepts responsibility and proposes redemption for the notion of creativity: If … one sees resistance as primary, and the state apparatus as secondary (as capturing ‘this life’), then one becomes involved in affirming this ontologically prior moment. This is the move from critique to creativity, or in fact the location of critique from within creativity.20 So demonstrated here, in art historian Simon O’Sullivan’s observation, is a register of critical immanence and an assured understanding of refusal and dissent as precipitant in the move towards what more properly constitutes creativity. That such a move must not necessitate the abandonment of the former in favour of the latter, however, is vitally important and will allow for conditions that permit two moments or movements (evocative of the ‘two speeds’ of Dada),21 wherein what emerges from deliberate non-participation is at once affirmative and creative. The case is to be submitted in this book, then, that the varied Dada platforms of 1916 and the shock of the immediately following years were developed with deliberation and deployed with gusto precisely because they gave primacy to what can now be named Dada resistance. Reconfiguring the nature of Dada engagement initiates thinking about art practice and political activity in terms that are not always associated with either art or politics, or with the way in which art establishes connections to the wider social milieu. It may involve a particular self-interrogation that concentrates on the production of subjectivity, and indeed an active and processual intervention in our own self-creation. To this extent, the political is determinant, as we would expect, in the critique of institution and of ideology. But it also becomes actively determinant in the production of subjectivity – subjectivity as a political field – as the coordinates of Dada manifest the impulse to participate in practices that may lead to a self-engagement productive of the possibilities of transforming and exceeding our selves. Habitual selves, of course, have long been tested and exploited in the social field. The proto-Dada (or ante-Dada) body, for instance, was itself an idea

Jones D, DADA.indd 6

21/05/2014 15:00:03

introduction: against the ‘infamous thing’

7

implicated through a plurality of possible selves; the body continuously confused with the subject and whose residence was somewhere other than in its representation (that is, its re-presentation, its ‘presenting again’). It was to be found not in sameness but in difference. If there is no being behind doing, as Nietzsche once reasoned, Deleuze’s philosophical advance on Nietzsche posits difference behind doing and, indeed, behind everything – ‘but behind difference there is nothing’.22 Thinking in terms of difference initiates a philosophical affirmation of surfaces, in the sense that surface phenomena cease to function as secondary to what resides elsewhere, and the philosopher herself functions ‘on a level with the surface’.23 It is perhaps the most notorious pluralist among proto-Dadaists that I would invoke on this point, the almost mythical poet and boxer Arthur Cravan: who sang of his own ‘fatal plurality’; in whose unreal life ‘he never was the things he became’;24 who reflected upon how ‘man is only so unfortunate because a thousand souls inhabit a single body’;25 who disappeared in 1918, but whose apprehensions continue to this day.26 Now, systems of pluralities and compositions of series (each series defined on the basis of difference) make consistent invocation of the term ‘singularity’ to signal that which is greater than the ‘individual’: What is neither individual nor personal are, on the contrary, emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution, radically distinct from fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of the syntheses of consciousness.27 The singularity of the one extends towards the singularity of the next, the other, and together they are mapped into the greater constellation that renders the continually changing ‘open totality’ of which Deleuze elsewhere speaks. Whether in the lyrical Parisian dreams of the singularity that is Cravan, or in the abrasive, scouring texts of Zurich Dadaist Walter Serner, we can say that words written and chronicled under the open totality ‘Dada’ constitute a style, ‘a series of singularities and differences that estrange common usages of language and make the world of both the writer and those in which the reader lives vibrate in unforeseen and compelling ways’.28 Style is something that the reader routinely struggles with in any conventional approach to Dada. In formal terms, style simply is not present – that is, style as signal of unity, completion and identity; the means by which artists are grouped together into the presumed and

Jones D, DADA.indd 7

21/05/2014 15:00:03

8

dada 1916 in theory

unified movements that are then conventionally and probably (most certainly) too conveniently recognised under modernist schema. Even when it is submitted as ‘representative’, as is frequently the art-historical case with Francis Picabia’s visual output in relation to Paris Dada, for instance, ‘style’ in this sense becomes a practical obstruction to any productive or critical engagement, and its invocation comes before the abandonment of what is demonstrated to be the futile pursuit of generality, of commonality, of style, in sameness. It is precisely the fault of style-in-sameness that it posits itself as being the constant against which deviation or variation will be measured; and what is different, consequently, amounts to nothing more than a relative measure of sameness (things are only ‘the same’ – or not ‘the same’ – to a greater or lesser degree). The error that follows is that the specificity of our lived experiences undergo a kind of phenomenal reduction and are assigned their place within the model of unity that rests upon sameness (or, elsewhere, the presence of Being; hence Deleuze’s critique of Hegel). For Deleuze, to repeat, there is no sameness behind difference; there is only nothing, and what is evident as we revise the terms of our engagement is that we should orient our thoughts on style to difference, to read Dada after Deleuze – the ‘philosopher of difference’ and in the line of Nietzsche and Spinoza – to recognise that what is daily at stake is ‘one’s style of life, one’s way of operating in, and attitude to, the world’.29 Style, if it is to be located anywhere, will reside in Dada process, in that which is unfinished and incomplete, therefore, as has periodically and philosophically been debated: ‘he only has a style who never has anything finished’.30 And releasing difference from the constraint of sameness, which is, among many other things, what Deleuze does, augurs a new concept free of reference to commonality, the concept of immanence and of difference-in-itself that functions as an existentialist philosophical fact. So subjectivity returns as the central contention, subjectivity as the individual or collective existential territory, which further becomes the more openly described object in continual process – the assemblage, the open totality, the war machine or the egg that so entirely describes the Deleuzian body without organs. The creative potential of subjectivity does, I am sure, find consistency when subjectivity’s passivity in relation to itself as well as to the world yields to an active participation in its own creation, so to ‘rebellion’. And for us, in turn, this is a matter of intervening in our own processing of subjectivity and finally of treating our lives as a work of art. Hugo Ball knew his own passivity and

Jones D, DADA.indd 8

21/05/2014 15:00:03

introduction: against the ‘infamous thing’

9

increasingly knew the terms of its negotiation: ‘It is a mistake to believe in my presence. I am just polite and accommodating. I have difficulty in feigning a real existence to myself … I avoid letting myself be seen.’31 Noting this much in a diary entry at the end of 1915, subjectivity was not a given or something that simply happened to Ball; it was something in the creation and then maintenance of which he was actively participant and even complicit – ‘pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn’32 – and it figured as the object from which he (and others, to be sure) developed means of detachment through aesthetic responses. Interestingly enough, this detachment from the norms of cursory ‘reality’ is intimated in Guattari’s much later writing as ‘a rupture … a cut, the detachment of semiotic content’, and invoked as something that happens in a ‘Dadaist’ fashion.33 This direct naming of Dada in Guattari’s essay ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’ implicates Dada in the greater project of schizoanalysis and is more than glancing affirmation of the centrality given within Dada itself to the engagement of subjectivity and the process of its production. Aesthetic perceptions and responses, and specifically artistic perceptions and responses, are constants in Guattari’s thinking on subjectivity as the site of breaks and ruptures that lead to the positing of alterities, and art (or, in the Dada lexicon, ‘anti-art’, which drives against the completion and unity of the object conventionally termed ‘the work of art’ – the term itself functioning ‘more as an observation than a prescription’)34 is duly invested with its critical, ultimately political, potential: The work of art, for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment, which leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself.35 The work of art, therefore, is critically productive and read as strategically deploying the ‘disinterested’ response long since described in Kant’s aesthetic as it surveys the perceptual field. Detachment through such aesthetic response comes in advance of the generation of the object, and it is the object that figures in the constitution of the structural other. The other, multiply rendered, presents us with not only the possibilities of life but also the creative possibilities in and beyond the production and processing of subjectivity itself. O’Sullivan is rousing on this particular point, it must be said, suggesting the expanded and still expanding field for art practice, wherein the emphasis falls on our involvement in the material production of our own subjectivities.36 What the chapters of this book intend, then, are readings of that involvement

Jones D, DADA.indd 9

21/05/2014 15:00:03

10

dada 1916 in theory

as encountered in the Dada activities and ultimately in the Dada event that underwent folding, unfolding and refolding in 1916 and during the Zurich residencies that followed. *** This book is not a history of Dada in Zurich. Its aim is not to present a historical analysis of the Dadaists’ activities in and around the inaugural formation of 1916, but rather to approach the distinctions and innovations – both technical and formal – of that first formation falling between 1916 and 1919 from theoretical positions. The work is titled to point to the historical moment out of which is developed its series of theoretical reflections on and re-readings of the Zurich Dadaists’ activities; and, in setting out to re-read and therefore to re-present, the material that is used is deliberately familiar. The sources put to work are among those most current and widely accessible for the study of Dada in the English language. Through a process that proceeds to make unfamiliar what are otherwise familiar sources, they are tested against the potentialities of theoretical reflection, posing some new conclusions and a continually revised urgency for the methods, techniques and strategies of critical engagement found in Dada. Among the sources are some that are familiar even to those least initiated in what happened in Zurich during the First World War and after, sources that are routinely presented as primers for Dada – Hans Richter’s Dada: Art and Anti-Art most obviously – yet these works can pose their own sets of complications before any reading gets underway. Richter’s book is notorious in this regard as the chronicle of a movement relating anecdotal accounts that are not always verifiable, factual information that frequently muddies and evidence that is occasionally wholly fabricated. All of this, combined with the issue of authorship in such accounts, can make their invocation extremely problematic;37 the vested claims and counter-claims made by so many of the Dadaists in the decades that followed the events have left us with a legacy that is still today being unpacked. And, to this extent, the reference to these sources in this book does defer the question of authorship (the author question is only infrequently, and therefore highly selectively, posed in passing), with perhaps some apology due for deference – though we will always be alert to the risk of eliding from Richter’s text, for example, into first-hand accounts of the Zurich activities; and, within quotation marks, there rests the implied concession that authority and authenticity may always somewhere be at stake.

Jones D, DADA.indd 10

21/05/2014 15:00:03

introduction: against the ‘infamous thing’

11

Several of the distinctions of Dada in its initial phase are today only accessible for recovery through summary documentation or anecdote – the performative aspect of dance, the masks and the puppets, most markedly – yet they remain stubbornly distinct and resonant qualities of the Zurich formation, and are dimensions of what this book will engage. But through such recovery there follow degrees of conjecture, speculation and supposition around those occasions that moreover make them accessible to us only as virtual phenomena. Within the overall and open structure of this book, the recovery of the performative occupies the verified historical context and the existing knowledge of historical specifics, with the eventual aim being pursuit of the conceptual intricacies of what it might be that makes culturally significant, or even radical, such a transient phenomenon as laughter – something that history, strictly speaking, does not teach us. An open structure is not an unqualified strength, however, despite what we must surely concede is, at best, the open structure of Dada itself during the first formation; but it is, in this particular instance, what makes viable the broad referencing of theory to develop what follows, not by a random trajectory but precisely as responses from appropriate theoretical positions (which are at times, not unproblematically, positions that can be characterised as men talking about other men – reflective of the fundamental complication of an artistic formation whose very name is itself evocative of domineering patriarchal authority) to what is the eclectic shape of Zurich Dada. Dada is sometimes diffuse in the readings that follow, when questions of language or ideology are pursued in consideration of simultaneous poetry or manifesto writing, for instance; in turn, the shape of Dada follows one delineation in the chronology given at the end of the book and included as a framework for the book’s content, reference for the open structure, in the form of an overview of the historical dimensions of Zurich Dada. Within historical enclosure, of course, a strict chronology functions as conceptually contrary to the notion of permanent Dada with which the book concludes: its place within the present work is, therefore, apart from of the main text. If we allow the opening concession that Dada is hard, then it deserves better than a soft response. This book aims at a reciprocal gesture to the one artistic movement of the twentieth century that takes its audience most seriously,38 directly engaging in theoretical terms the forms and the contexts that are today drawn into the recoveries of history – from ‘lautgedichte’ to laughter, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata – all of which instances repeatedly disorient the student reading the critical

Jones D, DADA.indd 11

21/05/2014 15:00:03

dada 1916 in theory

12

cultural phase of the greater Dada years, between 1916 and dissolution in the early 1920s. We might say of the observable albeit fragmentary residue of Dada that it has no proper function as a cultural phenomenon; even if it wanted to, it could not function in any such sense that anticipates its completion. And it is for this reason that the readings presented here look towards a reconstitution of Dada in terms that approach meaning for residual matter and fragments, not only as cultural but also as social and political phenomena – meaning that is to be found in creativecritical action. This immanence of critique exceeds the one-and-other construction of dialectic, so that process or becoming better describe the action – ‘it is not so much a question of the minor or of the major but of a becoming minor in the sense of producing movement from “within” the major’,39 signalling how we can think beyond the binary of good and evil, and do away with ‘the very idea of the Other’ as Jameson rightly suggests.40 One stark complication rears, that of the ethical binary and the revival of the discipline of ethics that Jameson so deplores, the problematic binary that always tempts us to reinsert the good/evil axis into conceptual areas supposed to be free of it, and to call for judgment where none is appropriate … [even] in the dualisms of Deleuze and Guattari … the reader feels perpetually solicited to take sides with the Schizo against the Paranoid … and with the Nomads against the State.41 We are well advised to heed caution against the encroaching ethical binary, of course, precisely because it is ‘always secretly at work with ideology’, as Jameson says. Just like ideology, binary mechanics are at their most efficient when we imagine ourselves free of their effects. But moderating the categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ into revised positions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ will duly render the ‘good’ individual who ‘seeks to make connections that increase her power to act … [without] diminishing similar powers in others’, in reflection upon the ‘bad’ individual who fails to organise her connections in this manner ‘and either falls back into guilt and resentment, or relies on guile and violence’.42 No more the morality that constricts the raving body beneath the sober consciousness of the mind and, mentored to this extent by Nietzsche and Spinoza, there is a charting of ethical thought via Deleuze in an exploration of the unknown of the body and the unconscious of the mind. The dialectic may be sorely wounded, yet dualisms remain in the constructing of thought, as do small amounts of signifiance and subjectification,43 each position progressively giving up former exclusion of

Jones D, DADA.indd 12

21/05/2014 15:00:03

introduction: against the ‘infamous thing’

13

the other and ultimately becoming manifest only with respect to the other. But oppositionality in the form by which it is routinely invoked functions with little consequence for as long as it is characterised as contrary – the unreconstructed condition that yields not much (the mother’s admission sums it up, as Christopher Hitchens signed her copy of Letters to a Young Contrarian: ‘I bought a copy of this to give to my son, hoping he’d become a contrarian, but he refused’),44 as so frequently demonstrated in the posturing and posing that reduced Dada actions, to their inevitable detriment, to predictable (and therefore not shocking) shock tactics. I will insist, of course (and far from exclusively), that the Dadaists of 1916 amounted to more than contrarians and that their concerted effort against all manifestations of a privileged orthodoxy (that is, against what Voltaire called ‘the infamous thing’) was necessarily to be participant in the revision of strategies of critical engagement that were demonstrably spent according to any conventionally described oppositionality. The anti-stance positively demands the continued presence of its object so that we are able to recognise and respond to the ruptures out of which emerge any new and spontaneous ways of being in the world. As each of the chapters that follows reads the contingent, fleeting and even vaporous forms of Dada in 1916 and its Zurich years, what is repeatedly demonstrated is that the erasure or obliteration of the objects of critique was never what Dada demanded; rather, in pursuit of a new creativity, the Dadaists’ interest was the deconfiguration and reconfiguration of those same objects, putting difference and repetition into practice through a minorisation that necessitated the continued and invested presence of already existing orders. So the forms assumed by the offensive are just as recognisable for us today as they were for the audiences of 1916 in the broadest and most immediate terms: as poetry, performance and plastic, all variously rallied to the anti. And reference to the fundamental radicality of form within Dada finds itself bluntly redundant when the ‘conventionality’ that we encounter signals how what might be construed as meaningful can only be fragmentary and incomplete,45 residing ultimately elsewhere – an ‘elsewhere’ of here, everywhere, over there and beyond – in the in-betweens of an early twentieth-century entre-garde that aligned cultural practice with its own production. It is distinctly in this alignment that the Dada forms achieve their greater resonance and their wider relevance bound to the political in its resistance to the code of cultural representations. The frailty of strategies of resistance makes them always prone to that inherent weakness when the economic arguably (and convincingly as far as art, more than any other cultural commodity, is concerned) becomes

Jones D, DADA.indd 13

21/05/2014 15:00:03

dada 1916 in theory

14

the main site of symbolic production as a result of the irresistible drive of capital to recoup and recode even resistance itself. If, however, cultural work is conceived within and addressed to collectivities (rather than to isolated individuals), and if indeed it becomes constitutive of collectivities, its production obtains the possibility of moving beyond the reductive states of incoherent addition and cultural freeloading. Reading and re-reading Dada, we are never more than six feet away from the diametricality of its liberating laughter and reconfigured violence, throwing everything at representation in the process of rendering its limits, in order to test what might emerge beyond those limits in forms that took the Dadaists as often as not to the point of absurdity. The famously rising laughter assumed an intensity that will now register an affirmative violence directed against the signifying formations that once amounted to Voltaire’s ‘infamous thing’. And bound to this exceeding of limits is the processing and exceeding of subjectivity itself; out of that excess emerges an aesthetic mode of production that tasks active participation in the generation of our own existential territories through creative process. Cultural work can become something very different and can more efficiently begin to operate inside the social structure through its continually reestablished strategies of public address, exceeding the claims of capital but conceding not to nostalgia for ‘authentic’ culture on the one hand or to romantic strategies of marginality on the other. It can, indeed, be more than an accommodation and cultivation of cultural idiosyncrasy, and can aspire to the future beyond any profound resignation in the present, staking new responses to the question that Deleuze has posed: what is the purpose of such thought that pretends to express its dynamism within the compass of laws (while rejecting them), of contractual relations (while denying them), and of institutions (while ridiculing them)?46 Notes 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A book for free spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 243. 2 Tom Conley, ‘From Multiplicities to Folds: On Style and Form in Deleuze’, in Ian Buchanan (ed.), A Deleuzian Century? (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 262. 3 Ian Buchanan, ‘Deleuze and Cultural Studies’, in Ian Buchanan (ed.), A Deleuzian Century? (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 105. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.

Jones D, DADA.indd 14

21/05/2014 15:00:03

introduction: against the ‘infamous thing’

15

Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone, 1984), p. 356. 5 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 362. 6 Stephen C. Foster, ‘Disaster and the Habits of Culture’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), p. 2. 7 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 362. 8 Tom Conley, ‘Singularity’, in Adrian Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 253. 9 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 29. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 116. 11 Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre a l’usage des jeunes generations (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 87; trans. John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking as The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rising Free Collective, 1979). 12 Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, in Yve-Alain Bois et al. (eds), October: The Second Decade, 1986–1996 (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1997), p. 377. 13 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 205. 14 Hal Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, October, 70 (1994), 19. 15 Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’, p. 388. 16 Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto. 1918’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 79. 17 Fredric Jameson, ‘Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze’, in Ian Buchanan (ed.), A Deleuzian Century? (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 31. 18 Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 77. 19 O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari, p. 77. 20 O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari, p. 77. 21 The ‘two speeds’ of Dada describes the formation’s contradictions in Marcel Janco’s reassessment in his article ‘Dada at Two Speeds’ (1966), in Lucy Lippard (ed.), Dadas on Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 36–37. Nicholas Zurbrugg reviews the article: ‘dada’s notorious initial “scandalous force” and “irrational attacks” gradually changed course as certain dada artists went “beyond the first speed, the negative speed” and affirmed “a new creative route”. Regretfully acknowledging that the “spiritual violence of the first phase … impressed minds and imprinted a stamp which could not be effaced”, Janco noted that even in the mid-sixties, people were “surprised to find that the best Dadas, like Jean Arp, seem least Dada”.’ Nicholas Zurbrugg, The Parameters of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 83. 22 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone, 1994), p. 57. Nietzsche’s original reads, ‘[T]here is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 45. 23 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 133. 24 Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands: Jargon Society, 1982), p. 317. 25 Arthur Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives’, in Roger Conover, Terry Hale and Paul Lenti

Jones D, DADA.indd 15

21/05/2014 15:00:03

16

dada 1916 in theory

(eds), 4 Dada Suicides (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 51. 26 Cravan’s aliases were legion; born Fabian Avénarius Lloyd, the subsequent aliases W. Cooper, Edouard Archinard, E. Lajeunesse, Robert Miradique and Marie Lowitska were all orchestrated by ‘Directeur Cravan’ who publicly declaimed his credentials in the boxing ring as ‘Confidence man – sailor in the Pacific – muleteer – orange picker in California – snake-charmer – hotel thief – nephew of Oscar Wilde – lumberjack – ex-boxing champion of France – Grandson of the Queen’s Chancellor – chauffeur in Berlin – etc.’ (Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 85), in advance of the sightings in other guises that continued long after his disappearance in 1918. The most recent ‘sighting’ may well be a painting attributed to Edouard Archinard, dated to the late twentieth century, reproduced on the cover of the collected poems of fourteenth-century European troubadour Dafydd ap Gwilym (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010). 27 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, pp. 102–3. 28 Conley, ‘Singularity’, p. 252. 29 O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari, p. 87. 30 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 79. 31 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 27. 32 Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby’, in Stanley Applebaum (ed.), Bartleby and Benito Cereno (New York: Dover Publications, 1990), p. 9. 33 Félix Guattari, ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’, trans. S. Thomas, in G. Genosko (ed.), The Guattari Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 200. 34 Foster, ‘Disaster and the Habits of Culture’, p. 5. 35 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995), p. 131. 36 O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari, p. 97. 37 Far better for the student of Dada is the invocation of more recent and rigorous accounts. See, for example, Raimund Meyer’s overview in preface to the expanded version of the 1993 catalogue Dada: Eine international Bewegung; Raimund Meyer et al., Dada Global (Zurich: Kunsthaus, Zurich, in association with Limmat Verlag, 1994). 38 Stephen C. Foster, Foreword to Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics, p. xiii. 39 O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari, p. 71. 40 Jameson, ‘Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze’, p. 32. 41 Jameson, ‘Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze’, p. 32. 42 John Marks, ‘Ethics’, in Adrian Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 86. 43 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), p. 160. 44 Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), p. 350. 45 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 65. 46 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1985), p. 143.

Jones D, DADA.indd 16

21/05/2014 15:00:03

1

Dada’s Radical Negation: The Declamators and Poets of Noise To the degree that modernity has a meaning, it is this: it carries within itself … a radical negation – Dada, this event which took place in a Zurich café. – Henri Lefebvre1

To establish some initial coordinates at the outset – between late Symbolist impulses from the East, Expressionist origins in Germany and familiar French imperialist bias towards the Parisian literary avant-garde – the received wisdom that Italian Futurism was ‘the actual seedbed of Dada art’ is often enough repeated2 and does not, therefore, bear repeating here (fig. 2). Beyond the political, however, the complex problematic nature of the relation between Futurism and Dada is a far less frequent site of address, and Dada’s aesthetic negotiation of anti-nationalist politics, for instance, is largely ignored. We know that in rejecting all cultural precedents, the Dadaists implicitly rejected Futurism. They declared their rejection explicitly, sloganising under Paris Dada that ‘The futurist is dead. What killed it? Dada.’3 To name and shame, it was Dada drummer Richard Huelsenbeck who famously denounced Filippo Marinetti’s world view and Futurism’s goals, despite being notably among the most enthusiastic Dada exponents of Futurist sound art4 – embracing as he did the concepts of simultaneity and of bruitism, even if he well recognised how bruitism was taken over by the Dadaists without their having ‘any idea of its underlying philosophy’.5 And it is perhaps by its remarkable prescience that Roman Jakobson’s essay on Dada, written in 1921, draws critical distinction, noting there the Futurists’ impassioned cry ‘long live the future’ in opposition to the Cabaret Voltaire players’ no less impassioned ‘down with the future’.6

Jones D, DADA.indd 17

21/05/2014 15:00:03

18

dada 1916 in theory

Fig. 2. F. T. Marinetti, ‘Futurismo, definizione’ handwritten folio, n.d. Dada emits from the Futurist vortex, at bottom left.

Jones D, DADA.indd 18

21/05/2014 15:00:04

dada’s r adical negation

19

Chronologically, Futurism comes before Dada, but the two formations overlap: strictly speaking, Futurism outlives formal Dada through the convolutions of Italian Dada and the emergence from the latter of the doubly misunderstood case of Giulio Evola, for instance7 – historical fact, ultimately, that compromises the preferred linear passaging of easy art history. Properly to consider the relationship between the two movements demands recourse to the less distinct position put into words by Hans Richter, who described Dada’s failure to digest Futurism, simply swallowing it whole, ‘bones, feathers and all’.8 We might summarise this as Dada’s indigestion, with Futurism constantly repeating on Dada – Dada’s heartburn, if not its burning heart. Indeed, almost everywhere we look in Dada, Futurism repeats in stances indebted to the terms of cultural engagement and visibility initiated by the Italians. The manifesto form in particular, that which announced Futurism to the world in 1909 (and in which the later Dadaist Walter Serner invested such venom during the Zurich Dada phase,9 having previously already denounced Futurism in essays that dismissed some of the movement’s painters from the realm of art), finds itself at the centre of the expanse of cultural-linguistic activities participated in by the international Dada brigade. *** Those who would one day become Zurich’s Dadaists discovered Futurism by varied means (Zurich, we must concede, proved to be a quite remarkable site of avant-garde fermentation in the early twentieth century – it was in this city, for example, that Marinetti published his pro-war manifesto, ‘In quest’ anno futurista’, in the journal Der Mistral, in March 1915). From the exposure of Futurism to its German constituency and its initial confluence with late Expressionist ideas, this chapter will give particular consideration to the way in which early Dada experimentation during 1916 negotiated the relation to its ultimately problematic Italian antecedent. Now, from first condemnation, the Berlin anarchist periodical Die Aktion would eventually embrace the Futurist cause as its publisher, Franz Pfemfert, gravitated towards the poet Theodor Däubler – ‘Däubler, the mighty’,10 ‘the gigantosaurus of expressionist lyric poetry’11 – who had been participant in the Futurist evening demonstrations of Milan and Florence alongside Marinetti, Giovanni Papini, Ardengo Soffici and Umberto Boccioni. Austrian-born Däubler was the only poet who wrote in German to have participated in the Futurist serate, and

Jones D, DADA.indd 19

21/05/2014 15:00:04

20

dada 1916 in theory

was memorable among many other things for his 1919 declamation, ‘the I creates the world’.12 Two special issues of Die Aktion were devoted to Futurism in 1915–16 (one reviewing Däubler’s achievements, the other edited by Däubler out of Papini’s Lacerba (1913–15)), and it published frequent translations by Else Hadwiger of Futurist poetry (Hadwiger had already published translations of Marinetti’s poems in 1912). Among the most devoted readers of Die Aktion – one of ‘our periodicals’, as he described it – was the future founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, Hugo Ball.13 Ball had met Pfemfert in 1913 and was a contributor to his periodical. At the same time, the always Futurist-friendly Der Sturm, published in Berlin by former Florentine art student and Germany’s cultural impresario Herwarth Walden, promoted the work of the Italian artists and writers in the name of the new creative revolution. Distancing itself from German Expressionism, Der Sturm distributed its versions of the Futurist manifestos to a German-speaking audience. It was during the war years, for instance, that poet Johannes R. Becher – ‘Becher, the genius of Berlin’14 – during what is described as his ‘developing period’, came into collaborative contact with the Sturm enthusiasts. Peter Demetz tells us how this wild young man, who would one day become the GDR’s first Communist Minister of Culture, ‘was more thoroughly attracted to the Italian Futurists than any other German poet of the war generation, and enthusiastically seized on Futurist rhetoric … in the most effective Leninist poems ever written in the German tongue’.15 Becher appropriated much of the Futurist techniques of wordsin-freedom, the parole in libertà – particularly Marinetti’s ‘analogies’, which he condensed into incendiary devices – to produce work that Peter Davies has since described as ‘the most comprehensive German reception of the formal and stylistic preoccupations of Futurism’.16 The periodical Der Sturm had been modelled initially on Giuseppe Prezzolini’s La Voce, the latter founded in 1909 as a debating forum in response to ‘the new forms of human coexistence’ of its time;17 and it was Der Sturm that duly proved to be the Futurists’ most vigorous mouthpiece outside Italy from March 1912 onwards, with its manifesto translations given suitably frequent public airings. In April 1912, for instance, Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’, the technical manifesto of Futurist literature subsequently to be published in Der Sturm as ‘Die futuristische Literatur – Technisches Manifest’, was read out by expressionist poet Ferdinand Hardekopf at the Weisser Hirsch hotel in Munich,18 as an encore to the Cabaret Grüner Teufel – the green devil cabaret, starring poet and performer Emmy Hennings, acquaintance of

Jones D, DADA.indd 20

21/05/2014 15:00:04

dada’s r adical negation

21

Becher,19 and future co-founder of the Cabaret Voltaire – and this, it is said, was the very evening that ‘for (and with) Hennings, futurism was launched in the Munich bohemia’,20 inciting its listeners to the future liberation of vocabulary and syntax. In summing up these varied exposures, however, Richard Sheppard notes that stylistically the prose and poetry of the Futurists in translation would have given Ball especially scant cause to consider the work of the Italians ‘as significantly distinct from the rhapsodic German Expressionism with which he was already familiar’.21 Sheppard is indeed emphatic on this point, that Ball was not yet, at least, in a position to draw any effective distinction between Futurism and Expressionism – a distinction that he would not make until after his first encounter in mid-1915 with the freefalling language of the parole in libertà. The assault on typography By whatever means some future liberation was to be achieved, before anything else it would be necessary to disturb the transparency of language in its habitual functioning. Performative declamation would duly manifest itself as dynamic and synoptic for the Futurists, and mapping the same would take place according to a revolutionary typographical philosophy that aggressively turned on the simplicity and transparency of an existing print culture that was subordinate always to the conveyance of meaning, transparent and anonymous, ‘calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain’.22 What the Futurist typographic revolution had already targeted by the early 1910s was the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page. On the same page, therefore, we will use three or four colours of ink, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary. For example: italics for a series of similar or swift sensations, boldface for the violent onomatopoeias, and so on.23 To embrace flux and reflux, ebb and flow, swell and spend, on the page first meant looking at the text instead of looking through it. In this way, the style and verbal surface became more immediately constitutive of meaning than any ‘content’ or ‘substance’ that lay beneath or independently of the surface. This did not do away with content, clearly, but critically it set up an oscillation – or more recently a ‘toggling’

Jones D, DADA.indd 21

21/05/2014 15:00:04

22

dada 1916 in theory

as rhetoric scholar Richard Lanham describes it – between surface and substance. Lanham draws for demonstration on pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s magnified microdot newsprint patterns of the early 1960s, which are described as presenting ‘a self-conscious and opaque design motif, something we are forced to look AT and not THROUGH’.24 In such works and elsewhere, surfaces are made emphatic, texts dissolve in texture; and so, declared the Futurists in 1916, the book, indeed, as printed codex, that most ‘wholly passéist means of preserving and communicating thought, has for a long time been fated to disappear like … the pacifist ideal’.25 Their sights were trained, in glorious anti-pacifism, on typographical convention. What came next was the intervention itself, and the consequent oscillation between surface and substance or suggested depth: the physical and the aesthetic planes together became coextensive and coordinate in a particular sense. Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb is perhaps the first virtuoso rendering of words-in-freedom (fig. 3) – published in 1914, having already been declaimed in parts within Berlin avant-garde circles during the preceding year – stressing and straining its rhythms and onomatopoeias through revolutionary typography. His Vive la France of 1915 suspends the linearity of the book. And by the time Europe was emerging from the war that ended in 1918, the Futurist orchestrator’s grandiose tumult had mustered its destructive potential as the explosive incendiary-novel, la bomba-romanzo esplosivo, performed the book’s auto-deconstruction, with the explosion ‘at its centre literally shattering typographical convention into distended fragments’.26 The approach to the assault on typography had been set out in 1912 with the technical manifesto, where Marinetti took heed of what the aeroplane propeller had to tell him above ‘the mighty Milanese smokestacks’ – to ‘free words, releasing them from the prison of the Latin period’27 – as he grafted the rousing rhetoric of transcendence ‘onto the technology of flight’.28 The random placement of nouns, infinitives substituting for indicatives, the abolition of adjectives, of adverbs and (most triumphantly) of punctuation, which was replaced by the dynamism of musical or mathematical signs, would all together combine in the undoing of the ‘abstract code’ of syntax, emphatically to negate the past and to affirm the futurist universe. Syntax, Marinetti wrote, ‘was a kind of interpreter and monotonous cicerone’,29 routinely exercised through simplified typography devoid of colour, assembled through a ‘strict order of left to right then down one line; no type changes; no interaction; no revision’.30 Modulation is then achieved as ‘[t]ype is altered and arranged according to classical

Jones D, DADA.indd 22

21/05/2014 15:00:04

dada’s r adical negation

23

models of balance and equilibrium, convention requiring capitals and minuscules, occasional italics to supply emphasis and differentiation, white space to define borders, margins, and interruptions on the page’.31 Marinetti argued how We must remove this intermediary [the monotonous cicerone] so that literature may enter directly into the universe and become one with it … Liberation of words, soaring wings of the imagination, analogical synthesis of the earth embraced in a single glance, all drawn together in essential words.32 Without heed for communication or for beauty, Marinetti’s declared interest in creativity that is free of all inhibition, released from rational control and constraint, was reiterated and expanded upon one year later in the manifesto ‘Destruction of Syntax’. The intoxication of intense life, he wrote, would stir the lyric voice of the individual who will begin by brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language. Breathlessly he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory, olfactory sensations, just as they come to him … Fistfuls of essential words in no conventional order. Sole preoccupation of the narrator, to render every vibration of his being.33 The rendering visual of the words-in-freedom, making us look at them before we look through them, practically takes us beyond awareness simply of the breathless, vitalist emotion that is declared in the writings – the soaring imagination, the embrace of the earth and of life’s intoxication. So the move into revolutionary typography deliberately exposes the act of simplification represented by ordinary printed text, and the action makes us ‘self-conscious about a register of expressivity that as literate people we have abjured’.34 Marinetti, it is argued, attacks the entire literate conception of humankind – the central self, a nondramatic society just out there waiting for us to observe it – and the purposive idea of language that rests upon it. He would urge us to notice that all this reality-apparatus is as conventional as the typography we are trained not to notice.35 What we should recognise, however, is that for all its aggression, nowhere in his writing does Marinetti imagine, let alone declare, for Futurism a deliberate and explicitly stated oppositional role in such an engagement

Jones D, DADA.indd 23

21/05/2014 15:00:04

24

dada 1916 in theory

with and deconstruction of reality-apparatus. We read, just as the first readers of Futurism did in 1909, of the flight from mythology and the mystic ideal (which, I suggest, is as close as Marinetti ever comes to looking directly at what has socially and culturally been abjured). But, ultimately, what we are left with is the enduring romantic image of the future man standing on the summit of the world, hurling defiance at the stars. Text and chaos, surface and substance The position of criticality in the midst of all this intoxication is, therefore, at stake. The emerging aesthetic of the words-in-freedom provides us very early on with the recognisable relation between the aesthetic and the ideological. The aesthetic, we know, ‘reflects’ its enveloping ideology, but it is at the same time an ideological act, one that participates in the resolution of social conflict and historical contradiction. It is an act in Marxist thought, therefore, that functions in the promotion and perpetuation of false consciousness. Yet, despite the proliferation of aesthetic activity under the precise same conditions that made possible the age of technology that was now being embraced culturally, any thought of securing annulment or remedy for social conflict and historical contradiction was similarly misguided or, simply and inevitably, absent. Annulment; remedy; resolution; reconciliation; even synthesis – whichever term we use, there follows from it a conflation of the aesthetic and the ideological, a collapsing of that distance wherein criticality might reside. The collapse ejects from the work of art any critical potential with regard to the aesthetic ‘as not much more than a realm where consent to bourgeois class rule is guaranteed’.36 If Futurism assumed a revolutionary posture, it nonetheless complied to perpetuate this conflation of surface and substance, and in this we may recognise the later contention among the Dadaists as they struggled with their own relation to Futurism. Ball, at the end of June 1915, recorded his at least theoretical resistance to ‘the idea of revolution as art for art’s sake’ and his greater desire to know where he was heading rather than what he was leaving behind: ‘If I found that life had to be conserved in order to survive, then I would be conservative.’37 One of the poems he would later recite as part of the Cabaret Voltaire’s relatively conventional opening fare was first published in Die Aktion – Erich Mühsam’s ‘Revoluzzerlied’ (Revolutionary Song) – which, behind its frivolity, signalled most

Jones D, DADA.indd 24

21/05/2014 15:00:04

dada’s r adical negation

25

certainly Ball’s clear aversion to rebellion without a cause and the posturing of ‘radicals’ and ‘revolutionaries’ alike: There once was a rebel […] He walked with a rebel’s gait. ‘I am a rebel,’ he yelled; His rebel’s cap was pulled Down over his left ear. Thought he really inspired fear.38 Being loud and declamatory simply for the sake of it was not an option for Ball and, within a fortnight of his end-of-June diary entry, the productive possibilities of Futurist activity began to register: Marinetti sends me Parole in Libertà by himself, Cangiullo, Buzzi, and Govoni. They are just letters of the alphabet on a page; you can roll up such a poem like a map. The syntax has come apart. The letters are scattered and assembled again in a rough-and-ready way. There is no language any more … it has to be invented all over again.39 This, for Ball, came at a critical juncture in the development of his political philosophy. By this time, in mid-1915, committed to pacifism and having rejected anarchist utopianism, his correspondence with Marinetti came about from his attraction to fantasy in language, an attraction consistent at that time with his growing interest in mysticism. His resistance to the content of Futurist art, however, is recognisable in his first real encounter with the movement’s painters at an exhibition held at Emil Richter’s gallery in Dresden, in November 1913, which made a marked impression on him. Yet, though his was a negative response to the content, he judged that the work redeemed itself by the truthfulness of its ‘heightened representation of the modern and mechanistic world’.40 Ball wrote what he described as his ‘enthusiastic article’41 on this Futurist exhibition for Revolution – yet one more of the instrumental publications of the pre-war years in Germany – describing what he saw in paintings by Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini and Luigi Russolo not so much in terms of Futurist embrace of machine civilisation but as a terrifying Expressionist vision of ‘a world in agony … which expressed the artist’s own “ecstatic sickness”’.42 The idea of publishing Revolution had been discussed by Ball, Huelsenbeck and writer Hans Leybold in 1912 – all of whom were united participants in Berlin’s drinking

Jones D, DADA.indd 25

21/05/2014 15:00:04

26

dada 1916 in theory

Fig. 3. F. T. Marinetti, parole in libertà, in Zang Tumb Tumb, 1914, p. 105.

and whoring dens, as Huelsenbeck would later disclose in personal correspondence. The first issue of Revolution appeared at the end of 1913, edited by Ball and Leybold as an attempt to provide an alternative to Pfemfert’s Die Aktion, in vociferous support of revolution ‘that was more aesthetic than political’.43 Ball’s increasing alienation at this time from Pfemfert’s commitment to political solutions to the cultural crisis

Jones D, DADA.indd 26

21/05/2014 15:00:04

dada’s r adical negation

27

in Germany became more pronounced during Zurich Dada, with Ball’s radical departure in pursuit of alternative resolutions in aesthetics and metaphysics. The prophetic slogan for Revolution came courtesy of the poet whose work Ball would eventually recite at the Cabaret Voltaire – Mühsam’s heroic declaration, ‘Lässt uns chaotisch sein!’ (Let us be chaotic!) – and, with its clarion call, Revolution was perhaps inevitably short-lived. In a life ‘full of quixotic reversals, sudden leaps, and steep emotional ascents and descents’,44 before we arrive at nascent Dada, the years 1912–15 proved hugely important for Ball in terms of the personal and creative collaborative relationships that he entered into, and in terms of the critical-intellectual repositioning that he underwent. The most important and most personal relationship to emerge from this intense period was, of course, the one with Emmy Hennings, whom Ball met in the autumn of 1913 at the Café Simplicissimus in Munich, to remain with her through overwhelming bouts of jealousy and throughout his most productive years, until his death in 1927: ‘It is impossible to measure the influence this frail girl had on Hugo Ball. Hugo was so strongly influenced by Emmy that one cannot love his writings unless one fully and deeply understands her influence.’45 So said Huelsenbeck, who subsequently with Ball promoted anti-war views at such evening performances as the ‘Commemoration of fallen poets’ at the Berlin Architektenhaus in 1915, an event of remembrance that was consolidated by the Expressionistenabend at the city’s Harmoniumsaal (at which Hennings and Becher, interestingly enough, were also present and participant). This last occasion was reported locally as being ‘basically a protest against Germany in favour of Marinetti’,46 where the self-proclaimed ‘negationists’ railed against kultur and ‘the kind of courage it takes to get shot for the idea of a nation which is at best a cartel of pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural association of psychopaths’.47 Both events came after Ball’s own exposure to the conditions of privation at the Belgian front in late 1914 – where, by the time of Ball’s civilian visit, Leybold had already committed suicide in early September during a period of hospitalisation at Itzenhoe, after being seriously wounded on active service. Ball’s unsentimental and unpatriotic Totenrede to Leybold at the Architektenhaus, delivered in a manner that seemed to poke fun at his dead comrade, posed obvious discomfort for those listening. Sections of Ball’s then unworked ‘fantastic novel’, Tenderenda (1914–20), are most likely in retrospect to be resonant of his obituarate sentiments:

Jones D, DADA.indd 27

21/05/2014 15:00:04

dada 1916 in theory

28

This was a psychofact … not a person. Hermaphrodite from head to toe. His spiral shoulders struck sharply through the gussets of his cutaway. His head a magic onion of intellectuality. Blindly commanded by the urge to confess ceaselessly, his beginnings, his start and finish were of such virginal, such utterly uncompromising mental hygiene … Requiescat in pace.48 In life, the relationship between Ball and Leybold had been one of unexpected convolution, blurring many distinctions in their collaborative writings published under their composite pseudonym ‘Ha Hu Baley’, the psychofact as presented by Ball in the 1915 obituary, introduced to the world for the purpose of ‘cultivating poses, gestures and vexations’.49 It went further: the two men shared a sexual liaison, for instance, with a Finny Morstadt who bore Leybold’s child, but with whom Ball appears to have had sexual intercourse during the period of the child’s conception – and this, it was suggested, only ‘in order to help his friend Leybold evade liability for support’. This slight was recorded in his diaries by Mühsam who, at this particular juncture, held Ball in viciously low regard and fully intended to ‘force Mr Hugo Ball … to pay for alimony’.50 Such intimacy is as maybe, but the impact of the appalling reality that Ball had now seen with his own eyes at the Belgian front, scenes ‘fearful, shocking and tragic beyond anything the theatre could produce’,51 did indeed banish his theatrical aspirations to a very remote place, and impressed upon him the moral bankruptcy of art and art-making that did not rise to the challenge of its own political time and conscience. The dilemma was a stubborn one for Ball. The first summer of Dada was marked by the continuing struggle as he questioned himself: ‘I do not know if we will go beyond Wilde and Baudelaire in spite of all our efforts; or if we will not just remain romantics’.52 The problem had not gone away for him in the preceding months, the time during which he had developed his own sound poetry within the enabling environment of Dada cabaret and performance. What complicated matters, I think, was the residual romanticism of the Futurist words-in-freedom, a romanticism of the expressive-intuitive individual that Ball himself was prone to, but which might compromise the political potential he invested in Dada as ‘an opportunity for true perception and criticism of the times we live in’.53 There was, of course, no conflict with Marinetti’s preparedness to abandon traditional ideas of beauty in favour of the creation of ‘ugly’ art. As Sheppard observes, Ball found the parole in libertà to breathe ‘new life into a language that had been worn out by modernity … [and to enable]

Jones D, DADA.indd 28

21/05/2014 15:00:04

dada’s r adical negation

29

the Dadaists to develop their idea of a redeemed, magical language’ – and, indeed, Ball now recognised that the parole in libertà was something distinctly different to later Dada sound poetry.54 But the Italian’s casual letting go of communication manifested a real complication. To declare that it was not necessary to be understood, as Marinetti did, posed the triumph of free intuition over rational logic in the Futurists’ return to the senses. But, for Ball, it was of fundamental importance that the Futurists’ and subsequently the Dadaists’ ‘disintegration right in the innermost process of creation’55 be understood as more than motor impulse or re-action. It was, precisely, a pro-action, the interruption of synthesis and order as affect (and affect as opposed to concept, the latter being that which gives order to our thinking). Rather than a letting go, this affect obtained renewed engagement with language: It is imperative to write invulnerable sentences. Sentences that withstand all irony. The better the sentence, the higher the rank. In eliminating vulnerable syntax or association one preserves the sum of the things that constitute the style and the pride of the writer – taste, cadence, rhythm, and melody.56 What this amounted to was the renunciation of conceptual thought by means of the retention of the expressive surface of language, and simultaneously the abolition of resident meaning – not, however, in order to transform language into some ‘significant form’, but in order to direct attention at language: ‘The only attention permitted was at attention; looking through was abolished.’57 Still, the retention of recognisable or familiar word-forms preserves something that we can look through and, ultimately, there is a logic that will lead us to Ball’s sound poetry, where even the liberated words of the Futurists are abolished. Symmetries and rhythms Within a month of the Cabaret Voltaire opening its doors in 1916, Ball was recording his thoughts on the public presentation of poetic works: ‘Reciting aloud’, he wrote, ‘has become the touchstone of the quality of a poem for me’.58 He had long been alert to the potential of exploiting rhythm and cadence in performance, and Tenderenda gave opportunity to explore devices of linguistic and vocal possibilities in response to his recognition of the way in which the dramatist might purposely move into song for dramatic effect, observing in his diary how ‘[t]he words of the song do not matter; the laws of rhythm are more important’.59

Jones D, DADA.indd 29

21/05/2014 15:00:05

30

dada 1916 in theory

Fig. 4. Hugo Ball, typeset ‘Karawane’, from the Dada Almanach, 1920, p. 53.

This does clearly link to the Futurist linguistic programme in terms of cleansing language and reducing it to its essentials, and occurs in the context of Wortkunst theory as practised among the Sturm Expressionist circle in Berlin; but this is not to empty Ball’s developing sound patterns of meaning. Among the poems without words, for example, ‘Karawane’ presents the listening audience with far from random, arbitrary or even chaotic sounds (fig. 4). Rather, the poem’s evocative and rhythmic sequences pose ‘new’ sign systems (conventional language being the

Jones D, DADA.indd 30

21/05/2014 15:00:05

dada’s r adical negation

31

sign system par excellence), with the deliberate intention of putting in place foundations ‘for signs that would not be any more signs, but the object, thereby overcoming the necessary falsification [of language], the lies produced by the cultural arbitrary sign system’.60 The euphony of ‘Karawane’ generates new signs and sound patterns that resist functioning as metaphors; signs and patterns that, therefore, resist operating as part of the currency of ‘lies’ produced by and circulating within culturally sanctioned but arbitrary sign systems (‘the language that journalism has abused and corrupted’);61 signs and patterns that resist functioning in a ‘second-hand’ manner as our medium for engaging the world. But they position themselves, nonetheless, as sounds that can touch ‘lightly on a hundred ideas … without naming them’62 – coming close to metaphor but not being metaphor – and the poem is then manifestly not purely self-referential.63 Herein, for Ball, lay the ‘alchemy’ and transformative potential of the word as he renounced all ‘words (to say nothing of sentences) that are not newly invented for our own use’.64 To be precise, of course, it is clear from Ball’s approach that it does not divest itself of the romantic ideal of an original, adamic language that resides innocently in a pre-logical and pre-cultural state: The primeval strata, untouched and unreached by logic and by the social apparatus, emerge in the unconsciously infantile and in madness, when the barriers are down; that is a world with its own laws and its own form …65 As a romantic ideal this, critically, would not get in the way of, but would rather enable, the political potential that was central to Ball’s activities. It provides a departure from the romanticism that Ball perceived in Marinetti’s approach, for instance, along with all of the attendant complications. Ball comes to the poems without words (the ‘verse ohne worte’) and to the sound poems (the ‘lautgedichte’) from an intriguing place. When he writes of ‘alchemy’, he signals for us how religious ideas and mysticism guide an approach that is indebted, in no small measure, to the contribution of Wassily Kandinsky. Ball met Kandinsky in 1912, the same year he met Huelsenbeck, and he was receptive to the older and established artist’s observations on the literature of the future and on the way in which sounds impress upon the soul, which ‘experiences a non-objective vibration that is more complex … more “supersensible” … than the effect on the soul produced by a bell’.66 It was in May 1912 that Der Blaue Reiter almanac was published in Munich, airing Kandinsky’s

Jones D, DADA.indd 31

21/05/2014 15:00:05

dada 1916 in theory

32

logical continuation to ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ with the essay ‘On the Question of Form’: ‘If the reader of these lines looks at one of the letters with unaccustomed eyes, i.e., not as a customary sign for a part of a word, but rather as a thing’, then it becomes a thing defined as ‘a being with its own inner life’.67 This thing-ness is a problematic that cannot be glossed over – it was Viktor Shklovski who declared that ‘the word is a thing’68 – and it becomes later the foundation of the specific charge levelled against the ‘aloof aesthetic game’69 of formalism by Bakhtin and Medvedev, stating that ‘the materialisation of the word is attained at the price of a naturalistic subtraction of meaning’.70 The extent to which Ball thus registered Kandinsky’s ideas is debatable and, to whatever extent they were registered, Sheppard argues that Ball proceeded to bend them ‘toward a purpose which is alien to Kandinsky’.71 Nietzsche was perhaps inevitably the moderator for Ball in 1912, in the face of Kandinsky’s spiritual orientation, reconfiguring the innerer Klang ‘by understanding the content of art as primitive and demonic, and only later, after his [Ball’s] brief experience at the front in November 1914 … [did he come] to view it in more spiritual terms’.72 In the meantime, from the early 1910s onwards, Ball knew also of the coherence but unintelligibility of the so-called ‘lost language of the soul’ that was transcribed from speech in hypnotic states and published by poet Justines Kerner in 1829, for example. Through Kandinsky, Ball encountered the suspended configurations in the poetry of some of the Russian Futurists, the work of phoneticists Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, with its transrational experimentation in zaum that was designed to penetrate ‘the known and palpable meaning of words to their ulterior soundmeanings, their preliterate signification, and their unconscious linguistic depths’73 (but, subsequently, charged with isolating and tearing the word ‘away from the unity of ideological and historical life’).74 And the works of Germany’s Christian Morgenstern, who died in 1914, were eventually to be read out by Ball to the motley cabaret audiences: Kroklokwafzi? Semememi! Seiokrontro – prafriplo: Bifzi, bafzi; hulalemi: quasti basti bo … Lalu, lalu lalu lalu la!75 Out of such phonetic, rhythmic configurations were generated these seductive and ‘wonderfully plaintive words’ that Ball located in ‘ancient

Jones D, DADA.indd 32

21/05/2014 15:00:05

dada’s r adical negation

33

Fig. 5. Photograph of Hugo Ball reciting ‘Karawane’, 1916.

magical texts’,76 such evocative and mysterious words as the priestmagician’s powerful ‘abracadabra’.77 So, Ball wrote, ‘[w]e have loaded the word with strengths and energies that helped us to rediscover the evangelical concept of the “word” (logos) as a magical complex image’78 – and supreme among these words is ‘dada’: for Ball ‘the heart of words’;79 for Jakobson, a meaningless little word thrown into circulation in Europe, a little word with which one can juggle à l’aise, thinking up meanings,

Jones D, DADA.indd 33

21/05/2014 15:00:05

dada 1916 in theory

34

adjoining suffixes, coining complex words which create the illusion that they refer to objects: dadasopher, dadapit.80 Perhaps the signal event to have taken place at the Cabaret Voltaire (which, by mid-1916, gave way to the Dada soirées) is the only one for which there exists a widely reproduced, albeit a necessarily stiff and staged, photographic record. It is the photograph of Ball performing his sound poetry, taken in June or July 1916, just before his first break with Dada (fig. 5). He is rigged in the painted cardboard cylinders, the huge collar, the ‘wings’, the famous witchdoctor’s hat – the attire of the ‘magic bishop’81 – and flanked by the music stands for his manuscripts, all of which he describes in detail in his triumphant diary entry of 23 June 1916 that followed the performance.82 In truth, perhaps, how different might we argue Ball to be from the man that Jakobson described in 1921, the improviser who, having ‘received the gift of a clarity of vision which laid everything bare, ends his life as a fool in a cap scrawling transrational verses’?83 Ball, in his own fool’s cap, began at that June performance ‘slowly and solemnly’ to vocalise his cycle of word-like configurations: gadji beri bimba glandridi lauli lonni cadori gadjama bim beri glassala glandridi glassala tuffm i zimbrabim blassa glassasa tuffm izimbrabim … Here was what Ball had already charged himself with doing – his self-appointed task was to adopt ‘symmetries and rhythms instead of principles’, working out his aesthetic negotiation of the political terrain through opposition of ‘world systems and acts of state by transforming them into a phrase’.84 The power and ‘magic’ of the spoken word became tangible in the sound poetry that ultimately resisted the visual renderings of the Futurist poems or, elsewhere and later in the context of Berlin Dada, the visual renderings of Raoul Hausmann’s optophones.85 By that resistance to visual rendering, and with the arrest of attention on its texture and plasticity, the formation of language becomes, ‘magically’ we might say, the object that we can no longer look, or now listen, through. What was pursued from the outset was the idea of a culturally redemptive ‘new’ art, precisely the function that Ball designed for sound poetry that brought music down to the level of speech (as Paul Valéry

Jones D, DADA.indd 34

21/05/2014 15:00:05

dada’s r adical negation

35

conceived of poetry, rather than poetry being speech raised to the level of music), privileging above the nonsense of others ‘my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own’.86 To attempt to imagine how Ball might have visualised his ‘lautgedichte’ ultimately runs out of road when we recognise his priority of positioning a sense of authenticity or ‘truth’, therefore, as an aesthetic norm. His reading initially of the parole in libertà acknowledges what was distinct in the Futurist innovation: They [the Futurists] took the word out of the sentence frame (the world image) that had been thoughtlessly and automatically assigned to it, nourished the emaciated big-city vocables with light and air, and gave them back their warmth, emotion, and their original untroubled freedom.87 What had been the Dada burp – Futurism repeating on Dada, Dada’s burning heart – became the sound poetry that Ball elaborated upon in order to apply in the break-up of the structures and inhibitors of his own world. Ball describes his recovery and reclamation of the contingence of humanity that signally departed from Futurism’s imbroglio and at times crude celebration of technology, a move at once constructive and constitutive: We [the Dadaists] went a step further. We tried to give the isolated vocables the fullness of an oath, the glow of a star. And curiously enough, the magically inspired vocables conceived and gave birth to a new sentence that was not limited and confined by any conventional meaning … [T]his sentence made it possible to hear the innately playful, but hidden, irrational character of the listener …88 Ball extends no appeal to the reader, then, and fully resists the imposition of text on the ‘vocables’. The new and eruptive sentence is composed for the listener, it achieves integrity in process, to find its function as a sociopolitical phenomenon. When language and life fall apart, the necessary disintegration of all that appeared stable and permanent makes way for something else, and we hear again and anew what was hidden and what is now freed from inhibition. The task becomes the rupturing of the stability of signifying practices that are anchored socially, the conventions of language and literature and of the speakable and thinkable, the entire conception of the world within language (‘Weltbild in der Sprache’). So Ball: once it is recognized that the word was the first discipline, this leads to a fluctuating style that avoids substantives and shuns concentration.

Jones D, DADA.indd 35

21/05/2014 15:00:05

dada 1916 in theory

36

The separate parts of the sentence, even the individual vocables and sounds, regain their autonomy. Perhaps one day it will be the task of language to demonstrate the absurdity of this doctrine.89 Notes 1 Henri Lefebvre, ally of the Situationists in the 1960s, cited in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 24. 2 Gundolf Winter, ‘Zurich Dada and the Visual Arts’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), p. 141. 3 Arnauld Pierre, ‘The “Confrontation of Modern Values”: A Moral History of Dada in Paris’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 252. 4 In action, Huelsenbeck was a notable executor of Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto ‘The Art of Noises’. Luigi Russolo, ‘The Art of Noises (extracts)’, trans. Robert Brain, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 88–90. 5 Karin Füllner, ‘Richard Huelsenbeck: “Bang! Bang! Bangbangbang” The Dada Drummer in Zurich’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), pp. 97–98. 6 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 38. 7 See Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Bad Dada (Evola)’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 2005), pp. 31–55; Richard Sheppard, ‘Julius Evola, Futurism and Dada: A Case of Double Misunderstanding’, in Richard Sheppard (ed.), New Studies in Dada: Essays and Documents (Hutton: Hutton Press, 1981), pp. 85–94. 8 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 33. 9 See chapter 4. 10 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Foreword to the History of the Age’ (1918), trans. Michael Kane, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 77. 11 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism’ (1920), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 40. 12 Cited in Raymond Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p. 87. 13 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 6. 14 Huelsenbeck, ‘Foreword to the History of the Age’, p. 77.

Jones D, DADA.indd 36

21/05/2014 15:00:05

dada’s r adical negation

37

15 Peter Demetz, ‘The Futurist Johannes R. Becher’, trans. Wilhelm Werthern, Modernism/ Modernity, 1/3 (September 1994), 179. 16 Peter Davies, ‘Becher’s Version of Majakovkij’s “150 000 000”’, Modern Language Review, 97 (2002), 892. 17 Giuseppe Prezzolini, ‘Al lettore’, La Voce, 1/9 (11 February 1909), 33. 18 The translation was published in Der Sturm, 133 (October 1912), 194–95. 19 Becher once described Hennings as his ‘first poetic risk, my passionate adventure, which spun me into the middle of literature and brought me together with Leonhard Frank, van Hoddis and Hardekopf’. Bernhard Echte (ed.), Emmy Ball-Hennings: 1885–1948. ‘Ich bin so vielfach …’ Texte, Bilder, Dokumente (Frankfurt am Main and Basel: Stroemfeld, 1999), p. 78. 20 Hubert van den Berg, ‘The Star of the Cabaret Voltaire: The Other Life of Emmy Hennings’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), p. 73. 21 Richard Sheppard, Modernism–Dada–Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 213. 22 Beatrice Warde, ‘The Crystal Goblet’, in Gunnar Swanson (ed.), Graphic Design & Reading: Explorations of an Uneasy Relationship (New York: Allworth Press, 2000), p. 91. 23 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax – Imagination without Strings – Words-inFreedom 1913’, trans. R. W. Flint, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 104–5. 24 Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 43. We might similarly reference the work of British pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi as he brings serialised order to bear upon the disparity of ‘cut out sheets for planes and tanks, building instructions for Lego-kits, the works of a clockwork robot, stickers for Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and their synthetic companions’. In graphic works, Paolozzi exercised first of all the principle of ‘computerising’ material into informational and potentially interchangeable units. Such units enter into the circulation of signs on the picture plane and, ‘in relation to similar objective details, these then become abstract, and in the repetition of geometrical elements they can combine and often lead to associative legibility’ (a regularity that emerged most distinctly in examples of Paolozzi’s Moonstrips Empire News screenprints of 1967, where columns of text generated formal cohesion pointing towards such associative legibility). See Wieland Schmied, ‘Bunk, Bash, Pop – The Graphics of Eduardo Paolozzi’, trans. Peter Bostock, in Frank Whitford et al., Eduardo Paolozzi: Sculpture, Drawings, Collages and Graphics (Stamford: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976), pp. 23–24; Eduardo Paolozzi, Moonstrips Empire News, 100 screenprinted sheets and a text by Christopher Finch, published by Editions Alecto in 1967. 25 F. T. Marinetti et al., ‘The Futurist Cinema 1916’, trans. R. W. Flint, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 207. 26 Lanham, The Electronic Word, p. 33. 27 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (11 May 1912)’, in Selected Poems and Related Prose, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 77. 28 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Propeller Talk’, Modernism/Modernity, 1/3 (September, 1994), 169.

Jones D, DADA.indd 37

21/05/2014 15:00:05

38

dada 1916 in theory

29 Marinetti, ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’, p. 80. 30 Lanham, The Electronic Word, p. 34. 31 Arthur Cohen, ‘The Typographic Revolution: Antecedents and Legacy of Dada Graphic Design’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979), pp. 73–74. 32 Marinetti, ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, p. 80. 33 Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax’, p. 98. 34 Lanham, The Electronic Word, p. 33. 35 Lanham, The Electronic Word, p. 34. 36 Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1985), p. 158. 37 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 22. 38 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 52. 39 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 25. 40 John Elderfield, Introduction to Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. xviii. 41 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 6. 42 Annabelle Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 26. 43 Elderfield, Introduction to Flight Out of Time, p. xvii. 44 Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), p. 69. 45 Richard Huelsenbeck, cited in Thomas F. Rugh, ‘Emmy Hennings and Zurich Dada’, Dada/Surrealism, 10/11 (1982), 10. 46 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 17. 47 Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada’, p. 23. 48 Hugo Ball, ‘Tenderenda the Fantast’, trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! The First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 123. 49 Ball, ‘Tenderenda the Fantast’, p. 169. 50 van den Berg, ‘The Star of the Cabaret Voltaire’, p. 72. 51 Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance, pp. 25–26. 52 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 66. 53 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 58. 54 Sheppard, Modernism–Dada–Postmodernism, p. 214. 55 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 25. 56 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 25. 57 Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 66. 58 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 54. 59 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 16. 60 Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ‘The Semiotics of Dada Poetry’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979), p. 67. 61 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 71. 62 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 68. 63 Richard Sheppard invokes the line ‘elomen elomen lefitalominai’ from Ball’s ‘Wolken’

Jones D, DADA.indd 38

21/05/2014 15:00:06

dada’s r adical negation

39

of 1916, for example, as strongly reminiscent of Christ’s words on the Cross, ‘Eli, eli, lama sabachthani’; Richard Sheppard, ‘Dada and Mysticism: Influences and Affinities’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979), p. 94; the sigil ‘elomen’ recurs in Ball’s ‘Tenderenda the Fantast’, p. 141. 64 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 71. 65 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 75. 66 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, trans. Peter Vergo, in Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (eds), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, I (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 147. 67 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, trans. Peter Vergo, in Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (eds), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, I (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 245. 68 Cited in Pavel Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 62. 69 Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, p. 66. 70 Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, p. 63. 71 Richard Sheppard, ‘Kandinsky’s Early Aesthetic Theory: Some Examples of its Influence and some Implications for the Theory and Practice of Abstract Poetry’, Journal of European Studies, 5 (1976), 28. 72 Sheppard, ‘Kandinsky’s Early Aesthetic Theory’, 27. 73 Cohen, ‘The Typographic Revolution’, p. 78. 74 Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, p. 64. 75 Christian Morgenstern, The Gallows Songs: Christian Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder: A Selection, trans. Max Knight (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1963), p. 13. 76 Ball, Flight Out of Time, pp. 66–67. 77 The supposed ancient Aramaic meaning of ‘abracadabra’ reinforces the power of words: ‘I will create, as I say’. We might find homonymic resonance in ‘abre [el] cadáver’, ‘open the body’, the body opened in two, and the whole intricate interconnectivity to which the body laid bare is exposed. 78 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 68. 79 Hugo Ball, ‘Dada Manifesto’ (1916), trans. Christopher Middleton, in Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 221. 80 Jakobson, Language in Literature, p. 37. 81 Anecdotally, I am reminded of another bishop from history, the tenth-century Bishop Abraham of Freising, who was granted land in the year 973 near the southern limestone Alpine range known in German as ‘Karawanken’. 82 Ball, Flight Out of Time, pp. 70–71. Hans Richter provides his own impressions of Ball from slightly after this period: ‘I never understood Hugo Ball very well. He was rather tall and very thin; when I first met him he looked to me like a dangerous criminal. I took his soft speech for a technique to put one off guard. His dark, mostly black clothes and black, wide brimmed hat made him look abbé-like (another suspicious note) … When he recited his abstract poems in the enormously overcrowded Dada exhibition at the Tiefenhoefe in Zurich in 1917, towering over an exploding and applauding-laughing crowd of pretty girls and serious bourgeois, he was … fanatical, unmoved, unsmiling.’

Jones D, DADA.indd 39

21/05/2014 15:00:06

40

83

84 85

86 87 88 89

Jones D, DADA.indd 40

dada 1916 in theory Hans Richter, ‘Dada X Y Z …’ (1948), in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 285. Jakobson, Language in Literature, p. 38. Ball established his own conceptual link between the Dadaist and the village idiot in his later and more conventional poem ‘Der Dorfdadaist’ (The Village Dadaist); Hugo Ball, ‘Der Dorfdadaist’, in Gesammelte Gedichte, ed. A Schütt-Hennings (Zurich: Arche, 1963), p. 36. Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 56. It is a critical point to note, though in passing it may be, that the typesetting of ‘Karawane’ with which we are today so familiar (fig. 4) comes from the 1920 Dada Almanach, edited by Huelsenbeck; this layout of 1920 was, crucially however, never authorised by Ball himself, whose stress fell always on the performance of his poems; still, in delightful symmetry, the eighteen typefaces of Huelsenbeck’s Almanach version practically matches the twenty typefaces in italic and boldface so heartily recommended by Marinetti in his 1913 ‘Destruction of Syntax’ manifesto. Ball, ‘Dada Manifesto’, p. 221. Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 68. Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 68. Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 22.

21/05/2014 15:00:06

2

Becoming the Dada Body: Masks, Dance and Mime One can act like one would like to live … I always acted what I longed for … acted for so long, and everything became the truth for me.

– Emmy Hennings, 19191

By the time Walter Benjamin described the body that speaks, it (the body) was fully torn and rent from organic closure, dismembered and achieving apocalyptic revelation only in death.2 Corporeal fragments comprised for Benjamin the ‘authenticity’ that he sought in art, rejecting representation in favour of the embrace and presentation of actuality even in ‘the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life [that] says more than paintings … [or] the text’.3 So by the time he presented his famous address on authorial production to the Institute for the Study of Fascism, in the same year that socialist realism was sanctioned by the Soviet Writers’ Congress, Benjamin was more than pleased to reflect upon what he recognised as being the ‘revolutionary strength of Dadaism [which] consisted in testing art for its authenticity’4 – the Authentizität that provided him with the category in which a sense of modernist realism was assembled, nailed and pasted together out of the actual material of experience (although Benjamin’s conception of ‘experience’ as basis for authenticity may ultimately have taken too much for granted, and merits its own discussion). And added to the quality of ‘authenticity’ was, crucially, the ‘actuality’ (‘topicality’) or Aktualität of the fragment delivered in context, revealing the aura of its topicality in a process devoid of pretence and which was infinitely more productive ‘than showing off the rather … petit bourgeois idea of education for the masses’.5 The mimesis here outlined is understood as having been generated from

Jones D, DADA.indd 41

21/05/2014 15:00:06

42

dada 1916 in theory

Fig. 6. Marcel Janco, Cabaret Voltaire (photograph of lost painting), 1916.

Jones D, DADA.indd 42

21/05/2014 15:00:06

becoming the dada body

43

creative as opposed to reproductive imitation (Kant’s nachfolgen rather than his nachahmen), or alternatively from the productive as opposed to reproductive imagination (Nietzsche), extending in the process beyond sign and referent, and into the realm of experience and actuality to reflect the conditions of its production. The creative imitation of structures of production, then, carries the potential to achieve something that is otherwise denied to the subject under capitalist relations – namely control over what the subject, he or she, produces. Creative imitation, or artistic mimesis, by the productive imagination is able to recover the option of control in aesthetic terms, and in Benjamin’s example the montaged assembly of fragments instances critically a reflection of the real and, simultaneously, a construction of potential. Establishing such a context, this chapter will consider the performative dimensions of Zurich Dada (without which it might well have passed unnoticed in the middle of the First World War), which foreground the contingency and impermanence of the Dada body in the process of creative imitation. Its centrality as the medium that made Dada as loud and as combative as it was distinguishes it as a feature in the contributions of all of the Zurich players. So, starting at the top, with the face, in the form of the grinning Dada mask glimpsed in one of the few visual records that we have of the Cabaret Voltaire, what follows will introduce the philosophically intricate function of the face in rendering present what is absent. In the face’s refusal to be contained, the function of the mask will be outlined in deliberating how the face presents a relationship with the infinitely other – precisely the otherness (and the ethical claims of others) that is (are) granted priority over selfhood in the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas – by which process subjectivity is brought into question. In the emerging resistance and claim of the other, it will be suggested that the performativity of the Dada body gains politically and, detouring philosophically, the body will assume to signal its own absence through the slippage and supplement of representation. Dada performance, just like any other performance, poses difficulties that we can anticipate in attempting a present commentary – specifically in the contorting bodies of the Dada dancers – yet it gives us opportunity to pursue such processes as those by which we experience our own representation of things.

Jones D, DADA.indd 43

21/05/2014 15:00:06

dada 1916 in theory

44

*** The limits of representation stake themselves in the way formations (as deformations, to echo Barthes) obscure not only our apprehension of reality but also the act of representing. When the critique of representation is directed at the obscuring surfaces, art can assume an effective role of critical intervention; if flight from the limits of representation is impossible, then at least working against its system can generate new possibilities when the politics of representation overtake the representation of politics. The latter requires a particular working through of the relation between the assemblage named the state-form and the circuitry of the regime of signs that perpetuates the state-form, wherein the body enacts a ‘dialectical justice’ between its own physicality and political materialism to such an extent that ‘no limb remains unrent’.6 As the image sphere undergoes reconstruction, perhaps the most difficult dismembering for us to look at directly and, at least conceptually, to reconstruct is of that particular body part in which we will find ourselves embedded. The face, it has been proposed, disrupts subjectivity through the paradoxical rendering of le rapport sans rapport (the relation without relation) when it is the face of ‘the other’ that I look upon and that looks at – or confronts – me. Consider, for example, Levinas when he describes how the face is present in its refusal to be contained … [i]t is neither seen nor touched – for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content.7 Stating this much appears to point towards subjectification of the object through gaze. Yet, in the work of Levinas, evidently, the face has been thought of as a site of refusal to be contained by (and within the politics of) the gaze, its disruptive force evidenced in how it ‘cuts across vision’.8 Deferral to the infinite transcendence or foreign-ness of the other, which Levinas does not contest but rather reaffirms, famously in the distillation tout autre est tout autre (every other is entirely other),9 preempts the possibility of any kind of intersubjective relation between beings, because such a relation requires maintenance of some difference between the self and the other. He indicates, however, a relational asymmetry when it is precisely identification of the other’s alterity that results in that alterity’s envelopment and subsequent nullification. The position being staked here is complicated and argued centrally in Levinas’s first major book, Totality and Infinity,

Jones D, DADA.indd 44

21/05/2014 15:00:06

becoming the dada body

45

Fig. 7. Marcel Janco, Au Cabaret Voltaire, 1916.

in the form of the relation without relation, as ‘the subject relates itself to something that exceeds its relational capacity’.10 Responding to this particular complication, Simon Critchley has more recently observed formal alignment in the notions of excess, overflow and the concept of ‘infinity’ as received in Descartes; infinity, by definition, as ‘a thought that contains more than can be thought’.11

Jones D, DADA.indd 45

21/05/2014 15:00:08

dada 1916 in theory

46

Thinking in the face of the other Now, for Levinas, the face functions as a significant indicator of the other’s corporeal absence, from which I will initially approach the emphatic corporeal presence of the first Dada manifestations in and around 1916. There is no single contemporary rendering from 1916 that out-does all others in depicting the Cabaret Voltaire in action. Any image that remains today in its continuing ‘presence’ from that fragmentary phase has persistently been reconstructed in and out of written accounts, dominated visually by Marcel Janco’s lost yet widely reproduced painting Cabaret Voltaire (fig. 6) – a work retrospectively dated 1916, but which was dated 1917 by Hans Arp and is most likely to be a remembered and no doubt part-romanticised reconstruction of the original cabaret scene. Excepting all staged photographic records, a sheet of drawings by Janco titled Au Cabaret Voltaire and dated 1916, depicting the exaggerated poses of possibly masked performers in varied guises (we might speculate that the most fully rendered figure at bottom left depicts the diseuse, standing by the rustling cabaret curtain and ‘ravaged by grief’),12 may well be the only other visual document of the cabaret activity in the back room of the Holländische Meierei (fig. 7).13 For now, Christian Schad’s tantalising Cabaret of 1916, with its striking formal similarity to Janco’s Cabaret Voltaire, can only safely be assigned a similarly generic role to the Zurich cabaret depictions that Marcel Słodki, among others, produced in the same period.14 But it is to Janco’s painting with its ‘naturalism in zigzag’,15 already at several removes, that we first turn in our attempts to visualise those early performances – remembering Peggy Phelan’s timely and cautionary note that ‘a believable image is the product of a negotiation with an unverifiable real’.16 Whichever of several conflicting identifications of the cabaret players may be correct, the large grinning, glaring mask that looks out at the clientele from above and behind the cabaret troupe can surely be ascribed to Janco. Numbering among the many masks that Janco made for the performances of Zurich Dada, Hugo Ball described how the effect of the masks within the confined enclosure of the cabaret was sensational, tangibly and paradoxically revealing the otherwise masked ‘primitive’ unconscious of modern life: What fascinates us all about the masks is that they represent not human characters and passions, but characters and passions that are larger than life. The horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible.17

Jones D, DADA.indd 46

21/05/2014 15:00:08

becoming the dada body

47

Ball’s reference to qualities ‘that are larger than life’ prefigures the ‘refusal to be contained’ that Levinas recognises in the face. But such passages as this one from the Dada founder’s diary, however illuminating they may be of the masks’ perceived transformative potential, are most frequently cited in order to situate Dada interest in the primitive. Yet, in addition to Ball’s and others’ notes on the masks, we should not lose sight of Janco’s own existing familiarity with the masks of Jewish theatre in his native Romania and, concurrent with Zurich Dada, the masks created by Picasso for Apollinaire’s Les mamelles de Tirésias, for instance – masks that acknowledge the primitive but find their form through Cubism.18 As a corporeal emblem of the other’s otherness, the face that the mask renders poses an eruptive immediacy – eruptive, no less, the moment the cabaret performer assumed the Dada mask: Not only did the mask immediately call for a costume; it also demanded a quite definite, passionate gesture, bordering on madness … The motive power of these masks was irresistibly conveyed.19 Ball’s extended description of this revelatory moment in the late spring of 1916 signals the immediacy of the rupture of social roles, rituals, codes and rules – what Levinas calls dérangement, that which skews our anticipated daily trajectory at the point of the unforeseen encounter with the strangeness of the other. Ball, of course, used the word Gesicht for ‘face’, a word that connotes more than the frontal view or façade of the English word. The German Gesicht refers to seeing and being seen; the words Angesicht and Antlitz introduce the different emphases of the face facing us and our mutual facing. The same is also present in the Hebrew word panim that Janco would have known. But this is already an admission of the expanded and more emphatic currency of meaning that embraces the literal sense of active ‘looking at’ (the Greek prosôpon) and the sense of masks and roles (the Latin persona). When emphatic, the culturally overdetermined face is argued as being formed through the gaze of the other, constituting in the process the corporeal self-presence of the other. From this sequence, Levinas moves to describe ‘a relation between beings that remain absolute within that relation’, which is discussed and understood by him as being an ‘ethical’ relation. Well, the ethical is well rehearsed in the approach to the body most usually posited alongside the political approach initiated by Nietzsche, taken up by Foucault, which poses the question of the constructed body as a field of contesting power relations. The ethical question, on the other hand, intertwined with the political but retaining

Jones D, DADA.indd 47

21/05/2014 15:00:08

48

dada 1916 in theory

autonomy, is concerned with the subject’s relation to its own body – that is, my relation to my own body – and with how the relation shifts. Levinas’s thought on a relation or relations between absolute beings directs its attention to the intersubjectivity between self and other, which is read as heteronomous. But such heteronomy lies at the receiving end of the autonomy orthodoxy that is part of Kant’s legacy today, and of the dominance of the ultimately problematic concept of autonomy that we now wrestle in approaching the terms of the ethico-political. For Kant, the subject acts upon maxims that it gives to itself, and the concession to any authority is only ever the freely determined consequence of the subject’s own moral deliberation: the subject’s ethical status therefore presupposes the subject’s autonomy. This kind of wilful resignation can arise as much from the subject’s uncritical deference as from critical engagement: ‘If I have a book which understands for me … I need not trouble myself. I need not think … [because] others will readily undertake the irksome work for me’.20 What enlightenment means for Kant is the subject’s freeing of itself from the imposed tutelage of the moral norms and ethical values of, effectively, others. The heteronomy of this otherness is to be found, Kant would say, in the books that absolve the subject of any need to think or reason for itself. Consequently, heteronomy is posed as a handicap, first, in the development of autonomy and, second, for the subject’s freedom. So we have Kant’s and the Enlightenment’s charge: ‘Have the courage to use your own reason.’21 This seems to conflict with Levinas’s position, where the ethical is thought as an experience of heteronomy. But what Levinas is attempting, I believe, is to outline a relationship with the infinitely foreign or transcendent other (the other that always calls the subject into question) in terms of its being an ethical relationship that is primarily and above all heteronomous – and heteronomous, moreover, as soon as Levinas acknowledges ‘the face of the neighbour … with respect to the other … [b]ut the men round me are multiple’.22 It is this that not only conditions the subject’s thought but also places the subject’s thought under sometimes painful, always difficult, scrutiny. It necessarily precedes the activity of the thinking subject, the activity most commonly called ‘autonomy’. The abstract machine of faciality Looking at the face of the other involves our cognisant activity in the confrontation. This, however, amounts at once to confronting the infinite

Jones D, DADA.indd 48

21/05/2014 15:00:08

becoming the dada body

49

when the other ‘remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign’23 (‘Hence the question: “Who is my neighbour?”’).24 It is the infinity of the other that Levinas opposes to the totality of the same, the infinity of that otherness in perpetual excess of the limits of any order. We will, then, concede that cognisance of the other’s autonomy always escapes us, as Levinas also conceded in a late observation as he felt the dying winds of 1968, when ‘all values were “up for grabs”, with the exception of the value of the “other man”’.25 If the face of the other resists being contained, if ‘it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed’,26 then it counteracts any and every attempt on our part to fashion an image of the other after the self. The result is that refusal to be contained becomes a concretisation of the other’s infinity, and its relation to the self is marked by an asymmetry. Levinas introduces the dimension of height to the self’s ethical relation with the face of the other, whose voice comes from above – from ‘on high’ – producing a ‘curvature of … intersubjective space [that] inflects distance into elevation’.27 Like the elevated mask set high above the performers, looking out at the clientele (surveying the ‘subjective field’, as Levinas would say) in Janco’s Cabaret Voltaire, the experience of the other is as the high point of the curve against which the subject assumes the worm’s-eye view. And the worm’s eye is, effectively, the only viewing option, as the impassive thirdperson perspective is an impossibility (or, at least, is an impossibility without the consequence that the ‘absolute difference’ of the self–other relation is totalised or nullified). The asymmetry of intersubjectivity, as Levinas indicates, throws up a kind of mutual obedience when the explicit statement is made that the other’s command ‘commands me to command’28 – and here an important departure from Kant’s autonomy begins to manifest in the impossibility of our own possibilities in the otherness of the other. So Levinas: ‘This infinity … already resists us in his [the other’s] face, is his face, is the primordial expression, is the first word.’29 This intersubjectivity, specifically in the dialogical form that Levinas outlines, ends in the abstraction of the third-person perspective – which is problematic. The supposed impassive, neutral, exterior status of the third person, removed from the relation and standing outside it, is what frames the relation in the first instance. If, for example, the self–other relation could assume a neutral guise, it would remain unresponsive to the exteriority of the other’s otherness because the neutrality of any third-person ‘vision’ is distorted by the curvature of intersubjective space. As a result, we are obliged to interrogate and to critique the bases of

Jones D, DADA.indd 49

21/05/2014 15:00:08

dada 1916 in theory

50

an ethico-politics that emerges from the dialogical model of the other; it is from such interrogation that the politics of the gaze is effectively disrupted. What Levinas is concerned to do is resist the generation and propagation of the ‘waves of sameness’ beneath which difference slowly disappears from view – the unrelenting wave after wave that Deleuze and Guattari have recognised in racism, for example, as rising ‘until those who resist identification have been wiped out … Its cruelty is equalled only by its incompetence and naiveté.’30 The ethics in which Levinas meanwhile engages is an ethics that cautions against a concept of dialogical intersubjectivity grounded in notions of equality and social reciprocity (such a concept as Jürgen Habermas elsewhere employs to situate the autonomy that he outlines in ‘communicative action oriented to mutual understanding’).31 Rather, for Levinas, the emphasis is upon demonstrating how intersubjectivity actually works to make the other more like, or indeed the same as, the self (me). To this extent, we can provocatively ally Levinas with Deleuze and Guattari as all three rally against the politics of a given regime of sameness within which the other would claim to identify itself.32 The face figures prominently as each of these three thinkers moves towards the implied ethics of their respective observations – the face, indeed, ‘is a politics’ for Deleuze and Guattari,33 ‘is a surface: traits, lines, wrinkles … the face is a map’,34 and: the abstract machine of faciality assumes a role of selective response … the machine rejects faces that do not conform … [in its] role as deviance detector, the faciality machine does not restrict itself to individual cases but operates [as] the computation of normalities.35 From this perspective we should properly begin to read Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of recognition (far removed from and in contrast to – and ultimately in conflict with – the inclusivity of a ‘politics of recognition’ in which arguably operate the tolerance and respect of the other and of the ‘horizon of meaning’ that the other brings; that is, multiculturalism’s overcoming of ethnocentricity).36 Deleuze and Guattari set their challenge to the liberal sensibility that embraces a sense of multiculturalism in its desire dialogically to include the other within an image of the same – and which does so without ever being disturbed by the constantly whirring spindles of the faciality machine that perpetually emits signs from its surface (whatever deep meaning we might seek to recover from its crannies and furrows, dimples and wrinkles).

Jones D, DADA.indd 50

21/05/2014 15:00:08

becoming the dada body

51

The darker, more pernicious, politics of recognition that Deleuze and Guattari outline is confluent with the emerging logics that we encounter in nascent Dada. Richard Huelsenbeck, for instance, aggressively bit back at the liberal sensibility that voiced opposition to the First World War: We were against the pacifists, because the war had, after all, given us the opportunity to exist in all our glory. And in those days, the pacifists were even more respectable than now, when every fool with his books railing at the times wants to take advantage of the boom. We were pro-war and Dadaism is still pro-war today. Collisions are necessary: things are still not cruel enough.37 Our first response to Huelsenbeck’s polemic may be positive as – despite any reservation in relation to the sentiments expressed in relation to war – we make ourselves aware of the Dadaists’ deliberate deployment of semantic cynicisms. On this score, Peter Sloterdijk sits comfortably with Huelsenbeck’s tactical move, namely to engage in ‘the art of declaring oneself, in an ironic, dirty way, to be in agreement with the worst possible things’.38 What is suggested is a kind of self-abjection that, for Sloterdijk at least, carries the distinction of being (in 1918) the most recent bearer since Nietzsche of the returned repressed. And yet this ‘maliciously clashing third position “free” of all scruples’39 remains conditional – even artistic claims to free and uninhibited expression ‘in the name of art’ stop short of eating babies – and remains responsive first and foremost to outward manifestation at the expense of engagement with the internal faults of the dialogical model of intersubjectivity. There are, however, fleeting glimpses of the necessary recognition of such faults in instances of direct though infrequent observations – reflective more than descriptive – made in relation to the Dada masks during the Zurich phase. The necessity of the masks was reiterated as substituting for ‘an underground shelter to hide the faces too shocking to be seen’,40 and subsequently their role was contextualised under more sustained scrutiny: Man suddenly finds himself placed before an image of himself which he didn’t suspect existed and which plunges him into terror. His confidence in himself, in life itself, disappears. He is at the limits of his reason. The horror which the grotesque, degenerate mask communicates is purely negative and destructive … Is it not there rather than in the hedging and polite explanations, that one holds the keystone to Dadaist provocation?41

Jones D, DADA.indd 51

21/05/2014 15:00:08

52

dada 1916 in theory

This last question is clearly rhetorical, but I am still tempted to nod enthusiastically – at least to the extent that the degeneracy being described signals an exhaustion of reason and, consequently, forces a rupture of the limits of reason. The face, and the mask that hides the face, is (are) not the surface(s) behind which the other’s otherness resides – the face is not a condensation of any aspect of the other, but is the other as such. The whole body expresses and, Levinas would argue, our hands, our stooping shoulders, our ribs, all express as well as our face. The performative identity By the time of Levinas’s second major book, Otherwise than Being (1974), his interest in the motif of the face continues, but its former centrality is recast as the old oppositions (totality/infinity, self/other) transform into the ‘entanglements’ of different topics (markedly Levinas’s particular use of ‘proximity’ in rendering a tensional dynamism). The face figures in, but no longer dominates, his thought relating to the ongoing process of totalisation, where the whole body now participates in disturbing the process of totalisation and in activating the counter-process of excedence.42 And first among the Dadaists to pursue whole bodily participation was the ‘star’ of the Cabaret Voltaire, Emmy Hennings.43 By 1916, diseuse Hennings was an experienced nightclub and cabaret performer – she sang, she danced, she recited poetry – having travelled with theatrical troupes the length and breadth of central and eastern Europe, from Hamburg to Budapest, from Moscow to Bern. This veteran of Expressionist cabaret danced at the Cabaret Voltaire and Dada soirées to musical arrangements and piano accompaniment by Ball. Janco directed some of her performances – she might appear alone on stage or at other times be joined by Ball, Huelsenbeck and Tzara. There were ‘cubist’ dances and, of course, Hennings presented performances wearing Janco’s masks. Broadly speaking, the themes that she pursued through dance and any other medium were the conventional Expressionist fare of the urban demimonde – alienation, ecstasy, isolation, the night – though without the usual Expressionist polemic, and we encounter some real points of Dadaist disjuncture and fragmentation in her poetry; the poem ‘Die vieilleicht letzte Flucht’ (Perhaps the Last Flight), for instance, which was published in Cabaret Voltaire. Her movement on stage oriented itself to bohemia, the world with which she had become familiar over ten years, not in the way she reflected it

Jones D, DADA.indd 52

21/05/2014 15:00:08

becoming the dada body

53

but in the way she experienced it. And herein resides the ontology of performance – Hennings’s specifically and the Dadaists’ generally – as Phelan has described it: ‘[p]erformance’s only life is in the present … [p]erformance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity … becomes itself through disappearance’.44 Addressing such disappearance is a primary concern as we reconstruct Hennings dancing on stage, understanding precisely as performative her interaction with the cabaret and soirée audiences, and as we engage in descriptive recovery of such performance. Remarking directly in relation to identity (viz. the identity of the masked dancer), Phelan observes the integral bond between self and other: Identity cannot … reside in the name you can say or the body you can see … Identity emerges in the failure of the body to express being fully and the failure of the signifier to convey meaning exactly. Identity is perceptible only through a relation to an other – which is to say, it is a form of both resisting and claiming the other, declaring the boundary where the self diverges from and merges with the other.45 This is the same resistance (the totality) and claim (the infinity), the one compounding the other, that was described by Levinas. Though the body may be denied (at least as it is for Kant) in the formation of subjectivity, it is necessarily retained as the site of reason and rationality – and ethico-moral conduct, of course, is immanent to Kant’s own purified conception of rationality. We are minded of how the subject of reason is manifest as the divided subject in the conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason, the subject that renounces and quits its own nature and thus divides itself from itself in the face of an overwhelming vastness that it must contemplate. The philosopher’s subject finds refuge through moral law, and though divided it remains bound to the body from which subjectivity arises, ‘inextricably interlaced … for the purpose of reciprocal ascent’.46 Nothing if not the body assumed priority when the Expressionist cabaret dancer took to the stage in 1916, and the centrality of the body here demands at least theoretical delineation in order that we may negotiate the criticality of its presence and of its ‘becoming Dada’. The deviation from certain orders can and will be of no consequence without the continuity of what is being deviated from – that is, the old and ordinary (the new can only shock for as long as it is underwritten by the old, as Robert Hughes once plainly put it).47 On the theatrical stage, for instance, ‘the real is what theatre defines itself against, even while reduplicating its effects’.48 And the ordinary, then, is precisely

Jones D, DADA.indd 53

21/05/2014 15:00:08

dada 1916 in theory

54

what the extra-ordinary requires if it is to withstand its own reduction merely to being another order, complete with that order’s embedded constraints and limitations. When the body is emphasised as the locus of limitations on what is possible, the result of such emphasis (or centring) is the decentring of the subject and the opening up of the body as the site of multiple interpretations on a stage (to appropriate Derrida) that is an ‘abyss (the indefinite multiplication) of representation’.49 We respond, culturally and politically, to this impulse as radical today as the day it was described by Nietzsche – it defines even the breathtaking capacity of asymmetric warfare in the twenty-first century. The deed, as we have read (and will read again), is everything; and consciousness an effect, not a cause. So, for Nietzsche, consciousness is an effect of the body; Zarathustra’s address on the ‘despisers’ of the body gives us no room for misrecognition on the point that ‘body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body’.50 But Nietzsche’s body, of course, is not a single thing; it is an insubstantial phenomenon that expresses the relationships between forces, and in its fluid state evaluates reigning values and engenders new ones. It is the body constituted as the arbitrary relation of force with force, according to which reading we should properly approach the description of the body in Beyond Good and Evil as a ‘social structure’ (‘social’ here understood in psychological terms as the nexus of forces in competition with one another, rather than the sociological model of the social construction of subjectivity – though the competing forces will themselves often enough arise from the social environment and its conditions). The interpretive plurality We find here reprise for observations on masks through Nietzsche’s thoughts on the body. When consciousness is an effect of the body, it is manifestly the consequence or outcome of an interpretive process. Consciousness is distinctly not the origin of experience as factual, but rather the consequence of interpretation and articulation. In outlining his principles of a new evaluation in The Will to Power, for instance, Nietzsche states the following: Against positivism, which halts at phenomena – ‘There are only facts’ – I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing … ‘Everything is subjective’, you say; but

Jones D, DADA.indd 54

21/05/2014 15:00:08

becoming the dada body

55

even this is interpretation. The ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is. – Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis.51 Nietzsche admits the phenomenon of consciousness but, in recognising that only ‘the most superficial and worst part’ of man’s continual thought ever rises to the level of consciousness,52 he wittingly relegates the importance of the cogito. What this proceeds to offset is the importance of the body to which some would argue Nietzsche reductively accords a foundational role – but Nietzsche cannot be reductivist and perspectivist. He insists on the body because the body provides a locus for perspectives – often enough competing perspectives – and, as Nietzsche scholar Eric Blondel has observed, ‘to interpret is to have a body, and to be a perspective’.53 Nietzsche chooses not to explain but rather to emphasise interpretation, the body for him being ‘a thousandfold process’,54 making it thus analogous with the text that is also interpreted. What follows is that ‘[a]sking what the body is … means asking what interpretation is’ and, Blondel continues, ‘the ultimate principle is not the body, but interpretation, the “body” being merely the metaphor of interpretation, the human means of interpreting it’.55 This field of forces, these interpretations, this body, indeed this metaphor, is and are a site of contestation, instability and friction between forces and interpretations that only temporarily, if ever at all, fall under corporeal regulation. The implied unity of selfhood that the cogito secures with the absence of conflict engenders a stream of illusions – under the veil of maya (Nietzsche’s continuation of Schopenhauer’s web of maya),56 or of the multiply defined subject ‘who dreams of being able to possess himself as one’57 – in among which is the belief that action is directed by moral thought. And it is the latter that Nietzsche inverts, placing all action ahead of the moral thought that can only come after it. The temporary nature of these conditions is why no single meaning will emerge, however desperately we search for it, out of self-perpetuating contestation – ‘life is the instability of power-relations, there is no domination, only a struggle for domination’58 – there is no power, only the process of a will to power; and, to round off this particular sequence, there is no will to power, only wills to power.59 Now, interpretations will be contained by this need to represent themselves and, in Nietzsche’s terminology, representation is Apollonian in nature. To contain the Dionysian in order to render its representation,

Jones D, DADA.indd 55

21/05/2014 15:00:08

dada 1916 in theory

56

however, is far removed from the traditional notion of a turbulent, eternal struggle between polarities (these two polarities of restraint and intoxication in particular). It is rather what Sloterdijk describes as ‘a stationary polarity that leads to a clandestine doubling of the Apollonian’, with one extreme (the Apollonian) increasingly coming to characterise itself as in some way constitutive of the other. Sloterdijk continues: The Apollonian Unified Subject makes certain, through the mechanisms of the silently established axiom of balance, that the Dionysian Other never comes into play as itself, but only as the dialectical or symmetrical Other to the Unified Subject. An Apollonian principle governs the antagonism between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.60 Nietzsche’s insistence is that this relationship between polarities emerges structurally out of the individual’s desire both to negate and to affirm ego boundaries. To the extent that it is not directed at any exterior object, the effect is reproduction of the divided self. A principle of doubling or substitution, or indeed self-masking, wherein ‘everything appears in its “second edition”’ as Sloterdijk says,61 is outlined and imparts our abandonment of any hope of encountering an ‘original’ or of touching the ‘Dionysian foundation of being’62 (this ‘foundation of being’ indicating the formative scene of Western culture and civilisation, rather than any foundationalist logic). And it is in The Birth of Tragedy that Nietzsche declares the elevation of the social through symbolic expression arising from his process of substitution: The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a new world of symbols; and the entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the mere symbolism of the lips, face, and speech but the whole pantomime of dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic movement.63 Here the Apollonian subject starts to unravel with the realisation that beneath the surface of representation the Dionysian is raving – for Nietzsche, ‘the Apollonian in him suspected that he was at bottom only a Dionysian “phenomenon”’64 – and the subject’s belief in its own sovereignty disintegrates with the suspicion that the present self is only a substitute, or a mask, for the ‘true’ self. The stage of Zurich Dada with its masks and dances, its distortions of the body made central, demonstrates one stage for this struggle, where ‘the self of the thinker on stage that is in search of itself oscillates … back and forth between the frozen halves of his mask’.65 The oscillation

Jones D, DADA.indd 56

21/05/2014 15:00:09

becoming the dada body

57

Fig. 8. Emmy Hennings, Puppen, as reproduced in Cabaret Voltaire, 1916, p. 20.

mirrors the effect of a perpetual masking and unmasking and ‘whatever position the ego may assume, whatever “representation” of itself it may choose to offer, it will perpetually sense that the other side, the displaced aspect, is lacking’.66 Sloterdijk exerts some rigour on this point in order to present the idea of Nietzsche’s grimacing ‘third face’, one that can be as easily discarded as assumed, and one that is too distanced from the thinker’s systematic scepticism even to be sceptical of it. Caution resides in such distance because the ‘third face’ is an image that appeals to the blind narcissism of the thinker who has been misled into an optimism that ‘strikes the person who passionately desires at his weakest point – the fact that he would like to have “in reality” what he allows himself to have only in the image’67 – precisely Hennings’s concession in the epigraph

Jones D, DADA.indd 57

21/05/2014 15:00:09

58

dada 1916 in theory

to this chapter. Interestingly, Sloterdijk suggests that Nietzsche’s intense concentration on Dionysus may threaten a desire to make the Greek god incarnate – if only in order to take possession of him. But, Sloterdijk reminds us, ‘Dionysus does not permit himself to possess, and whatever can be possessed is not Dionysus’.68 The ‘third face’ is compelled to look directly at the cooptive forces that rise up to it, yet its ever-changing grimace signals aggressive resistance to cooption and the mordantly humourless ‘instinct for self preservation’ that Hennings described in her Letter from a Corpse.69 The ‘second edition’ of the body is perhaps most concisely demonstrated in the Dada dolls or puppets that proliferated between 1916–18, physical substitutes, some might say, when the performer’s own body failed. (Hennings’s occasional physical exhaustion is reported by Ball: ‘Emmy fainted in the street. We were waiting under a streetlamp for the tram. She leaned against the wall, staggered, and gently collapsed.’)70 It is fair to say that we know more of the Dada dolls, puppets, marionettes and mannequins from photographic than any contemporary written records, but the few references that have remained from Zurich attest to their visible presence in Dada activity. That visibility is secured by the image of Hennings’s Puppen reproduced on page 20 of Cabaret Voltaire in May 1916 (fig. 8), puppets whose skeletal shapes Renée Riese Hubert has described in ‘their lack of contact, [and] the futility of their captive gestures’;71 Ball also records the opening evening at the Galerie Dada in March 1917, when Hennings’s Zar (czar) and Zaress (czarina) dolls were put to work in an improvised political puppet show featuring Alsatian socialist Salomon Grumbach as puppeteer;72 Georges Hugnet notes that satirical skits and Ball’s Krippenspiele were performed using Hennings’s dolls; and finally, in addition, Sophie Taeuber created her finely crafted marionettes for the Théâtre Zurichois de Marionnettes production of the play König Hirsch (King Stag) in 1918 (the marionette ‘Freud Analytikus’ was reproduced on page 25 of the unique-issue Der Zeltweg in November 1919).73 The staging and striving of the will The way Nietzsche develops his reading of the body, and his employment of the concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy in particular, is informed by recourse to his use of the Schopenhauerian positions with which he was so familiar – and of which he was ultimately so critical. Schopenhauer, as we know – the thinker that Nietzsche

Jones D, DADA.indd 58

21/05/2014 15:00:09

becoming the dada body

59

touchingly claimed had written The World as Will and Representation especially for him; whose work of systematic philosophy was described by Thomas Mann as a symphony in four movements; and whose mother somewhat distressingly referred to him in childhood as her ‘new doll’ – argues that in perception and thought we experience our own representations of things (rather than experiencing things in themselves). What we perceive and think, he says, are precisely what we ourselves are and have imagined: ‘Life and dreams are leaves of one and the same book … we find no distinct difference in their nature, and are forced to concede to the poets … that life is a long dream.’74 For the modern reader, for instance, Bret Easton Ellis’s numbing classic American Psycho weaves Schopenhauer into at least recent literary fiction as the unravelling and disintegrating central character of the novel asks, ‘does anyone really see anyone? Does anyone really see anyone else? Did you ever see me?’75 The body may well render intimacy and immediacy in its perceptual connection with the world – the body thus as ‘the starting-point of the subject’s knowledge’76 – but the body is never outside the web of maya and is thus always a representation: there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory … I simply am not there … Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being … This confession has meant nothing …77 The metaphor of the chiasm has been used in philosophical writing to render the interweaving of body and world – not as the relation between situation and reaction, stimulus and response, but rather as the relation between sinews of a common flesh that overlap and interlock. And how a subject is formed from tactility, that is and more emphatically to say formed by a touch that belongs to no subject,78 is the very question posed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his posthumously published major work The Visible and the Invisible. For our concern with the body, Schopenhauer makes free admission that ‘this body is a representation like any other’,79 but he does so only before proceeding to question his own assertion, asking ‘whether this world is nothing more than representation’ – the point, of course, at which the indefinite article, American Psycho’s protagonist and active agent, stalls under exposure of a ‘severely impaired capacity to feel … no one ever asks me for any identification’.80 Schopenhauer’s question – is this world nothing more than representation? – is posed precisely in order to demonstrate how we are bound to the economy of representation if we pursue the conventional approach of inquiry to look at the world from the outside. But to remain resident

Jones D, DADA.indd 59

21/05/2014 15:00:09

dada 1916 in theory

60

within the confines of representation, he says, cannot render the world as anything more than that which would ‘pass us by like an empty dream, or a ghostly vision, not worth our consideration’.81 For Nietzsche, in turn, it would be the world ‘felt as if only a parable passed us by, whose most profound meaning we almost thought we could guess’.82 If it is to amount to anything more, the task in hand becomes patently to consider our orientation and then reorientation to this world and to what we now recognise as being representations – to consider the reorientation in our relation to our own bodies, therefore. The cool and contemplative realm of representation is inevitably at odds with the striving and desiring of our movements and actions – the striving and desiring that is the active component, devoid of cognitive intelligence, which Schopenhauer calls ‘will’. Body and will are inseparable, he reasons, with ‘[e]very true, genuine, immediate act of the will … at once and directly a manifest act of the body’,83 as will reaches out, sometimes through painful striving, towards the goal that can only be generalised as some form of satiation. Of itself, the activity of willing involves no object representation and neither does it contain what Schopenhauer calls a principle of individuation (without which principle the will is neither an individual nor a plurality of individuals). As something more basic than rationality, willing does not necessitate consciousness or even a mind, and this means that every animal, mineral and vegetable manifests will to the extent that nothing is wholly self-sufficient as everything perpetually progresses towards some place and some condition: ‘Everything presses and pushes towards existence, if possible towards organic existence, i.e., life, and then to the highest possible degree thereof’.84 But, most importantly, by being linked to the representation of the body that it activates, the will attains individuation. If the time and space that we perceive are (like the body) representations also, then will cannot be situated in time and space. And if delineation and demarcation of a thing in terms of its being an individual first necessitates orientation in time and space, then the body as a distinct individual can only be qualified as a ‘phenomenon’. The outline of the body within which the will moves, however, manifests form revealing of (and so representing) the nature of that will: Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse; grasping hands and nimble feet correspond to the more indirect strivings of the will which they represent.85 This is not residual graphic render or leftovers from American Psycho;

Jones D, DADA.indd 60

21/05/2014 15:00:10

becoming the dada body

61

this is Schopenhauer, whose suggestion is, evidently, that to observe the moving body and what the body objectifies tells us something about the nature of the will. It is through such observation and the use of our representing senses that we might gain the most productive insight into willing, as moving limbs – the dancer’s hands and feet – actively represent. And alongside the representing body, Schopenhauer finds in music also a representation of striving will – so the dancer’s moving body interweaves with music, which also moves. Schopenhauer reads willing, then, as being devoid of discipline and form, those attributes of perception, thought and intelligence that can only come after (or in) representation; it is the primordial will that Nietzsche later condenses in the image of ‘an entirely reckless and amoral artist-god’.86 The moving, tactile and sensate body of the dancer invites the bodily participation of the beholder and rejects any assumption of a transcendent or objective-analytic point of view. The latter we encounter in the pervasive models of historical meaning that assume transcendence for the interpreter’s historical position, along with distance in time and space; the challenge to this is submitted in the overcoming of separation between subject and object for the purpose of interpreting according to the viewer’s point of view. This is to demonstrate reflexivity and active participation in the emergence of meaning, Hans-Georg Gadamer reminds us, not ‘as an action of subjectivity, but as the entering into an event of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated’,87 and in which the systems and conduits active in transmission rather than meaning itself come to dominate. In the contemporary language-based works of now not-so-young YBA Cerith Wyn Evans, for example, this transmission and mediation is quite emphatically the case: the open-ended words of a homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini illumine in burning firework text; the biennale night-sky cleaved by a searchlight transmitting words in code by the eighteenth-century sleeping poet Ellis Wynne; rooms revolving to pulsing beams that flash now obsolete code transcriptions of William Blake at mirror balls; chandeliers sparkling with Georges Bataille’s accursed share; the cool glow of neon script substituting for words denoting absences. Always and inevitably at stake is subjectivity and meaning – the subject’s perception on the one hand, and the communication of meaning on the other – since embedded in textual fragments are greater twentieth-century literary, philosophical and avant-garde positions and figures, which and whom the artist desires to keep in play or to bring back to life, to be redeployed as ‘raw material for future thought’.88

Jones D, DADA.indd 61

21/05/2014 15:00:10

62

dada 1916 in theory The slippage and supplement of representation

Meaning is subjected to ever mounting stress in more recent works that Wyn Evans has produced, where sound that flickers over new images, this time rendered on film and slides, undergoes deliberate disturbance. The terrifying moment of recognition that comes before the overwhelming relief we experience, as first yields to second recognition that the former was just a misrecognition (for example, my recently experienced eruption of anxiety, the visceral jolt of terror, in ‘the unexpectedness of on-rushing impressions’ making eye contact with a menacingly muted screaming psychopath coming towards me on a busy street – who turned out to be nothing more threatening than a mild-mannered shopper in mid-yawn), underlies the disturbing slippage of the Surrealist uncanny and the prompting and generating of ‘other’ and contingent meanings out of unremarkable and everyday environments.89 It is the point, we might say, at which Munch’s scream dissolves into Munch’s yawn. Wyn Evans’s intervention in this process with film and slide installations is to manipulate sound ‘to form a parallel “text” to the visuals, where meaning is opened up by the unexpected slippage that occurs as soundtrack is dislodged, changed or removed’.90 Of note in this jarring of the senses is that fundamental to the functioning of the work of art under all of its aleatory post- and post-post- conditions – and primary as its (and ultimately our) mode of address – is the capacity to move and to be moved. The deployment of scientific analyses and descriptions in art history may not completely deny but they certainly corrode this capacity and do so to our detriment, we are reminded, if we incline towards the view that ‘we are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved’.91 Further, our slippage into misrecognition signals not the arbitrary nature of representation, but rather its excess encountered in the eruptions of ‘other’ meanings, the parapraxes and rupturing of limits of representation, the supplement that art can reveal. And this supplement is crucial because it is out of it that multiple and resistant readings become possible. Despite excess, there remain interstices and, Phelan observes, ‘[p]recisely because of representation’s supplemental excess and its failure to be totalising, close readings of the logic of representation can produce psychic resistance and, possibly, political change’.92 On this question of completion and excess, Levinas maintains a certain legitimacy for representation’s capacity to be totalising, instead of indicting it for any assumed failure, a legitimacy founded on his insistence that the ongoing process of totalisation ‘is itself balanced

Jones D, DADA.indd 62

21/05/2014 15:00:10

becoming the dada body

63

by a counter-process of excedence’.93 The default position, then, is not default opposition to the modernist epiphany in terms of representation’s achieving coherence and ultimate truth. By process and counter-process, in all its totalising corporeality, as the dancer’s body represents it also deforms itself in order to break out of the habits of expression that function to inhibit, with the result that it exceeds itself in capacity to represent ‘the body’. So, to repeat, representation will always represent more than it represents. Sitting in the audience at one of the Cabaret Voltaire performances in early 1916 was dance pioneer and theorist Rudolf von Laban, then of Zurich’s Labanschule on Seegartenstrasse, for whom the body’s capacity to exceed itself in organic movement was a constant concern. Together with dancer and collaborator Mary Wigman, Laban had opened his school for the art of movement teaching an approach to dance that defied classical forms, following a pre-war summer dance farm phase between 1912 and 1914 at Ascona; after the school’s dispersal at the outbreak of war, Laban relocated in 1916 to open his dance studio in Zurich. Independently of Dada, therefore, and as the result of largely different though occasionally overlapping impulses (Laban’s Dadaist conclusion that it is ‘in the madness that the sense lies’ is striking),94 Laban was engaging dance in exercising principles of restraint and intoxication, inhalation and exhalation, all in the presence of engaged audiences. And for a brief moment in Zurich there was shared currency between Dada and Laban as dance forms of a very different kind to the rutting equivalent ‘negro dances’ of the male Dadaists (who, on the whole, as Huelsenbeck representatively admitted, had ‘never particularly cared for, or understood much about the dance’)95 found a place in the Dada soirées. We might well marvel at what certain individuals brought to Dada in Zurich, and few brought more than did Gesamtkünstlerein Sophie Taeuber (her Dada-Köpfe of 1918–20 are, without overstating, the most remarkable creations).96 Already attuned to the eurhythmic movementperformances of Émile Jacques-Dalcroze and to the collaborative works of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Taeuber was a pupil of Laban and Wigman at the Labanschule and took her precise, angular and incisive dance performances to the Galerie Dada where she collaborated with Ball and Arp in the presentation of ‘abstract dances’. These dances, at least in the accounts that we have of them, bear close conceptual affinity to Laban’s own and earlier (circa 1908) ‘dance-sound-word’ performances. In the ‘abstract dances’, Ball recited passages of ‘lautgedichte’, whose ‘word particles’ rather than any excluded music prompted

Jones D, DADA.indd 63

21/05/2014 15:00:10

dada 1916 in theory

64

Taeuber’s dance movements, her face unseen on stage behind masks by Janco and Arp.97 Ball recorded the following detail in his diary for the end of March 1917: The dance has become an end in itself … Here, in this special case, a poetic sequence of sounds was enough to make each of the individual word particles produce the strangest visible effect on the hundredjointed body of the dancer … a dance full of flashes and edges, full of dazzling light and penetrating intensity.98 Witness to these abstract Dada dances was Wigman, sitting in the audience with Laban, and, as the lines of Taeuber’s body fragmented on stage, Wigman would have recognised the ‘elegant deformation’ that was eventually to be remarked upon in her own new dance, radically freed as it was of any past and conventional bind to music: her fingers flare; her body writhes with terror; she squirms on the ground, stamps furiously, collapses exhausted. To all the flexions and tractions of her members she lends a spasmodic violence … The classic ballerina aims at grace … Wigman’s pupils seek their effects in a rupture of the harmony of the body, in an elegant deformation.99 Responding to the rhythm of non-music – gongs, whistles, rattles, ‘word particles’ – and even to silence that amplifies sighing stage boards and breathing bodies, primary for Wigman and the Laban dancers was the performer’s own experience of the lived body in its excedent torsion, and the intellectual experience of that body as a phenomenon of living. This is the German Erlebnis that was privileged above all else at the Labanschule, the lived and experienced body that I am as opposed to the objective physicality of the body that I have – the distinction between Leib and Körper that Helmuth Plessner, pioneer in philosophical anthropology, later drew in his Laughing and Crying (1941). What took shape as Plessner’s critique of Cartesian dualism developed out of a rejection of the opposition between body and mind (where the mind is in control of the body), in favour of the condition of constant negotiation between the two (where the mind functions as constitutive of the body and vice versa). The centred or centric nature of living and experiencing for all animals, Plessner argued, was surpassed by the eccentric nature of the reflective human being (that is to say, the decentring of the subject) that lives, experiences and, crucially, experiences its experiences (‘erlebt sein Erleben’).100 The self-reflexivity of the body restores Schopenhauer as we advance revision of the subject–object relation. The Leib/Körper distinction is

Jones D, DADA.indd 64

21/05/2014 15:00:10

becoming the dada body

65

familiar enough in varied manifestations – we might consider how Leib gained in the ascendant for Laban dancer Alexander Sakharoff, famously, when he declared how we ‘do not dance to music … we dance the music’101 – in affirmation of the striving towards incorporation of the self in the world. For Nietzsche, too, it is the body ‘that does not say “I”, but does “I”’;102 for Lenin, in 1908, it was not to philosophise but to practise philosophy;103 and for Hennings, as Expressionist cabaret diseuse, it was not how she reflected bohemia but how she experienced it. Where once stood (or danced) Kant’s a priori subject looking out and facing the world of representation as an eye that cannot see itself, Schopenhauer supplants the subject that now has the capacity not only to face the world of representation, but also to look at and see itself (to see itself as object and as representation) and also to know itself as embodied will.104 It is the continual and ‘blind’ striving of the will that underlies the self even at its most intellectually imposing, and the centrality that Schopenhauer accords will is what makes radical his revision from the mind–body relation to will–body identity in any subsequent engagement of the human body. What will underlies for Schopenhauer is, I suggest, what it undermines for Dada – namely the intellect, the exposure of which Dada then pursues in order to make redundant – and the theoretical problematic of Dada’s historical succumbing eventually to cooptive pressures is at least partly unravelled by the great depressive philosopher’s progression through which the self-realisation of the will may at turns take the form of its own and radical self-negation. Schopenhauer gives us subjective and objective access to our bodies in the knowledge we have of both our actions and our motives, by which process can be revealed for us the meaning and the inner mechanism of our being: To the subject of knowing, who appears as an individual only through his identity with the body, this body is given in two entirely different ways. It is given in intelligent perception as representation, as an object among objects, liable to the laws of these objects. But it is also given in quite a different way, namely as what is known immediately to everyone, and is denoted by the word will.105 The dance that found its place in Zurich, first at the Cabaret Voltaire and then (via Taeuber’s fête littéraire in September 1916) at the Dada soirées, exercised this immediacy of knowing and deliberately moved the body into physical space. Though indeed it is always in space, the dancer’s body does not always shape that space or enter into an affinity with it or, as a result, find itself ‘galvanised into contact with the fourth

Jones D, DADA.indd 65

21/05/2014 15:00:10

dada 1916 in theory

66

dimension’.106 For Laban, the self’s incorporation into and shaping of the space that it occupied aspired to the principles of his theory of harmony and movement; for Wigman, it was propelled by the emotional thrust of ‘space feeling’ and all of its ‘counter direction – a game, up and down, forward and back, a meeting of one’s self, a struggle in space for space – the Dance’107 (the double-exposure photograph of Wigman reproduced on page 21 of Zurich Dada’s final offering, Der Zeltweg, shows us nothing if not the dancer’s moving body in excess, exceeding itself). Wigman’s recollection of the Dada masks in Zurich tells us ultimately more of their function relative to the body – and the shaping of the space through which the body moves to break its containment – than does Ball’s description of the masks as ‘sensational’. Their first and arresting appearance allowed Wigman to visualise ‘only motionless silence’, followed by the energetic burst: And then it happened … Suddenly my entire body was tense, unbearably tense, my hand grasping my tightly closed coat; I was straightening, growing in a struggle within and without me, prancing, three steps wide into the dark empty room – a rhythm forced my arm upward – the theme was born.108 The subject’s knowing of its action, then, is bound to the objective recognition of motive. For Schopenhauer: Every true act of his [the subject’s] will is also at once and inevitably a movement of his body; he cannot actually will the act without at the same time being aware that it appears as a movement of the body. The act of will and the action of the body … do not stand in the relation of cause and effect, but are one and the same thing …109 It would seem that as for Levinas’s ethical relation, so too for Schopenhauer’s subject, in the latter’s apprehending of its own body and suspension of principles of cause and effect. As the subject loses itself in the object, ‘the person who is involved in this perception is no longer an individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself; he is pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge’.110 This purity in will-less knowing, it is argued, is eventually the state that resides in aesthetic contemplation as an activity that takes us from the subject’s own will to the fundamental reality of the world-will that is masked by the veil of appearances. Through the slippages and supplements of representation, then, the part that the performer’s body plays on the Dada stage is constitutively

Jones D, DADA.indd 66

21/05/2014 15:00:10

becoming the dada body

67

different to the actor, say, or to the dancer in more conventional, more familiar and less culturally critical and urgent sites. It may be, as indeed it has been, suggested that the new dance forms witnessed in Zurich during the Dada phase were motivated by other than Dada concerns and that they grate somewhat next to anarchic Dada performance;111 but from the Laban and subsequently Dada dancers, with their ‘hundredjointed’ bodies, there precipitates interest in ways of knowing the body – of knowing what moves it, what shapes it and what makes it distinct from other bodies. It is Schopenhauer’s achievement firmly to effect initial means of overcoming the scientific separation of subject and object by describing the attraction between the two in the terms of an aesthetic way of knowing: ‘What as representation of perception I call my body, I call my will in so far as I am conscious of it in an entirely different way comparable with no other.’112 And what follows philosophically from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century is the rebuke to the adherents of scientific ways of knowing, a rebuke to those whom Nietzsche brands ‘despisers of the body’, before their rebuke for the self-denial of any capacity to create beyond themselves.113 The body in its staged torsion exercises means by which it strives to experience beyond itself – the ‘bliss of the epileptic’ that Hal Foster picks up from Benjamin, for instance, before that bliss hardens ‘into political catatonia’114 – and though Dada was at its outset and continues to be today blighted by internal contradictions, we return always to its structural weaknesses as that which, somehow, make its manifestations cohere and as that in which, somehow, there resides meaning. Ball mused during the soirées of 1917: ‘Is our loathing of life only a pose? Huelsenbeck often thought it was, and he is probably right.’115 Notes 1 Emmy Hennings, Gefängnis (1919) (Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna: Ullstein Verlag, 1985), p. 23; cited in translation in Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 48. 2 ‘The product of the corpse is life. It is not only in the loss of limbs … but in all the processes of elimination and purification that everything corpse-like falls away.’ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1977), p. 218. 3 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (London: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 215. 4 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, p. 215. It is with the relegation in importance of authenticity that Benjamin subsequently argued that ‘the total function of art is reversed

Jones D, DADA.indd 67

21/05/2014 15:00:10

68

dada 1916 in theory

… it begins to be based on another practice, politics’; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 218. 5 Walter Benjamin, ‘Nichts gegen die Illustrierte’, G.S.IV.1, in Gesammelte Schriften, IV/1, ed. Rolf Tiedmann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–91 (vols I–VII)), p. 449; cited in translation in Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto, 2000). 6 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 239. 7 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 194. 8 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 195. 9 Jacques Derrida pursues the Levinasian permanent deferral of knowing the other in The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Jacques Derrida, ‘Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know)’, in Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (eds), Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 151–74. 10 Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 57–58. 11 Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, pp. 57–58. 12 The Zürcher Post, reviewing Hennings on 26 March 1916, commented: ‘Years ago she stood by the rustling yellow curtain of a Berlin cabaret, hands on hips, as exuberant as a flowering shrub; today too she presents the same bold front and performs the same songs with a body that has since then been only slightly ravaged by grief.’ Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 63; Ball documents this end of March review in his diary at the start of the following May. 13 Marcel Janco, Au Cabaret Voltaire, 1916; coll. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, ex. coll. Tristan Tzara. 14 Christian Schad, Cabaret, 1916; coll. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Marcel Słodki’s famous poster for the Cabaret Voltaire is reproduced in Leah Dickerman (ed.), Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, catalogue of an exhibition held in Paris, Washington and New York, 2005–6 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 22; cf. also Słodki’s holzschnitt (woodcut) that depicts a similar cabaret scene, reproduced on page 27 of the unique-issue Cabaret Voltaire. 15 Hans Arp, On My Way (1948), cited in Robert Motherwell, Introduction to The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. xxvi. 16 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 1. 17 Ball, Flight Out of Time, pp. 64–65. 18 The Dada masks that are ascribed to Janco and continue to be exhibited today are dated to 1919 and belong, therefore, to the last days of Zurich Dada and the soirées rather than to the initial cabaret phase. 19 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 64. 20 Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in S. Lotringer and L. Hochroth (eds), The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995), pp. 7–8. 21 Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, p. 13. 22 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone, 1999), p. 170.

Jones D, DADA.indd 68

21/05/2014 15:00:10

becoming the dada body

69

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 194. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 170. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 180. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 194. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 291. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 213. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 199. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), pp. 177–78. 31 Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 170. 32 Eric Alliez makes an ‘aesthetics of sensation’ a point of convergence between Levinas, Deleuze and Guattari in The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?, trans. Paul Ross and Alberto Toscano (London: Athlone, 2006), pp. 72–74. 33 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 177. 34 Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues with Clare Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1987), p. 170. 35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 177–78. 36 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 72–73. 37 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘First Dada Lecture in Germany’ (February 1918), trans. Derek Wynand, in Richard Huelsenbeck, The Dada Almanac (1920) (London: Atlas Press, 1993), pp. 111–12; an alternative translation to this passage is given in Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (London and New York: Verso, 1988), p. 392. 38 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 392. 39 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 393. 40 ‘Lettre de M. Hennings’, quoted in Robert Maguire, Le hors théâtre: Essai sur la signification du théâtre de notre temps; cited in translation in Annabelle Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 218, n. 56. 41 Georges Burnad, Les Masques; cited in translation in Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance, p. 85. 42 See Bernhard Waldenfels, ‘Levinas and the Face of the Other’, in Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 66. 43 Further on Hennings, see Thomas F. Rugh, ‘Emmy Hennings and Zurich Dada’, Dada/Surrealism, 10/11 (1982), 5–28; Hubert van den Berg, ‘The Star of the Cabaret Voltaire: The Other Life of Emmy Hennings’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), pp. 68–88; Bärbel Reetz, Emmy Ball-Hennings: Leben im Vielleicht. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001); Renée Riese Hubert, ‘Zurich Dada and its Artist Couples’, in Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (ed.), Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1998), pp. 516–45; and Hemus, Dada’s Women, pp. 17–51. 44 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 146. 45 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 13.

Jones D, DADA.indd 69

21/05/2014 15:00:10

70

dada 1916 in theory

46 Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 29. 47 David Lewis Richardson (dir.), The Shock of the New (BBC and Time-Life Films, 1980). 48 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 2. 49 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 163. 50 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York and London: Penguin, 1976), p. 146. 51 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 267 (section 481). Also, to respond to Nietzsche, ‘That there are alternative interpretations of reality does not entail that we cannot grasp the truth about the world, only that we can’t grasp all of the truth.’ Julian Young, Schopenhauer (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 227. 52 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 298–99 (section 354). 53 Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Sean Hand (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 242. See also Eric Blondel, ‘Nietzsche: Life as Metaphor’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1985), pp. 150–75. 54 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Modern Library Giant, 1968), p. 493 (essay II, section 1). 55 Blondel, Nietzsche, p. 219. 56 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 40; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), pp. 17. 57 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 31. 58 Blondel, Nietzsche, p. 213. 59 Blondel, Nietzsche, p. 233. 60 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 25. 61 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 30. 62 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 25. 63 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 40. 64 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 31. 65 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 31. 66 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 32. 67 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 32 68 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 32 69 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 95. 70 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 96. 71 Hubert, ‘Zurich Dada and its Artist Couples’, p. 522. 72 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 102. 73 Taeuber’s marionettes are illustrated in Dickerman, Dada, pp. 74–75, and discussed in Hubert, ‘Zurich Dada and its Artist Couples’, pp. 533–35. 74 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, p. 18. 75 Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1991), p. 238.

Jones D, DADA.indd 70

21/05/2014 15:00:10

becoming the dada body

71

76 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, p. 19. 77 Easton Ellis, American Psycho, pp. 376–77. 78 Judith Butler, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche’, in Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 181. 79 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, p. 99. 80 Easton Ellis, American Psycho, p. 343. 81 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, p. 99. 82 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 135 (section 24). 83 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, p. 101. 84 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, II, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 350. 85 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, p. 108. 86 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 22 (section 5). 87 H.-G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. D. E. Linge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. xvi. 88 White Cube Gallery, http://www.whitecube.com/artists/wynevans/ (accessed 1 December 2013). 89 Sigmund Freud, in Das Unheimliche, describes the uncanny as ‘that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’; cited in Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 112, n. 13. Georg Simmel, in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, subsequently described the ‘rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of on-rushing impressions’; cited in Huyssen, Twilight Memories, p. 122, n. 33. 90 White Cube Gallery, http://www.whitecube.com/artists/wynevans/ (accessed 1 December 2013). In this context also, the thoughts of the protagonist in American Psycho return as surface elements – audio and visual – are scrambled and reconfigured: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in’. Easton Ellis, American Psycho, p. 375. 91 Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 20. 92 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 2. 93 Waldenfels, ‘Levinas and the Face of the Other’, p. 66. 94 Rudolf von Laban, A Life for the Dance: Reminiscences, trans. Lisa Ullmann (London: Macdonald and Evans, 1975), p. 51. See Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 58. 95 Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 11. 96 Further on Taeuber, see Jill Fell, ‘Sophie Täuber: The Masked Dada Dancer’, Forum for Modern Languages Studies, 35/3 (1999), 270–85; Hubert, ‘Zurich Dada and its Artist Couples’, pp. 516–45; Hemus, Dada’s Women, pp. 53–89; and Jill Fell, ‘Zurich Dada Dance Performance and the Role of Sophie Taeuber’, in Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson (eds), Dada and Beyond, Volume 2: Dada and its Legacies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 17–32. 97 As well as for aesthetic effect, Taeuber did literally hide behind the Dada masks for practical reasons, having been specifically instructed by her employers at the Zurich school of applied arts not to participate in any extra-mural activities with the Dadaists.

Jones D, DADA.indd 71

21/05/2014 15:00:10

72

dada 1916 in theory

98 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 102. 99 André Levinson, ‘The Modern Dance in Germany’, Theatre Arts (February 1929), p. 144. Further on Wigman, see Walter Sorell, The Mary Wigman Book (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 100 See Simon Critchley, On Humour (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 28–29. 101 Cited in Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance, p. 92. 102 Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, p. 146. 103 V. I. Lenin, Letter to Gorky (7 February 1908); cited in Louis Althusser, ‘Lenin and Philosophy (February 1968)’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 31. 104 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, pp. 99–103. 105 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, p. 100. 106 Maria Theresa, ‘What Dancers Think about the Modern German Dance’, The Dance Magazine (May 1931), 14. 107 Mary Wigman, quoted in Lucille Marsh, ‘The Shadow of Wigman in the Light of Duncan’, The Dance Magazine, 16/1 (May 1931), 62. 108 Mary Wigman, ‘… excerpts from the final lecture addressed to the dancers in the Zurich School … Summer 1949’, The Dance Magazine (August 1950), 29. 109 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, p. 100. 110 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, p. 179. 111 See, e.g., David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 115–16. 112 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, pp. 102–3. 113 Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, p. 147. 114 Hal Foster, ‘Dada Mime’, October, 105 (Summer 2003), 168. 115 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 110.

Jones D, DADA.indd 72

21/05/2014 15:00:10

3

A Disintegrating Culture: Dada Violence and Degradation The International of Arses is the only worldwide organization that has no statutes, ideology, or dues. Its solidarity cannot be shaken.

– Peter Sloterdijk, 19831

The appeal to and exercise of violence in Dada during its initial and probably most ambivalent manifestation situate the formation somewhat awkwardly and contradictorily at times, for instance with regard to the strategic deployment of violent means in achieving transformative socio-political ends. Aggression, hostility, assault – the demarques of violence – rarely absent themselves beyond shallow recess. Their presence can of course be read as continuing the potentialities of antecedents, most notably Futurism’s art of provocation and dinamismo universale, but there is an equally critical reading of the necessity in deployment of such methods that accords them centrality within the entire Dada project. The project, we were once told, would happily set out to destroy. But it would not, and perhaps the Dadaists ultimately believed that it could not, pass judgement upon others; prerequisite to judgement is an opinion, and an opinion, as Kierkegaard had long since suggested, presupposes ‘a security and well-being in existence akin to having a wife and children in this mortal life’.2 The doubly farcical and notorious mock trial of Maurice Barrès, staged under the auspices of later Paris Dada, is demonstration enough of Dada’s self-reflexive proximity to a reading of juridical authority, while the philosophical complexity of passing judgement was widely and well recognised into the early twentieth century.3 Passing judgement, with its attendant quality of ‘justice’, functions to mandate and maintain the interests of defined groups and

Jones D, DADA.indd 73

21/05/2014 15:00:10

74

dada 1916 in theory

defined ways of life by means of positive forms of law (of law that can be posited; indeed ‘all law … is dependent on a positing (Setzung)’).4 The indiscriminate and all-inclusive aggression of Dada remains embodied for many in the confrontational poses struck at the Cabaret Voltaire and sporadically at the Dada soirées, and this chapter will begin by considering the quality of the ‘violence’ that initially manifested itself at those performances. It was violence to be validated under Dada’s red flag as a critical medium, and is here to be considered against a reading of Walter Benjamin’s later commentary on violence. Positions on what constitute violence are illuminated by Benjamin’s philosophy of language as an anti-politics – contentious as his position on language is due to its sources in idealism – extending to examine the complicity of language in violence (with recourse to the idea that language functions as a medium of violence, enacted in Dada language through a discursive performativity). In constructing his tradition, for instance, Benjamin applies modes of prompting the minor deviations from the anticipated ‘self’ or ‘norm’, mobilising a ‘politics of pure means’ and duly insisting on the presence in our conduct and action of something that the destructive Dadaists would have denied: that in the act of critique there resides also the act of passing judgement. For Benjamin, however, this act assumes critical form in the possible application of language as a means beyond all legal systems and, therefore, beyond all violence – posing ‘just violence’ as pure means – in order potentially to escape the means–ends syllogism. Alongside Benjamin, Ernst Bloch will here supplement the live philosophical context within which Dada took shape. A decade after Dada, Bloch invoked an always incomplete, unfinished subjectivity in the specific of the cabaret, which he described as one of the most open and honest forms of the present, admitting and embracing the fragmentary. By this reading, the eclectic and anti-narrative nature of cabaret was as varied, incongruous and disjunct as the experience of everyday life – always straining to contain its elements and stuttering when something struck a wrong, discordant note. The language of cabaret itself similarly fragments and fractures, responding affirmatively to Judith Butler’s elsewhere pursuit of means that will sever the tie between speech acts and their enunciation in such a way not only to destabilise structure but actively to dismantle it. The physical conditions of the exchange between the Dada body and its audience is then considered, in demonstration of which the usual suspects (notably Huelsenbeck with his aggressive posturing and, pairing this chapter with the chapter that follows, Tzara and Serner with their assaultive texts) each take the stage in turn.

Jones D, DADA.indd 74

21/05/2014 15:00:10

a disintegr ating culture

75

It is to this very complex of law, then, as inextricably bound to violence that Benjamin famously directed his thoughts in the essay on the ‘Critique of Violence’, written post-Zurich Dada in 1921 (incidentally, the year of Paris Dada’s Barrès trial) and designed to capture ‘something essential’ of its object of critique;5 the essay that conceptually exercises the eventual impossibility of ‘justice’ by means of law that is the expression of the dialectic between ‘the law-imposing and law-preserving formations of violence’.6 For the present context, one of the aleatory beauties of Benjamin’s essay is that, as a distillation of his longer treatise on violence, it is a significant reflection on his association with his seniors in the years leading up to its writing – namely Hugo Ball and Ernst Bloch, two among the anti-Kaiser Germans of Bern during 1918–19. Ball and Bloch were close associates during this period, both contributing political writings to and editorial duties for the ‘heroic’ Hermann Rosemeier’s anti-war weekly Die Freie Zeitung; Richter was to recall many years later Ball’s participation in the editing of this publication, which ‘fought a hopeless battle against the past, present and future of All-German arrogance’.7 It was indeed the now-retired magic bishop of Zurich who introduced Bloch, author of Geist der Utopie (the spirit of utopia, that ‘wild synthesis of religio-apocalyptic and proto-socialist ideas’,8 which had advocated the violent-if-necessary opposition of established power ‘with appropriately powerful means, like a categorical imperative with a revolver in your fist’),9 to the younger Benjamin in March or April 1919 (Benjamin was at this time writing his doctoral dissertation on the concept of art criticism in German Romanticism, at the University of Bern).10 Of note in Bloch’s output from this phase is a short essay that he contributed to René Schickele’s avant-garde-friendly journal Die weissen Blätter in 1919, ‘Das Noch Nicht Bewusste Wissen’ (To know the not-yet-conscious), an essay in which he progressed the foundations of the ontology of not-yet-being that would find maturity as a developed system in his much later published writings; and it was for Die weissen Blätter that Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ had originally been commissioned by the journal’s editor, Emil Lederer (the essay would eventually be published in the less obviously fitting Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft). The marked difference in positions that we can identify at this time, however, is between Bloch’s gradual move towards Marxism in opposition to Benjamin’s rejection of politics – the latter despite the combined efforts of Ball and Bloch to convince their younger acquaintance of the necessity of political activity. In mobilising his philosophy of language as an anti-politics, Benjamin read

Jones D, DADA.indd 75

21/05/2014 15:00:10

76

dada 1916 in theory

the instrumentalisation of language in all political judgement as making it, language, complicit in violence. There is, we might then suggest, a moderating function to which the 1921 essay can now be directed in our reading of the ‘violence’ of Zurich Dada that broke out five years before its writing, recognising how we will correctly understand the quality of Dada violence as being found more in the staging of a discontinuous and ruptured reality than in any physical aggression that might conclude in a bloodied nose or worse. The formalities of violence Physically demonstrated instances of violence are not, of course, absent in Zurich Dada, although such instances as we do encounter often acquire more than a passing pantomimic quality – consider, for instance, the deliberately menacing gait of Huelsenbeck, ‘an aggressor, a noise-maker, a fighter, a Götz von Berlichingen’,11 armed with his college-boy insolence dedicated to the infuriation and excitation of his audience; he who strode arrogantly upon the Dada platform with quivering nostrils and arched eyebrows, haranguing any and all in attendance, slashing the air ‘and, metaphorically … the public’s collective behind’ with his Oxford cane.12 This parodying is ultimately of the totalitarian mindset – although, lest we forget, beyond any authoritarian menace, ‘it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip’ in order to be participant in that mindset – rather, ‘it is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others’.13 Huelsenbeck had first cultivated this particular confrontational stance, flinging out verses ‘like so much invective’,14 revelling in the hostility of as much negative reaction as he could muster, during his pre-Dada collaborative activity with, yes, Hugo Ball in Berlin 1915. And it was Ball’s drafting of Huelsenbeck into the Cabaret Voltaire, it has been said, that provided the ‘trigger event’ to rouse in the already resident cabaret players ‘feelings and aggressions which had been reserved and repressed’.15 The quality of Dada violence that first erupts at the end of February 1916 is exercised in Huelsenbeck’s strutting parody of the violence of modernity, in the ‘conjuration and critique’ that Richard Sheppard describes as attempting ‘not to imitate and celebrate but to enact discordant, chaotic, heteroglossic reality’.16 The violence is, of course, less in what is done than in how it is done – and we register such enacting within the broader confrontation of the question of political activity that acquired an urgency of heroic proportions in Europe as the decade so brutally punctured by the First

Jones D, DADA.indd 76

21/05/2014 15:00:10

a disintegr ating culture

77

World War roused to a crescendo of failed, successful and failed-again revolutions (of ‘revolving revolutions’ or the ‘revolution of revolutions’). The means deployed were the means by which precisely the Dadaists engaged and disturbed the normative. Benjamin’s essay on violence would become in the twentieth century eventually a prompt to a variety of conclusions, as critical thought from the 1960s onwards, complicated by the occasions of left-wing violence in Germany, for instance, sought routes beyond Oskar Negt’s interpretation of the essay’s negotiation of its subject matter as ultimately serving to maintain violence in all its structural and institutional forms.17 Responses invoked Benjamin’s ‘politics of pure means’ in their workings out of Negt’s materialisticpolitical position, though the positioning of Benjamin on the side of conservative anti-liberalism by Jürgen Habermas in the 1980s, for instance, was hardly restoration and rehabilitation for Benjamin as theologian of the revolution.18 Peter Bürger’s collapse of a viable sense of the historical avant-garde after Dada and early Surrealism arose from a similar concern that the posturing of oppositionality does effectively nothing more than reproduce the object of critique with all its operations intact. Critical for Benjamin, however, and for a recovery of his observations to a broader application, is his reflection on the instability of seemingly stable ground that could so easily give way to fascism. Such slippage can occur when left-wing and right-wing violence come precariously close to a point of indistinction – this itself being a self-styled relation between fascism and Bolshevism, characterised by Benjamin in 1927 as assuming to be as close as that between twin, though they may be hostile, brothers.19 And, as reflections go, Benjamin’s is far from unproblematic; though he rejects the idea that the conflict between the fascist and the Bolshevik is a fraternal one, what he attempts in his ‘Critique of Violence’ is a description of different modes of violence that are consequent to different modes or manifestations of force (divine force versus inauthentic force). His ‘critique’ is more accurately, therefore, the Kantian Kritik (that is, transcendental critique accepting of subjective and universal judgements, but rejecting any governing role for determinate concepts).20 Differences are prerequisite; from the breaks and fragments that condition differences, Benjamin constructs his own tradition out of the one that he experienced disintegrating all around him. For this philosopher, who ‘had nothing of the philosopher in the traditional sense’,21 his insistence on the connection between knowledge and experience directed the Kantian system of philosophical knowledge towards the ‘different’ or ‘higher concept of’ experience that Benjamin

Jones D, DADA.indd 77

21/05/2014 15:00:10

dada 1916 in theory

78

engaged philosophically. His move was deliberately against and beyond the discipline of philosophy, thinking to exceed the predicate of thought, and expanding towards a ‘philosophy of the future’ that ‘had to be concerned with demarking the provinces of experience denied or ignored by Kantianism, with its blindness to religion, the irrational, and history’.22 So Dada is shot through with the same post-Kantian impulse, advancing art against art. As Bloch would in 1928, during the ‘Golden Twenties’ of Cabaret, acknowledge the differences and multiple subgenres of Benjamin’s One-Way Street by the invocation of ‘philosophy as cabaret’, for instance, the Dadaists’ designation of ‘art as cabaret’ had been around the Niederdorf block a couple of times already: Whenever a Cabaret appears, we cheerfully go along to see it – then, one moment something strikes a wrong note, the next moment something else has changed and doubled back in its tracks … The self that it projects is very close to ours, but keeps changing.23 Bloch invokes an always incomplete, unfinished subjectivity in the specific of the cabaret, to be understood in the general of society by reference to his principle of the not-yet, operative within his philosophical system to describe ‘an open process of movement toward an unknown that cannot be described in positive terms’.24 In constructing his tradition, Benjamin productively applies modes of prompting the minor deviations from the anticipated ‘self’ or ‘norm’. He mobilises a ‘politics of pure means’, duly insisting that in the act of critique there resides the act of passing judgement (which conclusion the Dadaists would have resisted). For Benjamin, this politics of pure means assumes critical manifestation in ‘just violence’. It is Benjamin’s essay on violence, I suggest, that will begin to yield the coordinates to move away from both a celebration and an aestheticisation of violence – from the elevation of war as expressive of national triumph, let’s say, to the art of state power as consolidant of fascism – to make way for the violence of anarchy and destruction that seizes the false continuum of progress. In 1916, the Munich-based Expressionist poet Ferdinand Hardekopf (whose translation of Aristide Bruant’s ‘A la Villette’ had been performed by Emmy Hennings during the first week of the Cabaret Voltaire, and who later participated in the Zurich Dada soirées of 1917) wrote his ‘Der Wintergarten’ from Munich’s variety land, a prose passage in drunken embrace of the rousing clamour of central Europe against the backdrop of war:

Jones D, DADA.indd 78

21/05/2014 15:00:11

a disintegr ating culture

79

We want rebellion: for that is our peace; we want excitement at any price: for that is our cure. Welcome: you howling storms and thundering organs, you terrors in the catacombs of derangement, revolver shots, atropine conflagrations and you disciplined confusions of Cancan dancing camisoles!25 Such tempered violence, the stock in trade of flaming youth, conjures so much of what we familiarly recognise in the widespread abandonment of theatre in favour of the popular and vulgarised theatrical forms of variety shows at the start of the twentieth century – Hardekopf’s variety dancing camisoles a muffled echo of the seriously more skewed ‘athleticstyle form-fitting costumes … with wonderful open-topped canvas shoes’ that were ‘Dada suicide’ Jacques Vaché’s preferred attire for the ‘amusing deception’ of a brutal and bloody war, described by him in his infamous ‘War Letters’26 – yet Hardekopf suggests a resolution that, frankly, fails to convince any more: We can enjoy all this in unified desire. For the booming of the bells, the pealing of the Carmagnole and the rhythmic barbarism of the steam-hammers is brusquely and blissfully drowned out by a harmonizing, idiotic melody …27 If only it could be. The way in which the variety theatre negotiated its declarations of violence is a far more problematic proposition than any possible ironing out that was achievable in the form of the variety show itself, which was by 1916 among the defining modern cultural forms, a direct product and consequence of life in the city, the locus of modernity. And far from unifying or harmonising the discontinuities of the modern city, the fragmented urban consciousness was further fractured by the form of variety, wherein precisely lay the form’s redemptive quality as Bloch described it: cabaret may be employed as one of the most open and – contrary to its own intentions – most honest forms of the present; it then becomes the mirror of that empty space in which nothing can be made whole without a lie and where only fragments can still meet and intermingle.28 The eclectic and anti-narrative nature of the performances themselves was, therefore, as varied, incongruous and disjunct as the experience of everyday life. Reading cabaret thus does all but convey upon it that which Hardekopf would have claimed, resisting temptation to acknowledge in

Jones D, DADA.indd 79

21/05/2014 15:00:11

dada 1916 in theory

80

it anything so unified as ‘an emergent new sensibility’ that the Futurists to the south were also desiring.29 Staging disintegration Into the Weimar years cabaret would gain marked distinction as a socio-political phenomenon as well as gaining procedural integrity. Its deployment ahead of Weimar, however, was not infrequently as ‘a potentially optimum vehicle for artists and intellectuals who had made a public political commitment’.30 Art historian Allan C. Greenberg has debated this particular point, proposing that the production of art as a social activity can be considered political whatever its precise content, to the extent that ‘a political discussion is one that focuses on the nature of society’s governing norms and values … and on how they are determined’.31 Greenberg contributes preliminary observations to such readings of cabaret as a socio-politically critical medium that we might now embark upon, despite his being distinctly unprepared to commit much beyond hypotheticals to any ‘scholarly, after-the-fact, analysis’:32 Only a conjectural analysis may make it possible to examine Dadaist impact via the cabaret. And while impact may be the more important interest ultimately, we may, nonetheless, reflect on presentations and apparent intent and hypothesize a relationship between the Dadaists in the cabaret and … society.33 To an important extent, the point that Greenberg fails to develop – although he makes simultaneous and significant concession to it here – is that rather than thinking always in terms of Dadaist impact via the cabaret, we might do better not to overcomplicate matters. In February 1916, for instance, critically, fundamentally and quite simply, the Dadaist impact was the cabaret with its chaotic breaks and seizures (just as subsequently the Dada manifesto impact was its disorienting effect, as will be argued in chapter 4, with the ballistic force that Benjamin elsewhere described).34 Cabaret has variously been theorised for us – Manfred Berger’s Kabarett nach vorn (1966) described a typology that naturally included forms affirmative of dominant orders; but also types that operated critically in relation to such orders, especially in their imperialist forms, and that self-consciously aligned the cabaret performers with working-class struggle (though not necessarily driven by any explicitly Marxist commitment) in pursuit of change. And what is argued to be the only consistently politically significant cabaret,

Jones D, DADA.indd 80

21/05/2014 15:00:11

a disintegr ating culture

81

effectively mobilising art in class struggle, is submitted in the form of the proletarian cabaret. But the outlining of typology does not advance any engagement with the pure means of cabaret as a form, nor with its physical impact (or shock) or the violence of thought enacted upon the audience.35 The shape assumed by cabaret is initially its most arresting aspect, reeling disparate, unconnected, even random – certainly chaotic – items before its audience, read as the miniature forms that Bloch observes in Benjamin’s thought experimentation and exercise: a considered improvisation, debris from an exploded totality, a sequence of dreams, aphorisms and catchwords linked at most by a variety of oblique associations … a journey through a disintegrating culture.36 Early on, Bloch had intimated how the shape of cabaret would always strain to contain its elements and how the shape or form would stutter when, one moment, something struck a wrong, discordant note. At this juncture of ‘failure’, of course, in the unhinging of each faculty, the form itself becomes critical. The moment of creation, as it might be argued that which is no longer chaotic in chaos, intimates the faculty of order that Deleuze describes: Rather than all the faculties converging and contributing to a common project of recognising an object, we see divergent projects in which, with regard to what concerns it essentially, each faculty is in the presence of that which is its ‘own’. Discord of the faculties, chain of force and fuse along which each confronts its limit, receiving from (or communicating to) the other only a violence which brings it face to face with its own element, as though with its disappearance or its perfection.37 This is the impress of violence upon thought, its necessity indeed, testing the limit of thought in chaos that is at the same time order, the bearing of each faculty ‘to the extreme point of its dissolution’.38 To give shape to the thought of ‘justification’ (to conceptualise ‘justification’) poses particular difficulties for the Dadaists, therefore – though in their declarations they may flee, in their deeds they are implicitly locked in combat with ‘justification’. The struggle stems from the violence perceived as being present in the establishing of a thought, as Foucault once summed it up: ‘There is never … an interpretandum that is not already interpretans, so that it is as much a relationship of violence as of elucidation that is established in interpretation.’39 This might well appear to confound all attempts at

Jones D, DADA.indd 81

21/05/2014 15:00:11

dada 1916 in theory

82

achieving justification, to the extent that what is fully acknowledged is the impossibility that any interpretation (for Foucault), or any decision (elsewhere, for Derrida), can ever be just – as the judge’s decision effects a suspension of the law, despite its conceding to the necessity of the rule of law in determining that decision. David Couzens Hoy describes it thus: The decision is said to be a performative that exceeds itself. It is violence at the beginning, because it represents a break with past law, and it is violence in the outcome, because it imposes its interpretation on the present in the name of the law … The law depends on violence being misrecognized as legitimate.40 Present, perhaps, in the Dadaists’ wish not to be implicated in the violence of the acts of interpreting and decision-making is the transcendental empiricism that Deleuze intimates in the passage from Difference and Repetition previously quoted. This is transcendental empiricism that will not attempt to achieve adequate description from the point of view of empirically established common sense (ultimately in the imprecise form of universalising abstractions given in stock transcendentalism), but that will rather embrace the uncertainty about the outcome of research as ‘the only way to avoid tracing the transcendental from the outlines of the empirical’.41 Hence the celebration of the discontinuities, contingencies and varieties of individual lives. From violent means to radical ends We recognise how Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism provides a basis for a politics of difference, distinctly so to the extent that any evaluation (that is, judgement) of practices effects the enabling or disabling of an individual’s power to act (that is, an individual’s agency). The conditions of individual agency themselves arise from our deference to universal norms – and it is among such norms that Benjamin, in 1921, placed our philosophical complicity in violence, at least since Aristotle established the means–ends relation that bound the two polarities inextricably together. Benjamin’s motive is radically to rethink the conception of violence as instrumental in any move towards desired ends – specifically when those ends are political ones – to found a critique aimed at revising a philosophical current that has been reinscribed at intervals in the Western tradition (by Kant’s Gewalt or Engels’s Anti-Dühring). Rethinking evidently does not repeal violence, but it does initiate the formulation of violence as a phenomenon that escapes its historicised

Jones D, DADA.indd 82

21/05/2014 15:00:11

a disintegr ating culture

83

alignment with positive legal norms inside a liberal constitution – and this Benjamin takes as his point of departure, ultimately to establish ‘[d]ivine violence … [as] the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution [of law, and which] … may be called sovereign violence’.42 ‘Divinity’ and ‘sovereignty’ sit uneasily within the broader sweep and discourse of modernity, but their function for Benjamin is to provide markers as he engages (in order to disrupt) the means–ends syllogism. If there is continuity in relation to Kant as far as a maintenance of distinction between morality and legality is concerned, Benjamin’s interest beyond this is to resist the slightly too comfortable correlation of justified means and just ends. This is precisely his prompt in questioning Kant’s formulation that cautions against the qualification of violence – ‘Act in such a way that at all times you use humanity both in your person and in the person of all others as an end, and never merely as a means’43 – in turn to question whether Kant’s injunction may perhaps ‘contain too little, that is, whether it is permissible to use, or allow to be used, oneself or another in any respect as a means’.44 The nature of means are then prioritised for Benjamin, recognising from the outset that ‘all violence as a means … is implicated in the problematic nature of law itself’,45 and so thinking to ‘extract’ means from their corruption when they are applied instrumentally in the positing and preserving of law. His interests are in the possibilities of a ‘pure’ (pure by virtue of their non-instrumentality) application of means ‘beyond all legal systems and therefore beyond violence’46 – the results of which may veer into bloody consequences but, as disengaged from political ends, retain integrity in the non-instrumentality that is constitutive of the laws of their means. Just or revolutionary violence is then manifest for Benjamin in the form of ‘the violence of an action [that] can be assessed no more from its effects than from its ends, but only from the law of its means’.47 Might such a politics of pure means, however, appear to reinscribe the potentially problematic constant, or foundation, for the same authority that posits and preserves law? To recoil on principle from such constants is to forfeit a possible strategy of escape from the means–ends syllogism; just as Deleuze resists the outright rejection of binaries if they can be put to strategic use, we should surely resist dogmatic rejection of constant and stable points of reference because, though their use may at times prove to be necessary, we will always exercise caution against their privileging and reifying as absolute, and so moderate their use as always and only provisional. For Benjamin, ‘if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is

Jones D, DADA.indd 83

21/05/2014 15:00:11

dada 1916 in theory

84

assured, then this furnishes the proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed [pure] violence by man, is possible, and by what means’.48 The means then depose (Entsetzung) rather than substitute for (Ersetzung) the positing of violence, which is the point at which the means become revolutionary: Pure violence does not posit, it ‘deposes’; it is not performative, but afformative. If the pure violence of de-posing exists even beyond the sphere of law, this pure, and thus non-violent, non-instrumental violence may at any time … break through the cycle of laws and their decay.49 Literary theorist Werner Hamacher here observes the beginning of Benjamin’s sense of a pure, revolutionary violence as afformative, which deposes positive violence and which is made known to us in political acts, as we would expect, but also and critically in linguistic ones. The politics of the afformative The move from performative to afformative marks a transformation that takes place at more than one level, but the most remarkable as we assess the Zurich cabaret activities of 1916 is surely the transformation that occurs at the linguistic level. The nature of the transformation is as a reversal, whereby the effect of speech is reversed in its return to the speaker. Judith Butler has identified this change in what she terms ‘discursive performativity’, through a ‘ritual chain of resignification whose origin and end remain unfixed and unfixable’.50 Within a developing theory of linguistic agency, the possibility of resignification arises from the recontextualisation of the initial intention, an intention offensive or even injurious as it was spoken or written on the early Dada platform by the Dada ‘actor’ (or, multiply, ‘actors’), when ‘the one who acts … acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset’.51 So, though her theorising clearly aims beyond the Zurich instance, Butler narrates the perlocutionary that begins in the speech act, which progresses by way of consequences that are, ultimately and critically, not the same as the initial speech act itself. Huelsenbeck, reviewing the initial Dada phase, recounted how we did not neglect from time to time to tell the fat and utterly uncomprehending Zurich philistines that we regarded them as pigs …

Jones D, DADA.indd 84

21/05/2014 15:00:11

a disintegr ating culture

85

Then there was always a big fuss, and the students, who in Switzerland as elsewhere are the stupidest and most reactionary rabble – if in view of the compulsory national stultification in that country any group of citizens can claim a right to the superlative in that respect – at any rate the students gave a preview of the public resistance which Dada was later to encounter on its triumphant march through the world.52 With barbed invective or fantastic prayers – ‘what do you want from me with my tender years … who kicked the old aunt in her rubber bum it was I ladies and gentlemen I am the great event’53 – Huelsenbeck is exemplary as his pronouncements act upon his audience and listeners in a process that Butler refers to in the more directly political context of assaultive speech, as read in the introduction by Mari Matsuda to the volume Words that Wound (1993), for example. Indeed, the direction of speech towards its listeners becomes constitutive of them as audience, and contributes to their social interpellation: The listener is understood to occupy a social position or to have become synonymous with that position, and social positions themselves are understood to be situated in a static and hierarchical relation to one another. By virtue of the social position he or she occupies, then, the listener is injured as a consequence of that utterance.54 So, Huelsenbeck’s hurling of derision at his audiences in Zurich was not an act shy of assuming the position of high superiority that even the low cabaret platform gave him, reinscribing ‘a structural relation of domination … [and constituting] the linguistic occasion for the reconstitution of that structural domination’.55 Where Butler invokes a politics of the performative, then, our revision of the coordinates will find Huelsenbeck moving towards what can be termed, after Benjamin, a politics of the afformative. This distinction of de-posing rather than positing violence is clearly of some import. Matsuda recognises how, rather than simply reflecting relations of social domination, the ‘hate’ speech that she describes constitutes and enacts such domination, ‘becoming the vehicle through which that social structure is reinstated’.56 This constitutive enactment proves to be reconstitutive and consequently resistant to the fixity of the present, appealing to a future form that duly escapes the constraints and containment of time and history; appealing to ‘a future context, not yet delineable and, hence, not yet precisely a context’.57 On a high philosophical plateau, we might suggest that facing his audience Huelsenbeck found

Jones D, DADA.indd 85

21/05/2014 15:00:11

86

dada 1916 in theory

‘the people to come and the new earth’ outside democracy and inside himself: ‘The people is internal to the thinker because it is a “becoming people”, just as the thinker is internal to the people as no less unlimited becoming.’58 In the encounter, we note, Huelsenbeck is more inclined to bend than break the system (just as he does his Oxford cane), goading and challenging his audience as both readers and listeners of the fantastic prayers: ‘who can doubt then in the ascension of the speaking man’.59 In his 1920 Dada narrative, moreover, he concedes how ‘[t]o make literature with a gun in hand, had for a time, been my dream’.60 To inflict injury in the enacting of domination, with its converse of subordination, ‘where the injury is understood as social subordination’,61 does yield alternatives through subversion as the permanence of any structure enunciated in speech is, patently, illusory; rather than look for permanence of structure in the open temporality of the speech act, it is in terms of continuity of structure that the language of Dada registers. And Butler poses the timely question, ‘[c]an there be an enunciation that discontinues that structure, or one that subverts that structure through its repetition in speech?’62 – timely because it suggests the possibility that the tie between speech acts and their enunciation might be severed in a way that not only destabilises structure but actively dismantles it. Language, and its particular use by the Dadaists, is then charged beyond the communicative to make structural intervention, dismantling as it claims to uphold, and not always operating on the structural plateau that we might anticipate for strategies of opposition. Such a mode of operation that has the appearance of contradiction is familiar enough within Dada (most enduringly in Tzara’s 1918 principled manifesto commitment against principles), but we now find its presence in the paradox of Benjamin’s anti-liberalist liberalism when the violence of worker strike action, for example, clatters into his Unterredung and as he grapples with the paradoxical politics and implications of legitimate (rather than legal) modes of violence. Whatever else we might conclude from the ‘Critique of Violence’, the proposition of a pure and therefore just form can only come about by escaping the means–ends circuitry (the very possibility of pure means or pure violence, of course, encounters failures and breakdowns of its own conditions). The conditions of escape might be glimpsed in Tzara’s coexistence of opposites, let’s say, when he lectures on Dada to commend the manifesting of creative intensity at ‘the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners’ or in dingy cabaret rooms.63 And it is to ‘exceptional events’

Jones D, DADA.indd 86

21/05/2014 15:00:11

a disintegr ating culture

87

generated out of the same conditions that, in a very different world to Tzara’s, Jean Baudrillard once made his appeal, naming the point the ‘singularity’ that possesses its own aesthetic in the face of nihilism: The fragment is like a nucleus of an ephemeral destiny of language, a fatal particle that shines an instant and then disappears. At the same time it allows an instantaneous conversion of points of view, of humours and passions.64 In such conversion is posed an escape from the circuitry of the syllogism, if not the subversion and discontinuity of structure to which Butler appeals, tied to the medium of enunciation itself; and this medium, this material body of the voice, is posited potentially and ultimately as the revolutionary moment in history. The universal installation of the idiot So we are presented with a linguistic corporeality emerging out of the very medium that Benjamin reasoned in 1921 as being ‘nonviolent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of “understanding”, [that is] language’.65 The register of differences, however, rather than reduction to dualisms, admits for language currents that move to confront the state, or the ‘law’ in Benjamin’s lexicon, carrying an implicit threat in the eyes and ears of the ‘law’ that a new law might be declared; and, precisely, ‘law sees violence [which it identifies with some indiscrimination]66 in the hands of individuals as a danger undermining the legal system’.67 The parodic and extrovert wielding of violence (Huelsenbeck) made Dada as suspect in 1916 as, bizarrely, did quiet introversion (Arp),68 because in one as in the other there resided an implied declaration of a new law. And though any such implied ‘Dada law’ would barely have achieved the semblance of stability necessary for its implementation, we are minded of Dada’s continuous and deliberate contradictions and its embrace of that which is ostensibly objectionable, and of its strategic detour of the flawed concept of ‘revolution’ as conventionally understood (which does declare a new law to replace the old, before then proceeding to implement and uphold the new – Benjamin’s two functions of violence apply here, the lawmaking and the law-preserving, and Dada recoil from the latter is what we can safely anticipate). There never was any declaration of ‘Dada Revolution’ in 1916, and for good reason: the very notion would have necessitated the validation of critique through the subsequent passing of judgement.

Jones D, DADA.indd 87

21/05/2014 15:00:11

dada 1916 in theory

88

When Tzara said that Dada was ‘working with all its might to introduce the idiot everywhere’ (or the ‘universal installation of the idiot’, as alternatively translated),69 what he had in mind for the idiot was the social correlative of the desubjectivised, fragmented voice of the Dadaist poem – the idiot as a social actor refusing the certainty of the relation between signifier and signified that society would offer – perhaps even the ‘real idiot of the family’ that Peter Sloterdijk once so memorably situated in the arse.70 This idiot is not to be construed as a person who has been violently crushed by society, but rather as the necessary figure through whom desire can move in flows far exceeding those of the individual subject. The corporeal dynamic creating and created by the forces of our inculturation draws into its gathering pace a reinscribed notion of agency and, inevitably, a not-easily dismissible aspect of autonomy (as embodied in Serner’s disengaged identity in his Letzte Lockerung, we might say, which will be considered along with Tzara’s 1918 manifesto in the chapter that follows).71 But disengagement restores for us the compulsive concern with meaning that we strive for in deployment of the parts of language to say something through the symbolic constructions that they constitute. The residence of meaning therein as significant by virtue of the individual’s aspiration rests on what we can break down in the symbolic object to its initial dimension as designative, as being meaningful by what it can be used to refer to or talk about in the world; out of the designative emerges the expressive wherein feelings are made manifest in a way that cannot be contrasted with a non-expressive (that is the empiricist designative) mode of presentation: ‘what expression manifests can only be manifested in expression’.72 The combined functioning of the designative and the expressive therefore positions symbolic constructions as meaningful by relating both to the objects that they are about and to the feeling or thought that they express. We ultimately locate the violence of Dada critique in what constitute the sustained assaults on established meaning that emerged and found form in the precincts of a low-brow social environment – ‘the street, the fairground, the circus and cheap fiction … forms associated with despised corners’ – and that were loudly and proudly declaimed from the traditional stage: The clown has burst in upon the dying ballet, the light and airy dwelling-machine usurps the place of architectural styles long dead, and the old harmonious stage-drama is replaced by the open-work cabaret.73

Jones D, DADA.indd 88

21/05/2014 15:00:11

a disintegr ating culture

89

The violence we encounter is not performed by the clown, but is rather a violence of de-posing. The forms that the language of Dada assumes in 1916 are – far from being complicit in violence – subject themselves to a violence enacted upon language. What we witness is violence exercised afformatively upon the body, violence where ‘every rule is to be applied as an exception, for the rule is an exception’,74 of the radically revised form that Benjamin summatively critiqued in 1921. Notes 1 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (London and New York: Verso, 1988), p. 148. 2 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments: Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 7. 3 ‘[T]he ultimate distinction between philosophical heads and the others would be that the former desire to be just, the others to be a judge.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A book for free spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 223. 4 Werner Hamacher, ‘Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 110. 5 Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gersholm Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 174. 6 Hamacher, ‘Afformative, Strike’, p. 111. 7 Hans Richter, ‘Dada X Y Z …’ (1948), in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 285. Richter continues to describe how Ball ‘had become a hardworking, whispering diplomat … not really. In a city [Bern] that was full of spies, intrigues and “pulls”, he was clearly one of the few idealists, whose intelligence was obviously great enough to attract political figures.’ 8 NLB, Aesthetics and Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1980), p. 9. 9 Cited in Anson Rabinbach, ‘Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism’, in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, III (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 139. 10 Bloch and Benjamin would eventually find mutual and productive interests: ‘In the later twenties … [they] took narcotics together, cross-annotating their impressions of the experience’. NLB, Aesthetics and Politics, p. 10, n. 2. 11 Hans Richter, Dada Profile (Zurich: Arche, 1961), p. 70. 12 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 20. 13 Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), p. 232. 14 Marcel Janco, ‘Schöpferischer Dada’, in Willy Verkauf (ed.), Dada: Monograph of a Movement (New York: Wittenborn, 1957), p. 34.

Jones D, DADA.indd 89

21/05/2014 15:00:11

90

dada 1916 in theory

15 Miklavž Prosenc, Die Dadaisten in Zürich (Bonn: Hans Bouvier, 1967), p. 55. 16 Richard Sheppard, Modernism–Dada–Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 216. 17 See Oskar Negt, ‘Rechtsordnung, Öffentlichkeit und Gewalt’, in Heinz Grossmann and Oskar Negt, Die Auferstehung der Gewalt: Springerblockade und politische Reaktion in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), pp. 168–85. 18 See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique’ (1972), in Gary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988), pp. 118–19. 19 Walter Benjamin, ‘Für die Diktatur: Interview mit Georges Valois’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, 1/2, ed. Rolf Tiedmann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 487–92. 20 See Winfried Menninghaus, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Exposition of the Romantic Theory of Reflection’, trans. Robert J. Kissin, in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, I (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 56–57: ‘critique is not a judgemental “reflecting on a work of art”, but rather a consciousnessraising “unfolding”, in a new formation, of that “reflection” which itself already exists in the work as its structural principle’. See also Joshua Rayman, Kant on Sublimity and Morality (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), pp. 38, 40. 21 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983), p. 229. 22 Rabinbach, ‘Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment’, p. 132. 23 Ernst Bloch, ‘Philosophy as Cabaret’ (1928), in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, I (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 1. 24 Joel Freeman, ‘Ernst Bloch and Hugo Ball: Toward an Ontology of the Avant-garde’, in Dafydd Jones (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 229. 25 Ferdinand Hardekopf, ‘Winter Garden’, in Malcolm Green (ed.), Black Letters Unleashed: 300 Years of ‘Enthused’ Writing in German (London: Atlas Press, 1989), pp. 96–97. 26 Jacques Vaché, ‘War Letters’, trans. Paul Lenti, in 4 Dada Suicides (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 231. Vaché was once described thus: ‘Dandy, anglomaniac and opium addict, a young man who rejected life’; Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, ‘History of Dada’ (1931), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 105. 27 Hardekopf, ‘Winter Garden’, pp. 96–97. 28 Bloch, ‘Philosophy as Cabaret’, p. 2. 29 F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Variety Theatre’ (1913), trans. R. W. Flint, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 127. 30 Allan C. Greenberg, ‘The Dadaists and the Cabaret as Form and Forum’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada/Dimensions (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 25. 31 Greenberg, ‘The Dadaists and the Cabaret as Form and Forum’, p. 26. 32 Greenberg, ‘The Dadaists and the Cabaret as Form and Forum’, p. 25. 33 Greenberg, ‘The Dadaists and the Cabaret as Form and Forum’, p. 26. 34 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility’ (Third Version), in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1838–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings,

Jones D, DADA.indd 90

21/05/2014 15:00:11

a disintegr ating culture

91

trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 267. 35 Further to this discussion, see Raymond Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London and New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 81–94. 36 Bloch, ‘Philosophy as Cabaret’, p. 2. 37 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), p. 141. 38 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 143. 39 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’, trans. Jon Anderson and Gary Hentzi, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 275. 40 David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2005), p. 130. 41 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 144. 42 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Anthropological Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 300. 43 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment?, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959). 44 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p. 285. 45 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p. 287. 46 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p. 293. 47 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p. 292. 48 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p. 300. 49 Hamacher, ‘Afformative, Strike’, p. 115. 50 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p. 14. 51 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 16. 52 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism’ (1920), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 23–24. 53 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘The Speaking Person’ (1916), trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press 1995), p. 62. 54 Mari Matsuda (ed.), Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), p. 18. 55 Matsuda, Words that Wound, p. 18. 56 Matsuda, Words that Wound, p. 18. 57 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 14. 58 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 109. 59 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘The Kettle Drum’ (1916), trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press 1995), p. 69. 60 Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada’, p. 28. 61 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 18. 62 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 20.

Jones D, DADA.indd 91

21/05/2014 15:00:11

92

dada 1916 in theory

63 Tristan Tzara, ‘Lecture on Dada’ (1922), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 251. 64 Jean Baudrillard, Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, ed. Mike Gane (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 159. 65 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p. 289. 66 ‘[E]ven conduct involving the exercise of a right can … under certain circumstances, be described as violent’; Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p. 282. 67 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p. 280. 68 See Benjamin’s concise demonstration of how strike action, initially ‘an omission of actions, a nonaction, which … cannot be described as violence’, will be reinterpreted in the form of the revolutionary general strike wherein ‘the law meets the strikers, as [perceived] perpetrators of violence, with violence’; Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, pp. 281–82. I develop the discussion on Arp’s ‘quiet studiousness’ in chapter 5. 69 Tristan Tzara, ‘Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 94; the alternative translation is given in Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love’, trans. Barbara Wright, in Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries (London: Calder, 1992), p. 42. 70 In his Critique of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijk advances an inverse representation of the body, proposing a ‘physiognomic philosophy’. This he submits in the form of a corrective to realms of brute reality overlaid by social symbolic systems, as a philosophy wherein language and knowledge systems retain the dialectical relation with the body that operates as a dynamic component in any symbolic system. Sloterdijk states, for instance, what the inclusion of the arse would mean for any future philosophy: ‘The arse seems doomed to spend its life in the dark, as the beggar among body parts. It is the real idiot of the family. However, it would be a wonder if this black sheep of the body did not have its own opinion about everything that takes place in higher regions … Dying and shitting are the only things one must do … The arse is thus, of all bodily organs, the one closest to the dialectical relation of freedom and necessity … To understand the arse would be therefore the best preparatory study for philosophy, the somatic propaedeutic’ (pp. 147–49). Relating these lines has an analytical as well as a rhetorical function – not of the role of any particular organ in generating knowledge or of the scatological intuitions secreted in the interstices of literary language, but of an avant-garde preoccupation with the performative destruction of the formal qualities of art. 71 Walter Serner’s intellectual disgust makes no concession for his own desperate subjectivity – when he laughs destructively, he laughs at himself with unbiased and equal contempt for all meaning and all generation of meaning. See Walter Serner, ‘Last Loosening Manifesto’, trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 159. 72 Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 219. 73 Bloch, ‘Philosophy as Cabaret’, p. 1. 74 Walter Serner, ‘The Swig about the Axis’, trans. Caitríona Ní Dhubhgaill, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 58.

Jones D, DADA.indd 92

21/05/2014 15:00:11

4

Dadaist Disgust: Ideology Theory and the Manifesto Writings The ultimate disappointment? When the illusion that one is free of illusion reveals itself as such. – Walter Serner, 19191

The aggressivity and nature of Dada violence introduced in the previous chapter was, during Zurich Dada, routinely distilled in the textual form of the manifesto writings, particularly so in the manifestos of Tzara and Serner (debatably at their most venomous owing more to the imprint of Serner than of Tzara). Following on from the consideration of Dada violence in chapter 3, the manifesto writings are here to be given priority in a chapter that takes twentieth-century philosophical routes to develop the argument for the manifestos (in form and content) as ideology critique, positing centrally the question of subjectivity (and the construction and processing of subjectivity) as the object of Dada critique. From Louis Althusser’s now well-rehearsed account of interpellation, the willing submission to authority is read through Dada as that which indicts the subject, and the focus on Tzara’s and Serner’s manifestos gives opportunity to negotiate exits from subjectivity. The problematics of any attempt at subjecting state power and authority to direct critique are foregrounded in the writings of Jacques Rancière; and, debating the ‘subject effect’, the writings of Alain Badiou elicit from Althusser the possibility of thinking subjectivity without a subject (to vary le rapport sans rapport, from chapter 2). An emerging space for critique is arguably to be prised through ideology critique, the task of which is to take into account what might be (as opposed to representational models, which take into account what is). Detours in what follows here will move to more contemporary

Jones D, DADA.indd 93

21/05/2014 15:00:11

94

dada 1916 in theory

Fig. 9. Tristan Tzara, ‘Manifeste Dada 1918’, first page as published in Dada 3, 1918, p. 1.

Jones D, DADA.indd 94

21/05/2014 15:00:12

dadaist disgust

95

cinematic engagements – given in Fight Club and The Usual Suspects – introducing the contentious position of ‘subjective destitution’ and the radical unplugging of situational coordinates in order to attain an illusion of freedom. The work of Slavoj Žižek, the acknowledged master in the invocation of cinema in critical theory, will be introduced as observation is directed back at Rancière and Badiou. The Dada instances, I will argue, demonstrate a critical immanence resident in the Dada effect. In the case of the 1918 manifesto specifically, it will be suggested that the effect generated is above all else the deliberate confusion and disorientation of the reader or listener by a style of presentation that conveys a tactic and a way of engaging the world that is, at a profound level, constitutive of the emerging Dada processes. Where we might locate reason – in its critical or cynical forms, or even when it is turned against itself in a necessarily self-destructive move – indicates at least a commitment to the progressive power and possibilities of rationality. The reasoned critique of reason then takes the object of critique into a new field, insisting on the progressive possibility of reason that poses its challenge most directly against itself. *** The Dada problematic is today posed in immediate proximity to subjectivity, which in our contemporary setting demands to be read through political philosophy as we struggle to comprehend the politics of subjectivity. Historically, the Dada formation recoiled from the notion that it might in any way constitute some kind of synthetic resolution to the binaries of Western logic, rejecting all suggestions that it signalled a new (dis)order to replace the old, and resisting its own sedimentation and stratification. It engaged most urgently the mediation of our world in its irregular formations, rupturing the illusion (or fantasy, or fiction) of seamless transparency assumed by habitually used sign systems – most notably language, as the general equivalent of signs – to break down the process that forcibly and sometimes violently arrests the subject under political constraint or subjugation. In the breakdown of the medium, Dada can potentially emerge for us as multiply distinct in the form of ‘cultural language(s) conceived to intercept and engage dominant discourses’,2 itself mediate in the event but continually reconfigured, necessarily self-destructive at the first point of its own security. Dada, indeed, is nowhere more frustrating than in the counter-strategy developed within the historical and geographical demarcation of Zurich, radiating through

Jones D, DADA.indd 95

21/05/2014 15:00:12

96

dada 1916 in theory

bluff, counter-bluff and bluff again, and the unrelenting cultivation of contradiction so famously rifled in Tzara’s 1918 manifesto. Yet, though frustrated we may be, there is no disputing the eventual Dada effect; instead of dread terror, it is one of the joyous embrace of disorientation, disintegration and life falling apart, through programmatic dissolution as all that is Dada melts into air. The embrace of dissolution, and of the conditions and forces of dissolution, which Dada exercised arose from the (in 1916) untheorised recognition of subjectivisation as a distinctly political phenomenon. The ‘political’ colour of Huelsenbeck’s Dada was thoroughly explicit, polemical and direct; the multicolour of Tzara’s Dada was evasive and excremental – ‘from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors’3 – redeploying the indiscriminate Dada ‘bomb’ in scattering and disorienting cluster attacks and through asymmetric strategies, arguably more incisive and destructive – and politically meaningful – as a result than the openly ‘political’ and directly oppositional type. This chapter’s consequent reading of the Zurich manifesto soundings will propose what might more problematically be registered as a Dada ‘aesthetic’. For this purpose, an initial outlining of what would later in the twentieth century emerge as a theory of political subjectivity is instructive, from the individual’s interpellation as he turns, literally, into an addressee – the physical conversion by which the individual becomes a subject. Althusser’s account concisely enough describes the hailing of the individual and the pivotal moment of recognition, the event of interpellation, as the addressee realises that it was really him who was hailed,4 but at the same time a recognition that is itself a ‘misrecognition’ (and, as such, a theoretical contradiction that Tzara would have happily accommodated in 1918). To specify, Althusser is clear in his implication of the interpellated subject as the individual operating erroneously under a fundamental ‘misrecognition’ as the hail itself actually has none of the authority that the individual would grant it at the outset. The Dadaists, we know, most visibly opposed bourgeois reason for their duration because of the implementation of that same reason in the structuring of authority and the imposition of control. Yet, at the same time, the Dadaists’ indiscriminate oppositionality railed against the subjectivised social class, no less valid a target than the one wielding authority precisely because of the former’s passive and unquestioning acceptance of, and its complicity and so culpability in, its own miserable state. Here, political subjectivity distinguishes itself by affirming a form of authority that has no justification beyond its own existence, but the

Jones D, DADA.indd 96

21/05/2014 15:00:12

dadaist disgust

97

absence of justification is never questioned or put under any scrutiny. For Althusser, rather than being the product of the individual’s conscious imagining, this ‘imaginary’ aspect is an undeclared manifestation of social, political and institutional practice, which means that the addressee – and, for the Dadaists, this is the crime of the addressee – willingly submits to the authority of he who hails (the policeman, in Althusser’s account). By subjecting himself to the legal-institutional authority of the hailing policeman, the becoming-subject defers to the operative (the policeman) of one (the legal) among many (the religious, the educational, the family etc.) state apparatuses. Althusser’s position is notoriously pessimistic. He reads our envelopment in ideology as at its most complete when we imagine ourselves outside ideology – ‘one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, “I am ideological”’.5 There is a depressingly bleak conclusion in responding to ideology as negatively conceived, with scant hope against political resignation and the abandonment of any possibility of revolutionary change; but to take the explicitly Althusserian approach as a point of departure rather than as a point of closure can allow for a theorising of political subjectivity that moves away from negative conclusion and towards ‘different ways of negating’.6 In recognising that there is no ideology ‘except by the subject and for subjects’,7 Althusser indicates a ‘misrecognition’ for which Peter Sloterdijk later revives the phrase ‘necessarily false consciousness’: If every consciousness is precisely as false as corresponds to its own position in the process of production and domination, it necessarily remains captive to its own falsity, as long as the process is taking place … Here the hidden functionalism in marxian theory goes into effect. For this functionalism, there is to the present day no sharper formulation than the famous phrase ‘necessarily false consciousness’. From this viewpoint, false consciousness is reified into its place in the system of objective delusions. False being is a function of the process.8 Of course, ‘false’ problematically militates in opposition to ‘true’ for Althusser and, as such, becomes inadmissible in his preferred operative mode of theoretical practice that works towards a conceptual order of clarity – ideology as specific rather than general. The point of stress, however, is where theoretical practice fails to provide the motive for the subject critically and actually to negotiate the subjugating influence of the ISAs; Althusser’s pessimism indicts the subject whose ‘misrecognition’

Jones D, DADA.indd 97

21/05/2014 15:00:13

98

dada 1916 in theory

is to perceive state authority as ‘really’ justified, rather than to recognise it as ‘imaginary’. Political subjectivity How the subject can begin to negotiate exit from subjectivity – or if not exit then at least the opening up of a critical space, and then maintenance of that space through continued renegotiation and strategies of subject ‘evasion’ – becomes the task of the theorisation of political subjectivity, which will inform the present reading of the Dadaists’ practice of political subjectivity (the linkage between theory and practice, however, being far from direct and unproblematic in this instance). In effect, any space that is identified through rupture or transgression of the envelopment by ideology constitutes a space that claims autonomy from the subjugating influence of the state; such is the form of political subjectivity developed more recently in the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, for instance, whose position will permit a return to historical Dada as managing, at least theoretically, to subject state power and authority to direct critique. Rancière maintains a reading of the subject as distinct from the state; one is substantively different from the other, and such a reading potentially opens up critical space for the subject to occupy, and from which to disrupt the usually smooth and uninterrupted operations of the state. But there are subjects and subjects: if what Althusser once described for us was the policed subject, what Rancière now describes is the politicised subject. Rather than being subjugated to the codes of the reigning order, what the politicised subject attempts is democratisation through change in the public sphere that permits dissenting voices from the margins to be heard in the revised centre (or centres) – making of the politicised subject a democratising subject. But the difficulty for Rancière is the daily effective depoliticising of the public sphere by the state, which routinely reassures its subjects that, when all is said and done, there really is no need for change and ‘normal’ service is quickly resumed, though the variations on themes of successive governments engender the most miserable and chronic disillusionment. It is in these terms that the state’s police logic is read as anti-democratic. We heed the cautionary note, however, in relation to the position of the ‘radical’ political thinker as exemplified by Rancière: what exactly is supposed to come after the critique of authority or power when the critique refuses to assume responsibility for power? To engage in critique is very commendable, but it is ultimately unproductive unless such engagement

Jones D, DADA.indd 98

21/05/2014 15:00:13

dadaist disgust

99

can move to embrace the institutionalising of political change. Failure to move to the latter implies a conservatism underlying the ‘radical’ stance being described, and is what makes possible the cooption of ‘radical’ cultural forms within a very short space of time (viz. historical Dada and recovery of the fragments of the spent Dada ‘bomb’) when those forms are generated from a broadly defined anarcho-nihilist position. Such a position distinguishes itself as resistant to the conceptual inversions of revolution as conventionally exercised, but by that same resistance the possibility of any effective and lasting (and so institutionalised) change becomes questionable. Art-historically, the binary of revolution puts the task of instituting a new order in place of what Dada laid waste – that is to say, a new order diametrically opposed to the old – in the hands of Dada’s supersedent (in Paris at least), the Surrealist Revolution of 1924. But does (or can) revolution in these terms ever change anything? It will be argued that nothing beyond surfaces change when one order is replaced by its opposite and the cultural, political, social or economic logic is simply inverted; the logic remains intact, and its inversion perpetuates its reproduction rather than changing (that is, transforming) it.9 Critically resisting binary logic, however, foregoes institutionalised change. And it is at this point that Dada might appear to collapse as an effective critical force, yielding to its now casual characterisation as the great radical yet wholly negative cultural gesture of the early twentieth century, at the impasse of subjugation that denies the adequate theorising of a possible critique of hegemonic power or authority. For the structuralist Marxist, unless a radicalism is a Marxist radicalism then its direction in the service of the revolution is not necessarily bound to the destruction of state apparatuses, but rather defaults as anything but revolutionary, duly relegating itself to self-indulgence on the part of the ‘radical’ protagonist. Aping radicalism is certainly not revolutionary when the resulting ‘revolution’ aggressively condemns the system and then asks the system it has condemned for acceptance;10 more than once during the twentieth century, it was forcefully and frequently violently demonstrated that people involved in revolutions do not become part of systems, but that they destroy systems. How we invoke the idea of revolution in view of this requires a deliberate revision of readings that have hitherto dominated art-historically, prescriptive (and predictable) readings of Dada, which characterise it as anarchic, a nihilist gesture, an act of cultural destruction offering nothing to replace what it set about destroying (and therefore, strictly speaking, not revolution as the self-styling Surrealists would have understood it). If, however, we

Jones D, DADA.indd 99

21/05/2014 15:00:13

100

dada 1916 in theory

read revolution as committed to breaking down systems in all their forms, the revolutionary agent increasingly assumes the recognisably destructive, anarchic and nihilist traits previously ascribed to the Dada (art-historically contra the Surrealist) type, abandoning binary schemata and engaging cultural logic itself – revolution, therefore, that is not defined by predetermined conditions. Such, potentially, becomes revolution without a goal, but revolution with effect; not revolution as Lenin envisaged it emanating to Russia and beyond from its filterbed in neutral Switzerland (Lenin had arrived in Zurich in February 1915, to become the decidedly miserable neighbour of the Cabaret Voltaire on Spiegelgasse one year later, ‘[i]n the most obscure of streets in the shadow of architectural ribs, where you will find discreet detectives amid red street lamps’11 – before departing in April 1917 to return to Russia), but revolution revised practically and theoretically throughout the twentieth century in reflection upon the sobering aftermath and ultimate failure of October 1917. Zurich’s Spiegelgasse, it has been said, threading the city’s old and seedy Niederdorf quarter, became ‘the epitome of the violent, the double, the waking and the dreamt revolution’,12 simultaneously one and the other, where Lenin studiously planned future events from his lodging room at Spiegelgasse 14 – and, as historical anecdote records, complained about the neighbours: He hated cafés, these smoky breeding places of endless tirades, in which day and night the revolutionary ‘declamators’ prostituted themselves. During the war a whole crowd of unfathomable foreigners had come to Zurich: adventurers, wheeler-dealers, racketeers, students, deserters, and intellectual babblers, who rebelled with philosophical manifestos and artistic protest-actions against what-not. And they all met in the cafés.13 To create a new reality, Lenin conceded, the revolutionary had to be able to dream. Yet his aversion to and intolerance of all that is ‘uncontrollable’ (as chance or even creativity) allied Lenin paradoxically with the bourgeois world view, and perhaps condemned his planned revolution to failure even before it had started. His concession for the revolutionary was applicable only to assumed meanings of the world (pending, obviously, their postrevolutionary change), and it remained in practical terms for the declamators, from their ‘strange protectedness’ in Zurich’s cafés, to confound strategic coherence and in the process to revolutionise the self. One thing the revolutionised self was never likely

Jones D, DADA.indd 100

21/05/2014 15:00:13

dadaist disgust

101

to be, however, was unified – neither politically, socially, economically, nor artistically – as Dada’s declared need for independence and distrust towards unity bluntly made known: ‘Dada was born of … a distrust toward unity’.14 But unity, specifically political unity, was essential for the Bolshevik émigrés on Spiegelgasse, in the face of the divisive threat of the philosophical disputes among the ‘free thinkers’ that made Lenin so uncomfortable. Still, in their disciplined unity, Althusser observes ‘a “practice” of philosophy, and the consciousness of the ruthless, primary fact that philosophy divides’. Althusser continues, ‘[i]f science unites, and if it unites without dividing, [then] philosophy divides, and it can only unite by dividing’.15 If, as Althusser argues, we are indebted to Lenin for contributing to the conditions that in the early twentieth century began to allow for the possibility of anticipating a non-philosophical theory of philosophy, we might suggest that Dada is now poised in anticipation of a non-artistic theory of art, giving centrality to the idea of practice – coherent practice – that divides. Lenin’s example demonstrates how ‘his political anti-spontaneism presupposes the deepest respect for the spontaneity of the masses, [and] his theoretical anti-spontaneism presupposes the greatest respect for practice in the process of knowledge’.16 As such, it becomes instructive in our turn to Dada. What prompted Lenin to laugh through the interminable headaches he suffered on Spiegelgasse was the realisation that there is no such thing as philosophical communication or philosophical discussion; the breakdown in any sense of artistic communication was, similarly, the prompt to laughter for the Dadaists as they placed ‘straight-line thinking’ under rigorous scrutiny. Little wonder that the quiet, studious Lenin complained of those headaches when his loud and riotous neighbours at Spiegelgasse 1 ‘were known, to laymen and experts alike, more by our roars of laughter than by the things we were really doing … we laughed and laughed’.17 The trouble for Lenin, however, was that the laughter rising from the Cabaret Voltaire was very serious – the Dadaists took their laughter deadly seriously and, as Richter retrospectively suggested, ‘laughter was the only guarantee of the seriousness with which … [they] practised anti-art’.18 The ‘subject-effect’ Within Althusser’s thought we observe that, in distinguishing between science and philosophy, a third and critical distinction (or separation) is drawn around politics and is advanced through philosophical theses.

Jones D, DADA.indd 101

21/05/2014 15:00:13

102

dada 1916 in theory

First, that ‘[s]cience is a process without a subject but with objects, and objectivity is its specific norm’; and, second, that ‘politics, just like philosophy, has no object and does not submit to the norm of objectivity’.19 Alain Badiou extracts this much from Althusser in order to read the ‘non-objective norm of politics’ (which is not the same as the ‘subjective’ norm of politics) as a necessary counter to the logical conclusion that the notion of a ‘political subject’ is now a redundant one: [Bourgeois] ideology is characterized by the notion of subject, whose matrix is legal and which subjects the individual to the ideological State apparatuses: this is the theme of ‘subjective interpellation’. It is crucial to note that ideology, whose materiality is provided by the apparatuses, is a statist notion, and not a political notion. The subject, in Althusser’s sense, is a function of the State. Thus, there will be no political subject, because revolutionary politics cannot be a function of the State.20 This, theoretically, is to separate the space of politics at once from objectivity and from the subject: an obvious problem. Though ‘class struggle’ may be ongoing and endemic, ‘class’ itself indicates the absence of a subject, while a ‘struggle’ is not an object and so indicates the absence of a political object. Still, the clear indication by Althusser is that what is bound up in politics is indisputably of the subjective order. So, Badiou provisionally concludes, the point to which Althusser leads us … is the following: is it possible to think subjectivity without a subject? What’s more, is it possible to think subjectivity without a subject whose figure is no longer the (scientific) object?21 If such a question is demonstrably to be more than rhetorical, we must look to the structural placement of objectivity, of the subject and of the political, to allow for the conditions that will make of Althusser’s ‘speculative topography’ a terrain that we can begin to navigate in terms that off-road from what is already his own philosophical detour. If it is determined that ‘the economic place (objectivity) is that of well-ordered stability, and the statist place (ideological subjectivity) makes individuals “function”’, then locating the political marks the move into the realm of the possible. Badiou names evental overdeterminations (exemplified in catastrophes or revolutions) as the events where choice becomes possible22 – overdetermination, he says, ‘is in truth the political place’ – employing the critical distinction between that which belongs to the subjective

Jones D, DADA.indd 102

21/05/2014 15:00:13

dadaist disgust

103

realm (as choice must do), and that which knows subject-effects (such effects as are statist). Subjectivity without a subject, if it is a place that can be thought, is ‘not determined through (scientific) objectivity … [and neither is it] captive to the (ideological) subject-effect’.23 We might respond that the concept of expression in its uncritical subjectivist form demonstrates this ‘subject-effect’, repeatedly tested to destruction through structuralist, poststructuralist, postmodern and post-postmodern thought. Yet today it remains a stubborn proposition that, culturally, refuses to give way. A kind of expressionism is argued even to have substituted for the now sorely crippled concept of communication as the nature of the causal link between the subject’s expression and its content (or ‘objects’) undergoes change, leading to expression’s forming of its content. It would, indeed, be an error on our part to believe ‘that content determines expression by causal action, even if expression is accorded the power not only to “reflect” content but to act upon it in an active way’, as Deleuze and Guattari duly caution.24 Reading expression as a ‘subject-effect’ quickly becomes a process of continuous revision when it disengages the link to its content as cause. Communication has traditionally demanded the causal link, which posits an objective existence for the content necessarily coming before the form of its expression. But what emerges theoretically in anticipation of practical instantiation is the necessary reconfiguration of the traditional one-way determination into some kind of subject–object (or expression–content) dialectic. Representational models require that expression, in the most basic terms, reflect its content as is, but they fail to take into account what might be. The latter is the role arguably given to ideology critique in its preoccupation with change. And change, in turn, can occur only if and when the expression–content symmetry is broken, and the correspondence between the two is reestablished asymmetrically, placing emphasis on how the two interact and on what governs their interaction, or dialectic, rather than on the polarities themselves. This asymmetry means that expression no longer functions unproblematically as what Huelsenbeck once termed ‘propaganda for the soul’,25 from the moment its correspondence with the content is destabilised (and notwithstanding Deleuze and Guattari’s eventual accounting for the return of correspondence, despite every effort theoretically to preempt that return, when, beyond merely expressing the system, the subject is an expression of the system). The effective principle is that there is no shared form between expressions and contents, and expression itself defies ownership, eventually overspilling and sometimes radically exceeding its own limits:

Jones D, DADA.indd 103

21/05/2014 15:00:13

104

dada 1916 in theory

‘[l]anguage is not content to go from a first party to a second party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen’.26 Language, then, in indirect discourse, resists functioning as expression that is attributable to a particular speaker, and we consequently move away from the subjective mode to read ‘expressive qualities … [as] auto-objective’.27 To be able to think in terms of expression as agency without an agent, or as a subjectless subjectivity, is to move the emphasis away from the actions themselves and towards the effect of Dada actions upon their public. It is here that we might propose to situate a Dada aesthetic. The effect, as Benjamin still felt it twenty years after the event, was akin to that of a missile, an instrument of ballistics: ‘[i]t jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile [taktisch] quality’.28 What ‘happened’ left the spectator, or reader, dazed and confused, the shocked victim reeling at the sustained intensity of Tzara’s manifesto writing, for instance: I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles … I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense … Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation = negation: … I proclaim bitter destruction with all the weapons of DADAIST DISGUST29 Whether declaimed from the Dada platform, or read in print, this is lexical ‘noise’, the effect of which corresponds to the visual ‘noise’ reverberating from the pages of the journal Dada (fig. 9), working ‘like fuzz on the supposed purity of the message within’.30 To this extent, the very style of the 1918 manifesto places certain demands upon us within the register of aesthetic politics – demands that Tom Conley has most elegantly described in discussion of Deleuze’s The Fold, which he sets in a tradition that includes Gabriel Faure, Henri Focillon, André Malraux and Victor Hugo, a tradition that ‘invests plastic and verbal expression with political efficacity’: A style of composition conveys a tactic and a way of dealing with the world, hence a habitus, understood in a general fashion, that determines both being and action. Authors in this mould … seek to create ‘styles of thinking’ consequential enough to supersede their content. However utopian they may seem, they compel us to believe that to aestheticize is to politicize.31

Jones D, DADA.indd 104

21/05/2014 15:00:13

dadaist disgust

105

The Dada manifesto writer of 1918, then, exercises a style that is as deliberate as any polemic in the declamatory words. Tzara’s semantic is applied in disembodiment of the critique from its history and content, yet deliberately the manifesto retains the myth of cultural critique among those privileged concepts of the culture that Tzara rejects. If the manifesto reader expects ABC, just as the writer conventionally wants it, Tzara’s anticipation and logical countering of that same expectation is what makes his use of the genre in 1918 incendiary – it becomes something that ‘happens’ to the reader (rather than its responding to and realising any expectation upon it as a socially instrumental text), and the reader eventually ends up with anything – everything – but ABC. The event, and its very physical effect, is theatrical within what Stephen C. Foster has more broadly argued to be Dada’s ‘theatre of radicalism’ – the event as that which ‘happens’ critically understood, ‘adopted as a theoretical reference point, or medium of artistic action’.32 The form of the event – here the specifically linguistic undermining of the function of the manifesto – marks Dada’s turn into ‘radical subjectivity’, constituting to that extent ‘an assault on the public, communicative functions of language, [and] on its socially binding character as a collective system governed by laws’.33 The erasure of language, as Ball famously observed, comes now to demand its reinvention. Subjective destitution Huelsenbeck wrote how the Dadaist ‘is not the same man today as tomorrow, the day after tomorrow he will perhaps be “nothing at all”, and then he may become everything’.34 In rearticulation of the words of the Dada drummer, it has far more recently been asserted that ‘it’s not until you lose everything that you are free to do anything’.35 The sentiment resonates at both ends of the twentieth century – from Tzara’s levelling of Western cultural pretence in 1918, and Huelsenbeck’s ‘history of Dadaism’ in 1920, to the fictional Tyler Durden’s resistance against consumer capitalism in 1999 – and central to this chapter is the move towards recognition precisely of how such resonance occurs. If we are swayed by the argument, for instance, that such a cinematic feature as Fight Club (1999) develops a critique of the meaninglessness of Western consumer capitalist value-systems and of their repressive functioning, we ought at the same time to be alert to the way in which that critique is structured. Such an interpretation of Fight Club comes from the assembly of ‘political concepts’, an interpretation that is therefore ideological

Jones D, DADA.indd 105

21/05/2014 15:00:13

106

dada 1916 in theory

because we make our analysis in terms of those same concepts. In his breakdown of ideologies, for instance, Michael Freeden has noted how competing ideologies are … struggles over the socially legitimate meanings of the political concepts and the sustaining arrangements they form, in an attempt to establish a ‘correct’ usage … What is meaningful is why one specific … ordering of the political world prevails over another.36 The interpretation, or reading, as consumer capitalist critique itself becomes the primary reading of Fight Club, and so becomes the film’s social and political ‘meaning’, through a process that has been termed ideological decontestation.37 The ‘freedom’ to do anything, to which Tyler Durden consistently alludes in his declarations throughout the film, is complex, potentially already compromised, and (we should admit) ‘freedom’ was always in the twentieth century a compromised position. At the start of the century, Lenin himself made clear distinction on more than one occasion between ‘freedom’ as symptomatic of bourgeoisanarchist individualism, and the real freedom he believed would be actualised through revolutionary thought breaking out of bourgeois slavery and merging with ‘the movement of the really advanced and thoroughly revolutionary class’.38 His distinction drew on Joseph Dietzgen’s nineteenth-century hostility to the materialist theory of knowledge embodied in ‘free-thinkers’ who, together, constituted a reactionary mass in relation to social democracy. For Lenin, what opposed ‘free thinkers’ were ‘integral people … who do not separate theory from practice’,39 whose system is inscribed in their practice, even, indeed and perhaps surprisingly argued, when such a system is as an opiate. To believe that we are free in our liberal democratic society is our delusion; it is a belief that demonstrates our failure to see our own structural placement, accommodation and containment, and our failure to admit the painful truth, as Lenin understood it, that there can be ‘no real and effective “freedom” in a society based on the power of money’.40 The admission, if conceded, is at least productive; to recognise Lenin’s comparison of a living movement with a mechanism is to make the structure visible – and, if nothing else, this much subsequently redeems the structuralist’s position. The problematic nature of the ‘freedom’ here invoked is graphically demonstrated in the referencing of cinema, comfortably incumbent today in cultural and media literacy. A further example we might profitably invoke is the one made famous by Slavoj Žižek within discourse on

Jones D, DADA.indd 106

21/05/2014 15:00:13

dadaist disgust

107

ideology theory, of the flashback scene in The Usual Suspects (1995) where the faceless Keyser Söze walks in on the hostage-taking of his family, and resorts to the radical unplugging of ‘the coordinates of the situation’ in order to attain ‘freedom’: he resorts to the radical gesture of shooting his wife and daughter … [which] enables him mercilessly to pursue members of the rival gang [the hostage-takers], their families, parents and friends, killing them all … This act, far from amounting to a case of impotent aggressivity turned against oneself, rather changes the coordinates of the situation in which the subject finds himself: by cutting himself loose from the precious object through whose possession the enemy kept him in check, the subject gains the space of free action.41 The unplugging points towards what Žižek presents as the wilful self-annulment of the subject, that is the subject’s self-release from containment and inscription within social networks of meaning and sense. Žižek names this concept ‘subjective destitution’, the letting go of all that formerly held any value for the subject, an agonisingly painful yet willed stance that refuses to yield control to those others who are in possession of power, and which then delivers for the acting subject the space of free action. Such a space, Žižek contends, brings release from hegemonic power or authority to within the subject’s reach, even if only fleetingly, and subjective destitution is the condition of such freedom. The suspension of meanings and values invested by the subject in the social-symbolic network, it is argued, corresponds to the potential suspension of meanings and values that regulate our political life, and the radical nature of Keyser Söze’s act effectively achieves a collapse of any distinction between the ethical and the political. If some ethical moment habitually provides the political with its limit, the suspension of such a limit becomes itself the supreme political gesture. For Žižek, collapsing the distinction constitutes the act: ‘It is not so much that, in the act, I “sublate”/“integrate” the Other; it is rather that, in the act, I directly “am” the impossible Other-Thing.’42 This is to qualify the subject’s assertion of the ‘non-existence of the big Other’,43 because the ‘big Other’ is already the ‘One’ and has no existence that is independent of the ‘One’ – to the extent that the assumed authority of the values that govern social life are understood only to carry authority because they are invested with meaning and significance by the subject (the ‘One’) in the very first instance. What this poses is a very different understanding of resistance to authority from the conventional reading of defiant challenge and

Jones D, DADA.indd 107

21/05/2014 15:00:13

108

dada 1916 in theory

rupture. The ‘embrace of the act’ that Keyser Söze performs is a direct attack upon the symbolic authority assumed by the hostage-takers, and the freedom he gains results from his engaging in the concept given by Žižek of subjective destitution. That the act in question is not simply symptomatic of ethical collapse needs somehow to be demonstrated – there is a difference between suspending a limit and erasing a limit, namely that suspension maintains the referential concept. The fictional Keyser Söze recognises the almost unbearably painful price he has to pay to gain freedom, and in choosing the act of subjective destitution he touches Žižek’s central referent, which is the Lacanian notion of ‘the Real’. The latter position’s potential destabilising effect on ‘the symbolic’ (against which it is defined) is visible in the cinematic scene described, as the social-symbolic unravels in the moment of choosing, and what resurface are the traces of ‘the Real’ that were never fully repressed within ‘the symbolic’ (‘the Real’, therefore, as immanent to ‘the symbolic’). Tzara is preemptive as manifesteur in 1920, when he declares how ‘[e]very act is a cerebral revolver shot – the insignificant gesture the decisive movement are attacks … and with words set down on paper I enter, solemnly, into myself’.44 The immediate context and consequence of the act may dramatically veer between Keyser Söze and Tzara (bullet in head, pen on paper), but the radical nature of the act is not diminished; the immanence of ‘the Real’ to political discourses in ‘the symbolic’ is the central antagonism identified by Žižek, which condemns those discourses ultimately to failure in their attempt at fixing social meaning and ordering social life. Meaning invested in the symbolic realm, it is argued, is always contestable as something that is presupposed if not performed by the positing agent.45 The effect of approaching the contestability of meaning from Žižek’s direction is to foreground the experience of antagonism as something that is present and mediated (explicitly) through the act of political critique – and the twentieth century, as we know, is punctured throughout by critiques of political discourses that are otherwise maintained by contestable (but for the most part uncontested) assumptions and meanings. The ‘fantasy-space’ Active politically in the cultural sphere, the Dadaists did determinedly not delude themselves, as Tzara reminded his audience at the first Dada demonstration in July 1916: ‘we are wise enough to know that our brains will become downy pillows and that our anti-dogmatism

Jones D, DADA.indd 108

21/05/2014 15:00:13

dadaist disgust

109

is as exclusivist as a bureaucrat that we are not free yet shout freedom – A harsh necessity without discipline or morality and we spit on humanity’.46 The concessions made at the outset put Dada on a trajectory that was never intended to destroy art (‘anti-art’ is not concerned with the obliteration of the category, after all, no more than antimatter has ever been contemplated as the obliterant of matter, and the eventual recuperation or cooption of Dada by and for the reigning order is, as a result, inadmissible as evidence of any ‘failure’ on Dada’s part; Huelsenbeck, with remote retrospection, reminds us how Dada ‘was positive and pursued positive aims from the very beginning of its existence’),47 but it was directed towards a sustained interrogative assault upon culture at every manifest level. European culture was recognised at the start of the twentieth century as being heavily biased as an emerging culture of spectacle within which appearances were organised. Therein, art lent itself most resignedly to cultural recuperative or cooptive processes through one or other of two strategies: either by being ignored or, in the event of that first strategy’s failure, by being bought. Raoul Vaneigem understood the same, half a century after Tzara’s manifesto writings, urging his readers not to work ‘for the spectacle of the end of the world, but for the end of the world of the spectacle’.48 We can consistently move towards readings of Dada actions as routing upon the world of the spectacle, a move that always retained culture’s privileging function of art and the reception of art, however, as well as what was (and remains) perpetually categorised under the forces of culture, in unashamed mercenary fashion, whenever such categorisation proved useful for Dada engagement. To this extent, Stephen C. Foster has argued how ‘art was necessitated by the situation … and became, ironically enough, the legitimate stage for a Dada critique that could not function except on a theatricalized basis’.49 Hence the artistic and political legitimacy for Tzara of using forms that he is at least theoretically opposed to – ‘I write a manifesto … and in principle I am against manifestos’ – and the acute increase in their destructive potential, when they are put into operation from those theatrical sites that Dada itself created, those very places that ‘put, or kept Dada squarely “inside” culture, or better yet, inside “culturing”’.50 Foster alerts us to the case for such a transactional functioning of culture, as opposed to a notion of the Dadaists’ wholesale rejection of culture, emphasising these outsiders’ acceptance of ‘a position on the inside, a position that was tenuous and momentary, an impermanent configuration from which one could continue the process of culture’.51

Jones D, DADA.indd 109

21/05/2014 15:00:13

110

dada 1916 in theory

The ‘theatricality’ of the position occupied is more precisely termed the ‘fantasy-space’ that, at least through Žižek’s ideology theory, has provided demarcation of the site of subjectivisation. It is the space, for instance, that Althusser’s interpellated subject occupies at the moment of hailing, yielding authority to the state in deference to its agent; the yield, however, is the result of the subject’s desire to affirm the ‘fantasy-image’ of authority as impregnable state power. This fantasyspace becomes complicated in Žižek’s reading of Rancière and Badiou after Althusser. The two contemporary French thinkers appear in their writings to have thought themselves beyond Althusser’s impasse of subjectivisation and crippling ideological containment, demonstrating in their pronouncements none of Althusser’s pessimism, and working as they do towards a conception of subjectivity that disrupts the smooth operation of the state apparatuses. But Žižek reads Rancière’s and Badiou’s positions as themselves also compromised; that is to say, he reads them as already subjugated and engaged in ‘hysterical’ provocation,52 which ultimately is nothing more than neutered and so comfortably contained provocation. Whatever their declarations against the omnipotence of the state, the paradoxical effect is that they also yield to it as interpellated subjects, granting the state the authority by which it orders both them and political life according to its own logic. For Žižek, suggesting this much constitutes a critique of Rancière and Badiou as being despite themselves caught up in the desiring of a fantasy-image of the state as impregnable, and their provocations as safely accommodated and contained to the degree that they pose no effective challenge, quite literally, to anything. This is indictment indeed when we return to the historical location of the Cabaret Voltaire, the magic bishopric of Zurich, complete with Dada drumming and no-doubt sincerely meant yet nonetheless hysterical provocations – as well as the resigned admission by some of the cabaret players themselves that their repetition of provocative gestures rapidly ceased in any way to be a provocative act. The extent to which what went on inside can be read as cultural critique or even political activity relies initially, I think, on the invocation of the notion of subjective destitution to animate the cabaret acts themselves, and in deployment of critical reasoning as ‘the symbolic’ is left outside and simultaneously reconstituted inside, on the cabaret stage. The coordinates, to repeat, are familiar – the ‘peaceful dead-centre’ of the First World War, neutral Switzerland; the financial capital, Zurich, with the perfume of money and Dada toiletries wafting down the

Jones D, DADA.indd 110

21/05/2014 15:00:13

dadaist disgust

111

Bahnhofstrasse;53 the detour into the dimly lit Niederdorf, host to a mongrel population, and to the Holländische Meierei – where the cabaret players and clientele could cut loose from the shared spaces of meaning that outside constituted ‘the symbolic’, while inside they proceeded to (re)constitute and change the circumstances of their own existence. Marginal even on this margin stood the pale and pasty figure of Walter Serner, ‘the great cynic of the movement, the complete anarchist, an Archimedes to unhinge the world … and to leave it unhinged’.54 Serner’s tone, despite his marginality, was no less violent than the aggravated Dada declamations that spread from Niederdorf – ‘before falling asleep imagine with the greatest clarity the terminal state of a suicide who at last wishes to plumb the depths of self-awareness with a bullet’.55 Whether it be Keyser Söze’s shooting of his wife and daughter, or Tzara’s cerebral revolver shot, or now Serner’s becomingenlightened enacting of self-erasure, the gesture is one of defiance against subjugation at the hands of those who symbolically assume power over the subject: ‘one must bellow the utterly indescribable, so unbearably close up that no dog would wish to continue leading its life so smartly – but rather far more stupidly! So that everyone loses their wits and gets their heads back again!’56 This almost reads as a willing of subjective destitution on the part of the manifesto writer, as we encounter Serner’s infusion of cultural critique and cyanide in the Letzte Lockerung manifesto and the outward direction of cynical introspection, simultaneously and indiscriminately: to clap a redeeming heaven over this chaos of filth and enigma! To perfume and order this pile of human excrement! Thanks a lot! … THAT’s the reason … why philosophies and novels are sweated out of people’s pores, pictures are daubed, sculptures hewn, symphonies groaned out and religions founded. What appalling ambition, especially because of these vain asinine games … have come to a complete nought.57 Serner submits his case, recognising the ‘social fantasy’ of Western culture not merely as a direct result of the attempt to structure or project the image of ‘social reality’ that is dismantled in his manifesto, but also visibly as an unquestioningly ideological proposition. Dada withdrawal from ‘the symbolic’ is instanced on this occasion by the refusal to be held by subjugation and constraint, as Serner reasons against giving way to that which has symbolically assumed power over him.

Jones D, DADA.indd 111

21/05/2014 15:00:13

112

dada 1916 in theory Critical immanence

The prescient nature of the Zurich Dada manifesto writings – specifically those written by Tzara and Serner – and their anticipation of and resulting preemptive strikes against any ‘appalling ambition’, round on Western social fantasy as a markedly political phenomenon – and it is by the same thinking that Žižek is led to read fantasy as decidedly ideological: ‘[t]he fundamental level of ideology … is that of … fantasy structuring our social reality’.58 By means of the ‘social reality’ that is generated, and the desire to secure that ‘social reality’ as prompted in us, ideological fantasy will tighten its grip on its subjects (us). The process by which we become subjects – that is to say, the process by which we are inserted into the ‘social reality’ – gives the subject definition within the subjugating fantasy-space, and both fantasy and subjectivisation carry ideological significance as a result. To this extent, Žižek understands not only the interpellated subject, but equally the ‘hysterical’ forms of subjectivity encountered in Badiou and Rancière, as already fully accommodated by the state ideology, in submitting as they do to an ideological image of the state as omnipotent and therefore posing unassailability. The constraining effect of the same submission is present as well in the thinking of Deleuze, who indicates how ‘consciousness’ is always that which belongs to the slave, fixing the flow of experience into a being whose recognition of an image of itself stifles and halts any further creativity on its part.59 We are reminded in turn of Huelsenbeck’s caution, writing in Berlin, that ‘to sit in a chair for a single moment is to risk one’s life … [for] to be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to oppose all sedimentation’.60 Oppositionality falters when it stakes itself against its object, precisely as the idea of the avant-garde breaks down when it takes on diametrically state morality and economy. Here lies the task in hand, to revise how ‘oppositionality’ is thought, and consequently how ‘revolution’ is thought. The manifesto soundings of 1916–19 patently refuse to give way to direct oppositionality, and so resist reduction to revolutionary claims. Nowhere do they allow the reader or listener to find the security of meaning that is assumed by ideology when it holds its subjects captive within a shared fantasy-space: If there is a system in the lack of system … I never apply it. In other words I lie. I lie when I apply it, I lie when I don’t apply it, I lie when I write that I’m lying, for I am not lying … for myself has never been myself […].61

Jones D, DADA.indd 112

21/05/2014 15:00:13

dadaist disgust

113

Ideology is properly understood to take captive its subjects by rendering the ‘symbolic’ staging of that which constitutes the ‘social reality’ – an exercise perhaps most demonstrably given today, under post-late capitalism, as the subject adopts a ‘cynical distance’ from the ‘social’ only to blind himself to what constitutes the ‘social reality’ and thus secure the subject’s containment by ideological fantasy. Tzara, in response, reading his ‘Manifesto of mr aa the anti-philosopher’, destabilises every expectation that might fall upon him to refute the authority of ideology and takes issue even with his own cynical reason. The complexity of this introspection is apparent in the blunt admission that ‘myself has never been myself’, signalling the subject Tzara’s loss of control as his lexicon takes shape outside his thought, but at the same time shapes it. The subject’s freedom is alienated and substituted for by the illusion of ‘the symbolic’. Tzara’s singular refusal to admit any settled or stable meaning takes on ideology’s assumption of stable meaning and significance in ‘the symbolic’ – however contingent or contestable – in order to break it down. This Tzara does, consistently I would argue, in the Zurich manifesto writings in order to open up a space that will relate to the ideological as it similarly relates to ‘the symbolic’. Indeed, that this is a space (elsewhere named as Žižek’s central referent, ‘the Real’) actively permitted by the ideological means that it is at once immanent to the ideological, and its immanence makes redundant any invocation of the conventional space of oppositionality (located on the outside) usually anticipated for such dissenting voices. Whether such voices are on the inside or outside ceases to have any bearing in the struggle to orient ourselves to their various positions, as they renege equally on the reader as on themselves: ‘One should begin at long last to speak out against oneself! One should begin!! One!!’62 Serner’s uncompromising stance is undiminished as he places himself in the direct line of his own critical fire, his performative self-loathing and subjective destitution exposed, as ‘for a long time now I have, in quiet hours, been spitting on my own head’.63 If it is suggested that Tzara’s notorious 1918 manifesto carries Serner’s heavy though anonymous imprint,64 Serner takes full credit for ‘Der Schluck um die Achse’ (The Swig about the Axis), a text as destructive and disorienting in intent as Tzara’s submission of 1918. ‘Der Schluck’ appeared as a late contribution to Zurich Dada, published in the uniqueissue Der Zeltweg in November 1919 (by which time Serner had already quit Zurich, as had most of the other Dadaists of 1916), and in practical terms it constituted a sustained summation of the Tzara–Serner brand

Jones D, DADA.indd 113

21/05/2014 15:00:13

114

dada 1916 in theory

of anarcho-nihilism manifested during the preceding years (subsequently to be integrated into the extended version of Serner’s Letzte Lockerung, published in 1920). It is, nonetheless, a distillation of the nihilist tone along with its incipient critical mode as already encountered in the 1918 manifesto that Tzara took with him from Zurich to Paris. The source of emission of the manifesto voices is relegated in priority: ‘Even if I didn’t believe it, it is the truth just because I have set it down on paper – because it is a lie that I have PINNED DOWN.’65 Here, Tzara’s position of immanence to the ideological is one from which the manifesto writer necessarily bears witness to the meanings and assumptions current in the ideological formation itself, and deploying reason to contest any discourse within ideology becomes strategic within a critique of ideology. The breakdown of the usually stable image of ‘social reality’ is one critical consequence; the space that is immanent to the ideological, which is to say the space that is the site of ‘the Real’, makes unstable the ideological projection of its ‘social reality’. The challenge is then mounted from ‘the Real’ as antagonistic resistance to the fantasy-projections of ideology, resistance that gains critical distance and prises open critical space. The platforms in Zurich, from which the sustained antagonistic assault of the manifesto declamations rained down, are here now argued to be the critical spaces of Dada. Upon these platforms, the Dadaists struggled to wrestle free from ideology intermittently at the Cabaret Voltaire, and then even more sporadically at the Dada soirées, demonstrations and festivals within the precincts of Zurich over the following three years. This invocation of ‘the Real’ as encountered in Žižek, of course, is not in itself unproblematic; it obtains a particular assumption of autonomy and significance, which remains to be addressed. For the present, however, it marks the potential demarcation of a ‘neutral’ space, the ‘peaceful dead-centre’ of ideology so to speak (although, actually, ‘peaceful’ or ‘dead’ it never was in the case of Zurich Dada, despite the image of idle distraction given by Huelsenbeck in 1920: ‘in Zurich people lived as in a health resort, chasing after the ladies and longing for nightfall that would bring pleasure barges, magic lanterns and music by Verdi’),66 the centre self-released from the subjugating influence of ideology. It is an ‘intraideological’ (as opposed to an ‘extra-’ or ‘non-’ or even ‘anti-ideological’) space that signifies the transience of meaning in our world, and permits contestability beyond the gestural of such assumptions that underpin ideological images of ‘social reality’. Žižek thus understands ideology to assume its social meaning through operation within ‘the symbolic’, then pinning down or fixing meaning through its performative in staging

Jones D, DADA.indd 114

21/05/2014 15:00:13

dadaist disgust

115

the sense of what is perceived to constitute the ‘reality’ of the social. Critically, however, Žižek argues against the possibility of the absolute and unconditional subjugation of interpellated subjects, because of the inevitable breakdown of ideology when it comes into contact with the critical space that is ‘the Real’ of ‘antagonism’. In this space, a particular release is effected, a stepping out of the symbolic field in which ideology operates, opening critical distance and a type of freedom from the ideological,67 where Tzara could hazard one definition of Dada as ‘a quantity of life undergoing a transparent transformation both effortless and giratory’.68 Where reason is located – in its critical or cynical forms, or even when it is turned against itself in a necessarily self-destructive move – indicates at least a commitment to the progressive power and possibilities of rationality. Serner made known his unflinching verdict that ‘world views are word mixtures’ in the Letzte Lockerung,69 as recognition of the problematic (because contingent and irrational) foundations of our reasoning. Those ‘world views’ are the projections relayed within ‘the symbolic’, the background of ‘fantasy’ against which Žižek insists on theorising the creative, transformative potentialities of reason as it struggles free from fantasy, which would otherwise influence and shape its application in the social world. To criticise a concept (even if it is the concept of the subject) is not in itself productive, as Deleuze has observed. Far better, he suggests, ‘to build the new functions and discover the new fields that make it [the concept] useless or inadequate’.70 By this turn, the reasoned critique of reason takes the object of critique into a new field, demanding the progressive possibility of reason that poses its primary challenge against itself.

Notes 1 Walter Serner, ‘The Swig about the Axis’, trans. Caitríona Ní Dhubhgaill, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 58. 2 Stephen C. Foster, ‘Disaster and the Habits of Culture’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), p. 6. 3 Tristan Tzara, ‘Manifesto of Mr. Antipyrine’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 75. 4 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) (January–April 1969)’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 175.

Jones D, DADA.indd 115

21/05/2014 15:00:14

116

dada 1916 in theory

5 Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, p. 175. 6 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), p. 232. 7 Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, p. 170. 8 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (New York and London: Verso, 1988), pp. 38–39. 9 This inversion mirrors one of the complications of the death of God: ‘Did we kill God when we put man in his place and kept the most important thing, which is the place? The only change is this: instead of being burdened from the outside, man takes the weights and places them on his own back.’ Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 71. 10 Hugo Ball performed this very point with his recitation of Erich Mühsam’s ‘Revolutionary Song’ at the Cabaret Voltaire (see chapter 1). 11 Tristan Tzara, ‘Zurich Chronicle (1915–1919)’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 235. 12 Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978) p. 59; cited in translation in Brigitte Pichon, ‘Revisiting Spie(ge)lgasse: Mirror(s) and Prism(s), Cultural and Political Stagings of Emigration and Liminality’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), p. 8. 13 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), p. 113. 14 Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto. 1918’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 77. 15 Louis Althusser, ‘Lenin and Philosophy (February 1968)’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 26. 16 Althusser, ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, p. 52. 17 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti­-Art, trans. David Britt (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), p. 64. 18 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 65. Further, see chapter 7 in this book. 19 Alain Badiou, ‘Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject’, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (New York and London: Verso, 2005), p. 63. 20 Badiou, ‘Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject’, p. 63. 21 Badiou, ‘Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject’, p. 64. 22 For the Dadaists of 1916, the evental overdetermination was the war laying waste to Europe; for Lenin, it would become the Russian Revolution. 23 Badiou, ‘Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject’, p. 65. 24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1987), p. 89. 25 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Collective Dada Manifesto’ (1920), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 244. 26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 76–77. 27 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 317. 28 Walter Benjamin, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility’ (Third Version), in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings,

Jones D, DADA.indd 116

21/05/2014 15:00:14

dadaist disgust

117

trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 267. 29 Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto. 1918’, pp. 76–81. 30 Matthew S. Witkovsky, ‘Pen Pals’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 279. 31 Tom Conley, ‘From Multiplicities to Folds: On Style and Form in Deleuze’, in Ian Buchanan (ed.), A Deleuzian Century? (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 250; see also Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley (London: Athlone, 1993). 32 Stephen C. Foster, ‘Zurich Dada: The Arts, Critique, and the Theatre of Radicalism’, keynote address to the conference ‘Zurich Dada’ (Manchester Metropolitan University, 1994), n.p. 33 Leah Dickerman, ‘Dada Gambits’, October, 105 (Summer 2003), 11. 34 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism’ (1920), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 43. 35 David Fincher (dir.), Fight Club (20th Century Fox, 1999). 36 Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 77. 37 Freeden introduces this usage, stating how, ‘[u]ltimately, ideologies are configurations of decontested meanings of political concepts’. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 76. 38 V. I. Lenin, ‘Party Organization and Party Literature’ (1905), Lenin on Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress, 1967). Reproduced in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 140. 39 Althusser, ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, p. 30. 40 Lenin, ‘Party Organization and Party Literature’, p. 139. 41 Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 149–50. 42 Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Four Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), p. 160. 43 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 230. 44 Tristan Tzara, ‘Manifesto of mr. aa the anti-philosopher’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 85. 45 See Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 164, 99. 46 Tzara, ‘Manifesto of Mr. Antipyrine’, p. 75. 47 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Dada Manifesto 1949’, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 399. 48 Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), trans. John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking (London: Rising Free Collective, 1979) (originally published as Traité de savoir-vivre a l’usage des jeunes generations [Paris: Gallimard]); cited in Bob Black, ‘The Realization and Suppression of Situationism’, in Stewart Home (ed.), What is Situationism? A Reader (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996), p. 146. 49 Foster, ‘Zurich Dada’, n.p. 50 Foster, ‘Zurich Dada’, n.p.

Jones D, DADA.indd 117

21/05/2014 15:00:14

118

dada 1916 in theory

51 Foster, ‘Zurich Dada’, n.p. 52 On Žižek’s invocation of ‘hysteria’ and its ethico-political importance, see Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Wiley, 2003), pp. 164–65. 53 The Dada brand of toiletries was manufactured by Bergmann & Co., Bahnhofstrasse 51, in Zurich. Ball noted, ‘Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap’; Hugo Ball, ‘Dada Manifesto’ (1916), trans. Christopher Middleton, in Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 221. 54 Hans Richter, ‘Dada X Y Z …’ (1948), in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 286. 55 Walter Serner, ‘Last Loosening Manifesto’, trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 159. The cited version of this manifesto is the first section of the extended version that Serner dated to March 1918, but only published in Hanover in 1920; Serner read the first version of this manifesto at the eighth Dada soirée in April 1919, and published it in the German-language edition of Dada 4–5 in May 1919. He revised the entire manifesto, removing all references to Dada, and further extended it for publication in Hanover in 1927. In considering the 1920 post-dating to 1918, we should not discount Serner’s enthusiastic participation in the activities of the ‘société anonyme pour l’exploitation du vocabulaire dadaïste’ from 1919 onwards, or the sub-title that he gave the manifesto for its 1927 publication: A handbook for confidence tricksters and those who wish to become confidence tricksters. 56 Serner, ‘Last Loosening Manifesto’, p. 160. 57 Serner, ‘Last Loosening Manifesto’, pp. 156–57. 58 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 33. I discuss this notion further in relation to the actual and the virtual in chapter 5. 59 Specifically in the reading of life as the perpetual affirmation of difference, as submitted in Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983). 60 Huelsenbeck, ‘Collective Dada Manifesto’, p. 246. 61 Tzara, ‘Manifesto of mr. aa the anti-philosopher’, p. 85. 62 Serner, ‘The Swig about the Axis’, p. 61. 63 Serner, ‘The Swig about the Axis’, p. 61. 64 Serner’s authorship of the most relentlessly aggressive of the Zurich manifestos most likely extends well beyond those that carry his name: some years after the events, André Breton recorded that Tzara ‘probably had very little to do with the writing of the Dada Manifesto 1918 which was the basis for the reception and credit we accorded him [in Paris] … The paternity of this manifesto is in any case, formally claimed, by Max Serner [sic], doctor of philosophy, who lives in Geneva and whose manifestos written in German before 1918 have not been translated into French’. André Breton, ‘After Dada’ (before 1924), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 204. Documenting the changes that Tzara made to the manifesto before its first publication in 1918, and then before its republication in 1924, see Hubert van den Berg, ‘Tristan Tzaras “Manifeste Dada 1918”: Anti-Manifest oder manifestierte Indifferenz? Samuel Friendlaenders “Schöpferische Indifferenz” und das dadaistische Selbstverständnis’, Neophilologus, 79 (1995), 353–76.

Jones D, DADA.indd 118

21/05/2014 15:00:14

dadaist disgust

119

65 Tristan Tzara, ‘Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 86. 66 Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada’, p. 39. 67 On Žižek’s use of ‘freedom’ and ‘the Real’, see Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1997), pp. 31–32; Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 33–34. 68 Tzara, ‘Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love’, p. 95. 69 Serner, ‘Last Loosening Manifesto’, p. 155. 70 Gilles Deleuze, ‘A Philosophical Concept …’, in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), p. 94.

Jones D, DADA.indd 119

21/05/2014 15:00:14

5

Hans Arp: Resistance and the Philosophy of Virtual Creation The real is not only that which is cut out (se découpe) according to natural articulations or differences in kind; it is also that which intersects again (se récoupe) along paths converging toward the same ideal or virtual point. – Gilles Deleuze, 19661

Zurich Dada presents us with a series of strategic visual interventions that are critical to our reading of the inaugural formation, though the formation itself is not marked primarily for its visual residue. We are given to understand historically the way in which artworks have exercised resistance to closure (as both inclusive and exclusive) in the familiar distinction of ‘the separation between plastic representation (which implies resemblance) and linguistic reference (which excludes it)’,2 and though it will be conceded that the linguistic references of the Dada activities in 1916 are never absent, they are in specific instances not always the most immediately visible. What remains as visual residue from the brief years of Zurich Dada is varied, uneven and inconsistent, but might wholly be redeemed by the remarkable works that two individuals, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, produced during this phase. This chapter will document the visual output of Arp specifically in Zurich – his textiles, woodcuts, automatic drawings, reliefs and collages, culminating with the so-called arrangements according to the ‘laws’ of chance – in terms of visual strategies of cultural resistance. Though a reading of Taeuber is critically prerequisite to a reading of Arp’s work, the emphasis in what follows will be on Arp’s almost uniquely passive, non-aggressive role within Dada, to be reviewed against the challenge posed by his visual works (contradictorily lauded some decades later by

Jones D, DADA.indd 120

21/05/2014 15:00:14

hans arp

121

Fig. 10. Hans Arp, untitled (Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), 1917.

Clement Greenberg and assimilated into twentieth-century modernist critique) – detouring via Herman Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby’ and the devastating impact of the fictional copyist’s passive resistance, which I will provocatively introduce as characterising Arp’s Dadaist engagement

Jones D, DADA.indd 121

21/05/2014 15:00:15

122

dada 1916 in theory

with his audiences. And, introducing Peter Hallward’s particular reading of Deleuze, a commentary through schizoanalysis will be applied to re-present the Zurich works, pursuing a line of inquiry that culminates in Arp’s chance squares as correlates for creation itself. In the process, the artworks are thoroughly revised in their historical context. If resistance is creation (as Deleuze and Guattari once suggested), then Arp’s position assumes a radically new dimension as he repeatedly yet quietly resists any and all expectations upon him as an artist – though stubbornly still ‘an artist’ – and as we negotiate the category of anti-art itself. The opposites of ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’ will be read out of the early twentieth-century popular philosophy of Henri Bergson, leading to the Deleuzian position eventually that illusion appears only in what is constituted. The freewheeling artist who assumes originality, it will be argued from several positions, does no more than participate in a realisation of existing possibilities, or elaborate on what is already formed. And as Hallward reads Deleuze’s distinction on this point, contentious as it is within ongoing Deleuze studies, the position is to be submitted that creation belongs to the virtual. We are frequently aware also of the co-presence and simultaneous resemblance (or representation) and reference of two distinct systems in the visual works, reminding us that what we are faced with is the task of reading such works: it is the now-established axiom that we must ‘recognise the necessity of a non-perceptual, linguistic moment in painting … and learn to READ pictures rather than to imagine meanings’.3 Embedded in the image is the textual dimension, and in the text the image, colliding and colluding, performing the ideological complexities of representation as ‘reading’ is exercised ‘in the sense of a critique of knowledge and representation’.4 This chapter proposes, then, critically to review Arp’s Zurich output, works submitted by him in ‘soft flute-tones’ that might so easily have drowned beneath the fortissimo of his comrades Tzara and Huelsenbeck had he not, ‘by the magic of his strange personality … found himself a place during one of their pauses for breath’.5 *** Reading begins in the exchange not only of the co-present elements, but at once in the exchange of the artist’s ‘thinking’ and the actual material. It is also a discursive exchange, in the address of the artefact itself through the ‘absolute mutism’ once pointed to as ‘the very place of a word that is all the more powerful because it is silent, and that carries

Jones D, DADA.indd 122

21/05/2014 15:00:15

hans arp

123

within it … a discursive virtuality that is infinitely authoritarian’.6 This, at turns, is correctly projected on to the silence that modernism has visually imposed upon grids, for example, the same silence to which those words submit that espouse Kantian aesthetics ‘in the defence of the purity of painting, uncontaminated by the alien presence of anything not of painting’s essence’, and tested to the affirmation of a formalist position that sees the medium ‘as source and bearer of artistic value and experiential meaning’.7 That which inevitably looms for us is the complication of Arp’s most widely known output during the Zurich phase, his arrangements of chance squares on muted grid-like structures. Visually, these works elide into a modernist mainstream that resists narrative, and their problematic is compounded by reference to the resistance to theory – and we are minded of a heavy over-subscription to ‘the supremacy of a so-called “visual language” over language in art, the supremacy of image over text, the supremacy of perception over cognition … as part of a much wider resistance to theory’.8 Grids notoriously provide a site for the acting out of such resistance as they construct visual surfaces that are ‘mapped’ and read – certainly as routinely understood through Rosalind Krauss’s reductive version of Greenbergian modernism – as announcing ‘modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse’,9 and its resistance, therefore, to all but the formalist reading of the surface. It is the intention here, however, to advance the possibility that, by the same grid, we may potentially prise from this resistance the narrative of the subject’s reconfiguring as object and the deliberate setting out of a series of non-identical repetitions. Much modernist commentary has posed a contour mapping of formalism by formalist means, suggesting visual works that not so much renounce art’s aesthetic rules as redeploy them in what Baudrillard once seductively called the ‘transaesthetic era of the banality of the image’, an era in which art becomes caught up in ‘a pure circulation of images’ (as appropriated or reappropriated, vulgarised or simulated). The primary concern for Baudrillard proved to be identification of the correct, affirmative response to any new forms that might emerge. His declared interest in ‘the balance between the extreme banality of objects and their enigmacity’ was, rather than being an interest in resolving or resisting conflict, always a concern ‘not to integrate them, but to challenge one with another – the intimacy and strangeness of objects’.10 As a response, it engages conflict as an integrating principle, an affirmation then of the ‘strangeness’ of new forms, a levelling even of ‘ersatz’ and ‘true’ culture so often yet so falsely opposed. The forms that emerge proceed to open

Jones D, DADA.indd 123

21/05/2014 15:00:15

124

dada 1916 in theory

out previously ‘veiled structures of viewing and interpretation’, using art to perform its own meaning. In so doing, the surface is made emphatic as ordered grids undermine their affirmation of a will to silence and resistance to intrusive speech: ‘rather than suppress and veil, meaning [is made visible] as a process, an ongoing exchange’.11 In this regard, the collaborative exchange in solo and duo works produced by Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber in Zurich presents, among other things, a quite remarkable deployment of grids, which, even at their apparently most geometrically inflexible and textually resistant, function in such a way as to contend their deliberately anti-mechanical (simultaneously at odds with their deliberately depersonalised) making through controlled random techniques. Foregrounding the work of Arp during the period between 1916 and 1919 – problematic as it is within the context of Dada and historical avant-gardism for as long as it might, despite itself, invoke artistic autonomy (Arp’s making of works that appear to exercise, in Clement Greenberg’s words, a ‘single-mindedness with which, all outer appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, he has striven for a strict internal aesthetic logic’12 complicates this point particularly) – this chapter will challenge the recovery of these works within a revised reading of Dada and the idea of artistic creativity as experienced ‘in ourselves when we act freely’.13 A logic of preference Shortly before the Cabaret Voltaire was inaugurated at the start of 1916, Arp and Taeuber met for the first time when she visited the exhibition of eighteen of his works, all titled Gestaltung (‘formation’), at the Galerie Tanner on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse in late November 1915 (the occasion with which Tzara, incidentally, starts his chronicle of Zurich Dada).14 Three of the exhibited works were textiles designed by Arp and worked by Adya van Rees-Dutilh – one silk embroidery and two tapestries on stretchers – works that are more likely to have immediately attracted Taeuber, who would the following year start teaching embroidery at Zurich’s Kunstgewerbeschule (she would continue to teach until 1929), than Arp’s ink and charcoal drawings shown alongside them. They provided the common ground from where the Taeuber–Arp collaboration of the following years commenced. The severe geometry of the one tapestry identified from the exhibition shares a close formal affinity with Arp’s non-figurative, compositionally Futurist and post-Synthetic Cubist collage works of the same period, works that incorporate found elements

Jones D, DADA.indd 124

21/05/2014 15:00:15

hans arp

125

and that together give cursory indication of the artist’s overriding concern with pattern, texture and abstraction for their own intrinsic properties.15 That the term ‘concrete’ (or sometimes ‘elemental’) was favoured by the artist over ‘abstract’ in describing these works – ‘as there was no trace of abstraction [as a process] in them’16 – signals also their departure from the currents of Expressionism and Cubism towards anonymity in artistic production, with Arp and Taeuber programmatically undertaking to critique and to quit this ‘pretentious and conceited world’.17 We should correctly recognise the critique of notions concerning art by 1916 as being found in the artistic media that were rejected in favour of alternative ways of making, which challenged the privileged status of conventional fine art techniques and materials. By renouncing the most entrenched and emblematic of fine art media – oil paint on canvas – Arp and Taeuber together embraced an applied art that was unrestrained in its pursuit of the decorative and indiscriminate in its gender inclusivity. For Arp, moreover, it should be understood that this move was one designed to exercise creative humility, a stepping away from the easel, down from the artist’s elevated plane and into the world of ordinary objects, an already formulated position as the joint manifesto published for the Galerie Tanner exhibition outlined: These works are put together from lines, planes, forms and colours … a reaction against egotistical human concerns. They show hatred for the shamelessness of human existence, a hatred of paintings as such.18 The forms here described – the flat, geometric, triangular and arc forms – functioned in recoil from conventional aesthetics and were given their most public visibility in a remarkable mural painted by Arp in Zurich in 1915–16 (but painted over in 1918–19 after it had been ‘fearfully misunderstood’ by the city fathers who were ‘enraged by the blobs of colour, representing nothing’19 – straight lines and pure colours, Arp would later observe, particularly excited people’s fury) that employed no recognisable figuration, and in the papierbild (collage) and the teppich (tapestry) works that were reproduced on pages 15 and 29 respectively of Cabaret Voltaire at the end of May 1916. The ‘concrete’ aspect of Arp’s work entering into 1916 is particularly marked in the pages of Cabaret Voltaire where, with the exception of Otto van Rees’s (the van Reeses were Arp’s co-exhibitors in 1915 at the Galerie Tanner), the reproduced works by other artists (including Janco) are arrived at through Cubist- and African-derived figuration. The visible difference is not only one of form; it is a difference arising

Jones D, DADA.indd 125

21/05/2014 15:00:15

126

dada 1916 in theory

simultaneously in terms of anticipated subject matter in artworks. Arp’s rejection of the traditional contents of images and his simplified drawing techniques were the starting point for the emerging ‘anonymous’ and abstract geometries, reflexive works, as Hugo Ball noted on St David’s Day 1916, intended ‘to purify the imagination and to concentrate on opening up not so much its store of images [as] what those images are made of’.20 Ball registers the critical foundation of what Arp was doing at this date in engagement not only of reality as constructed, but also of the imagination as constructed – in the process questioning the cogito and the singularity of artistic identity. Arp’s assumption, Ball continues, is ‘that the images of the imagination are already composites. The artist who works from his freewheeling imagination is deluding himself about originality. He is using a material that is already formed and so is undertaking only to elaborate on it.’21 To say this much might appear to take away from the artist that which is conventionally held most dearly – the artist’s imaginative and creative faculty – and to indict artistic claims to originality: the artist, therefore (and uninspiringly), is rendered silent, pale, mechanical copyist.22 In negotiating Arp’s position, the initial difficulty posed by the seeming formal unity of his work, coming as it does from within the historical avant-garde, makes its approach from without the anti-stance of Dada an instructive option that offers alternatives to the sometimes tired version of aggressive secularism in Dada oppositionality. Indeed, ‘resistance’ registers more practically and positively than ‘rejection’ in the renunciation of oil painting as the artistic medium of choice, for example, and reading in terms of critical resistance becomes the productive operative mode as we consider Arp’s practice during the Zurich phase. Resistance – long since posited by Deleuze and Guattari as being creation23 – is fundamentally an act of refusal and an attitude that refuses to resign to the conditions of subjectification. In both action and attitude, I will initially propose that Arp developed a position consistently to inform his making of art objects, a position that worked from passive resistance to challenge standard patterns of art-making in the first decades of the twentieth century. Within cultural orders that automatically assume the resignation and submission of their subjects, passive resistance functions to frustrate and aggravate the reigning order’s assumption that alternatives will be abandoned and, in such abandonment, that current states of affairs will inevitably be accepted without question. The passivity and ethicality of resistance has been broadly deliberated – in declining, for example, that the term résistance

Jones D, DADA.indd 126

21/05/2014 15:00:15

hans arp

127

can be translated even into French, Derrida located the ethical in ‘the non-resistance of the powerless even in the face of death’24 – and culturally read out of such specific instances as Herman Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby’ (1853). Through disobedience and dissent, the obedient subject Bartleby the scrivener (a copyist in an attorney’s office) ‘does not refuse, but neither does he accept, he advances and then withdraws into this advance’.25 This he does with devastating impact, Deleuze argues, each time he is asked by his employer to complete a particular task, by continual repetition of the at once non-affirming and non-negating formula ‘I would prefer not to’, a formula that eliminates the preferable just as mercilessly as any nonpreferred. It not only abolishes the term it refers to, and that it rejects, but also abolishes the other term it seemed to preserve, and that becomes impossible. In fact, it renders them indistinct: it hollows out an ever expanding zone of indiscernibility or indetermination between some nonpreferred activities and a preferable activity. All particularity, all reference is abolished.26 The attorney’s assumptions are continually frustrated by his copyist’s refusal simply to refuse – it would be so much easier to deal with if Bartleby resignedly said ‘no’ to his employer’s requests. Resignation would pose no threat or even challenge to anything; disconcertingly, resistance (even the most passive resistance) does precisely the opposite. Standard norms of daily conduct, behaviour and subordination fall within a critical range as passive resistance opens up the indefinite possibilities of alternatives and even of their realisation in some future shape or form: If Bartleby had refused, he could still be seen as a rebel or insurrectionary, and as such would still have a social role. But the formula [‘I would prefer not to’] stymies all speech acts, and at the same time, it makes Bartleby a pure outsider [exclu] to whom no social position can be attributed.27 The distinction of Arp’s work entering into the Dada phase is that it deliberately does not make the refusal that is characteristic of explicitly crude oppositionality. Rather, it opts through what is perhaps more usually termed subversive complicity to function in such a way as to sever reference – even in the extreme when such reference is to nothing but itself – and Arp finds correspondence in what Deleuze states is Bartleby the copyist’s absolute vocation, that is ‘to be a man without references’.28

Jones D, DADA.indd 127

21/05/2014 15:00:15

128

dada 1916 in theory

This is no nihilist impulse, but the preference of ‘nothing rather than something: not a will to nothingness, but a growth of a nothingness of the will … Pure patient passivity … Being as being, and nothing more.’29 The copyist, in one sense, negotiates his survival by maintaining distance in his engagement with others and simultaneously resistance to the polarities of ‘yes’ and ‘no’; to succumb to one or the other would see him quickly defeated, Deleuze notes, and be judged useless.30 In his diary entry on artists’ self-delusional tendencies as they elaborate on what are already formed materials, and on Arp’s enlightened engagement with such compromised conditions, Ball comes close to describing one necessary premise to Deleuze’s much later ontology of creation. Deleuze’s posthumously published draft text ‘The Actual and Virtual’ reasons its opening gambit that ‘[p]urely actual objects do not exist’ on the understanding that the actual is ‘the object of actualisation, which has nothing but the virtual as its subject’. In such actualisation, the actual is at the same time surrounded by ‘a cloud of virtual images’ – the virtual then as both text and context for the actual.31 What it means to be virtual follows inversely from what it means to be actual; the qualities of the virtual will not be objective, therefore, and they will never be visible or ‘seen’ in the normal sense. One critical distinction is here drawn between the virtual and the merely possible: To realise a possibility is to bring something effectively pre-existent into existence … The realisation of a possibility will resemble the pre-existent possibility itself; realisation of the possible is thus simply an aspect of actuality. Virtual differentiation, by contrast, creates the very thing that it actualises.32 So the freewheeling artist who assumes originality does no more than participate in this realisation of possibilities, or elaborate on what is already formed – the realisation of which ‘is always reproductive or limiting’.33 And, if we take the reading that Peter Hallward has proposed with regard to Deleuze’s distinction, then creation belongs elsewhere; that is to say, it belongs to the virtual. By this distinction, moreover, the difficulty we encounter in Arp’s work as it is reduced in formalist criticism to a continuation of Cubism’s ‘flattening out, “abstracting”, “purifying” process’34 can perhaps begin to register more constructively and productively within historical avant-gardism as the severing of any reference to the already formed and pre-existent, in affirmation as Hallward suggests of Deleuzian creation, which ‘refers to nothing pre-existent, ignores resemblance and proceeds through a sort of “inclusive disjunction”’.35

Jones D, DADA.indd 128

21/05/2014 15:00:15

hans arp

129

The abstractness of the work in 1916 is not the working of modernism’s internal logic, but correctly now a preferred choice of non-referentiality deployed in subversive complicity and passive resistance. Infinite sense and finite means Hallward’s reading of Deleuze on the actual and the virtual is arguably a misreading that ascribes a moralism to the difference between the actual and the virtual, which in turn becomes the basis of a reading of Deleuze as a spiritual thinker whose philosophy should be abandoned by ‘those interested in emancipatory and revolutionary political projects … because it is insufficiently materialist’.36 Hallward’s is, however, a reading to which we might give currency as offering one line of pursuit in relation to Arp in Zurich: accounting for Deleuze’s ontology, the virtual alone is proposed as constituent while the actual is always constituted, ‘the one is creative, the other created; the one composes, the other is composed’.37 Deleuze speaks of creative ‘power-quality’ as distinct from the condition of that which is actualised, and as a quality that indeed gains in power through severance from mere actual states. To argue, then, that Arp’s work at the 1916 juncture was busily severing itself from all reference allows us to relocate that work, to move it away from its modernist containment as something that ‘only contributed to the further deployment of abstract painting pure and simple’,38 and towards an informed reading that makes the constructive shift from passive eventually to critical resistance. Bartleby’s formulaic preference (Deleuze concentrates on the formula ‘I prefer not to’, making no more than passing reference to Bartleby’s later apparent and repeated concessionary ‘but I am not particular’ – which functions in practical terms, of course, stubbornly to restate the initial resistance) engages the conditions by which the creative power-quality of the virtual gains in the ascendant over the actual. It emerges, for Deleuze, through its repetition, as a cabalistic formula to be compared with ‘that of the Underground Man, who can not keep two and two from making four, but who will not RESIGN himself to it either (he prefers that two and two not make four)’.39 Perhaps the most prominent severance that Arp executes at this stage is the one from his own activity as artist, the activity of creating as distinct from the object created, the distinction that Hallward seeks to clarify when he describes how creation, or creare, is one, ‘but it involves both the active creans and the passive creaturum. The creating is “implied” or “implicated” within its creator; the creature is an explication

Jones D, DADA.indd 129

21/05/2014 15:00:15

130

dada 1916 in theory

or unfolding of the creating.’40 Arp’s advocacy of machine precision over the artist’s signature then registers as such anonymous (or alternatively collective) creating. Rather than signalling ‘a certain lack of weight in his art, a certain neutrality, a certain shyness that has made it, alas, only too often overlooked’,41 the separation from ‘the vague and the nebulous’,42 Arp’s introduction of strict order and the removal of arbitrariness all now manifest themselves as deliberate interventions: When he advocates the primitive, he means the first abstract sketch that is aware of complexities but avoids them. Sentiment must go, and so must analysis when it occurs only on the canvas itself. A love of the circle and of the cube, of sharply intersecting lines.43 This recognition of Arp’s concerns by Ball (and we ought not to forget that this was still in 1916, to Ball’s enduring credit, more than thirty years before the modernist critic’s failed hindsight) understands how the base corruption of art that wilfully contains itself – on the canvas or anywhere else – necessitates a disturbance of received ideas, conditions and pronunciation. The devotion that Ball notes to a formal simplicity and precision, the very ‘transparencelineprecision’ that Tzara elsewhere notes,44 continued to be worked through by Arp in the woodcuts he prepared later in the year for Huelsenbeck’s volume of poetry, Phantastische Gebete, published in its first version in September 1916. These woodcuts are inevitably – and reductively – most frequently read as diagrammatic renderings of the human figure and of plant crosssection. But such reading deflects from what are here being argued to have consistently been among Arp’s priorities – that is, in creating, to work with the intrinsic properties of the wood blocks and the stifled anticipation of what might now be more instantly recognised in Rorschach variants and their unfolding symmetries. Ball was clearly on similar albeit more explicitly subversive and oppositional terrain with his sound poetry, noting in his diary the introduction to his own work of ‘symmetries and rhythms instead of principles’.45 One of Arp’s Phantastische Gebete woodcuts was used for the printed announcement for the group exhibition of graphics, embroideries and reliefs held at the Galerie Dada in the Tiefenhöfe, leading off the Bahnhofstrasse, in late May 1917. Arp exhibited again on this occasion alongside the van Reeses, among several others, and alongside examples of children’s art. It is most probable that he showed the two woodcuts and one embroidery that were subsequently reproduced in the July publication of Dada 1 (fig. 11), and perhaps two further small wool

Jones D, DADA.indd 130

21/05/2014 15:00:15

hans arp

131

Fig. 11. Hans Arp, woodcut, as reproduced in Dada 1, 1917, p. 15.

embroideries,46 works that together continue the interests in grain, material and symmetry that we see in the Phantastische Gebete woodcuts. If making the formal correspondence to the standing human figure and plant cross-section is, as I suggest here, reductive to the point of being regressive (and Arp himself was cautious in his response to art forms that employed a ‘ridiculous resemblance to the appearance of other things’), there is alternatively a recognition of upward, organic, plant-like unfolding from the root, which does far more productively inform our reading of the works that date from the middle of 1917. Arp, indeed, made the close correspondence of art as ‘a fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant’, sprouting independent forms that are not compelled to resemble anything. His critique was directed at the misguided assumption that man could be elevated through reason to

Jones D, DADA.indd 131

21/05/2014 15:00:15

132

dada 1916 in theory

operate above nature and ‘to live and to create against the laws of nature’, rounding with his own declaration: I love nature but not its substitute. Illusionistic art is a substitute for nature. In many points however I have to count myself among the ugly men who let reason tell them to put themselves above nature … Dada wanted to destroy the rationalist swindle for man and incorporate him again humbly in nature. Dada wanted to change the perceptible world of man today into a pious senseless world without reason. That is why Hugo Ball furiously beat the dadaistic kettle-drum and trumpeted the praise of unreason … Dada is as senseless as nature and life. Dada is for nature and against art. Dada is direct like nature and like nature wants to give its essential place to each thing. Dada is moral in the way nature is. Dada represents an infinite sense and finite means.47 Arp evidently, therefore, was fully participant in the Dada project so often characterised as destructive for the sake of being destructive, recognising in it a redeeming and restorative capacity in the face of cultural degeneration. And we should note the very remarkable affinity here between Arp’s conception regarding the emergence of art from the containment of life and the observations noted by Henri Bergson in theoretical pursuit of means that would dissolve the very containment to which our needs commit us; Bergson wrote of how, ‘by unmaking that which these needs have made, we may restore to intuition its original purity and so recover contact with the real’.48 The impulse that Bergson responded to in his endeavour towards the recovery of ‘the dawn of our human experience’ is clearly recognisable in Arp’s shame when he remarks how ‘man does not want to look at the origin of things [because] the purity of the world emphasises too much his own degeneration’.49 Now, following Hallward’s reading, if creating (as opposed to the creature, that is the created or creatural form) is the active element in Deleuze’s ontology, then is drawn one of Deleuze’s most important distinctions, whereby ‘the creating is more “internal” to the creature than any actual inside’: It is only the creating that differs or produces, and it is only the creating as such that can claim to be properly new. However novel or impressive an actual work of art, for instance, it bears no resemblance to the process that created it, to the power of its working. However novel it might be in respect to other existent creatures, a newly created individual is never itself new in the Deleuzian sense.50

Jones D, DADA.indd 132

21/05/2014 15:00:16

hans arp

133

By these terms, then, Arp’s tangible lack of interest in shocking his audience (although recognition of their reactionary potential didn’t stop him quietly working with ‘straight lines and pure colours’), the notable absence of direct and hostile aggression in his cultural critique (not a bit of the cyanide that Sloterdijk ascribes to Walter Serner, for example) and his restraint in iconoclastic gestures is, I think, fully conversant with an understanding that the creating itself is what first obtains significance in the work of art; in the over-familiar language of Dada studies, it is to prioritise process above product.51 At several levels, it can be argued that what is presented to us visually in the work that Arp produced during the period 1916–19 is not radically new – although of course it is new – nor radically different to what others were pursuing at the same time under the varied guises of ‘abstraction’. But the terms of its engagement (these are ‘concrete’ works, not ‘abstract’ as was being debated in other artistic circles) signal its radical nature. Arp addressed the difference: Man calls abstract that which is concrete … I understand that he should call a Cubist picture abstract because parts have been abstracted from the object which served as a pretext for the picture. But a picture or a plastic for which no object was pretexted I find as concrete and as perceptible as a leaf or a stone … Art is a fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant like the child out of the mother.52 This organic emergence of artistic form manifests the sense of the creating and the created, the shaping and the shaped, the constituting and the constituted, according to the reading given by Deleuze of Bergson, and Deleuze’s subsequent use of ‘virtual’ in opposition to ‘actual’. As ‘pure past’, Bergson’s popular philosophy at the start of the twentieth century famously argued the simultaneity of past time as one whole, indivisible continuum constituting the reality of existence. Though the present, as actual, may have the appearance of ‘a thing absolutely determined’,53 its solidity is at most only ever apparently so and, for Bergson, the idea of the past as some aggregate of sequential, once-present moments achieves very rapid redundancy. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, for example, Bergson argues that ‘[o]ur intelligence … can place itself within … mobile reality, and adopt its ceaselessly changing direction’. This placement, however, would not be without effort and neither would it be some passive event. On the contrary, ‘[t]he mind has to do violence to itself, has to reverse the direction of the operation by which it habitually thinks’.54

Jones D, DADA.indd 133

21/05/2014 15:00:16

134

dada 1916 in theory Chance and the true dimension of reality

The emerging philosophy at the start of the twentieth century did, of course, face its detractors as the century progressed – famously Trellech-born Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy, who charged Bergson with thriving ‘upon the errors and confusions of the intellect’.55 But the appeal for Deleuze, which now brings Bergson into the present discussion, needs no greater elaboration when we encounter such passages in the earlier thinker’s writings as those that argue how the mind ‘will attain to fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its sinuosities and of adopting the very movement of the inward life of things’.56 It is by the illusory nature of the actual that Deleuze can consistently begin to make reference to the virtual as being more ‘real’ – that is, as bringing us into greater proximity with ‘reality’ – than the actual: Philonenko: So illusion appears only in what is constituted. Deleuze: That’s right …57 From extensive and actual, Deleuze shifts the emphasis on to intensive and virtual whereby it is the vast and infinite remainder, the non-actual or the non-present (in opposition to the present), Bergson’s ‘pure past’ therefore, which becomes of primary interest. Hallward again: for the same reason that the actual, despite its seeming solidity, is in reality ephemeral and illusory, so too is the virtual, despite (or rather on account of) its immateriality and non-presence, the only true and lasting dimension of reality.58 The effect of the present in its imposition upon the non-present is to isolate and limit the aspects that are relevant or necessary to our specific needs now, in the present moment; in Bergson’s words to sharpen the non-present ‘so that it presents nothing thicker than the edge of a blade to actual experience, into which it will thus be able to penetrate’.59 This penetration has long been subject to philosophical inquiry – ever since Zeno’s arrow, at least, which never did and never will arrive – glossed upon here by Brian Massumi in his deviations from Deleuze and Guattari: Halve the distance between the blade and the surface, halve it again, and again … the blade will never reach its goal. Yet it cuts. The event of the gouging is empty, instantaneous, insubstantial. The wood

Jones D, DADA.indd 134

21/05/2014 15:00:16

hans arp

135

is always about to be cut, or has just been cut. The cutting has no present, only the scintillating abyss of a future-past. It is a meaning, but a meaning without depth … It is an event, but in the infinitive, with no recognisable tense … Has cut, will cut. Definite tenses keeping company in time. In the slash between their future and their past: ‘to cut’, as always timeless and alone.60 On this conceptual plane can we position Arp’s work from the second half of 1917, the crystals, scarabs and stars of his woodcuts and, in particular, the works that have most recently been collectively dated 1916–18,61 the so-called arrangements ‘according to the laws of chance’, which perform a severe isolation and constriction of time. This same position accommodates the organicity and restrained sinuous forms of the Phantastische Gebete woodcuts of 1916, which themselves find further expansion in ten woodcuts prepared by Arp for Tzara’s Vingt-cinq poèmes, published in July 1918, and in the scattered examples from published Dada ephemera during that same year. They are, as a result, not contrary in principle to the chance collage arrangements, which they chronologically overlap. The process that Arp is said to have employed in the production of these works was repeatedly to draw the same imaginary form, modified in responding visually on the illustration pages of Tzara’s small volume of poetry to the shape of the poems facing them, taking his further cue in the transfer to woodcut from the grain of the medium itself (fig. 12). From the village of Ascona – that is, from Switzerland – wrote Ball in the summer of 1917, would Europe be revitalised.62 And it was in Ascona (the ‘anarchic alternative’ and rejuvenating retreat in the south of Switzerland, home to Arthur Segal, among others,63 and of the ideally non-political mystico-anarchic commune at Monte Verità)64 in 1917 that Arp recalled moving away from his symmetrical woodcuts towards the decisive forms eventually of the Vingt-cinq poèmes, drawing the ‘broken-off branches, roots, grasses, [and] stones which the lake [Maggiore] had thrown up on the shore’.65 Two known brush-and-ink drawings correspond to Arp’s description: the first is more recognisably of the shoreline detritus that Arp lists, while the second is more resonant of the simplified, unifying forms that he goes on to describe as ‘moving ovals, symbols of the eternal metamorphosis and change of bodies’.66 As forms emerge they in turn reciprocate, and the drawings, of course, inevitably betray the hand of the artist in stark contrast to the anonymity of production that had proved such a prominent concern for Arp since 1915

Jones D, DADA.indd 135

21/05/2014 15:00:16

136

dada 1916 in theory

Fig. 12. Hans Arp, woodcut, as reproduced in Tristan Tzara, Vingt-cinq poèmes, 1918, p. 30.

and his entry into Zurich Dada. To retain at least a degree of anonymity in the context of these drawings, the shapes that emerged would be cut out – from paper with scissors, from cardboard with a modelling knife, or from wood by a nominal artisan ‘assistant’, a carpenter using a band saw – before being painted and arranged by Arp to arrive at new chance configurations, according to the method most concisely demonstrated in the concurrent arrangements of squares and rectangles in 1917. The

Jones D, DADA.indd 136

21/05/2014 15:00:16

hans arp

137

resulting painted freeform reliefs that, together with the chance squares, constitute Arp’s most resonant creative innovations of the Zurich Dada phase were not shown publicly until late 1918 at the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg; the exhibition catalogue lists three reliefs alongside six embroideries by Arp. Likely to have been among the exhibited works is the well-known Plant Hammer (later reproduced, untitled, in the Zurich issue of Francis Picabia’s 391, published in February 1919; fig. 13), distinguished among the small number of known reliefs from this period by its rectangular base (as opposed to the ‘floating’ potential of the others’ orientation) and as being, according to the artist’s own recollection, the first of that series of works. By the time of this exhibition, Arp was already making one logical progression to draw the freeform reliefs back into two dimensions; one such work is identified as that included in the exhibition at the Zurich Kunsthaus by the Das neue Leben group, in January 1919, and reproduced in Dada 4–5 the following May, the ‘moving ovals’ and ‘change of bodies’ rendered in oil (fig. 14). The prompting of chance configurations that Arp cultivated by controlled means is to be found at its most unambiguous in the arrangements ‘according to the laws of chance’ of 1916–18. Better than the freeforms, the chance squares instance the closest point of convergence between the ‘blossoms of ice’ of Arp’s visual output and the ‘crystal hand’ of Sophie Taeuber who, by the time she met Arp, was already working within the rigour and stricture of the grid. It had started, as we know, in late 1915, and in collaboration they pursued an approach to the making of art that sought to free itself from the burden of such emotional investment as that which fed into what was now perceived as the discredited personality of the West, which in the estimation of both ‘had developed in a petrified and lifeless world’.67 In Arp’s work, the impersonality that was now being exercised in moving towards an anonymous art first made itself markedly and publicly visible in the small tableau composition dated 1916, and exhibited at the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg in September–November 1917 (almost a year before the first freeform reliefs were exhibited there), and which was subsequently reproduced in Dada 2 (fig. 15). The grid, which Taeuber was utilising as a more strict and mathematically controlled system, is applied in Arp’s example in no more than approximate terms.68 His ‘tableau en papier’, only later – and ultimately confusingly – referred to as ‘rectangles arranged according to the laws of chance’, retains the ‘rootedness’ of the Phantastische Gebete woodcuts, indeed even of the Plant Hammer relief; that is to say, Arp retains (for the moment at least) the gravitational pull

Jones D, DADA.indd 137

21/05/2014 15:00:16

dada 1916 in theory

138

Fig. 13. Hans Arp, Plant Hammer, relief, as reproduced (untitled, top left) in 391, 8, 1919, p. 2.

Jones D, DADA.indd 138

21/05/2014 15:00:17

hans arp

139

Fig. 14. Hans Arp, untitled painting, as reproduced in Dada 4–5 (Anthologie Dada), 1919, p. 19.

Jones D, DADA.indd 139

21/05/2014 15:00:18

140

dada 1916 in theory

Fig. 15. Hans Arp, ‘tableau en papier’ (Rectangles According to the Laws of Chance), as reproduced in Dada 2, 1917, p. 3.

and visual weight of the base as foundation for the precarious tectonics assembled above. Written correspondence from the period affirms the geometrical concretion of the art understood in relation to architecture – in late 1916, Ball records how ‘[a]rchitecture begins where painting stops: at the ground plan’,69 while Arp himself describes the joy to be experienced in ‘dividing up the world into orderly planes’.70 Use of the term ‘chance’ – a term only retrospectively applied in relation to Arp’s work in Zurich – certainly confuses much of the discussion around these compositions. Statements can casually be read as contradictory: Arp, in one of the rare instances where he makes

Jones D, DADA.indd 140

21/05/2014 15:00:18

hans arp

141

direct comment on these collages, notes how ‘[a]ny element of chance was eliminated’ in his and Taeuber’s work at this time, before affirming practically in the same breath a method of working ‘according to the law of chance’ – the law, he says, that ‘comprises all other laws and surpasses our understanding’.71 Almost without exception, the invocation of ‘chance’ reduces these works by Arp to some kind of visual correlates to Tzara’s celebrated recipe for a Dada poem,72 and such reduction consistently happens on the back of Hans Richter’s anecdotal, widely read and probably too often repeated (so I’ll repeat it here) and romanticising account of Arp’s making of the first of these collage arrangements: Dissatisfied with a drawing he had been working on for some time, Arp finally tore it up, and let the pieces flutter to the floor of his studio … 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 … 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 [Richter] was not there, of course …73 As a descriptive account of an event at which the author happily concedes his absence, this clearly gives us little if anything that can usefully stand up to the most rudimentary art-historical address, and it is, I think, correct to say that what Arp understood by ‘chance’ had nothing to do with uncontrolled accidents erupting from a rejection of discipline. On the contrary, ‘chance’ was what emerged, or what organically grew, for Arp out of the practice of controlled composition, of discipline precisely, and ‘working according to the law of chance’ meant deliberately and methodically ‘eliminating all volition and working automatically’.74 After first meeting Taeuber in 1915, he recalled how together they rejected all mimesis and description, giving free rein to the Elementary and Spontaneous. Since the arrangement of planes and their proportions and colours seemed to hinge solely on chance, I declared that these works were arranged ‘according to the law of chance’, as part of an inexplicable reason, of an inaccessible order.75 Chance is thus embedded in reason and order – inexplicable and inaccessible though they may be – as emphasis falls on the control and clarity of the exercise, and for Arp and Taeuber the elimination of chance denied the opportunity for any spot, tear, fibre or imprecision to

Jones D, DADA.indd 141

21/05/2014 15:00:18

142

dada 1916 in theory

undermine that same control and clarity. Chance, then, is anything but accident, and is here emphatically aligned with deliberate and calculated selection in the act of creating: Alone and together we embroidered, wove, painted and pasted static, geometrical pictures. The results were rigorous and impersonal constructions of surfaces and colours. Any element of chance was eliminated … For our paper pictures we even discarded scissors, which we had originally used but which all too readily betrayed the life of the hand. We used a paper cutter instead.76 This was a deliberate process designed to test the possibilities of artistic creation under severe stricture as the alternatives available to the artist were subjected to different (though in truth no more severe) controls than those that had at least notionally applied in the case of Expressionism or Cubism, for instance, and the radical departure was from artistic decision-making to artistic reflex. The reflex, the increasingly urgent and automated action and instinctual response to stimulus, marks the compression of time in the present and virtual (most recognisably referenced culturally in Futurist compression of time and space as one among a host of sources for Dada simultaneity). Hallward is again apposite on this punctual point in Deleuze’s ontology of creation: ‘The reflexive present is just time reduced to an “objective” actuality, and thus reduced to a minimum of indetermination, freedom, or creativity. It is reduced, in other words, to the minimal (most compressed, or actualised) degree of virtuality.’77 The contention, then, is that Arp’s collage arrangements of 1916–18 exercise this constriction to the virtual. Utilising the recognisable grid to structure the works, and then to hold in tension the viewer’s anticipation and expectation, the arrangements confound the same through chance interventions that provide release from the arid plains and planes of geometrism. As if to forestall what appeared to be the ‘madness’ and ‘total nothingness’ of the white square on white ground, the ‘striving for the absolute’ led to Taeuber’s ‘working it out of her system by introducing a musical rhythm … [while] Arp was throwing himself into chance arrangements’.78 Perhaps the most marked demonstrations of the simultaneous Taeuber–Arp currents are the rightly famous duo-collages of 1917–18 (fig. 16), where Taeuber’s strict grid provides the system and all-over pattern within which Arp’s intuitive and restrained gradations between black, white, silver and grey, and his occasional division of his collaborator’s regular rectangles, are controlled. Relative to the duo-collage

Jones D, DADA.indd 142

21/05/2014 15:00:18

hans arp

143

Fig. 16. Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, untitled (Duo-Collage), 1918.

works is a group of collages and embroideries that Arp produced, taking Taeuber’s system of vertical rectangles as their point of departure to vary size, colour and texture in juxtaposition. The most significant departure from rigid grid structures for Arp during the middle phase of Zurich

Jones D, DADA.indd 143

21/05/2014 15:00:19

144

dada 1916 in theory

Fig. 17. Hans Arp, untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), 1916–17.

Jones D, DADA.indd 144

21/05/2014 15:00:20

hans arp

145

Dada, however, occurs in the group of works best represented by the example held in the MoMA collection in New York. In the untitled work known as Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance of 1917 (fig. 17), the grid has dissolved – not completely, but sufficiently to allow the cream and dark blue rectangles seemingly to float apart on the grey base paper to which they have been stuck. Without yielding control and clarity in the exercise, Arp admits a return to his working method for the tears and fibres that are absent in the cleanly cut elements of the 1917 Wolfsberg exhibit and other prior works (figs 10 and 15). The edges of the thin, fibrous paper from which the rectangles are made are now delicately torn; they are softly absorbed back into the base paper; in vertical lines or circular patterns the rectangles float in formation and, always, in relation to the ghost of the grid. Despite its patent formalist bias (together with our complacency in the ‘aesthetic intuition’ and ‘internal logic’ of twentieth-century modernism), and despite the use of the term ‘accident’ where ‘chance’ might more properly be applied, the following by Greenberg, an observation made in 1949, does correctly register how Arp maintained control over any chance aspects: Arp never used the accident … as a result, but always subordinated it to an aesthetic intuition that insisted on working itself out according to its own internal logic, of which the accident itself – the bits of torn paper scattered over a page – served only as the shove that set the process of creation going.79 For our interests, Greenberg proves unexpectedly useful in referring us back to creation; more precisely to creating, as already discussed, and, as this chapter contends, creating in the Deleuzian sense that Hallward reads to describe ‘the emergence of unpredictable self-ordering trajectories from complex material situations’.80 In An Introduction to Metaphysics, it is Bergson who already sets the discussion – and identifies ‘[t]he most powerful of the methods of investigation at the disposal of the human mind’ – in the field of mathematics and the procedure of infinitesimal calculus.81 Deleuze subsequently, and in agreement with Bergson, engages mathematical equivalents to pure creating, notably in the pursuit of mathematical ratios in Difference and Repetition, for instance, where a positive stress is placed on differential calculus.82 In the event, Deleuze resists what we might anticipate of him as philosopher to the exclusion of ‘coherence of the self, world and God’;83 in short, for Deleuze, such exclusion does not eliminate the idea of God, that is to say the idea of an

Jones D, DADA.indd 145

21/05/2014 15:00:20

146

dada 1916 in theory

all-embracing creative force. What goes – what is abolished – with the death of God is ‘the cosmological distinction between two worlds, the metaphysical distinction between essence and appearance’.84 The death of God, therefore, is the death of the idea of a transcendent and remote, uncreative or finitely creative, sentient being presiding as ‘sole guarantor of the identity of the self … The death of god essentially signifies, and essentially entails, the dissolution of the self.’85 What Deleuze retains in the meantime are the mathematical conditions that allow for creating, the regulation and order that allow chance variations to be thrown in – not so much the controlled programmed deviations of computer fractals that simulate natural formations, as the endless snowflaking of infinite and proliferating fissures, which yet obtain paradoxical precision. But, with the potent image of Massumi’s God as ‘a drunken gambler’, nature is never effectively controlled (causing but uncaused; founding but unfounded). Every moment in life is a step in a random walk. Uncannily familiar as … [it] may seem, looking back reveals no Eden of interiority and self-similarity, no snowflake state to regain. Ahead lies nothing with the plane reliability of solid ground. You can never predict where the subatomic particle will appear, or what will flash across the synapse … Once thrown, however, the dice are destiny.86 It is out of the same paradoxical precision that chance throws up the deviations that Arp, in turn, pursues towards random figures, the elements of which are never the same but remain mathematically describable. Tristan Tzara, finally, poetically notes on Arp in 1917: In nature all things have this imperceptible clarity of organisation, united in kinship, bound together like children of lunar light, the axis of a wheel infinitely turning, its freedom, its ultimate, absolute existence, bound to these innumerable laws of progression. My sister is root, flower, stone. The organism is complete in the voiceless intelligence of the veins of plants and insects and their appearance. … the artist is a creator: he knows how to work the organic form. He makes decisions. He improves men. He tends the garden of the mind, watches over it.87

Jones D, DADA.indd 146

21/05/2014 15:00:20

hans arp

147

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Haberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 29. 2 Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, ed. and trans. J. Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 32–33. 3 Terry Atkinson, ‘Phantoms of the Studio’, Oxford Art Journal, 13 (1990), 59. 4 Atkinson, ‘Phantoms of the Studio’, 61–62. 5 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 24. 6 Peter Brunette and David Wills, ‘The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 13. 7 Martin Ignatius Gaughan, ‘Textual Titles: Resisting Translation’, in Jeff Morrison and Florian Krobb (eds), Text into Image: Image into Text (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997), p. 262. 8 Atkinson, ‘Phantoms of the Studio’, 59. 9 Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Grids’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1985), p. 9. 10 Jean Baudrillard, interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, Brisbane, 22 April 1994; cited in Nicholas Zurbrugg, ‘Just What Is It That Makes Baudrillard’s Ideas So Different, So Appealing?’, in Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact (London: SAGE Publications, 1997), p. 4. 11 Amelia Jones, ‘Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning’, in Performing the Body/ Performing the Text (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 46, 50. 12 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. II, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 208. 13 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911; reprinted Dover Publications, 1998), pp. 248–49. 14 Tristan Tzara, ‘Zurich Chronicle (1915–1919)’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 235–42. 15 The tapestry is listed as ‘Untitled (Diagonal Composition – Crucifixion)’ in Leah Dickerman, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, catalogue of an exhibition held in Paris, Washington and New York, 2005–6 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 46. It has been suggested that the work is an abstraction of a crucifixion drawing by Arp reproduced in the 1 November 1915 issue of Walter Serner’s Sirius magazine; see Alastair Grieve, ‘Arp in Zurich’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979), pp. 177–79. The silk embroidery exhibited by Arp is reproduced in Herbert Read, Arp (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1968), p. 28. 16 Hans Arp, Collages (Paris: Berggruen, 1955), pp. 3–4. 17 Hans Arp, ‘Signposts’, in Arp on Arp, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 271. See also Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp against Greatness’, in Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1996), pp. 413–17.

Jones D, DADA.indd 147

21/05/2014 15:00:20

148

dada 1916 in theory

18 Cited in Grieve, ‘Arp in Zurich’, p. 180. 19 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 26. Grieve, in 1979, noted the then recent restoration of Arp’s mural at 15 Fehrenstrasse, on the site of a former Pestallozzi school directed in 1915 by Enrico Corray. Grieve, ‘Arp in Zurich’, p. 178. 20 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 53. 21 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 53. 22 This bleak conclusion is to be countered by detour to Borges’s famous story ‘Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote’, for instance. In the story, in anticipation of ‘the vanity awaiting all men’s efforts’, Menard sets out to reproduce material that is already formed – that is, Cervantes’s original text – word for word from memory. Menard’s experience of being Menard, however, finds him recreating in the process of telling, escaping the pointless repetitive toil of the pale, mechanical copyist – as Arp, I would suggest, finds himself creating in the process of retelling. See Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. David A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 70. 23 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 110. 24 David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2005), pp. 9–10. 25 Philippe Jaworski, Melville, le désert et l’empire (Paris: Presses de l’École Normale, 1986), p. 19; cited in translation in Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998) p. 70. 26 Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, p. 71. 27 Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, p. 73. 28 Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, p. 74; see also Mathieu Lindon, ‘Bartleby’, Delta, 6 (May 1978), 22. 29 Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, p. 71. Elsewhere, Deleuze states, ‘Better a nothingness of the will than a will of nothingness!’; Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boymen (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 82. 30 Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, p. 71. 31 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Actual and Virtual’ (1996), in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 148, 149. 32 Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London and New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 36–37. 33 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 101. 34 Greenberg, Arrogant Purpose, p. 29. 35 Hallward, Out of This World, p. 37. 36 Anthony Paul Smith, ‘Believing in this World for the Making of Gods: Ecology of the Virtual and the Actual’, SubStance, 39/1 (2010), 103. 37 Hallward, Out of This World, p. 37. 38 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. I, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 36–37. 39 Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, pp. 81–82. Deleuze suggests that Bartleby adds the element ‘but

Jones D, DADA.indd 148

21/05/2014 15:00:20

hans arp

149

I am not particular ... in order to indicate that whatever else might be suggested to him [as an alternative to remaining a passive and no longer welcome resident at the attorney’s offices] would be yet another particularity falling under the ban of the great indeterminate formula, I PREFER NOT TO, which subsists once and for all and in all cases’; Deleuze, ‘Bartleby’, p. 69. 40 Hallward, Out of This World, p. 36. 41 Greenberg, Arrogant Purpose, pp. 282–84. 42 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 53. 43 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 53. 44 Tzara, ‘Zurich Chronicle’, p. 235. 45 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 56. 46 The two embroideries are most likely to be the works reproduced (inaccurately dated 1914) in Read, Arp, pp. 20, 21. 47 Hans Arp, ‘vases with umbilical cords’ (1932), in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 222–23. I have modified Arp’s minuscules throughout. 48 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 185. 49 Arp, ‘vases with umbilical cords’, p. 222. 50 Hallward, Out of This World, p. 28. 51 Before Nietzsche or Deleuze on process and becoming, we have Kierkegaard (now the emerging ‘new Kierkegaard’, for whom the paradox is central: ‘one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is … a mediocre fellow’; Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments: Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985], p. 37). Further, on the spiritual dimension of process: ‘An existing individual is constantly in process of becoming; the actual existing subjective thinker constantly reproduces this existential situation in his thoughts, and translates all his thinking into terms of process. It is with the subjective thinker as it is with a writer and his style; for he only has a style who never has anything finished … Thus constantly to be in process of becoming is the elusiveness that pertains to the infinite in existence’; Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 79. 52 Arp, ‘vases with umbilical cords’, pp. 222–23. I have modified Arp’s minuscules throughout. 53 Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 138–39. 54 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), trans. T. E. Hulme (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 59. 55 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (1946) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), p. 762. 56 Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 59. 57 Gilles Deleuze in discussion with Alexis Philonenko, a specialist in German Idealism, in 1967; cited in Deleuze, Desert Islands, pp. 115–16. 58 Hallward, Out of This World, p. 33. 59 Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 106. 60 Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1992), p. 20.

Jones D, DADA.indd 149

21/05/2014 15:00:20

150

dada 1916 in theory

61 See Dickerman, Dada, pp. 56–58. 62 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 126. 63 Arthur Segal’s pursuit of ideal form was recounted for me by Henry Maas, describing his encounter with the artist in 1943, in personal correspondence of 16 September 2010: ‘My Segal cachet (I fear) is at about the level of my dukedom in the kingdom of Redonda. My mother, who liked to find work for refugees (and had herself knocked about a bit with Blaue Reiter people in Munich c.1912), got it into her head that it would be good for me to learn to draw – or perhaps she just wanted to be rid of me for a bit during school holidays. Anyway she sent me off to Arthur Segal’s studio, where, sitting among a crowd of people who seemed to be there for occupational therapy, I confronted a used canvas, with a palette and brushes in my hand, and at his bidding tried to paint a blue circle in the middle. It started small, got bigger, but never became remotely circular. He was a kindly old gent with flowing locks of fine, snow-white hair round a shining bald dome, but I don’t think even he could find anything complimentary to say about my circle, and there, possibly after one or two more sessions, my artistic career came to an end. I hope it was not from a heart broken by my ineptitude that he died the following year.’ As for Segal himself, in the artist’s statement to his 1919 exhibition at the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg, the ideal blue circle had long been preempted: ‘Equivalence is juxtaposition and superimposition … Each part is as important as the others. One is there for all, all for one.’ See Matthew S. Witkovsky, ‘Chronology’, in Dickerman, Dada, p. 437. 64 Karl and Gusto Gräser’s open-air centre at Monte Verità was ‘characterized by its theosophical direction, vegetarianism, nudist culture, and political anarchism, as a true paradise, an oasis for hopeful defectors who together formed a curious community of idealists from all over the world: anarchists, pacifists, theosophists, vegetarians, fanatics, artists, politicians, and hopelessly lost dreamers, of whom many gathered together at the Segal house to discuss, read poetry, and solve all the problems of the world. To talk about material matters was forbidden, money was considered the worst scourge of mankind, and it was also impossible to earn money in Ascona, though one could obtain valuable experiences, since there was plenty of time to contemplate and dream.’ Tom Sandqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2006), p. 188. 65 Hans Arp, Unsern täglichen Traum … (1955); cited in Grieve, ‘Arp in Zurich’, p. 197. 66 Arp, Unsern täglichen Traum …, p. 197; the first untitled drawing (Large Drawing) is held in the Centre Pompidou collection in Paris, and the second (Automatic Drawing, wrongly inscribed 1916) in the MoMA collection in New York. See Dickerman, Dada, p. 65. 67 Hans Arp, ‘And So The Circle Closed’, in Arp on Arp, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 232. 68 This difference in Arp’s and Taeuber’s application of the grid is underscored by characteristics that draw strong distinctions between the work and practice of the two artists. Ruth Hemus notes, ‘Where Arp experimented with chance, Taeuber was more motivated by precision. Where Arp’s work developed biomorphic forms, Taeuber’s took geometric ordering. In fact, these differing emphases offer a reversal of male–female stereotypes, Arp’s compositions making use of organic, rounded feminine forms and Taeuber’s constructions built from straight lines, order and structure.’ Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 85.

Jones D, DADA.indd 150

21/05/2014 15:00:20

.

hans arp

151

69 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 94. 70 Hans Arp, Letter to Hilla von Rebay, 8 November 1916; cited in translation in Jane Hancock, ‘Arp’s Chance Collages’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada/Dimensions (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 54. 71 Arp, ‘And So The Circle Closed’, pp. 245–46. 72 See Tristan Tzara, ‘Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 92 (this manifesto is dated 1920, by which time Tzara had left Zurich and the Zurich Dada formation had dissolved). The veracity of the recipe for a Dada poem has most recently been contested in relation to Tzara’s 1917 poem ‘Le Géant blanc lépreux du paysage’; see Stephen Forcer, ‘The Importance of Talking Nonsense: Tzara, Ideology, and Dada in the 21st Century’, in Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson (eds), Dada and Beyond, Volume 2: Dada and its Legacies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 264–67. 73 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 51. 74 Arp, ‘And So The Circle Closed’, pp. 245–46. 75 Hancock, ‘Arp’s Chance Collages’, p. 55, n. 18. 76 Arp, ‘And So The Circle Closed’, pp. 245–46. 77 Hallward, Out of This World, p. 33. 78 Hancock, ‘Arp’s Chance Collages’, p. 67. 79 Greenberg, Arrogant Purpose, pp. 282–84. 80 Hallward, Out of This World, p. 36. 81 Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 59–60. 82 See Hallward, Out of This World, p. 51. 83 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 176. 84 Deleuze, Desert Islands, p. 74. 85 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 294. 86 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 23. 87 Tristan Tzara, ‘Note 2 on Art. H. Arp’ (1917), trans. Dawn Ades, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 33.

Jones D, DADA.indd 151

21/05/2014 15:00:20

6

‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’: The Counterpoint and Counterpolitics of Language What the language will look like when I have finished I don’t know. But having declared war I shall go on jusqu’au bout.

– James Joyce, 19251

The collision of the poetic-textual experiments of 1916 and the deliberate application of chance in the generation of new works produced one of the earliest of the Zurich Dada innovations to be formally named. The ‘simultaneous poem’ is the subject of this chapter, subjected to interrogation as a form that establishes means of critical engagement other than oppositionality, via bi- or multilingualism to the minorisation that Deleuze and Guattari first introduced in their 1974 book on Franz Kafka. The scoring and performance of the poem ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’ will here be prioritised to extend beyond tired renditions of linguistic seizure in the proposition of series of linguistic contestation. From accounts of linguistic misrecognition, the potentialities of the Dadaists’ simultaneous poetry will begin to make themselves known; in his work on literary theory, for instance, Jean-Jacques Lecercle has provided commentary on literary minorisation with expansion from Kafka’s German/Yiddish/Czech instance to the Scots/Irish/Welsh example of the English language that is reinvigorated by the process of minorisation as the minor variants impact upon it. Lecercle’s commentary will duly be presented and developed here, foregrounding the minority deployment of a non-minority language not as the result of the subject’s wilful aesthetic choice but rather as the result of an exigency. The existential situation in which the ‘minor’ subject finds him- or herself is crucially not one of possessing an abstract universal in the form of a single national language or cultural identity, with the result that a new

Jones D, DADA.indd 152

21/05/2014 15:00:20

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

153

economy of production and reception is called into being. This chapter will argue how the negation of established, dominant culture through the process of minorisation politicises minor literature at the point of enunciation, hence the analysis that follows of what is played out in the simultaneous poems themselves. Even if language becomes arid, it retains potentialities and it is Deleuze’s charge to make language ‘vibrate with a new intensity’. *** On the evening of Thursday, 30 March 1916, we are told that Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara performed together and for the first time the contrapuntal recitative ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’ at the Cabaret Voltaire. Between them, they provided three standard starts and stoppages; in between them, they staged the arrest of the material (the sum of the signs) and of the structure of poetry. Today’s generic category into which that evening’s poetic-linguistic experimentation would fall is familiarly ‘concrete poetry’, but the specific circumstance in the smoky cabaret gave slightly polluted airing to the form that the Dadaists self-consciously named the ‘simultaneous poem’

Fig. 18. Score for ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’, as reproduced in Cabaret Voltaire, 1916, pp. 6–7.

Jones D, DADA.indd 153

21/05/2014 15:00:21

154

dada 1916 in theory

– a form assumed in continuation of the polyphonic simultaneity of Henri-Martin Barzun in 1912–13, or of the poète mineur and advocate of counter-assonance Tristan Derême, for instance, poetics that sought to celebrate modernity and signal ‘a more direct relationship between the polyrhythmic symphony and the poem’;2 more immediately of Marinetti’s Futurist innovations and, of course, of Tzara’s own poetic experimentation since 1914. The Cabaret Voltaire performance is ascribed importance within Dada literature, occasioning as it does one of the earliest recognisably defined Dada forms, and Hugo Ball’s description in his diary entry recounting the exploits of the night before is most frequently cited in pitting the uncontaminated human voice against the corrupting machine of the age.3 It is admittedly easy, I think, to grasp how ‘L’amiral cherche’ emphatically demonstrates the way in which the machine parts of languages seize as they struggle to be heard against and above one another, and the range of positions rehearsed in relation to the Dadaists’ – specifically Ball’s – sound poetry is most obviously apposite once again. The simultaneous poems, however, are patently not poems without words; what might initially appear to parallel the interests of the ‘verse ohne wort’ veer and career in the direction of the ‘lautgedichte’, yet the sound produced can only ever be a product of the words. The more we encounter Dada simultaneity, the less compliant it becomes to such frequent accounts that conjure a white noise, obtaining no meaning; and in the continued encounter, the centrality of Dada simultaneity gains in strategic form and function. The performance of ‘L’amiral cherche’ can be described and reconstructed adequately enough, cautiously but confidently so given the strict performance notes or ‘score’ published just a few months after the event in Cabaret Voltaire (fig. 18) – notes paralleled sans pareil in Dada history by Kurt Schwitters’s scored poetry of Hanover Dada, famously represented by his sonatas and the major ‘Ursonate’. The recognition of the importance of ‘L’amiral cherche’, in the meantime, can occasionally appear less assured – in the essay devoted to Janco chronicling his creative input to Zurich Dada, for instance, published in the series Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada,4 there is the singularly marked absence of any reference to the poem or its performance, in which Janco played such a key collaborative part – and there remains the awkward sense that, to a large extent, even the most critical literature that engages Dada simultaneity is too quickly sated in describing the poetry’s triumph in the demonstration ‘that language is just rhythmical noise’,5 or that its ‘sonorous verbal collage simply produced multilingual cacophony’.6 The

Jones D, DADA.indd 154

21/05/2014 15:00:22

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

155

consequence of simultaneous poetry must, surely, amount to more than the white noise that can miraculously sedate babies; if simultaneous poetry merits its place in the literature, then it is to interventions that pursue the invasion of languages by otherness according to a ‘poetics of exile’,7 or the performance about performances (of social roles and their subversion),8 that we should look. The transient effect of ‘L’amiral cherche’ gives neither the military officer of the poem’s title or the listening audience a fixed residence, rather throwing up simultaneous lines of signifying flight until the ensemble grinds to linguistic unity and a last standard stoppage: ‘L’amiral n’a rien trouvé’. What pertain are conditions under which Benjamin’s invocation enters play as he describes a new aesthetic that assumes ‘the form of transcendental homelessness’,9 and from which position art historian T. J. Demos has further developed his own sustained and productive engagement in observation of an aesthetic that is ‘less revolutionary than existential’, embracing as it does the geo-psychic experiences of dislocation and fragmentation10 – which existentiality Samuel Rosenstock explicitly assumed in 1915 when he named himself ‘Tristan Tzara’, homonym to trist en ţară, the sad stranger in his own country. It is with the scored performance that this chapter, therefore, begins. The performance’s occasion at the Cabaret Voltaire has often enough been described in evocative tones as well as in terms of its technical detail of duration, absent punctuation, percussive attacks, abstract vocalisations and rhythmic interlude – combining to distil an event resistant to the back teeth to hierarchy or the dominance of one language over others (until, that is, the linguistic unity and intelligibility of the last line). T. J. Demos most efficiently condenses the cosmopolitan stage of this performance as a site for ‘multilingual interactions’ and the intermingling of ‘the plural speech of displaced subjects’ – the result, he says, was a recitative where ‘words inevitably mixed with others from different languages, each continually invaded by an otherness not only foreign but also an integral part of the poem’.11 This signals the remarkable capacity that language possesses in its ability to operate far outside the conventional communicative and mediatory function; under certain conditions, language takes on an actively participant role in breaking down conceptual and also more physically defined political, social, even national structures. Tzara was already working with this capacity of language in his poetry by the time of the first Cabaret Voltaire performances, noting for ‘the bourgeoise’ his deliberate intention of ‘letting each listener make links with appropriate associations. He [the listener]

Jones D, DADA.indd 155

21/05/2014 15:00:22

156

dada 1916 in theory

retains the elements characteristic of his personality, mixes them, the fragments etc., remaining at the same time in the direction the author has channelled.’12 In no uncertain terms, then, the address is to the listener, and the interactivity of language erupts in its transmission and reception – and this, critically, without cursory abandonment of the author function. For the Dadaists, simultaneous poetry prioritised a particular effect that deflected meaning, its immediacy put to work in a form that prefigured alternatives, and its parts set out as cultural demarcators. The tolerance and intolerance of languages Staking culture, of course, is at best a contingent activity, and the return on cultural investment is problematic – problematic enough to agitate rogue Marxist Welshman Raymond Williams, author of Culture and Society (1958) and Marxism and Literature (1977), on at least one occasion to vent his frustration: ‘Culture: I don’t know how many times I wish I’d never heard the damned word.’13 Moreover, the way in which language participates in staking culture becomes increasingly complicated as it, language, masks and deflects its object – and the stakes themselves are rarely if ever visible. We habitually make daily assumptions that are based in language, of course, assumptions that obstruct the possible concretisation of what the stakes might be in a given cultural situation – the stakes remain abstracted in language – and, further, it is through language that we would seek to absolve ourselves of precisely the responsibilities that language first impresses upon us. Let us say that we assume to share, broadly speaking, the same political stakes. In due course, this becomes the assumption that underlies generation through social mechanisms of the both dismissive and exonerating ‘power of oblivion’, the idea as it is most notably developed and elaborated upon in the work of pioneering queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem in the 1970s – the ‘power of oblivion’ that arises as a response in words-to-the-effect ‘this problem does not concern me’.14 We are given an assumption that appears not to concern its nominal ‘public’ – at least the assumption is framed for discussion in such a way, functioning as it does as indicative of the politically marginal status of all but dominant cultural production (although what I consider my dominant may well be your dominated – my majority, your minority – just as a geopolitically defined minority group can be a majority within the nation-state). And for this ‘public’, then, the assumption will proceed to circulate as politically impotent and

Jones D, DADA.indd 156

21/05/2014 15:00:22

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

157

culturally phatic, its difference tolerated by a token gesture or cursory nod. When languages contest, any assumptions embedded in them begin to stutter and draw our attention; the impediment will expose the conditions that make possible the assumption that my stakes are the same as yours – conditions of tolerance that are no more than nominal, a virtual tolerance ‘because real tolerance would be a contradiction in terms’.15 This last observation – the words belong to the polymath Pasolini – deserves some further consideration. As a ‘contradiction in terms’, the nature of the tolerance that Pasolini has in mind is one of condemnation (rather than any gesture of support), tolerance that masks the imposition of identity by others upon the individual as being different or as belonging to a minority: they tell the ‘tolerated’ person to do as he wishes … that the fact that he belongs to a minority does not in the least mean inferiority, etc. But his ‘difference’ – or better, his ‘crime of being different’ – remains the same both with regard to those who have decided to tolerate him and those who have decided to condemn him. No majority will ever be able to banish from its consciousness the feeling of the ‘difference’ of minorities.16 We may then initially posit the ‘crime of being different’ as actively belonging to each of the languages comprising ‘L’amiral cherche’, to suggest the existence of a dialogic relation between them, one that is approximate to the majority–minority relation. Now, the broad application of the too-convenient catch-all ‘postmodern sensibility’ can quickly muddy rather than clarify approaches to the majority–minority constellation; readings that are less discriminate than desired invoke the range from authenticity to otherness to postcolonialism – ultimately delivering decidedly uncritical theory. The ‘difference’ in question is taken as given from the minority position, naturally, but the minority status of the tolerated voice is far from defined. In order to establish a theoretically sound reading of what ‘minority’ refers to requires that we make consistent our invocation of the notion of ‘majority’, and specifically the invocation of ‘majority’ as the pretext for democracy: it will refer to a standard or model, rather than to a quantity of people, precisely because majority status is not secured by greater number – we are reminded that the masses are, in all practical events, restrained from forming the majority.17 ‘Majority’ takes its shape as the opposite to a multiplicity of social or cultural ‘minority’ formations, each of which is

Jones D, DADA.indd 157

21/05/2014 15:00:22

158

dada 1916 in theory

a formation in process, a ‘becoming-minor’ as Deleuze would tell us, the example demonstrating that ‘there is a becoming-woman of men (but no becoming-man of women, masculinity being a constituent part of the standard)’.18 The sober revolutionary path Until the univocity in the last line of ‘L’amiral cherche’, what is recognisable as a vigorous component in its performance is this sense of the ‘becoming-minor’, a sense of minority that has little use for notions of fixity in defining itself. The condition of continual process indicates ‘a combination of active forces, of forces for change’ – the collective force for change that provides the locus for creativity in minority. To this extent, it is a condition that militates in opposition to the more conventional claims intrinsic to so many minority groups, driving against what can frequently be reduced to essentialist declarations claiming constancy and continuity, as commonly related by minority representations and their self-styling as ‘cultural custodians’. This poses questions over the validity of such ‘minority’ claims, most obviously, but we are alerted to the broader complexity by Jean-Jacques Lecercle, for example, in whose observation is made clear how any minority identity claim will be thrown into crisis as soon as it loses its status relative to the majority: nobody is a member of the majority (hence its famed ‘silence’), as everybody is caught in some sort of becoming-minor. And, contrary to appearances, the left’s appeal to ‘the people’ is not an appeal to the majority … but an appeal to the potential for change of an array of creative minorities.19 Lecercle pursues certain implications of this crisis in his explication of the concept of ‘minor literature’ as advanced by Deleuze and Guattari. By ‘minor literature’, what is meant is the work called minor – as opposed to notions of ‘minor literary classics’ or any attempt ‘to put Metamorphosis in the same category as Lorna Doone’20 – and it is indeed to the author of Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, that Deleuze and Guattari turn as they engage the exposure of literature as a social product to the contingencies and differences of its constituent parts.21 In their 1975 work Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari present a revision of the entire economy of language and literature generally as a centre of subjectification, a revision designed to reinstitute the subject specifically as the centre of language. Now, the

Jones D, DADA.indd 158

21/05/2014 15:00:22

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

159

diffuse subjectivity that is first most arresting in ‘L’amiral cherche’ is emitted by two (out of three) voices speaking in languages that are not their own – Janco in English and Tzara in French – and the unfamiliarity that is most discernible in Janco’s linguistic remoteness is, I suggest, that which brings the ‘minor’ into relief for Deleuze and Guattari: How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to use? This is the problem … of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path.22 The major language in ‘L’amiral cherche’ is, it would appear, French – not ‘their own’ language for any one of its three performers, although Tzara was well at ease writing, speaking and shouting in it. Entering the fray beneath the overarching French, Janco’s English and Huelsenbeck’s German vie to be heard above one another, but French becomes the expedient that rounds off the poem. We would not invoke English or German as conventionally read minor languages (in the sense that Romansch would be understood as ‘minor’ in the linguistic Swiss mix of Italian–French–German, let’s say), but ‘minor’ becomes applicable in the challenge that a ‘minor literature’ will pose for its own language. What Deleuze and Guattari propose as ‘minor literature’ in the book on Kafka is not literature written in a minor language, but rather ‘that which a minority constructs in a major language’.23 The minority deployment of a major language is not the result of the subject’s wilful aesthetic choice, but rather the result of an exigency. The existential situation in which the ‘minor’ subject finds him- or herself is, crucially, not one of possessing an abstract universal in the form of a single national language or cultural identity, with the result that a new economy of production and reception is called into being. Tzara’s role in the performance of ‘L’amiral cherche’ is particularly engaging when we consider the degree to which the poem’s staging of languages-in-contest is analogous to Tzara the Romanian’s habitual linguistic behaviour. The occurrence of minorisation within a language requires somehow that it negotiates means beyond supplication to its referent – the major, dominant language – so that the minor variant can begin to effect change in the realms of production and consumption. Tzara, as we know, was Jewish by birth and the greater number of

Jones D, DADA.indd 159

21/05/2014 15:00:22

160

dada 1916 in theory

Romanian Jews at the close of the nineteenth century spoke Yiddish as their first language.24 He belonged, therefore, to a minority within Romanian society – a society that was in majoritarian terms both antisemitic and strongly ethno-nationalist. Linguistically, he had graduated from writing his early poetry in Romanian to the French of his mature output (the French title to his Romanian poem, ‘Dans de fée’, published in the literary journal Simbolul in Bucharest (‘the little Paris of the Balkans’)25 in 1912–13, signals the future linguistic direction) and it is with this background that Tzara can be read as surmounting a series of ‘impossibilities’, just as Kafka once surmounted their equivalent.26 Kafka was a Czech-speaking Czech and a Yiddish-speaking Jew who chose to write in a third and foreign language, German. Deleuze and Guattari’s proposition is that the series of ‘impossibilities’ encountered by Kafka embraced the ‘impossibility of not writing … the impossibility of writing other than in German … the impossibility of writing in German’.27 Moreover, the contingent state of the German language in Prague under the Hapsburg monarchy allowed, through intermixing with the languages of its environment, the generation of ‘a withered vocabulary, an incorrect syntax’28 – and syntactical disturbances pose far more significant and far-reaching consequences than does a changing vocabulary. Klaus Wagenbach, writing of Kafka’s youth, provides an analysis of the Prague German that Deleuze and Guattari now revisit: the incorrect use of prepositions; the abuse of the pronominal; the employment of malleable verbs … the multiplication and succession of adverbs; the use of pain-filled connotations; the importance of the accent as a tension internal to the word; and the distribution of consonants and vowels as part of an internal discordance.29 Wagenbach might plausibly have characterised what he heard being spoken as a demonstration of the Prague citizenry speaking German in Czech – that is, German words deployed in Czech syntax – a problematic state of affairs today in its converse, for example, effecting from the top down, when the round words of minority languages that are threatened by subsumption into major languages are idly forced into the square syntax of the major. The Prague German model, however, inverts the present-day problematic, which is the move that validates what comes next. As manifest in Kafka’s writing, what is elsewhere problematic is now read positively, effecting from the bottom up: ‘all these marks of the poverty of a language show up in Kafka, but have been taken over by a creative utilization for the purposes of a new sobriety, a new expressivity,

Jones D, DADA.indd 160

21/05/2014 15:00:22

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

161

a new flexibility, a new intensity’.30 Complete with withered vocabulary and incorrect syntax, the Prague German with which Kafka was most at home and that provided him with his medium gave rise to the productive despite paradoxical possibility of invention31 – a possibility that gains in political inflection as it is revealed through the writer’s ‘paper language’ how ‘national consciousness, uncertain or oppressed, necessarily exists by means of literature’.32 The opportunity posed is a powerful one, it must be said, to shape a literature that destabilises the imposed major culture; what evolves is the exemplarity of living in an alien language and of becoming ‘a nomad and an immigrant … in relation to one’s own language’.33 This conclusion is ground for the shared conviction in the possibility of sustaining political radicalness under particular conditions of poetic production, for instance, because, despite any contrary intention, Deleuze and Guattari will insist that everything in linguistic minorisation is political.34 This notion of minorisation, then, takes shape around the theoretical deterritorialisation of the major language. In the prose and poetry of such a religiously nonconformist writer as Dylan Thomas, for instance, himself a footnote to British Surrealism in the late 1930s, the cultivation of ‘unpredictable and uncontainable meaning’35 exercises a minorisation of English – that is, Thomas’s variant within the standard dialect. For Deleuze and Guattari, what is here productive and creative is not simply the part minorisation plays in keeping the major language alive, but the part it plays in invigorating and exhilarating the major: The minor ‘treatment’ of a major language must be understood in the medical sense of the term. This is obviously the case in the literary treatment – but this is also the case of the treatment through minor dialects and registers. English literature, as is well known, is peopled by Scots, the Irish and the Welsh: Under Milk Wood is an example of an extraordinary minorisation of English – it is through such minorisation that the language lives.36 The invigoration of a language through peripheral variance and modification is something remarkable to observe – the instance gives us Thomas, who indulged himself in contradicting his own images, ‘saying two things in one word, four in two words and one in six … Man should be two tooled, and a poet’s middle leg is his pencil.’37 As Lecercle reads Deleuze and Guattari, what Thomas’s Under Milk Wood does to the English language is extraordinary; it is where a jaded type of English ‘becomes alive again, because here English is minorized by Welsh’

Jones D, DADA.indd 161

21/05/2014 15:00:22

162

dada 1916 in theory

– and it is this alienation of a major language that is the concern of true literature, Lecercle suggests, ‘the only form of reterritorialization in which it is worth indulging’.38 Further, deterritorialisation marks a disruption of the dominant or major form that distinguishes the linguistic from the political to the extent that linguistic domination destabilises the normally anticipated political relation between victor and vanquished. This last point is to propose instances of inversion whereby the language of the vanquished finds itself in a paradoxical position of dominance over the language of the victor – early years spent reading the Latin element in the Welsh language, under the instruction of the great Professor D. Simon Evans, taught me as much.39 It is as a consequence, in the meantime, that minorisation understood as arising from deterritorialisation can be argued to be both political and collective when ‘the people’ speak, only to be confounded in the face of the irresistible tendency towards hegemony or even the imperialism demonstrated by the dominant through its extraordinary capacity for being twisted and shattered and for secretly putting itself in the service of minorities who work it from the inside, involuntarily, unofficially, nibbling away at that hegemony as it extends itself: the reverse of power.40 This poses the conditions of reversal that constitute the minority’s false consciousness, a false consciousness that binds and blinds it to its own absorption by the hegemon’s secret service. But they are the conditions that make possible invigoration of the dominant and that constitute each of its potential variants as a ‘deterritorialised language appropriate for strange and minor uses’.41 The in-betweens of language There is to this process a linguistic testing of syntactical structure and of its attendant meaning, and ‘L’amiral cherche’ takes this testing into a performed and very public collision. We can follow a productive detour of simultaneist works that provides continuity for the linguistic minorisation that Kafka was first used to demonstrate in the poetry that belongs to the bi- (or multi-) linguist; whose very bilingualism and biliteracy intimate a condition of immanence for simultaneity in the act of writing and in the event of which we are urged not to think of bilingualism as two distinctive languages operating independently … [rather] we must approach bilingualism as the

Jones D, DADA.indd 162

21/05/2014 15:00:22

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

163

simultaneous existence of more than one cultural model … [that is to say] a form of ‘dialogism’. This in turn becomes a sort of excess or intractable multiplicity.42 The reference here is to the philosophical work of Tzvetan Todorov, in relation to the simultaneity of different cultural models and the exercise of a ‘survival tactic’ that keeps the different sides of linguistic families apart for as long as possible,43 writing independently in one language or the other for the bilingual poet – not translating, therefore.44 The external collisions of the simultaneous poem are recast internally through bilingualism, as practice and principle achieve congruence to the point of the poetic utterance, betraying the discomfort of minorisation – and yet it holds. It is ‘held’, in this sense, by the limits of language that the bilingual poet becomes aware of in practice, limits now reconfigured to function as conduits, and held in the encounter of gaps in comprehension that make ‘writing in two languages a hazardous activity, culturally and psychologically’.45 Gaps conjure the spatial dimension of bilingual comprehension in the form of holey space that deterritorialises and defamiliarises all at once.46 It may well be smart-ass semantics to slip from ‘hole’ to ‘whole’, but Deleuze and Guattari subject this slippage to the rigour of what Deleuze first named ‘nomad thought’, allying the form with a singular race that ‘does not ground itself in an all-encompassing totality, but is on the contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu’; and, moreover, this singular race is not one that can claim purity but only impurity, admitting ‘bastard and mixed blood … [as] the true names of race’.47 The hazards of deploying languages simultaneously are obvious – even if we are mindful of the gap, there is an in-between to negotiate, an in-between that ‘enjoys both an autonomy and direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo.’48 Negotiation of the in-between is concerned less with extending itself to an exteriority than with occupying an exterior position on the inside – trist en ţară, the outsider inside the city walls. Indeed, we read, the nomad is ‘he who does not move’ and who ‘does not depart, does not want to depart’, who is infinitely patient: a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive, speed is intensive … [speed] constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any point.49

Jones D, DADA.indd 163

21/05/2014 15:00:22

164

dada 1916 in theory

There is a particular gain in intensity through this stationary process and the sense of movement that arises from the studied engagement of language in the form of poetry – for a bilingual poet such as the contemporary Gwyneth Lewis, for instance, it is her bilingualism that has given her ‘a crash course in the nature of language, its limits and the incredible distance we can travel in it, against all expectations’,50 finding neither comfort nor familiarity in that which is nearest at hand. This condition is indeed what Lewis embraces most emphatically, she says, ‘because if you’re not entrenched in the code which is nearest at hand … you have a chance of taking in more of the world’.51 Deleuze and Guattari embrace the effect of simultaneity in destabilising, disorienting, rewriting and invigorating language, together with the precipitation of linguistic collisions as we think in one and write in another. When two or more languages find currency, their simultaneity assumes collective value – ‘there are no possibilities for an individual enunciation’, we are reminded, and every enunciation refers by default to a collectivity.52 Herein, the quality of minor literature is characterised as threefold: it connects the individual to a political immediacy; it deterritorialises language; and enunciation becomes a collective assemblage.53 Well, the criticism is familiar enough – sometimes also predictable – that the analysis of culture as given by Deleuze and Guattari is stymied by the attention to surfaces, yet concession will be made to the value of the theory that is outlined for us by the collective assemblage named ‘Deleuze-Guattari’. In the field of comparative literature David Lloyd, writing on nationalism and minor literature, acknowledges the prior emergence of a combative field of literature that is expressly political insofar as the literature … of ‘minorities’ of formerly marginalised communities, calls into question the hegemony of central cultural values. A retrospective, even belated, analysis discovers in articulating the political structure of the canon the terms of an aesthetic culture that have already been negated by a new literature.54 The negation of established, dominant culture – or the negation of dominant structures, as was the case with ‘L’amiral cherche’ – through the process of minorisation, therefore, politicises minor literature at the point of enunciation; it is anti-authoritarian to the extent that it riddles the dominant with holes, or spaces, which vent those voices that would otherwise remain muted as a result of the totalising formulations of formalist literary organisation. Kafka is put to strategic use in revision of the criteria applied to define ‘literature’; his work and literary authority

Jones D, DADA.indd 164

21/05/2014 15:00:22

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

165

are reactivated in the name of minor literature in order to make visible the boundaries and limits of the established system – the development, then, that comes after the critical neutralising of minor literature through cooption into the dominant literary canon and the reinforcing of such boundaries and limits. If we map the system, its potential negotiation and disturbance becomes possible and the minor is invested with political function in the act of exposing the dominant’s ideological operation and its ways of making us think. There is demonstrably more at stake than different conceptions of subjectivity or redefined literary genres – Lloyd describes how it is the historical and political motives of minorisation that now gain prominence: a minor literature pushes further the recognition of the disintegration of the individual subject of the bourgeois state, questioning the principles of originality and autonomy that underwrite that conception of the subject.55 The threefold characterisation of minor literature is then reiterated, as the integration of its qualities gives occasion for the analysis of what is played out in the texts themselves – ‘since the language is arid’, says Deleuze, ‘make it vibrate with a new intensity’.56 The polyphonic and polyrhythmic babel Acting upon this impulse to revive language becomes possible in a cultural moment when existing and established value systems fail sufficiently to impose themselves – a failure resulting not only from the changing culture, but also from the disintegration of the institutional structures that once posed culture as eternal. Deleuze and Guattari append to Kafka the minor literary variants demonstrated in Samuel Beckett’s use of English and of French, and in James Joyce’s use of English and of every other language he could lay his hands on – in which instances English ‘never stops operating by exhilaration and overdetermination and brings about all sorts of worldwide reterritorialisations’.57 Joyce once wrote that he knew three languages very well – English, Italian and French – and ‘two others passably well’ – German and Danish58 – but his portfolio would relentlessly expand and he devotedly researched new and invented languages, amassing in the process the dictionaries and reference volumes which he would ultimately have readily given up the remainder of his library to keep.59 During the Zurich Dada phase, Joyce was himself yet another of the city’s residents, from 1915 until 1919,

Jones D, DADA.indd 165

21/05/2014 15:00:22

166

dada 1916 in theory

preoccupied with his drafting of Ulysses, which he had started writing in Trieste in 1914. Making the most of his residency, Joyce became acclimatised to Zurich’s varied quarters, although there is no record of him ever running into any of the Cabaret Voltaire players staggering their idle ways to and from dingy dens and dives through the seedy Niederdorf (the quarter that Joyce would invoke a decade later in Ulysses as Neederthorpe) – a timely reminder against overstating any exclusive centrality in Dada for strategies of creative language intervention at the start of the twentieth century. While Tzara, Janco and Huelsenbeck were reciting simultaneously under the patronage of Herr Ephraim and his bullish demand for a more entertaining fare at the Holländische Meierei, Joyce was subject to the very different conditions of patronage extended by Harriet Shaw Weaver from 1917 onwards, pursuing a linguistic bent that, very early on, he had signalled for the reader when he noted that ‘in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men … [and in that history resides] a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race’.60 Now, language was opened up to Joyce in all its rhythmical inflections and stuttering as entropic noise and, in words he would later ascribe to the fictional Stephen Daedalus (subsequently Dedalus) mouthing the author’s own rebellious opinions, in gesture was to be found ‘a universal language, [with] the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm’.61 The idea of ‘a universal language’ is to be approached with the same caution that we would exercise in relation to the idea of ‘abstraction’ as it is linked to the primitive and as invoked by Ball, for example, in discussion of the chance collages of Arp.62 It is a reductive concept in its casual invocation and uncritical use and will, ultimately, compromise any deliberate intervention in language that engages the particular. In the case of Joyce, this problematic is engrossing; it is his apparent cultivation of an international language, what is described in Finnegans Wake (1922–39) as an ‘artificial tongue with a natural curl’,63 that prompts thoughts of such as Esperanto or Basic English, in whose artificiality resides a forceful reduction of language that notoriously stifles and defeats creative, poetic expression. Responding to this point, however, Joyce scholar Laurent Milesi has been insistent on the modernist’s radically different ideological premises with regard to the expansive Wakese: Joyce’s ideal desire to let every fragment of the Wake speak to any citizen of the world should not be misconstrued as the triumph of

Jones D, DADA.indd 166

21/05/2014 15:00:22

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

167

the communicative, let alone commercial, proselytizing function of literature but as that of the imaginative force of poetry in bridging the post-babelian linguistic gap, if only in a dream. What Joyce’s dream of a universal language makes clear is that global communication is not achieved through the reduction of difference and meaning to a mythically common denominator but by multiplying and crossfertilizing localisms.64 Embedded in multiplicity itself is the potential for communicative expansion: multiplicity in the composition of ‘L’amiral cherche’, ahead of any improvisation that entered its performance, resided in the poem’s assembly in three parts admitting a condensation of the tetralinguistic Swiss air. To describe the dynamic of simultaneity, particularly in its transgressive state, has been severally attempted: Foucault memorably describes how it ‘takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust’,65 rendering a simultaneity of outside and inside; the same simultaneity is invoked by the Möbius strip employed as Jacques Lacan’s metaphor; and, for the same, Alain Badiou describes a transtemporality that makes us really the contemporaries of the great scientific, political, amorous and artistic figures of history, ‘which means that we think with – and in – them, without the least need for a temporal synthesis’.66 To conceptualise such thetic activity between two or more participants comes in advance of an engagement of the primary distinction between inside and outside: so Deleuze, The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by … folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.67 So far so clear – the folding of outside into inside is an effect of reversal, indeed of doubling, which Deleuze recognises as a doubling of ‘the outside with a coextensive inside’,68 a potentially multiple folding that takes it beyond the double, in the folds of the fan (fold upon fold) or the leaves of the book (folds of thought), or now the parts of the performed simultaneous poem. The simultaneity – or we might even say contemporaneity – here in question allows the one to inscribe in the process of erasing the other, and vice versa, forcing the question of the idea of a limit separating outside and inside, and to rethink it, in Deleuze’s words, as ‘the common limit that links one to the other, a limit with

Jones D, DADA.indd 167

21/05/2014 15:00:22

168

dada 1916 in theory

two irregular faces, a blind word and a mute vision’.69 This simultaneity demarcates limit, therefore, as a traced line determined at the surface – the fold that Badiou describes: If you fold a sheet of paper, you determine a traced line where the folding takes place, which, although it certainly constitutes the common limit of the two subregions of the sheet, is not, however, a tracing on the sheet, black on white. For what the fold presents as a limit on the sheet as pure outside is, in its being, a movement of the sheet itself.  70 Though it may be folded, the outside can still be apprehended precisely as outside, however many times it is folded: my father once assembled his own ‘combinatory ensemble’, to use Badiou’s term, which admittedly exceeded domestic necessity but demonstrated that admirable resourcefulness born of wartime privation – a triple-glazed window (which, given the means, he would no doubt have allowed to proliferate endlessly), folded transparency, exercising a further instance of the multiple fold in ‘unity that creates being, a multiplicity that makes for inclusion, a collectivity having become consistent’.71 Badiou is particularly lucid in describing the fold and in describing thought (which philosophers have traditionally positioned in the dimension of interiority) as fold, to provide us with what is arguably a necessary identification of the limit against which we can think in order to transgress. Still, as soon as the limit is transgressed, exteriority becomes reversed as interiority and the limit is no longer what affects the outside, but is rather a fold of the outside, as Badiou observes: ‘that there is a fold of the outside … ontologically signifies that it creates an inside’.72 This maintains a simultaneity, and the fold acknowledges what Deleuze has already stated is the necessity of at least two multiplicities and, hence, of ‘two types [that] will certainly not be one above the other but rather one beside the other, against the other, face to face, or back to back’ – the fold as conceptual origami, purely and infinitely variable therefore.73 Badiou’s ‘hard’ folding, with its tracing of the limit between two subregions of a sheet obtaining ‘the ascetic rigor of the cut’,74 does, however, appear to describe something different to Deleuze’s ‘soft’ (though no less defined), more organic, sensual, baroque folding with its chiaroscuro that generates luminosity inside closed spaces – where it seems as effortless to move backwards as it does to move forwards (or in any other direction), as effortless to deterritorialise as it does to territorialise, that is the movement of each of the voices of ‘L’amiral cherche’ in concert.

Jones D, DADA.indd 168

21/05/2014 15:00:22

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

169

For Deleuze, the recognition of limit, which the fold presents, functions as not so much a condition as a conduit for movement75 according to his procedure of rethinking the dimensionality of territory through ‘the fluidity of matter … [and] the elasticity of bodies’.76 This is to render the partial determination of the one always by the other – from the constituted actual to the constituent virtual – and redirects us from Badiou’s fond to Deleuze’s fondu; from Badiou, for whom ‘thinking coincides with being when it is a fold’,77 to Deleuze, for whom it remains that ‘what always matters is folding, unfolding, refolding’.78 The movement and folding of language becomes a means to negotiate otherness, and the implication for the subject also makes itself apparent. The importance of the fold for Deleuze resides in the fact that it makes discernible the multiple – that is to say, it becomes ‘activated’, as the fold provides unity for the multiple and makes sense of his appeal that there is necessarily and simultaneously multiplicity of the one. Badiou makes his practically inevitable invocation of Deleuze, observing that the subject thus understood ‘as the “inside-space” … is not separate from the outside (whose fold it is), or yet again, that it is “completely co-present with the outside-space on the line of the fold”’.79 What is submitted, then, is that the simultaneous poetry of the Dadaists that assumed epic proportions for the final Dada soirée in April 1919 developed means in order deliberately to intervene in language and the way that language works. In ‘L’amiral cherche’, the specific variability of the one language always implies the other, as ‘[t]he one slides over the other or against it, the one folds on the other – without passage from one to the other, without a synthesis of the two’.80 The distinction of each is fundamental to the continued and productive failure to resolve dialogue, which gains precedence over the monologue of the compliant yet blind subject set against the background (that is, the default) language. The distinguished line of thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century who set out to demonstrate the active function of language in the production and processing of subjects is one that hardly needs rehearsing here. It is enough to say that, through its potential to affect social relations, it is by virtue of such demonstration that language rears politically: the introduction of discontinuities and disidentifications into language overthrows the ideological subjection of the monologic;81 the result is the production of new language orientations. What is now productive is the way in which language can ‘move toward its extremities or its limits’ and demonstrate resistance to the exercise of power.82

Jones D, DADA.indd 169

21/05/2014 15:00:22

170

dada 1916 in theory Notes

1 James Joyce, Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 11 November 1925; in Letters of James Joyce, I, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957; reissued with corrections, 1966), p. 237. 2 Tristan Tzara, ‘Note for the Bourgeoise’ (1916), trans. Dawn Ades, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 21. 3 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 57. 4 Harry Seiwert, ‘Marcel Janco’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). 5 Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ‘The Semiotics of Dada Poetry’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979), p. 59. 6 Nicholas Zurbrugg, ‘Towards the End of the Line: Dada and Experimental Poetry Today’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979), p. 228. 7 T. J. Demos, ‘Zurich Dada: The Aesthetics of Exile’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 12. 8 Cornelius Partsch, ‘The Mysterious Moment’, in Dafydd Jones (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 49. 9 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 99. 10 See T. J. Demos, ‘The Language of “Expatriation”’, in Dafydd Jones (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 91–116; T. J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2007). 11 Demos, ‘Zurich Dada: The Aesthetics of Exile’, p. 12. 12 Tzara, ‘Note for the Bourgeoise’, p. 21. 13 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: NLB, 1979), p. 154. The description of Williams as ‘rogue Marxist Welshman’ belongs to Christopher Hitchens. 14 The idea of the power of oblivion is developed in the work of Hocquenghem, specifically in his theoretical trilogy Le désir homosexuel (1972), L’Après-Mai des faunes (1974), and Le dérive homosexuelle (1977), which together comprise a radical critique of Freudian psychoanalytic theory and liberal social theory from a Marxist perspective, providing analysis therein of the role of the state and civil society in the determination of ‘identity politics’. The first of these tracts has been translated into English as Homosexual Desire, trans. Danielle Dangoor (London: Allison and Busby, 1978). 15 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Grenneriello’, in Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (Manchester: Carcanet Mill Press, 1983), pp. 21–22. 16 Pasolini, ‘Grenneriello’, pp. 21–22. 17 And I am reminded, in turn, of Kierkegaard’s invocation of ‘the public’, which he equates with modern mass society: ‘a public remains a public … no single person who belongs to the public makes a real commitment … made up of individuals at the

Jones D, DADA.indd 170

21/05/2014 15:00:22

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

171

moments when they are nothing, a public is a kind of gigantic something, an abstract and deserted void which is everything and nothing’. Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (London: Collins, 1962), p. 69. 18 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 194. 19 Lecercle, Deleuze and Language, p. 194. 20 Lecercle, Deleuze and Language, p. 194. 21 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 22 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 19. 23 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 16. 24 See Tom Sandqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2006), pp. 282–83. 25 Hans Richter, ‘Dada XYZ ...’, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 287. 26 I can only idly speculate on what might have been impressed linguistically on Tzara in 1916 following his ‘abortive sexual encounter’ with Berthe Hughes, for whom, in her rare Welsh of rural Monmouthshire, ‘Da! Da!’ meant ‘Good! Good!’ (further, see Stephen Forcer, ‘The Importance of Talking Nonsense: Tzara, Ideology, and Dada in the 21st Century’, in Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson [eds], Dada and Beyond, Volume 2: Dada and its Legacies [Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012], p. 266). Both Emmy Hennings and Hans Arp are instructive on the present point also, the former by February 1916 a seasoned performer of Danish folk songs in multilingual cabarets in Germany and in Budapest, Hungary, and the latter at ease in his linguistic moves between German and French, and having written and published early examples of poetry in the Alsatian dialect. 27 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 16. See Hannah Arendt’s commentary in her ‘Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 36–37. 28 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 16. 29 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 23. 30 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 23. 31 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 20. 32 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 16. 33 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 19. 34 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 17. 35 M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), p. 230. 36 Lecercle, Deleuze and Language, p. 197. 37 Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (London: Dent, 1985), p. 182. 38 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ‘Can There Be Such a Thing as a Welsh Lara Croft?’, in Angharad Price (ed.), Chwileniwm: Technoleg a Llenyddiaeth (Chwileniwm: Technology and Literature in an Enquiring Millennium) (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2002), p. 120. 39 My source book for the period between 1984 and 1987 was Henry Lewis, Yr Elfen Ladin yn yr Iaith Gymraeg (The Latin Element in the Welsh Language) (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1943).

Jones D, DADA.indd 171

21/05/2014 15:00:22

172

dada 1916 in theory

40 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 58. 41 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 17. 42 Nerys Williams, ‘Gwyneth Lewis: Taboo and Blasphemy’, Poetry Wales, 3/3 (Winter 2003), 27. 43 See Gwyneth Lewis, Chaotic Angels: Poems in English (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2007), p. 143. 44 ‘The basic error of the translator,’ says Benjamin, ‘is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 81. It has been said that ‘to translate songs is a bastard’ (Gruff Rhys, http://web.mit.edu/ skd/www/swapnotes3/drygioni.html [accessed 1 December 2013]), a complication that I have previously pursued in the chapter ‘The International Language of Screaming: Holey Space and Minorisation in Music and Language’, in John Wall (ed.), Music, Metamorphosis and Capitalism: Self, Poetics and Politics (Newcastle: CSP, 2007), pp. 1–17. 45 Ian Gregson, ‘Negotiations: Gwyneth Lewis interviewed by Ian Gregson’, Planet, 173 (October/November 2005), 53. 46 Deleuze and Guattari pose the analogy of the earth turned into Swiss cheese in A Thousand Plateaus, where the strategy of engagement is to ‘excavate the land instead of striating it, bore holes in space instead of keeping it smooth, turn the land into swiss cheese’. They submit one visual correlate in a sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), which presents ‘a holey space where a disturbing group of people are rising, each emerging from his or her hole as if from a field mined all directions’ (the sequence gives us a slightly more grid-like and striated mined field than Deleuze and Guattari would, no doubt, ideally want it to be); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), pp. 413–14. This sense of movement through holey space is, it must be said, extremely attractive in describing the dynamic movement of simultaneity. 47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 379. 48 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 380. 49 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 381, italics original. 50 Gregson, ‘Negotiations’, p. 53. 51 Gregson, ‘Negotiations’, pp. 55–56. 52 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 17. 53 So Lecercle, ‘a minor language … [as Deleuze and Guattari define it in a strict philosophical sense] has three characteristics. Firstly, it is deterritorialized, not concerned with a parochial sense of identity, with nostalgic recollection of one’s past or that of one’s immediate neighbours; it encourages the speaker, but also and more importantly the language, to follow its lines of flight, to forget about boundaries, strata and segments, to explore new territories. Secondly, it is immediately political: … it subverts the relations of social and cultural dominance and raises the cultural-cum-political issues that they seek to forget. Literature that speaks as minor language, that minorizes a major language, proceeds by strange new connections, and thus intervenes in the political conjuncture. Thirdly, it is immediately collective, not so much the product of an individual author, as of what Deleuze and Guattari call a “collective assemblage of

Jones D, DADA.indd 172

21/05/2014 15:00:22

‘l’amir al cherche une maison à louer’

173

utterance”. This is where its political efficacy comes from, where its deterritorialization is inseparable from a form of reterritorialization, or, to speak plainly, where it can only minorize German because it speaks Czech and Yiddish within it, because there are independent Czech and Yiddish languages and literatures from which it can emerge and invade German. This is why, Deleuze and Guattari say, a minor literature never “represents” a nation, a state or a class, and yet is “of the people”.’ Lecercle, ‘Can There Be Such a Thing as a Welsh Lara Croft?’, pp. 116–17. 54 David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 5. 55 Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, p. 25. 56 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 19. 57 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 19. 58 James Joyce, Letter to his brother Stanislaus, in Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 153. 59 Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, I, p. 299. We might speculate on Joyce’s ideal library in the form of Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’; Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. David A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 205. 60 James Joyce, ‘The Study of Languages’ (1898/9), in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959), p. 28. 61 James Joyce, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, 3 vols (New York: Garland, 1986), pp. 105–7 (episode 15). 62 Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 53. 63 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Penguin, 1939), p. 169. 64 Laurent Milesi, ‘Joyce, Language, and Languages’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté (ed.), Advances in James Joyce Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 151. 65 Michel Foucault, ‘A Preface to Transgression’, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, in F. Botting and S. Wilson (eds), Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 28. 66 Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 60. In this regard, Jean-Luc Nancy has elaborated: ‘A contemporary is not always someone who lives at the same time, nor someone who speaks of overtly “current” questions. But it is someone in whom we recognise a voice or gesture which reaches us from a hitherto unknown but immediately familiar place, something which we discover we have been waiting for, or rather which has been waiting for us, something which was there, immanent. We know immediately that this is a possibility which constitutes the presence of the present, and must do so.’ Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Deleuzian Fold of Thought’, trans. T. Gibson and A. Uhlmann, in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 107–8. 67 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (London: Athlone, 1988), p. 97. 68 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 118. 69 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 65. 70 Badiou, Deleuze, p. 89. 71 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone, 1993), p. 31.

Jones D, DADA.indd 173

21/05/2014 15:00:23

174

dada 1916 in theory

72 Badiou, Deleuze, p. 89. 73 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 152. 74 Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 176. 75 In these terms, the limit facilitates movement, that which Judith Butler so resonantly termed the ‘enabling constraint’. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p. 16. 76 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 4. 77 Badiou, Deleuze, p. 89. 78 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 137. 79 Badiou, Deleuze, p. 90; citing Deleuze, Foucault, p. 118. 80 Nancy, ‘The Deleuzian Fold of Thought’, p. 113. 81 See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 82 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 23, italics in original.

Jones D, DADA.indd 174

21/05/2014 15:00:23

7

The Rude Product of Luxury: Dada Laughter A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it’s the only weapon we have.

– Roger Rabbit, 19881

The single most audible quality of Dada is its ringing laughter, without which the formation, quite literally, would not have been heard above the din of war. As emphasis has fallen on laughter as intellectual activity, we read of the unguarded moment as that in which humour rebounds upon the subject and the laugh laughs at itself. Indeed, the potential of laughter’s historical obtaining of deep philosophical meaning has been thoroughly deliberated, described by Bakhtin as ‘one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole’, and now the critical force of humour is to be discovered in the way in which it will make us laugh and then call us into question through that same laughter. Following laughter into more current thought, Deleuze has posited its diametric opposition to ‘the whole tragedy of interiority’, always referring to an exterior movement of intensities and of intensive qualities. The cynical and loudly laughing posture adopted by the Dadaists is crucial in completing the revised readings of the 1916 formation as presented in this book, as from the great cynic rises his own self-denunciation; and as from that self-denunciation there emerges a form that deterritorialises and ‘goes elsewhere’. Cynicism is exercised as its own antagonist and, in Diogenes of Sinope (the Dada prototype from antiquity), it is manifestly kynicism read properly and politically as resistance and as a counterstrategy, the vital current of Dada. As a staging of ‘behaviour’, cynicism gives a new twist to the question of how to say the truth, and we find in Diogenes’ wilful abandonment of public protocol the initiation of a

Jones D, DADA.indd 175

21/05/2014 15:00:23

176

dada 1916 in theory

laughter containing philosophical truth and illumination of the complex relation between the object (the individual and the social) and the laughter that erupts from it. It is precisely such complexity that gives rise to laughter’s multiplicity of meanings, and it is the explosive politics of the body in its dismissal of self-deluding notions of self-identity that gives us, finally, its specific variability. *** Somehow, Lenin resisted the distraction of his riotous neighbours in the late winter months of 1915–16. From his lodgings on Zurich’s Spiegelgasse, he remained focused on future events and the revolutionary goal while, all around him, goals as objectives seemed to be wilfully disintegrating and joyously abandoned, melting into the cool night air. He may have settled awkwardly in among the wheeler-dealers, racketeers, bloody students and intellectual babblers of the Niederdorf district – all of whom did, in fact, drive him to distraction, as Solzhenitsyn described: Lenin hated ‘the smoky breeding places of endless tirades, in which … the revolutionary “declamators” prostituted themselves’2 – but his proximity, along with fellow Russian socialist exiles Karl Radek and Grigory Zinoviev, to the historical emergence of Dada just a few doors away is remarkable. Lenin, of course, enjoyed a maturity of age against the rowdy and angry (and probably hungry) young men who frequented the local dimly lit dens, and it was surely wishful reminiscing on Richard Huelsenbeck’s part to suggest that Lenin actually visited the Cabaret Voltaire; similarly, Marcel Janco’s distant and apocryphal retrospection of the cabaret room, thick with smoke, where ‘some sudden apparition would loom up every now and then, like the impressive Mongol features of Lenin’.3 Hugo Ball could more safely speculate in mid-1917, by which time Lenin had returned to Russia ahead of that momentous October, that the leader of the revolution ‘must have heard our music and tirades every evening; I do not know if he enjoyed them or profited from them’.4 But far from any dramatic collision between revolutionary art and revolutionary politics in the middle years of the First World War, it is more than likely that the encounter (if encounter it was) would have been fleeting, unacknowledged and decidedly unremarkable – dreaming revolutionaries stumbling up the Spiegelgasse cobbles towards distant points of divergence.5 Lenin certainly found cause to complain about his neighbours in Zurich at this time – complaints no doubt exacerbated by the headaches

Jones D, DADA.indd 176

21/05/2014 15:00:23

the rude product of luxury

177

he suffered and aggravated by the roars of laughter that he couldn’t but help hear rising from the lower end of Spiegelgasse. And it is this laughter, as we are so often reminded by the literature, that came to epitomise the Zurich Dada activities ‘to laymen and experts alike … we laughed and laughed’; laughter erupting out of absurdity, but also a sobering laughter that, is it said, was ultimately ‘the only guarantee of the seriousness with which … [the Dadaists] practised anti-art’.6 This seriousness necessarily comes before any description of laughter as radical or destructive, but reconfiguring a register of laughter’s release in radical and destructive terms is a critical move that we should not fail to engage. What is at stake, of course, is not the impact of an intense amplification of sound – be it laughter or other – in reducing solid structures to rubble, but the destructive possibilities of laughter and intense sensation in the rupture and razing of reigning conditions. Descartes, documenting the passions of the soul, once famously described laughter as an ‘inarticulate and explosive utterance’,7 and its address consistently acknowledges the laughing subject’s inadvertent loss of corporeal control and subsequent convulsive self-exposure resulting from ‘the break between the person and their body’8 – as is the case, arguably, with all bodily eructations and ejaculations: from the instant of sneezing or the missile shit (the original out-of-body experience) to the more sustained loss of control (as eccentricity) during orgasm or weeping as the body exits itself. In the break, ‘when the barriers are down’,9 our exposure makes us vulnerable. Samuel Beckett points to the unguarded moment as that in which humour rebounds upon the subject and the laugh laughs at itself, reconstituting laughter as intellectual activity: ‘the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh … the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding’. In his eloquent book on humour, Simon Critchley employs these words as epigraph and returns to them reading Beckett’s humour, the genius of which, Critchley says, ‘is that he makes us laugh and then calls us into question through that laughter’.10 When humour rebounds upon the subject, the subject may stall and find itself inarticulate in response, stumped by its own self-reflexivity. Among its responses are consistently the explosion of laughter, or an alternative in the less eruptive smile (this is not to say that these particular responses are interchangeable, but they are bound together in evolutionary terms). In ‘The wanderer and his shadow’, part two of volume two of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche gives one potential account for the most audible difference between Lenin and his neighbours in early 1916:

Jones D, DADA.indd 177

21/05/2014 15:00:23

178

dada 1916 in theory

The more joyful and secure the spirit becomes, the more man unlearns loud laughter; on the other hand, a spiritual smile is continually welling up in him – a sign of his astonishment at the countless hidden pleasures existence contains.11 The smile is a more restrained form of communication, Critchley suggests, that speaks no less than laughter, to be sure, only not out loud. Security and the sense that man will ‘unlearn’ particular behavioural traits is a deliberate signalling of maturity that comes from experience, which increases over time. But Nietzsche has no wish to privilege one above the other or to suggest that smiling is somehow better, more mature and intellectually apt, than laughing. Nietzsche would rather acknowledge that although joy and the laughter that comes with it describe ‘a good man’, that same good man does not have to be the cleverest, ‘even though he has attained precisely that [joy in laughter] which the cleverest man strives after with all his cleverness’.12 This same is recognised by the forerunner from antiquity, Diogenes of Sinope, whose short-cut to ‘authentic life’ detoured culture: ‘it is divine not to need anything, and semidivine to only need little’.13 Laughter, patently, obtains its own, different qualities that declare themselves loudly as they range from the base and bitter to the alterity and transformationality of revolutionary joy. The camouflage of laughter Not all laughter is the same, of course, and it certainly does not all mean the same: ‘there is laughter and laughter’.14 Bakhtin’s taxonomy perhaps best describes laughter in its situationality, its negative aspects recorded from the non-laughter of the satirical type to the meaningless laughter that is tolerated merely for the provision it makes for relief and distraction from the heavy weight of gravity – all of which completely lacks the ‘liberating and regenerative element … which is precisely the creative element’.15 If the Dadaists were to wield laughter in the rousing of an enlightened rabble, then its reading now must necessarily situate what is regenerative at the heart of what is most destructive, duly recognising Bakhtin’s observation on laughter’s historical obtaining of deep philosophical meaning: [Laughter] is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole … it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint.16

Jones D, DADA.indd 178

21/05/2014 15:00:23

the rude product of luxury

179

For laughter (and the interruption of breath that it is), to be able to function as part of the subject’s own enlightenment is quite clearly a critical claim. Bakhtin’s recognition was that, by the time of the Renaissance, serious officialdom had excluded laughter; but alongside such officialdom, a no less serious unofficialdom had evolved that positively embraced laughter. This unofficial sphere was embodied in the medieval feast of fools, and the laughter that rang out was expressive of essential forms of truth and was free from the later blight of self-consciousness – it is Bakhtin’s carnivalesque laughter that, like Beckett’s mirthless laugh, will laugh at itself. In the free laughter of medieval festive occasions, along with such occasions’ suspension of official prohibitions, Bakhtin makes identification of laughter’s ‘indissoluble and essential relation to freedom’.17 Now, we will be familiar enough with examples of sanctioned misconduct, or disconduct, in the history of Dada – think of Berlin Dada’s Johannes Baader and the ‘hunting permit’ that made of him an ‘allowed fool’,18 judged and certified insane as he was by the authorities because he could not be a contracting party. Indeed, Bakhtin’s comments could well be applied to Baader’s entry into the sphere of utopian freedom when he affirms the fantastic and utopian radicalism that is ‘born in the festive atmosphere of images’19 – I am thinking specifically of Baader’s carnivalesque self-publicising and such works as his collage and photomontage Reklame für mich: Dada Milchstrasse (1919–20).20 But those brief and authorised encounters are always the result of inversions rather than any revision or real change in logic – the result of decodification and recodification, as Deleuze has it, rather than the transmission of anything that is uncodifiable.21 And because the cultural logic or the logic of code remains intact, it can only lead to further ‘struggles and new prohibitions’.22 This particular impasse is well rehearsed; Derrida once challenged the reader that, in order to get beyond seizure, what must occur is not merely a suppression of all hierarchy, for an-archy only consolidates just as surely the established order of a metaphysical hierarchy; nor is it a simple change or reversal in the terms of any given hierarchy. Rather, the Umdrehung must be a transformation of the hierarchical structure itself.23 Naturally, what went unstated for Bakhtin as he grappled with laughter in 1941 was the reigning hierarchical structure and the still raw experience in Russia of purges in ‘the sterile landscape of Stalinism’.24

Jones D, DADA.indd 179

21/05/2014 15:00:23

180

dada 1916 in theory

In his defence and praise of grotesque realism and ‘comic heteroglossia’, Bakhtin was implicitly mounting a critique of non-smiling Stalinist hierarchy and the socialist realist aesthetic in which it was garbed. (Stalin did, of course, occasionally smile – contrary to popular belief – although those closest to him ‘were always at their most nervous when he was in a “good’ mood”’.)25 With this as background to the Rabelais book, our present interest in relation to Dada had patent urgency for Bakhtin subsequently – that is to say, the apparent omnipotence of cooptive forces, constantly active and in the face of which normal resumption of service appears at all times inevitable. In this regard, what nature of change is possible? Laughter poses something penetrative and even permanent – clearly so for Bakhtin – within medieval carnival, during which festivities ‘the world was permitted to emerge from the official routine … exclusively under the camouflage of laughter. Barriers were raised, provided there was nothing but laughter.’26 Because laughter as the transient interruption of breath would appear non-threatening, as merely a temporary condition amounting to ‘nothing but laughter’ from the point of view of officialdom, it could well provide camouflage beneath and behind which more permanent effects might enter into a dialogic process with, perhaps, socially transformative consequences. It is here that the reading is developed in the direction of the carnivalisation of speech and literary genres in order conceptually to combine with the Marxist doctrine of the permanent process of formation in the social world. As a linguistic idiom, laughter asserts an important relation to what Bakhtin describes as the people’s unofficial truth, out of which emerges the overcoming of ‘all that oppresses and restricts’.27 By the time of writing the Rabelais book, its author was working within points of reference that had already established a political dimension for laughter in its capacity as leveller, which, at least for revolutionary democrat and the ‘father of Russian socialism’ Alexander Herzen, was no matter for joking … facing the department head, the police officer, the German administrator, nobody laughs … Only equals may laugh. If inferiors are permitted to laugh in front of their superiors, and if they cannot suppress their hilarity, this would mean farewell to respect.28 To this extent, and when deployed as camouflage, laughter’s possibilities take it beyond what literary theorist Alexander Veselovsky once outlined as its ‘harmless form … without any pretense at a serious role’; such

Jones D, DADA.indd 180

21/05/2014 15:00:23

the rude product of luxury

181

a harmless form as is ultimately embodied in the medieval clown.29 Bakhtin calls laughter a ‘free weapon’, indeed, an instrument of truth as opposed to an instrument of control, which finds irregular form to erupt in between and around rigid social striation. Yet he laments its degradation since the medieval, the consequences of which the present has to contend with as laughter ‘loses its essential link with a universal outlook … [and] is combined with negation, and with a negation that is dogmatic’.30 It is precisely as anti-dogmatic and anti-authoritarian that Bakhtin recognises the critical impulse that retains a new historical awareness, which might otherwise be dispersed through laughter’s degraded condition when it loses its universal character and individuality and is reduced to negative sarcasm. The joy of carnival laughter and its radical strength was its ambivalent logic and its expression of a perpetually regenerative impulse; following Marx, Bakhtin reads, with regret, the imposition upon laughter of the unyielding ‘cogitative reason … [of the enlighteners, as] the yardstick of all that existed’.31 The utopian impulse To laugh in the present, then, as Rabelais and his contemporaries once did, poses a concern that has little diminished in the interval since; of course, we would be missing (or rather avoiding) the point if we were to claim for the Dadaists a laughter that arose directly from medieval festive carnival. In reality, as we know, Dada laughter frequently functioned at the very base level of pointing at and mocking, just as the famous ‘laughter of Voltaire’ had once done, ‘its force … almost entirely deprived of the regenerative and renewing element’.32 It ran the risk always of reducing itself to ‘ineffectual babbling, irrational attacks … [which, when repeated] over and over again with no logic, became superficial, empty, like a circus’.33 It is by the relocation of ‘truth’, however, that Bakhtin suggests laughter may allow for the inflection upon it of a system of ambivalent and comic images that restore to it ‘a liberation of the emotions … [and the revelation of truth] with a smile when man abides in a nonanxious, joyful, comic mood’.34 Without the pointing that makes specific, the object of mockery is absented, and the act of mockery finds itself redundant; it is as a consequence that laughter can reclaim the (destructive) ambivalence that allows for multiplicity and the exceeding of meaning and limits. This is one dimension that offered some hope for Benjamin in establishing an informal description, by distinction of the authentic (good) and counterfeit (bad), of aspects

Jones D, DADA.indd 181

21/05/2014 15:00:23

182

dada 1916 in theory

of his later, mature political aesthetic. In the year of the Cabaret Voltaire, suitably enough, the 24-year-old Benjamin wrote in a letter of how ‘[t]he magic of true critique appears precisely when all counterfeit comes into contact with the light and melts away. What remains is the authentic: it is ashes. We laugh at it.’35 So Bakhtin saw similar ‘light’ in the carnivalesque – similar but not the same, I suggest, because of what was so much more eruptive in the feast of fools. In contrast to Bakhtin’s raking light, Benjamin’s glow evokes the kind of subversive strategic alternatives we might elsewhere consider in the Dada works of Arp and the seemingly non-threatening assumption of hostile positions generative of a type of critique that will bring about change not by seismically shifting the world’s foundations, but by making slight and considered adjustments to them – which tallies with Bakhtin. The explosion of laughter is, nonetheless, of critical importance in releasing the impulse to alterity that finds its form through dialogic process; it is the vital thrust that points laughter in the political direction of regenerative intoxication and sets it on its carnivalesque way to utopia. Carnival is always precariously poised as a short-lived licensed rupture of hegemony, but its reflexive form is what makes it instructive, a form that is effectively ‘a kind of fiction: a temporary retextualising of the social formation that exposes its “fictive” foundations’.36 It is by this exposure that carnival finds release, overcoming the restraint of abstract objectivist linguistics that functioned as default setting for Bakhtin (or Valentin Vološinov – ‘the proper name is always a mask … that masks its agent’),37 who worked his way beyond it through the dialogic decentring of carnival,38 and imagined striding into the wide open spaces that laughter opens onto. Here is a glimpse of the ‘outside’ that is poised to allow us to invest in laughter the conditions from which new forms of discourse may emerge without collapsing back in on themselves, a more permanent (because of its material effect) retextualising where, in Marx’s own writ, ‘the content goes beyond the words’.39 Here, indeed, is a glimpse of the law of interior and exterior; of the state-form that ‘only reigns over what it is capable of internalising, of appropriating locally’,40 and the exterior alterities that oppose the state-form, so emphatically described first by Deleuze, and then in collaboration with Guattari, as ‘a diffuse and polymorphous war machine’:41 ‘The nomad and his war machine oppose the despot with his administrative machine.’42 What rapidly becomes apparent in this instance is the non-desirability of any attempt at separation between interior and exterior – the non-desirability, of course, of the necessity of such separation that allows Bakhtin’s

Jones D, DADA.indd 182

21/05/2014 15:00:23

the rude product of luxury

183

carnivalesque to cohere. Though the form of Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine is one of exteriority: ‘it exists only in its own metamorphoses … in all the flows and currents that only secondarily allow themselves to be appropriated by the State’.43 The law of interior and exterior now operative is not one of independent positions, but of coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interaction … [in terms of which] we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identities … The same field circumscribes its interiority in States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes States or stands against States.44 The field is the wide open space into which laughter leads us, laughter posited as a means of escaping the state-form’s prescribed ‘goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs, an entire organon’.45 It is the space from which, potentially, combative negotiation will force continual critical revision and interrogation of that which it is outside of. Deleuze signals the outside for us in his short essay ‘Nomad Thought’,46 asserting a fundamental link between movement to the outside and laughter. The work foregrounds Nietzsche’s use of an aphoristic style as a critical distinction of his philosophical writing, a style that gives the text immediacy in its relation to the outside but that, in itself, ‘means nothing, signifies nothing, and is no more a signifier than a signified’.47 The immediacy of the relation is redoubled by the intensity that Deleuze observes as necessarily bearing ‘a relation to another intensity, a point of contact and transmission … [that] escapes all codes’,48 when immediacy and intensity may be demonstrably identical but, it is fair to suggest, characteristic of the risus purus. What Deleuze reads out of the aphorism, the form that by its discontinuous character appeals to pluralism and renewal of interpretations in an extreme condensation of the cabaret form itself, is the aphorism’s third significant relation: ‘Those who have read Nietzsche without laughing – without laughing often, richly, even hilariously – have, in a sense, not read Nietzsche at all.’49 It is laughter understood in diametric opposition to ‘the whole tragedy of interiority’, laughter ‘and not meaning … Schizophrenic laughter or revolutionary joy … not the anguish of petty narcissism.’50 Deleuze suggests that what Nietzsche does in the pulsional form of writing that is the aphorism – in which fragmented state, for some observers at least, Nietzsche’s writing comes closest to poetry – is to negotiate a means to resist accreditation for so-called bad conscience in ‘the evolution of spirit’. On the contrary, Deleuze says,

Jones D, DADA.indd 183

21/05/2014 15:00:23

184

dada 1916 in theory

If you put thought into contact with the exterior, it assumes an air of freedom, it gives birth to Dionysian laughter. When, as often happens, Nietzsche finds himself confronted with something he feels is nauseating, ignoble, wretched, he laughs – and he wants to intensify it, if at all possible. He says: a bit more effort, it’s not disgusting enough; or, on the other hand: it’s astounding because it is disgusting, it’s a marvel, a masterpiece, a poisonous flower; finally, ‘man begins to become interesting’. This is how Nietzsche considers – how he deals with – what he calls bad conscience …51 If Deleuze can then cite Klossowski or Lyotard as having reasoned the relation to the outside and the intensity of that relation as being identical,52 might we not similarly propose that Nietzsche’s aphorism and the mirthless laugh (of Beckett), the risus purus, share something? Deleuze’s point is that, for Nietzsche, laughter always refers to an exterior movement … of intensities, of intensive qualities … There is a free play between the low and high intensities; a low intensity can undermine the highest, even become as high as the highest. Not only does this play on scales of intensity affect the ebb and flow of irony and humour in Nietzsche … it also constitutes or qualifies experience from without. An aphorism is a matter of laughter and joy.53 Free play and the air of freedom are what we associate with the laughter of Zurich Dada above all else – certainly at its riotous birth in 1916 – the Dadaists’ laughter in the face of the nauseating, ignoble and wretched condition of Europe and the West, laughter in its convoluted relation to the ‘bad conscience’ of the Dadaist reprimand that ‘things are still not cruel enough’.54 Reading Deleuze, we are reminded of Nietzsche’s own aphorism on Having much joy, where cleverness may strive for, yet never attain, the immediacy and intensity of joy in laughter55 – and Deleuze makes the timely reminder that ‘[i]f we have not discovered what it is in the aphorism that makes us laugh … what the division of intensities is, then we have not found anything’.56 Situational properties Contact with the exterior is then advanced as placing thought outside itself – outside thought or thinking on the outside – where, theoretically at least, thought has had occasion to visit ever since Plato urged the

Jones D, DADA.indd 184

21/05/2014 15:00:23

the rude product of luxury

185

expulsion of poets from the Republic for the crime of yielding deleterious effects (singing of surfaces and outsides).57 The outside can variously be read as the ‘that-sidedness’ of thought, a counter to the ‘this-sidedness’ of thought that Marx specified in his theses on Feuerbach – an outside that will always be subject to crude reduction in the most frustrating terms. Take, for example, the following particularly crude reduction, which takes the form of the donut of the free world, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, eventually caught over the six-second duration between Zapruder frames 222 and 313; the mute and blurred focal point of the unsolved and hollowedout detective story, the whodonut;58 and the eventual scramble for the president’s brain bouncing away and presumably, at that precise point, still fully functioning (thinking) on the outside. This is a poor attempt at rendering ‘outside thought’,59 but it alerts us, if we are seriously to attempt the application of ‘outside thought’ to revolutionary joy in laughter, that there is first required an outlining of interiority before we take flight from it. In response to the way in which relative spatial compositions – let’s say stratum relative to strata – function to establish a definition of their own space and the space of the other, Deleuze and Guattari attend to the epistemological existence of what they call ‘nomad’, or variously ‘minor’, science. Now, we know that the most consistent response to the postulate among scientists is to declare that ‘we just don’t know’ – or, in the award-winning comedy realm of politics, as former defense secretary Rumsfeld once exhaustively made affirmative, ‘we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’60 Brilliant and, even with the closing concession, Rumsfeld unwittingly approaches enlightenment as we are reminded that knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance, but rather knowledge of the elusive nature of ‘truth’ and of the whole.61 Yet to admit that they just don’t know is, ultimately, the only consistent position that scientists can stake once concession is made that all that can ever be asserted are at best working hypotheses – in the realm of dark energy, for instance – and that the only thing that can be stated with any scientific certainty is that we have no idea what’s coming next. With this in mind, Deleuze and Guattari employ the word ‘science’ not to intimate the limiting certainties of ‘royal science’, but precisely the opposite. Science is accordingly problematic rather than theorematic, wherein ‘one does not proceed … by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it, but from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it’,62 through points of contact more than points of connection.

Jones D, DADA.indd 185

21/05/2014 15:00:23

186

dada 1916 in theory

The ‘nomad’ science offers construction of a theoretical model not around the primacy of solids that occupy and move in fluid space, but around the primacy of the fluid that poses formal resistance to being conceptualised as a whole possessing anything like a stable interiority. The departure that is staked in the principle that ‘flux is reality itself’ is acknowledgement of the already disseminated idea of a reality of knowing popularised in the early twentieth century in the work of Bergson, for instance, and the description of peripheral forms as representative of flux and the constant evasion of conceptualisation. We would gain scant return on an investment in structural shifts as offering any formal definition of oppositionality – structural shifts from one stratum into other strata – because what is proposed as the space in which the nomad moves and engages is conceptually and constitutively alien to the stability of structure, a space unaccounted for and unaccountable by the state apparatuses deployed by our educators to instil in us the wishes, projects and ambitions that ultimately deny us our social freedom;63 a space alien to one within which shifts are structurally admitted. Deleuze and Guattari have in mind an altogether different sense of movement captured in the formation of spirals and vortices that throw up lines of escape ‘in an open space throughout which thing-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things’. It is the difference, they propose, ‘between a smooth (vectorial, projective or topological) space and a striated (metric) space’.64 In smooth space, the laughing war machine does not encounter problems as obstacles that it must overcome. Rather, problems are remarked upon as being ‘affective … [and] inseparable from the metamorphoses, generations and creations within science’ – which is to say that the problem is the overcoming itself, ‘the surpassing of the obstacle, a projection, in other words a war machine’ of unlimited and unconstrained movement.65 Through negotiation of the situation that was presented at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 and the Dada soirées that followed – a situation that for many would have been characterised as ‘a social experience bereft of any meaningful social coordinates’66 – much was transmitted while much less, it has to be said, was deposited. The question, therefore, was never meant to be whether the Dadaists ‘succeeded (at something), but whether they were engaged successfully in behaviour’.67 And this ‘behaviour’ is what Deleuze and Guattari’s treatise on nomadology describes in its board game analogy, applying the rigid two dimensions that allow us to conceptualise the borderlines of meeting and conflicting forces, and from those borderlines the fluid

Jones D, DADA.indd 186

21/05/2014 15:00:23

the rude product of luxury

187

three dimensions of smooth space. The dynamic movement of the nomad – ‘becoming, heterogeneity, infinitesimal passage to the limit, continuous variation, etc.’68 – falls under state imposition of strictly limiting and localising controls, analogous to the codification of chess pieces, which have an internal nature and intrinsic properties, from which their movements, situations and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, the chess player himself or the game’s form of interiority.69 The radical contrast is made with the playing pieces, or ‘stones’, in the Chinese board game Go, a game of strategic complexity despite the stones being no more than pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units … [which] have only an anonymous, collective or third person function: ‘It’ makes a move. ‘It’ could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant.70 And ‘it’ could, presumably, be a Dadaist. Between chess and Go are observed radically different means of engaging the opposition – Go pieces engage without any prescription, predictability or the reproduction of prior and unquestioned impositions, moving as they do as ‘elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties … only situational ones’.71 In their ‘milieu of exteriority’, Go pieces interrelate in a manner alien to chess pieces in their state-analogous ‘milieu of interiority’; Go pieces, we read, establish ‘extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which … [they fulfil] functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering’.72 The one necessity for a Go piece is to engage, active in its ‘pure strategy’, always with the potential to ‘destroy an entire constellation synchronically’ while, in coded semiology, each chess piece can only hope to achieve its potential diachronically. The board game analogy, finally, describes how the nature of the space imposes upon the movement that occurs within it: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arranging oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the

Jones D, DADA.indd 187

21/05/2014 15:00:23

188

dada 1916 in theory

movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The ‘smooth’ space of Go, as against the ‘striated’ space of chess.73 The space functions critically: the chess board is codified and decodified with each move; the Go pieces, in contrast, territorialise and deterritorialise the space on their board. So Deleuze and Guattari: make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialise the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialise oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere.74 The movement now described does not have a final destination in view, but is rather the movement of the nomad through the shifting desert landscape, a landscape that confounds being measured and mapped, the movement towards oases – oases not as sites of settlement but as points arrived at in order to proceed. If we listen, we will hear the shattering of territory from within in the form of laughter in smooth space rising rhythmically – but not through structured, measured and cadenced rhythm. Laughter in smooth space rises ‘in the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space’,75 space conceptualised as steppe, desert or sea, free of any measure in its seethe and swell. The kynical offensive The fluid can, of course, be harnessed. Hydraulic science imposes its grid in the construction and striation of the state-form – quintessentially the city with its civic centre – setting out ‘conduits, pipes, embankments which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another’, and which make the fluid dependent upon the solid, the smooth dependent upon the striated.76 Yet for the outsider inside the city walls, solids reside as membranous and permeable: Sloterdijk presents Diogenes of Sinope as the shameless ‘plebeian outsider’ inside the city walls of Athens, sometimes Corinth, in the fourth century bc, ‘who challenged state and community through loud satirical laughter and who lived an animalist philosophy of survival and happy refusal’.77 If Diogenes’ freedom of movement was in any way hindered by ‘false weights’, his manifest principle for living came to be the discarding of such weights.78 He resisted engaging the vanity of philosophical sophisticates and their intricacies of reason, for instance, whose language

Jones D, DADA.indd 188

21/05/2014 15:00:23

the rude product of luxury

189

he refuted ‘with that of the clown’;79 he poked fun at his philosopher colleagues, ‘not only at how they torture themselves with problems but also at their credulity regarding concepts’;80 and, though it shamed certain onlookers, Diogenes was the first European philosopher who, instead of employing a lot of words … performed his urgent business. Naturalia non sunt turpia. In nature, he says, we find nothing about which we would have to be ashamed.81 What he ‘performed’ was an uncompromising and practically defined morality that, though elsewhere critically judged for its valorisation of the self, released an impulse that continues to rebound among anti-theoreticians, anti-dogmatists and anti-scholastics, from Voltaire to Nietzsche, from Dada to Damo Suzuki. Out of the great cynic rises his own self-denunciation – and Sloterdijk’s critical observation of cynicism as a cultural dominant under late capitalism is not lost on the reader – in the form of denunciation that deterritorialises (as Deleuze and Guattari would have it) and that ‘goes elsewhere’ or, as Fredric Jameson puts it, in ‘enlightened false consciousness … [which] no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology: its falseness is already reflexively buffered’.82 Cynicism is effectively exercised as its own antagonist: it is Diogenes’ kynicism, read properly and indeed politically as resistance, ‘as a counterstrategy, as the only form of subversive reason left after the failures and broken promises of ideology critique in the tradition of Western Marxism’.83 Diogenes, then, assumed public platform in the Athenian market, a stage ‘electrified by the kynical offensive’84 and in which we immediately recognise the 1916 stage of Zurich Dada marked by the ‘total, uncramping laughter that wipes away illusions and postures’.85 The Cabaret Voltaire had not yet been playing a month when Ball recorded how ‘[e]veryone has been seized by an indefinable intoxication. The little cabaret is about to come apart at the seams and is getting to be a playground for crazy emotions.’86 Huelsenbeck, of course, was by this time present and participant, willing and able, an exemplar of the manifesting of enlightenment in antiquity, as Sloterdijk describes it, ‘in quarrelsome figures who are capable of reacting in an uncivil way to the spectacle of false living’.87 Ball wrote of Huelsenbeck’s impact in early 1916: When he enters, he keeps his cane of Spanish reed in his hand and occasionally swishes it around. That excites the audience. They think

Jones D, DADA.indd 189

21/05/2014 15:00:23

190

dada 1916 in theory

he is arrogant, and he certainly looks it. His nostrils quiver, his eyebrows are arched. His mouth with its ironic twitch is tired but composed. He reads, accompanied by the big drum, shouts, whistles, and laughter … The Gorgon’s head of a boundless terror smiles out of the fantastic destruction.88 Here, practically taking on the role of one of Janco’s cabaret masks, Huelsenbeck live was the most aggressive and intimidating of the Cabaret Voltaire players, but there was quite evidently a shared and, it is fair to say, indiscriminate aggression among the Zurich Dadaists generally. As Richter said, ‘[w]e destroyed, we insulted, we despised – and we laughed’89 – and Ball’s characterisation of Dada as subjecting reason and rationality to extreme stresses and pressures through blague, bluff, double-bluff and counter-bluff, and through cultivation of the ‘technique of disturbing, molesting and openly insulting the public, performed with such skill and gusto in the meetings, manifestos and hoaxes of the Zurich movement’,90 is paralleled in observations made frequently enough by others among the Dada ranks. We might consider, for instance, how laughter functioned as the most comprehensive leveller for Arp (most uniquely distinguished for non-aggression in the field of combat) who remembered how, on such ‘symbolic’ occasions as dinner between diners who might choke on their sausages,91 ‘an incredible amount of malice and stupidity was reduced in an instant to dust by our tremendous laughter’.92 The Dadaists’ indiscriminate mockery and self-denunciation is also explicitly stated: ‘We laughed at everything. We laughed at ourselves just as we laughed at Emperor, King and Country, fat bellies and baby-pacifiers.’93 Most incongruously marked, however, is Richter’s summing up of Dada laughter as amounting to very little in either strategic or constructive terms in the greater scheme of things. Recounting Dada and its wholesale vestedness for posterity, Richter states how laughter ‘was only the expression of our new discoveries, not their essence and not their purpose’94 – so laughter, he suggests, in and of itself, was aimless and inconsequential. This chapter contends, however and to the contrary, that laughter decidedly was and remains both critical and foundational to the purpose of Dada, functioning independently of any necessity, any goal or objective – it occupies Dada as the laugh of laughs, as laughter that remains ‘perpetual without aim or destination, without departure or arrival’.95 Dada laughter is itself nomadic in this sense, occupying smooth space ‘without counting … [and for it] there is no

Jones D, DADA.indd 190

21/05/2014 15:00:23

the rude product of luxury

191

possible method … but only relays, intermezzos, resurgences’.96 There is a hugely satisfying perpetuity of process to be observed: construction and destruction, occupying and renouncing space, an innocence of ‘play as artists and children engage in it … coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive’.97 This is play that Deleuze aligns with chance in his study of Nietzsche, chance invoked as the relational element between forces (the contesting forces that constitute ‘the body’); the contingent quality of force ‘that gives meaning to a given phenomenon, or event’,98 and from which also existence erupts as an effect of chance. Reading Nietzsche, Deleuze recognises the necessary affirmation of chance that initiates an ethic of joy contra bad conscience, chance unimpeded by any causal motive; most recently documenting Dada, Rudolf Kuenzli remarks how it is precisely ‘this anarchic, Nietzschean “joyful wisdom”, creating and performing without any claim to truth … that gives the Dada movement its complexity’.99 The complexity, as stated at the beginning of this book, is the challenge that we now respond to, taking Dada apart in order to start to put it back together again. What radiates from Dada’s ethic of joy is Nietzsche’s realisation of how ‘our feeling of “freedom”, our feeling of responsibility and our intention to perform an act … [are combined] into the concept “cause”’,100 impressing upon us the experience of this process as a pleasurable one in which we welcome ‘every moment of universal existence with a sense of triumph’.101 The subject without subject-matter The pleasure of Diogenes is recounted by Sloterdijk as belonging to ‘the original hippie and proto-Bohemian’, pleasure that does not orient itself to the interior but to the exterior and to intelligent living, introducing ‘the original connection between happiness, lack of need, and intelligence into Western philosophy’.102 The image is arresting, even if it isn’t the first that we would necessarily associate with an ethic of joy and the risus purus: ‘Look, how this wise man, before whom Alexander the Great stood in admiration, enjoys himself with his own organ! And he shits in front of everybody …’103 Sloterdijk’s point, of course, is not to stake enlightenment in acts of public defecation or even political inflection in acts of sexual autonomy (‘sex with someone I love’, as Woody Allen once put it),104 but to identify the emergence of a philosophy that concerns itself with ‘truth’ in conscious and deliberate acts of resistance:

Jones D, DADA.indd 191

21/05/2014 15:00:24

192

dada 1916 in theory

Diogenes is the only Western philosopher who we know consciously and publicly performed his animal business, and there are reasons to interpret this as a component of a pantomimic theory. It hints at a consciousness of nature that assigns positive values to the animal side of human beings and does not allow any dissociation of what is low or embarrassing. Those who do not want to admit that they produce refuse and that they cannot choose to do anything else risk suffocating one day in their own shit.105 From this sense of ‘shitting in denial’, the assignation of positivity to what was previously read as only negative, and the new redundancy of old oppositions, further insists on a public and exterior (rather than a private and interior) site for performance. As a staging of ‘behaviour’ – ‘behaviour’ in the terms previously submitted by Stephen C. Foster – this is kynicism in action, giving ‘a new twist to the question of how to say the truth’.106 Diogenes’ wilful abandonment of public protocol, for instance, publicly jostling the clown or shitting between the cabbages, is where there ‘begins a laughter containing philosophical truth, which we must call to mind again if only because today everything is bent on making us forget how to laugh’.107 This rising kynical laughter is uninhibited and loud – extremely loud and incredibly close: [it] comes from the intestines; it is grounded at the animal level and lets itself go without restraint. Those who claim to be realists should, strictly speaking, be able to laugh this way … We have to imagine the laugh of the great satirist Diogenes as just such a laugh … [where] the ego itself, which had taken things so seriously, laughs itself to death.108 The ego – so touted as a constant or regulating principle in the natural world but critiqued in the same terms by Jacques Lacan, of course, for its bias towards a remodelling of psychoanalysis ‘into a right-thinking movement whose crowning expression is the sociological poem of the autonomous ego’109 – arrives at dissolution in Diogenes’ laughter. The seriousness once posed by the ego is the intellectualisation of ‘bad’ psychoanalysis, Lacan says, and he duly discharges the ego as the location of personal identity in favour of processes of signification wherein ‘a signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier’.110 This gives us Lacan’s subject without subject-matter as ‘the displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their acts’,111 and the subject is reconfigured into a series of linguistic events characterised by the sensations that arise from the propulsion of the signifying chain – and in which laughter is embedded.

Jones D, DADA.indd 192

21/05/2014 15:00:24

the rude product of luxury

193

The process that gains overt and strategic currency in Dada studies finds a prototype of some distinction in Diogenes, then, ‘one of those philosophers of life for whom life is more important than writing’.112 What is enlightening, at least in Sloterdijk’s invocation and in elaboration on the Diogenes tradition, is the processual self-experiencing (Selbsterfahrung) that the kynical subject engages. Far from employing cynicism and kynicism as binary opposites, Sloterdijk uses dialectically the struggle between the two as opposing consciousnesses, ‘the cynicism of power and its institutions … versus the kynical revolt from below, which responds to the cynicism of domination with satirical laughter, defiant body action, or strategic silence’.113 Andreas Huyssen, in commentary on Sloterdijk’s move towards theorising counter-strategic activity, correctly sets reservations in relation to the circuitry of the cynicism–kynicism dialectic that risks collapse into tautology, where ‘the fear of total closure … [is] as delusive and irrelevant as the hope for total emancipation’.114 Yet there is real potency to the kynic as typified in the antique: Diogenes comes to represent the ‘self-embodiment in resistance’, an enlightened affirmation of a laughing, excreting, and masturbating body that actually undercuts the modern notion of a stable identity, attacks the armored, self-preserving, and rationalizing ego of capitalist culture, and dissolves its strict separations of inside and outside, private and public, self and other.115 To establish potent, effective and coherent means of culture critique in the face of ‘enlightened false consciousness’ is what ultimately validates the analysis of post-enlightened cynicism presented by Sloterdijk in his Critique of Cynical Reason: Diogenes’ kynical impulse becomes the author’s means to respond to the central question posed in a review of the book, that is, ‘how to relinquish the obsession with a fixed identity opposed to all Others without abandoning whatever identity is needed, first to perceive and then to end very real and institutionalized forms of oppression’.116 As with the complication of the cynicism–kynicism circuitry, neither should we elide the explosive device of Sloterdijk’s Critique, which is, ironically, a comforting proposition in the conventional theatre of war – we can point at the bomb and at the site of impact. But what happens (now bringing to mind the Dada bomb) if all the fragments remain live? Such a prospect that would scatter impact, both geographically and temporally, can only prove disorienting for the combatant who, strictly

Jones D, DADA.indd 193

21/05/2014 15:00:24

194

dada 1916 in theory

speaking, will be able to sidestep the precision bomb, but will not as easily dodge the raining cluster bomb or the ground-hugging carpet bomb – and may even embrace the rogue ally who masks the suicide bomb. When bombs mutate, they become ‘violent in their acts, discontinuous in their appearance … [and their existence becomes] mobile in history’ – precisely how Deleuze and Guattari describe counterthoughts, the acts of a private thinker who destroys images,117 not without laughter, and precisely their qualities when thrown into asymmetric strategies. It is in the nature of counterthoughts, we read, to ‘change meaning drastically depending on the interactions they are part of and the concrete conditions of their exercise or establishment’;118 compliant to the extent that they occupy the spaces prised between strata, which limit and oppose their development, and assign them ‘as much as possible a communicational role’; but defiant as they affirm ‘a noncommunicating force or a force of divergence like a “wedge” digging in’.119 They signal the complexity of the relation between the object (the individual and the social) and the laughter that finally survives and escapes the burst. It is such complexity that gives rise to laughter’s multiplicity of meanings, and it is the explosive politics of the body in its dismissal of self-deluding notions of self-identity that gives us, finally, the specific variability of the Dada identity. The joys of youth This revising of Dada laughter proposes its capacity for rupture and release in the face of the inhibiting conditions of repression and subjugation; it illumines and, in so doing, subverts the very conditions that strive to hold it in check. As an extension of Plessner’s ‘die Mimik des Geistes’, his description of smiling as the mind’s mime,120 laughter gains the quality not only of smiling but also of thinking in order to prise distance from the immediate surroundings – general and local (specific) – and even a distance from one’s own body. This last and particular release is from a fixity of constitution that, philosophically, is nothing if not problematic – Hegel, we will recall, and as Sloterdijk pointedly reminds us, ‘was blind to the theoretical content of a philosophy that finds ultimate wisdom precisely in not having a theory for the decisive things in life and that teaches instead to undertake the risk of existence consciously and serenely’.121 In his recoil from risk, however, Hegel is timely in providing us with a reminder of Diogenes as embedded in context:

Jones D, DADA.indd 194

21/05/2014 15:00:24

the rude product of luxury

195

The entire Cynical mode of life adopted by Diogenes was nothing more or less than a product of Athenian social life, and what determined it was the way of thinking against which his whole manner protested. Hence it was not independent of social conditions but simply their result; it was itself a rude product of luxury.122 Rude product, indeed, which would no doubt help account for the distance that Lenin kept in 1916. Diogenes’ protest is eventually Dada’s resistance two millennia hence to ‘all order, all hierarchy, all sacralization, all idolatry, whatever might be the idol’,123 and laughter is the indiscriminate weapon that the Dadaists wield. With deference to Nietzsche – he who, even in the madness of his wahnbriefe, declared himself to be ‘condemned to amuse the coming eternity with bad jokes’124 – yet without the broken philosopher’s own pessimism, what we might finally find embedded in the rising laughter is the contingency of a Dada identity and Dada’s relation to art as the ‘moving recollection of the joys of youth’.125 Notes 1 Who Framed Roger Rabbit, dir. Robert Zemeckis (Touchstone Pictures and Steven Spielberg, 1988). 2 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), p. 113. 3 Marcel Janco, ‘Creative Dada’, in Willy Verkauf (ed.), Dada: Monograph of a Movement (London: Tiranti, 1957), p. 28. 4 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 117. 5 Motherwell records one of the few glimpses we have of Lenin outside his immediate circle in Dada-central, documenting the young Romanian Marcu’s recollection from 1915–16: ‘“Your determination to rely upon yourselves,” Lenin finally replied, “is very important. Every man must rely upon himself. Yet he should also listen to what informed people have to say. I don’t know how radical you are or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself …”’; in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. xxiv. 6 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965), pp. 64–65. 7 René Descartes, ‘Selections from the Passions of the Soul’, in Selections, ed. Ralph M. Eaton (London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), p. 388 (part second, article CXXIV). 8 Helmuth Plessner, ‘A loss of self-control as the break between the person and their body’ (‘Verlust der Selbstbeherrschung als Bruch zwischen der Person und ihrem

Jones D, DADA.indd 195

21/05/2014 15:00:24

196

dada 1916 in theory

Körper’); cited in Simon Critchley, On Humour (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 8. 9 See chapter 1, note 67; Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 75. 10 Critchley, On Humour, p. 49. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A book for free spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 351. 12 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 225. 13 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (London: Verso, 1988), p. 166. 14 Critchley, On Humour, p. 105. 15 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 51. 16 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 66. 17 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 89. 18 In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, act 1, scene 5, Olivia remarks that ‘there is no slander in an allowed fool’; cited in Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), p. 148. 19 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 89. 20 See Leah Dickerman, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, catalogue of an exhibition held in Paris, Washington and New York, 2005–6 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 135. For commentary, see Stephen C. Foster, ‘Johannes Baader: The Complete Dada’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada/Dimensions (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), pp. 249–71; Stephen C. Foster, ‘The Mortality of Roles: Johannes Baader and Spiritual Materialism’, in Dafydd Jones (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 187–99. 21 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1985), pp. 142–43. 22 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 90. 23 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 81. 24 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, p. 144. 25 Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), p. 52. 26 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 90. 27 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 92. 28 Cited in translation in Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 92, n. 37. 29 Cited in translation in Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 93. 30 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 101. 31 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), p. 16. In further expansion on the carnivalesque in this context, see Debbie Lewer, ‘Dada, Carnival and Revolution’, in Sacha Bru et al. (eds), Regarding the Popular: Modernism, Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 99–114. 32 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 119. 33 Marcel Janco, quoted in Lucy Lippard (ed.), Dadas on Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 36. 34 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 141.

Jones D, DADA.indd 196

21/05/2014 15:00:24

the rude product of luxury

197

35 Walter Benjamin, Briefe, vol. I, ed. Gersholm Scholem and T. W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), p. 132; cited in translation in Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, p. 155, n. 79. 36 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, p. 149. 37 Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, p. 147. 38 Ken Hirschkop’s critical reading observes the absence in Bakhtin’s theory of the potential repressiveness of dialogism, an absence that results in a failure to provide an account of the possible stifling of dialogic meeting of contexts: ‘in all his varied formulations of the social relations which determine style, the relations are entirely intersubjective. Discourse is dialogical in the sense that within it the ideological imperatives of at least two consciousnesses intersect. But the social situation is thereby reduced to the interplay between the speaking subject and alien subjects.’ Hirschkop continues to argue that Bakhtin never fully explains how monologue can become a tool of authority – dialogue, it is said, is construed as a harmonious process in language that irons out ideological inconsistencies as it constructs a ‘forum of differences’ in which everyone lives happily ever after. See Ken Hirschkop, ‘Bakhtin, Discourse and Democracy’, New Left Review, 160/1 (1986), 92–111. 39 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1934; reprinted 1984), p. 13. 40 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), p. 360. 41 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 360. 42 Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, p. 148. 43 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 360. 44 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 360–61. 45 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 374. 46 First published as ‘Pensée nomade’ in Nietzsche aujourd hui (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1973). 47 Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, p. 145. 48 Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, p. 146. 49 Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, p. 147. 50 Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, p. 147. 51 Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, p. 147. 52 ‘In addition to its relation to the exterior, the aphorism has an intensive relation. Yet, as Klossowski and Lyotard have shown, the two characteristics are identical.’ Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, p. 146. 53 Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, p. 147. 54 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘First Dada Lecture in Germany’ (February 1918), trans. Derek Wynand, in Richard Huelsenbeck, The Dada Almanac (1920) (London: Atlas Press, 1993), pp. 111–12; an alternative translation of this passage, rounding with perhaps the more acerbic ‘things are not proceeding nearly as horribly as they should’, is given in Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 392. 55 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 225. 56 Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, pp. 147–48. 57 The artist, Plato states, ‘is able to reproduce everything because he never penetrates beneath the superficial appearance of anything’. Plato, The Republic (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 374.

Jones D, DADA.indd 197

21/05/2014 15:00:24

198

dada 1916 in theory

58 It is desire that in psychoanalysis famously empties need from demand; desire is ‘the interval that demand hollows within itself’ (Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan [London: Routledge, 1977], p. 263); desire as difference deconstructs the traditional metaphysical opposition between mind and body, and as it does so activates itself as the unreachable absent centre, ‘the self which is perpetually created and destroyed by the signifier’ (Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994], p. 60); for the ‘whodonut’, see Barbara Johnson, ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’, Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977), 457–505. 59 Additionally, the berliner isn’t quite the ring-donut that makes Johnson’s ‘whodonut’ so appealing in this instance, but rather the jam-donut, yet which still demands the hollowed-out centre. To illustrate, see Sigmar Polke’s Berliner (Bäckerblume), 1965, acrylic on canvas (private collection). This sequence around JFK was presented as part of the paper ‘Subject Evasion’ to the conference Ethics and Politics: The Work of Alain Badiou at Cardiff University in May 2002. 60 Winner of the 2003 Foot in Mouth Award, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3254852.stm (accessed 1 December 2013). 61 See Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959). 62 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 362. 63 ‘[W]hat civilization offers by way of comfortable seductions to entice people to serve its ends: ideals, ideas about duty, promises of redemption, hopes for immortality, goals for ambition, positions of power, careers, arts, riches. From a kynical perspective, they are all compensations for something a Diogenes does not let himself be robbed of in the first place: freedom, awareness, joy in living.’ Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, pp. 165–66. 64 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 361–62. 65 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 362. 66 Stephen C. Foster, ‘Dada and Cultural Criticism’, in Dada Conquers! The History, the Myth, and the Legacy, conference papers (Taipei: Taipei Fine Art Museum, 23–25 July 1988), p. 47. 67 Foster, ‘Dada and Cultural Criticism’, p. 47. 68 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 363. 69 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 352. 70 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 352–53. 71 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 353. 72 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 353. 73 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 353. 74 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 353. 75 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 364. 76 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 363. 77 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Postenlightened Cynicism: Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual’, in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 165. 78 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 158. 79 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 103. 80 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 160. 81 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 150.

Jones D, DADA.indd 198

21/05/2014 15:00:24

the rude product of luxury

199

82 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (July/August 1984), 65 (emphasis original). 83 Huyssen, ‘Postenlightened Cynicism’, p. 159. 84 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 160. 85 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 143. 86 Ball, Flight Out of Time, pp. 51–52. 87 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 164. 88 Ball, Flight Out of Time, pp. 55–56. 89 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 65. 90 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 66. 91 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 65. 92 Hans Arp, ‘Vom Hundertsten ins Tausendste’, in Unsern täglichen Traum … Erinnerungen, Dichtungen und Betrachtungen aus den Jahren 1914–1954 (Zurich: Arche, 1955), pp. 40–41; cited in translation in Reinhard Döhl, ‘Hans Arp and Zurich Dada’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game From Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), p. 112. 93 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 65. 94 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 65 (emphasis original). 95 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 353. 96 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 377. 97 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1987), p. 62. 98 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983), p. 53. 99 Rudolf Kuenzli (ed.), Dada (London: Phaidon Press, 2006), p. 18. 100 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Critique of the Concept “Cause”’, in The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 295–97. 101 Deleuze, Nietzsche, p. 36. 102 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 158. 103 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 106. 104 Annie Hall, dir. Woody Allen (United Artists, 1977). 105 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 151. 106 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 104. 107 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 106. 108 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, pp. 143–44. 109 Lacan, Écrits, p. 171. 110 Lacan, Écrits, p. 316. 111 Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’ (1955); cited in Jeffrey Mehlman (ed.), French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis, special issue, Yale French Studies, 48 (1972), p. 60. 112 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 159. 113 Huyssen, ‘Postenlightened Cynicism’, p. 165. 114 Huyssen, ‘Postenlightened Cynicism’, p. 165. 115 Huyssen, ‘Postenlightened Cynicism’, pp. 166–67. 116 Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Against the Enlightenment: A Theory with Teeth for the 1980s’, German Quarterly, 57 (Fall 1984), 631. 117 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 376.

Jones D, DADA.indd 199

21/05/2014 15:00:24

200

dada 1916 in theory

1 18 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 387. 119 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 384. 120 Helmuth Plessner, ‘Das Lächeln’, in Mit anderen Augen. Aspekte einer philosophischen Anthropologie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), pp. 183–97; see Critchley, On Humour, p. 109. 121 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 160. 122 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 269 (additions 124, paragraph 195). 123 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, cited in Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 176. 124 Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Jacob Burckhardt, 6 January 1889, in Malcolm Green (ed.), Black Letters Unleashed: 300 Years of ‘Enthused’ Writing in German (London: Atlas Press, 1989), p. 34. 125 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 105.

Jones D, DADA.indd 200

21/05/2014 15:00:24

Conclusion

Permanent Dada

I can no longer think what I want to think.

– Georges Duhamel, 19301

The overriding address of this book in pursuit of the social production of that which we most desire to possess – the processing of a subjectivity – is, I think evidently, to the centrality of language in the Dada activities that radiated and continue to radiate from 1916 (but ‘radiate’ implies a point of origin; to resonate (to ursonate?) or to reverberate might be more useful verbs), and of the determined attempts to put language efficiently to work in some sort of lateral oppositionality. Now, what have been consistently read as oppositional strategies validated under late capitalism have notoriously effected their own undoing – pastiche, for instance, is dissolved by using the instruments of pastiche itself; alternatively, some genuine historical sense is reconquered by using the instruments of what have been called substitutes for history. Hal Foster has described one lateral move with the instructive proposition of a postmodernism of resistance, in terms of a ‘counter-practice not only to the official culture of modernism but also to the “false normativity” of reactionary postmodernism’, operative through its resistance in the questioning rather than in the exploitation of cultural codes, desiring ‘to explore rather than to conceal social and political affiliations’.2 Indeed, as thought systems collapse in on themselves, they instigate their own dissolution through anti-logic or, in lamentable ignorance, invert and thereby reproduce the flawed logic that was ostensibly the object of critique at the outset. Even to talk about a postmodern text (as I am now talking about Dada), Fredric Jameson has suggested, is ‘to reify it, to turn it into the work of art that it no longer is, to endow it with a

Jones D, DADA.indd 201

21/05/2014 15:00:24

202

dada 1916 in theory

permanence and monumentality that is its vocation to dispel’3 – precisely the counterintuition of thinking and talking too long and too hard about what happened in Zurich in 1916. Of course, before Dada ever reached us – indeed, before Dada had even reached Dada, if we account for Serner’s attack on Ball and Huelsenbeck for ‘blasphemy against the intellect’ following their 1915 ‘Commemoration of fallen poets’ in Berlin (see chapter 1), and his dismissal of the repetition of the absurd and riotous at the Cabaret Voltaire, which he believed ‘would quickly become flat and fade’4 – it was argued that Dada had already collapsed in on itself. Benjamin gravely alerted his audience to this much, stating how ‘Dadaist manifestations actually guaranteed a quite vehement distraction by making artworks the center of scandal’5 – hardly an endorsement to point at the distracting consequence of Dada in such terms, but perhaps the greater criticality is how Benjamin’s observation hints at the dissimulating effect of Dada, the effect that we may now be more able consistently to read. If we question whether language might be construed as the perfect or imperfect instrument of state, we would be hard pressed to conclude otherwise than that language is an instrument like any other – ‘pure means’ as Benjamin would argue6 – and as we might take a hammer to an object, the result can be harmful or helpful, depending on what we do with it.7 Though the premise may well be that ‘questions of language are basically questions of power’,8 it will be conceded that language can variously be deployed – an instrument of oppression or, in opposition, an instrument of liberation. To concede that language can be whatever we want it to be is to concede at once to its neutrality (which is ultimately concession to its ‘truth’), yet the encounter rarely occurs on neutral terms. Language is always spoken by someone and is always tendentious to that one; and, in philosophical extension, whereas language can (but doesn’t necessarily always) become the instrument of oppression, it already is for Nietzsche the oppressive and illegally occupying force of metaphors. J. B. Thompson, introducing the work of Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, observes how in the routine flow of day-to-day life, power is seldom exercised as overt physical force: instead, it is transmuted into a symbolic form [that is, language], and thereby endowed with a kind of legitimacy that it would not otherwise have.9 It is in being spoken that language militates, and the instances and encounters are, therefore, critical conditions in our encounter with

Jones D, DADA.indd 202

21/05/2014 15:00:24

permanent dada

203

language today just as they were in 1916. We might respond to the question by reasoning language as the perfect instrument, but we might only state this much if its actualisation is deferred (that is, if we stop using it according to habit). This would knowingly parry all of the recognisably (and unrecognisably) consistent currents in Western cultural formations that are in constant collision and at various stages of theoretical auto-destruction – currents identifiable from the enlightenment’s critically enlightened self-reflexivity, to the ‘radical evil’ of emancipatory politics, to postmodernism’s generation as a cultural dominant, and beyond – the very currents that shape language and that make it mean something. The shaping of language resists mapping as, through ‘alert sinuousness’ and ‘discontinuous scintillation’, even anarchic thought systems and formations can become subject to theoretical inversion, and procedures will founder under their own presuppositions. Dada methods have demonstrated themselves as possessing no greater immunity in this regard than the punctures and collapses that we variously read under modernity, most enduringly perhaps in Bürger’s 1974 cancellation of the historical avant-garde.10 Among more recent theoretical or philosophical critiques of a deluding ‘reification’ has been the charge brought by Badiou against his older (and since 1995 absent) contemporary Deleuze – the charge being that, in the latter’s thought, equivocity was ‘reinstalled at the heart of being itself and … the virtual finally [gained] the status of a “final cause” that explains everything only to the extent that it explains nothing at all’.11 Badiou’s ordered conception of chaos squared to indict Deleuze’s chaotic conception of order, in the end rendering Deleuze ‘as the joyous thinker of the world’s confusion’.12 The eventual dispute between these two turned out to be the inevitably one-sided affair in Deleuze’s absence, but the difference had already been documented between the anarcho-desirer contra the Maoist during the so-called ‘red years’, the invective charge of ‘Bolshevik’ against the counter-charge of ‘fascist’ at Vincennes leading to ‘the reflective determination of intellectual incompatibilities’13 – and finally the establishment, in Badiou’s words, of the two thinkers’ ‘mobile divergence in its exact confused clarity (or obscure distinctness)’.14 The divergence is a difference argued to result from equivalence – a complicated proposition, we must surely concede, in its reliance in this instance on Badiou’s application of the terms and methods of set theory, where the disparity between equality (=) and equivalence (↔) exercises the way in which the two sets named ‘Deleuze’ and ‘Badiou’ do not have to be equal in order to be equivalent.15 But, as

Jones D, DADA.indd 203

21/05/2014 15:00:24

204

dada 1916 in theory

such, the emerging difference from equivalence is affirmative of a current and critically necessary rethinking of oppositionality – most notably oppositionality as invoked in the context of a cultural avant-garde, and in practical terms as it enters into states of suspension through cooption and containment, and achieves a final depressing redundancy. In the face of such a prospect, the contention in this book has been that, culturally and politically at the start of the twentieth century, Dada presented us with an instance of radically deployed critical and combative modes of engagement – easy to say, not quite as easy to demonstrate. In continued practice, it is submitted here that the Dadaists’ own strategies of engagement – as resistant, as revolutionary, as ruptive – offer possibilities for the revision of what could otherwise appear to be irretrievably redundant oppositionality, and the reconfiguration of Dada in terms greater than the negative charge against it at the end of the twentieth century as constituting little more than a ‘trivial irreverence’.16 Jameson’s resignation on this point as, in his own words, ‘the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial’,17 is symptomatic perhaps of poststructuralist pessimism in relation to the postmodern taken as an indicator of critical and creative crisis in the West. To accommodate the viability today (as in 1916) of the same avant-garde practice that we were famously told by Bürger had ceased as ‘historical’ will insist on the revisiting, as well as on the revising, of the historical instances and thinking beyond the immediate: At any point in time, there is a tendency when one ‘thinks’ about world society to ‘think’ that things are fixed, cannot change. This non-changeability is imaginary, invented by ‘thought’ to simplify the process of ‘thinking’. But thinking is nowadays complex … Our minds are changing … to a courageous seeing of things in movement, life as revolution.18 The words of John Cage at the end of the situationist decade – here rearticulating Huelsenbeck’s resistance to sedimentation and fixity (‘to be a Dadaist’, for Huelsenbeck, was ‘to let oneself be thrown by things, to oppose all sedimentation’)19 – and of Vaneigem’s 1967 treatise on the revolution of everyday life,20 indeed also of the ceaselessly changing directions conceptualised in Bergson’s ‘mobile reality’, recognise ‘thinking’ itself as counting among the controlling state apparatuses: ‘free thinking’ is yet another less than discriminate notion that we might now do better to abandon as ‘thinking’ (under whatever conditions,

Jones D, DADA.indd 204

21/05/2014 15:00:24

permanent dada

205

even under severe constraints) gains in the ascendant. Lenin obligingly identified those first in line for his dismissal as ‘muddled idealists’, professors of philosophy, whose very vocation was the legitimate object of scrutiny for the committed proletarian militant of early Marxism. Lenin, moreover, provided us with the timely contradiction in this context that ‘in order to follow a true path it is necessary to study philosophy, which is “the falsest of all false paths” … [and this means] that there can be no true path … without a study, and, eventually a theory of philosophy as a false path’.21 To this extent, Lenin quite distinctly isolated himself and was tarred as ‘philosophically intolerable’, but his concession to his own vague and unpolished formulations in the face of the sophisticated ruminations of others underscored the critical distinction that he wanted to make: ‘not only do I not “philosophize” like them at all … I treat philosophy differently, I practise it’.22 It is Althusser who argues our indebtedness to the Bolshevik leader for contributing to the conditions under early Marxism that made the anticipation of a non-philosophical theory of philosophy possible; in actualising a procedural truth by direct engagement of that which is false (but which masquerades as truth), even in consciousness that problematically yet necessarily remains captive to its own falsity, we should now argue an indebtedness to Dada in anticipation of a non-artistic theory of art. The Dadaists of 1916 treated art differently – they interrogated it and, at a profound and fundamental level, they practised it. This practice is at several junctures exemplarily demonstrated in the Zurich activities of Arp that appear sublimely untroubled by any easy, sometimes laboured, but always safe notions of oppositionality – the deep peace of being in opposition. It is a practice of uninterrupted interrogation and revision, if not of permanent revolution – the latter theory that severally underwent its own reworking from Marx and Engels through Parvus to Trotsky as the idea of the separateness of progressive developmental stages was rejected. Trotsky’s description of permanent revolution, most engagingly, locates real revolutionary processes inside capitalism, rather than outside in the traditional site of oppositionality, and specifically they are so located in capitalism’s interstices and margins. That which is given socially, politically and economically is not opposed or rejected, but modified, altered and changed along what Lev Davidovitch once described as ‘a permanent revolutionary chain’,23 the means by which Trotsky argued an eventual transformation of democratic revolution into socialist revolution would be achieved. His deployment of Marxism in the analysis of social relations (rather than

Jones D, DADA.indd 205

21/05/2014 15:00:24

206

dada 1916 in theory

in the analysis of texts) was directed precisely at an analysis of the how rather than of the what – as is proposed in this book that Dada did and continues to do culturally, and towards which proposition today we can count schizoanalysis as moving thought and the activity of thinking. The rigid separation of processes, or stages, was critiqued by Trotsky as being a condition rationalised out of logic, a purely formal operation that risked reduction to syllogism in its obliviousness to the dialectical category of totality. Tzara’s headed notepaper, issued under Paris Dada to embrace Dada’s international (which, at that particular juncture, remained Western) aspiration, was no more a dilution of integrity than the argument that class struggle was a world process in response to the modes of production and commerce of capitalism, such forces as had ‘converted the whole world into a single economic and political [and, Tzara would add, cultural] organism … [that] immediately gives the events now unfolding an international character, and opens up a wide horizon’.24 The dialectics that underlie the theory of permanent revolution admit the paradox and contradictory process and the continuous posing of alternatives – Tzara’s Dada manifesto of 1918 is nothing, therefore, if not dialectical – in revolutionary and arpesque pursuit of the discovery of possibilities.25 The epigraph to this conclusion belongs to the French writer Georges Duhamel, famously quoted by Benjamin in his work of art essay to signal the negative reaction of his age to the dazzling possibilities of new means of reproducibility.26 I cite them here in order to re-read them out of their author’s original intent as – despite themselves – articulating something about the sanctuary and ‘deep peace’ of oppositionality or, alternatively, of the philosophical throwaway that, instead of me changing my mind, my mind has changed me. Duhamel’s intention, writing in 1930, was to voice objection to cinema and the distraction of popular forms of entertainment (in opposition to the intensity of concentration he believed was required in the presence of a work of art), which he described as wretched and hopeless diversions requiring no concentration and even less intelligence. He judged their crime, in nuce, to be the denial of any variant thought directions to the given – and by way of his observations we can return to Kantian commentary on the uncritical deference of the subject who is blissfully content to allow others to think on his or her behalf.27 On this point, however, Benjamin could and did quite comfortably yield any sense of the contemplative read as the temporal activity that Duhamel would privilege, observing how ‘before a painting by Arp … it is impossible to take time for concentration and evaluation,

Jones D, DADA.indd 206

21/05/2014 15:00:24

permanent dada

207

as one can before a painting by Derain’.28 Here, then, to rearticulate Duhamel, we have posed the ‘before’ of security and permanence, wherein the activity called ‘thinking’ was a happy and uncomplicated affair, and the ‘after’ that laments a long-lost deep peace of permanence. Our departure is now located in the necessary impermanence of the coordinates of Dada engagement, continuously revised and reconfigured as a matter of course, allowing culture’s ongoing process and, in turn, providing the legitimate context within which a reconfigured effective (I mean really effective) oppositionality becomes viable (though even to call it ‘oppositionality’ now distorts). Direct and hostile engagement of a concept has limited value; it is infinitely better, Deleuze suggests, ‘to build the new functions and discover the new fields that make it [the concept] useless or inadequate’.29 Among the submissions of this book is that the Zurich manifesto writings of Tzara and of Serner patently enter into such new fields and, though in more recent parlance they may well struggle in environments of simulation and simulacra, as they do so they demonstrate an efficiently critical use of ‘the arms and weapons specific to that world which are themselves very precisely simulacra’.30 As we now orient ourselves to the location of Dada culture, we think our relation to the encounter – the where and how – of Dada. For this ‘phenomenon in flux, constantly reconstituting and redefining itself’,31 if Dada is an event then its occurrence is located in the critical space it opens for itself, immanent to the ideological, the in-between or the ‘meanwhile’ – or, more precisely, un entre-temps in Deleuze’s own usage, where ‘it is the event that is a meanwhile [un entre-temps] … it belongs to becoming’.32 Here, more than locating the event in the space that opens, the distinction between the event and the space is suspended and our apprehension of Dada both in and as the mean, still time (or ‘dead time’) of the event remains vital: ‘nothing happens there [in the event], but everything becomes, so that the event has the privilege of beginning again when time is past. Nothing happens, and yet everything changes …’33 We find ourselves reading revolution without a goal but with effect: Dada tests and exceeds its own limits, unconditionally reconfiguring itself and submitting to our theoretical reflection a practical stability understood not as fixity but as continuous, permanent, uninterrupted revision and variation within limits – declaring emphatically oui oui si si ja ja da da, ‘yes to a life that strives upward by negation’.34 In the interstices of culture – in its ruptures and fissures, in its margins, on its peripheries and borders – Dada reforms and begins again.

Jones D, DADA.indd 207

21/05/2014 15:00:24

208

dada 1916 in theory Notes

1 Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future, 2nd edn (Paris, 1930), p. 52; cited in Walter Benjamin, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility’ (Third Version), in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 267. 2 Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. xii. 3 Fredric Jameson, Interview with Anders Stephanson, Flash Art (international edn), 131 (December 1986/January 1987), 72. 4 Walter Serner, article for Sirius (March 1916), and Christian Schad, Relative Realitäten, in Walter Serner, Die Tigerin (Munich, 1971); cited in Malcolm Green, Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 25. 5 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility’, p. 267. 6 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Anthropological Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). See chapter 3. 7 Language was notoriously described as ‘the perfect instrument of empire’ by the Bishop of Ávila to help explain the purpose of the first grammar book of the Spanish language upon its presentation to Isabella of Spain in 1492. See Lewis Hawke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London: Hollis and Carter, 1959), p. 8. In reiteration of a reply that he had undoubtedly reiterated many times before, Noam Chomsky responded to this same question, as recounted here, at the Noam Chomsky Pierhead Session held in Cardiff on 11 March 2011. 8 Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 191. 9 J. B. Thompson, Editor’s Introduction, in P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. J. B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 1–31. 10 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 11 Louise Burchill, Introduction, in Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1997), trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. xv. 12 Badiou, Deleuze, p. 10. 13 Badiou, Deleuze, pp. 2–3. 14 Badiou, Deleuze, p. 5. 15 Jason Barker, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 151. 16 See Fredric Jameson, ‘Hans Haacke and the Cultural Logic of Postmodernism’, in Brian Wallis (ed.), Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986), p. 38. 17 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (July/August 1984), 57. 18 John Cage, A Year From Monday (1969) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), p. 166. 19 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Collective Dada Manifesto’ (1920), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 246.

Jones D, DADA.indd 208

21/05/2014 15:00:24

permanent dada

209

20 Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre a l’usage des jeunes générations (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); trans. John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking as The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rising Free Collective, 1979). 21 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 31. 22 V. I. Lenin, Letter to Gorky (7 February 1908); cited in Louis Althusser, ‘Lenin and Philosophy (February 1968)’, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 31. 23 Lev Davidovitch, cited by Michael Löwy, ‘Permanent Revolution: The Marxism of Trotsky’s “Results and Prospects”’, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article2339 (accessed 1 December 2013). 24 Leon Trotsky, cited by Michael Löwy, ‘Permanent Revolution: The Marxism of Trotsky’s “Results and Prospects”’, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article2339 (accessed 1 December 2013) (the reference to Tzara is my own). 25 ‘The ultimate paradox of thought,’ as Kierkegaard noted, is ‘to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.’ Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments: Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 38. 26 Benjamin’s own note on Duhamel describes the Frenchman as a physician who ‘published novels, poetry, plays, and criticism in which he sought to preserve what he thought was best in civilization and to encourage individual freedom in an age of growing standardization’; cited in Benjamin, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility’, p. 282, n. 41. 27 Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in S. Lotringer and L. Hochroth (eds), The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995), pp. 7–8; see chapter 2, note 20. 28 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility’, p. 267. 29 Gilles Deleuze, ‘A Philosophical Concept …’, in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), p. 94. 30 Jameson, ‘Hans Haacke and the Cultural Logic of Postmodernism’, pp. 42–43. 31 Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson, Preface, in Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson (eds), Dada and Beyond, Volume 2: Dada and its Legacies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), p. 11. 32 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 158. 33 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 158. 34 Huelsenbeck, ‘Collective Dada Manifesto’, p. 246.

Jones D, DADA.indd 209

21/05/2014 15:00:24

Appendix

Zurich Dada Chronology

1909 February F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944) publishes ‘Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo’ (The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism) in Bologna. The manifesto is published in translation later in the month in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro and is disseminated throughout continental Europe – notably in Romania (‘Dada East’), in the newspaper Democraţia in Craiova, and a few days later in the journal Biblioteca modernă in Bucharest. 1910–11 Hans Arp (1886–1966) is a founding member of Der Moderne Bund (The Modern Association) of artists in Weggis, Switzerland, and develops a friendship with Paul Klee (1879–1940). The second exhibition by Der Moderne Bund in the summer of 1911 is held in Zurich, featuring works by Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) artists, including Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). 1912 March Kandinsky invites Arp to join Der Blaue Reiter in Munich, where Arp exhibits alongside prominent members of the group. May Publication of Der Blaue Reiter almanac, on which Arp has collaborated via his involvement with the Munich group. June–August Rudolf von Laban (1879–1958) establishes the summer dance farms that are held in Ascona, in the south of Switzerland, until the outbreak of the First World War. September In Munich, Hugo Ball (1886–1927), a recent philosophy student and reader of Nietzsche at the city university, first meets Richard

Jones D, DADA.indd 210

21/05/2014 15:00:25

zurich dada chronology

211

Huelsenbeck (1892–1974). In this year also, Ball meets Kandinsky in Munich, the year of Kandinsky’s publishing his manifesto Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art). Ball debates with members of Der Blaue Reiter the idea of manifesting a Gesamtkunstwerk in the form of a revolutionary artists’ theatre. October Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) and Marcel Janco (1895–1984) are among a youthful group in Bucharest who found the literary journal Simbolul. 1913 March Luigi Russolo (1883–1947) completes his Italian Futurist manifesto ‘L’arte dei rumori’ (The Art of Noises). June Mary Wigman (1886–1973) joins Laban’s dance farm at Ascona, to become his pupil, disciple and eventual collaborator. October Ball meets poet and cabaret performer Emmy Hennings (1885–1948) at the tingeltangel Café Simplicissimus in Munich, to embark on a lifelong relationship of rocky devotion; it is in this year that Hennings publishes Die letzte Freude (The Last Joy), her first volume of poetry, in Leipzig. With poet Hans Leybold (1892–1914), Ball founds the journal Revolution, which boasts Munich resident Huelsenbeck as its Paris correspondent. November Ball sees for the first time works by the Futurist painters, and writes enthusiastically of the exhibition in Dresden for Revolution. 1914 May Arp meets Max Ernst (1891–1976) for the first time at a Cologne Werkbund exhibition. June Janco leaves Bucharest, eventually to register as resident in Zurich on 14 December. June–August Sophie Taeuber (1889–1943) joins Laban’s dance farm, now named the Schule für Tanz-Ton-Wort (School of Dance, Sound and Word), but the summer session is cut short as war takes hold in Europe. August Ball, Leybold and Huelsenbeck contribute to the journal Die Aktion in Berlin. Ball is swept up by the general enthusiasm at the outbreak of war, but almost immediately its effects dampen his ardour. Arp moves from Cologne to Paris to avoid conscription in the German army, taking a room in the now legendary Bateau Lavoir studios and coming into contact with members of that Parisian milieu

Jones D, DADA.indd 211

21/05/2014 15:00:25

212

dada 1916 in theory

(including Robert and Sonia Delaunay (1885–1941 and 1885–1979), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Arthur Cravan (1887–1918) and Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920)). September Leybold commits suicide during military hospitalisation at the Belgian front, after which Ball and Huelsenbeck develop a closer intellectual relationship. October The Romanian painter Arthur Segal (1874–1944) establishes his family home as a gathering place for artists in Ascona, which duly provides an alternative and pacifist haven for Arp, Ball, Tzara and Otto van Rees (1884–1957), among many others. The Swedish painter Viking Eggeling (1880–1925) moves from Paris to Ascona. November Ball starts to write the diary that will be published only shortly before his death in 1927, Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Flight Out of Time). It is in this year also that he starts writing his ‘fantastic novel’ Tenderenda der Phantast (Tenderenda the Fantast), which he completes in 1920. 1915 February Walter Serner (1889–1942) registers as resident in Zurich, having fled Germany at the close of 1914. V. I. Lenin (1870–1924) arrives in Zurich during his 1907–17 exile from Russia. Ball and Huelsenbeck collaborate on the ‘Gedächtnisfeier für gefallene Dichter’ (Commemoration of fallen poets), held at the Berlin Architektenhaus. Hennings is involved in, and imprisoned for, the forging of passports to help Franz Jung (1888–1963) and others avoid military call-up (it was the forging of a medical certificate for Jung, who had deserted from the front, that had compromised Serner in Berlin only two months previously); Hennings is released from prison at the start of March. Drawings by Hans Richter (1888–1976) are published in Die Aktion, and he becomes a regular contributor to the journal during the years that follow. March Serner starts writing for Der Mistral, the newspaper critical of the bourgeois institutional, linguistic and social structures perceived as legitimising the war. Der Mistral publishes poems by Marinetti and by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918). In this month also, the newspaper publishes Marinetti’s pro-war manifesto ‘In quest’anno futurista’ (In This Futurist Age). May Ball and Huelsenbeck collaborate on the Expressionistenabend, held at the Berlin Harmoniumsaal. At the invitation of Serner (whom

Jones D, DADA.indd 212

21/05/2014 15:00:25

zurich dada chronology

213

Ball had previously met in Berlin) to collaborate on Der Mistral, Ball and Hennings travel to Zurich, but are too late to make any contribution as the newspaper has already folded by the time they arrive. Over the next few months, the Zurich authorities record Hennings active as a prostitute, with Ball as her pimp. The pair’s increasingly destitute state contributes to Ball’s attempted suicide in September–October, implied but not stated in his diary; police records also confirm an attempted suicide by Hennings, whose condition as a morphine addict Ball describes as constructing a world ‘of extremes in good and evil; a dangerous world, that knows reckless stakes and losses; a world with an heroic turn of mind’; for Hennings, in her poem ‘Morfin’, ‘High-towered days crumble into ruins’. June James Joyce (1882–1941) moves from Trieste to Zurich. During his four years resident in the city, the serialised publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which started in 1914, continues; he works on Ulysses, sending out the first sample chapters in December 1917; and, in May 1918, he publishes Exiles. July Ball sees Marinetti’s parole in libertà (words-in-freedom) for the first time. August Ball is finally detained by the authorities in Geneva and imprisoned for a week, having done his best with false passports and identities to evade too close monitoring. Christian Schad (1894–1982) arrives in Zurich and is introduced to Serner by artist Marcel Słodki (1892–1943). September Arp, van Rees and Adya van Rees-Dutilh (1876–1959) move from Ascona to Zurich. Janco registers for, and will complete, four years’ study in architecture at Zurich’s Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Federal Institute of Technology). October Ball and Hennings participate prominently with the Maxim ensemble cabaret troupe – Ball writing songs and playing piano. Having inaugurated the journal Chemarea in Bucharest, Tzara departs his home town and arrives in Zurich before the first issue of the journal has appeared (and in which also his pseudonym, ‘Tristan Tzara’, makes its first appearance). Schad and Serner collaborate on the journal Sirius, a publication that positions itself on occasion in philosophical opposition to Dada. November Arp and the van Reeses put on their exhibition at Zurich’s Galerie Tanner, the starting point of Tzara’s later ‘Chronique Zurichoise’ (Zurich Chronicle) for 1915–19. Arp meets his immediate collaborator Taeuber, who starts teaching textile design at the city’s

Jones D, DADA.indd 213

21/05/2014 15:00:25

214

dada 1916 in theory

Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in 1916. Ball writes, in a letter, of his and Hennings’s ultimate ambition to found their own variety ensemble. December Following an evening of readings put on by Ball and Hennings on the 17th of this month, the idea is first aired that the two should found an artistic cabaret. Ball starts drafting his assault on Prussian militarism and cultural and political authoritarianism, to be published in 1919 as Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz (Critique of the German Intelligentsia): ‘Perhaps it is necessary to have resolutely, forcibly produced chaos before an entirely new edifice can be built on a changed basis of belief’. It is in this year that Hennings writes her semi-autobiographical novel Gefängnis (Prison), also to be published in 1919. 1916 January Ball and Hennings found the Arabella ensemble, touring to Arbon and Baden. February The famous newspaper announcement for the Cabaret Voltaire appears on the 2nd, and on the 5th of this month the inaugural cabaret performance is held in the Holländische Meierei (Dutch dairy) at Spiegelgasse 1. At Ball’s instigation, Huelsenbeck arrives from Berlin (on the 11th according to Ball’s diary, on the 26th according to Tzara’s Zurich chronicle), marking a turning point with his introduction of bruitist components to the Dada performances. Lenin takes lodgings at Spiegelgasse 14, evidently unaware of the neighbours. March The simultaneous poem ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’ (The admiral is looking for a house to rent) is recited by Huelsenbeck, Janco and Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire. Serner directly attacks Ball and Huelsenbeck in an article published in Sirius – a response, however, to their Munich rather than Zurich activities. In this month, Arp registers as resident in Zurich, and will retain official city residency until 1928. April Ball’s diary entry on the 18th makes first mention of the word ‘dada’. May Publication of the Zurich formation’s first journal, the unique-issue Cabaret Voltaire, edited by Ball. The editorial puts the word ‘dada’ in print for the first time with its announcement of the forthcoming journal Dada. June On the 23rd of this month, Ball gives the first public performance of his ‘verse ohne worte’ (poems without words), dressed as the magic bishop. Soon after this event, Ball ceases all Cabaret Voltaire activities,

Jones D, DADA.indd 214

21/05/2014 15:00:25

zurich dada chronology

215

and breaks from the Dada group. Lenin completes drafting L’Impérialisme dernière étape du capitalisme (Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism), on which he had started work in January. July In Ball’s absence, the first Dada soirée is held at the Zunfthaus zur Waag, which signals Dada’s first ‘gentrifying’ move from Niederdorf to the west bank of the Limmat, precipitating what will be Ball’s final disengagement from Dada in May 1917. Tzara reads his ‘Manifesto of Mr Antipyrine’ to the soirée assembly. The ‘Collection Dada’ series is launched with publication of Tzara’s La première aventure céleste de Mr Antipyrine (The First Celestial Adventure of Mr Antipyrine), with coloured woodcuts by Janco. August Richter arrives in Zurich. September The second title is published in the ‘Collection Dada’, Huelsenbeck’s Phantastische Gebete (Fantastic Prayers), with woodcuts by Arp (the volume is expanded and reprinted in Berlin in 1920, with illustrations by George Grosz (1893–1959)). Taeuber hosts a fête littéraire at her home on Magnolienstrasse. October The third title is published in the ‘Collection Dada’, Huelsenbeck’s Schalaben schalabai schalamezomai, with drawings by Arp. November Schad moves from Zurich to Geneva. December Ball returns to the Dada fold in Zurich, where he completes his semi-autobiographical novel Flametti (to be published in Berlin in 1918). Huelsenbeck leaves Zurich, arriving in Germany in early 1917 to study medicine at the University of Greifswald and to contribute to publishing the journal Neue Jugend in Berlin, and eventually to orchestrate the formation of Berlin Dada and the founding of Club Dada in March 1918. 1917 January The first Dada art exhibition, the Exposition Dada, is held at the Galerie Corray, running into February. Works by Arp, Janco and Richter are included. Between mid-January and the end of February, Tzara delivers three lectures on art. March Poems ‘aus “die wolkenpumpe”’ (from ‘the cloud pump’) by Arp are read publicly (not by Arp) for the first time at a costume party at Laban’s and Wigman’s Labanschule. The renamed Galerie Dada (in the Galerie Corray space) opens, exhibiting into April works by Berlin’s Sturm Gallery artists (including Kandinsky and Klee). Tzara delivers his lecture ‘L’expressionisme et l’art abstrait’ (Expressionism and

Jones D, DADA.indd 215

21/05/2014 15:00:25

216

dada 1916 in theory

Abstract Art), and Taeuber performs abstract dances, to accompany the exhibition. April The third Dada art exhibition (the second Galerie Dada exhibition, therefore) features more works by Sturm Gallery artists (including Ernst), and drawings by children. The second Dada soirée is held, the Sturm-Soirée, featuring performances by the Laban dancers giving prominence to masks by Janco. The play Sphinz und Strawman (Sphinx and Strawman) by Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) is performed, ‘Bravo! & Boom boom!’ Ball delivers his lecture on Kandinsky, after which his diary announces the Dada realisation of ‘total art’. The third Dada soirée is held at the end of the month, the Neuer Kunst (New Art) soirée. Tzara presents a simultaneous poem for seven voices. Lenin leaves behind the ‘intellectual babblers’ of Zurich, returning to Russia to campaign for a Bolshevik regime and an end to the war. May The fourth, fifth and sixth Dada soirées are held: the Alte und neue Kunst (Old and New Art) soirée on the 12th, repeated on the 19th, and the Hans Heusser (1892–1954) soirée at the end of the month, at which the musician Heusser presents his own compositions. Ball breaks definitively with the Dada group, moving first from Zurich to the village of Vira-Magadino and, by autumn 1917, to Bern where he writes for the radical newspaper Die Freie Zeitung and becomes acquainted with Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) and later with Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). July Tzara announces the launch of the ‘Dada Movement’ – the very idea against which Ball had twelve months previously cautioned in his ‘Dada Manifesto’. Publication of Dada 1, edited by Tzara. September–November The Galerie Dada relocates to the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg, exhibiting works by Arp and Segal into December. December Publication of Dada 2, reproducing Arp’s ‘tableau en papier’. 1918 March Serner moves from Zurich to Lugano, to work on his Letzte Lockerung (Last Loosening) manifesto; the extended version of the manifesto published in Hanover in 1920 will be dated to this period in Lugano. April Arp, Janco, Segal and Taeuber are among the founding members of the artists’ group Das neue Leben (The New Life) in Basel. The group signals the Zurich Dada artists’ association with other progressive artists in Switzerland, with whom they continue to exhibit until 1922. In this year, Arp meets Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) for the first time (Schwitters

Jones D, DADA.indd 216

21/05/2014 15:00:25

zurich dada chronology

217

obliquely names his new friend Arp in the 1918 work Zeichnung A2: Hansi, one of a small series of collages that predate the major corpus merzbilder). June Janco hosts a studio party, with art displays, at his home. Janco’s ‘perishable’ object montage and relief works from the period 1917–18 (‘Construction 3’ is reproduced in Dada 1) count among his most innovative and radical contributions to Dada. July On the 23rd, Tzara holds his own (and the seventh) Dada soirée at the Zunfthaus zur Meise, and reads his ‘Manifeste Dada 1918’. The ‘Collection Dada’ continues with publication of Tzara’s Vingt-cinq poèmes (Twenty-five Poems), with woodcuts by Arp. August The painter Francis Picabia (1879–1953) begins active exchange of ideas in correspondence with Tzara; Picabia’s work is seen (and admired) by the Zurich Dadaists the following September. September The marionette play König Hirsch (King Stag) is premiered at the Théâtre Zurichois de Marionnettes, featuring the seventeen puppets created for the production by Taeuber. September–October Works by Arp, Hennings, Janco and Richter (including Richter’s ‘visionary portraits’) are exhibited at the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg. December Publication of Dada 3, which includes Tzara’s ‘Manifeste Dada 1918’ and his obvious imprint in the form of the aggressive typographical departure from the first two issues. 1919 January One-man show by Segal at the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg, exhibiting into February. Picabia and Tzara meet for the first time. As part of Das neue Leben, Arp, Janco, Picabia and Taeuber exhibit works at the Zurich Kunsthaus, issuing a group manifesto, with Janco and Tzara delivering lectures on abstract art and its aims. February Picabia publishes the eighth issue of his peripatetic journal 391 in Zurich, reproducing Arp’s early Plant Hammer relief, before leaving for Lausanne. Serner returns from Lugano to Zurich. March Eggeling arrives in Zurich, and is introduced by Tzara to Richter, his later Berlin collaborator in abstract film. Eggeling is only briefly resident in Zurich before settling in the outlying Höngg district, and subsequently the Engadine region, participating in Zurich Dada activities between March and August. April The eighth Dada soirée is held at the Saal zur Kaufleuten. The

Jones D, DADA.indd 217

21/05/2014 15:00:25

218

dada 1916 in theory

occasion, which will also be the last Dada soirée, is a Dada tour de force of audience baiting and farce – a ‘tour de farce’, therefore – featuring a simultaneous poem for twenty voices and Serner’s public reading of the Letzte Lockerung. Among the provocative consequences of this evening is the publishing of faked reports and reviews that Serner embarks upon over the coming months. Arp, Eggeling, Janco, Richter and others combine as the Bund radikaler Künstler (Association of Radical Artists). The association prepares (but does not publish) a manifesto, Richter’s ‘Manifest radikaler Künstler Zürich’, which calls for the reform of art and its social function, demanding art’s input to the ideological evolution of the state. Immediately following the eighth soirée, Richter leaves Zurich to join the rapidly organising Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich (part of the German Revolution of 1918–19), where he is appointed chair of the Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists; by the start of May, however, the Munich soviet has been suppressed. May Publication of the double-issue Dada 4–5 (the Anthologie Dada) on which Picabia collaborates, and the German-language edition of which includes the first version of Serner’s Letzte Lockerung as read out by him at the eighth soirée in April. Richter returns from Munich to Zurich. September The Neues Wiener Journal publishes a review of the ‘ninth’ Dada soirée, written by Serner. The review is entirely fictitious, however, as is the soirée that never happened. Arp, Serner and Tzara combine as the ‘société anonyme pour l’exploitation du vocabulaire dadaïste’ (The Exploitation of Dadaist Language Company), publishing fictitious reports in newspapers as far afield as Prague and Hamburg. October Serner leaves Zurich, joining Schad in Geneva to participate in the self-styled and short-lived Geneva Dada. Joyce leaves Zurich, returning to Trieste. November Publication of the unique-issue Der Zeltweg by ‘Dada Movement Editions’, edited by Serner, Tzara and Nietzsche scholar Otto Flake (1880–1963), and including Serner’s Der Schluck um die Achse (The Swig about the Axis, a manifesto later to be incorporated into the long version of his Letzte Lockerung published in 1920). After Der Zeltweg, there are no more Zurich Dada publications. Arp leaves Zurich, briefly to participate in Cologne Dada with Ernst (contributing to the cover of the unique-issue Bulletin D). December Tzara leaves Zurich for Paris and eventually the formation of Paris Dada, following Picabia who departed in November. Zurich Dada dissolves. D.J.

Jones D, DADA.indd 218

21/05/2014 15:00:25

Bibliography

Adamowicz, Elza and Eric Robertson (eds), Dada and Beyond, vol. 2: Dada and its Legacies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012). Ades, Dawn (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006). Adelson, Leslie A., ‘Against the Enlightenment: A Theory with Teeth for the 1980s’, German Quarterly, 57 (Fall 1984). Adorno, Theodor W., ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983). Allen, Roy F., ‘Zurich Dada, 1916–1919: The Proto-Phase of the Movement’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada/Dimensions (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985). Allen, Woody (dir.), Annie Hall (United Artists, 1977). Alliez, Eric, The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?, trans. Paul Ross and Alberto Toscano (London: Athlone, 2006). Allison, David B. (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1985). Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). —, ‘Lenin and Philosophy (February 1968)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). —, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) (January–April 1969)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). Apollonio, Umbro (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). Arp, Hans, Arp collages (Paris: Berggrunen, 1955). —, Unsern täglichen Traum … Erinnerungen, Dichtungen und Betrachtungen aus den Jahren 1914–1954 (Zurich: Arche, 1955). —, Arp on Arp, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking, 1972). —, ‘And So The Circle Closed’, in Arp on Arp, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking, 1972). —, ‘Signposts’, in Arp on Arp, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking, 1972). —, ‘vases with umbilical cords’ (1932), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981).

Jones D, DADA.indd 219

21/05/2014 15:00:25

220

dada 1916 in theory

Atkinson, Terry, ‘Phantoms of the Studio’, Oxford Art Journal, 13 (1990). Badiou, Alain, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). —, ‘Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject’, in Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (New York and London: Verso, 2005). Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). —, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Ball, Hugo, Gesammelte Gedichte, ed. A Schütt-Hennings (Zurich: Arche, 1963). —, ‘Dada Manifesto’ (1916), trans. Christopher Middleton, in Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996). —, ‘Tenderenda the Fantast’, trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! The First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press, 1995). —, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996). Barker, Jason, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002). Baudrillard, Jean, Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, ed. Mike Gane (London: Routledge, 1990). Belsey, Catherine, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Benjamin, Andrew and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge, 1994). Benjamin, Walter, Briefe, vol. I, ed. Gersholm Scholem and T. W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966). —, ‘Nichts gegen die Illustrierte’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4.1, ed. Rolf Tiedmann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). —, ‘Für die Diktatur: Interview mit Georges Valois’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4.1/2, ed. Rolf Tiedmann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). —, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1977). —, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979). —, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (London: Harper and Row, 1982). —, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Anthropological Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). —, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Anthropological Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). —, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992). —, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992).

Jones D, DADA.indd 220

21/05/2014 15:00:25

bibliogr aphy

221

—, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992). —, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gersholm Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). —, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). —, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility’ (Third Version), in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory (1896), trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988). —, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), trans. T. E. Hulme (London: Macmillan, 1913). —, Creative Evolution (1911), trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover Publications, 1998). Black, Bob, ‘The Realization and Suppression of Situationism’, in Stewart Home (ed.), What is Situationism? A Reader (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996). Bloch, Ernst, ‘Philosophy as Cabaret’ (1928), in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, vol. 1 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Blondel, Eric, ‘Nietzsche: Life as Metaphor’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1985). —, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Sean Hand (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Bois, Yve-Alain, ‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp against Greatness’, in M. Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible. An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art: In, Of, and From the Feminine (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1996). Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. David A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). Botting, F. and S. Wilson (eds), Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Bourdieu, Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. J. B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Breton, André, ‘After Dada’ (before 1924), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). Brunette, Peter and David Wills, ‘The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Buchanan, Ian ‘Deleuze and Cultural Studies’, in Ian Buchanan (ed.), A Deleuzian Century? (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999).

Jones D, DADA.indd 221

21/05/2014 15:00:25

222

dada 1916 in theory

Buchanan, Ian (ed.), A Deleuzian Century? (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999). Buck-Morss, Susan, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, in Yve-Alain Bois et al. (eds), October: The Second Decade, 1986–1996 (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1997). Burchill, Louise, Introduction to Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984). Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). —, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche’, in Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Cadava, Eduardo, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? (New York and London: Routledge, 1991). Cage, John, A Year From Monday (1969) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979). Carman, Taylor and Mark B. N. Hansen (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Chomsky, Noam, Language and Responsibility (London: Routledge, 1979). Cohen, Arthur, ‘The Typographic Revolution: Antecedents and Legacy of Dada Graphic Design’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979). Conley, Tom, ‘From Multiplicities to Folds: On Style and Form in Deleuze’, in Ian Buchanan (ed.), A Deleuzian Century? (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999). —, ‘Singularity’, in Adrian Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Conover, Roger, Terry Hale and Paul Lenti (eds), 4 Dada Suicides (London: Atlas Press, 1995). Cravan, Arthur, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives’, in Roger Conover, Terry Hale and Paul Lenti (eds), 4 Dada Suicides (London: Atlas Press, 1995). Critchley, Simon, On Humour (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). —, Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2007). Critchley, Simon and Robert Bernasconi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Davies, Peter, ‘Becher’s Version of Majakovkij’s “150 000 000”’, Modern Language Review, 97 (2002). Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983). —, ‘Nomad Thought’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1985). —, Dialogues with Clare Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1987).

Jones D, DADA.indd 222

21/05/2014 15:00:25

bibliogr aphy

223

—, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (London: Athlone, 1988). —, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990). —, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). —, ‘A Philosophical Concept …’, in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? (New York and London: Routledge, 1991). —, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Haberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991). —, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone, 1993). —, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994). —, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998). —, ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998). —, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001). —, ‘The Actual and Virtual’ (1996), in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (London: Continuum, 2002). —, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2004). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, ‘Rhizome’, trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, I&C, 8 (Spring, 1981). —, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone, 1984). —, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). —, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). —, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994). Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (London: Continuum, 2002). Demetz, Peter, ‘The Futurist Johannes R. Becher’, trans. Wilhelm Werthern, Modernism/Modernity, 1/3 (September 1994). Demos, T. J., ‘Zurich Dada: The Aesthetics of Exile’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 2005). —, ‘The Language of “Expatriation”’, in Dafydd Jones (ed.) Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). —, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2007). Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

Jones D, DADA.indd 223

21/05/2014 15:00:25

224

dada 1916 in theory

—, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979). —, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). —, ‘Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know)’, in Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (eds), Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Descartes, René, ‘Selections from the Passions of the Soul’, in Selections, ed. Ralph M. Eaton (London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927). —, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Dickerman, Leah, ‘Dada Gambits’, October, 105 (2003). — (ed.), Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, catalogue of an exhibition held in Paris, Washington and New York, 2005–6 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005). Dickerman, Leah and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 2005). Döhl, Reinhard, ‘Hans Arp and Zurich Dada’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). Due, Reidar, Deleuze (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). Duhamel, Georges, Scènes de la vie future, 2nd edn (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930). Eagleton, Terry, Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London and New York: Verso, 1981). Easton Ellis, Bret, American Psycho (London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1991). Echte, Bernhard (ed.), Emmy Ball-Hennings: 1885–1948. ‘Ich bin so vielfach …’ Texte, Bilder, Dokumente (Frankfurt am Main and Basel: Stroemfeld, 1999). Elderfield, John, Introduction to Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996). Fell, Jill, ‘Sophie Täuber: The Masked Dada Dancer’, Forum for Modern languages Studies, 35/3 (1999). —, ‘Zurich Dada Dance Performance and the Role of Sophie Taeuber’, in Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson (eds), Dada and Beyond, Volume 2: Dada and its Legacies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012). Fincher, David (dir.), Fight Club (20th Century Fox, 1999). Forcer, Stephen, ‘The Importance of Talking Nonsense: Tzara, Ideology, and Dada in the 21st Century’, in Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson (eds), Dada and Beyond, Volume 2: Dada and its Legacies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012). Foster, Hal, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). —, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1985). —, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, October, 70 (1994). —, ‘Dada Mime’, October, 105 (2003). Foster, Stephen C., ‘Johannes Baader: The Complete Dada’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada/Dimensions (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985). —, ‘Dada and Cultural Criticism’, in Dada Conquers! The History, the Myth, and the

Jones D, DADA.indd 224

21/05/2014 15:00:25

bibliogr aphy

225

Legacy, conference papers (Taipei: Taipei Fine Art Museum, 23–25 July 1988). —, ‘Zurich Dada: The Arts, Critique, and the Theatre of Radicalism’, keynote address to the conference ‘Zurich Dada’ (Manchester Metropolitan University, unpublished paper, 1994). —, ‘Disaster and the Habits of Culture’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). —, ‘The Mortality of Roles: Johannes Baader and Spiritual Materialism’, in Dafydd Jones (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). Foster, Stephen C. (ed.), Dada/Dimensions (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985). — (ed.), Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). Foster, Stephen C. and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979). Foucault, Michel, This is Not a Pipe, ed. and trans. J. Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). —, ‘A Preface to Transgression’, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, in F. Botting and S. Wilson (eds), Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). —, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’, in J. Faubion (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998). Freeden, Michael, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Freeman, Joel, ‘Ernst Bloch and Hugo Ball: Toward an Ontology of the Avant-garde’, in Dafydd Jones (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). Froehlich, A. J. Peter, ‘Reaktionen des Publikums auf Vorführungen nach abstrakten Vorlagen’, in Wolfgang Paulsen (ed.), Sinn aus Unsinn: Dada International (Bern: Francke, 1982). Füllner, Karin, ‘Richard Huelsenbeck: “Bang! Bang! Bangbangbang” The Dada Drummer in Zurich’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). Gadamer, H.-G., Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. D. E. Linge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977). Gaughan, Martin Ignatius, ‘Textual Titles: Resisting Translation’, in Jeff Morrison and Florian Krobb (eds), Text into Image: Image into Text (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997). Green, Malcolm (ed.), Black Letters Unleashed: 300 Years of ‘Enthused’ Writing in German (London: Atlas Press, 1989). Greenberg, Allan C., ‘The Dadaists and the Cabaret as Form and Forum’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada/Dimensions (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985). Greenberg, Clement, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. I, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986). —, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. II, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

Jones D, DADA.indd 225

21/05/2014 15:00:25

226

dada 1916 in theory

Gregson, Ian, ‘Negotiations: Gwyneth Lewis interviewed by Ian Gregson’, Planet, 173 (October/November 2005). Grieve, Alastair, ‘Arp in Zurich’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979). Guattari, Félix, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995). —, ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’, trans. S. Thomas, in G. Genosko (ed.), The Guattari Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique’ (1972), in Gary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988). —, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Hallward, Peter, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). —, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London and New York: Verso, 2006). Hamacher, Werner, ‘Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge, 1994). Hancock, Jane, ‘Arp’s Chance Collages’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada/Dimensions (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985). Hardekopf, Ferdinand, ‘Winter Garden’, in Malcolm Green (ed.), Black Letters Unleashed: 300 Years of ‘Enthused’ Writing in German (London: Atlas Press, 1989). Hawke, Lewis, Aristotle and the American Indians (London: Hollis and Carter, 1959). Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). Hemus, Ruth, Dada’s Women (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009). Hennings, Emmy, Gefängnis (1919) (Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna: Ullstein Verlag, 1985). Hirschkop, Ken, ‘Bakhtin, Discourse and Democracy’, New Left Review, 160/1 (1986). Hitchens, Christopher, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (London: Atlantic Books, 2007). —, Hitch-22: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books, 2010). Hocquenghem, Guy, Homosexual Desire, trans. Danielle Dangoor (London: Allison and Busby, 1978). Home, Stewart (ed.), What is Situationism? A Reader (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996). Hopkins, David, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Hopkins, David and Michael White (eds), Virgin Microbe: New Studies in Dada (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). Howard, Michael and Debbie Lewer, A New Order: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire (Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University, 1996).

Jones D, DADA.indd 226

21/05/2014 15:00:26

bibliogr aphy

227

Hoy, David Couzens, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2005). Hubert, Renée Riese, ‘Zurich Dada and its Artist Couples’, in Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (ed.), Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1998). Huelsenbeck, Richard, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (New York: Viking, 1974). —, ‘Collective Dada Manifesto’ (1920), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). —, ‘En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism’ (1920), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). —, ‘Dada Manifesto 1949’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). —, ‘First Dada Lecture in Germany’ (February 1918), trans. Derek Wynand, in Richard Huelsenbeck, The Dada Almanac (1920) (London: Atlas Press, 1993). —, The Dada Almanac (1920) (London: Atlas Press, 1993). —, ‘The Speaking Person (1916), trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press 1995). —, ‘The Kettle Drum’ (1916), trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press 1995). —, ‘Foreword to the History of the Age’ (1918), trans. Michael Kane, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006). Huyssen, Andreas, ‘Postenlightened Cynicism: Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual’, in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). —, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). Hyde, Lewis, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage, 1983). Jakobson, Roman, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). Jameson, Fredric, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (July/August 1984). —, ‘Hans Haacke and the Cultural Logic of Postmodernism’, in Brian Wallis (ed.), Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986). —, Interview with Anders Stephanson, Flash Art (international edn), 131 (December 1986/January 1987). —, ‘Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze’, in Ian Buchanan (ed.), A Deleuzian Century? (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999). Janco, Marcel, ‘Creative Dada’, in Willy Verkauf (ed.), Dada: Monograph of a Movement (New York: Wittenborn, 1957).

Jones D, DADA.indd 227

21/05/2014 15:00:26

228

dada 1916 in theory

—, ‘Dada at Two Speeds’ (1966), in Lucy Lippard (ed.), Dadas on Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971). Jaworski, Philippe, Melville, le désert et l’empire (Paris: Presses de l’École Normale, 1986). Jelavich, Peter, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993). Johnson, Barbara, ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’, Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977). Jones, Amelia, Performing the Body/Performing the Text (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Jones, Dafydd, ‘The International Language of Screaming: Holey Space and Minorisation in Music and Language’, in John Wall (ed.), Music, Metamorphosis and Capitalism: Self, Poetics and Politics (Newcastle: CSP, 2007). Jones, Dafydd (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Penguin, 1939). —, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959). —, ‘The Study of Languages’ (1898/9), in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959). —, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957; reissued with corrections, 1966). —, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1975). —, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, 3 vols (New York: Garland, 1986). Kandinsky, Wassily, ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). —, ‘On the Question of Form’, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment?, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959). —, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in S. Lotringer and L. Hochroth (eds), The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995). Kay, Sarah, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Wiley, 2003). Kierkegaard, Søren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944). —, The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (London: Collins, 1962). —, Philosophical Fragments: Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Krauss, Rosalind E., ‘Grids’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1985). Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Kuenzli, Rudolf E., ‘The Semiotics of Dada Poetry’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf

Jones D, DADA.indd 228

21/05/2014 15:00:26

bibliogr aphy

229

E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979). —, ‘Communication and the Avant-Garde’ (University of Iowa, unpublished paper). Kuenzli, Rudolf E. (ed.), Dada (London: Phaidon Press, 2006). Laban, Rudolf von, A Life for the Dance: Reminiscences, trans. Lisa Ullmann (London: Macdonald and Evans, 1975). Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977). Lanham, Richard A., The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). —, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990). —, Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). —, Deleuze and Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). —, ‘Can There Be Such a Thing as a Welsh Lara Croft?’, in Angharad Price (ed.), Chwileniwm: Technoleg a Llenyddiaeth (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2002). —, A Marxist Philosophy of Language (London: Haymarket Books, 2006). Lenin, V. I., ‘Party Organization and Party Literature’ (1905), in Lenin on Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress, 1967). Reproduced in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Leslie, Esther, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto, 2000). Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969). —, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone, 1999). Levinson, André, ‘The Modern Dance in Germany’, Theatre Arts (February 1929). Lewer, Debbie, ‘Dada, Carnival and Revolution’, in Sacha Bru et al. (eds), Regarding the Popular: Modernism, Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012). —, ‘“The uncorrupt image”: Hugo Ball, Zurich Dada and the Aesthetics, Politics, and Metaphysics of Asceticism’, in David Hopkins and Michael White (eds), Virgin Microbe: New Studies in Dada (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). Lewis, Gwyneth, Chaotic Angels: Poems in English (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2007). Lewis, Henry, Yr Elfen Ladin yn yr Iaith Gymraeg (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1943). Lindon, Mathieu, ‘Bartleby’, Delta, 6 (May 1978). Lippard, Lucy (ed.), Dadas on Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971). Lloyd, David, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Löwy, Michael, ‘Permanent Revolution: The Marxism of Trotsky’s “Results and

Jones D, DADA.indd 229

21/05/2014 15:00:26

230

dada 1916 in theory

Prospects”’, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article2339 (accessed 1 December 2013). Loy, Mina, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands: Jargon Society, 1982). Marcus, Greil, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Marinetti, F. T., ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (11 May 1912)’, in Selected Poems and Related Prose, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002). —, ‘Destruction of Syntax – Imagination without Strings – Words-in-Freedom 1913’, trans. R. W. Flint, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). —, ‘The Variety Theatre’ (1913), trans. R. W. Flint, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1973). Marinetti, F. T. et al., ‘The Futurist Cinema 1916’, trans. R. W. Flint, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). Marks, John, ‘Ethics’, in Adrian Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Marsh, Lucille, ‘The Shadow of Wigman in the Light of Duncan’, The Dance Magazine (May 1931). Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1934; reprinted 1984). Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976). Massumi, Brian, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1992). Matsuda, Mari (ed.), Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). Medvedev, Pavel, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Mehlman, Jeffrey (ed.), French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis, special issue of Yale French Studies, 48 (1972). Melville, Herman, ‘Bartleby’, in Stanley Applebaum (ed.), Bartleby and Benito Cereno (New York: Dover Publications, 1990). Melzer, Annabelle, Dada and Surrealist Performance (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Menninghaus, Winfried, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Exposition of the Romantic Theory of Reflection’, trans. Robert J. Kissin, in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, I (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Meyer, Raimund et al., Dada Global (Zurich: Kunsthaus, Zurich, in association with Limmat Verlag, 1994).

Jones D, DADA.indd 230

21/05/2014 15:00:26

bibliogr aphy

231

Milesi, Laurent, ‘Joyce, Language, and Languages’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté (ed.), Advances in James Joyce Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Morgenstern, Christian, The Gallows Songs: Christian Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder: A Selection, trans. and intro. Max Knight (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1963). Morrison, Jeff and Florian Krobb (eds), Text into Image: Image into Text (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997). Motherwell, Robert (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘The Deleuzian Fold of Thought’, trans. T. Gibson and A. Uhlmann, in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Negt, Oskar, ‘Rechtsordnung, Öffentlichkeit und Gewalt’, in Heinz Grossmann and Oskar Negt, Die Auferstehung der Gewalt: Springerblockade und politische Reaktion in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968). NLB, Aesthetics and Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1980). Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967). —, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967). —, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Modern Library Giant, 1968). —, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968). —, ‘Critique of the Concept “Cause”’, in The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968). —, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974). —, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York and London: Penguin, 1976). —, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York and London: Penguin, 1976). —, Human, All Too Human: A book for free spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). —, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1987). Osborne, Peter (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, vol. 3 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). O’Sullivan, Simon, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Parr, Adrian, The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Partsch, Cornelius, ‘The Mysterious Moment’, in Dafydd Jones (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (Manchester: Carcanet Mill Press, 1983).

Jones D, DADA.indd 231

21/05/2014 15:00:26

232

dada 1916 in theory

—, ‘Grenneriello’, in Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (Manchester: Carcanet Mill Press, 1983). Patton, Paul (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Picabia, Francis, ‘Origines du mouvement Dada’, Comoedia (3 April 1920). Pichon, Brigitte, ‘Revisiting Spie(ge)lgasse: Mirror(s) and Prism(s), Cultural and Political Stagings of Emigration and Liminality’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). Pichon, Brigitte and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). Pierre, Arnauld, ‘The “Confrontation of Modern Values”: A Moral History of Dada in Paris’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 2005). Plato, The Republic (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955). Plessner, Helmuth, ‘Das Lächeln’, in Mit anderen Augen. Aspekte einer philosophischen Anthropologie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982). Prezzolini, Giuseppe, ‘Al lettore’, La Voce, 1/9 (11 February 1909). Prosenc, Miklavž, Die Dadaisten in Zürich (Bonn: Hans Bouvier, 1967). Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), Advances in James Joyce Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Rabinbach, Anson, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). —, ‘Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism’, in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, vol. 3 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Rayman, Joshua, Kant on Sublimity and Morality (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). Read, Herbert, Arp (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1968). Rée, Jonathan and Jane Chamberlain (eds), Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Reetz, Bärbel, Emmy Ball-Hennings: Leben im Vielleicht. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). Renza, Louis A., “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, ‘History of Dada’ (1931), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). Richardson, David Lewis (dir.), The Shock of the New (BBC and Time-Life Films, 1980). Richter, Hans, ‘Dada X Y Z …’ (1948), in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). —, Dada Profile (Zurich: Arche, 1961).

Jones D, DADA.indd 232

21/05/2014 15:00:26

bibliogr aphy

233

—, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965). Robertson, Eric, Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Rugh, Thomas F., ‘Emmy Hennings and Zurich Dada’, Dada/Surrealism, 10/11 (1982). Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy (1946) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961). Russolo, Luigi, ‘The Art of Noises (extracts)’, trans. Robert Brain, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). Sandqvist, Tom, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2006). Sawelson-Gorse, Naomi (ed.), Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998). Schmied, Wieland, ‘Bunk, Bash, Pop – The Graphics of Eduardo Paolozzi’, trans. Peter Bostock, in Frank Whitford et al., Eduardo Paolozzi: Sculpture, Drawings, Collages and Graphics (Stamford: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976). Schnapp, Jeffrey T., ‘Propeller Talk’, Modernism/Modernity, 1/3 (September 1994). —, ‘Bad Dada (Evola)’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 2005). Schopenhauer, Arthur, World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969). Schrift, Alan D., ‘Putting Nietzsche to Work: The Case of Gilles Deleuze’, in Peter R. Sedgwick (ed.), Nietzsche: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995). Schwitters, Kurt, Das literarische Werk, ed. F. Lach (Cologne: Du Mont, 1973). Seiwert, Harry, ‘Marcel Janco’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). Serner, Walter, ‘Last Loosening Manifesto’ (1920), trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press 1995). —, ‘The Swig about the Axis’ (1919), trans. Caitríona Ní Dhubhgaill, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006). Sheppard, Richard, ‘Kandinsky’s Early Aesthetic Theory: Some Examples of its Influence and some Implications for the Theory and Practice of Abstract Poetry’, Journal of European Studies, 5 (1976). —, ‘Dada and Mysticism: Influences and Affinities’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979). —, ‘Julius Evola, Futurism and Dada: A Case of Double Misunderstanding’, in Richard Sheppard (ed.), New Studies in Dada: Essays and Documents (Hutton: Hutton Press, 1981). —, Modernism–Dada–Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000). Sloterdijk, Peter, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (London and New York: Verso, 1988).

Jones D, DADA.indd 233

21/05/2014 15:00:26

234

dada 1916 in theory

—, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Smith, Anthony Paul, ‘Believing in this World for the Making of Gods: Ecology of the Virtual and the Actual’, SubStance, 39/1 (2010). Smith, Gary (ed.), On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988). Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, Lenin in Zurich, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976). Sorell, Walter, The Mary Wigman Book (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986). Strauss, Leo, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959; reissued UCP, 1988). Taylor, Charles, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). —, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Theresa, Maria, ‘What Dancers Think about the Modern German Dance’, The Dance Magazine (May 1931). Thomas, Dylan, The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (London: Dent, 1985). Thomas, M. Wynn, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010). Tzara, Tristan, ‘Manifesto of Mr. Antipyrine’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). —, ‘Dada Manifesto. 1918’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). —, ‘Manifesto of mr. aa the anti-philosopher’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). —, ‘Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). —, ‘Zurich Chronicle (1915–1919)’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). —, ‘Lecture on Dada’ (1972), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). —, Seven Manifestos and Lampisteries, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Calder, 1992). —, ‘Note for the Bourgeoise’ (1916), trans. Dawn Ades, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006). —, ‘Note 2 on Art. H. Arp’ (1917), trans. Dawn Ades, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006). Vaché, Jacques, ‘War Letters’, trans. Paul Lenti, in 4 Dada Suicides (London: Atlas Press, 1995).

Jones D, DADA.indd 234

21/05/2014 15:00:26

bibliogr aphy

235

van den Berg, Hubert, ‘Tristan Tzaras “Manifeste Dada 1918”: Anti-Manifest oder manifestierte Indifferenz? Samuel Friendlaenders “Schöpferische Indifferenz” und das dadaistische Selbstverständnis’, Neophilologus, 79 (1995). —, ‘The Star of the Cabaret Voltaire: The Other Life of Emmy Hennings’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). Vaneigem, Raoul, Traité de savoir-vivre a l’usage des jeunes generations (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); trans. John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking as The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rising Free Collective, 1979). Verkauf, Willy (ed.), Dada: Monograph of a Movement (New York: Wittenborn, 1957). Waldenfels, Bernhard, ‘Levinas and the Face of the Other’, in Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Wallis, Brian, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representations (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). Warde, Beatrice, ‘The Crystal Goblet’, in Gunnar Swanson (ed.), Graphic Design & Reading: Explorations of an Uneasy Relationship (New York: Allworth Press, 2000). Weiss, Peter, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978). Wheldon, Huw (ed.), Monitor: An Anthology (London: Macdonald, 1962). Wigman, Mary, ‘… excerpts from the final lecture addressed to the dancers in the Zurich School … Summer 1949’, The Dance Magazine (August 1950). Williams, Nerys, ‘Gwyneth Lewis: Taboo and Blasphemy’, Poetry Wales, 3/3 (Winter 2003). Williams, Raymond, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: NLB, 1979). —, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London and New York: Verso, 1989). Winter, Gundolf, ‘Zurich Dada and the Visual Arts’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). Witkovsky, Matthew S., ‘Pen Pals’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005). Young, Julian, Schopenhauer (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Zemeckis, Robert (dir.), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Touchstone Pictures and Steven Spielberg, 1988). Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989). —, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996). —, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1997). —, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999). —, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000).

Jones D, DADA.indd 235

21/05/2014 15:00:26

236

dada 1916 in theory

—, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Four Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001). —, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). Zurbrugg, Nicholas, ‘Towards the End of the Line: Dada and Experimental Poetry Today’, in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979). —, The Parameters of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1993). —, ‘Just What Is It That Makes Baudrillard’s Ideas So Different, So Appealing?’, in Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact (London: SAGE Publications, 1997).

Jones D, DADA.indd 236

21/05/2014 15:00:26

Index

Abraham of Freising, Bishop 39n81 abstraction 37n24, 48–52, 63–64, 125–26, 128, 129, 130, 133, 147n15, 156, 166, 215–16, 217 see also ‘concrete’ abstract film 217 Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists 218 ‘The Actual and Virtual’ see Deleuze aesthetic, anti-aesthetic 4, 9, 14, 17, 22, 24, 26–27, 32, 34–35, 43, 66–67, 78, 96, 104, 123, 124, 125, 145, 152, 155, 159, 164, 180, 182 agency 82, 84, 88, 104 see also individual; language Alexander the Great 191 Allen, Woody 191 Alliez, Eric 69n32 Althusser, Louis 93, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 110, 205 see also interpellation American Psycho see Easton Ellis anarchism, anarchy 19, 25, 67, 78, 99, 100, 106, 111, 135, 150n64, 191, 203 antisemitism 160 anxiety 62 aphorism, aphoristic 81, 183–84, 197n52 Apollinaire, Guillaume 47, 212 Apollo, Apollonian 55–56, 58 appearance 66, 109, 131, 133, 146, 197n57 see also surface Arabella ensemble 214 Arbon 214 Architektenhaus (Berlin) 27, 212

Jones D, DADA.indd 237

Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft 75 Aristotle 82 Arp, Hans 15n21, 46, 63, 64, 87, 120–46, 147n15, 148n19, 148n22, 150n68, 166, 182, 190, 205, 206, 210–18 see also Taeuber arse 73, 88, 92n70 art (object) 21, 22, 29–36, 37n24, 46, 63, 68n14, 120, 124, 125, 126, 130–31, 133, 135–36, 137–38, 37n24, 140, 141, 142–43, 144, 145, 146, 147n15, 148n19, 149n46, 150n63, 150n66, 150n68, 154, 166, 179, 187, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217 art (subject) 8, 9, 17, 21, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30–31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 61, 62, 63–64, 71n97, 78, 80, 90n20, 101, 103, 104, 109, 122, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132, 133, 142, 145, 154, 165, 177, 182, 191, 201, 206, 211, 216 Ascona 63, 135, 150n64, 210, 211, 212, 213 assemblage 3, 8, 44, 105, 164, 172n53, 187 see also Deleuze; Guattari Athens 188, 189, 195 Au Cabaret Voltaire 45 see also Janco Automatic Drawing 150n66 see also Arp author, authorship 10, 41, 104, 118n64, 148n22, 156, 172n53, 206 authority 10, 11, 48, 73, 76, 83, 93, 96–98, 99, 107–8, 110, 113, 123, 164, 181, 197n38, 214

21/05/2014 15:00:26

238

dada 1916 in theory

autonomy 36, 48–50, 88, 98, 114, 124, 163, 165, 191, 192 avant-garde 2, 4, 17, 19, 22, 61, 75, 77, 92n70, 112, 124, 126, 128, 203, 204 Avila, Bishop of 208n7 Baader, Johannes 179 bad conscience 183–84, 191 Baden 214 Badiou, Alain 93, 95, 102, 110, 112, 116n22, 167, 168, 169, 203 Bahnhofstrasse 111, 118n53, 124, 130 Bakhtin, Mikhail 32, 175, 178–83, 197n38 see also laughter Ball, Hugo 3, 8–9, 20–21, 24–36, 38n63, 39n82, 40n83, 40n85, 46–47, 52, 58, 63, 64, 66, 67, 75, 76, 89n7, 105, 118n53, 126, 128, 130, 132, 135, 140, 154, 166, 176, 189, 190, 202, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216 Ballets Russes 63 Barrès, Maurice 73, 75 Barthes, Roland 44 ‘Bartleby’ 121, 127, 129, 148n39 see also Melville Barzun, Henri-Martin 154 Basel 216 Bataille, Georges 61 Bateau Lavoir 211 Baudelaire, Charles 28 Baudrillard, Jean 87, 123 Bavarian Soviet Republic 218 Becher, Johannes R. 20–21, 27, 37n19 Beckett, Samuel 165, 177, 179, 184 becoming 5, 12, 15n22, 41–72, 86, 97, 111, 149n51, 158, 161, 187, 207 being, Being 1, 7, 8, 13, 15n22, 23, 52–53, 56, 65, 75, 97, 104, 128, 168, 169, 203 see also Hegel Benjamin, Walter 4, 41, 43, 67, 67n4, 74–75, 77–78, 80, 81, 82–84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 89n10, 92n68, 104, 155, 172n44, 181–82, 202, 206, 209n26, 216

Jones D, DADA.indd 238

Berger, Manfred 80 Bergson, Henri 122, 132, 133, 134, 145, 186, 204 Berlin 16n26, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 30, 34, 68n12, 76, 112, 179, 185, 202, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217 Berlin Architektenhaus 27, 212 Berlin Dada 34, 179 see also Club Dada Berlin Harmoniumsaal 212 berliner 185, 198n59 Berliner (Bäckerblume) 198n59 see also Polke Bern 52, 75, 89n7, 216 Beyond Good and Evil see Nietzsche Biblioteca modernă 210 The Birth of Tragedy see Nietzsche Blake, Peter xii, 207 Blake, William 61 Bloch, Ernst 74, 75, 78, 79, 81, 89n10, 216 Blondel, Eric 55 Boccioni, Umberto 19, 25 body (corporeality) 3, 6–7, 8, 12, 39n77, 41–72, 74, 87, 88, 89, 92n70, 163, 176, 177, 191, 193, 194, 195n8, 198n58 body without organs (BwO) 8 see also Deleuze Bologna 210 Bolshevism 77, 101, 203, 205, 216 Borges, Jorge Luis 148n22, 173n59 Bourdieu, Pierre 202 bourgeois, bourgeoisie 4, 24, 39n82, 41, 96, 100, 102, 106, 155, 165, 212 Breton, André 118n64 Bruant, Aristide 78 bruitism 17, 214 Bucharest 160, 210, 211, 213 Budapest 52, 171n26 Bulletin D 218 Bund radikaler Künstler 218 Bürger, Peter 77, 203, 204 Butler, Judith 74, 84, 85, 86, 87, 174n75 Buzzi, Paolo 25

21/05/2014 15:00:26

index cabaret 20, 28, 32, 46–47, 52, 53, 65, 68n12, 68n14, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80–81, 84, 85, 86, 88, 110, 111, 153, 171n26, 176, 183, 189, 190, 211, 213, 214 Cabaret 78 Cabaret Grüner Teufel 20 Cabaret Voltaire 4, 17, 20–21, 24, 27, 29, 34, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 52, 57, 58, 63, 65, 68n14, 74, 76, 78, 100, 101, 110, 114, 124, 153, 154, 155, 166, 176, 182, 186, 189, 190, 201, 214 Cabaret Voltaire (journal) 52, 57, 58, 68n14, 125, 153, 154 Cabaret Voltaire (painting) 42, 46, 49 see also Janco Café Simplicissimus 27, 211 Cage, John 204 Cale, John xiv Cangiullo, Francesco 25 capital, capitalism 14, 43, 105, 106, 113, 189, 193, 201, 205, 206 Carrà, Carlo 25 Cervantes 148n22 chance 11, 100, 120–51, 152, 166, 191 chance squares 121, 122, 123, 136, 137, 144, 145 see also Arp Chemarea 213 chess 187–88 Chomsky, Noam 207n7 ‘Chronique Zurichoise’ 124 see also Tzara city (urban environment) 35, 52, 79, 163, 188 clown 88–89, 181, 189, 192 Club Dada 215 see also Berlin Dada cogito 55, 126 see also Descartes Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance 144, 145 see also Arp; chance squares; Taeuber ‘Collection Dada’ 215, 217 Cologne 211, 218

Jones D, DADA.indd 239

239

Cologne Dada 218 Cologne Werkbund 211 ‘Commemoration of fallen poets’ 27, 202 communication 22, 23, 29, 50, 51, 61, 81, 86, 101, 103, 105, 155, 167, 178, 194 ‘concrete’ (geometric concretion) 125, 133, 140 see also abstract Conley, Tom 104 consciousness (knowing) 1, 7, 12, 22, 23, 24, 54–55, 60, 67, 75, 79, 80, 90n20, 97, 101, 112, 153, 157, 161, 162, 179, 189, 192, 193, 197n38, 205 ‘Construction 3’ 217 see also Janco Corinth 188 Craiova 210 Cravan, Arthur 7, 16n26, 212 creation, creativity 6, 8–9, 12, 13 14, 15n21, 20, 23, 27, 28, 29, 43, 81, 86, 88, 100, 112, 115, 120–51, 154, 158, 160, 161, 166, 178, 186, 191, 204 Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada 154 Critchley, Simon 45, 177, 178 critique 5–6, 12, 13, 44, 49–50, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 87, 88, 90n20, 93–119, 122, 125, 131, 133, 170n14, 182, 189, 193, 201, 203 Critique of Cynical Reason 92n70, 198n63 see also Sloterdijk Critique of Practical Reason 53 see also Kant ‘Critique of Violence’ see Benjamin Cubism 47, 52, 124, 125, 128, 133, 142 culture, culturing 1, 3–4, 11–12, 13–14, 17, 19, 24, 26–27, 31, 34, 47, 50, 56, 67, 73–92, 95, 99–100, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 120, 123, 126, 132, 133, 152–53, 156–59, 161, 163, 164, 165, 172n53, 178, 179, 189, 193, 201, 203, 204, 206, 207, 214 Culture and Society see Williams

21/05/2014 15:00:26

240

dada 1916 in theory

cynicism 51, 95, 111, 113, 115, 175, 189, 193, 195 see also kynicism Dada 1 passim Dada (journal) 94, 130, 131, 137, 139, 140, 216, 217, 218 Dada 1, ed. Tzara 130, 131, 216, 217 Dada 2, ed. Tzara 137, 140, 216 Dada 3, ed. Tzara 94, 217 Dada 4–5 (the Anthologie Dada), ed. Tzara 139, 218 Dada Almanach, ed. Huelsenbeck 30, 40n85 see also Huelsenbeck ‘Dada Manifesto’ 118n53, 216 see also Ball Dada soirées 4, 34, 52, 53, 63, 65, 67, 68n18, 74, 78, 114, 118n55, 169, 186, 215, 216, 217, 218 first soirée 215 second soirée (Sturm-Soirée) 216 third soirée (Neuer Kunst soirée) 216 fourth soirée (Alte und neue Kunst soirée) 216 fifth soirée (Alte und neue Kunst soirée repeated) 216 sixth soirée (Hans Heusser soirée) 216 seventh soirée (Tzara soirée) 217 eighth soirée (Saal zur Kaufleuten) 118n55, 169, 217–18 ‘ninth’ soirée (fictitiously reported) 218 Dada toiletries 110, 118n53 Dada: Art and Anti-Art see Richter Dada-Köpfe 63 see also Taeuber Dafydd ap Gwilym 16n26 dance 11, 41–72, 210, 211, 216 see also body; Laban; mask; performance; puppets; Wigman ‘Dans de fée’ 160 see also Tzara Das neue Leben 137, 216, 217 ‘Das Noch Nicht Bewusste Wissen’ see Bloch

Jones D, DADA.indd 240

Däubler, Theodor 19, 20 Davidovitch, Lev 205 see also permanent revolution Davies, Peter 20 death of God 116n9, 146 declamation 20, 21, 25, 100, 105, 111, 114, 176 see also mask; performance; puppets degeneration 51, 52, 132 Delaunay, Robert 212 Delaunay, Sonia 212 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 8, 12, 14, 50, 51, 69n32, 81, 82, 83, 103, 104, 112, 115, 116n9, 121, 122, 126–28, 129, 132, 133, 134, 142, 145–46, 148n39, 152, 153, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 172n46, 172n53, 175, 179, 182, 183–84, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 194, 197n52, 203, 207 see also Guattari Demetz, Peter 20 democracy 86, 98, 106, 157, 205 Democraţia 210 Demos, T. J. 155 Der Blaue Reiter 210, 211 Der Blaue Reiter almanac 31, 210 ‘Der Dorfdadaist’ 40n83 see also Ball Der Mistral 19, 212, 213 Der Moderne Bund 210 ‘Der Schluck um die Achse’ (The Swig about the Axis) see Serner Der Sturm 20 Der Zeltweg 58, 66, 113, 218 Derain, André 207 Derême, Tristan 154 Derrida, Jacques 54, 68n9, 82, 127, 179 Descartes, Réné 45, 64, 177 see also cogito desire 3, 60, 79, 88, 110, 198n58, 203 ‘Destruction of Syntax’ 23 see also Marinetti Diaghilev, Sergei 63 dialectic 4, 5, 12, 44, 56, 75, 92n70, 103, 193, 206

21/05/2014 15:00:26

index dialogue 49–50, 51, 157, 163, 169, 180, 182, 197n38 Die Aktion 19, 20, 24, 26, 211, 212 Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Flight Out of Time) see Ball Die Freie Zeitung 75, 216 Die letzte Freude (The Last Joy) see Hennings ‘die Mimik des Geistes’ see Plessner ‘Die vieilleicht letzte Flucht’ (Perhaps the Last Flight) see Hennings Die weissen Blätter 75 Dietzgen, Joseph 106 difference, difference-in-itself 7, 8, 13, 44, 49, 50, 77–78, 82, 87, 118n59, 120, 125–26, 129, 157, 158, 167, 186, 197n38, 198n58, 204 Difference and Repetition see Deleuze Diogenes of Sinope 175, 178, 188–89, 191–92, 193, 194–95, 198n63 Dionysus, Dionysian 55–56, 58, 184 disinterestedness 9 dolls see puppets domination 55, 85, 86, 97, 156, 162, 193 see also power; subordination Dresden 25, 211 Duhamel, Georges 201, 206–7, 209n26 Duo-Collage 143 see also Arp; Taeuber Easton Ellis, Bret 59, 71n90 Eggeling, Viking 212, 217, 218 ego 2–3, 56, 57, 104, 192, 193 Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Zurich) 213 Eisenstein, Sergei 172n46 ‘enabling constraint’ see Butler Engadine 217 Engels, Friedrich 82, 205 entre-garde 13 equivocity 203 Ernst, Max 211, 218 ethics 12, 43, 47–50, 53, 66, 107–8, 126–27, 191 Evans, D. Simon 162

Jones D, DADA.indd 241

241

Evola, Giulio 19 excess 6, 12, 14, 45, 49, 52, 62–63, 64, 66, 78, 82, 88, 103, 163, 168, 181, 207 see also Dionysus Exiles 213 see also Joyce existence, existentialism 2, 4, 8–9, 14, 20, 60, 73, 86, 96, 103, 107, 111, 125, 128, 133, 146, 149n51, 152, 155, 159, 163, 183, 185, 191, 194 experience 2, 8, 31, 41, 43, 48, 49, 53, 54, 59, 64, 65, 67, 74, 77–78, 79, 112, 123, 124, 132, 134, 155, 177, 178, 184, 186, 191, 193 Exposition Dada 215 expression 49, 51, 56, 63, 88, 103–4, 215 Expressionism (German Expressionism), Expressionist cabaret 17, 19, 20, 21, 25, 30, 52, 53, 65, 78, 125, 142 Expressionistenabend, Harmoniumsaal (Berlin) 27, 212 face 43, 44, 46–52, 56–58, 64 see also appearance, mask; surface false consciousness 24, 97, 162, 189, 193 fantasy, fantasy-space 108–11, 112, 113, 114, 115 Faure, Gabriel 104 Fehrenstrasse 148n19 Fight Club 95, 105–6 Finnegans Wake 166 see also Joyce First World War 3, 10, 20, 22, 27, 28, 43, 51, 63, 76–77, 78, 79, 100, 110, 116n22, 175, 176, 210, 211, 212, 216 Flake, Otto 218 Flametti 215 see also Ball Florence 19 Focillon, Henri 104 The Fold see Deleuze ‘Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo’ 210 see also Marinetti

21/05/2014 15:00:27

242

dada 1916 in theory

formalism 7, 20, 32, 37n24, 46, 92n70, 123, 124, 126, 128, 130, 145, 164 see also Greenberg, Clement; style Foster, Hal 67, 201 Foster, Stephen C. 2, 105, 109, 192 Foucault, Michel 47, 81, 82, 167 Frank, Leonhard 37n19 Freeden, Michael 106 freedom 48, 92n70, 95, 106–8, 109, 113, 115, 119n67, 142, 146, 179, 184, 186, 188, 191, 198n63 Freud, Sigmund, 58, 71n89 ‘Freud Analytikus’ 58 see also Taeuber Freudian analysis 2, 3, 5, 170n14, 71n89, 192, 198n58 ‘From Multiplicities to Folds’ see Conley Futurism (Italian) 17–25, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 73, 80, 124, 142, 154, 210, 211, 212 see also Marinetti Futurism (Russian) 32 ‘Futurismo, definizione’ 18 see also Marinetti Gadamer, Hans-Georg 61 ‘Gadji Beri Bimba’ xi, xii, 34 see also Ball Galerie Corray 215 Galerie Dada 58, 63, 130, 215, 216 Galerie Tanner 124, 125, 213 gaze 44, 47, 50 see also face Gefängnis (Prison) see Hennings Geist der Utopie see Bloch Geneva 118n64, 213, 215, 218 Geneva Dada 218 German Revolution (1918–19) 218 Gesamtkunstwerk 211 Go (board game) 187–88 Govoni, Corrado 25 Gräser, Karl and Gusto 150n64 Greenberg, Allan C. 80 Greenberg, Clement 121, 123, 124, 145 grid 123–24, 137, 142, 143, 145, 150n68

Jones D, DADA.indd 242

see also abstraction Grosz, George 215 Grumbach, Salomon 58 Guattari, Félix 9, 12, 50, 51, 69n32, 103, 122, 134, 152, 158–59, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 172n46, 172n53, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 194 see also Deleuze ‘Ha Hu Baley’ 28 Habermas, Jürgen 50, 77 Hadwiger, Else 20 Hallward, Peter 122, 128, 129, 132, 134, 142, 145 Hamacher, Werner 84 Hamburg 52, 218 Hanover 118n55, 154, 216 Hanover Dada 154 Hapsburg monarchy 160 Hardekopf, Ferdinand 20, 78, 79 Harmoniumsaal (Berlin) 27, 212 Hausmann, Raoul 34 Hegel, G. W. F. 8, 194 Hemus, Ruth 150n68 Hennings, Emmy 3, 20, 21, 27, 37n19, 41, 52–53, 57, 58, 65, 68n12, 78, 171, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217 Herzen, Alexander 180 heteronomy 48 Heusser, Hans 216 Hirschkop, Ken 197n38 History of Western Philosophy see Russell Hitchens, Christopher 13, 76, 170n13 Hocquenghem, Guy 156, 170n14 Holländische Meierei 46, 111, 166, 214 Höngg 217 Hoy, David Couzens 82 Huelsenbeck, Richard vi, 17, 25, 26, 27, 31, 36n4, 40n85, 51, 52, 63, 67, 74, 76, 84–85, 86, 96, 103, 105, 109, 112, 122, 130, 153, 159, 166, 176, 189, 190, 202, 204, 211, 212, 214, 215 Hughes, Berthe 171n26 Hughes, Robert 53

21/05/2014 15:00:27

index Hugnet, Georges 58 Hugo, Victor 104 Human, All Too Human see Nietzsche identity 3, 7, 44, 50, 52–54, 59, 65, 88, 126, 146, 152, 157, 158, 159, 170n14, 172n53, 176, 183, 192, 193, 194, 195 see also individual; subject ideology 5, 6, 11, 12, 24, 32, 73, 93–119, 122, 165, 166, 169, 189, 197n38, 207 ‘In quest’anno futurista’ (In This Futurist Age) 212 see also Marinetti in-between 13, 162–65, 207 individual 7, 8, 12, 14, 28, 56, 60, 65, 66, 82, 88, 96–97, 102, 132, 149n51, 157, 164, 165, 170n17, 172n53, 176, 194 see also identity; subject infinity 2, 43, 44, 45, 48–49, 52, 53, 123, 129–33, 134, 145, 146, 149n51, 163, 168, 187 The International of Arses 73 see also arse interpellation see Althusser interpretation 22, 54–58, 61, 70n51, 81–82, 92n68, 105–6, 124, 183 An Introduction to Metaphysics see Bergson Isabella of Spain 208n7 Jacques-Dalcroze, Émile 63 Jakobson, Roman 17, 33, 34 Jameson, Fredric 5, 12, 189, 201, 204 Janco, Marcel 15n21, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52, 64, 68n18, 125, 153, 154, 159, 166, 176, 190, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 Jewish theatre 47 Jones, W. Arwyn 168 Joyce, James 152, 165, 166, 167, 173n59, 213, 218 judgement 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 82, 87, 90n20, 128, 179, 189 Jung, Franz 212

Jones D, DADA.indd 243

243

Kabarett nach vorn see Berger Kafka, Franz 152, 158, 159–61, 162, 164, 165 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature see Deleuze; Guattari Kandinsky, Wassily 31, 32, 210, 211, 215, 216 Kant, Immanuel 9, 43, 48, 49, 53, 65, 77, 78, 82, 83, 123, 206 ‘Karawane’ 30, 31, 33, 40n85 see also Ball ‘Karawanken’ 39n81 Kennedy, John F. 185, 198n58 Kerner, Justines 32 Keyser Söze 107–8, 111 Kierkegaard, Søren 73, 149n51, 170n17, 209n25 Khlebnikov, Velimir 32 Klee, Paul 210, 215 Klossowski, Pierre 184, 197n52 Kokoschka, Oskar 216 König Hirsch, marionette play 58, 217 Krauss, Rosalind 123 Krippenspiele 58 see also Ball Kruchenykh, Aleksei 32 Kuenzli, Rudolf 191 Kultur 27 Kunstgewerbeschule (Zurich) 71n97, 124, 214 Kunstsalon Wolfsberg 137, 145, 150n63, 216, 217 kynicism 175, 188–91, 192, 193, 198n63 see also cynicism la bomba-romanzo esplosivo 22 see also Marinetti La première aventure céleste de Mr Antipyrine see Tzara La Voce 20 Laban, Rudolf von 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 210, 211, 215, 216 Lacan, Jacques 108, 167, 192, 198n58 Lacerba 20 language 1, 7, 11, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28–32, 34, 35–36, 61, 74, 75–76, 84, 85,

21/05/2014 15:00:27

244

dada 1916 in theory

86–87, 88, 89, 92n70, 95, 104, 105, 120, 122, 123, 124, 127, 152–74, 180, 182, 187, 188–89, 192, 197n38, 201, 202–3, 208n7, 212, 218 languages Alsatian (dialect) 171n26 Basic English 166 Czech 152, 160, 173n53 Danish 165, 171n26 English 152, 159, 161, 165 Esperanto 166 French 127, 159, 160, 165, 171n26 German 19, 20, 118n55, 152, 159, 160, 161, 165, 171n26, 173n53, 218 Irish 152 Italian 159, 165 Latin 162 Romansch 159 Scots 152 universal 166, 167 Wakese 166 Welsh 152, 161, 162, 171n26 Yiddish 152, 160, 173n53 Lanham, Richard 22 Large Drawing 150n66 see also Arp Laughing and Crying see Plessner laughter 1, 11, 14, 64, 92n71, 101, 175–200 Lausanne 217 law, legality 14, 74, 75, 82–84, 86, 87, 92n68, 97, 102, 105 ‘lautgedichte’, sound poetry 11, 28, 29, 31, 34–35, 63, 130, 154 ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’ 152–74, 214 see also simultaneous poetry; voice ‘L’expressionisme et l’art abstrait’ see Tzara Le Figaro 210 ‘Le Géant blanc lépreux du paysage’ see Tzara Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 152, 158, 161, 162, 172n53 Lederer, Emil 75 Lefebvre, Henri 17

Jones D, DADA.indd 244

Leipzig 211 Lenin, V. I. 20, 65, 100, 101, 106, 176, 177, 195, 195n5, 205, 212, 214, 215, 216 Les mamelles de Tirésias see Apollinaire Letter from a Corpse see Hennings Letzte Lockerung 88, 92n71, 111, 114, 115, 118n55 see also Serner Levinas, Emmanuel 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 62, 66 Lewis, Gwyneth 164 Leybold, Hans 25, 26, 27, 28, 211, 212 Lichtenstein, Roy 22 Limmat, river 215 literature 20, 23, 31, 32, 35, 37n19, 86, 123, 153, 154–55, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164–65, 167, 172n53 Lloyd, David 164, 165 Lugano 216, 217 Lyotard, Jean-François 184, 197n52 Maas, Henry 150n63 Maggiore, lake 135 magic bishop see Ball Magnolienstrasse 215 Malraux, André 104 ‘Manifest radikaler Künstler Zürich’ see Richter ‘Manifeste Dada 1918’ see Tzara manifesto 11, 19, 20, 22, 23, 80, 86, 88, 93–119, 125, 151n72, 190, 206, 207, 210, 211, 212, 215, 216, 217, 218 ‘Manifesto of mr. aa the anti-philosopher’ see Tzara ‘Manifesto of Mr Antipyrine’ see Tzara ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’ 20 see also Marinetti Mann, Thomas 59 Marcu 195n5 Marinetti, F. T. 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 40n85, 154, 210, 212, 213 marionettes see puppets; Taeuber

21/05/2014 15:00:27

index Marx, Karl 181, 182, 185, 205 Marxism 3, 24, 75, 80, 97, 99, 156, 170n14, 180, 189, 205 Marxism and Literature see Williams mask, masking 11, 41–72, 182, 190, 216 see also face; dance; performance; puppets Massumi, Brian 134, 146 mathematics 22, 137, 145, 146, 203 Matsuda, Mari 85 Maxim ensemble 213 meaning 2, 12, 13, 17, 21, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 47, 50, 53, 55, 60, 61, 62–67, 71, 88, 92n71, 100, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117n37, 122, 123, 124, 135, 154, 156, 161, 162, 167, 175, 176, 178, 181, 183, 186, 191, 194 means (of engagement) 9, 21, 22, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 82–84, 86, 123, 129–46, 152, 183, 187, 193, 202, 205 Medvedev, Pavel 32 Melville, Herman 121, 127 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 59 metaphor 31, 55, 59, 76, 167, 202 ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ see Simmel Milan 19, 22 Milesi, Laurent 166 mind see consciousness minorisation 12, 13, 152–53, 158–65, 172n53 modernism, modernity 8, 17, 28, 41, 63, 76, 79, 83, 121, 123, 129, 145, 154, 166, 201, 203 Modigliani, Amedeo 212 Monte Verità 135, 150n64 morality 12, 48, 53, 55, 83, 109, 112, 132, 189, 191 ‘Morfin’, morphine addiction see Hennings Morgenstern, Christian 32 Morstadt, Finny 28 Moscow 52 Mühsam, Erich 24, 27, 28 Munch, Edvard 62

Jones D, DADA.indd 245

245

Munich 20, 21, 27, 31, 78, 150n63, 210, 211, 214, 218 music, non-music 22, 34–35, 52, 61, 63, 64, 65, 142, 176, 216 mysticism 24, 25, 31, 135 Nancy, Jean-Luc 173n66 nationalism (anti-nationalism, ethnonationalism) 17, 160, 164 Neederthorpe 166 negation, negationism 5, 17–40, 65, 97, 104, 153, 164, 181, 204, 207 Negt, Oskar 77 neo-avant-garde 4 Neo-Dada 4 Neue Jugend 215 Neues Wiener Journal 218 Niederdorf 78, 100, 111, 166, 176, 215 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 7, 8, 12, 32, 43, 47, 51, 54–56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 65, 67, 177, 178, 183, 184, 189, 191, 195, 202, 210, 218 nihil, nihilism 87, 99, 100, 114, 128 nomad, nomadism, nomadology 5, 7, 12, 161, 163, 182, 183, 185–88, 190 ‘Nomad Thought’ see Deleuze ‘Note 2 on Art. H. Arp’ see Tzara object, objective (non-objective), objectivity 2, 8, 9, 13, 31, 34, 37n24, 44, 56, 60–61, 64–67, 75, 77, 81, 88, 93, 95, 97, 102–4, 107, 112, 115, 123, 128, 142, 156, 176, 182, 201 October (1917) 100, 176 Oedipus 3 One-Way Street see Benjamin ontology 5, 6, 53, 75, 128, 129, 132, 142, 168 oppositionality 3–4, 5, 13, 23–24, 77, 86, 96, 112, 113, 126, 127, 152, 186, 201, 204, 205–7 O’Sullivan, Simon 6, 9 other, Other, otherness 2, 4, 7, 9, 12–13, 14, 43, 44, 46–48, 49–50, 52–53,

21/05/2014 15:00:27

246

dada 1916 in theory

56, 98, 100, 107, 155, 167, 169, 185, 193 Otherwise than Being 52 see also Levinas pacifism 22, 25, 51, 150n64, 212 Paolozzi, Eduardo 37n24 Papini, Giovanni 19, 20 Paris 7, 8, 17, 73, 75, 99, 114, 118n64, 160, 206, 210, 211, 212, 218 Paris Dada 8, 17, 73, 75, 206, 218 parole in libertà (words-in-freedom) 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 35, 213 see also Marinetti Parvus, Alexander 205 see also permanent revolution Pasolini, Pier Paolo 61, 157 perception 1, 2, 9, 28, 59, 61, 65, 66, 67, 122–23 performance, performative, performativity 11, 13, 21, 27, 28, 29, 34, 40n85, 43, 41–72, 74, 79, 82, 84, 85, 92n70, 113, 114, 152, 154, 155, 158, 159, 167, 192, 214, 216 see also body; cabaret; Cabaret Voltaire; dance; Laban; mask; puppets; Wigman permanent Dada 11, 201–9 permanent revolution 180, 205–6 Pestallozzi 148n19 Pfemfert, Franz 19, 20, 26 Phantastische Gebete 215 see also Huelsenbeck Phelan, Peggy 46, 53, 62 phenomena, phenomenology 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 35, 54–55, 56, 60, 64, 80, 82, 96, 112, 191, 207 Philonenko, Alexis 134 Picabia, Francis 8, 137, 217, 218 391 (journal) 137, 217 Picasso, Pablo 47, 212 Plant Hammer 137, 138, 217 see also Arp Plato 184–85, 197n57

Jones D, DADA.indd 246

Plessner, Helmuth 64, 194 plurality 7, 54–58, 60, 155, 183 poetry 11, 13, 19–21, 24–25, 28–32, 34–35, 39n82, 40n83, 40n85, 52, 64, 88, 130, 135, 136, 141, 150n64, 151n72, 152, 153, 154–56, 159, 160, 161, 162–64, 166, 167, 169, 171n26, 183, 192, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 see also ‘lautgedichte’; ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’; simultaneous poetry; ‘verse ohne worte’; voice politics (political activity) 1, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 17, 25, 26, 28, 31, 34, 35, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 58, 62, 67, 68n4, 73, 74–78, 80, 82, 83, 84–87, 93–119, 129, 150n64, 153, 155, 156, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170n14, 172n53, 175, 176, 180, 182, 185, 189, 191, 194, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 214 Polke, Sigmar 198n59 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 213 see also Joyce postmodern, postmodernism 103, 157, 201, 203, 204 power, power relations 4, 47, 55, 75, 78, 94, 98, 99, 107, 110, 111, 129, 156, 162, 169, 170n15, 187, 193, 202 see also domination; subordination Prague 160, 161, 218 Prezzolini, Giuseppe 20 primitive 32, 46, 47, 130, 166 product, production (process) 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 41, 43, 46, 79, 80, 97, 125, 133, 135, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 161, 169, 172n53, 195, 201, 206 proto-Dada 6, 7 psychoanalysis 2, 3, 170n14, 192, 198n58 see also Freud; Freudian analysis Puppen see Hennings; puppets puppets 11, 57, 58, 217

21/05/2014 15:00:27

index see also body; dance; mask; performance racism 50 Radek, Karl 176 Rancière, Jacques 93, 95, 98, 110, 112 reality, reality-apparatus 9, 23–24, 44, 70n51, 76, 92n70, 100, 111, 112–15, 126, 133, 134, 186, 195n5, 204 reason 48, 51–52, 53, 95, 96, 110, 113, 114, 115, 131–32, 141, 181, 188, 189, 190 recipe for a Dada poem 141 see also Tzara Rectangles According to the Laws of Chance (‘tableau en papier’) 37, 140, 216 see also Arp; chance squares; Taeuber Reklame für mich: Dada Milchstrasse see Baader Renaissance 179 representation 7, 13, 14, 25, 41, 43, 44, 54, 55–57, 59–61, 62–67, 92n70, 93, 103 resistance 4, 5–6, 13–14, 24, 31, 34, 35, 43, 49–50, 53, 58, 62, 83, 85, 95, 99, 104, 105, 107, 112, 114, 120–22, 123–24, 126–29, 145, 169, 175, 186, 188, 189, 191, 193, 195, 201, 203, 204 résistance 126–27 Revolution 25, 26, 27, 211 Revolution of Everyday Life see Vaneigem ‘Revoluzzerlied’ see Mühsam Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges 90n26 Richter, Emil 25 Richter, Hans 4, 10, 16n26, 19, 39n81, 75, 89n7, 101, 141, 190, 212, 215, 217, 218 Riese Hubert, Renée 58 Roger Rabbit 175 Romania 47, 160, 210 Rorschach 130 Rosemeier, Hermann 75 Rosenstock, Samuel see Tzara Rumsfeld, Donald 185 Russell, Bertrand 134

Jones D, DADA.indd 247

247

Russolo, Luigi 25, 211 Saal zur Kaufleuten 217 Sackaroff, Alexander 65 Schad, Christian 46, 213, 215, 218 Cabaret 46 Schalaben schalabai schalamezomai 215 see also Huelsenbeck schizoanalysis see Deleuze; Guattari schizophrenia 2, 183 Schopenhauer, Arthur 55, 58, 59, 60–61, 64, 65, 66, 67 Schwitters, Kurt 154, 216–17 Seegartenstrasse 63 Segal, Arthur 135, 150n63, 150n64, 212, 216, 217 self see subject serate 19 Serner, Walter 7, 19, 74, 88, 92n71, 93, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118n55, 118n64, 133, 147n15, 202, 207, 212, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218 Setzung 74 Severini, Gino 25 Shakespeare, William 196n18 Sheppard, Richard 21, 28, 32, 38n63, 76 Shklovski, Viktor 32 sign, signifier 14, 22, 30–31, 32, 37n24, 43, 44, 50, 83, 95, 153, 198n58 The Signature of the World see Alliez silence see grid Simbolul 160, 211 Simmel, Georg 71n89 simultaneous poetry 11, 17, 142, 152–74, 214, 216, 218 see also ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’; voice singularity 2–3, 7, 87, 126 see also individual; subject Sirius 147n15, 213, 214 Słodki, Marcel 46, 68n14, 213 Sloterdijk, Peter 51, 56, 57, 58, 73, 88, 92n70, 97, 133, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194, 198n63 ‘société anonyme pour l’exploitation du

21/05/2014 15:00:27

248

dada 1916 in theory

vocabulaire dadaïste’ 118n55, 218 society 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 14, 23, 24, 31, 35, 47, 50, 54, 56, 73, 75, 78, 80, 85–86, 88, 92, 96, 97, 99, 101, 105, 106, 107–8, 111, 112–15, 127, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 169, 170n14, 170n17, 172n53, 176, 180, 181, 182, 186, 194, 195, 197n38, 201, 204, 205, 212, 218 Soffici, Ardengo 19 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 176 sound poetry see ‘lautgedichte’ speed 163 Spiegelgasse 100, 108, 176, 177, 214 Spinoza, Baruch 3, 8, 12 Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance 121 see also Arp; chance squares; Taeuber Stalin, Joseph 179–80 state, state-form 5–6, 12, 34, 44, 78, 87, 93, 97–99, 102–3, 110, 112, 156, 165, 170n14, 172n53, 182–83, 186, 187, 188, 202, 204, 218 see also authority; law; power Sturm Gallery 215, 216 style 7–8, 20, 21, 29, 35–36, 95, 104–5, 149n51, 183, 197n38 subject, subjectivity 1, 2, 5–7, 8–9, 12, 14, 43, 44–45, 48–51, 53–56, 59, 61, 62, 64–67, 74, 76, 77, 78, 88, 92n71, 93, 95–107, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 123, 126–27, 128, 149n51, 152, 155, 158–59, 165, 169, 175, 177, 179, 187, 191–94, 197n38, 201, 206 see also Althusser; identity; individual ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’ see Guattari subordination 21, 86, 127, 145 suicide 27, 79, 111, 212, 213 surface 7, 21–22, 24, 29, 44, 50, 52, 56, 71n90, 99, 123, 124, 134–35, 142, 164, 168, 185 see also appearance; grid; text Surrealism 62, 77, 99, 100, 161 Suzuki, Damo 189 symbol, symbolic 14, 56, 88, 92n70, 107,

Jones D, DADA.indd 248

108, 110, 111, 113, 114–15, 190, 202 see also authority; language; state ‘tableau en papier’ see Rectangles According to the Laws of Chance Taeuber, Sophie 58, 63, 64, 65, 71n97, 120, 124, 125, 137, 141, 142, 143, 150n68, 211, 213, 215, 216, 217 see also Arp Tenderenda der Phantast 27–28, 29, 39n63, 212 see also Ball text, texture 21–23, 24, 34, 35, 37n24, 41, 55, 61, 62, 74, 93, 105, 113, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 143, 148n22, 152, 165, 183, 201, 206 Théâtre Zurichois de Marionnettes 58, 217 Thomas, Dylan 161 Tiefenhöfe 39n82, 130 Todorov, Tzvetan 163 totality 7, 8, 49, 52, 53, 62–63, 76, 81, 163, 164, 206 see also Levinas Totality and Infinity 44 see also Levinas Trieste 166, 213, 218 trist en ţară see Tzara Trostky, Leon 205, 206 see also permanent revolution truth 35, 41, 63, 70n51, 106, 114, 175–76, 178, 179, 180, 181, 185, 191, 192, 202, 205 typography 21–24, 217 Tyler Durden 105–6 Tzara, Tristan 52, 74, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 96, 104, 105, 108–9, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118n64, 112, 122, 124, 130, 135, 136, 141, 146, 151n72, 153, 154, 155, 159–60, 166, 171n26, 206, 207, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 Über das Geistige in der Kunst (‘On the Spiritual in Art’) 32, 211 see also Kandinsky

21/05/2014 15:00:27

index Ulysses 166, 213 see also Joyce Under Milk Wood see Thomas ‘Ursonate’ see Schwitters The Usual Suspects 95, 107–8 Vaché, Jacques 79, 90n26 Valéry, Paul 34 van Hoddis, Jakob 37n19 van Rees, Otto 125, 130, 212, 213 van Rees-Dutilh, Adya 124, 125, 130, 213 Vaneigem, Raoul 4, 109, 204 variety theatre 78–79, 214 see also cabaret Verdi, Giuseppe 114 ‘verse ohne worte’, poems without words 30–31, 214 see also Ball; poetry Veselovsky, Alexander 180 Vincennes 203 Vingt-cinq poèmes 135, 136 see also Tzara violence 12, 14, 15n21, 64, 73–92, 94, 133 Vira-Magadino 216 The Visible and the Invisible 59 see also Merleau-Ponty Vive la France 22 see also Marinetti voice 23, 49, 87, 88, 114, 154, 157, 159, 164, 168, 173n66 see also ‘lautgedichte’; ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’; poetry ; simultaneous poetry; ‘verse ohne worte’ Vološinov, Valentin 182 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 13, 14, 181, 189 Wagenbach, Klaus 160 Walden, Herwarth 20 ‘The wanderer and his shadow’ see Nietzsche war machine 8, 182–83, 186 see also Deleuze; Guattari Weaver, Harriet Shaw 166

Jones D, DADA.indd 249

249

Weggis 210 Weimar 80 Weisser Hirsch 20 ‘whodonut’ 185, 198n59 Wigman, Mary 63, 64, 66, 211, 215 see also dance; Laban; performance Wilde, Oscar 16n26, 28 will, willing 55, 58–61, 65, 66, 67, 107, 111, 123, 124, 128, 148n29 see also Nietzsche; Schopenhauer The Will to Power see Nietzsche Williams, Raymond 156 ‘Wolken’ 38n63 see also Ball words-in-freedom see Marinetti; parole in libertà The World as Will and Representation see Schopenhauer Wortkunst theory 30 Wyn Evans, Cerith 61, 62 Wynne, Ellis 61 YBA (Young British Artist) 61 Young, Julian 70n51 Zang Tumb Tumb 22, 26 see also Marinetti Zapruder film 185 Zar and Zaress see Hennings; puppets Zarathustra 54 zaum 32 Zeichnung A2: Hansi see Schwitters Zeno 134 Zinoviev, Grigory 176 Žižek, Slavoj 95, 106, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115 Zunfthaus zur Meise 217 Zunfthaus zur Waag 215 Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz 214 see also Ball Zurbrugg, Nicholas 15n21 Zürcher Post 68n12 Zurich 1 passim Zurich Dada 3 passim Zurich Kunsthaus 137, 217

21/05/2014 15:00:27

Jones D, DADA.indd 250

21/05/2014 15:00:27