Dada's Subject and Structure: Performing Ideology Poorly 3031266102, 9783031266102

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Dada’s Subject and Structure Performing Ideology Poorly Brandon Pelcher

Dada’s Subject and Structure

Brandon Pelcher

Dada’s Subject and Structure Performing Ideology Poorly

Brandon Pelcher Tufts University Boston, MA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-26609-6    ISBN 978-3-031-26610-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26610-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank Andrea Krauss, for her indefatigable support and encouragement throughout much of my academic career, including her many constructive comments that have helped me to complete this book. The careful reading and advice of Patrizia McBride, Patrick Greaney, and Arne Höcker over the years have also helped me to clarify elements of my arguments, for which I am particularly grateful. Acknowledgments are also due to previous publishers of elements of this book. Segments of Chap. 5 were previously published in my article on Marcel Duchamp, “Window Shopping with Duchamp: Commodity Aesthetics Delayed in Glass.” Creative Commons 4.0, 2019. This article first appeared in Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, Volume 43, Issue 2, September 2019. Published with permission by New Prairie Press. Segments of Chap. 1 were previously published in my article on Kurt Schwitters, “Ideology with an /i/: Reading Dada with Schwitters.” Copyright © 2020 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Modernism/Modernity Print +, Volume 5, Cycle 3, November 2020. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Segments of Chap. 4 were previously published in my article on Hannah Höch, “Höch’s Weimar and Wilhelm: Rundschau’s Avant-Garde Reframing.” Copyright © 2021 Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. This article first appeared in Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation, edited by Julia Listengarten and Yana Meerzon. Published with permission by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. v

Contents

1 Introduction: Taking Dada and Ideology Seriously  1 2 “A  Constant Problem and Preoccupation”: Dada and/as Sign 29 3 “A Spectre is Haunting Dada”: Dada and/as Manifesto 59 4 “We  Need Only Take Scissors”: Dada and/as Photographic Image107 5 “So  That Its Useful Significance Disappeared”: Dada and/as Commodity159 6 Conclusion:  Stumbles and Possible Solutions in Dada Scholarship183 Bibliography189 Index219

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Abbreviations and Conventions

For reasons of space as well as ease of identification, several frequently occurring core primary texts are abbreviated as follows:

BDF BSW CP CWD DA DAA DDS DLW DR DT

Bilanz der Feierlichkeit: Texte bis 1933, Raoul Hausmann. 2 volumes. text+kritik, 1982. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Walter Benjamin. 4 volumes. Harvard University Press, 2004–2006. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Peirce. Harvard University Press, 1960. References followed by section number. Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Arturo Schwarz. 2000. Dada Almanac, edited by Richard Huelsenbeck and Malcolm Green, translated by Malcolm Green et al. Atlas Press, 1998. Dada Art and Anti-Art, Hans Richter. Thames & Hudson, 2007. Duchamp du signe, suivie de notes, Marcel Duchamp. Flammarion, 2008. Das Literarische Werk, Kurt Schwitters. 5 volumes. DuMont Schauberg, 1973. The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Dawn Ades. University of Chicago Press, 2006. “Dada Triumphs!”: Dada Berlin, 1917–1923—Artistry of Polarities: Montages-Metamechanics-Manifestations, Hanne Bergius. G.K. Hall & Co., 2003.

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Abbreviations and Conventions

FDMR “First Dada Manifesto,” Hugo Ball. In Flight out of Time, edited by John Elderfield, translated by Ann Raimes, 219–221. University of California Press, 1996. FDMW “The First Dada Manifesto,” Hugo Ball. In The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet, Erdmute Wenzel White, translated by Erdmute Wenzel White, 228–229. Camden House Press, 1996. FMF “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Filippo Marinetti. In Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman. Yale University Press, 2009. FOT Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, Hugo Ball. University of California Press, 1996. MECW Marx and Engels: Collected Works, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 50 volumes. Lawrence & Wishart, 2010. OC Oeuvres Complètes, Tristan Tzara. 7 volumes. Flammerion, 1975. ORC On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Althusser. Verso, 2014. PF Philosophical Fragments, Friedrich Schlegel. University of Minnesota Press, 1991. PMF Le premier manifeste du futurisme: édition critique avec, en fac-­ similé, le manuscrit original de F. T. Marinetti, edited by Jean-­ Pierre Andreoli-de-Villers. Édition de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1986. SDM Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, Tristan Tzara. One World Classics, 2011. TTDM “Dada Manifesto 1918,” Tristan Tzara. In Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, translated by Barbara Wright, 3–13. One World Classics, 2011. ZZM Zinnoberzack, Zeter und Mordio: Alle Dada Texte, Hugo Ball. Wallstein Verlag, 2011.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Fig. 5.1

Raoul Hausmann’s Porträt eines Dichters: Paul Gurk [Portrait of a Poet: Paul Gurk] as printed in Der Dada, no. 2 (December 1919) 3 Raoul Hausmann’s Was ist dada? [What is Dada?] as printed in Der Dada, no. 2 (December 1919) 7 John Heartfield and George Grosz’s advertisement, Gegen die Ausbeuter! [Against the Exploiters!], for the journal Der blutige Ernst [The Bloody Seriousness] (1919) 11 Kurt Schwitters’ “Das i-Gedicht” [The i-Poem], originally printed in Die Blume Anne: Die neue Anna Blume (1922) 32 A comparison between the Kurrent and the Sütterlin handwritten scripts, as written at the beginning of the twentieth century36 Tristan Tzara’s Manifest Dada 1918 [Dada Manifesto 1918] as printed in Dada, no. 3 (July 1917) 92 Anonymous publicity photo of the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe [First International Dada-Fair] (June 1920) 122 The cover of Erste Internationale Dada-Messe [First International Dada-Fair] (July 1920), edited by Wieland Herzfelde133 Badebild [Resort Photo] as printed on the cover of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (24 August 1919) and a tipped-in postcard, Einst und Jetzt! [Then and Now!], to the Deutsche Tageszeitung139 Photograph of the Woolworth Building upon completion (1913)173

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Taking Dada and Ideology Seriously

In an issue of Littérature, Tristan Tzara published “Pour faire un poème dadaïste” [To Make a Dadaist Poem] (July 1920h), which was eventually incorporated into Tzara’s larger “Dada manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer” [Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love] (12 December 1920j, in OC 1, pp. 377–387), the last of his Dadaist manifestos.1 Appropriately titled, the recipe lays out precisely how one makes a Dadaist poem: Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd. (in SDM, p. 39) 1  Given the very brief window that Dadaism was active, full dates of a work’s first performance or publication will be given when available. These dates are likewise added in the bibliography.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Pelcher, Dada’s Subject and Structure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26610-2_1

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This work promotes and, particularly in its later attached example poem, performs many of the hallmarks often associated with Dada: the inclusion of chance, montage aesthetics, appropriation of mass media, simultaneously manifesto and anti-manifesto, an attack on the conception of genius and authorship, an ironically winking self-deprecation, among other tactics and strategies. In a simple, formal, imperative tone, Tzara goes step by step, prescribing exactly what must be done in order to make a Dadaist poem. One line, however, stands out among the rest, the first to switch from that recipe-like imperative voice to explain: “The poem will resemble you.” Acting as something of an epilogue to the work of the poem’s creation, Tzara suggests with this line that the author of the new Dadaist poem, the now Dadaist poet—you, whoever you are—is reflected in the randomly jumbled words of an appropriate-length newspaper article. Somehow, that is what you resemble, how you are seen, how people see you. While Tzara may have been among the most blatant in this formulation—you are (little more than a jumbled version of) what you read— other Dadaists have made similar allusions, if not outright arguments. Perhaps most directly similar to Tzara’s sentiments would be a series of collages created in 1919, the year before Tzara’s manifesto-recipe, by Raoul Hausmann. Three works, subtitled Paul Gurk; Dr. Max Ruest; and Dr. S.  Friedländer-Mynoud (see Fig.  1.1; see also Dickerman 2005, p. 129), are all portraits that resemble, presumably, the three people who go by these eponymous names. These neo-primitivist portraits are comprised of strips of newsprint and newspaper headlines, for example, two headline “e”s for eyes, a long line of text for a nose. Similar techniques that suggested a deep interaction between media and subjectivity were repeated across many Dadaist photomontages and assemblages with various elements of mass media and mass-produced commodities, to whatever extent those are separable entities. John Heartfield, for example would repeat this motif in his infamous Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung work, Ich bin ein Kohlkopf. Kennt ihr meine Blätter? [I’m a Cabbage Head! Do You Recognize My Leaves?] (February 1930, see Zervigón 2012, p.  241). Scholarship has made connections between Dada and subjectivity in the past, perhaps most recently by Patrizia McBride (2011) and Matthew Biro (2009). These connections have largely been framed as a re-constitution of the subject, particularly in the wake of the violence and trauma of the First World War, whether through techniques and practices of montage or the cyborgization of the human body. Tzara and other Dadaists, however,

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Fig. 1.1  Raoul Hausmann’s Porträt eines Dichters: Paul Gurk [Portrait of a Poet: Paul Gurk] as printed in Der Dada, no. 2 (December 1919)

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seem more concerned with the construction and reconstruction, the formation, continual maintenance, and reinforcement of subjectivity. In his own Dadaist manifesto, “Was will der Dadaismus in Europa?” [What Does Dada Want in Europe?] (22 February 1920a), Hausmann expands the line of thought in Tzara’s “Pour faire” beyond mass media to include all of culture in a typically incisive, Dadaist fashion: “The milieu, your somewhat dusty atmosphere started the motor of the soul and the thing runs by itself […] you are simply being played. You are the victim [Opfer] of your way of looking at things, your so-called education, which you draw wholesale generation to generation from books of history, the bourgeois legal code, and a few classics” (1920a, in BDF 1, pp. 94–95).2 Beyond Tzara’s suggestion that you resemble a mixture of the newspaper that you read, Hausmann suggests you are a tool, a play-thing of the culture, in which you grew up. You are whatever it is that you have been acculturated to be, constructed by and reactive to, “played” by, cultural elements, an Opfer, both the victim of and sacrifice to that culture. For Hausmann, a human is more a cog in the machine of culture; their mechanized soul set in motion, activated by the culture, “played and sung by its own milieu” (1920a, in BDF 1, p. 94). These elements, passed from generation to generation through specific educational and acculturational practices, combine to create “your way of looking at things,” the system of your beliefs and principles, less simple ideas thought by you than procedures and policies played through you. Fellow, if short lived, Dadaist Walter Serner attempted to sum up this line of thought in his Letzte Lockerung Manifest Dada [Last Loosening Dada Manifesto] (1920a), which he worked on for two years before being published: “World views are word mixtures” (1920b, in Green 1995, p. 155). Those words and those mixtures, what Hausmann would call the constitutive elements of culture’s dusty milieu, were neither coined nor combined by you, but rather by the accumulated culture transmitted through the generations. As Tzara put it, these literal word mixtures, cobbled together from these or those elements of the culture and society in which you move rather than from you yourself, resemble you. I argue that this process of resemblance, the ways in which combinations of cultural elements combine into something that looks like a subject is the focus of the theoretically incisive critique of Dada. This begs the question, of course: What is Dada?

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 Unless otherwise noted, all translations of BDF are my own.

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Under the Banner of Dada As is always the case in explorations of Dadaism, the term Dada is exceedingly problematic, not only in the purposeful ambiguity of its genesis, but also in the ambiguity of its referent. That is, when one asks “What is Dada?,” they may be questioning the meaning of the word itself, the movement of authors and artists that loosely utilized the term, the modifier of this or that work of art, or some complex amalgamation of all three.3 For the most immediate purposes of this book, this question becomes “What counts as Dada?” or “Is this a Dadaist work?,” which is to say, is this therefore a work within the bounds of this examination? While there are no entirely adequate ways to answer this question either, it does clarify a few initial difficulties that previous scholarship has encountered. Many previous studies have focused on some temporal and/or geographical chapter, almost always between 5 February 1916, at Spiegelgasse 1, Zurich, and 13 May 1921, at Rue Danton 8, Paris—the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire and the dissolution of the mock trial of Maurice Barrès (see FOT, pp. 79f., DAA, pp. 11–19, as well as Bonnet 1987, Harding 2013b). This approach, of course, has a series of problems. The word dada, for example, would not be appropriated and used to denote any movements or works until two months after the Cabaret Voltaire opened its doors to the public. Indeed, a group of artists that “wasn’t Dada, but it was in the same spirit” (Cabanne 1971, p. 56), which included artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Man Ray, and others, had been agitating the literary and art scene in New York since mid-1915. Much of this confusion was by design. Hugo Ball, proclaims with the first line of his “Eröffnungs– Manifest 1. Dada Abends” [Opening Manifesto of the First Dada Evening] (14 July 1916): “Dada is a new art movement” (1916f, p. 228). A little over three years later, in the second issue of Der Dada (December 1919f), edited by Raoul Hausmann, readers are informed matter-of-factly: “Dada is not an art movement” (p.  2). With his manifesto, Hugo Ball, the ostensible founder of Dada disavowed it a mere four months after opening the cabaret (see FOT, 3  In order to avoid, as best as possible, such ambiguity, this book will capitalize the word when using it to refer to the literary and artistic movement, either as the noun “Dada” or the adjective in reference to a work or artist “Dadaist.” To refer to the signifier itself, on which much of Chap. 2 is focused, this book will italicize the term “dada.” Similarly, this book will use “art” in the widest sense, including specifically literary art, in order to avoid the repetition of “author and artist,” “literary and art movement,” etc.

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p.  73). Across multiple manifestos, however, Tzara, Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, and others all agreed that disavowal of Dada was practically a requirement of membership in Dada. Unlike preceding –isms, where works could be judged against defined and foundational concepts, such as the geometric form of cubes or technological progress and speed of futures, Dada had no stable, well-defined, central idea around which its artworks or artists could orbit. Like the structure of the very movement itself, Dada was radically, farcically decentralized. This decentralization of Dada is, of course, not merely a result of how so-called Dadaists talked about their own movement. The works themselves were radically heterogeneous, often with little connecting them to others. They span themes as broad as religion, industrial and technical revolutions, the First World War, mass media, consumerist capitalism, aesthetics and the world of art. They take on a number of forms, genres, media, and techniques, from dance, recital, singing, happening, poetry, verse, manifesto, review, relief, painting, photography, typography, montage, assemblage, sculpture, readymade. Beyond the suggestion of Rex Last that “in a real sense there are as many ‘Dadas’ as there are ‘Dadaists’” (1973, p. 162), it may well be more appropriate to suggest that there are as many Dadas as there are Dadaist works. This circular definition appears easily, if admittedly imperfectly, solved by ascribing to a given work the descriptor “Dadaist” only when it is directly indicated as such by the use of the word dada, whether in title, collection, theme, or by the creators themselves. Such an attribution causes far fewer, if also some new, difficulties. For example, did Ball’s celebrated sound poem gadji beri bimba (23 June 1916c, see Ball 2016, p. 67) only become Dadaist after its inclusion in Galerie Dada, its first association with the word dada, almost a year after it was originally performed in Cabaret Voltaire? While such a strategy will clarify the limits of this book’s object of study in a number of ways, there will be times when a brief excursus to argue for the inclusion of particular works will prove helpful. Such limits are necessary for a study of the (non)art (non)movement of Dada. Of course, Dadaists themselves had no such limits when defining what might or might not be Dadaist, asking rhetorically: “What is dada? An art? A philosophy? A politics? A fire insurance? Or: state religion? Is dada absolute energy? or is it ☞ nothing at all, i.e. everything?” (see Fig. 1.2; Hausmann 1919f, p. 7).4 This book argues that it is less their lack of limits 4  Unless otherwise noted, all emphases, including manicules, underlining, italics, etc., are in the original. This was also reproduced, with occasional alterations. See Hausmann (1991, p. 8); Huelsenbeck (1920g, in DR p. 99).

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Fig. 1.2  Raoul Hausmann’s Was ist dada? [What is Dada?] as printed in Der Dada, no. 2 (December 1919)

than their lack of an appropriate theoretical vocabulary with which to explain their works, their movement, and indeed their goals, a vocabulary simultaneously broad and incisive enough to accurately communicate Huelsenbeck’s description of Dada as something that “crystalizes into a single point yet extends over the endless plain” (1920c, in DA, p. 10).

Ideology: More than Mere Ideas Antoine Destutt de Tracy was the first to coin the term ideology, from his jail cell following the French Revolution. Although Tracy had imagined ideology as the rational and scientific study of ideas, literally idea -ology, in contrast to what he saw as the irrationality of The Terror that had

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imprisoned him, it was Napoleon who transformed the term into how it is often used today, as he turned it against Tracy and others, pejoratively branding them “ideologues” who stood in the way of his formation of the First French Empire (see Eagleton 2007, pp. 65–70). Some 50 years later, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity] (1841) reformulated the concept of ideology yet again (see Feuerbach 2013). Rather than ideology functioning as a determined system of ideas, à la Tracy and Napoleon, Feuerbach argued that the Christian idea of God is an external personification of inner human nature, a specular creation of Christianity’s adherents rather than an external argument foisted on or against them. Karl Marx famously seized on this conception of a de-personalized ideology in his base-superstructure metaphor of the bourgeois capitalist State (see MECW 29, pp. 257–417). The base, which comprises the exploitative and alienating forces and modes of production, creates and informs a superstructure of social and cultural norms and ideals meant to conceal, legitimize, and maintain that base. This superstructure is both where ideology resides and what it is; a specular creation of those caught within the base’s exploitation and alienation, which has often been called a “false consciousness” of their real conditions of existence.5 Marx’s bifurcation of society in this way has been critiqued and adapted since its inception (see E. Wood 1995, Ervin 2020). Antonio Gramsci, for example, highlighted the influence of the superstructure on the base and theorized the compartmentalization of the superstructure into various political and civil spheres to underscore the “complex, contradictory, and discordant ensemble of the superstructures” that account for the differences in ideological force between, for example, a police officer and a journalist (1992, p.  366; see also 1992, pp.  407–409). While Dadaist works have examined the Christian god (along with many other gods), capitalism and the bourgeoisie, beat cops and beat reporters, it was always ideology itself, the language and logic the fueled its reproduction in the formation of its subjects that underpinned the opponent of Dadaist praxis.

5  Friedrich Engels wrote of the worker deceived by false consciousness in a letter dated 14 July 1893: “The actual motive forces by which they are impelled hidden from them […] Hence the motives they suppose themselves to have are either spurious or illusory […] They work solely with conceptual material which they automatically assume to have been engendered by thought” (2010, in MECW 50, p. 164). And Walter Serner wrote, giving a decidedly Dadaist twist: “The ultimate disappointment? When the illusion that one is free of illusion reveals itself as such” (Serner 1919, in DR, p. 58).

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Tzara suggested that “Dada opposed everything that was literature, but in order to demolish its foundations we employed the most insidious weapons, the very elements of the literature and art we were attacking” (1979, p. 403). This tactic, however, was used far beyond the bounds of traditional ideas of literature and art, for it was not only literature and art that Dada opposed, but rather every kind or method of ideology, the totality of what Huelsenbeck called “cultural ideology” that “the Dadaist instinctively sees as their mission to smash” (1920e, p.  34; see 1920f, p.  44). In combination with the fact that, “fundamentally, Dadaism is about making and producing art” (Dickerman 2003, p. 8), which is to say elements of culture and cultural ideology, Dada employed the weapons of cultural ideology in order to demolish the foundations of cultural ideology, which Tzara called language and logic but others might well simply call the discourse of ideology.6 Dadaists, then, use the cultural practices through which humans make meaning, on which ideology rests and through which ideology functions and reproduces itself, in order to oppose that very ideology. While opposition to ideology, to the structure of culture itself, is a uniquely vague proposition, their mode of opposition was the subversive appropriation of elements from ideology taken to its extreme. As Walter Benjamin noted, “the Dadaists turned the artwork into a bullet. It jolted the viewer, taking on a tactical [taktisch] quality” (1989, p. 379; see Benjamin 2008b, p. 39). This tactic was meant, however, not merely as a physical jolt, to arrest or stun the viewer, but rather to forge them into a particular type of viewer. As Dorothée Brill summarized, the weaponized Dadaist work “deprived the audience of the means of controlling its perception” (2010, p.  155). Dadaist works refuse the passive, contemplative observer who controls their own interaction with the work. The work confronts its potential audience, attacks, calls out, howls, and hails, until that audience is forced, whether through defense or acceptance, outrage or enjoyment, to respond. Theodor Adorno suggests: “Involuntary and unconsciously the spectator enters into a contract with the work [of art], agreeing to submit to it on condition that it speak” (2002, p.  73). The Dadaist work, in contrast, writes its own contract, forges the spectator’s signature, slaps the spectator, all while screaming in their face that this is what it is doing. The audience of a Dadaist work is comprised exclusively of those who have been harried and harassed by the 6  This book refers to discourse in the Foucaldian sense. See Foucault (1972), especially Part Two.

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work itself. The audience has been formed by the work to be precisely those who have been assaulted by the work. Before a response to any specific and meaningful content of the work—to whatever extent the Dadaist work might have any—the observer of a Dadaist work is forced to respond to the fact that they have been forced to respond. In other words, the observer is made to acknowledge and respond to their own interaction with the work, to the now forcefully made-evident discordance between themselves and the resemblances with which they are presented by this new combination of cultural elements.

Dada’s Critique of Ideological Process Tzara’s recipe-manifesto “Pour faire une poème dadaïste,” for all its pragmatic and straightforward rhetoric, is conspicuous in its radical ambivalence toward the actual content of the article to be dismantled. At first glance, this is unexpected, as Dadaist works and indeed Dadaism itself have long been considered a reaction against various ideologies, most directly and notably those ideologies that Dadaists viewed as contributing to the destruction of the war. Indeed, Dadaists have written these very words. In the same week that the word dada was chosen by those who would come to be called Dadaists, Hugo Ball was clear about the relationship between those first few months of the Cabaret Voltaire in early 1916 and the war. “Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect. What could be respectable and impressive about it? Its cannons? Our big drum drowns them. […] The grandiose slaughters and cannibalistic exploits? Our spontaneous foolishness and our enthusiasm for illusion will destroy them” (FOT, p. 61). Three years later, a similar declaration was made by Heartfield, George Grosz, and Carl Einstein for an advertising pamphlet for Grosz and Einstein’s short-lived Dadaist review, Der blütige Ernst (see Fig. 1.3; 1919): “Against the bourgeois ideologies! […] ‘Der blütige Ernst’ [The Bloody Seriousness] nails down the sickness of Europe […] combats the deadly ideologies and institutions that caused the war” (n.pag.). Here, Einstein broadens the conceptual target of Dadaist ire laid out by Ball from the war itself to the various ideologies that had led to the war. The systems of thought, the ideologies that orbited the war to one degree or another— nationalism, militarism, capitalism, chauvinism, to name a few—have long been targeted by Dadaist works and, therefore, highlighted by Dadaist scholars. Similarly, while Dadaists were clearly comfortable with the

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Fig. 1.3  John Heartfield and George Grosz’s advertisement, Gegen die Ausbeuter! [Against the Exploiters!], for the journal Der blutige Ernst [The Bloody Seriousness] (1919)

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vocabulary of ideology as false consciousness and the conception of ideologies as so many systems of thought, there are moments where Dadaists make clear that they are more interested in something more fundamental that underpins all ideology and indeed ideology as such. For as often as Dadaists referenced the war, they referenced ideology in and of itself as their object of disdain. Richard Huelsenbeck wrote in the introduction to his edited collection of Dadaist works, Dada Almanach [Dada Almanac] (1920a), that it was not merely bourgeois ideologies or those associated, no matter how loosely, with the war, but rather that Dada “opposes every kind [jede Art] of ideology” (in DA, p.  11; see 1920a, p.  6). Of course, to oppose every kind of ideology, seemingly regardless of its content or connections to specific ideas, is to oppose ideology itself, both in form and in function. More specifically, it is to oppose the underlying forms and functions that constitute each and every ideology, the fundamental elements and processes that allow continual ideological function in and of itself. Dadaist critique is focused on ideology rather than mere ideas, on ideological function and processes rather than ideological content, although the latter is, of course, implicated in the critique of the former. This is the Dadaist critique that is both pointedly focused on function and broadly applicable to content, a critical attack that simultaneously “crystalizes into a single point yet extends over the endless plain” (Huelsenbeck 1920c, in DA, p. 10). Tzara wrote in a 1951 retrospective on Dada that there was something of a hierarchy to this doubled target of Dadaist critique: “the very fundaments of society, language as the agent of communication between individuals, logic as the cement” were in fact those elements which had underpinned and propped up all of the “ideologies, dogmas, systems” of civilization (Tzara 1979, pp. 404, 403). Less a perceived relationship to the war, the most direct targets of Dadaist praxis are in fact ideology, individuals within it, and how those individuals relate to that ideology and to themselves. In other words, Dada’s targets are ideological subjects, ideological structures, and their ideological communications and relationships—the material processes in and through which ideology functions and reproduces itself. While Tzara had often served “as a theoretician of Dada” (Dickerman 2003, p. 10), we can begin to see the relative inadequacy of the theoretical vocabulary and framework with which Dadaists were working. Of course, Dada was not a theoretical, but rather an artistic and literary movement. Tzara’s “Pour faire” highlights precisely this tension between the shortcomings of Dada’s theoretical vocabulary and the innovations in Dada’s

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artistic praxis. Rather than focus on an article’s ideological content, its dogmas, systems, or even its lines of thought, Tzara’s recipe-manifesto is particularly focused on the functional processes of ideology that result in the resemblance of a subject. Like Serner, Hausmann, and other Dadaists, Tzara was focused on the traditional formation of a subject made by cultural elements of language and logic, an individual made subject to be victimized and played by the word-mixtures of their cultural milieu, seemingly regardless of which specific ideology or ideological content those elements may espouse—and more pointedly on the sabotage and subversion of the processes of that formation. Tzara’s newly dismantled and chaotically reassembled amalgamation of ideological elements that looks like a subject also looks like you, resembles you, and is therefore a subject with which you can identify. Indeed this identification, a seemingly foregone conclusion, is induction into Dada as a Dadaist, as an artist: “there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility” (SDM, p. 39). The production of art, rather than the detailed elucidation of the theories and frameworks that underpin that production, remained Dada’s driving purpose. Although the vocabulary of ideology as false consciousness, which continued to dominate the conception of ideology (Eagleton 2007, p.  89), served Dadaists well to describe various examples of ideological content on which Dadaist works would focus their critical ire, it was ideological function and reproduction that Dadaists targeted. In its preternatural interest in the hidden currents of ideological processes driving the ideological flotsam, however, in those fundamental processes of reproduction and subject formation, Dada prefigured a more complex conception of ideology and its reproduction through subject formation. Dadaist works would recognize and subsequently sabotage and subvert those processes without the functional frameworks or vocabularies to describe or theorize them. Indeed, it would take another half century before the processes of ideological function and reproduction would be rigorously theorized.

Forming Subjects in/under Ideology In 1970, Louis Althusser sought to understand how conditions of production, in order to continue to exist, reproduce themselves. In his essay, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État. (Notes pour une recherche)” [Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes on an Investigation)] (2014b in ORC, pp.  232–272), and its book length expansion, Sur la

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reproduction [On the Reproduction of Capitalism] published posthumously in 1995, Althusser created the framework for interpellation and its relation to theories of ideology. Similar to Gramsci’s distinction between the ideological forces of a police officer and a journalist, Althusser suggests a distinction between the apparatuses within which they operate, the former a single repressive state apparatus and the latter complex series of ideological ones.7 While the police officer is able to deploy the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” enjoyed by the state (Weber 1948b, p. 78), the journalist uses the processes of material communication—ink and paper, editorial structures and distribution channels—in order to form and reinforce certain ideas and norms while precluding others. Rather than a set of deeply held beliefs or false consciousness, which is to say psychological phenomena, Althusser focused on the material discursive means in which those ideas exist, repeat, and ultimately through which they are reinforced. The structure of the material discourse that surrounds and enables the journalist and their work creates a position from which a potential member of the audience can meaningfully engage. To meaningfully respond to a journalist’s work, for example, one must be literate in a specific language, have the money to purchase journalism, live within the bounds of that journal’s distribution, and so on. A series of structures restrict the type of person who is able to engage with that work. In other words, the work creates a position within society, the center of a Venn diagram with innumerable circles, exclusively from which one can interact with that work. In order to respond to this work, whether you agree or disagree, love or hate it, you must do so from this position created by the work itself, right here; the work creates its own audience. Moreover, the moment that you do respond, you tacitly assent to the ideological framework provided and your place in it. This is Althusser’s concept of interpellation: the discursive means through which the material ideological apparatus creates a position within society and thereby populates it with subjects who are only then able to interact with those means and within that apparatus.8

7  Althusser noted: “To my knowledge, Gramsci is the only one who went any distance in the road I am taking” (ORC, p. 242n7). 8  This and the continuing discussion of interpellation in this book are necessarily simplifications and highlight those elements that are the most pertinent to this book’s argument. In addition to Althusser’s original work, see Montag (2003) and Pêcheux (1982).

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Althusser notes the relationship between ideology and interpellation: “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way as to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals […] or ‘transforms’ individuals into subjects […] through the very precise operation that we call interpellation” (ORC, p.  190).9 Interpellation is the motor of ideological reproduction; it forms ideological subjects. The precise operation of interpellation is not merely a series of rhetorical and material tricks, but is constituted by the ways that individuals respond to and interact with these elements, with interpellations. Althusser illustrates such a response and interaction with his infamous example of a police officer, who yells out across a crowded square “Hey, you there!” to which someone turns around (ORC, p.  190). In this acknowledgment and turn, this individual someone has been transformed into the ideological subject called “you” within a complex structure of legal, political, and other ideologies. This is a simultaneous recognition and misrecognition on the part of “you.”10 I am a “you,” a fully formed human subject that interacts with objects, and I am the “you” who is the subject of and subjected to the calls of that police officer. This dynamic is not based on merely the deference to law enforcement or a guilty conscience. Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” (1972) and its infamous lyric, for example, “I bet you think this song is about you,” interpellates and derides anyone who may (mis)recognize themself in the song. Beyond deictic personal pronouns, like “we,” “you,” “I,” etc., and potential deficiencies of personality like a guilty conscience or vanity, imagine someone finds a bottle on the beach with a letter than begins “Dear Reader” and they (mis)recognize themself as not only a reader but the reader of this very letter to whom it is addressed—what luck that this message specifically meant for that reader has arrived to that reader for that reader to read after all the miles and years on the ocean tides! As Slavoj Žižek summarizes an insight by Barbara Johnson: “A letter always arrives at its destination since its destination is wherever it arrives” (2001, p. 12; see Johnson 1977). In other words, (mis)recognition of the newly minted ideological subject retroactively confirms that specific ideological subject as the destination of 9  Althusser continues: “The existence of ideology and interpellation are one and the same thing” (1995, p.  227; see ORC, p.  191). Although the French term “interpellation” has occasionally been translated as “hailing,” this book will exclusively use the term “interpellation” and its verbifications. See Montag (2017). 10  In order to avoid repeating this phrase, this book will simply shorten “simultaneous recognition and misrecognition” to “(mis)recognition.”

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the interpellation. This is not, of course, merely the (mis)recognizing delusions of a single person; it takes two to tango, and a song. As an element of discourse, of reality imbued with meaning, interpellation requires both an interpellator and the interpellated, for “[n]othing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign” (CP §2.308; see Silverman 1984, pp. 14–25). This, however, can only occur if the two interlocutors share a common vocabulary or framework, “on the absolute condition that there is an Other Subject”; the God, Justice, Father, etc. within religious, juridical, patriarchal ideologies, for example (ORC, p.  195; see Žižek 1989, pp. 111–113). This creates the tripartition of ideological subject formation: “1) the interpellation of individuals as subjects; 2) the mutual recognition between subjects and Subject and among the subjects themselves, as well as the subject by themself; and 3) the absolute guarantee that everything really is so”—interpellation, recognition, and (mis)recognition (ORC, p.  197). Ideological recognition, however, is an imaginary relationship of alienation. Like Feuerbach’s conception of the Christian God, this capital-s Subject is a specular, alienated representation of ideological subjects; with whose vocabulary and framework one interpellates and is interpellated, and to which those minuscule-s subjects relate their alienation. The interpellated subject is specularly alienated from the interpellator, who is simultaneously the subject of and spokesperson for the Subject (e.g. police officer of and for Justice, clergy of and for God). Similarly, Jacques Lacan has shown the specular alienation of subjects from themselves in his concept of the mirror stage (see Lacan 2006b).11 Here, an infant recognizes themself in the mirror and notices their specular image’s recognition back, simultaneously subject and object. This specular image, however, appears more fully constituted and autonomous than the infant’s experience of their own body, a specularly alienated image of an ideal self. Althusser’s third point notes that ideology solidifies these specular images of alienation, the ideological subject’s recognitions and relations, as real. In this way, Althusser sees that the so-called “false consciousness” ­conception of ideology, often attributed Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels, is less false—an alienated reflection of alienated circumstances being in fact rather accurate—than it is imaginary, in the Lacanian sense; constructed of images. That is: “Ideology represents individuals’ imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence” (ORC, p. 181). This removes ideology 11  For an in depth discussion of Althusser’s use of Lacanian thought, see Montag (2013, pp. 118–140).

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from the realm of pure mind and into the ideological subject’s reactions to the real, which is to say material world. Whether prayer, signed petitions, marches on Washington, demos in Berlin, a police officer’s yell, or simply knocking on a door, shaking hands, whistling, and writing—the material world constructs and constitutes, indeed is ideology. Althusser reverses the concept of idea-then-action with Blaise Pascal’s dialectic: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe” (ORC, p. 186).12 In a return to Marx’s materialism, Althusser views belief as an effect of material causes and accordingly directs his critique toward the “material acts inserted into material practices regulated by material rituals, which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus” (ORC, p.  186). In this way, the constitutive elements of ideology function through and extend throughout the world of material, observable, readable practices. Ideology is ubiquitous in that every readable practice is ideological: “There is no practice whatsoever except by and under an ideology” (ORC, p. 187).13 This ubiquity, then, is not only locational but also historical, “omnipresent and therefore immutable in form throughout all of history” (ORC, p.  176). For those within ideology, which is to say everyone, this ubiquity is in fact inescapability. Although Althusser suggests that the complex of ideological apparatuses are given protection “behind the ‘shield’ of the Repressive State Apparatus” (ORC, p. 141),14 his metaphor belies his own arguments that there is no strict separation between ideological and repressive apparatuses, or the omnipresence of ideology. There is no outside, nothing in front of the shield. Rather, the shield is turned around, faced inward, insofar as such ­directionality makes sense. Far more than a shield that protects against a nonexistent “outside,” the repressive apparatus functions as a series of prison walls that structure the limitless “inside” of ideology.15 With no 12  For a thorough reading of Althusser’s reading of this dialectic, and Žižek’s reading of Althusser’s reading, see Pepper (1995). 13  This is similar to Lacan’s concept of the symbolic universe: “As soon as the symbol arrives, there is a universe of symbols […] they imply the totality of everything which is human. […] Everything which is human has to be ordained within a universe constituted by the symbolic function” (Lacan 1991b, p. 29). 14  This metaphor mirrors that of Gramsci’s description of the geography of the superstructure: “The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of [ideological] fortresses and earthworks” (1992, p. 238). 15  Michel Foucault’s investigation of the modern prison system, the repressive state apparatus in nuce, noted that “the principle aim of the penalty” is “the reformation and social rehabilitation of the convict,” that is, the return of the convict to the “inside” of society (1995, p. 269).

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“outside” available, not only can ideology be read, it must be.16 This requirement, however, is simultaneously ideology’s weakness. Whether they know it or not, each subject is well versed in ideology, can read and therefore critique it.17 Not only are ideological apparatuses “the stake, but also the site of class struggle […] because the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself there” (ORC, pp. 245–246).18 The promised land is the battle ground, the crown jewels are the weapons. Althusser adds in a footnote that “the struggle of exploited classes may […] turn the weapon of ideology against the classes in power” (ORC, p.  246n11). Dadaist praxis extends this conception, turning the weapon of ideology against itself.

Less What Dada Is Than What It Does In the century or so since the opening of Cabaret Voltaire and the appropriation of the word dada by the cabaret’s participants, all manner of questions have been posed and answers suggested to determine what Dada is, as a movement. Indeed, this book begins with a similar set of questions and proposed answers. Dadaists themselves, whatever such a label may mean, did little to clarify the situation. Rather, they gleefully exacerbated the ambiguity of the meaning of the word dada, the aesthetic program of the movement Dada, and indeed the very borders between word and movement. This has occasionally led critics to abandon all hope, throw up their arms in frustration, deem it all playful, if not nihilistic nonsense, and walk away. Of course, Dadaists gave these critics ample evidence to make such claims, proclaiming that Dada means nothing, “smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing” (Picabia 1920 in DA, p.  56), that “there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished” 16  Judith Butler notes that injurious speech constitutes the subject whether that subject responds to the interpellation or not. Even if you don’t desire to read ideology, it is read for and to you. If the effect is the same either way, may as well read it. “Thus we sometimes cling to the terms that pain us because, at a minimum, they offer us some form of social and discursive existence” (1997, p. 26). 17  Although not using the same vocabulary, this parallels arguments by Luce Irigaray regarding mimesis and femininity. See Irigaray (1985), especially “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine” and “Women on the Market.” 18  Michel Pêcheux adds: “the ideological state apparatuses constitute simultaneously and contradictorily the site and the ideological conditions of the transformation of the relations of production” (1982, p. 99).

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(SDM, p.  12).19 Other critics, however, changed tack and strategically bypassed questions of what Dada is in order to focus on what Dada does, on Dadaist praxis. Here too, Dadaists gave ample evidence of the movement as a specific type of gesture, as a practical reaction against elements of the early 1900s, particularly those elements that could be viewed as contributing to the First World War. Of course, this constituted essentially everything—art, philosophy, politics, religion, even fire insurance. Combined with the disparate and disjointed nature of the movement itself, chapters here and there, earlier and later, personalities and aspirations, this everything-ness has forced criticism to become endlessly fragmented and focused on specific elements of Dada. This focus on elements within Dadaism and Dadaist praxis is, of course, also supported by the Dadaists themselves, who proclaimed that Dada “extends over an endless plain” in its various critical engagements, yet also “crystalizes into a single point” (Huelsenbeck 1920c, in DA, p. 10). The breadth of their engagements, the complexity of the systems and structures—seemingly each and every specific ideology, theme, genre, etc.— with which they engage, and the theoretical innovation and incision of those engagements have both facilitated and to a certain degree necessitated scholarship focused on the specificities of each of those engagements. In short, Dada’s multifaceted confrontations with a seemingly endless number of complex topics required a long history of similarly multifaceted and complex scholarship.20 More recent studies have innovatively expanded on this corpus, including Ruth Hemus’ and Paula Kamenish’s scholarship regarding Dada’s engagement with gender and femininity (2009; 2015), Elza Adamowicz’s work on Dada’s engagement with the human body as such (2019), Elizabeth Benjamin’s study of Dada’s engagement with existentialism (2016), or Stephen Forcer’s book that combines French-­ language Dada’s engagements with gender, psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and science (2015). These studies have proved invaluable to better understand the various systems and structures, as well as the ways in which Dada 19  For a brief history of the critical reception of Dada as nihilism, see Weller (2011, pp. 92–101). For a more in depth discussion of the intersection of Dadaism and philosophical nihilism, see Benjamin (2016). 20  Of course, the number of studies of particular aspects of Dada are far too numerous to list here. Perhaps the largest and, as it is continually updated, the most current bibliography of Dadaist scholarship is the searchable International On-Line Bibliography of Dada, the database for the International Dada Archive in the Special Collections and Archives of the University of Iowa Libraries. See https://dada.lib.uiowa.edu.

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engaged them. As Dickerman has noted, however, “something crucial is missed in suggesting—as most scholarship implicitly has in its fragmented form—that there is nothing more macro, nothing more overarching about the idea of Dada” (2003, p. 9). Rather than something more overarching about Dada, I argue that there is something that is underpinning Dadaist praxis and therefore the Dadaist works as embodiments of that praxis. This book’s pivot from ideological content to ideological processes therefore also mirrors a shift in the scholarship of Dada and ideology. I show that, although ideological content was anything but ignored, Dada was preternaturally focused on ideological processes, and more specifically on reproduction through ideological subject formation and interpellation, which then came to affect Dadaist engagements with all ideologies. That is, insofar as interpellation underpins the reproductive process of ideology as such, opposition to every kind [jede Art] of ideology—as Huelsenbeck states Dada’s goal—must also be underpinned by some form of critical engagement with interpellation and ideological subject formation. This book explicates and systematizes this critical engagement; the engagement, which underpins all other Dadaist engagements, that I call Dadaist praxis. My approach decenters the complex histories of the ideological content and Dada’s confrontations in order, rather, to focus on both how Dada viewed the reproductive processes of ideology itself, regardless of how it is instantiated in as ideological content, and ultimately how Dadaist praxis is less concerned with confronting content than with sabotaging and subverting processes. Of course, this book makes no claims to have “solved” Dada, whatever that may mean. While this approach certainly does not, nor could it possibly, illuminate every aspect of any Dadaist work, I argue that this approach is able to describe and evaluate the foundational elements of every Dadaist work as an instantiation of Dadaist praxis, without constraining, categorizing, or compartmentalizing those works or dulling their impacts. Indeed, formerly disparate works of Dada are able to find new similarities across previous temporal and geographic borders. By decentering the content of this or that engaged ideology likewise decenters the content of Dada’s engagement—the focus on sabotage and subversion shows that, as Tzara had suggested, Dadaist works deployed “the very elements of the literature and art we were attacking” (1979, p.  403). That is, the processes of interpellation and ideological subject formation that underpin every kind of ideology are simultaneously the focus of Dada’s conceptualization of what ideology is and are the

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targets that underpin every kind of Dada’s critical intervention against every kind of ideology. That an artistic and literary movement within a ubiquitously ideological culture, although that ubiquity has often come to function as a kind of disguise of ideology, might create works that are replete with ideological content is, of course, no surprise. Indeed, there is nothing else, no other kind of content from which works, Dadaist or otherwise, can be constructed. That Dadaist works are overloaded with ideological content, however, seems to have dissembled the fact that they focus their critique on ideological subject formation. That is, they prefigure Althusser’s concept of interpellation, if not necessarily with an Althusserian vocabulary. As ideological content, moreover, Dadaist works are moments of interpellation. This is, of course, not merely an incidental side effect of creating art with ideological materials, but rather is continually thematized by and within the work itself. Previous scholarship has, in its own way, broached elements of this confrontation between Dada and the smooth function of ideological narrative. Richard Sheppard (2000) and Mark Pegrum (2000), for example, place Dada at the inflection point between modernism and postmodernism, and to a certain extent subjectivity within it. Although both recognize Dada’s challenge to modernism and modernist subjectivity, neither explore the prefiguring recognition of structuralist ideological subject formation nor Dada’s innovative and incisive challenge to it. Of course, Dada does not merely prefigure Althusser’s conception of ideological subject formation, but meaningfully plays with it. In creating literary and artistic works in general, and works of pointed ideological content more specifically, Dadaists necessarily perform interpellation. That Dadaist works are and function as interpellation is not reason enough to view them through the lens of Althusser’s conception of interpellation, but rather that they perform that interpellation so conspicuously, so wildly, yet also so incisively, and, I argue, so purposefully poorly that interpellation becomes folded back on itself, subverting and sabotaging the processes of ideological reproduction itself. If Dadaist praxis prefigures structuralist concepts of ideological subject formation, as I argue that it does, so too does it pre-perform poststructuralist critical and subversive performativity. Most immediately, their bombastic confrontations with ideology disallow “the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’” (ORC, p. 191). That is, Dadaist works reveal ideological processes that function smoothly only when inconspicuous, quiet, and

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hidden in plain sight. Tzara’s recipe-manifesto “Pour faire” not only suggests influence, but also questions whether your ideas are entirely your own, whether you are merely the garden in which the thoughts of others grow, whether you are a poem rather than a poet, played by your milieu.21 Of course, Tzara’s critique moves beyond simple illumination and is made all the more forceful by Tzara’s reaction to and suggestions against his diagnosis of ideological subject formation. Take scissors and destroy this element of cultural ideology, re-assemble it in a way that radically disrupts its original message, indeed any message. This new work “will resemble you,” but will not be you; there is a dissonance created by these actions, a space is produced within the bounds of this ubiquitous ideological structure from and within which you can critique both that ideological structure and its effects on you.22 That is, without the benefits or burdens of a theoretical framework, Tzara and Dadaists recognized that the foundational misrecognition [méconnaisance] of interpellation is a space of “resemblance” perpetually available for subversive exploitation and sabotage. Then, they strategically performed this foundational dissonance so poorly as to subvert and sabotage ideological subject formation itself. There is a double movement; illumination of interpellation and its imperfections, imperfections then exploited for the radical subversion of interpellation. I call this double movement Dadaist praxis. Here the process, the technique—irony, paradox, montage, etc.—takes precedent as a theoretically incisive, purposefully unsuccessful performance of ideology and its reproduction through ideological subject formation. Tzara’s “Pour faire” ends with a different directionality of interpellation. After you have completed this recognition and subversion of the chosen article’s interpellation, performed Dadaist praxis, created and completed a Dadaist poem, you are now a Dadaist: “And there you are— an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd” (SDM, p.  39). Just as Pascal’s and later Althusser’s believer began to believe because they kneeled, so too do you become a Dadaist by performing a Dadaist act, the recognition and 21  “Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in them!” (Nietzsche 1997, p. 384; IV.382). “I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject” (Lacan 1998a, p. viii). 22  Just under 50 years after Tzara’s “Pour faire,” Althusser would infamously describe this relationship between art and ideology similarly, in that great art “makes us ‘perceive’ (but not know) in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which [great works of art] are held” (1971, p. 223).

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subversion of interpellation. In other words, you have been interpellated as a Dadaist insofar as you have been interpellated to question the interpellation of another, if not yourself, by some interpellative fragment of mass media. You have turned interpellation against itself and thus become a Dadaist. More directly, this is the creation of a Dadaist work, the Dadaist poem that you have just assembled. However, these processes are Dadaist because they have been called Dadaist by another Dadaist, namely Tzara. The question remains, however, what Dada means and what it means to be a Dadaist. You have been interpellated into Dada with no knowledge of what dada or Dada are, beyond the material act itself that has no immediate or traditional association with Dada. It is the kneeling without the belief, without the knowledge of what the belief is supposed to be or even that kneeling is or has been associated with belief, a prayer without a God, interpellation without an ideology. You have been interpellated as a Dadaist and dada is an empty signifier, meaningless. This is the nothing, the non-thing or not-anything, the hollow center at the heart of Dada and more specifically at the heart of Dadaist praxis—a material interpellation that interpellates you to nowhere, without the Other Subject on which the ideology and its framework is constructed, and therefore without ideology. That is, this is not the interpellation of nihilist subjects, but rather an interpellation of subjects critical of interpellation utterly regardless of ideology; not an ideology of “no,” but no ideology. Dada forcefully, positively in a way, asserts itself as nothing, as no ideology, leaving no target for any critical force of interpellated subjects beyond or behind the material method and methodologies of interpellation itself. I argue, then, that Dadaist praxis does not set out to rebut ideological content, but rather sabotage ideological reproductive function; it is not the critique of ideologies, but rather ideology critique insofar as the existence of ideology and interpellation “are one and the same thing” (ORC, p. 191). Dadaist praxis is a subversive performance of interpellation that forces those in its way to grapple with interpellation itself. Moreover, Dadaist praxis performs ideological interpellation in such a way that their performance never successfully, meaningfully interpellates new ideological subjects, either because the performance of the interpellation itself was radically subversive or because there was no coherent ideology, no Other Subject, behind the interpellation to which the targeted subject could be subjected. This book, for all the warnings of previous Dada scholarship, means to provide a theoretical vocabulary and framework that underpins Dadaist praxis, and therefore Dadaist works that embody that praxis: a

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recognition of interpellation as the motor that allows each and every ideology to function and reproduce, and subsequently, a purposefully unsuccessful performance of interpellation that therefore critiques interpellation itself. This study of Dadaist praxis is simultaneously, then, a study of ideology and the elements that underpin it. Indeed, the novel entanglement of Dadaist praxis with various modes of ideological subject formation, which is to say with material communication, is precisely why Dada has remained so resonant and relevant in the century plus since its historical apogee. That is, the contemporary viewer is far less interested in the ideological policy positions of some obscured (and for many, simply obscure) aristocrat than the fact that he seems to have a wheel for a nipple, wrestlers for a moustache, and a baby for an eye; that all pomp and circumstance has been radically drained from the literal embodiment of aristocratic, communicative, and therefore ideological authority. These shifts in focus, from ideological content to processes, however, do not solve those moments of Dadaist failure. As Althusser noted of his own project, and Judith Butler would later reiterate, not even the radical recognition and subversion of ideological processes undoes the author’s own placement at the intersection of a series of overlapping ideologies.23 That is, while the ahistorical processes of ideological subject formation and interpellation underpin all ideology, that radical lack of history and historical context does not, of course, extend to those who mean to critique or subvert those processes. While this study is particularly focused on what Dada did, on Dadaist praxis, rather than what it was, the elements that did constitute Dada as it was unavoidably influenced that praxis. Just as those historical contexts seemingly forced Dadaists’ hands to critique the various ideologies that constituted their milieu, so too did it often restrict their ability to see their own ideological limits and the ways that they affected their praxes. Dada, particularly in its traditionally appreciated geographic centers of Zurich, Berlin, Paris, and New York, was overwhelmingly homosocial—white European males. This aspect of who Dada was, the ideological contexts within which they lived, affected what they did and perhaps even what they deemed to be worth doing. Dadaists, overwhelmingly European men, often failed to live up to their own revolutionary anti-hierarchical and seemingly anarcho-­communist 23  Althusser writes: “it is essential to realize that both he who is writing these lines and the reader who reads them are themselves subjects, and therefore ideological subjects” (ORC, p. 262). See also Butler (1995).

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rhetoric in their misogyny toward women, including and especially their own partners, and in their primitivist appropriation of African, Oceanian, and Native American cultures (see Kamenish 2015; Hemus 2009; Burmeister, Francini, and Oberhofer 2016; Adamowicz 2019). That is, the recognition of the extent to which their own critique of ideological subject formation, which apparatuses of ideological content structures were to be critiqued, appears not to have been fully recognized or recognizable even to themselves. This book means to shift foci, not erase contexts. In shifting these foci toward the strategically poor performances of ideological subject formation—performances that indeed underpin Dadaist praxis—new connections and relations are possible between and across Dadaist eras, chapters, artists, media, genres, and techniques; all of which had been seen as hopelessly heterogenous and disparate.

Organizing Dada While most surveys of Dada are structured by the movement’s geographical chapters, often beginning in Zurich (with the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire) and ending in Paris (with either the Barrès trial or the founding of ex-Dadaist André Breton’s Surrealism), this book’s simultaneous focus on interpellation, along with Dada’s unique interactions with it, requires a different organizational form. Of course, the borders between media, genres, techniques, etc. have always been porous. Dadaist works are no exception and indeed may prove to be exemplary as their radical heterogeneity is exemplified not only between works but also within them. This is made no easier by the radical advancements made to both the understanding of ideological processes and the propagation of ideological content. Ferdinand de Saussure’s groundbreaking theories of the structure of language and the linguistic sign were published in 1916, fundamentally changing how language was viewed. Filippo Marinetti reconstituted the political manifesto toward literary and artistic ends in his 1909 Manifeste du futurisme [Manifesto of Futurism] distributed through mass media. The mass reproduction of photographic images first became economically feasible for printed mass media in the early 1910s. Fordist developments in mass production, honed with the Model T of 1913, ushered in new forms of ostentatious consumption, advertisement, and commodity aesthetics. Exemplary of many of these elements, Tzara’s “Pour faire” is an element of a larger manifesto. By the time that Tzara had included it in his “Dada manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer,” he had included a

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poem using the technique described. This technique, however, is predicated on the commodity of mass media. That is, as Dadaist works involve a number of media, themes, techniques, etc., in other words engagements with interpellation, there is no flawless taxonomy. Despite these inherent difficulties, and as imperfect a system as it may be, this book will be divided according to chapters based on which of these processes or modes of interpellation appear to be simultaneously subverted and used as means of subversion in the work. This book loosely organizes these elements from the less to the more complex: namely the individual material sign, the genre of the politico-literary manifesto, the mass-reproduced photographic image, and the form and aesthetics of the mass-consumed commodity. Chapter 2 outlines how ideology is embedded within an individual mark and an individual sign. As the foundation on which the literary arts, interpellation, and Dada’s subversive attacks are built, this will serve as not only the first but also this book’s most fundamental element of investigation. Specifically, this chapter explores the supposed obviousness of signification as an ideological effect and as a target of Dadaist attack. A thorough investigation of the letter i, the basis of Kurt Schwitters’s i, a subgenre of Merz, takes place with a close reading of Schwitters’s “Das i-Gedicht” [The i-Poem] (1922b) and his essays on i. This reading shows both the work’s subversion of educational ideological interpellation and the creation of an an-ideological interpellation of i. I focus on various forms of materiality, its relationship to “Das i-Gedicht,” and its role in the subversion of interpellation. This offers a framework with which I then read the word dada itself, its materiality, and its radically deictic nature. At stake is not an idea of determining what Dada is or what dada means, but rather how dada is deployed and used by Dada in its Dadaist praxis. A unique combination of materiality and deixis positions dada, and therefore works that adopt its label, as something of an empty center from and with which Dadaists launch their subversive attacks of performatively hollow interpellation. Where Chapter 2 shows the subversive hollowness of the word dada, Chapter 3 investigates the purposefully unsuccessful creation of ideological force in Dadaist manifestos as an extension of this previous praxis. With close attention to the history of the manifesto as a genre, I focus on the roles of theatricality and performativity of Dadaist manifestos. Dadaists’ initial refusal and continual deferment of proper authority to found or manifest themselves, traditionally gained in the passage from theatricality to performance, sabotages their very ability to manifest or induce others

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to join them, to form Dadaist subjects in the traditional sense. I closely read the specificities of this purposefully unsuccessful subject formation, or unhappy as J.L. Austin might put it, in the often ironic and paradoxical manifestos of, among others, Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, and the meta-­ manifestos of Tzara, particularly his “Manifeste Dada 1918” [Dada Manifesto 1918] (23 July 1918b, TTDM). These readings greatly expand on critical readings of Dadaist manifestos as nonsensical polemics ‘beyond understanding.’ They perform their own eschewal of their authority to perform and indeed of themselves as performers, subverting the genre of the manifesto and its ideological force in subject formation. Chapter 4 moves from the semiotics of the written word to those of the photographic image. The development of the Dadaist photomontage is contextualized by contemporaneous theories of photography by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, László Maholy-Nagy, and others, along with a thorough media history of the technological and ideological breakthroughs of the mass-produced photographic image in illustrated media at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Dadaist photomontage, simultaneously a subversion of traditional visual art and a performative manifesto of Dadaist praxis, is situated in dialogue with the nationalist, militarist, and capitalist ideologies of their medial sources and contexts. Within the critical framework of iterability, citation, and theatricality elucidated in previous chapters, I closely examine photomontages by Hausmann, Georg Grosz, and John Heartfield, among others. An extended reading of Hannah Höch’s Dada-dyad, Dada Rundschau [Dada Review] (1919) and Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands [Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany] (1919–1920) combine to show the subversive performance of ideology and subject formation that underlies what has often been taken as a complex cross-section of Weimar German culture. Chapter 5 expands on the complex interactions between Dadaist praxis and the commodity. In the wake of the Fordist revolution, the commodity became omnipresent and its attendant aesthetic presentation became pervasive. In the context of the evolving cultural techniques of this new form of consumerist capitalism, I read the readymades of New York Dada, particularly Marcel Duchamp, as less a provocation of the world of art by the attempted induction of a commodity, as traditional criticism has almost unanimously viewed the readymades, than as a complex subjection of the commodity aesthetics to the criticisms of the traditional aesthetics of the

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art world. With readymades as a type of proof by contradiction, I show how Duchamp promises the removal of the use value and aesthetic presentation of the commodity-readymade while simultaneously showing that the readymade is fundamentally incapable of doing so, thereby ultimately revealing the commodity’s role in the formation of subjects within consumer capitalism. While Duchamp’s interactions with commodities may be the most direct, Dadaist praxis has consistently been intertwined with commodity logic and culture. I expand these readings to examine the self-­ commodification of other Dadaist works, such as Francis Picabia’s “object portraits,” the mercantile representation of the 1920 Erste Internationale Dada-Messe [First International Dada Fair], and the commodified journals and pamphlets that served as a Dadaist media network. By way of conclusion, I further highlight the significant cross-­pollination of these various techniques, genre, media, etc., which the chapter structure of this study unfortunately but necessarily precludes. This synthesis of Dadaist works similarly synthesizes Dadaist praxis. The subversive performance of elements that constitute cultural ideology and the purposefully ineffectual formation of new Dadaist subjects are recognized as two elements of a more general theory of Dadaist praxis. Moreover, this functions as a more thorough theory of ideology and interpellation, and the ways that it can be undermined and subverted.

CHAPTER 2

“A Constant Problem and Preoccupation”: Dada and/as Sign

If Tzara was right and Dada meant to focus their attacks on the “foundations of civilization” (Ernst 1969, p. 35), there are few better places to begin the assault than on the linguistic sign. To use language against itself, sign against sign, requires something of an internal sabotage, a subversive performance of signification itself. This subversion, however, does not confine itself as an attack on what language is, but rather comes to include an attack on what language does and how it functions between individuals. Dada’s attack on language functions, therefore, as an attack on those who use it and how they use it. With a panoply of uses across a wide array of practices and/of ideologies, Dada’s attack focused on language and its role in the function of ideology and ideological reproduction. As Althusser noted, “the elementary ideological effect” is the obviousness of signification, “that a word ‘names a thing’ or ‘has a meaning’” (ORC, p. 189). In order to undermine both language and its role in ideology, Dada focused its attack on the obviousness of signification itself as the building block of ideology and interpellation. There are, of course, no shortage of examples of ideologically imbued signification in Dadaist works. For example, one of the very first works retroactively labeled Dadaist, Tzara’s simultaneous poem “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer” [The Admiral Searches for a House to Rent] (30 March 1916c, in OC 1, pp.  492–493), plays with signification through the simultaneous speech, shouts, screams, and chants in the three languages of the Great War’s combatants. Rather than investigating a chronological or conspicuously ideological work in order to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Pelcher, Dada’s Subject and Structure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26610-2_2

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theorize Dada’s subversions, however, it may prove useful to focus nearer the end and closer to the periphery of Dada, with a quieter work engaged less with these or those ideologies than with the problems of interpellation and obvious signification’s role within it. That is, the work of an artist, whose involvement with Dadaists afforded insight and whose tangentiality to them encouraged a more critical analysis, may show that even in their works’ relative stillness and simplicity, those works nonetheless subvert the smooth operation of ideology and interpellation: the works of Kurt Schwitters.

Ideology and Simple Impassivity Positioned in quiet Hannover, rather than the Dada metropole of Berlin, Schwitters had a strained relationship with many Berlin Dadaists, most notably Huelsenbeck, who saw Schwitters’ infamous poem, “An Anna Blume” [To Eve Blossom] (1919a, in DLW 1, pp. 58–59), as sentimental, romantic, bourgeois, and therefore doing far too little to contribute to Dada’s opposition to ideology of every kind.1 At the time, however, Schwitters was interested precisely in the critique of ideology that comes from doing too little, from radical impassivity. Soon after “An Anna Blume,” Schwitters began a collaboration with the Dadaist Hans Arp entitled Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling [Franz Müller’s Wire Springtime]. Although it was never completed, Schwitters published the first chapter “Ursachen und Beginn der großen glorreichen Revolution in Revon” [Causes and Beginnings of the Great, Glorious Revolution in Revon], an unsubtle, reversed stand-in for Schwitters’ Hannover (5 November 1922d, in DLW 2, pp. 29–46). It recounts a radically passive man, simply standing and refusing to answer inquiries to explain himself to the mob growing around him, the various reactions of that mob, their growing agitation that leads to “the picture of a violent explosion” as he silently walks away, and eventually “the outbreak of the great, glorious revolution” (1922e, in DLW 2, pp. 37–38). Not only does “Revolution” investigate the revolutionary potential of impassivity, the very element that Berlin Dadaists 1  “An Anna Blume” was originally published in Der Sturm (10 August 1919a) and later released in the infamous pamphlet Anna Blume, Dichtungen [Eve Blossom: Poems] (1919b). Huelsenbeck clarified Schwitters’ supposed position in relation to Berlin Dada: “Dada fundamentally and emphatically rejects such works as the famous ‘Anna Bloom’ by Mr. Kurt Schwitters” (DA, p. 14.)

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claimed Schwitters’ work lacked, but it also specifically investigates the effects of radical impassivity amidst ceaseless ideological interpellation. The silent protagonist of “Revolution” is represented as wholly impassive, referred to repetitiously throughout the first chapter of the work as “The man [who] stands” and “There stands a man” (1922e, in DLW 2, pp. 29–37). Aside from the grammatically required gender, the unnamed protagonist is an ideological blank slate, particularly to those in the crowd slowly growing around him, none of whom he deigns to answer as they continually confront and question him. What may initially appear as a naïve simple-mindedness begins to assert itself as a radical refusal to be socially positioned or pigeonholed by interactions with elements of that society. That is, the man who stands and does not answer refuses to participate in his own interpellation, his own formation as a subject of and within the ideological society of Revon. The nameless man’s ideological vacuity is put into harsh relief by his greatest interrogator and the chapter’s de facto antagonist. Initially introduced as “Sir Doctor Leopold Feuerhake,” the inquisitive bystander is given increasingly more names and therefore more subjectivities: “Sir Doctor Friedrich August Leopold Kasimir Amadeus Gneomar Lutetius Obadja Jona Micha Nahum Habakuk Zephanja Hagai Sacharja Maleachi Feuerhake” (1922e, in DLW 2, pp.  30–31). In addition to this series of names-cum-titles, Feuerhake’s wife introduces him as an “a-art critic, editor, m-m-manager, publisher [of the Revon newspaper], m-minister, indeed minster of the State of Revon” (1922e, in DLW 2, p. 34). At the intersection of journalism and the state, Feuerhake therefore wields two important apparatuses of interpellation. Prefiguring Judith Butler’s revision of interpellation to recognize that the “subject need not always [respond] to be constituted as a subject” (Butler 1997, p. 31, see also Montag 2017, p. 68), however, the man who stands is indeed interpellated by, for example, a series of epithets from Feuerhake’s wife: Lauseaas [lazy devil], Filu [rogue], Rübenschwein [turnip swine], among others (1922e, in DLW 2, pp. 32–34). In addition to these uncontested interpellations, Feuerhake then involves a Revon police officer in the interpellative interrogation of the man who stands, anticipating Althusser’s infamous example by 50 years. As Althusser noted, interpellation at the hand or hails of the police, simultaneously repressive in nature, is ultimately focused on “Identity, concentrated in first and last names, and so on [date of birth, home address, profession, citizenship, etc.], [which] makes it possible to identify the subject […] without confusing them with another subject” (ORC, p. 190n24). Revon’s police

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officer states as much in his interrogation of the man who stands: “I must […] establish your identity,” establish [feststellen] but also state or declare, later admitting that to do so is “one of the main tasks of local police” (1922e, in DLW 2, p. 36; 38). While Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling shows Schwitters’ deep considerations of creatively and impassively confronting what would come to be called interpellation, an impassively simple poem ostensibly composed of a single letter—for the “word is not the primordial material of poetry, but rather the letter” (1924b, in DLW 5, p. 190)—critiques and performs the implicit and unique ideological peculiarities and complications of such a creative confrontation, all with the letter i.

i, i, T , and /i/ First published in Schwitters’ 1922 collection of poems, Die Blume Anne, Die neue Anna Blume [The Blossom Eve, The New Eve Blossom], “Das i-Gedicht” [The i-Poem] (see Fig. 2.1; 1922b, in DLW 1, p. 206) is perhaps the shortest and simplest of his works. The structure of the work is that of the traditional tripartite emblem—a title (lemma), a picture or design (icon), and a following, often explanatory text (epigram)—a form originally designed for easy consumption and comprehension, although it so often falls into enigma.2 Here the presumptive title/lemma above is “Das i-Gedicht,” a title which serves as both a preparatory descriptor of Fig. 2.1  Kurt Schwitters’ “Das i-Gedicht” [The i-Poem], originally printed in Die Blume Anne: Die neue Anna Blume (1922)

2  For a brief introduction to the structure of the traditional emblem, see Manning (2002, pp. 13–16). For a history of its didactic uses, see Daly (2008). For a brief discussion of their often enigmatic nature, see Benjamin (2003, pp. 183–189).

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the content of the work—it is a poem and it deals with the letter i—as well as of the aesthetic ideals and philosophy that Schwitters followed in its production and would enumerate in the following years.3 In the second issue of his literary journal Merz (April 1923), playfully “numbered” i, Schwitters elaborated on the central iconic design of the poem: “The sign i means » T «. It is a small » T « from the German alphabet” (1923a, in DLW 5, p. 138, font in original). Here, Schwitters contrasts the sign-i, rather than the letter-i, with the former ornate Kurrent script of German handwriting, the script-font he utilizes in the citation, and which a new, simpler Sütterlin script was meant to replace. The i-design takes the place of the emblematic visual icon in the poem as both the only piece of (mechanically approximated and printed) handwritten script of a German (Fraktur) script, surrounded by the printed Latin (Antiqua) typeface utilized for both the title and epigram, finally set in brackets beneath: “[lies: »Rauf, runter, rauf, Pünktchen drauf«]” ([read: »up, down, up, Little dot on it«], 1922b, in DLW 1, p. 206). The emblematic structure of the work implicates, at least initially, the Sütterlin-i as a visual icon rather than an excised or decontextualized letter, and the epigram explicitly refers to it in those terms. The epigram does not reference it as the letter-i, Sütterlin or otherwise, but rather material given a particular form and design through bodily performance; for Schwitters, a reinforcement of the primordial materiality of the letter. This materiality becomes the focus of the epigram’s grammatically informal command: read. Here, we see the third letter-i of the work in the switch from the German infinitive, lesen [to read] to its imperative form, lies [read]. That is, the very letter-i creates and clarifies the command and therefore the (explicit) formation of whoever reads the poem as precisely the reader of the poem. Of course, whoever views the poem has already been interpellated as—and as with any successful interpellation misrecognized themself to be—readers from the very beginning, for if the title/ lemma is to be believed, this is a poem meant to be read rather than a design merely to be beheld. Only now with the reading of the epigram is the subject of the general reader reformulated into a specific reader: the reader of this specific material design. Throughout the work, the spectator reads the dual nature of the iconic Sütterlin-i as simultaneously letter and material design, as “i” (in the title 3  See “i (Ein Manifest),” (1922c, in DLW 5, p. 120); “/i/,” (1923a, in DLW 5, p.137); and “i-Architektur,” (1924a, in DLW 5, pp. 176–177).

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and epigrammatic command lies, read) and as “up, down, up, Little dot on it” (in the icon itself and the epigram). Through this split and decentered reading and interpellation process, the reader-subjects are similarly decentered. This seeming symbol-material duality is not unique to the letter-i, although it is in the letter-i where it is represented in its most foundational way. Schwitters wrote: “i is the first letter, i is the easiest letter” (1923a, in DLW 5, p. 139). Of course, the letter-i is neither of those things, but rather the ninth letter in the alphabet and no more simple or complex—as a letter—than any other. However, the material design of a point and a line is foundationally simple, practically unchanged between German and Latin typefaces or their handwritten script counterparts. Sybile Krämer and Rainer Totzke note its initial, simple, and above all its elemental role: “The core of graphism is the dash or the line, which— together with the dot—forms the elemental repertoire of notation” (2012, p. 18). If Mallarmé had found that “literature is made up of no more and no less than twenty-six letters” (Kittler 1999, p. 14), then Schwitters furthers the investigation; not the symbolic but the symbol, not literature but the letter. However, the epigram to “Das i-Gedicht” does not command one to read the letter, but rather to read the material design that creates letters; not “i” but “up, down, up, Little dot on it.” This command can only succeed by the reading of the letter-i in the commanding epigram itself, to the letter: lies, read. This complex of reading, materiality, and literacy; the German alphabet, handwritten scripts, and typefaces; and their intricate relations to ideology and subject formation—all of this is mirrored in the work’s peculiar historical origins: the heated Fraktur-­ Antiqua debate at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Fraktur-Antiqua, Kurrent-Sütterlin The roots of the Fraktur-Antiqua debate extend deeply into the history of German printed type, most notably to Martin Luther’s deliberate choice of Fraktur for his 1534 printing of the New and Old Testaments (see Flood 1993). Luther set German language and type, in both his printed Bible and therefore the Protestant educational programs that would surround it, against the Latin Antiqua: “The Latin letters hinder us beyond measure from expressing ourselves in good German” (qtd. in Flood 1993, p. 132; see Heiderhoff 1971). This implicit intersection of national identity and education, spiritual or otherwise, converged again in the decade leading up to “Das i-Gedicht.” On the eve of World War I, Fraktur was

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considered not only to be “the landmark of German awareness,” but also a “bulwark against the de-Germanization, a means of protection for the conservation of the German way” (Ruprecht 1912, p. 45; Reinecke 1915, p. 85; both qtd. in Wehde 2000, p. 254). For advocates of Fraktur, the typeface was inextricably bound to Germanness—from the romanticized past, in the present, and into the future. The so-called Fibelfrage, the question of whether a German child’s school primers and workbooks would be printed in Fraktur or Antiqua, became a central theme of the debate. To print such books in Antiqua, the Fraktur proponents argued, would show “a contempt for the Germanness of the child’s soul” (Kapr 1993, qtd. in Wehde 2000, p.  253). Schwitters not only couched his “i-Gedicht” in this battleground, but rather, with the juxtaposition of Antiqua and Sütterlin as well as the poem’s formation of the reader subjects of Sütterlin material in Antiqua, actively evokes it. A year after its publication, Schwitters made the origin of “Das i-Gedicht” explicit—the children’s classroom. “The child learns it [the letter-i] in school as the first letter. The class sings »up, down, up, Little dot on it«. […] i is the simplest letter” (1923a, in DLW 5, p. 139). Here, Schwitters describes the moment in which a child is made into a writer, directed by their teacher and workbook, their Fibel, to trace out “up, down, up, Little dot on it” with their hand and create a Sütterlin-i, an initial bodily performance, a formation of the body into a writing instrument. The students are also made into readers, able now to differentiate the mark of the letter-i from others by its material, visual configuration. Schwitters marks this ur-scene of reading as a moment fraught with ideological subject formation within the classroom, what Althusser would later consider the epicenter of “the educational ideological apparatus […] that has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalism.” (ORC, p.  250; see also Foucault 1972, p.  227). Schwitters describes the classroom’s quasi-militaristic scene: the children formed into chorus to sing the verse in harmonious unison, led by the schoolmaster. This is the originary touchstone, the moment when reading begins, when the subject formation inherent in alphabetization and the written word, explicit in the letter-i of the epigram’s command to read, lies, becomes possible. That is, this ideological subject formation begins with reading the letter-i as material, whose ease, simplicity, and naïveté are mirrored in the malleability of the interpellated school children. “Faithfully, schools cling to their old duty of fabricating individuals (in the literal sense of the word) by drilling them in a beautiful, continuous and individual handwriting” (Kittler

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1999, p.  17). Of course, these “individuals” are the same “unique” as every other child in the class, and indeed many children through educational apparatuses in the German speaking world. Education, ideology, and a national script, language, and typeface are all evident in the historical creation and adoption of the iconic Sütterlin-i itself. In 1911, Ludwig Sütterlin, a graphic designer, was commissioned by the Prussian minister of culture and education to create a new handwritten script to replace the instruction of Kurrent in schools. Sütterlin radically simplified the ornate Kurrent (see Fig. 2.2). All ornamental swashes and tails were removed, inclination made vertical, its 2-1-2 relation between ascender, x-height, and descender was simplified to 1-1-1 (see Süß 1995, pp.  5, 51). It was immediately popular throughout Prussia and became the standard script taught throughout the Weimar Republic, finally replacing all other scripts in the classroom in 1935. Along with the replacement of pointed nibs for broad ones, which children’s small hands found easier to handle, Sütterlin’s simplifications were directed specifically at alleviating the difficulties of primary students as they learned to write. While these

Fig. 2.2  A comparison between the Kurrent and the Sütterlin handwritten scripts, as written at the beginning of the twentieth century

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simplifications did little to address the many arguments of primary teachers, among the most vocal factions of Antiqua proponents, the introduction of Sütterlin gave the proponents of Fraktur a new point of reference. Sütterlin would function as a bridge for the students to learn to read Fraktur type, which it more closely resembled than the ostentatious Kurrent. The integration of handwriting and type-reading, which Schwitters reproduces in “Das i-Gedicht,” lies at the heart of the Fraktur-­ Antiqua debate. That is, the intersection of writing, reading, and the overlapping complex of ideological apparatuses—religious, national, educational, etc.—inherent to the Fraktur-Antiqua debate and occupied by “Das i-Gedicht” continually alludes to the presumed transparency of language. Althusser notes: “the elementary ideological effect” is the obviousness of signification, “that a word ‘names a thing’ or ‘has a meaning’ (including, therefore, the self-evident facts of the ‘transparency’ of language), the ‘self-evident fact’ that you and I are subjects” (1995, p.  224; see ORC 189). The visual phenomenon of transparency in collaboration with language results in a reading, presumed to be transparent. As Schwitters noted, to write and read a word, to be literate, is in fact determined by its letters, its primordial material. Summarizing Eric Havelock, Richard Lanham writes that “a culture, to be truly literate, must possess an alphabet simple […] and unobtrusive enough […] that a reader forgets about its physical aspects and reads right through it to the meaning beneath. The written surface must be transparent” (1994, p. 33; see Havelock 1982). Schwitters investigates this simplicity and unobtrusiveness, this transparency in the i’s elementary dot and line, from which all subsequent letters are made. Moreover, the ideological apparatus of the classroom from which this i was excised investigates not only the material, but also the process by which one “learns” this transparency, that “people were programmed to operate upon media in ways that enabled them to elide the materialities of communication” (Winthrop-Young and Wutz 1999, p. xxii). “Das i-Gedicht” unrelentingly alludes to this materiality of communication at the heart of the Fraktur-Antiqua debate, its historical-­ideological contexts, and the presumed transparency that undergirds them. The nationalist bravado that foreshadowed the First World War often framed the Fraktur-Antiqua debate in those terms, only to be heightened as the war began. Specifically for Fraktur proponents, the German script had become as important as the German language to the German people: “Nation and people are regarded not only as a linguistic community, but

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also as a script community” (Wehde 2000, pp. 252–253).4 Fraktur was the well-fitted “dress of the German language” (Wehde 2000, p 251).5 That is, Fraktur as a typeface better suits the German language, is less opaque, interrupts and interferes less than other typefaces with the meaning of the language that it transmits, to the point that its proponents and Schwitters himself refer to it as the German alphabet. As Adolf Reinecke argued, “The German script [Fraktur] is a true reading script; it is more readable [lesbarer], that is clearer and more distinct [deutlicher] in its word-images than the Latin script [Antiqua],” which is to say that through Fraktur, German words have a “greater clarity and lucidity [Übersichtlichkeit]” (1910, pp. 38, 41). Rather than a typeface uniquely created to transparently transmit a language, however, arguments for Fraktur as the well-­suited German alphabet reversed the causality: “The language forces the script to adapt itself to it” (Sammer 1932, qtd. in Wehde 2000, p. 251). This is a process that has taken some time: “Our script is an historically naturally grown thing” (Den Gegnern 1911, qtd. in Wehde 2000, p.  256). As Wehde summarizes, “The relationship between the German language and broken typefaces is naturalized and thus withdrawn from social availability” (2000, p. 251). That is, the relationship between German and Fraktur was transformed from a social or personal opinion about linguistic history into a natural and self-evident fact. In short, it is ideology in the most literal sense, “the confusion of linguistic with natural reality,” a confusion that “transforms history into nature” (de Man 1986, p.  11; Barthes 1991, p. 128; see Žižek 2012b, p. 11). “Das i-Gedicht” then comes to function as a radical critique of that ideological stance. We see in Schwitters’ poem something of a subversion of German language writing and reading since Goethe and the early Romantics: “Writing was effortless and sound was removed from reading in order to confuse writing with nature [um Schrift mit Natur zu verwechseln]” (Kittler 1986, p. 18; see Kittler 1999, p. 9). Schwitters pointedly recreates, through the jolted intersection of Antiqua and Sütterlin within the work, the sociohistorical dimension of typography and reading, and therefore attempts to denaturalize the constitutive letter of the alphabet 4  Although Wehde does not mention it specifically, Schriftgemeinschaft (script community) could similarly be seen in the religious context, a community based upon not only script but scripture. Many proponents of Fraktur saw the national character of Germany as implicitly tied to its religious heritage, particularly in view of Luther’s typographic choices for this translations of the Bible. 5  This is in reference to Gustav Ruprecht’s Das Kleid der deutschen Sprache.

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through the deployment of history, of a script recently designed at the behest of a Prussian minister and taught in elementary schools. The naturalized Fraktur defended in the Reichstag debates is returned to the corporeal, personal, social, and historical. Within this turbulently ideological environment, Schwitters interpellates us as a reader who necessarily recognizes the materiality of reading. We are made the reader of the Sütterlin-i, not as a representation of the letter, but as the reader of its material, graphic representation, now made anything but transparent or superfluous. As Lanham notes, “[w]e must not notice the size and shape of the letters” (1994, p.  33). Schwitters forces us to do exactly that, turning interpellation against the elementary effect of ideology and making of us reader-subjects who question the transparency of language. This dynamic of perceptive reading and ideology critique continues throughout Schwitters’s eponymous genre: i.

From /i/ to i In addition to the theme of the material design of the Sütterlin-i, the “i” and its connective hyphen in the title “Das i-Gedicht” function rheumatically in that Schwitters chose “this letter as label of a special genre of works of art” (1923a, in DLW 5, p. 139): i. That is, just as “Gedicht” indicates the form of the work as a poem, so too does “i” announce the work as an exemplary embodiment of i. In his “i (Ein Manifest)” [i (A Manifesto)], Schwitters explains that Merz creates artistic works through a collage or constellation of ready-made materials, the combination of which thereby shortens the distance “from the intuition to the visualization of the artistic idea” (1922c, in DLW 5, p.  120), with fewer instances of unnecessary representation, where the artist refuses to transform the elements of the collage in order to represent something that they themselves are not already. i, in contrast, nullifies this distance altogether: “i sets this distance = zero. Idea, material, and work of art are one and the same” (1922c, in DLW 5, p. 120). Through the refusal of a recontextualization of the ready-made material into a Merzian constellation, Schwitters sees the artistic process of i as something of a collage of one: “it is the detection [Auffinden] of an artistic complex in the non-artistic world and the creation of an artwork from this complex through demarcation, nothing else” (1923b, in DLW 5, p. 148). If Merz is the creation of art with scissors and glue, i requires only scissors.

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Schwitters suggested that “MERZ is comprehensive. i is a special form of MERZ. i is the decadence of Merz” (1923a, in DLW 5, p.  141), to which the small amount of critical attention concerned with i has largely conformed.6 These genres and their role in subject formation, however, can be qualitatively differentiated. Patrizia McBride has persuasively argued that Schwitters’ Merzian “montage […] functioned as a discursive medium for reconceptualizing subjectivity and agency after the trauma of the Great War,” highlighting its “proto-constructivist and productivist imagination” in a new type of human, a new type of postwar subjectivity (2011, pp. 246; 250). Here the reformation of the subject, traumatically fractured in the violence of the war, is the remade, reformed, reconstituted body assembled from elements of everyday life. McBride argues that Schwitters’ montage “turns [the materiality of the body] into a starting point for a wide-ranging inquiry into possible options for reshaping subjectivity” after the horrors of the war (2011, p.  262). In contrast to Schwitters’ Merzian montage, i appears far less concerned “with refashioning subjectivity” than with understanding its building blocks, the primordial material from which subjectivity is fashioned (McBride 2011, p. 265). If the Merz-artist is the surgeon of subjectivity, the i-artist is its analytical anatomist (see Doherty 1998). The i-artist examines the primordial material, the “first” letter, similar in form to the number 1, and indeed the first letter of the German first person pronoun ich and only letter of the English I, a language with which Schwitters was conversant. That is, the letter i is tied to one’s own identity within language; the Sütterlin-i similar as well to the human figure, little head on top, extremities outstretched but unmoving, like an impassive revolutionary. The primordial material of the i-artist is not merely the typographical material of the work, but rather its intersection with human bodies and the subsequent formation of them as ideological subjects; the very process depicted in the classroom scene from which “Das i-Gedicht” was taken. Works of i, however, are not the remnants of some deceased and dissected subjectivity from which a future subjectivity might be refashioned or reformed, but rather, in their radical excision and their denied material juxtapositions, these works ideologically complicate themselves and their own role in subject formation. 6  To my knowledge, there are no articles dedicated to an investigation of either “Das i-Gedicht” or its relation to i. Rather, i is conceived as a “special form” and therefore material support for larger examinations of either Schwitters’ Merz or Lettrism at the turn of the century. See, for example, Ehrlicher (2011) and Grasshoff (2000, pp. 150–159).

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In his longest critical discussion of i, titled simply “/i/” from the second issue of Merz (April 1923), Schwitters considers the example of Pierre Reverdy’s poem “Regard” [Look] (December 1918), which begins “seated on the horizon, the others begin to sing” (p.  5), to which Schwitters responds: “The song of the others is for me i” (1923a, in DLW 5, p.  137). As Schwitters emphasized, the i-artist “recognizes [erkennt] that some individual detail in the world of appearances around them need only […] be bordered for a work of art to emerge” (1923a, in DLW 5, p.  139). The unique mode of reading in which the i-artist necessarily engages becomes visible. Initially, there exists some fragment of the human world, whether from a school room, a hospital, a tram ticket, a store catalog or a group of jovial “others” singing a song, that is, a fragment of history, of a human or group of human others. While this material fragment need not be significant or meaningful in itself, the i-artist recognizes or perceives it—a kind of reading without symbolic interpretation, a recognition of the material as material, indexical merely to itself, the distance between what it is and what it represents reduced to zero, a reading of the material as nothing other than the potential material of a future work of i-art. This is, however, a dual movement, a full reading of both the material and the location of its excision, its necessary boundary. As Jacques Derrida notes, this boundary creates “the spacing that constitutes the written sign,” that is, “the very structure of the written text” (1988b, p. 9). In his later reading of Paul de Man, Derrida would recognize the un-­innocent nature of this constitution, likening his early spacing to what de Man called the “Grammar of the text when it is isolated from its rhetoric, the merely formal element without which no text can be generated,” the “mechanical, no matter how deeply […] concealed by aesthetic, formalistic delusions. The machine not only generates, but also suppresses, and not always in an innocent or balanced way” (de Man 1979, p. 294). Schwitters, and his method of i-reading and reading i, appears to have prefigured, to some extent, these concepts of constitutive spacing and machine-like grammar: “That’s why you mustn’t look too hard at the material; because that isn’t what it’s all about” (Schwitters 1926, p. 229). That is, the i-artist reads not only the material what to excise but also the where to cut; the work of i-art then consists of both material and nonmaterial, paradoxically self-contained but unbounded. This simultaneous reading and work of i is particularly explicit in “Das i-Gedicht.” Schwitters represents this boundary, the where of the cut, transforms it into something recognizable, positioned, marked, a readability not of

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material or sense or meaning, but rather of excision. This is all the more conspicuous in “Das i-Gedicht,” an excised fragment of handwriting, which “wrote and wrote, in an energetic and ideally uninterrupted flow” (Kittler 1999, p.  9). Like two cilia searching for connection, the iconic Sütterlin-i’s two “rauf”s, the two angled bars that would serve as connectors of the central letter i, were there other Sütterlin letters with which to connect, make their excision all the more evident. While these “rauf”s point back to the educational ideological apparatus from which the icon was excised, as Schwitters made clear in various paratexts, the icon’s status as a montage of one, a fragment, /i/, there are few direct juxtapositions with other elements of the work. Rather, the “rauf”s point to the otherwise unintelligible background of the white paper; they conspicuously pierce the page and mark the place of the cut. That is, the white to the left and right of the vertical “runter” is itself marked, made visible, by the angled “rauf” on each side. It is highlighted again, as the potential though un-actualized place of a cut in the separation inherent to the design of the letter itself, the space between the little dot on top and the vertical “runter” over which it floats. While only inherent in the Sütterlin-i icon, the poem’s epigram makes it explicit. The two brackets signal a form of separation from the icon, while the double guillemets that surround the children’s song further mark the place of excision in the small white between the two angles, give it form and make it recognizable.7 Moreover, Schwitters commands us to read the material as well as those marks that both site and cite that material, to read not only the “rauf, runter, rauf…” but also the “» «.” This excision is the location of the aesthetic and formalistic borders and constraints of the material, or more precisely, it is the fragmentation of both the material and its aesthetic and formalistic totalization, not merely made visible, but pointedly highlighted. In this way, the excision of the simple letter i from a children’s schoolbook conspires to identify the work’s inability to feign the totality of a signifier through which a reader might then transparently access a signified. The naïve material becomes opaque with the introduction of the new conspicuous aesthetic and formalistic framework, which is to say the ideological grammar that would otherwise remain invisible in service of an ostensibly transparent, and therefore non-ideological, totality. It begins to belie its own ideological 7  The initial printing of “Das i-Gedicht” used parentheses and quotation marks, although subsequent printings switched to brackets and double guillemets. See Schwitters (1922, p. 30).

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nature. As Althusser notes, “one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology. Ideology never says ‘I am ideological’” (ORC, p. 191). The radical fragmentation in “Das i-Gedicht,” and more specifically its ostentatious depiction in the brackets, guillemets, angled “rauf”s, and disparate typefaces, exposes the thoroughly ideological nature of this presumed impassive, innocuous, simple, even banal i, the very graphical basis for all material writing and alphabetization. This marked fragmentation, then, of even the most mundane material, not only highlights but also implicitly critiques the ideological grammar that underpins that material. Here we can begin to see the revolutionary character of “Das i-Gedicht” as a work of both interpellation and i. “Das i-Gedicht” both performs and manifests its genre, i—a performative manifesto. It is performative not only in that it performs, i.e. executes or satisfies the aspects of i set out by Schwitters in works such as “i (Ein Manifest),” “/i/,” or his “Banalitäten,” but also in that it functions as its own manifesto. The epigrammatic command to read, lies, can be seen as instructive and directive, a helpful answer to “How do I read this icon?” and a command to read in itself, which combines to become a type of self-­ fulfillment, the command fulfilled in its very recognition as command. This dual command to read invariably makes readers of the observer, although not only of the material, the “rauf, runter, rauf…,” but thanks to the prominent inclusion of the marked fragmentation, the guillemets that the work commands be read, it also makes the observer a reader of the location of the excision. With this complete reading of both facets of the work, then, the observer not only repeats or reiterates, but also recites and recreates the very act of artistic citation that creates a work of i-art. The passing observer becomes the work’s most recent (co)author. That is, through its inescapable command to read, it makes the observer into, i.e. the observer is irrevocably interpellated and recruited as, i-artists, now part of the club, whether they like it or not. “Das i-Gedicht” is then a compelling manifesto that never fails to conscript not only new adherents of i, but also, or rather, new i-artists. Of course, a definitional aspect of the i-artist, which the passing observer has now inescapably become, is the critical reading of ideology. “Das i-Gedicht” critically turns interpellation against itself, stages interpellation as a tool against ideological interpellation, interpellates observers into critics of interpellation. “Important for i is […] that it is a something through me, even if the other have made it, that I have stamped it as artwork, through my

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recognition” (Schwitters 1923a, in DLW 5, p.  137). “Das i-Gedicht” includes within itself, it visibly marks that very recognition through which it is created, indeed a reading and recognition that each reader is then commanded to repeat and recite. It simultaneously exemplifies and recruits as observers simultaneously read and write. This interpellation of the observer, then, is not meant to end with that particular observer, but rather propagate further, to recruit others to both reread and therefore recite this “artwork […] i.e. rhythm, which can also be perceived as artwork by others who think artistically” (Schwitters 1923a, in DLW 5, p.  139). “Das i-Gedicht,” as performance and manifesto of i-art itself, functions as a self-critical interpellation that recruits individuals as subjects critical of their own interpellations as and into subjects, a recruitment that becomes a germ of self-reproductive critical thought without ideology. The work of i-art is meant to be read, written, read again, and so on, the two activities now one and the same, and freshly stamped “i-art” or simply “i” anew. This final stamp by the reader/author is the completion of the process of i, and until the next recitation, momentarily finishes the work: “To me, that is i.” From 1922 to 1924, Schwitters punctuated many of his critical texts on i with some variation of “Das ist mir i” [To me, that is i].8 While many of Schwitters’ works are thematically titled, e.g. “Das i-Gedicht,” “Unsittliches i-Gedicht” [Indecent i-Poem] (April 1923), “Pornographisches i-Gedicht” [Pornographic i-Poem] (April 1923), or his 22 i-Zeichnungen [i-Drawings], the process of creating a work of i-art, in which the artist does nothing but recognize and excise some rhythm, this stamp cannot be some symbol or seal subsequently attached or appended by the artist.9 Rather, this stamp is inherent to the process itself, the “is (to me) i” written with the final snip of the scissors, the mark of the excision, or rather, the excision staged, made visible as less a brand or seal than it is a unique mold or cast, the conclusive punctuation at the end of every work of i-art. This, however, is only the momentary finality of a particular iteration of reading/writing, a temporary closure which allows for further repetitions and recitations demanded by the work of i-art and i. Like Derrida’s mark 8  In reference to Reverdy’s “Regard” (1918) for example, Schwitters uses a similar formulation: “Es ist für mich i” [For me, it is i]. See Schwitters (1923, in DLW 5, p. 137). 9  The two i-poems are both internal elements of Schwitters’ larger work, “/i/” (1923a, in DLW 5, p. 139; 140). The i-Zeichnungen are published in Schwitters (2000, pp. 357–365; 515–516).

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and symbiotic spacing, or de Man’s material and materiality without matter, the work of i-art is meant to be read, written, read again, and so on, the two activities melded and infinitely repeatable (see Derrida 1988b, p. 9; de Man 1979, pp. 294–296). As this final move signals and specifies the momentary completion of the work of i-art, it also serves to reorient the excised material and its previous grammar as something other than what it had been, no longer merely a child’s school book, a department store’s price list, or a misprinted label for table salt.10 They are now, through this act of rhythmic recitation, recontextualized into the realm of the ideologically critical i-art or the i-artistic. In other words, the final stamp closes and thereby momentarily reaffixes the signification of the raw material and immaterial materiality, the text and grammar, of the citation that came before as i-art. That is, Schwitters’ written-excision of i functions like a point de capiton.11 With the closure of a rhythmic citation of and from some previously raw, readable material, a new signification emerges based on the visible cut, the newly repositioned point de capiton, the moment of the work’s retroactive recontextualization as i-art, like a “sentence [that] only exists as completed and its sense [that] only comes to it retroactively” (Lacan 1973, pp. 3.297–298; see Lacan 1997b, p.  262). Only when this new i-meaning is retroactively created in the final moment of excision by this i-point de capiton can the audience recognize the work as a work of i-art, can they consider themselves to have received its message. This, however, is precisely the moment of interpellation within the vocabulary of Althusser’s Other Subject: “The point de capiton is […] the point which interpellates individual into subject by addressing it with the call of a certain master-signifier (‘Communism,’ ‘God,’ ‘Freedom,’ ‘America’)—in a word, it is the point of the subjectivation of the signifier’s chain” (Žižek 1989, p.  101; see Lacan 2007b). This is precisely what i, with its new, unique master-signifier, “i,” accomplishes. Whether the explicit paratext of “to/for me, that is i” or the conspicuously visible excision-as-stamp of i in the closure of the citation, this i-point de capiton gives a new diachronic meaning to a Sütterlin-i, some song of the others on the horizon, 10   These were the original materials of Schwitters’s “Das i-Gedicht,” “Unsittliches i-Gedicht,” and the i-drawing Tafelsalz [Table Salt]. See DLW 1, p. 206; DLW 5, p. 139; and Schwitters (2000, p. 515), respectively. 11  Point de capiton is variously translated into English as “anchoring point,” “quilting point,” or “upholstery button.” See Lacan (1997b).

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etc., as embodiments of i. What makes this i-interpellation unique, however is its refusal to obscure itself as interpellation, its refusal to hide the ideological grammar that undergirds the material. In the act of rhythmic citation in “Das i-Gedicht,” our horizon of expectation is radically and conspicuously shifted to i in the angled “rauf” bars’ disappearance into the white page, the conclusive guillemet, the final bracket, all of which anchor, stabilize, package the work’s own signification as a complete ideologically interpellative unit. That is, the i-interpellation of the observer as reader/ writer of ideological interpellation requires us to recognize, to read that ideological grammar, read the where of the excision, to read the point de capiton, to read the moment of interpellation. The visible final cut of this excision that marks the work of i-art becomes a moment, then, of ideologically critical potential, a subversive disruption of the previously smooth and silent functioning interpellation of the material’s original context. “Das i-Gedicht” is particularly indicative of this potential, focused on the conspicuously ideological and interpellative battles that reverberated around the Fraktur-Antiqua debate in the first two decades of the twentieth century, both within the work as a radical juxtaposition of Fraktur and Antiqua, as well as the excision of the work itself, materially a single letter and epigram from the educational ideological apparatus, now visible in a fluctuating series of uncertain contexts. That is, both implicit process and explicit theme disregard the presage that interpellation never calls itself such. Indeed, in both its excision and the material, “Das i-Gedicht” positively and subversively performs, and therefore makes visible, the processes necessary for interpellation to function. As a reader of this work, the observer is not interpellated as the most recent reciters of ideology, as subject-cogs in the unperturbed reproduction of ideology, but rather as the most recent analysts and critics of ideology and the processes of its self-reproduction, as readers, writers, and reciters with only a new-found set of ideologically critical scissors.

i = dada If i is simultaneously the Schwitters’ stamp, the where of the excision, the point de capiton, the localized moment of interpellation, and Lacan-via-­ Žižek’s master-signifier, which is to say Althusser’s Other Subject that interpellation requires; this all begs the question: “But, what is i?” (Schwitters 1922c, in DLW 5, p. 120). As material, as a line and a dot, it is the basis of all written text, everything. As a letter, it is merely a line and a dot, able

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to differentiate itself from other configurations of lines and dots, but ultimately indexical only to itself, the distance between its material and its meaning, its signifier and signified, is zero, nothing beyond itself. As an artistic practice, it is the pronounced performance of these dynamics, aggressively drawing attention to the work as material, highlighting the work as an excised fragment of culture, with particular attention given to the where of the excision, the severed connections to the larger cultural contexts from which the fragment was taken. Although this final cut of excision completes the work as i, the addition of the letter i, a work of i in itself, titles and further stamps the work as i. Although Schwitters used this process, a particular subset of his larger Merz process and project, only a few dozen times and the resulting works were at something of a geographical and temporal periphery to it, he was clear in his answer to what i is: “Dadaists create Dada, the world is Dada, namely i = dada” (1923c, in DLW 5, p. 150). This equation is communicative, i equaling dada as much as dada equals i. Dadaists would regularly suggest that dada is potentially any or every given material, everything, although simultaneously the non-thing of the ideological grammar that underpins the material, the non-thing of the excision’s cut. Like i, the stamp-cum-title of dada, itself a (and perhaps the most recognizable) Dadaist work, is self-­ referential, material that signifies and references potentially everything and only itself, performatively empty: “☞ nothing at all, i.e. everything” (Hausmann 1919f, p. 7). Although “Das i-Gedicht,” for all its exemplarity of i and therefore relation to Dada, has rarely, if ever, been cited as a particularly notable or even effective Dadaist work, its ostensible, impassive simplicity provides a candid, if complex, view of Dadaist praxis. Dada prefigures recognition of ideological interpellation, they sabotage some element of that interpellation via radical excision, they reappropriate that fragment for their own subversion of future or further interpellation in the name of a perfomatively hollow dada, all of which lays bare and critiques the previously invisible interpellation. This was particularly evident for Schwitters’ potential audience in 1922, many if not all of whom had been introduced to this Sütterlin-i in school, along with this same explanatory epigram. Similar to works more traditionally ascribed the label of Dadaist, however, this unusual presentation of some purportedly obvious and transparent material, now excised from its original sources, from its cultural and historical contexts within the educational ideological apparatus, highlights those very interpellative processes in which that material was originally found

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and to which it therefore contributed. That is, the critique comes less from the exceedingly familiar material than from its ideological tethers—newly severed, sabotaged, and divulged—those interpellative processes now radically destabilized. From the simplest, most naïve, even quietest examples of Dadaist works, this appears to be the kernel of Dada’s subversion not only of specific ideological apparatuses, but also more fundamentally the subversive performance of interpellation that discloses its own ideological contexts and apparatuses, in order to radically destabilize the ideological subject. If there is a more fundamental work to Dadaist praxis, it is i’s equivalent, the word dada itself.

The Word dada On 18 April 1916, the word dada was used for the first time to refer to the loose association of artists that frequented the Cabaret Voltaire in Hugo Ball’s journal: “Tzara keeps worrying about the periodical. My proposal to call it ‘Dada’ is accepted” (FOT, p.  63). It would take another month before the word would be publicly printed, as a kind of epigraph to Ball’s introduction to the first journal that would come to be considered Dadaist, Cabaret Voltaire: “The next goal of the here united artists is the publishing of an international review. The review will come out in Zurich and will have the name »DADA«. (»Dada«) Dada Dada Dada Dada” (1916b, p. 20; see 1916a, p. 11). Perhaps in explanation for Ball’s sudden switch to French, indicated here by italics, when writing about “DADA,” Huelsenbeck suggested in 1936 that in fact the word was chanced upon in a French-German dictionary: “I was standing behind Ball looking into the dictionary […] Suddenly I cried halt. I was struck by a word I had never heard before, the word dada […] ‘Let’s take the word dada,’ I said […] And so it happened that it was I who pronounced the word Dada for the first time” (p. 280). Not everyone remembered it this way. In keeping with the dictionary, if adding a dash of violence, others suggested that it was in fact “Tristan Tzara [who] gave a new name to this malaise […] On February 8, 1916, a paper-knife was pointed at a page in a French dictionary opened at random, and a name was found for the manifestation of the new spirit—Dada” (Hugnet 1932, pp. 125–127). These discrepancies quickly became fodder for ironic Dadaist declarations: “I declare that Tristan Tzara coined the word DADA on 8 February 1916 at 6 o’clock in the evening; I was there with my twelve children […] in the Café Terrasse in Zurich and I was wearing a brioche in my left nostril” (Arp 1921, in DR, p. 68). This frustrated

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irony was focused not only on the word’s origins, but all the more so on its supposed meanings. When Ball first wrote the word dada in his journal, he added the meanings from the dictionary from which he may have taken it: “Dada is yes yes in Romanian, rocking horse and hobbyhorse in French. For Germans it is a sign of foolish naïveté and happily procreative attachment to the stroller” (FOT, p.  63). In the three months between that first mention of the word in Ball’s journal and his explanation of the word in the “Eröffnungs–Manifest 1. Dada Abends” (14 July 1916d), the meanings begin to loosen. “Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French, it means ‘hobby horse.’ In German it means ‘Goodbye,’ ‘Get off my back,’ ‘Be seeing you sometime.’ In Romanian: ‘Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely right.’ And so forth” (FDMR, p. 220). Tzara, two years later, added still more meanings to the word dada in his “Manifeste Dada 1918”: “the tail of a sacred cow […] A cube, and a mother […] a children’s nurse” (TTDM, p. 4). Unlike cube for Cubism or future for Futurism, none of these provided meanings of dada helped to clarify what Dada(ism) actually was, nor how that word was associated with the Cabaret Voltaire and eventually the other chapters of Dada further afield. This led to a cottage industry of journalists and critics who attempted to find the real or true meaning of the word which could then presumably be used as a skeleton key for Dadaist works, an industry that has long since outlived Dada itself.12 In much the same way that many Dadaists refused to take seriously the origins of the word’s appropriation,13 so too did they playfully disdain the earnest attempts to find a presumed true meaning of the word. As Hans Arp clearly stated, “I am certain that this word has no importance, and that only imbeciles and Spanish teachers bother about dates” (1921, in DR, p. 68). Much like i as a letter, the word has no importance as word, as a signifier with a specific, defined meaning, or even set of meanings. The continual efforts of journalists and critics to find the one true meaning, of course, did little more than add to the word’s ultimate confusion. 12  Perhaps the most recent attempt to solve this riddle was Arno Widmann’s article, “Dada-­ Rätsel gelöst!” [Dada-Riddle Solved!] written for Die Tageszeitung, which found in a dictionary of illicit sexual acts, the word dada ascribed to a series of sexual positions. See Widmann (1994). 13  Huelsenbeck, in particular, seemed more invested than others in being known to be the one “who pronounced the word Dada for the first time” (1936, p. 280).

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The contexts within which the word dada first appeared aligned the word not only with the group of artists at the cabaret but also with the target of those artists’ works. When Ball first writes that the next goal of the cabaret is to produce a journal titled DADA, the previous goal still lingers in the reader’s mind: “to recall, beyond the war and the fatherland, the few independents who live other ideals” (1916b, in DR, p. 20). This expands the context of Ball’s switch from German to French as he begins to discuss the planned international journal at the end of his introduction, from the word’s simple excision from a French-German dictionary to the much more conspicuous context of the languages of the two major combatants of the war, and, more specifically, the ongoing and bloody Battle of Verdun. By the time that Ball delivered his manifesto in July, the word’s contextual associations continued to orbit the war. This complex connection between language and the war was, of course, foundational to Dadaists.14 For Dadaists, as Tzara recalled, literature and art “served the war and, all the while expressing fine sentiments, they lent their prestige to atrocious inequality, sentimental misery, injustice and degradation of the instincts” (1979, p. 403). In his manifesto, Ball made this association with the word dada itself: “Dada world war without end. Dada revolution without beginning” (FDMR, p. 220). While such a formulation does little to help determine whether he refers to Dada or to dada, Ball clarifies that there is no distinction, for dada is an “international word. Just a word, and the word a movement” (FDMR, p. 220). The complications of the word dada build upon each other; world war and the revolutionary reaction to it, literature and art on each side, simultaneously inter–, extra–, and anti-national, a double affirmative and a big nihilistic no. The importance of the word dada, to the extent of course that it is either a word or is important, was rather that “☞ DADA NE SIGNIFIE RIEN” [Dada does not signify anything] (Tzara 1918a, in OC 1, p. 360; see TTDM, p. 4), a sentiment which many Dadaists echoed. Much like Dada itself, dada is less important for what it is than for what it does and, more specifically, what it is able to do because it has simultaneously no meaning and too many. Of the original meanings given by the Dadaists who claimed to have been party to the word’s appropriation, however, a particular theme emerges. The word alludes to elements of an infant’s world—a hobby horse, radical naïveté, a stroller, a mother, and for any anglophile participants, a father. 14  There are far too many Dadaist works that associate language with the war to list here. See Demos (2003).

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This is not the world, however, of one particular infant, but infancy in itself across multiple languages or indeed before language. In his later account of the word’s appropriation, Huelsenbeck noted this at the time: “It’s just made for our purpose. The child’s first sound expresses the primitiveness, the beginning at zero, the new in our art. We could not find a better word” (1936, p. 280). As the extended quasi-meanings of Ball’s manifesto make clear, the word dada serves as infantile holophrase, an ungrammatical and pre- or proto-linguistic vocalization meant to stand in for a larger and more complex idea; not merely “yes yes” but “Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely right” (FDMR, p.  220).15 Ball, however, appears to see the holophrasis of dada as less proto-linguistic than the distillation of that complex idea. Ball, in his manifesto that served to severe his ties with the cabaret, Dada, and dada, suggested that he wanted to survey the edges of the word, “a public concern of the first order” (FDMR, p. 221). Ball searched for the “shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words […] I want the word where it end and begins. Dada is the heart of words,” (FDMR, p. 221), precisely what he meant to avoid.16 The word dada, however, was far less the beating heart than it was the unfertilized seed, which Tzara would later call “a virgin germ” (1920f, in DR, p. 66). In many ways, Ball searched beyond the word dada for the very thing that the word dada would provide to other Dadaists. Ball wanted “to show how articulated language comes into being” (FDMR, p.  221), but overlooked dada, the proto-linguistic and holophrastic performance of that emergence of articulated language. Moving beyond the written mark and into articulated speech, the communicative property of Schwitters’ equation becomes more apparent: dada = /i/.

dada = /i/ Much as Schwitters’ Sütterlin-i occupied the intersection of ideology and language, so too does the word dada—immediately associated with the war and all manner of ideological apparatuses that orbit it, and continually referenced as appropriated from dictionaries, whether mono– or bilingual, 15  Holophrasis is not a mere interjection, but the speech of the holophrastic phase of linguistic development in toddlers where, for example, rather than calmly expressing that they are hungry and would prefer to have something to eat in the near future, they simply scream “food”! 16  This final sentence is from the second, edited version of the manifesto.

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educational reference books. Although the letter-i functions as the basis for all written marks and therefore forms the foundation of written text itself, the word dada functions similarly for spoken language.17 Just as the Sütterlin-i was excised from a school primer, a book of linguistic authority, so too was dada, so the story goes, excised from a dictionary, the book of linguistic authority, only to be then rewritten and repeated to be read or heard as distinct from other possibly readable and hearable marks.18 For Derrida, this excision, repetition, and re-citation, in short this iteration, is the very mark of a mark, its defining characteristic. This is not the mere success of being read by an addressee, as though it were a code to be solved by one with the key, but able to be read, to be repeated and re-cited in turn, by any third party or parties (Derrida 1988b, pp. 7–9). This is why, as Althusser notes, “the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself” within ideological apparatuses such as language, “the stake, but also the site of class struggle” (ORC, pp. 245–246)—anyone can be that third party and excise a piece of material from its ideological contexts and re-cite or perform it anew. In the case of the word dada, depending on who is asked, it was the soon-to-be-called Dadaists in Zurich. As such, they aimed their praxis of excision at the foundations of society, at language. While the word dada is unable to mirror the specificity of the point and line of the letter-i that forms the basis for all written marks and forms the foundation of written text itself, it is able to mirror the performance of /i/, the re-citation of the alphabetization of the school-children subjects in the ideological apparatus. Rather than the written alphabetization of /i/, however, dada becomes a performance and re-citation of the transition from vocalization to verbalization of infants, their induction into the world of the spoken word, precisely that coming to be sought by Ball. In the first printed mention of the word dada, Hugo Ball repeats the word six times: “the name »DADA«. (»Dada«) Dada Dada Dada Dada” (1916b, in DR, p. 20). In his manifesto a few months later, which functions as an extended critique of the word dada and its role, or rather lack thereof, in his artistic goals, a similar dynamic occurs, though here as something of a modifier of particular ideological constructs: “Dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysms, Dada literature, Dada 17  As Derrida has extensively argued, of course, the differences between the two are complex. In addition to Derrida (1988b), see also Derrida (2016). 18  The term “mark” here is used in the Derridian sense. See Derrida (1988b, pp. 7–11).

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bourgeoisie,” and of “conventional language,” that Ball wants “to have done with […] Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzschke [sic]” (FDMW, p.  228). Indeed, Ball appears to mock the word as such a modifier, as though it were used the way that a bad science fiction author places the word “quantum” in front of something to make it scientific: “How does one become famous? By saying Dada” (FDMW, p. 228). To say dada is not only an answer, but the answer to all manner of questions and predicaments; say dada “Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness” (FDMW, p. 228). Twice in the manifesto, Ball performs this very process: “Dada m’dada, Dada m’dada Dada mhm, dada dera dada” and “Dada m’dada. Dada mhm dada da” (FDMW, p. 228). As though the word itself cannot help but be repeated in “a sequence of increasingly nonsensical sounds, among which Dada itself figures as the repetitive core element” (Wilke 2013, p.  642). Tzara, in the final section of his 1918 manifesto, subtitled “Dégoût Dada” [Dada Disgust], would mirror this intersection of ideological constructs, the word dada, and its increasingly nonsensical repetition. Likewise with a series of proposed abolitions such as logic, hierarchy, memory, prophets, and futures, Tzara intersperses a series of typographically distinct dadas, as though cobbled together like a ransom note, ending “Liberty: DADA DADA DADA” (TTDM, p. 13). Regardless of the series of mythical discoveries of the word or its multilingual uses and contexts; excision, appropriation, recontextualization, repetition, iteration, all appear to be foundational to dada, to the very word itself, its most obvious repetition being its reduplication, the internal repetition of the phoneme da, doubled as da-da, then bounded. Raoul Hausmann, perhaps in an attempt to counteract the undue mania over the word dada and its relation to Dadaism concluded: “An act of naming is not an invention, it would make no difference to Dadaism if it had been named Dada or Bebe, Sisi or Ollolo, the situation would still be the same” (1921a, in BDF 1, p. 166). In his desire to demystify the importance of the word dada to Dada, Hausmann reveals one of the key elements of the word. Shared by dada and these potential names is the internal repetition, never the unbounded babbling of an infant, but rather the suspension of “the chain of potentially indefinite repetitions in a bounded structure of reduplication” (Wilke 2013, p.  663). This is the transition from babbling to speech and vocalization to verbalization, from pre- to proto-linguistic, “the ‘transition to articulate speech,’ the moment when the initial but inarticulate ‘vocal gesture’ gives way to an ‘articulate

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gesture’ of clearly defined syllabic units” (Wilke 2013, p.  649). Those moments of seemingly unbounded repetition in various manifestos make dada’s internal reduplication and therefore its movement toward becoming a word all the more pronounced. In addition to Althusser’s suggestion that every word is an opportunity for the expression of resistance, dada’s radical lack of a stable signified or referent as an as yet unformed proto-­ word further reinforces the instability of any previous contexts. As Derrida notes in his reading of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, “agrammatical” words such as abracadabra, itself a reduplicated proto-word, abra-cad-abra like da-da, are incapable of creating their own contexts (Derrida 1988b, pp. 10–12; see Husserl 2001, p. 1.201). Derrida sees in this incapability an extreme and flagrant version of what is true, indeed, of all words and signs: “Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written […], in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between guillemets; in so doing it can break with every given context” (1988b, p. 12). This is precisely how both dada and /i/ were initially presented, with the where of their excision, and therefore their status as excised citation, made evident with guillemets, parentheses, brackets. Neither dada nor /i/, however, have stable, original contexts as they have no stable referents, as they are agrammatical. This liminality as an agrammatical proto-word, before and between languages, without any stable referent, requires that dada be accompanied, in order to approximate linguistic meaning, “with the manual gesture of pointing, [where] it comes to designate a potentially infinite number of different objects” (Wilke 2013, p. 649), everything and nothing, and manicules pointing in every direction. With no stable, original context the word becomes entirely and always contextually new, deictic par excellence. Although often ignored in the seemingly unending lists of potential meanings, potential originary contexts, the proto-word dada, is not only the reduplication of the phoneme da, but also of the German word da, “there,” a positional pronoun aided by a nod of the head or a pointing hand in the direction of whatever may happen to be referenced. Theodor Adorno noted that “Dada, as the purely deictic gesture, was as universal as the demonstrative pronoun” (2002, p. 181). The multiple languages in which dada supposedly circulated—French, German, Romanian, Italian, Kru—were only the most immediate contexts for the word, contexts immediately associated with nations and ethnicities. The breadth of the ideological reach of the proto-word was extended. Ball suggests that “Dada is the world-soul [Weltseele].” (Ball 1916d, in ZZM, p.  12; see

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FDMR, pp.  220–221).19 Hausmann, in addition to his associations of dada with art, philosophy, politics, state religion, and fire insurance, suggests: “If god or tao, identity and number, individual and thing-in-itself— for Dada, these are not yet precisely posed questions, for Dada is all of these simultaneously and just as surely, consciously non-existent” (1921a, in BDF 1, p. 168). Dada is not merely hyper-contextual, the deictic mark par excellence, but the answer no matter the question, to every question, the answer to every material thing. As Tzara would later put it: “Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing […] Dada is a virgin germ that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions” (Tzara 1924, p. 251). Dada is the answer to questions unasked, questions unable to be asked. Dada is not simply “nothing” but the non-thing, like the mechanical grammar, the non-material materiality marked by Schwitters’ /i/, dada is also the where of the non-thing that had largely remained silent and invisible. Dada, as Hausmann, Tzara, and other so-called Dadaists alluded, is every material thing and their immaterial, grammatical arrangements into apparatuses, simultaneously pre- and proto-linguistic, which both enables and requires its hyper-deixis. Its radical lack of an original context, indeed, precludes it from what Althusser considered “the elementary ideological effect,” the obviousness of signification, “that make a word ‘name a thing’ or ‘have a meaning’” (ORC, p. 189). The word dada, then, is a unique, and uniquely subversive, element of ideological interpellation.

Hey, Dadaist over There! While Schwitters’ Sütterlin-i had a specific and well-known origin from which it was excised, whether thanks to Schwitters’ evocation in the paratexts of “Das i-Gedicht” or as a well-known element of the educational ideological apparatus of the work’s observers, dada does not have such an origin and is unable to create one on its own. Every context in which dada finds itself is a new context, every citation is a re-citation of another re-­ citation, with no original dada to which it is able to point or refer. Not only does every dada have guillemets, but the word dada itself is the 19  Ball uses this formulation, Weltseele, to describe Frank Wedekind’s (1908) play “O-Aha!” in the same entry of Flight out of Time that the word dada is first written. Eckhard Faul notes, along with this repeated formulation, the typographic similarity between Oaha and Dada. See Faul (2011, in ZZM, p. 131).

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performance of citation, of the excision and iteration of a piece of interminable noise without meaning or reference. That dada also has no meaning or reference further reinforces its performative nature of and as pure excision, iteration, citation of linguistic material. That is, in much the same way that Schwitters’ Sütterlin-i not only alludes to alphabetization, but also performatively recites the process of alphabetization, ensnares the reader to critically repeat that process, so too does dada not only allude to, but also performatively recites the transitional process from vocalization to verbalization, from babble to word. Where Schwitters commanded an observer to read the up-down-up material of the Sütterlin-i, Ball some four years earlier made a similar, if decidedly more sarcastic suggestion: “How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada […] Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanized, enervated? By saying dada” (FDMR, p.  220). In a kind of proof by contradiction, the repetition of dada returns one to a pre-linguistic world, which is tied to unconsciousness, bliss, an innocent world without external systems of value judgements of what is nice and right, moral, national, etc. to the point of enervation. While saying dada until one goes crazy or unconscious would unlikely result in such a return, the pre-linguistic world that would result is equated with a pre-ideological world. Like reading the up-down-up of the Sütterlin-i, saying dada introduces one to the non-material materiality of “grammar,” to the borders and limits of the elementary ideological effect, to the preconditions and specifications of the complex relation between material language and ideological force. That is, by saying dada, one practices dadaist praxis, one becomes both a dadaist and Dadaist. As a proto-word, dada a representation of those first articulate sounds made by all children (see Wundt 1911, p. 40; qtd. in Wilke 2013, p. 648), everyone is already a simultaneously latent and lapsed dadaist and Dadaist. The reflection of the everything-and-nothing structure of dada in the admittance of everyone as dadaist was not lost on certain critics of the time. “If you say Yes to the proclamation, you become a Dadaist by assent; if you say it Nay, you become one through your spirit of opposition, which is a form of self-assertion, which, being an immediate adjustment to reality, is Dada-ism par excellence” (Goldberg 1921; qtd. in Watts 2004, p. 3). The proclamation, to be against a Dadaist manifesto is a Dadaist act,

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is one that can only be made with a straight face by a Dadaist.20 Within the everything-and-nothing structure of the proto-word and now the slowly becoming actual word dada, Dada and Dadaists are able to function with an unusual amount of freedom. Under the moniker of dada, everything is allowed and self-contradiction is no longer a point for external critique, but rather a source of internal power; the ability to attack language with language and ideology with ideology, even to attack Dada with dada. Dada and dada, their unique ability for self-contradiction, become clever traps that are able to re-ensnare everyone as dadaist, or rather, to interpellate everyone as a dadaist. From this everything-and-nothing nature comes dada’s radical deixis as a demonstrative pronoun, meaningless in itself referring to nothing, but able to potentially mean anything. Dada is able to function prospectively and reproductively as interpellation. Like the “you” yelled by a police officer across a crowded square, dada, and therefore dadaist, is a particularly effective piece of deictic interpellation in that the word always finds its destination, for indeed everyone is already a dadaist because dada is everything, just as everyone is a “you.” Here, however, no one is allowed to (mis)recognize themselves as a Dadaist. The interpellation stutters, becomes hollow, and indeed loses much of its own interpellative force, but in the poorly performed process, lays itself bare to everyone for inspection and critique. The person interpellated as Dadaist is made aware of, is able to read their own interpellation in the awkwardness of the interpellation itself. The obviousness, self-evidence, naturalness required for the smooth interpellation of someone as Dadaist is impossible with the word dada. By saying dada, that is, language is revealed as the site and the stakes of ideological interpellation, available to everyone. By saying dada, language is turned against language, interpellation against interpellation. The hyper-contextuality of the radically deictic everything-and-nothing dada disrupts and subverts not only the formation of ideological subjects within the interpellative utterance itself, but also the organizing framework of interaction. That is, dada subverts “the interpellation of individuals as subjects” but also “the absolute condition that there is an Other Subject,” (ORC, pp. 197; 195), the master-signifier that fixes and structures the interpellation itself. In the place of Justice for the police officer, for example, is the paradox of a definitionally meaningless Dada for the 20  The final line of Richard Huelsenbeck’s “Dadaistisches Manifest” [Dadaist Manifesto] stated: “If you are against this manifesto you are a Dadaist!” (1918, in DA, p. 49).

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Dadaist. The framework that is meant to structure the interpellation is in shambles, unable to fix or structure any interpellative utterance, unable to serve as a standard against which any potential Dadaist could be measured. Much like Schwitters’ “to me, that is i,” dada as a point de capiton fails spectacularly and conspicuously to “stop[] the otherwise indefinite sliding of signification” and therefore to “produce[] the necessary illusion of a fixed meaning” (Lacan 2006c, p. 681; Evans 2006, p. 151). With no fixed meaning itself, dada certainly has no ability to fix the meaning or signification of other words, utterances, or interpellations under its banner or on its behalf. While the interpellation of an individual into a subject may have been successful with dada insofar as an individual may turn toward their potential interlocutor, the final two elements of Althusser’s tripartite process of ideological subject formation are made impossible by dada: “2) the mutual recognition between subjects and Subject [i.e. Other Subject or master-signifier] and among the subjects themselves, as well as the subject by themself; and 3) the absolute guarantee that everything really is so” (1995, p.  232; see ORC, p.  197). That is, while one may turn toward “hey, dadaist over there!,” only critical confusion follows. The vocabulary and framework of dada refuse to function in a way that allows for either recognition or the misrecognized guarantee that any such recognition is warranted. Without these final elements, interpellation itself loses its force, inclusive of the force to hide itself as interpellation, as ideological, and therefore is made available for critical study. How does one subvert ideological subject formation? By saying dada; in a way, the first Dadaist work.

CHAPTER 3

“A Spectre is Haunting Dada”: Dada and/as Manifesto

The term manifesto first appeared around the turn of the sixteenth century in English, German (Manifest), and French (manifeste). A manifesto was the declaration of the king, and by extension of God, that brought forth into the world a new law or new organization. With and through the words of the theo-political nexus of power, the real world is changed (see Lyon 1999). Although this form of manifesto persisted into the twentieth century,1 a new kind of manifesto—where a radical or revolutionary discourse opposes the state or some authoritarian power—was cemented with the monumental publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei [Manifesto of the Communist Party] (MECW 6, pp.  477–519). Marx and Engels’ manifesto was so popular that it created a “fury of manifestos,” an endless “art of fabricating manifestos, proclamations, and pronunciamentos” (1852, in MECW 11, p.  266).2 Although the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei and those that followed in the fury of manifestos were often rife with literary allusion and metaphor, manifestos with specific literary and artistic aims 1  Perhaps most notable was the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef’s “An meine Völker” [To My Peoples] known as the manifesto that declared war on Serbia and began the First World War. Certain early manifestos adhered to a more modern understanding of the genre, such as Thomas Müntzer’s “Praguer Manifest” [Prague Manifesto] written in 1521 and published two years later on the eve of the German Peasant’s War. See Müntzer (1993, pp. 53–60). 2  Here Marx and Engels are writing specifically of Arnold Ruge.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Pelcher, Dada’s Subject and Structure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26610-2_3

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would follow, themselves rarely free of political stances and rhetoric (see Berg 1997). This unique manifesto mixture of politics and literature in order to found a new art movement was deployed with particular bravado by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with his 1909 “La foundation du Futurisme et son manifeste” [The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism] (PMF; FMF). Made explicit here by Marinetti, these two pillars of the genre of the modern manifesto, the founding and the manifesting, reoriented the manifesto from the decree of an authoritarian power to the document that founds and manifests “a party, a group, a ‘mass,’” and now art movements (Marx and Engels 1852, in MECW 11, p. 266). The transition in the genre of the manifesto from a declaration of pre-­ ordained authority toward acts of foundation requires a peculiar, and peculiarly ideological, rhetoric. The very designation of the manifesto as a literary genre implies that it not only conforms or belongs to a genre-­ specific set of guidelines, but also performs and participates in the reinforcement and recreation of that genre (Derrida 1992b). That is, a work cannot or should not be able to be called or to call itself a manifesto without having done what a manifesto is meant to do—to found and manifest a new group. Marx and Engels’ Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, for example, lays out these dynamics in its first sentences. “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism” (MECW 6, p. 481). The spectre, the group that is to be formed, has been named, if by those with authoritarian power. However, it remains for the moment amorphous, borderless, fleeting, and unsubstantial, a ghost. Communism remains an uncorporealized entity, as yet unfounded and unmanifested, which Marx and Engels of course aim to rectify: “It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself” (MECW 6, p.  481). Within the span of a few sentences of the manifesto, the Communist Party went from a phantasmagorical ghost that had haunted European seats of power to an incarnated party with defined ideas and aspirations. In this way, Marx and Engels are simultaneously members of a nonexistent party and founders of that party, in that order. By their membership in a non-­ party, they were authorized to write a manifesto on behalf of that non-­ party that would only then found and manifest, retrospectively in a way, that very party. This is a bizarre dynamic of unique presuppositions necessary for the smooth function of a manifesto, which is to say the smooth function of the formation and manifestation of a group of human subjects.

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Derrida points out, however, the ideologically fraught aspect of authority in these manifestos that begin with no authority: “who signs and with what so-called proper name, the declarative act which founds an institution?” (Derrida 2002b, p. 47). That is, who is granted the authority to sign, to endorse the founding of an institution? How do they attain that authority? On whose behalf does this authorized person sign the text that founds an institution?

Manifesting Theatrical Authority In order to have the authority to sign a text on behalf of an institution, that institution must exist insofar as the signer must be a member of that institution. In the case of manifestos that found and manifest, however, that group of people as an institution does not exist and therefore definitionally has no members with the authority to sign, to found, to manifest. “They [this people] do not exist as an entity, the entity does not exist before this declaration, not as such” (Derrida 2002b, p. 49). This appears to leave the modern manifesto, definitionally devoid of initial authority, stranded without a path forward. The manifesto signature, however, functions with a “fabulous retroactivity” (Derrida 2002b, p. 50), something of a trans-­ temporal self-symbiotic self-birth. The signature given to a foundational text confers upon the signer a certain amount of retroactive authority as representative of the institution founded with that signature. “With this fabulous event, […] a signature gives itself a name. It opens for itself a line of credit, its own credit for itself to itself [… A] signature gives or extends credit to itself, in a single ‘coup de force,’ which is also a stroke [coup] of writing, as the right to writing” (Derrida 2002b, p. 50). This retroactively self-appointed and circular credit is the credited authority to found and manifest a group, an entity, an institution with and through text, to do things with words; it is both the action and the result which has become the “accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances” (Austin 1962, p.  14). As Bourdieu points out, this series of Austinian “certain”s remain centered around authority, where “the authorized spokesperson is only able to use words to act on other agents and, through their action, on things themselves, because [that spokesperson’s] speech concentrates within it the accumulated symbolic capital of the group which has delegated [the spokesperson] and of which [the spokesperson] is the authorized representative”

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(1993b, pp.  109–11). Bourdieu’s authorized spokesperson, Derrida’s signer, not only founds and manifests the group on whose behalf the speech and signature act, but also and simultaneously that group’s authority to speak and sign. A particular series of certain words, certain persons, and certain actions combine, essentially to fake it until they make it, to create a theater of authority in which it can be appointed and exercised until such point as they are able to break out of the theater and beyond theatricality into the so-called real world. “Theatricality is […] to be understood as a mimesis, which reveals itself publicly as a mimesis” (Mazza and Pornschlegel 2003b, p. 14). Although this dynamic is particularly evident in a theatrical play, with actors on stage before an audience who all fully understand that they are viewing a piece of theater performed by actors on a stage, theatricality is also “effective everywhere that signs are exhibited in their distantiation from the reality as signs and expose their own sign-being,” for example, “in literature that can be understood as a formally staged speech” (Mazza and Pornschlegel 2003b, p. 14). This formal staging is the Austinian series of “certain”s that fall under the umbrella of a work titled “manifesto” that means to perform the act of foundation, an act that requires the auto-creation of its own stage and soapbox, from which it is able to speak, formal staging that is necessary for the manifesto to be able to function. However, in his discussion of how to do things with words such as name a thing or found an institution, J.L Austin infamously excluded theatrical forms of speech: “a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy” (1962, p. 22). That is, according to Austin, theatrical words cannot do things, at least not really. The actors who play Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet do not actually get married on stage any more than they actually commit suicide. As Bourdieu points out, however, the authority that allows the actors to play such roles on the stage is not dissimilar to the authority necessary for priests, magistrates, judges, etc. to do things with their words.3 Theatricality then becomes the initial condition, or rather the initial movement, of performative speech acts. In order to do things with words, a series of “certain” scenarios must occur that effectively creates a (theatrical) soapbox-cum-stage that simultaneously confers ­authority and enables the effective enactment of that authority, namely the authority

3

 This is, of course, a very condensed version of the argument in Bourdieu (1993b).

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to create and speak for a group simultaneously.4 This theatricality allows for what Janet Lyon calls the “pronomial sleight of hand, whereby ‘we’ disguises the metonymic function of the small group of composite ‘I’s who claim to speak for a whole” (1999, p. 26). Although the ultimate goal for a successful manifesto is to overcome this the first step, where this theatrical sleight of hand that creates a group, a ‘we,’ leaves the stage and enters the world as an already founded institution, no longer a performance but rather a fait accompli, the manifesto is first and foremost a literary and theatrical document. Marx and Engels’ Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, like many other works of theirs, is steeped in literary metaphors, styles, and tropes. Indeed, the manifesto itself recognizes the importance of literature and open literary publishing to the very aims of the manifesto. Rather than the mere “nursery tale” of Communism, whispered in the halls of European power, Marx and Engels consider it “high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the world, publish their views” (MECW 6, p. 481). The preface of the manifesto ends, again invoking the literary dimension of the manifesto: “To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto to be published in the English, German, Italian, Flemish, and Danish languages” (MECW 6, p. 481). That is, not only is the manifesto first and foremost itself literature, but the theatrical environment of literature, the “certain” theatricality that provides the authority to write and publish the manifesto as literature at all, is itself bound up within the manifesto. The manifesto creates and exemplifies the literary practices that it itself requires: “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (MECW 6, p. 488). Like most literature, however, the Manifest builds on the literature and more specifically on the theatrical drama that had come before.5 As Derrida persuasively argues, this occurs already in the first line, indeed the first noun of the manifesto, spectre, which he ties to that of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the appearance of which opens Shakespeare’s play (2016, p. 2). These are not ghosts to be exorcised or even corporealized, but for Hamlet and for Marx and Engels, 4  The first to investigate the performative aspect of manifestos was Birgit Wagner. See Wagner (1997). Regarding theatricality itself, see Puchner (2000, 2002, 2006). 5  For an extensive reading of Marx and Engels’ manifesto as a melodramatic piece of theater, see Anker (2015).

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these spectres are the amorphous, which is to say theatrical, grantors of authority, whether to revenge a father’s murder at the hands of his brother or, no less dramatically, to found and manifest the Communist Party. While Marx and Engels were able to marshal the theatricality and literary representation “through which the representative creates the group which creates [that representative]” (Bourdieu 1993b, p. 106), the second pillar of the modern genre of the manifesto, as might be expected, makes these necessary elements all the more conspicuous.

Founding and Manifesting the Future Unlike the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, Marinetti’s “Premier manifeste du futurisme” was almost immediately recognized as theatrical, specifically by Marinetti and other now-named Futurists who would perform the manifesto on stage as one would a theatrical work. Throughout early 1910, in the immediate wake of the infamous publication, Marinetti’s manifesto, along with those of other Futurists, were staged at a series of Futurist serate [soirées, or evening performances], the very “progenitor of the entire tradition of performance art” (Rainey 2009, p. 9; see Kirby and Kirby 1986). These performances on the stage were never merely lectern bound re-readings of the manifesto to a receptive and amenable audience, but rather raucous and regularly violent, fisticuffs within the theater occasionally spilling out into the streets and inciting riots, leading the media to consider serate to be a “byword for violence” (Rainey 2009, p.  10). Although these performances were often theatrical readings of pre-­ published materials, at least at the outset of the evening before violence would break out, the Futurist desire to stage their own manifestos as a type of theater belies the theatrical framework, the very theatricality that Futurists saw within their own manifestos. Indeed, this iterative performativity or performative iteration is yet another moment in “the whole game which tends to present performative utterances, as constative utterances” (Derrida 2002b, p. 51), and therefore confuses the constative act of merely reciting a historical document with the performative reenactment of not merely the founding document, but the act of foundation itself. This theatricality of the theater, that ghostly self-credit of authority replayed again and again on stage, is indeed reinforced by the theatricality of and within the text itself. Infamously printed on the front page of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, almost 61 years to the day after Marx and

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Engel’s Manifest was published, the text was simply titled “Le Futurisme” (see Rainey et al. eds. 2009, p. 331). This was an edited and slightly shortened version of both the original manuscript and what would later come to be known as the complete founding and manifesto.6 While ostensibly a manifesto of an emergent literary and art movement, the work’s bombastic tone, its praise of war as tensions rose across Europe on the eve of the First World War, its celebration of technological progress after the Taylorist and Fordist revolutions of industrial capitalism remained across all editions of the manifesto.7 If the manifesto’s initial publication on the front page of a right-wing newspaper had not made it clear, the text itself clearly signaled a new and radical form of aesthetic manifesto that blurred the line that would have supposedly separated it from the genre of the political manifesto. Similarly, the form of Marinetti’s manifesto mimics the form of Marx and Engels’ political Manifest, “a bipartite document” that was more clearly indicated in the manuscript’s original title, “La foundation du Futurisme et son manifeste” [The Foundation of Futurism and its Manifesto] (PMF, p. 41), before it was edited for the front page of Le Figaro and its eventual title “Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo” [The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism]—a preamble of the movement’s foundation and then its proper manifesto. With the act of naming established by the very title of the text, for both Communism and Futurism, Marinetti begins his text not with a nebulous group meant to be solidified, but rather with a distinct group whose foundation is merely being recounted. “We had stayed up all night—my friends and I—[…]” (FMF, p. 49). Although this ostensible group has been introduced under the banner of, and to a certain extent named by the title of the work, this “we,” however, remains amorphous for a brief moment. This group, the “we” of Futurism, is already narrated rather than constructed, a constative history of a past foundation rather than a performative creation in itself. As Marjorie Perloff has noted, “Marinetti’s selfhood is subordinated to the communal ‘we’ (the first word of the manifesto)” (1986, p. 87). This was indeed a conscious choice by Marinetti. In his hand-written manuscript of the text, the initial words written are “I had stayed up all night […],” only to be crossed out and replaced by Marinetti with the “We had 6  For a facsimile and transcription of the original manuscript, along with other bibliographical changes to the manifesto over time, see PMF. 7  Indeed, such tensions between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire led to, or were deeply enmeshed within the violence that resulted from the Futurist serate.

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[…]” of the published work (PMF, pp. 40, 41). This strategic deletion and replacement is precisely Janet Lyon’s theatricality of the “pronomial sleight of hand” (1999, p. 26), where “we” obscures the amalgamation of “I”s that underlie it. That is, Marinetti’s deletion and replacement lays bare that sleight of hand, reminds the reader of that theatrical cover of authority to found a group, where “in ‘we’ it is always ‘I’ which predominates since there cannot be ‘we’ except by starting with ‘I’” (Benveniste 1971, p. 202). It is not merely Marinetti that stayed up late, but him and his friends, and by extension this text is not merely that of Marinetti, but of them all, of Futurists and therefore Futurism. Through this theatricality, again, the performative act of founding a group, a “we,” is able to be presented as a constative narration of a historical event that involved that same “we.” This “we” remains, however, little more than a collection of “I”s, a collection of friends who had stayed up late into the night, not yet a group with a coherent set of views, aims, or tendencies. As night ended, this would begin to change. Simultaneously staying up late and holding vigil over the night, as one might a corpse—the dual meaning of veiller in the original French and vegliare in later Italian versions of the text— Marinetti and his friends were finally roused from their stasis by “the first sunlight rising over the earth” (PMF, pp.  40, 41).8 Metaphorically, the dark night of the past now vanquished and the dawn of a new day upon them, Marinetti continues: “We go to attend the birth of the Centaur […]” (PMF, pp. 40, 41).9 Like the spectre of communism solidifying into the Communist Party, the birth of this car-human centaur is the birth of Futurism, and the rhetorical switch from a “we” composed of a collection of “I”s to a fully realized “We.” Eager to rush out and meet the dawn, Marinetti and his friends begin a reckless automotive joyride through the streets, rapturously praising the speed and violence that would become cornerstones of Futurist thought. It is in fact this speed and violence that leads to the birth of the Centaur and the foundation of Futurism. After Marinetti rolls his car off the road, he invokes this birth: “Oh! Maternal ditch, nearly full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your bracing slime! […] When I climbed out […] from underneath the capsized car, I felt my heart—deliciously— being slashed with the red-hot iron of joy” (FMF, p. 50). Although it was only Marinetti who climbed out from the ditch, followed by his shark of 8 9

 Rainey translates: “There, on the earth, the earliest dawn!” (FMF, p. 49).  Rainey translates: “We are about to witness the birth of the Centaur…” (FMF, p. 49).

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an automobile, fished out by nearby “fishermen” and “naturalists” (FMF, p. 50), the personal pronoun changes in dramatic and theatrical fashion: “And so, our faces covered with the good factory slime—a mix of metallic scum, useless sweat, heavenly soot—our arms bruised and bandaged, we, still fearless, have dictated our first intentions to all the living men of the earth…” (FMF, p. 51). Whether the centaur of Marinetti and his automobile or Marinetti and his friends,10 who may have likewise been metaphorically birthed from that “maternal ditch,”11 this pronomial switch from “I” to “our” and “we” was no longer a “we” of collected “I”s, but rather the “We” of a founded group with coordinated and consistent intentions that had, presumably, authorized Marinetti to drive and therefore speak on its behalf. This “We” returns near the end of the work, as the frame narrative returns, to declare: “we are flinging this to the world, our manifesto of burning and overwhelming violence, with which we today establish ‘Futurism’” (FMF, p. 52). The manifesto itself has taken pride of place in the foundation of Futurism, now that the birth of the Centaur has occurred, the group already founded and the manifesto authorized. This becomes not merely a confusion of authority within theatricality, but also the confusion of natural with linguistic acts that constitutes ideology; a birth attended and narrated as a constative act that authorized a performative linguistic act of foundation. That is, the question of authority within theatricality and the pronomial slip from “I” to “We” is a question of ideological force, a force exercised in the section of Marinetti’s text, the manifesto proper of eleven theses that outline the now Futurist programmatic intentions. Although this theatricality and pronomial switch had authorized the declaration that Futurism has indeed been founded and well established, if only within the preceding preamble, the transition to the proper manifesto of Futurism, the eleven theses that were meant to and would outline the movement’s intentions, remains somewhat fraught. Marinetti’s first thesis for Futurism, for example, was similarly changed from “The love of danger” to “We intend to sing to the love of danger […]” (PMF, pp. 46, 47; see FMF, p. 51). Marinetti continues to reaffirm this “We” in the majority of the remaining ten theses with declarations such as “We intend […],” 10  Marinetti mentions that the steering wheel was “a guillotine blade that menaced my stomach” (FMF, p. 49). 11  The original manuscript does not clarify this switch nor who is included in this new “we.” See PMF, pp. 44, 45.

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“We affirm […],” “We stand […],” “We shall […]” (FMF, p. 51). Despite these repetitions, the “We” remains relatively unknown, merely replaced and replaceable by “Futurists,” not having changed since the preamble a few lines above that presumes to have solidified them. That is, each “We” in this proper manifesto section is less the authoritative source of these theses than it is yet another attempt to reiterate and reinforce what is presumed to have already been accomplished. So too are the theses themselves, whose placement within the narrative frame suggests that “their ‘validity’ has already, so to speak, been established” (Perloff 1986, p. 86). Rather, these theses are enumerations of aesthetic principles that have already been demonstrated, and therefore supposedly need no enumeration. The bipartite nature of Marinetti’s work, the founding and the manifesto, is undone by the very necessity of theatricality and the confusion of performative acts with constative acts—each utterance of a founding and a manifesto includes elements of the other. The step out of the self-credited authority of theatricality into the actual, representative authority of felicitous performativity appears to never occur within the text itself. The text becomes something of a self-referential series of reaffirmations that are only authorized by the very thing that is meant to be reaffirmed, Derrida’s fabulous retroactivity made inescapable circuit. The goal of the manifesto is, then, to simultaneously act as though it can and to hide the fact that it cannot. It is this complex web of often hidden necessities that allows manifestos to “function” at all, to create subjects of and within a new movement, a new group, to convince and persuade, “a text which belongs to the world of ideological and political literature, which takes sides and a stand in that world” (Althusser 1999, p. 23). It is little wonder, then, that Dada and Dadaists were so eager to undermine the genre and its goals in so many unique ways.

Dada’s First Engagements with Founding Itself and Founding, Itself The manifesto, as a literary genre, simultaneously defines and enacts “the identities of radical groups, individuals, and parties […], the manifesto addresses and at the same time elicits an entity called the People, each constituent of which is hailed [interpellated] as an entitled universal subject” (Lyon 1999, pp. 1–2). In short, the manifesto is the literary genre of interpellation, par excellence; or rather, the manifesto is interpellation

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made and, to a certain extent, disguised as and given the cover of, literature. This intersection of interpellation and literature becomes, then, the central and constant target of the Dadaist praxis of subversion, interpellation against interpellation and literature against literature. If not specifically for these reasons, critics have recognized the importance of Dada’s interaction with the manifesto and its conventions: “Dada is the product of its manifestos, and as such all other Dada productions are to be understood first in the context of the constitutive, manifestoist character of the movement. Dada is avant-garde manifestoism in its purist form” (Backes-­ Haase 1997, p. 257). Already with the word dada, the first proper Dadaist work and therefore manifesto, Dada introduces itself as saboteur of the smooth and stable function of the genre of the manifesto, the framework of the master signifier now a hollow center from which easy interpellation is precluded. That is, from the first movement of the manifesto, the act of naming as the first step of the act of founding, itself the first act of a manifesto as such, dada and therefore Dada and Dadaist praxis already sabotages the very genre with which they are so closely tied. In this way, Dadaist confrontations and subversions of the tropes and tricks of the manifesto genre may be among the clearest examples of Dadaist praxis. “The Dadaists [find] in the literary genre of the manifesto the literal media substrate itself, in and through which they first and foremost construct their individual and collective identity” (Backes-Haase 1997, p.  257). That is, Dada recognizes and illuminates the literary form of ideological interpellation as interpellation, and immediately subverts it, subverts the very mechanism in order to “oppose every kind or method [jede Art] of ideology” (Huelsenbeck 1920c, in DA, p. 11). This uniquely hollow act of naming, of course, is merely the first, if foundational, in a long series of Dadaist subversions of the manifesto and what it means to accomplish. If the authority to speak on behalf of an as-yet unformed group comes from the theatrical stage, Dadaism was in a familiar position. From the very opening of the Cabaret Voltaire, before the word dada had been discovered, theatrical performance was deeply enmeshed in Dadaist praxis. Both co-founders of the cabaret had already amassed significant experience on the stage, Emmy Hennings was associated with various theaters as both actress and singer in Berlin, Munich, and eventually the Cabaret in Zurich, and her partner Hugo Ball likewise with multiple theaters in Berlin, Plauen, and Munich (see Bähr 1982, Berghaus 2005, Segel 1987). In many ways, the integration of the theater and theatricality into Dadaist praxis is an

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extension of the Futurist’s creation of “a politics of theatricality” (Rainey 2009, p. 20), in the wake of their violent serate and bolstered by their declaration that “Everything of any value is theatrical” (Marinetti et al. 1915, p. 206). As Tzara would write in his own Dadaist work as journal, Chronique Zurichoise [Zurich Chronicle], of the that opening Dadaist soirée where Ball would first break from Dada with his manifesto: “(Music, dances, theories, manifestos, poems, paintings, costumes, masks) / In the presence of a compact crowd, Tzara manifests, we want we want we want to piss diverse colors. Huelsenbeck manifests, Ball manifests, Arp declares” (in DA, p. 18). Although certainly not unique to the Zurich chapter of Dada, staged theatricality and performance were most evident in the Cabaret Voltaire. Indeed, Emmy Hennings, with her years of theatrical and performative experience before moving to Zurich with Ball, “initiated him” and subsequently the Cabaret and Dada itself into “the tricks of popular performance and its intersections with literary experiment” (Hemus 2009, p.  26). Similarly, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the “crucial bridging point between Dada and the Laban school” of dance (Hemus 2009, p. 64), was deeply influential to the injection of theatricality and performativity into the Dadaist praxis developing in the Cabaret Voltaire, where “reciting aloud has become the touchstone of the quality of a poem […] learned (from the stage)” (FOT, p. 54), where Dada itself is described as “a play with shabby leftovers” (FOT, p. 65), where with costumed dance, the “horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible” (FOT, p. 65), precisely that mimesis that shows itself as such, that theatricality. In many ways setting the stage, so to speak, of Dadaist praxis regardless of chapter, Dadaist manifestos that came from Zurich seem all the more apt to recognize, understand, and ultimately problematize that theatricality, and in various ways subvert it and the authority for which it is required. The subversion of the manifesto genre by Dadaists could not have gotten off to a more auspicious start. Hugo Ball asks rhetorically in his journal, “Has the first manifesto of a newly founded cause ever been known to refute the cause itself to its supporters’ face? And yet that is what happened” (FOT, p. 73). While Ball’s manifesto is never particularly explicit as to the reasons for this break, or indeed that it was a break, the manifesto itself gives a few distinct clues. As outlined above, Ball seemed to have a distinct difficulty with the word and name dada, despite no direct evidence for this problem between the time of its first mention in his journal and his manifesto. Indeed, as Wilke pointed out, the word dada functioned as a catalyst for Ball’s most lasting impact on Dada—his sound

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poetry—for dada is less a name than the “germ of a naming process” (Sully 1896, p. 161; qtd. in Wilke 2013, p. 650), that purposefully never quite fulfills its own promise, as Althusser might put it, to name a thing or have a meaning. For Ball, the problem arises when it in fact does name a thing, which he lays out in the first line of his manifesto: “Dada is a new tendency in art” (FDMR, p. 220). Ball’s newfound distaste of the word is rather his distaste at the proto-word made name, when the now word has been tainted by meaning in and through the act of foundation. Despite writing the first Dadaist manifesto, a genre dedicated to the act of naming and founding a new movement, Ball rather laments both. “An international word. Just a word and the word a movement. Very easy to understand” (FDMR, p. 220). Where Ball saw the word dada itself as “furchtbar einfach” [terribly simple], he described the word as movement, anastrophically, as “einfach furchtbar” [simply terrible] (1916d, in ZZM, p. 12).12 That is, the first Dadaist manifesto, the very genre that is deployed in order to found the movement Dada, openly detests the very foundational movement that it is meant to perform. Although the first line of Ball’s manifesto may indicate an initial willingness to the act of founding, he quickly removes himself from that act. “One can tell this [that Dada is a new tendency in art] from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it” (FDMR, p.  220). There is no personal connection to this act—“One can tell this…,” “nobody knew,” “tomorrow everyone.” There is no attempt to speak as a group, as a “we,” nor even to speak on behalf of a group as an “I” among and for other “I”s. With a series of impersonal pronouns—one (man), nobody (niemand), etc.—, Ball speaks to, rather than on behalf of, Dada and Dadaists with no hint of solidarity, particularly in regard to the founding of an art movement. “To make an art movement of it [the word dada] must mean that one wants to avoid complications” (FDMW, p. 228). Ball is clear that this complication avoided is in fact the complication of the word; a complication that has been suppressed or sidestepped in the transition from word to movement, in the act of founding. Those who have avoided these complications and founded Dada from dada are precisely those, from whom Ball disassociates himself: “yourselves [ihr], most honored poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always 12  Neither translation of the manifesto recognizes this anastrophe. Both translate both instances as “terribly simple.” See FDMR, p. 220; FDMW, p. 228.

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writing around the actual point” (FDMR, p.  220). Ball might consider himself an adherent of the word and opponent of the movement, a movement that he saw not himself but his friends to have founded. As the co-­ founder of the Cabaret Voltaire with and in many ways thanks to Emmy Hennings, few could have assumed the theatrical authority necessary to have founded Dada more easily than Ball. The theatricality necessary to found a movement had already been developed on the stage of the Cabaret, Ball having little more to do than exercise the authority already inherently there. Rather, by “the time he read his first Dada manifesto […] he was ‘no longer’ a Dadaist” (White 1998, p. 3). Soon after his performance of the manifesto, he and Hennings left Zurich, keeping in touch with Dadaists sporadically until their absolute split with Dada in May 1917, less than a year after the manifesto’s performance (see Elderfield 1996). A less successful manifesto, which is to say a more successful Dadaist manifesto, could hardly be imagined: a playful creation and dalliance with theatrical authority followed by a resolute refusal to exercise that authority, a distaste of “we” and pronomial tricks, a deep aversion to acts of founding and manifesting all while writing a manifesto. If Ball was repulsed by manifestos and the acts of naming and founding with which they were bound, Hausmann was fascinated. While Ball’s manifesto may have set the stage, so to speak, for not only its refusal to found the movement Dada but also its outright disgust and dismay at the act of founding itself and any movements that may result from it, other Dadaists would gleefully confront the difficulties involved in founding with and within manifestos themselves. In his short text “Tretet dada bei” [Join Dada] (December 1919h), for example, Raoul Hausmann appears to found not quite Dada, but rather “Club Dada,” literally on whose behalf Hausmann writes (in DR, p.  90). “[W]e have decided to build upon the esoteric Dadaist club an exoteric Dadaist club with social relevance” (in DR, p. 90). This exoteric club, as described, is predicated on supposedly previously founded institutions, everything from “the Dada Graphology Institute, the Dada Medicinal Department, the Dada Detective Institute,” to “the Dada School for the Renewal of Psycho-­ Therapeutic Life Relations Between Children and Parents, Spouses and Those Who Once Were or Intend to Become Such” (in DR, p.  90). Hausmann creates a network of institutions within which yet another institution, “Club Dada,” is supposedly founded. The borders of this new, fictional exoteric club are in fact so broad that they already encompass society as a whole, and everyone in it, for aside from a specific fee to

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become an “honorary Dada,” “there are no restrictions for entry into the Club Dada” (in DR, p.  90). Club Dada is so radically exoteric that its borders functionally extend to include all of society and indeed nothing is founded at all. In another text, Hausmann writes on behalf of the similarly Dada-adjacent and likewise fictional “Central Office of the German Dada-­ Movement” in order to entice new customers to “Legen Sie ihr Geld in dada an!” [Put Your Money in Dada!] (June 1919c). Transposed from social club to savings bank, Hausmann again creates a complex, fictional bureaucracy of mystical and economic return on investment with the Central Office’s relationship to other founded groups, such as Taoism, Buddhism, the Deutsche Zeitung, Deutsche Bank, among many others. Here again, every- and anyone is able to invest, to join the club, after following the unique set of rules to navigate the bureaucracy.13 Both of these acts of founding are fiction all the way down, as are, of course, all manifestos for a time. These, however, revel in their theatricality, make it evident, and lay out the creation of a fictional authority to speak on behalf of a fictional institution, an authority that will never be exercised to found an institution that will never exist. Where Ball refuses to found, Hausmann refuses to abstain from fictitious, infelicitous founding. Neither effectively found, but the latter creates a more thorough critique of the act of foundation, its role in the genre of the manifesto and its interpellation of ideological subjects. Tzara, in only relative contrast, saw in these foundings the opportunity to push the manifesto and its theatricality to the breaking point, thereby refusing to allow them to found or manifest at all, to ever function properly as interpellations.

Dramatis Personae: Antipyrine, Aa, “Tristan Tzara,” Tristan Tzara, Samuel Rosenstock If Dadaism and Dadaist praxis is indeed avant-garde manifestoism in its purest form, few Dadaists would function better in the “role as a theoretician of Dada” than Tristan Tzara, for the “aggressive, polemical manifesto was a literary genre which suited Tzara perfectly” (Dickerman 2003, p.  10; DA, p.  33). Tzara performed his first manifesto, “Manifeste de 13  One must go to the Siegessaüle in Berlin between 11 a.m. and 2 a.m., place a 100-mark note in the H of the Hindenberg statue and shout “dada” three times, at which time Kaiser Wilhelm II will pop up from underneath the statue to hand you your receipt. See Hausmann (1919c, in DR, p. 86).

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monsieur Antipyrine” [Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto] (14 July 1916d, in OC 1, p. 357; SDM, p. 2), at Waag Hall in Zurich, the same Dada soirée where Ball performed his “Eröffnungs–Manifest” and broke with Dada. Tzara’s work, however, was only retroactively deemed a manifesto. That night it was seen as merely a soliloquy on stage given by a character in a play, “La première aventure céléste de Mr. Antipyrine” [The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, Fire Extinguisher] (1916a, in OC 1, pp. 75–84), a character named “Tristan Tzara” performed by the author Tristan Tzara, precisely what Austin suggested would be incapable of performative force. Of course, the Romanian Dadaist Samuel Rosenstock already plays the character Tristan Tzara, Rosenstock’s pseudonym, or Dada stage name, which infamously plays on the Romanian trist în t ̦ară, or “sad in country” (see Sandqvist 2006, p. 125). The manifesto of Mr. Antipyrine, then, is a soliloquy in the middle of a staged play performed by a character synonymous but not equivalent to the author of that play. The listener or reader of this manifesto, then, is never sure of what precisely is being referenced in this theatrical context. Is this Rosenstock, Tzara, or “Tzara” speaking? Is the Dada referenced the Dada of our world or some representative of Dada within the world of the theatrical piece? Does “we” refer to “us” or to the play’s cast of characters—“Tzara,” Antipyrine, Mr Bleubleu, Mr. Cricri, Pipi? The theatricality that is initially necessary for a manifesto to function has now become a radical over-abundance of theatricality that confuses and complicates its original intended purpose. Nested in the center of a seemingly interminable series of concentric theaters and their theatrical authority, the manifesto is entirely unconcerned with exercising that authority in the act of founding. This tactic is not, of course, unique to “Manifeste de monsieur Antipyrine,” but would continue, to varying degrees of conspicuity, throughout all of Tzara’s manifestos. Two more of Tzara’s manifestos introduce, or rather are introduced by an evidently theatrical character: “Manifeste de Monsieur Aa, l’antiphilosophe” [Manifesto of Monsieur Aa the Antiphilosopher] (5 February 1920b, in OC 1, pp. 371–372; SDM, pp. 19–21) and “Monsieur Aa l’antiphilosophe nous envoie ce manifeste” [Monsieur Aa the Antiphilosopher Sends Us This Manifesto] (22 May 1920g, in OC 1, pp. 375–376; SDM, pp. 27–28). Between the first performances of these manifestos, Tzara also performed the manifesto titled simply “Tristan Tzara” (19 February 1920d, in OC 1, pp. 373–374; SDM, pp. 23–25), again raising the question to whom precisely these manifestos belong and to which world and characters—real or theatrical or both or neither—they

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refer. “Tzara” notes that the title, a place most often reserved for the institution, or group that is to be founded, is for no institution or group per se, but rather “himself,” spokesperson and institution one and the same thing. “Have a good look at me! / I’m an idiot, I’m a practical joker, I’m a hoaxer / […] / I wanted to give myself a bit of publicity” (SDM, p. 23). Within these three manifestos, there is no traditional “we” of the manifesto. The only use of “we” comes at the end of the manifesto of Monsieur Aa: “we’re all idiots” (SDM, p. 21). This is not the “we” written by the spokesman of a series of “I”s, but rather an “I” and a series of “you”s: “and I’ve come again to start again / and you’re all idiots” (SDM, p. 20). This refusal to engage in the pronomial slip to the required “we” of a properly functioning manifesto, to maintain and indeed highlight a deep distinction between “I” and “you all,” is further exacerbated by the radical theatricality of that “I” as Monsieur Aa, “Tristan Tzara,” or Tristan Tzara. That is, an overabundance of theatrical authority is developed, not in order to form a group, a mass, a party through the fabulous retroactivity of “we,” but rather merely to remain unapologetically independent, a singular “I” set against the generalized “you” and “you all,” an independence that required neither the genre of the manifesto nor the authority of the theater. Moreover, these manifestos—conceived, packaged, and advertised as Dadaist by their author14—do nothing to found or manifest Dada, rather appearing to place both Dada and Dadaists within the “you” and “you all” against whom the theatrical “I” presents itself. Tzara’s regular avoidance of “we,” particularly any “we” that could be read as Dada, does not entirely extend to his Antipyrine manifesto. However, and in typical Tzara form, his use of “we” and Dada undermines what is to be expected of a manifesto: “DADA n’existe pour personne” [DADA exists for no one], and moreover, “we want everyone to understand this” (1916d, in SDM, p. 2; see OC 1, p. 357). Here, Dada indeed exists, but no one has access to its controls, it follows no one’s dictates or demands, even and perhaps especially those of the Dadaists. Like gravity, it requires no act of founding as it has long since existed, has already been founded for, or rather applies to everyone. Again, Tzara’s “we,” for all the trappings of its theatricality, is squeezed between “no one” and “everyone” until it is forced to become “everyone” itself, as broad as those who 14  Tzara’s Sept Manifestes Dada (Seven Dada Manifestos) were originally announced and advertised at Dada au grand air in September 1921 by Tzara himself. However, it would take Tzara three years to fund and publish them. See OC 1, p. 694.

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are affected by gravity, a pronomial slip in the opposite direction that dilutes any potential performative force to zero and leaves Tzara again as simply “I” against everyone, including Dada. In “Tzara,” Tzara differentiates himself, or “Tzara,” from Dada: “DADA suggests 2 solutions / NO MORE LOOKS! / NO MORE WORDS!” to which author-Tzara attaches a footnote: “No more manifestos” (SDM, p. 24). Whether Tzara, or “Tzara,” or either on behalf of Dada, an imperative immediately follows: “Stop looking! / Stop talking! / For I, chameleon alteration infiltration with convenient attitudes—multicolored opinions for every occasion size and price—I do the opposite of what I recommend to other people,” again amended with a footnote: “Sometimes” (SDM, p.  25). The difficulty of discerning who is who, who writes to or against whom, and on whose behalf is multiplied, which eventually leaves a theatrically tangled web of disorientation and destabilization, for the manifesto’s audience if not also for the manifesto’s author and/or theatrical spokesperson. It is within this theatrical tangle, however, that “I” means to reside, with seemingly no desire to disentangle or stabilize—sometimes this, sometimes that, a superposition of opinions and subject positions and interpellations unable to be pinned down. Like Ball almost two years earlier, Tzara or “Tzara” chides Dada for its introduction of still more opinions, more subject positions. “DADA introduces new points of view […] That’s why I’ve quarreled with Dada” (SDM, p. 25). Even this quarrel of course takes on a seemingly ironic and theatrical flair. Much of the same confusion that resulted from Tzara’s “Tristan Tzara” manifesto, where author, institution, and spokesperson were theatrically enmeshed and confused, is further complicated and confounded with and by the anti-philosopher Aa. “[T]ariffs and the high cost of living have made me decide to aban- / don the Ds / it isn’t true that false dadas have deprived / me of them because / the reimbursement will be drafted / as soon as voilà” (OC 1, p. 371; see 1920c, in SDM, p. 19). Dada, deprived of Ds has become Aa, now personified by Monsieur Aa the Antiphilosopher, the theatrical author of this manifesto, written by Tristan Tzara, with two notable As in his last name, also known as Samuel Rosenstock. Within a Dadaist manifesto, a new institution is less founded than carved out of Dada, constrained to such an extent that it is incapable of supporting a “we” beyond Monsieur Aa, “Tristan Tzara,” Tzara, and Rosenstock—all one and the same person, equivalent to the institution Aa itself, a single human with multiple names. This polyonymous human-cum-institution, however, is not promoted or explained, as one might expect of a

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manifesto, but actively invalidated so as to never transition from “I” to “we”: “and you’re letting yourselves be led astray by Aaism / and you’re all idiots” (1920c, in SDM, p. 21). Two weeks after Monsieur Aa’s manifesto, Tzara’s “Tristan Tzara” had transformed Aa into a long ago founded corporation, “Aa & Co’s firm” whose products are recommended: “eat Aa, brush yourself with Aa toothpaste, buy your clothes at Aa’s” (SDM, p. 25).15 Two months later, Aa appears to come clean in a manifesto sent to “us,” with no clarification as to whom that “us” actually refers, of course. With this seeming separation between Aa and Tzara, again connected in Tzara’s reading of Aa’s transmitted manifesto, the subversive theatricality of Aa as character, rather than human, institution, or spokesperson is made evident. “The moment has come when I should tell you that I’ve been lying. 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 lie because I do not lie […]” (1920g, in SDM, p. 27). Within this vortex of lies upon lies, one particular lie appears to be important enough to have been singled out: “for myself has never been myself […] Myself: mixture kitchen theatre” (1920g, in SDM, p.  27). Much like ideology itself, the theater, its theatricality, and most importantly for the manifesto the initial authority that it provides function best when the fourth wall remains unbroken, when everyone plays along as though it were real. Here, and retroactively, Aa, Antipyrine, “Tzara,” and Tzara undermine the illusion with and within the theatrical elements of that illusion. While the triptych of Aa manifestos appears to purposefully destroy the illusion of theatricality, at least for Aaism, elements of this illusion are again brought into question for Tzara’s final Dada manifesto, the “Dada manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer” [Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love] (12 December 1920j, in OC 1, pp. 377–387; SDM, pp.  31–48). Composed of sixteen individually numbered sections, “L’amour faible et l’amour amer,” like many of Tzara’s manifestos, looks very little like a manifesto at all, with little discussion of Dada itself, and far less of its founding or Tzara’s authority to speak on its behalf. Of the sixteen sections, seven are given valedictions by Tzara, a type of signature that appears to vouch in some way for the section to which it was appended. Of course, this immediately begs the question of the remaining nine unsigned sections and their validity or credibility. For the seven that are  For a more in depth discussion of Dada’s relation to commodities, see below, Chap. 5.

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signed, however, no indication is given that they are signed on behalf of Dada or Dadaism; rather, the valediction is by Tzara alone. Moreover, Tzara’s signature exclusively follows the repeated refrain, only occasionally and slightly modified: “I consider myself very likeable” (1920j, in SDM, pp. 32–36). Rather than a stamp or signature denoting a fabulously retroactive approval from the institution being founded, these valedictions skew far closer to Tzara’s earlier desire for self-publicity outlined in “Tristan Tzara” than to speak on behalf of anyone other than himself. There are, however, two sections, thirteen and sixteen, signed by Tzara, though without the usual accompanying “likeability.” The former section ends “Dada is not a literary school, howl / Tristan Tzara” (1920j, in SDM, p.  45), with “hurle” [howl] like the obverse Schwitters’ “read” (lies), an imperative. The latter section is composed entirely of that imperative, “howl,” repeated 275 times only to end the section and manifesto with “who still considers himself very likeable / Tristan Tzara” (1920j, in SDM, p. 48),16 as though the text of the manifesto itself is no longer under Tzara’s control, now removed to the third person point of view, despite his signature of or as that exact person. Not only is Tzara a highly suspicious spokesperson for Dada, Tzara is now a dubious spokesperson for himself, indeed to the point that spokespersonship itself is thrown into question. Moreover, there appears to be a tactical refusal to meaningfully engage with, let alone answer that question.

From Theatricality to Performativity, Playing to Wanting While various Dadaists approached it differently, the act of founding itself is continually undermined, along with the theatricality and theatrical authority with which it is established. If the manifesto is meant to be “a genre that gives the appearance of being at once both word and deed” (Lyon 1999, p. 14), it is difficult to determine what deed a Dadaist manifesto in fact accomplishes. Of course, there is never an assurance that a manifesto will work, that its performative speech act will become felicitous. The manifesto’s “promise, its performative act, is thus staged in the text as the instantaneous positing of what is not yet—and perhaps never

16  The translation includes only 200 of the original 275 repetitions of “howl.” See OC 1, p. 387.

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will be—present” (Hamacher 2008, p. 190).17 For Dada manifestos, however, this “promise” never appears to be serious: there is always an ironic wink alongside it as if it never meant to actually test this promise outside or beyond the theater and theatricality. Ball, by almost any reasonable standard to be considered the perhaps unwitting or unwilling founder of Dada, promises that surely the people of Zurich and his soon to be former friends will get around to founding Dada themselves which allowed him to refuse to officially found it or even speak on its behalf in his manifesto. Hausmann, in his way, refuses to found or speak on behalf of Dada as well, but rather promises a series of forever fictional Dada-adjacent institutions and bureaucracies presumed to have indeed been founded, on whose behalf he is able to speak. Tzara, for his part, appears able to promise, found, or speak only from behind and through a series of theatrical masks, even if those masks do little if anything to mask the person wearing it. That is, these authors and their manifestos do little more than frolic in and with this theatricality, endlessly multiplying vortices of auto-generated theatrical authority. These complex structures of theatricality, however, do nothing but grant the authority to speak on behalf of an (as-yet formed) institution; to lay out a series of promises about and on behalf of an institution, that the author simultaneously promises will one day be retroactively fulfilled by that same institution. Dadaist praxis had no desire to keep or fulfill these promises. The theater, the authority, the promises were play things, dramatic and jocular, not tools. That is not to say, of course, that nothing was accomplished. If Dadaist praxis is the subversion of ideological interpellation, a Dadaist manifesto, the literary genre of ideological interpellation par excellence, could never have been allowed to function smoothly. In addition to the radical indeterminacy of the signifier dada itself, there was no more sure-­ fire way to pre-sabotage a Dadaist manifesto than to never allow it to found Dada in the first place, or in many cases, to speak actively against that formation. Ball’s outright refusal, Hausmann’s Dada adjacencies, Tzara’s Aaism as Aa, all under the banner of Dada as Dadaist manifestos, deny the manifesto its ability to function on behalf of Dada, which is to say, deny any potential audience members or readers of that manifesto a stable apparatus, within or against which their own subject position could be formed or measured. This resulting theater of ideological and 17  In his book How to Do Things with Words, Austin would regularly use the phrase “I promise…” as an exemplar of a performative speech act.

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interpellative instability is precisely what the authority to promise on an institution’s behalf is meant to overcome; to found firmly and manifest from that stability, an apparatus of interpellation that then places individuals into positions of subjectivity in relation to that apparatus. By keeping the manifesto in the theater and on the stage, denying its ability to move into the world, Dadaists prefigured, with raucous positivity, Austin’s contention that there is something about the stage, about theatricality that undermines performative, and therefore interpellative force. Dadaists refuse to move beyond that initial step of theatricality, the appropriate formation or creation of Austin’s series of “certain”s that are a precondition for a performative speech act to be happy or felicitous, to function as desired. This refusal by Dadaists to move beyond the initial injection of self-credited authority that theatricality enables is neither the simple “delight in theatrical pranks and the liberties provided by the theater,” nor is it the plain enjoyment “of founding a movement, […] forming a collective as an end all in itself” (Puchner 2006, pp.  25; 153). In short, this Dadaist praxis of the anti-­manifesto is not nihilistic play, but rather a tactical subversion of the otherwise hidden presuppositions and initial machinations necessary for a manifesto to function, as and from within the genre of the manifesto itself. This subversive Dadaist praxis does not end, however, with theatricality and the act of founding, but extends throughout the “act” of manifesting, the persuasive element of the manifesto that defines the desired tenets of the founded institution, advertises them, and induces others to join—to do things with words in the real world. In a properly functional manifesto, theatricality provides an initial injection of necessary authority to found an institution, but must then be immediately overcome as though it was never needed at all, as though that authority of spokespersonship had in fact already and always been granted in order that the manifesto is able to effect change in the real, rather than theatrical world. As Mary Ann Caws notes, the “manifesto [is] a deliberate manipulation of the public view. Setting out the terms of the faith toward which the listening public is to be swayed, it is a document of an ideology, crafted to convince and convert” (2001, p. ixx). This document of ideology is, in other words, a document of interpellation, an apparatus that creates a series of pre-defined and stable subject positions exclusively from which the listening public is allowed to respond. The institution founded, the manifesting of the manifesto is this creation of that institution’s aims, for or against but always in relation to which the subject is able to place themselves, the interpellation and (mis)recognition completed. This is the

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ultimate goal of the genre, of each manifesto itself and of each manifesting author. “When an author issues a text as a manifesto, he awakens at least the appearance that the text in question clearly provides explanation of its objectives, its plans, its intentions” (Berg and Grüttemeier 1998b, p. 25). Regardless of what the specificities of those objectives, plans, or intentions may be, a functional manifesto must have them. Indeed, they are the genre’s raison d’être, it is a genre of want and desire. These aims, however, must be new and novel, the defining characteristics and “extreme ‘vanguard’” of performative text that forms this new ideological movement (Asholt and Fähnders 1995b, p. xvii). That is, the manifesto as a genre of want does not simply take a stand, but creates, inhabits, and performs its own new and unique standpoint in contradistinction to those of others; a new complex of wants meaningfully distinct from the wants of others. The manifesto not only frames these new wants as a means to differentiate themselves, as “not only the nomenclature of a speaking group, but also a rhetorical device to evoke audiences and to mark the distance in ideological ground between those created audiences and their scripted oppressor” (Lyon 1999, pp. 23–24). This rhetorical device of the manifesto was mentioned specifically by Marinetti in a letter outlining requirements of the manifesto as genre: “some violence and some precision,” deployed as “the precise accusation, the well-defined insult” (qtd. in Lista 1973, pp. 18–19). More so, however, it is a well-defining insult, the set of insults that interpellate, create, and form both the movement’s adherents and opponents. The manifesto’s move beyond theatricality into aims, goals, and intentions, into want, and therefore into well-defining insults is the decisive move into “a mode [of address…] that interpellates and constitutes a subject” (Butler 1997, p. 2). Within the framework of a functional manifesto, to manifest is to want is to interpellate. In much the same way that Dadaists would variously confound the act of founding, so too would various Dadaist find various ways to refuse or refute acts of manifesting. When Richard Huelsenbeck reproduced his “Dadaistisches Manifest” (12 April 1918) in his 1920 edited anthology Dada Almanach (DA, pp. 44–49), he added a small preamble, “Was wollte der Expressionismus?” [What did Expressionism Want?] (1920d, in DA, p.  44). Although he would outline the various aims and intentions of expressionism along with the ways in which these were antithetical to Dadaist praxis, Huelsenbeck highlights the true problem with expressionism in the first line: “It [expressionism] ‘wanted’ something, that much remains characteristic of it” (1920d, in DA, p.  44). Wanting something is characteristic of

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expressionism and, for Dadaists, its original sin. The expressionist posture of “expectantly looking forward” to a new future, of wanting, of “a theoretical, melioristic understanding of life” (1918, in DA, p.  45), entirely regardless of the specificities of those expectations, wants, theories, or meliorisms, is what Huelsenbeck the Dadaist hates about expressionism; an expression of meliorism as such. He hates expressionism not for what it wants, but that it wants at all. As Huelsenbeck notes in his introduction to Dada Almanach, melioristic want is the foundation of ideological interpellation. “Human beings are simply ideologues if they fall for the swindle perpetrated by their own intellects: that an idea […] has any absolute reality. […] Whoever turns ‘freedom,’ or ‘relativity,’ […] into a ‘firm creed’ is just another ideologue” (DA, p. 11). It is not the belief or the concept, per se, but the swindle that turns the idea into a reality, into a firm creed, which is to say, into something to be desired, a new point of view to which others are cajoled into joining. These are “the world-reforming theories of literary blockheads!” (1918, in DA, p.  49), which both occupy and embody the intersection of want and ideological interpellation, the separation of the populace into those who are now subjects within and subjected to this new and newly desired stable ideological standpoint, and those who are not—the rhetorical us and them. For Huelsenbeck’s part, Dada “opposes every kind of ideology, i.e. every kind of combative stance” (1920c, in DA, p.  11), which is to say, every want. If expressionism is defined by its want, “Dada wants nothing. […] Dadaism is nothing but an expression of the times” (1920d, in DA, p. 44). As Ball not only refused to found but also refused to create the theater that would have self-credited the authority to do it, so too does Huelsenbeck refuse to manifest, but also refuses to allow Dada to want something new beyond the expression of the moment, which functions as the bedrock that supports a manifesto’s ability to manifest and to interpellate. The same year as his Almanach, Huelsenbeck’s En Avant Dada (1920e), written in close collaboration with Raoul Hausmann, included a slightly edited version of “Was wollte der Expressionismus?” and quoted liberally from Huelsenbeck’s own “Dadaistisches Manifest,” though here again in a modified and expanded form. These edited elements continued Huelsenbeck’s refusal to want, if now in the context of Berlin Dada’s growing involvement in Communist politics, proclaiming that “Dada is German Bolshevism” (1920f, p.  44). If uncharacteristically tied here to both a particular nation and ideology, Huelsenbeck earlier clarified the idiosyncratic nature of those ties. Dadaist communism, as conceived by

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Huelsenbeck, is “a communism, to be sure, which has abandoned the principle of ‘making things better’” (1920f, p. 42). Indeed, even though Lenin “creates a movement, […] he dissolves individualities with the help of a theory, he changes nothing” (1920f, p. 42). For Huelsenbeck, Dada merely understands and even celebrates the ineffectuality to which such founded movements, in particular communism, are subject. Ultimately, he concludes that the “word ‘improvement’ is in every form unintelligible to the Dadaist” (1920f, p. 42). As such, there is no such thing as a Dadaist want beyond the now slightly edited refrain where Dada no longer is, but rather “wants to be no more than an expression of the times” (1920f, p. 42). Huelsenbeck’s refusal to want as he simultaneously connects Dada to apparatuses best known for their want, “as paradoxical as it may seem” (1920f, p.  42), may have been due to the influence of his collaborator Raoul Hausmann. Although generally less politically fervent than Huelsenbeck, Hausmann enjoyed the freedoms afforded by paradox and irony in the wants of his manifestos as much as he had in the foundation of fictional institutions and bureaucracies. The question of want, who wants, or who refuses to want what, echoed throughout the works of Huelsenbeck and Hausmann during this time. Huelsenbeck’s “Was wollte der Expressionismus?” was included in his En Avant Dada, which similarly reprinted Hausmann’s “Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?” [What is Dadaism and What Does it Want for Germany?] (June 1919d),18 composed and signed by both Huelsenbeck and Hausmann. Hausmann’s text “Was will der Dadaismus in Europa?” [What Does Dadaism Want in Europe?] (22 February 1920a), first performed and printed by Hausmann during a Dadaist tour of Prague by Huelsenbeck and Hausmann in the months leading up to the publishing of Huelsenbeck’s Dada Almanach and En Avant Dada, reproduces much of Huelsenbeck’s “Dadaistisches Manifest,” in which he rails against melioristic want. Despite this vortex of printings and re-printings between Hausmann and Huelsenbeck, the distrust of melioristic want remained relatively steadfast: “The Dadaist knows no past and no aspiration, is bound by the living present, takes the world as it is, without wanting to change it” (1920a, in BDF 1, p. 95). This network of want and non-want at the heart of Berlin Dada moves beyond Huelsenbeck’s initial refusals. Already in title and form, Hausmann’s “Was 18  Originally presented as an insert to Der Dada 2, edited by Raoul Hausmann. Translated and reproduced in Huelsenbeck (1920f, pp. 41–42).

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ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?” suggests something uniquely different from Huelsenbeck’s strident refusals. Similar to the title, the form or the work is divided into two, the first a set of “demands” of “Dadaism,” numbered one through three, presumably to answer the initial question “What is Dadaism?,” seemingly equating Dada’s existence with its supposed desires. The first of these demands is yet another bureaucratic apparatus, an “international revolutionary union” based on “radical Communism” (1919d, in BDF 1, p. 60), as Huelsenbeck might envision. The second demand calls for full automation and unemployment, prefiguring post-scarcity fully automated luxury communism and the third continues to demand expropriation of property (see Bastani 2019). Although revolutionary, these demands seem to be in line with a functional, or at least serious manifesto of literary and communist beliefs. From here, however, the wants that comprise the entirety of the work turn quickly toward the emphatically hyperbolic. The second half of the third demand of Dadaism diverges from radical communism as such to include the construction of “communally owned cities full of light and gardens that prepare humanity for freedom” (1919d, in BDF 1, p. 60). This transition toward a vague utopia, presumably based on similarly nebulous city planning and landscape architecture, prefaces the manifesto’s transition from the demands of Dadaism [Der Dadaismus fordert] to the simple advocacies of “The Central Council” [Der Zentralrat tritt ein für] that constitute the remainder of the manifesto. In this transition from Dada to Central Council and from demand to advocacy, so too does the text switch from numerically to alphabetically ordered propositions. One through three demands and a through k advocacies would make for 14 points, in reference to either the Kiel mutineers’ 14 points that helped to end the First World War or Woodrow Wilson’s doomed 14 points after it, if Hausmann, however, had not bypassed j, leaving only 13 points.19 Wilson’s “programme for a world peace” is here replaced at the mutineers’ plans radicalized into far-left communism, progressive unemployment, and expropriation of property (Wilson 1918). In place of Wilson’s proposed League of Nations, Hausmann continued his penchant for proposing a series of fictional and indeed inconceivable bureaucratic institutions. Beyond the presumable trade union of revolutionary city 19  The work’s translation in The Dada Painters and Poets, edited by Robert Motherwell, changes the lettering of Hausmann’s “advocacies” to a through j. See “Beschlüsse und Forderungen” 5 November 1918.

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planners and landscape architects, Hausmann proposed something of a state restaurant in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz; a state art center; the injection of the state into clergy and education for the “compulsory adherence […] to Dadaist articles of faith” a performance of Dadaist poetry and communist prayers; an advisory council to remake the lives of cities; a Dadaist propaganda institute, including circuses; a law division of the central council; and a Dadaist sexual center to regulate all sexual relations (1919d, in BDF 1, pp. 60–61). These increasingly bizarre and knowingly unworkable institutions and apparatuses—all of which, from faith-based compulsory adherence to presumably cis-het normativity contradict concepts of an anti-ideological Dada—extend Hausmann’s previous tactics of founding into those of manifesting. While “Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?” pointedly answers neither of the questions posed by its title—the questions implied by any presumed text of Berlin Dada’s founding and manifesto—the work instead utterly ignores acts of founding and manifests overwhelmingly vague, evidently fictional, and clearly unworkable Dadaist articles of faith and poetry as communist prayer, Dadaist sexual ethics and proper gardening practices. Just as Hausmann’s “Tretet dada bei” and “Legen Sie Ihr Geld in dada an!” founded hyperbolically concocted and imaginary institutions, and were therefore assured of founding nothing, so too do Hausmann’s manifestos of want assiduously avoid the performative force of manifestos by manifesting too much and in all the wrong directions. Rather than Huelsenbeck’s refusal, Hausmann and others Dadaists were far more interested in the hyperbolic irony, the paradox and contradictions, the sarcasm and subversions that the manifesto as a genre allowed to undermine the manifesto itself, as well as its interpellative force.

“The Unconquerable Power of Irony!”20 Since Marx’s and Marinetti’s manifestos aim to change, if not radically overturn, some social or cultural element of the dominant order, the genre necessarily “promulgates the very discourses it critiques: it makes itself intelligible to the dominant order through a logic that presumes the efficacy of modern democratic ideals” (Lyon 1999, p. 3). That is, while certain license is taken, particularly in regard to the manifestos of the avant-garde, a manifesto functions as a point by point confrontation with  Hausmann (1920c, p. 93).

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the dominant order, but always on that order’s home turf, with that order’s vocabulary and grammar, a refutation of that and justification of this, insults and counter-insults well defined and well defining, readable, knowable, rational, and therefore available to be received or rebuffed in turn by adherents, opponents, and audience in general, functioning as a series of interpellations all the while. In short, a manifesto is meant to be composed of “all around positively formulated demands [and] thoroughly constructive aesthetics” (Asholt and Fähnders 1995b, p. xviii). As Marinetti noted, these are the elements of violence, precision, and insult that are necessary for a manifesto to function, or perhaps more specifically, that are needed for a manifesto that wants to function, that wants to be successful, to interpellate subjects into prefigured positions and points of view, indeed a manifesto that wants at all. Elements such as these can certainly be seen throughout Dadaist manifestos, from violently precise insults of cubism, expressionism, futurism. Walter Serner’s “Letzte Lockerung Manifest Dada” insults aestheticians regardless of aesthetics.21 Francis Picabia’s “Manifeste cannibale dada” [Cannibal Dada Manifesto] insults everyone who reads it.22 Such examples do not, however, translate or transform into the positively formulated demands of want, but rather far more often appear to turn around on themselves or balloon out into extravagantly overstated, and therefore imprecise, abuse leveled against any and all. In short, any hint of seriousness is quickly subsumed by irony. The refusal to found in Ball’s manifestos and to want in Huelsenbeck’s from within the genre of the manifesto, dedicated to the formation and promotion of institutions and want, for example, is deeply ironic. As Quintilian first explored the concept in a speech given by Cicero, irony asks the audience “to understand the opposite of what is said” (Quintilian 2014, p. 59; §9.2.44). This initial conceptualization of irony, however, has a unique set of presuppositions that must be met for a statement to be recognized as ironic. An author’s intended meaning, precisely what the author actually said, and the degree to which those two elements are different or discordant must all be evident for an audience member to recognize a statement as ironic. For so-called “stable irony” to function, both author and audience must exist within an easily navigable network of 21  “To clap a redeeming heaven over this chaos of filth and enigma! To perfume and order this pile of human shit! Thanks a lot!” (1920b, p. 156). Serner continues later: “All in all, my dearest: art was a teething problem” (p. 158). 22  The first words of the manifesto: “Arise. You are all accused” (1920, p. 55).

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stable conventions, meanings, and rhetorical usage, everything well defined and defining (see Booth 1974). In short, all actors have been successfully interpellated by and within the apparatus of language and logic in question. Stable irony functions only insofar as it reinforces the rules of rhetoric with which it plays. Manifestos, as a genre of polemical wants and well-defining insults, however, enables a new and not only far less stable but indeed destabilizing form of irony. As Friedrich Schlegel notes, there is “a rhetorical species of irony which, sparingly used, has an excellent effect, especially in polemics” (PF, p. 5), that particularly suits genres such as manifestos or systematic philosophical tracts that are otherwise dependent upon a series of stabilities. Schlegel, however, also noted that other genres were less bound by these rhetorical constraints and were therefore able to deploy irony in both new realms and new ways, where, for example, “poetry does not restrict itself to isolated ironical passages,” but can rather be “pervaded by the divine breath of irony throughout” (PF, p. 5). Freed from the rhetorical and interpellative requirements of a programmatic system, either against which a manifesto rails or for which it lobbies, poetry is free of the need for stable meanings or intentions, able to be “informed by a transendental buffoonery” (PF, pp. 5–6). This “[i]rony is the form of paradox” (PF, p. 6). Schlegel’s poetic irony and rhetorical irony map, in many ways, onto the genre of the manifesto composed of the acts of founding and manifesting. While the rhetorical irony of a manifested intention is based on the stability of that rhetoric, the poetic irony of the act of founding thrives on the theatricality beyond such systematized thought, “for wherever philosophy appears in oral or written dialogues—and is not simply confined into rigid systems—there irony should be asked for and provided” (PF, p. 5). Schlegel points to the exemplary Socratic irony displayed in Plato’s dialogues as “the real homeland of irony,” (PF, p. 5; see also, p. 13), where the exploration of philosophical thought is theatrical, where characters are able to take this or that stance, able in turn to contradict it as another character enters or exits the stage, less bound by a deep sense of seriousness or authenticity. Theatricality is precisely what allows a continual questioning of the limits of what is meant to be represented, performed, indeed formed, and in what ways and what times, where paradoxes and contradictions can be followed rather than denied and dismissed. These elements are what allow for a “continuous self-parody,” allow the characters-cum-­ standpoints to be “continuously fluctuating between self-creation and self-destruction” (PF, p. 13; 24). As a mode of interpellation, an ironic

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manifesto that parodies the conventions of the genre, if not outright refuses them, not only sacrifices its own performative force beyond the theatrical stage, but also simultaneously destabilizes through continuous fluctuation, the potential self-creation and self-destruction of the audience’s subject positions. This is the performative force of theatricality— not a move beyond the stage, but the radical expansion of it, the revelation that all the world’s a stage and, according to Hausmann, “All the world’s a manifestation of self-misunderstanding subjectivity that means to explain itself objectively and thus creates a never ending obfuscation of what it truly is” (1921b, p. 32). Here, the theatrical manifesto becomes hyper-­ theatrical, a theatrical manifesto staged as a play within a play, and conspicuously so, the irony of “a conscious artistic manipulation of mimetic representation” (Burwick 1997, pp. 52–53). The ironic manifesto, then, is this “metamanifesto” that continually gives a playful wink to the audience as it takes its place on stage and questions its own boundaries and genre and form for that audience (see Puchner 2006, p. 153). Walter Benjamin, investigating Schlegel’s expansion of the concept of irony in the context of German Romanticism, highlighted “the ironization of form” that results in “the destruction of illusion in the art form,” (1996b, pp. 163; 164), where the form itself is pointedly made to be seen as a form of art, of mimesis, where the art form is put on stage, theatricalized. Quoting Schlegel, Benjamin notes that this irony is no mere coincidence, but “thought-out wantonness [that …] heightens the deception […] in order to provoke without destroying” (1996b, p. 163). This is the criticism of ironic theatricality that, according to Benjamin, “presents a paradoxical venture: through demolition to continue building on the formation” (1996b, p. 165). This is precisely what so-called serious authors of manifestos feared. Marx and Engels decried the flood of manifestos and proclamations that followed their own Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, often, they felt, to the detriment of both communist thought and their own manifesto. Marinetti was similarly concerned about the proliferation of Futurist manifestos. In a now infamous letter to fellow Futurist Gino Severini, who had asked for Marinetti’s opinion of a proposed manifesto, Marinetti responded: “there is nothing of the manifesto in it. […] you must not repeat what I have already said, in ‘The Futurism’ and elsewhere” (qtd. in Perloff 1986, p. 81).23 Newness is paramount, as one cannot re-emerge from that metaphorical maternal ditch full of industrial  Marinetti refers to the initial publication of Le Futurisme in Le Figaro.

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waste, for every attempted repetition dilutes the power of that initial movement of the new day and new birth. Such repetition dulls the sharpness of those precisely defined and defining insults and ultimately blurs the difference between newly founded movement and those that came before, but also between adherents and opponents of that movement, both of whom are now able to selectively determine which manifesto’s aims to follow. Marinetti suggests that Severini rework and rewrite it, “intensifying and tightening it, recasting the whole new part in the form of Manifesto” (Perloff 1986, p. 81). Actively opposed to such stiff or strict definitional boundaries, Dadaist praxis ironically undermines any attempt by the manifesto to define what was Dada or who were Dadaists, precisely what Marx, Marinetti, and previous manifesto writers had determined to make of the manifesto genre. While the tactically deployed difficulties with Dada’s definitions already preclude the perfectly smooth operation of any potential Dadaist manifesto, the actual Dadaist manifestos further frustrated any possibilities of smoothness. As a series of manifestos entirely unconcerned with founding or defining and delineating a movement, let alone manifesting it, Dadaist manifestos were unconcerned with being the first, the determinant, or the authoritative. Without, and indeed as a check against, any pretensions to such primary or determinant authority, Dadaist manifestos multiplied wildly. Between Tzara’s seven Dada manifestos, Hausmann’s multiple fictional foundings and hyperbolic manifestings of Dada adjacent bureaucracies, Huelsenbeck’s manifesto-esque explanations of Dadaist praxis, even Schwitters’ i manifestos that function simultaneously as Dada manifestos or the “Vint-trois manifestes du mouvement dada” [23 Manifestos of the Dada Movement] in the thirteenth issue of Littérature (see DR, pp. 181–196), each would impinge on the others, overlap or contradict, but in every case de-solidify Dadaism. Both Dada itself and the manifesto as genre were theatrical playthings to and for Dadaist manifestos. Just as “amid music, dance, Montmartre chansons, Cubism and Futurism were ironized” (Hausmann 1920c, p. 92), where “Dada […] turned Cubism to a dance on stage” (Huelsenbeck 1918, p. 45), so too did Dada place itself, along with everything else, on the stage of irony. For Dada, however, the borders of the stage were radically expanded in order to ironically theatricalize and critique the world—themselves included. In this regard, Ball was exceedingly clear from the beginning: “What we call dada is a fool’s play [Narrenspiel] of nothingness; in which all higher questions are implicated […] a play with shabby debris, an execution of posturing morality

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and abundance” (2018, p. 84; see also FOT, p. 65). Not a mere juxtaposition of so-called high and low culture, but rather the use of irony afforded by contradictory, foolish theater to criticize the higher questions of meliorism and morality, Dadaist praxis was “buffoonery and a requiem mass simultaneously” (FOT, p. 56).24 This is precisely the irony described by Schlegel some 100 years earlier, the irony of “transcendental buffoonery. Internally, the mood that surveys everything and rises infinitely above all limitations, even above its own art, virtue or genius” (PF, p. 6). Surveying everything, Dadaist manifestos survey themselves, ironizing Dada, manifestos, and most importantly ironizing what non-ironic Dadaist manifestos would have meant to form: Dadaist subjects. The hypertheatricality that the transcendental buffoonery of Dada’s ironic meta-manifestos requires is often framed as a zero-sum game, where “the celebration of theatrical overreaching” is made “at the expense of its performative and transformative power” (Puchner 2006, p. 153). That is, Dadaist manifestos were unable, due to their theatricality, to manifest additional Dadaists, which is to say to interpellate individuals into Dadaist subjects in order to build a Dadaist movement. Neither Dadaist manifestos nor Dada itself, however, ever had designs to create or wield such performative or transitive power, to interpellate. It was not an expense, because they were never in the market. With radical hypertheatricality, Dadaist manifestos quit while they were ahead, having already created what they came for: an ironic stage. While Dada’s pointed refusal to interpellate meaningfully, to form more subjects is evidenced by the myriad forms of irony—self-parody, winking theatricality, continual and unstable self-negation and -creation, contradiction, paradox—already levelled against themselves and the very genre that is expressly meant for such subject formation in the very deployment of the Dadaist manifesto, Dadaists ruthlessly sabotaged the performative power of interpellation within their own manifestos. To end his own “Dadaistisches Manifest,” Huelsenbeck proclaimed, for example, “If you are against this manifesto you are a Dadaist” (1918, p. 49). This was then signed by Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, Tzara, Ball, and seventeen others, all similarly in the superposition of being Dadaists and not Dadaists. Hausmann was clear in his use 24  Friedrich Karl Forberg, a contemporary of Schelgel’s, noted the importance of contradiction to the fool [Narren]: “Even further—this is the maxim of fools [Narren]. The contradiction of the universal judgement is, to the sage, a reason to doubt their own; the mob to forsake their own; the fool to follow their own” (2011, p. 244).

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of irony and paradox to destabilize its own ability to interpellate as an authorized Dadaist: “We tootle, squeak, curse, laugh out the irony: Dada! For we are ANTI-DADAISTS!” (1919g, in DR, p. 88). In his “Dada manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer,” Tzara, for his part, keeps the paradox simple, but no less effective in the hobbling of interpellation: “the real dadas are against DADA” (1920j, in SDM, p.  38). As Tzara ended Bulletin Dada (March 1920e), “Everyone is the director of the Dada movement” (p. 4). There was no point in interpellating more dadas or Dadaists. There were no more. Even without any performative force, Dadaist manifestos appear to accomplish what they set out to do. The Dadaist manifesto theatrically represents the hidden theatricality of nonironic, meliorist manifestos, a hypertheatricality that removes the possibility of the Dadaist manifesto’s functional, performative authority, of itself functioning as a meliorist manifesto that interpellates further meliorists. In short, these Dadaist manifestos function perfectly as Dadaist praxis. While most Dadaist manifestos are in fact surprisingly forthright in their ironically theatrical or theatrically ironic goals, one is particularly meticulous and exhaustive.

The Most “Dada Manifesto 1918” After a series of Dada soirées in Zürich, Tristan Tzara organized the “Soirée Tristan Tzara” on 23 July 1918 at the Zunfthaus zur Meisen in Zurich. As the title given to the evening denoted, only works by Tzara were performed by Tzara. The advertisement flyers, however, were clear what the topic of the evening was going to be: “manifesto, antithesis thesis antiphilosophy DadA DADA DADA daDa dadaist spontaneity dadaist disgust LAUGHTER” (1920a, p. 27). These advertisements enticed less than one hundred people to join, who would, however, be the first to witness the performance of Tzara’s “Manifeste Dada 1918” [Dada Manifesto 1918] the Dada manifesto that would go on to be considered “the first, the true, and the great gospel of Dadaism” (Sanouillet 2009, p. 99), the manifesto that would make critics see Tzara as one of, if not the foremost theoretician of Dadaism itself (Dickerman 2003, p.  10). Indeed, Tzara’s “Manifeste Dada 1918,” after its circulation beyond the lonely audience of Meise Hall with its publication in the third issue of Dada, was celebrated by fellow Dadaists, even those with whom he would later have severe disagreements (see Fig.  3.1). Francis Picabia would commend the nietzschean element of Tzara’s “manifesto [that] is the

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Fig. 3.1  Tristan Tzara’s Manifest Dada 1918 [Dada Manifesto 1918] as printed in Dada, no. 3 (July 1917)

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expression of every philosophy that searched for the truth, when there is no truth, there are only conventions” (qtd. in OC 1, p. 700). With Hugo Ball no longer in Zurich after his final Dadaist foray with Galerie Dada and Huelsenbeck returned to Berlin, the manifesto itself and the third issue of Dada in which it was printed signaled new possibilities of clarity, or rather forthrightness to the extent that Dadaist praxis allows, of Dada. Without question, “Manifeste Dada 1918” is the most sustained engagement with Dada by Tzara, if not any Dadaist, within an expressly Dadaist work, which is to say a Dadaist manifesto. As such, Tzara’s manifesto functions well as Dadaist praxis, as a Dadaist manifesto that is simultaneously a refusal to dictate Dada and “the best exfoliation of the manifesto form” (Lyon 1999, p. 39), so as to disrupt and destabilize the creation of authority to create Dadaist subjects, indeed ideological subjects at all, to interpellate. Aside from a small epigraph-like blurb explaining the simultaneous magic and insignificance of the word dada, Tzara’s “Manifeste Dada 1918” begins with an extended discussion, to whatever extent Tzara is able to make discussion in his works, of the tropes and traditions of the manifesto as a genre. “To launch a manifesto you have to want [il faut vouloir]: A.B. & C., and fulminate [foudroyer] against 1, 2, & 3” (OC 1, p. 359; see TTDM, p. 3). It is a requirement to want, the primary and absolute necessity; and with and within that want, it is therefore a requirement to strike down the wants of others. This required want is the stable combative stance from which melioristic ideology is launched. Without naming them, particularly in the de-personalized il faut of the original French, a generic “we” and “them” are already delineated and formed as combatants. Even an egalitarian ABC desired in the place of a hierarchical 123, an unsubtle allusion to the enumerated theses of Marinetti’s infamous manifesto that Tzara had come to disparage, would require a surprising amount of vitriolic combat: “to sign, shout, swear, organize prose into a form that is absolutely and irrefutably obvious, prove its non plus ultra” (TTDM, p. 3). The ambiguity of “to swear,” and its French original jurer, functions here in both its meanings, both cursing with foul language and making and performing a promise, bridging the combative sign and shout with the organization of irrefutable prose. Emotions, desires, curses, and promises, the performances of a combative stance are stripped of their performativity and subjectivity and made into, presented as obvious and objective fact—the foundation of ideology in the confusion of the performative for constative, of linguistic with natural reality. As Tzara would

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note later in his “L’amour faible et l’amour amer,” a “manifesto is a communication made to the whole world […] it’s always right, it’s strong, vigorous and logical” (1920j, p. 33). Like Althusser’s police officer yelling across a crowded square, the manifesto is the combative communication of ideology to the whole world, addressed specifically to whomever will have happened to have turned at and toward the interpellation. Within the span of a few preliminary lines, Tzara lays out not only what a manifesto is, but also the difficulties (and opportunities) that a Dadaist manifesto encounters. Tzara is unequivocal in his feelings toward the meliorist manifesto and the elements that it requires. “To impose your A.B.C. is a natural thing— therefore regrettable. Everyone does it in the form of a crystalbluffmadonna, or a monetary system, or pharmaceutical preparations” (TTDM, p.  3). Everyone does it and it is everywhere—the ubiquity of ideology. Tzara notes, however, that this is not merely the case in well-defined or well-defining argumentation, the rhetorical organization and alphabetization of A.B.C.s meant to be imposed,25 but rather exists in a series of material institutions and systems, what Althusser would call ideological apparatuses, that extend through aesthetics, economics, biology, and beyond. That is, the material structure of society and the systems and apparatuses that constitute it are suffused with the imposition of A.B.C.s, with the imposition of ideology. It is so ubiquitous as to become as invisible and forgotten as the air breathed, obvious and just the way that things are, no longer a system or apparatus at all but “a natural thing,” and “therefore regrettable.” Unlike the ideology already inherent in material apparatuses such as aesthetic mores, economic systems, or biological customs that tend to seep hidden into the background of culture and society, the manifesto first acknowledges its need to argue on its own behalf. The novelty of the manifesto necessitates the signs, shouts, swears, and organized prose in a way that already extant material apparatuses, in other words the manifestos that have already been successfully manifested, no longer do. The manifesto as a genre necessarily lays bare the rhetorical creation of obviousness, its linguistic rather than natural formation, in the process of attempting to create its own. As the spearhead of a system of melioristic want, the manifesto is the most conspicuous as a genre of want, and because of that conspicuousness, that lack of camouflaging 25  The use of A.B.C. by Tzara prefigures the alphabêtise of Lacan and later Kittler. See Kittler (1999, p. 151).

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obviousness, it is simultaneously the most vulnerable to subversion. Tzara recognizes and exploits this unique vulnerability of the manifesto within a manifesto. However, as they have been defined up to now, this manifesto is not one. If the manifesto is a genre defined by ideological, systemic, melioristic, combative want to the point that the process of the creation of that want is exposed as rhetorical and the ostensible obviousness of that want is open to critique, as Tzara’s very analysis of the genre suggests, any attack against the genre, against the form, would necessarily take the form of a manifesto itself, of those same rhetorically sharpened A.B.C.s. This, however, would allow those manifestos on both sides to close ranks and refocus their wants against a solidified target of their own. Rather, Dadaist praxis and Tzara exacerbate the exposure and inherent vulnerability of the genre, disallowing the process that creates want from ossifying into structured prose and combative stances. Both the radical theatricality and the attendant refusal to want, refusal to transition toward the implementation of performative force, as a manifesto or under the banner of one, enables an ironic investigation of both form and content of the manifesto as a genre of ideology. For the only time in his Dada manifesto, Tzara mentions the founding of Dada: “Thus DADA was born” with the attached footnote, “in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich” (TTDM, p.  5). Here again, Tzara alludes to the faux-natural birth à la Futurism rather than an ideological and rhetorical foundation. This, however, was the first time in which Tzara spoke about “DADA” as a movement, or mass, or party being founded or having been founded after writing extensively about the word dada. That is, the founding of “DADA” is, within the bounds of the manifesto, inextricably tied to the found word dada. The halfhearted attempt by Tzara to frame the founding of DADA as natural, and his wholehearted allusion of that naturalness with Futurism, serves only to underscore and expose that same duplicity in other manifestos. Knowing that “born” is both a cheeky allusion and a poor performance of ideology’s intended confusion of linguistic with natural reality, the supposed linguistic core of that founding remains hollow. From the epigrammatic note to a fully capitalized and bolded declaration with a distinct and decisive manicule that famously and precisely clarifies the importance of dada to DADA. “☞ DADA NE SIGNIFIE RIEN” [Dada does not signify anything] (Tzara 1918a, in OC 1, p. 360; see TTDM, p. 4). This echoes, if more emphatically, the manifesto’s epigraph: “The magic of a word—DADA—[…] has for us not the slightest importance”

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(TTDM, p. 3). Tzara’s continual thwarting of a smoothly founded DADA extends even and specifically to the problematization of “us,” of “we,” of the very movement itself, founded or otherwise. What little attention that Tzara gives to the founding of Dada, twelve words including footnote, is immediately undercut. As soon as Dada is framed as something that resembles a movement or mass or party, the connective tissue that binds it together is undone: “born, out of a need for independence, out of a mistrust for community. People who join us keep their freedom” (TTDM, p. 5). The first sentence that makes a movement toward theatrical authority is undone before that same sentence comes to an end. Unlike Marinetti’s strategic elision of the formation of a “we” and “us” necessary for founding a movement, Tzara’s “we” and “us” here pointedly and conspicuously function as an association of “I”s. Tzara specifies a Dada free from the necessity for, and even ability to create, a theatrically authorized spokesperson as an “I” around which “we” is centered. Almost 50 years before Émile Benveniste suggested a “we” where “it is always ‘I’ which predominates” (Benveniste 1971, p. 202). Tzara suggests and exemplifies a Dadaist “we” as an egalitarian confederation of wholly independent “I”s. In short, there is no traditional theatricality and no founding, but rather a naming, a label that anyone can put on or take off as they please. This replaces the theatricality of a movement founded with the theatricality of an individual—Samuel Rosenstock, Tristan Tzara, Antipyrine, Monsieur Aa, etc. Tzara highlights the fluidity of individual (theatrical) subjecthood: “I always speak about myself because I don’t want to convince, and I have no right to drag others in my wake, I’m not compelling anyone to follow me” (TTDM, p.  5). The theatricality of Tzara’s “Manifeste Dada 1918” is decidedly not that of authority, but rather that of ironic criticism. The manifesto is, according to the title, a manifesto, but a manifesto that refuses to function as manifesto, to found, to generate the authority required to speak on behalf of a movement, in essence to do anything that a manifesto is meant to do. It is a manifesto that is so evidently and thoroughly ineffectual that its harmlessness becomes the point, sedated and defanged in order to function rather as a dissected model, as “the best exfoliation of the manifesto form” (Lyon 1999, p. 39). The manifesto’s ineffectuality brings the previously and necessarily hidden machinations of the genre to the fore, thereby rendering the manifesto still more ineffectual. Tzara makes it clear that this brash ineffectuality is in fact the point.

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Perhaps the most oft-quoted section of Tzara’s manifesto, already full of famous and infamous quips and witticisms, is somehow both its most paradoxical and clearest summarization of the manifesto itself. “I am writing a manifesto and there’s nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles” (TTDM, p. 3). Not only is this manifesto ineffectual, it is purposefully so, without even the initial desire to have been effectual. Indeed, Tzara specifically belabors that point, lays it out, makes it evident that he wants nothing and that this manifesto is him saying certain things, most loudly that he wants nothing. To impose A.B.C., to want the principles A.B.C. and drag people in its wake in order to promote them over and against some well-defined and defining 1.2.3., of course, is deplorable. This continual contradiction, a manifesto that wants nothing, does not suggest, however, that nothing is being accomplished. “I’m writing this manifesto to show that you can perform contrary actions at the same time, in one single, fresh breath; I am against action; as for continual contradiction, and affirmation too, I am neither for nor against them, and I won’t explain myself because I hate common sense” (TTDM, p. 4). This contradictory action of writing a manifesto and wanting nothing quickly multiplies beyond that single, fresh breath. Tzara is also against action itself, regardless of its origin or goal, presumably contradictory action as well. Contradiction and affirmation, for their part, are similarly contradictorily regarded. As Tzara mentioned, the desire of this manifesto, insofar as there is one, is the promulgation of contradiction itself, a brash ineffectuality that becomes impossible to overcome and impossible to ignore. The contradictions, along with the paradoxes that they subsequently generate, multiply and ultimately subsume any initially perceived sense. The stability of A.B.C. against 1.2.3., of the well-defined and -defining rhetoric, spirals quickly out of control and the naturalness of imposing A.B.C., the ease of common sense, the foundations of the manifesto as a genre are ironically and irredeemably undone. As a genre of ideology and ideological subject formation, undoing the manifesto similarly undoes the formation of the subject, well-defined. Not only is wanting and imposing A.B.C. natural, or at least considered natural rather than linguistic, it is unavoidable. Everyone does it and, regrettably, everyone becomes a target of Tzara’s displeasure—more specifically, everyone within the symbolic order, everyone with and within their own A.B.C., everyone who learned their A.B.C.s. There is little indication that this everyone does not include Tzara himself. He is indeed

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writing a manifesto, even though he wants nothing. Regarding want, as with action, contradiction, affirmation, principles, manifestos, etc., Tzara is neither for nor against, both and neither, simultaneously. Bifurcations and binaries, the divisions between this or that, the A.B.C.s versus the 1.2.3.s, are precisely what Dadaist rhetorical techniques of paradox and contradiction are able to destroy. Indeed, Tzara is at his least equivocal on this point, belying a seeming pride of accomplishment, a want in itself. “I destroy the drawers of the brain” (TTDM, p. 8). This is the want of not wanting A.B.C. or 1.2.3, not wanting the sets and series of principles devised and divided in the drawers of the individual brain, the very organization of combative points of view, of ideological subjectivity. Tzara’s destruction of them is, of course, not merely the expansion of ideas beyond their original bounds, but rather the destructive disturbance and destabilization of the material, rhetorical modes in and through which the ideological subject is formed and reproduced. As treatment for the detestably natural want of A.B.C.s, Tzara posits a je m’enfoutisme [I-don’t-give-a-­ fuck-ism], a radically contradictory and paradoxical refusal to annul or establish, to be for or against, but rather functions as merely “the way of life where everyone minds their own business, knowing to always respect other individualities, if not defend their own” (1918a, in OC 1, p. 364; see TTDM, pp.  9–10). In the radical confusion and obfuscation of any A.B.C. or oppositional 1.2.3., the delineations and definitions that were meant to separate them into identifiable antagonists and subjectivities, the us-­versus-­them becomes me-and-everyone else. The antagonist, insofar as there is one, is whoever continues to use or rely on these drawers of the mind, which is to say, anyone who continues to reiterate and reinforce them, both for themselves and for others. In short, the antagonist is whoever continues to form ideological subjects: everyone. Tzara’s “Manifeste Dada 1918,” as a manifesto, is meant to found and manifest. Rather than found or manifest Dada as a literary and artistic movement, as preconceived in the drawers of the mind, something else is founded and manifested. Written by Tzara, performed by him at the “Soirée Tristan Tzara,” organized solely by him, and finally published in the third issue of the review Dada edited exclusively by him, the authorizing theatricality or authoritative performativity that the writing, performing, or publishing of a Dadaist manifesto would generate goes not to Dada, but rather to the individual-cum-institution Tzara. Without the traditional, systemic hierarchy of authority, the location and stability of relationships between Tzara, Tzara, and Dada are continually undone.

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Under the banner of Dada and within its manifesto, Tzara founded and manifested Tzara, which in turn is precisely what that same Tzaraauthored Dadaist manifesto prescribes. No Dadaist manifesto is meant “to forge a group identity” for Dada, but rather “to flush out a radical individualism” (Lyon 1999, p. 42). This is the benefit of the word dada not signifying anything, of dada’s ability to function as an empty signifier that enables the creation of a theatrical stage, an apparatus without an ideology and therefore without the formation of ideological subjects. Dada is what allows individuals to found and manifest not Dada, but themselves. The radical individualism and the meaninglessness of dada are intertwined and inextricable. If dada does mean something, preconceptions arise and harden, drawers propagate through the minds of those who read it. In the middle of the manifesto’s discussion of the word dada, Tzara clarifies: “every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who […] tries to find causes or objects […] to give weight to their plot, a talking and self-defining story” (TTDM, p.  4). From the drawers of their mind and with the preconceived concepts and words, all of which were “other people’s inventions” (FDMW, p. 228), every bourgeois creates their own preconceived stories as though they were original and therefore think themselves as playwrights original. “Every spectator is a schemer, if they try to explain a word: (to know!). From their feigned refuge of serpentine complications, they allow their instincts to be manipulated” (1918a, in OC 1, p. 360; see TTDM, p. 4).26 An audience member becomes complicit in the (self-)deception the moment they attempt to explain a word, to know!, to impose their A.B.C. on a word, once they succumb to the elementary ideological effect, “that a word ‘names a thing’ or ‘has meaning’” (Althusser 1995, p. 224; see ORC, p. 189), once they succumb to interpellation. The word dada, as a radical subversion and destabilization of meaning-making and interpellation, is therefore a foundational element of true Dadaist individualism. Dada functions as both litmus test and as framework for those who pass it, who refuse to want or impose some A.B.C. meaning. Tzara calls those who fail the test “journalists.”

26  Richard Huelsenbeck, despite his distaste for Tzara and the “Manifeste Dada 1918,” made a similar point in his Dada Almanach two years later: “Every human is an ideologue, who falls for the swindle, perpetrated by their own intellect, that an idea, and so a symbol of a momentarily perceived reality, has any absolute reality” (1920b, p. 6; see 1920c, p. 11).

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As he edited the third issue of Dada in which his manifesto was published, Tzara added a note: “To introduce the idea of a temporary folly, lacking the scandal and publicity of a new ‘-ism’ […] journalists named Dadaism that intensity of a new art which made comprehension and the power to rise to abstraction impossible for them” (OC 1, pp. 699–700). The very act of imposing a definition on and of dada removes one from comprehension of Dada, it precludes abstraction, it is the reproduction and reinforcement of drawers of the mind, of interpellation. The word dada, then, has multiple functions. As a signifier with neither a signified nor a referent, the radically deictic word undermines signification itself. Within the context of a manifesto, dada similarly undermines the founding and manifesting of a Dadaism while simultaneously enabling a manifesto to be written. For those who take dada as it is, this functions as something of an advantageously ineffectual ideological framework in which an individual can be founded and manifested, a theatrical stage on which they can dance “according to their own personal boomboom, and that they’re right about their boomboom” (1918a, in OC 1, p. 363; see TTDM, p. 8). For those who give dada a definition, however, their series of imposed meanings become a scarlet letter that identifies their inability to grasp the abstraction of dada and Dada and, more importantly, what that abstraction enables and empowers in the formation of radical individualism. Tzara, in his way, outlines how dada functions as name, as work, and as manifesto in itself. These functions, however, extend beyond the cabinets of the mind, beyond the ideological subjects themselves, to upset and overwhelm the ideological apparatuses that form those subjects. While he assiduously avoids the formation of a well-defined A.B.C., or well-defining a 1.2.3. against which he would then necessarily sign, shout, swear, or organize prose, Tzara is nonetheless unequivocal about his and Dada’s distaste of both A.B.C.s and 1.2.3.s. If a reader perceives sharpened wings or organized prose by Tzara against Cubism or Futurism, he quickly clarifies that Dada has “had enough of the cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas […] We don’t recognize any theories” (TTDM, p. 5). Tzara and Dada have less a distaste of specific tenets than of formal and formalized theories and ideas, of well-defined and -defining 1.2.3.s., what Tzara calls “systems.” Tzara rhetorically asks, “How can one anyone hope to order the chaos that constitutes that infinite, formless variation: man [l’homme]” (TTDM, p. 5). Inherent here is the equivalence of order with imposition, that there is no way to order that which does not have order without wanting that

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order, arguing for it, and imposing it, which for Tzara is some or indeed any A.B.C. or 1.2.3., any system of divisions and delineations. Tzara, however, plays on the dual meaning of l’homme, simultaneously the individual human and humankind in its entirety: “I destroy the drawers of the mind and those of social organization” (TTDM, p. 8). That is, Tzara destroys both the systems of taxonomy forced on and embodied within the minds of individuals—what one might call the manifold identities, sexualities, races, genders, nationalities, and beyond—and those material systems of taxonomy that form ideological subjects from those individuals. As performed by Tzara, this destruction is already implicit in the radical individualism enabled under the banner and within the framework of the hollow signifier dada and free of the organizational theories of others. Any potential us-versus-them is dissolved and any divisive systems of organization and imposition are atomized ad absurdum into a series of individual idiosyncrasies.27 Tzara is, famously, both more explicit and more contradictory. “I am against systems; the most acceptable of systems is, on principle, to have none” (1918a, in OC 1, p. 364; see TTDM, p. 9). Tzara was, of course, similarly clear in his opposition to principles. In both rhetoric and content, Tzara draws a distinct parallel between systems writ large and the traditional manifesto of A.B.C.s against 1.2.3s as the genre that produces and reproduces those systems through subjectivation within the mind of the individual audience member and the resulting organization of society. Tzara is against those who create and establish such systems, the authors of foundings and manifestos. “Writers who like to moralise and discuss or ameliorate psychological bases have, apart from a secret wish to win, a ridiculous knowledge of life, which they have classified, parceled out, canalised: they are determined to see its categories dance when they beat time” (TTDM, p. 7). These authors want to impose their systematic 1.2.3.s; everyone does it, as is everyone a Dadaist, simultaneously us and them and neither, a subject incapable of categorization, of systematization, which is to say of ideological subject formation. This is the switch from ideology to interpellation, from a systematization that Tzara is against to a manifesto that he is against and simultaneously writes. As Henri Béhar, the editor of Tzara’s collected works, writes, “we insist on 27  Again, Huelsenbeck writes something similar two years later in the introduction to his Dada Almanach: “Dada is a state of mind independent of all schools and theories, one that address individuality itself without doing violence to it […] If you’re alive, you are a Dadaist” (1920c, p. 9).

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the originality of these theoretical texts [Tzara’s Seven Dada Manifestos], which for the first time in the genre links the practice [of writing a manifesto] to the ideological proclamation” (1975, p.  697). In particular, “Manifeste Dada 1918” functions as an ideological proclamation, as interpellation though through a hollow but conspicuous ideological framework purposefully incapable of creating ideological force or forming stable ideological subjects. Tzara does not write a traditional manifesto that forms stable ideological subjects but he is “saying certain things.” For Tzara, to write a manifesto is “to conquer and circulate lower- and uppercase a.b.c.s / To sign, shout, swear, organize prose into a form that is absolutely and irrefutably obvious” (TTDM, p.  3). This obviousness becomes the confusion of linguistic for natural reality that is the hallmark of ideology, what Althusser calls “the absolute guarantee that everything really is so” (ORC, p. 197). On this point, on the rhetorical organization that enables ideological obviousness, Tzara’s manifesto focuses its vitriolic attack. If “a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist” (TTDM, p. 10), a work that can be understood, that is stable enough to at least have a point of view, an implicit, even if hidden, A.B.C. that it necessarily presupposes, against which any potential audience member could measure and under which they would therefore subjectivize themselves, then Tzara claims that what “we need are strong, straightforward, precise works which will be forever misunderstood” (TTDM, p. 11). Sign, shout, and swear as strongly, straightforwardly, and precisely as desired, but comprehension and obviousness must be avoided. While often cited as exemplary of Dada’s supposedly crude and vehement nihilism, Tzara writes that “there is a great destructive, negative work to be done. To sweep, to clean. The cleanliness of the individual materialises after we’ve gone through folly [folie], the aggressive, complete folly […] With neither aim nor plan, without organisation: uncontrollable folly, decomposition” (TTDM, p. 12). The disorganized chaos of this folie and the radical abstraction that it produces—“licking the twilight and floating in the huge mouth filled with honey and excrement” (TTDM, p. 12), for example—certainly inhibits comprehension, but Tzara’s use of contradiction and paradox absolutely precludes it. No mere dalliance with contradiction or paradox, Tzara creates nested and recursive series of contradictory and paradoxical statements and actions. While his manifesto is meant to be a single fresh breath of contradictory action, he states unequivocally: “I am against action”; but in regards to “continual contradiction, and affirmation too, I am neither for

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nor against them” (TTDM, p. 4). Tzara creates contradictory contradictions and paradoxical paradoxes. This endless swirl of contradiction and paradox, irony and parody, prevents the audience from comprehending Tzara’s manifesto, let alone finding it obvious. The trenchant, radical disorganization and destabilization of an audience expected A.B.C. similarly affects and upsets any potential 1.2.3., and more importantly, any advocates or acolytes are denied the ability to determine their own stable subject position. Tzara’s “Manifeste Dada 1918,” as the genre of ideological proclamation, of a Dadaist interpellation, forms subjects of perpetual misunderstanding, an audience therefore incapable of ideological formation. The audience is destabilized and unsure of not only their relation to the work but also, if only for the duration of the performance or the time to read it, their relation to themselves. “It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke” (PF, p. 13). After having been interpellated— “hey, Dadaist over there!”—the audience may turn, but, after this initial moment of interpellation, is incapable of either recognition or misrecognition. The folly, irony, parody, contradiction, and paradox, which is to say elements long held as the core of Dadaist rhetorical tactics, interpellate without ideological force as they simultaneously outline precisely how interpellation suffused with ideological force is meant, in more traditional manifestos, to have smoothly functioned. The “exfoliation” of the process of ideological proclamation within the genre of the manifesto, through the subversion and destabilization of ideology, proclamation, and manifesto, is precisely what Tzara’s manifesto proposes and performs. That is, if functions perfectly well as a manifesto, if not in the traditional, ideological form, which Tzara outlined at the beginning of his own. Perhaps unexpectedly, Tzara’s “Manifeste Dada 1918” may in fact be the most forthright and plain spoken Dadaist manifesto, in both the clarity of its proposal of Dadaist praxis and its performance of it. While the audience may expect comprehension, understanding, or obviousness, they are instead presented with the strong, straightforward precision of how a traditional and a Dadaist manifesto functions—and their radical difference. As such, “Manifeste Dada 1918” indeed clarifies the function of other Dadaist manifestos. If not as clearly or precisely, if skewing further toward proposal or performance of Dadaist praxis, these Dadaist manifestos are emphatically not examples of “manifestos that themselves annul their own

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demands” (Asholt and Fähnders 1995b, p. xv), nor are their authors “turning the manifesto against itself” (Puchner 2006, p.  152). Rather, these manifestos demand differently, in ways that are incapable of annulling themselves as there is nothing stable within it, nothing that is not hypertheatrical, ironic, contradictory, paradoxical, which is to say Dadaist, within the Dadaist manifesto for that Dadaist manifesto to annul. Rather, the Dadaist manifesto remains surprisingly unscathed, too slippery to attack in itself, as it short-circuits the traditional manifesto, subversively and ironically performing the genre. The Dadaist manifesto is a revolutionary discourse against not only an authoritarian power, but all authoritarian power and indeed authority in and of itself, that follows the formation of theatrical and, in turn, performative authority of traditional manifestos so that the processes of those formations are exposed, analyzed, and ultimately performatively undercut. They sign, shout, swear, and organize their prose, if not to be rhetorically obvious, then to be literally inarguable in its anti-meliorism, its hypertheatricality, its disorganization, its contradictory ability at any time to take both sides of any speculation or conceptualization, and all the sides in between. Dadaist manifestos offer no wants, no authoritative power or organization to enact them, no point of view or combative stance, against which a potential audience can form themselves into an actual, traditional antagonist. If the manifestos do offer any of these elements, they are so ironically destabilized, so laughably hyperbolic, that to argue against it, to dispute it becomes in turn just as absurdly nonsensical. Rather than functioning as merely a meta- or anti-manifesto, though they are occasionally these as well, the Dadaist manifesto hacks the rhetoric of the traditional manifesto and becomes an ideological proclamation that forms ideological subjects without ideology, a tactically hollow but strategically functional interpellation that subverts ideology and forms destabilized subjects. Ironically, the Dadaist manifesto accomplishes precisely what it means to in that it accomplishes nothing that a traditional manifesto is meant to. Rather than play the rhetorical game of well-defined and -defining A.B.C.s and 1.2.3.s, Dadaist manifestos strategically and radically destabilize the meanings of words, not least of all dada and manifesto, and the ways that they create, or more often than not undermine and undo, meaning. These destabilizations shake the foundations of ideology and its elementary effects and subsequently propagate through the superstructure of subjects that are placed and dependent on that foundation. In destabilizing ideology, they destabilize ideological subjects and their

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formation—interpellative destabilization. This is precisely what Tzara meant, some thirty years after his manifesto, when he wrote that Dada aimed their “attacks against the very fundaments of society, language as the agent of communication between individuals, logic as the cement” (1979, p. 404). While these attacks on language and logic, meaning and rhetoric, the very building blocks of Althusserian ideological interpellation are made the most evident and explicit within the genre of the manifesto as ideological proclamation, such destabilizations exist across all Dadaist works that employ these tactics of contradiction, paradox, hypertheatricality, radical disorganization, etc., which is to say works that employ Dadaist tactics as such. As Backes-Haase summarized, “Dada is the product of its manifestos, and as such all other Dada productions are to be understood first in the context of the constitutive, manifestoist character of the movement. Dada is avant-garde manifestoism in its purist form” (Backes-Haase 1997, p. 257). These Dadaist productions are all manifestos, all interpellative proclamations of destabilization. Of course, they expand on Tzara’s concepts of language and logic to include other modes of ideology and interpellation.

CHAPTER 4

“We Need Only Take Scissors”: Dada and/as Photographic Image

William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers of photography and among its first theoreticians wrote in 1839 about what made photography so particularly exciting: “it is not the artist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes itself” (p. 73). Five years later, Talbot would write of the photographs printed in his book The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), the first book in history illustrated with photographic images, that they were “impressed by Nature’s hand” (1844, p. i), rather than that of an artist or artisan. This allowed for an “autonomy implicit in photography” as something of a “self-generated image” that “is now considered a purely natural phenomenon” (Geimer 2011, p. 30). This sentiment was further cemented by the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, who, some fifty years later in 1903, would write that “[p]hotographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent” (CP, §2.281). Unlike other types of signs, such as words or graphics, there is a direct relationship between the photographic representation and the thing that is being represented, “they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature,” to form a sort of “physical connection” (CP, §2.281). As Peter Geimer summarizes, so-called self-generating signs such as photographs “stand in direct physical continuity with the object that they signify” (2011, p. 29). There is no space between the referent and the sign into which a human producer, their perceptions or intentions, indeed their subjectivity would be able to interfere. Dadaist skepticism of this popular © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Pelcher, Dada’s Subject and Structure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26610-2_4

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perception, of a photographic image’s objective authenticity, its unwavering ability to transmit the scene of objects before the camera’s lens, is precisely what Walter Benjamin considered so revolutionary about Dada. “The revolutionary strength of Dadaism consisted in testing art for its authenticity” (1999b, p.  774). To Benjamin, Dadaists were among the first to recognize and show to their audience that the “picture frame ruptures time” (1999b, p. 774). Accordingly, then, much of the subversion and sabotage of Dada’s “revolutionary content has gone into photomontage” (1999b, p. 774).

Self-Generated Indexicality In his trifurcation of signs, Peirce considered photography an “indexical” sign in that the representation is not only flawless, but in that it is free from the intentions of a subjective producer of signs, much as a weather vane represents the direction of the wind or a hoof-print represents the recent presence of a moose (see Short 2007). The photograph’s designation as an indexical sign by Peirce has dominated the theoretical discussions of photography. That is, the “dominance of this connection [between Peircean indexicality and the ontological definition of photography] can hardly be over stated” (Herschberger 2014, p. 100). The assumption that the photograph is ontologically self-generated and therefore “potentially outside the domain of human subjectivity and meaning” is precisely what allows the photograph as index to be “reduced to its own singularity; it appears as a brute and opaque fact” (Doane 2002, p. 94). In other words, the photograph as an indexical sign is able to be uniquely perceived as factual, obvious, and natural. Even before the word photography was coined, this fledgling technology’s ability to function as a scientific device for the creation of scientific evidence, as an objective impression of nature akin to a micro- or telescope, was praised and promoted in books such as Talbot’s. Continual advances in optics, lens production, photochemical processes, and other photographic technologies allowed for significant enlargements or variations of elements of the material, natural world that had previously been inaccessible to the mere human eye. This new technology was capable of presenting elements of the natural world, new characteristics and perspectives that had previously gone unobserved or underanalyzed. As Benjamin noted, “it is another nature that speaks to the camera rather than to the eye” (1999a, p. 510). This perceived objectivity, beyond and free from the human eye and its subjectivities and intentions,

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is precisely what endeared the technology to so many artists and art critics in the first decades of the twentieth century and beyond. Although he never used Peirce’s concepts of indexicality, André Bazin’s “Ontology of Photography” codifies the view that the photographic image has an inherent truth. The photographic image has the “power to lay bare the realities […] stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-­up preconceptions […] able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention” (p. 8). There are no “ways of seeing” a photograph of an object, no readings, but only the “bare realities” of what is presented. Not only is the “impassive lens” free of human interference and the resultant photographic image self-generated, but its ontological truth disallows a subjective, which is to say mis–, reading. “[N]ature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist” (Bazin 1960, p. 8). Insofar as it is impossible for nature to be untrue, for a rock to not be a rock or a tree to not be a tree, for something to not be itself, so too is it for a photographic image. For Bazin, the photographic image is both true and natural; it is able to strip away the subjective and all that entails—the aesthetic, political, rhetorical, linguistic. That is, Bazin considers the photographic image to be beyond or outside of ideology. As many have noted since Althusser’s denegation of ideology, however, “the stepping out of (what we experience as) ideology is the very form of our enslavement to it” (Žižek 2012b, p. 6). Some twenty years before Bazin, László Moholy-Nagy, an early theorist of photography, Berlin-­ based Hungarian artist, and friend of many Berlin Dadaists, was among those who were the most excited by the possibilities that photography and its objectivity opened for artists. Moholy-Nagy noted that photography allowed artists to “create new relationships” that had been, without the technological possibilities of photography, radically neglected or ignored (1987, p. 29). These relationships remain predicated on the indexicality and therefore presumed objectivity of the photographic image. “Thus in the photographic camera we have the most reliable aid to a beginning of objective vision” (1987, p. 28). Moholy-Nagy goes still further: “Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true [das Optisch-wahre]” (1987, p. 28). Like Bazin, Moholy-Nagy introduces the concept of “truth” and separates the photographic image from the rhetorical, from aesthetics, indeed from subjectivity in production. The photographic image is not merely self-generated but ontologically true. The audience is forced to reckon with “that which is optically true, before they can arrive at any

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possible subjective position” (1987, p. 28). If ever so slightly, MoholyNagy leaves open the possibility of new, more fully realized and informed positions—subjective positions with new objective relationships. Where Moholy-Nagy saw the introduction of new relationships between the objective and subjective upon reading the photographic image, the creation of a new vision (see Moholy-Nagy 1947), Benjamin notes that the subjectivity ascribed to the act of reading the image echoes the subjectivity that was inherent in the preparation and creation of the image, the staging and framing of the objects before the camera lens. That is, the concept of photographic objectivity is deeply contingent. Only after photochemical treatments had begun to greatly increase the sensitivity to light of the photographic plate, and eventually photographic film, was the exposure time necessary for a clear image reduced and thereby made manageable for street photography or studio portraiture. In a certain respect, however, the die had been cast and formal elements of staging and composition necessary for previous photographic technology remained like a vestigial aesthetic. Speaking of portraiture in particular, Benjamin writes, “The accessories used in these portraits, the pedestals and balustrades and little oval tables, are still reminiscent of the period when, because of the long exposure time, subjects had to be given supports so that they wouldn’t move” (1999a, p. 515). Although the technology had advanced enough to no longer require it, particular modes of staging, for example “as were to be seen in famous paintings” (1999a, p. 515), continued to inform the production of photographic images thanks to unobtrusive aids from “head clamps and knee braces” to simple and innocuous props (1999a, p. 515). While Benjamin is here speaking largely of portraiture, it hints at the sophisticated ability of a photographer to subjectively stage a photograph without the eventual audience of that photograph knowing that it had been staged. Indeed, the very nature of photography and the photographic image precludes the audience’s ability to know the degree to which the objects within the frame of the image have been manipulated or staged. The moment that a camera shutter closes, any future audience is irreparably disconnected from the contexts and conditions of the image’s production, in both the objects it represents and the photographic apparatuses and methods used. There is no way to differentiate between “photography” and “instantaneous photography,” as Peirce would seem to suggest. Whether time-lapse or instantaneous, portraiture or streetphotography, the self-generated indexicality of the photographic image occurs

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only for the length of the open shutter—everything else outside that socio-temporal frame is radically inaccessible. Four years before Benjamin alluded to how formal elements continued to quietly inform photography, Benjamin’s friend Siegfried Kracauer discussed the radial rupture that constituted the photographic image. Set in opposition to what he calls the “memory image,” Kracauer argues that the “spatial continuum of the camera’s perspective dominates the spatial appearance of the perceived object: the resemblance between the image and the object erases the contours of the object’s history” (1995b, p. 58). Bertolt Brecht mirrored this sentiment, suggesting that “less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG [Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, General Electric Company] tells us next to nothing about these institutions” (qtd. in Benjamin 1999a, p. 526; see Brecht 1960b, p. 93). The photographic image erases both the history and the social relations embodied within the object from the audience of the photographic image. As Benjamin summarized, photography “can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists” (Benjamin 1999a, p. 526). If the photographic image is indeed a sign, it is a peculiar one in that the photograph’s self-­ generated indexical objectivity appears to have been purchased at the cost of a radical suppression of all socio-historical context. The spatio-temporal “details, diligently recorded by the camera, are in their proper place, a flawless appearance” (Kracauer 1995b, p. 47), as though that is all that there is, as though that self-generated, indexical objectivity is the whole, rather than a de-historicization and de-personalization of a whole. In the brightness of indexical, natural objectivity, historically contextualized truth cannot hold a candle. Here, the ideological import of photography begins to become clear—the removal of a cultural history in favor of a “natural” moment, or rather, the imminent confusion of that natural moment with, and as, a cultural history. The photographic image, that is, simultaneously removes cultural and historical contexts as it presents a whole, and wholly objective and natural, image. This aspect of the photographic image, its unique ideological efficacy, is still further exacerbated in its mass reproduction.

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Photographic Images, Mass Produced At the turn of the century, technological progress in photomechanical processes and photorealistic printing were among the largest catalysts of radical change in photography. Talbot’s book, Pencil of Nature, utilized a cutting edge calotype process from which the image could be reproduced using careful contact printing from the delicate negative, the reproductions then pasted by hand as the plates that constituted the majority of book. Talbot introduced these reproduced photographic images as “sun-­ pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation” (tipped-in page; qtd. in Gernsheim 1986, p. 40). It is not only the production, but also the reproduction of the image that must be guarded against human subjectivity and activity for the image’s ostensible natural indexicality, objectivity, and ultimately truth to continue to be believed by the audience. Delicate negatives and hand-pasted plates, of course, were incapable of the quantities or mechanical stresses of modern printing presses used in mass media, which instead continued to use engravers to artistically approximate, and therefore subjectively spoil, single photographic images for decades. Various photomechanical technologies have attempted to reproduce photographic images with varying levels of success over forty years. The first mass reproduced photographic image was an 1873 advertisement printed in New  York’s The Daily Graphic. Similar to Talbot’s declaration, it was presented as the final removal of subjectivity in mass reproduced photographic images.1 “There has been no intervention of artist or engraver but the picture is transferred directly from a negative […] We need not call attention to the faithfulness of the pictures which ‘granulating’ gives our readers” (qtd. in Buckland 1980, p. 2).2 Perhaps the most important breakthrough, however, was the automated stippling process that could create realistic half-tone, seemingly grayscale reproductions, patented in 1881 as the so-called Ives process (see Harris 1990b; Nadeau 1989). It would take another twenty some years before that process was perfected for integration into the industrial-­ mechanical world of mass printing—and was more economically viable than an engraver. While a single photo shown to a single viewer had presented an indexical and objective moment in time, these advancements 1  The image was of Steinway Hall on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. See Buckland (1980, p. 165). 2  “Granulated” photography was a form of leggotype, named after the co-founder of The Daily Graphic, William Leggo, and was a short-lived precursor of the Ives Process.

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had removed the final traces of subjectivity from a photographic image’s industrial mass reproduction and distribution through printed media. A flood of purportedly objective photographic images would quickly overwhelm a mass, public audience. Few were as immediately inundated as the residents of Berlin. For the first decade that it was published, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, often abbreviated simply as BIZ, contained only engravings, as the technology for the mass reproduction of photographic images had not yet become technologically or economically feasible. By 1901, however, photographic images could be found on every page. Once the law that had required subscriptions and subscribers to sell magazines was struck down, the front-page photos would function as advertisements for themselves and be seen in street corner and subway station kiosks. Finally conquering competing illustrated magazines, such as Die Woche and Leipzig’s Illustrirte Zeitung, BIZ was the unquestioned leader of illustrated media throughout Germany and eventually all of Europe, with print runs between one and two million each issue throughout the 1910s and 1920s.3 In addition to the striking increase in photographic images in both printed media and street advertisements that occurred during these initial turf wars for readership, the hegemony that BIZ gained over illustrated media in Germany and Europe shaped and solidified norms of illustrated journalism, pioneering the photo essay, photojournalism, street and sport photography, and the maintenance of a library and staff dedicated to photographic images for inclusion in their journalistic pieces (see Marien 2006, pp. 235–239). That is, the photographic images did not augment its journalism, but were inextricably infused into it, becoming fundamental to it. In a type of ideological symbiosis, journalistic objectivity is coupled with photographic authenticity, each mutually confirming the other. “Illustrations become documents and news, which are to print immediacy and authenticity, the photographer becomes an eye-witness who can be committed to objectivity” (Bucher 2016, p. 46). This symbiosis of journalistic objectivity and indexicality not only reinforced each other, but helped to further cement the concept of a photographic image’s naturalness, its flawless truth in the minds of the masses. Despite this flood of journalistic and therefore supposedly objective images, of course, not 3  For a history and commentary on the cultural importance of BIZ, see Feber (1982). For more thorough histories of BIZ and its relation to other media outlets, see Markwardt (1982) and Ross (2008).

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everyone was convinced, particularly those who had criticized the objectivity taken as comprehensiveness of an individual photograph. As Kracauer noted, the technological breakthrough of photography was its ability to “grasp[] what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum,” and nothing more (1995b, p. 50). The photograph’s very indexicality requires that it can only function as appearance. Unlike Kracauer’s memory-images, which “preserve the given in so far as it means something” (1995b, p. 50), the photograph necessarily erases those meanings and replaces meaning with fidelity. The consequences of the loss of meaning in a single photograph are amplified with the technological advancements of instantaneous photography, its photoreal mass reproduction, and its rise to cultural dominance in mass media. Not only does “the flood of photos sweep[] away the dams of memory” and subsequently the “‘image-­ idea’ drives away the idea” (Kracauer 1995b, p.  58), but the socio-­ historical contexts, the meaning and significance of an object, that have been erased in the process of photography are replaced by the new contexts and associations within the journalism and mass media in which those photographic images are now found. For Kracauer, photography becomes both quantitatively and qualitatively different in the service of mass media. While an isolated photograph de-historicizes and de-­ personalizes the objects in front of the camera lens, the flood of photographic images, images that are now contextualized only by other images, begins to replace the very ideas of the objects themselves. For example, a living breathing film star, who is only ever seen as a photographic image and in relation to other photographic images, becomes relegated to and as image—the “contemporaneous viewer believes that they see the film diva herself in the photograph, and not just her bangs or the pose of her head” (1995b, p. 54). There is no film star, there is only the image of the film star and as such, the actual film star is no longer available, no longer accessible. That is, the mass reproduced photographic image in fact becomes an active impediment to understanding the object being represented. “In the illustrated magazines, people see the very world that the illustrated magazines prevent them from perceiving” (Kracauer 1995b, p.  58). Brecht, following the same argument, is typically more blunt: “The gigantic mass of images that is spewed forth everyday by the printing presses and which certainly seems to have the character of truth, serves in reality only to obscure the facts” (Brecht 1931, p.  41). The previously, if minimally, acknowledged removal of socio-historical context in an isolated photographic image has, in the overwhelming torrent of mass produced

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photographic images, removed that very acknowledgment, has now transformed into the radical obliteration of both that context and its own removal. The contemporary criticism of photography recognizes the inherent contradiction of journalistic photography and its further integration into photojournalism. The photographic image no longer functions indexically when it becomes re-contextualized by surrounding journalistic text, but rather functions as merely another symbol, like another word in the journalistic text. For Kracauer, photography in illustrated magazines at the beginning of the twentieth century “registers an exteriority which, at the time of its reign, is a means to expression as generally intelligible as language” (1995b, p.  54). Where Havelock suggested that an alphabet needed to be functionally “transparent” so that a reader could peer through to the meaning beneath (Lanham 1994, p. 33), a photographic image already presents itself as indexically transparent and therefore as a sign that can be read right through to the presumed meaning beneath. As Kracauer continues, a photograph of a film star is simultaneously “an optical sign for the star and it counts as cognition of that star [deren Erkenntnis es gilt]” (1977b, p. 29; see 1995, p. 54). The photographic image as both index and sign is, therefore, both perfectly transparent and necessarily limited, where the former distracts from, or indeed even replaces the latter in the mind of the audience. As Paul de Man might have put it, the photographic image is uniquely positioned to facilitate the confusion of semiotic reality with natural reality—to function ideologically (1986, p.  11). Brecht, more straightforwardly, states that the “photographic apparatus can lie just as well as the typesetting machine can”; indeed, even better (1931, p. 41; see 1988, p. 21.515). With the advancement of photography and photomechanical technology, the photographic image comes to overwhelm semiotic society, begins to function as the decisive mode of communication, and ultimately to dominate how society relates to itself. In many ways, this is the beginning of the society of the spectacle, “a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (Debord 2006, p. 7),4 where images and their deployment therefore become “the stake, but also the site of class struggle” (ORC, p. 245). The target of Dadaist praxis suggested by Tzara, “the very fundaments of society, language as  For a brief discussion of the relation between Kracauer’s theory of photography and the mass ornament to Debord’s concept of the spectacle, see Gilloch (2015, p. 224n22). 4

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the agent of communication between individuals” (1979, pp. 404, 403), now required expansion beyond the transparency of language to include the indexicality of the photographic image.

Illustrated Media, Illustrated War, Illustrated Politics Much as the purported discovery of the word dada would be disputed among those who claimed to have discovered it, the invention of Dadaist photomontage likewise has two competing histories.5 George Grosz and John Heartfield, who would go on to become perhaps the most well-­ known political artist of photomontage for his eventual work with the Arbeiter Illustrierte-Zeitung (see Evans 1992), developed their concept of Dadaist photomontage in their subversion of care packages that they would send to friends and family, whether in the trenches at the front or convalescing in hospitals. Over time, they would begin to include ironic, impractical, and non-sensical aspects to the packages. These proto-­ photomontages were comprised of, for example, montaged elements and fragments such as a “price list of liqueurs […] pull-on-instruction leaflet for condoms, […] cooking recipes, gothic dime novels […] food stamps for bread, stock market reports for grain, and fashion gossip” (qtd. in DT, p.  93; see Grosz 1979, p.  63; Biro 2009, pp.  189–196). These initial experiments inspired Heartfield “to develop from an originally politically provocative hobby a conscious technique” (Herzfelde 1976, p. 18). The development of such political provocations into Dadaist photomontages also occurred to Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch as they vacationed on the Baltic Sea in 1918. Walking through a small sea-side town, Hausmann noticed that house windows often displayed a “colorful lithograph depicting the image of a soldier in front of a barracks. To make this military memento more personal, in place of the head, one glued on a photographic portrait” (1992, p. 44). Höch noticed similar postcards to which disembodied heads were appropriately glued: “In the centre was a youthful Kaiser Wilhelm II surrounded by ancestors, descendants, German oaks, medals and so on [and] a young grenadier” (qtd. in DAA, p. 117). Seeing these Reservistenbilder [reservist images] displayed in a number of windows, each adorned with the specific heads of local soldiers led 5  For a more thorough discussion of the invention and development of Dadaist photomontage see DA, pp. 114–118; Ades (1986, pp. 19–21); Doherty (1996, pp. 1–82).

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Hausmann to realize: “in a flash—I saw instantly—one could make a ‘tableau’ entirely from cut up photos” (1992, p.  44). While these histories conform to the apparent truism that all Dadaist art is a pointed critique of nationalist and militarist ideologies and subjectivities that surround the war, they also show Dadaist photomontage’s subversions of the reproduction of those ideologies through the formation and reinforcement of those subjectivities—that is, through the photograph as a mode of discourse in ideological reproduction. Hausmann was able to conceive of an entire tableau of fragments of photographic images, to the extent that any photographic image is whole, thereby transforming the indexical into the symbolic, or as Hugo Ball put it some two years before Hausmann had his epiphany on the Baltic: “The image differentiates us. We grasp the image. Whatever it may be—it is night—we hold the imprint of it in our hands. The word and image are one” (FOT, p. 66). That is, the indexical fragments are put into relation with and contextualized by other indexical fragments, which in turn function symbolically, like words. The increase in fragments of indexical material, paradoxically, increases the symbolic grammar. The fidelity of the indexicality recedes in the mind of the viewer, replaced by that fragment’s new contextualizations with others, such as words in a text. In other words, the totality of indexical fragments stresses the materiality of the photographic image as symbol, insofar as the audience is now less interested “reading through” the image to the presumed reality underneath than in staying with the fragments, connecting them in a symbolic chain. Parisian Dadaist and later founding member of Surrealism, Louis Aragon, was among the first to recognize this dynamic: “From these first collages come two categories of very distinct works, one where the glued element is valued by the form, or more exactly by the representation of the object, the other where it enters for its matter” (1965, p. 44).6 The latter functioned similarly to a fragment of newspaper in a synthetic cubist still life. For Aragon, this fragment would be important to the work less because it represented a newspaper than because it was literally newspaper, the way that a painter would use red in a work that “struggles with a problem of color, where everything reverts to an enrichment of the palette” (1965, p. 44). The fragment of newspaper is meant to highlight the artistic techniques of the work as an external catalyst for productive tension within 6  This book served as a critical catalogue to the first documented exhibition of collage works at Galerie Goemens in Paris in 1930.

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that work otherwise drawn with charcoal. The Dadaist photomontage, in contrast, is less concerned with the tension between modes of representation—a fragment of newspaper and a charcoal drawing, for example—than it is concerned with the interplay between the elements represented within and by juxtaposed photographic images—photographic images of a politician and a razor blade. Dadaist photomontage played on the radically iconic nature of photographic images and, in their juxtaposition, their ability to function as symbols. In other words, they began to de-emphasize the indexicality of the photographic image, often violently. The mass reproduced photographic images of Berlin’s growing image-­ based culture during and after the war were implicitly products of the capitalist and nationalist violence that helped to develop and subsequently deploy them. Dadaist photomonteurs were pointedly violent against that burgeoning society of the spectacle, the univocal narratives that the spectacle was able to create, and indeed against the very images themselves—a violence of excision against the violence of the spectacle. Of course, the violence of excision is elemental to every collage. Pre-Dadaist collage such as papier collé or Reservistenbilder, similar to the spectacle itself, attempted to hide that violence, often by disguising the cut of the excision itself, for example, by placing a soldier’s head precisely where the pre-printed form would suggest.7 Dadaist praxis was, of course, far less reverential to either war propaganda or the careful placement of photographic images that helped it to smoothly and stably function. With neither a pre-formed guide nor an aesthetic framework within which to place photographic fragments, Dadaist photomonteurs refused to hide the effects of excision. Like Schwitters’s evident where of the cut in various works of i, Dadaist photomonteurs actively showed, highlighted, and therefore thematized the violent cut. While the violence of such excisions was certainly directed against the ideological apparatuses that had come to utilize the photographic image so effectively and compellingly to contribute to the war, so too was it directed against the medium of photographic images itself and its continual presumption to a wholeness of indexicality throughout its mass reproduction. A “‘tableau’ entirely from cut up photos” is not merely the destabilization of a drawing nor of another photographic image (Hausmann 1992, p. 44), but rather of “that what appeared to present itself as an ontological precondition of photography (its indexicality) 7  Reservistenbilder were regularly printed in such a way that a small outline would guide the consumer as to where precisely they were meant to place the excised photographic head in order to meld, as seamlessly as possible, into the work.

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[, which] was therefore only the result of the normal usage and perception of this medium” (Haige 2008, p. 216). The violence of excision and juxtaposition, free from an overarching framework of aesthetics or politics within which those fragments would have been placed, destroys the normativity of indexicality, which is to say, shows that indexicality as normativity, that natural reality as a cultural reality—simultaneously shows the photographic image as inherently ideological and how to subvert it.8 The spatio-temporal discontinuity that is inherent, indeed definitional, if regularly disregarded, to photography becomes ubiquitous in Dadaist photomontage. Rosalind Krauss, quoting Roland Barthes, argues that “undoubtedly the photograph implies a certain displacement of the scene [such as] cropping” (1977b, p. 59; see Barthes 1964, p. 42).9 Within a tableau exclusively comprised of fragments of photographic images, as Hausmann envisioned Dadaist photomontage, that discontinuity and cropping is impossible to disregard in the multiple wheres of the excisions that are not hidden but rather necessarily foregrounded. Such a Dadaist photomontage radicalizes and relocates the frame of the crop from its normative position at the edge of the work, and with it the viewer’s normative perception of it, into and throughout the work, creating a conspicuous series of internal sub-frames for each element excised from, and reminiscent of, the external world. In as much as this practice is a subversion of the concept of the normative frame, so too is it a subversion of its normative perception that literally marginalized the “personality of the photographer” who had framed the image upon its production, or the “creative intervention of a human” who may have cropped the image at any of a number of photomechanical mass-reproductions (Bazin 1960, p. 7). This marginalization of the photographer- and reproducer-subject is also the marginalization of the symbol and the icon, those sign-types of Peirce’s dependent upon human subjectivity for their creation and consumption, in ideological favor of the index that presumes “no person was involved” (Geimer 2011, p.  27).10 However, “the use of the index in 8  Rosalind Krauss makes a similar argument, suggesting that violence against a photograph is analogous to violence against indexicality. See Krauss (1977a, 1977b). 9  Krauss’s two-part article revived the use of Peircean indexicality within photographic theory and art history. 10  Regarding the ideological preference for the index, Bazin states: “Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need humanity has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer” (1960, p. 8).

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i­solation from the symbol and icon is a misuse of Peirce’s theory, since he was adamant that every sign includes elements of all three” (Elkins et al. 2007, p. 131). The violent cut thematized by Dadaist photomontage both subverts the presumption to ontological indexicality of the photographic image and also re-engenders the perception of the photograph as capable of modes of subjective, i.e. iconic and symbolic, modes of representation. That is, while each fragment of a Dadaist photomontage “is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object” (Krauss 1977a, p. 75), so too do they “play the role of a word” (Aragon 1965, p. 44), of a symbol “as a separate unit which, like a word, is conditioned by its placement within the syntagmatic chain of the sentence, is controlled by the condition of syntax” (Krauss 1997b, p.  105). In this way, one is able to read a Dadaist photomontage just as one reads any literary work.

Photographic Images, Montaged On 15 February 1919, Wieland and Helmut Herzfelde, the latter of whom would eventually go by John Heartfield, published their small pamphlet Jedermann sein eigner Fussball. The pamphlet was almost immediately banned for its support of Bavarian revolutionaries in the face of the recently elected and installed Scheidemann cabinet, the first cabinet of the newly minted Weimar Republic.11 The cover of this pamphlet carries the first two Dadaist photomontages available for mass consumption. The much more prominent of the two, the centerpiece of the broadsheet, is George Grosz’s Galerie deutscher Mannesschönheit, Preisfrage “Wer ist der Schönste??” [Gallery of German Manly Beauty, Prize Question “Who is the Most Beautiful??”]. While this work does not exemplify either the totality suggested by Hausmann or the chaotic nature of future photomontages, Grosz’s Galerie does offer initial clues regarding Dadaist foregrounding of both the inherent political critique and the violent cut. A series of self-­ important and chauvinistic portraits of the members of the Scheidemann cabinet are seemingly emasculated both by the title’s explicit sarcasm, reducing the contestants to their physical beauty as women so often were and are, and in their alignment along a handfan, most often associated 11  After the failed Sparticist Uprising in January, the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany) boycotted the elections. Ultimately, Wieland would spend two weeks incarcerated for his role as publisher of the pamphlet. See DT, p. 52.

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with middle-class women. These portraits, however, appear to meld seamlessly into the dark backdrop of the handfan. Below the leaves of the handfan and the portraits aligned with them, however, are three smaller portraits, placed over the handfan’s sticks, more conspicuously excised fragments. The central and largest of these three additional portraits, though still smaller than those of the Scheidemann cabinet members aligned above, is a three-quarter portrait of General Erich Ludendorff in full military regalia. As the supreme commander of the German military during World War I (along with Paul von Hindenburg), champion of the reviled Auxiliary Service Law that pressed many into military service, zealous enemy of both the November and later Sparticist revolutions, advocate of the extremely antisemitic Dolchstoßlegende [stab-in-the-back myth], and total war (see Ludendorff 1935), Ludendorff was the personification of everything against which Dadaism strove. On each of his shoulders are still smaller portraits of Gustav Noske (left) and Matthias Erzberger (right), ministers of the Scheidemann government most closely associated with the Kiel mutiny that ended military action and the armistice that ended the war itself.12 The violence of Grosz’s cut, the only one particularly evident in an otherwise aesthetic presentation, is specifically relegated to Ludendorff, himself the perpetrator of an overwhelming violence. This connection was further highlighted in later associations for the work. In a promotional photograph for the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe [First International Dada Fair], Grosz’s Galerie can be seen to have been included in the upper center of yet another work, Otto Dix’s large oil painting Kriegskrüppel [45% Erwerbsfähig] [War Cripples [45% Fit for Service]] (see Fig. 4.1). The approximately three square meter painting, hung prominently in the first room of the Messe, features a parade of four veterans of World War I, the violence of which has resulted in amputations, scars, and post-traumatic stress. At the time of its presentation at the Dada-Messe, a large pointing hand, not dissimilar to the manicules of Dadaist print works, is directed precisely and accusatorially at the Scheidemann cabinet and Ludendorff represented in Grosz’s Galerie.13 12  Noske, of course, was also instrumental in the suppression of the Sparticist Uprising that killed Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht a month before Jedermann’s publication, perhaps reason for Noske’s relatively minuscule portrait. 13  This element of Dix’s work would later be transformed into signage for a Schuhmacherei (shoe maker), in front of which the “war cripples” hobble, limp, and roll. Added to the signage is a sign of a boot, only three of which would be necessary between the four veterans.

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Fig. 4.1  Anonymous publicity photo of the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe [First International Dada-Fair] (June 1920)

The violence of the montage cut is here pointedly connected to the physical violence to the body, particularly the body of military war veterans. This connection between the violence of Dadaist art, particularly photomontage, and the violence of the war was prevalent not only in the configurations of photographic fragments within the works, but also in the manifesto-like discussions of Dadaist works and praxes by Dadaists. Although photomontages are not mentioned specifically, one of Richard Huelsenbeck’s most cited passages makes these connections explicit: “The highest art will be that whose mental content represents the thousandfold problems of the day, which has manifestly allowed itself to be torn apart by the explosions of last week, and which is forever trying to gather up its limbs after the impact of yesterday. The best and most unprecedented artists will be those who continuously snatch up the tatters of their bodies out of the chaos of life’s cataracts” (1918, p. 45). In order to represent the acts of violence that surrounded them near the end of the war—this being delivered by Huelsenbeck in April 1918  in Berlin, the Ludendorff Offensive, the final German offensive of the war begun less than a month

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earlier and still raging on the Western Front—the best Dadaist works, then, would utilize the traces of that violence on the physical body, the limbs strewn about. This mirrors the Dadaist photomontage in both the violence of the initial cut and the gathering together of fragments, but also in the use of indexical signs in the montaged representation of a past event. Similar to Peirce’s example of footprints on a sandy beach as an index (and symbol) of a human who had previously walked past (CP, §4.531), the scars and disembodied limbs serve as indexes of battles previously waged. More broadly, however, Huelsenbeck and Dadaist photomonteurs considered this utilization of the index to be capable of representing all manner of violence, physical as well as societal and cultural. The second photomontage on the cover of Jedermann exemplifies this very process. In the upper left corner of Jedermann is a smaller photomontage most often attributed to John Heartfield and, as a literal representation of it, is simply referred to as the title of the journal, Jedermann sein eigner Fussball [Everybody Their Own Football]. The photomontage is composed of the head of Heartfield’s brother and the journal’s publisher, Wieland Herzfelde, and presumably his limbs, although a soccer ball has replaced the trunk of his body. Each element is woefully disproportionate with the other; the head twice too small, the legs twice too large, the arms displaced and stiff, all of which are either small enough to be placed on a soccer ball—or a soccer ball made large enough to replace the trunk of a human body. The violent process of becoming a soccer-ball-body has transformed each element of Herzfelde. Nonetheless, Herzfelde remains a proper bourgeois gentleman, complete with walking cane and doffing his bowler cap in greeting to the readers of the pamphlet. As a metonymic ‘everyman’ of the newly formed Weimar Republic, Soccer-Ball-Herzfelde not only carries the disfigured traces of a violence after which he was made to collect and reform his body, with the ersatz soccer ball, but also introduces the tension between that violence and the Weimar bourgeois culture that it maintains. The introduction of the soccer ball is similarly the introduction of commodity capitalism, already evident in the montages juxtaposition with the pamphlet’s costs, purchased as a single issue or subscription, special editions variously signed and on special hand-made paper, and its various advertising rates that run along the top of the broadsheet.14 With the introduction of a soccer ball, however, the metonym for 14  The work is recreated, enlarged with dramatically shortened limbs, on the back cover of Der Dada 3 (April 1920). Here, Heartfield commands with a speech bubble: “Buy the books of Malik-Verlag and don’t forget: DADA TRIUMPHS!!!” (Hausmann 1920b, p. 18).

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Weimar is itself a commodity, specifically one to be violently kicked, “buffeted by external forces” beyond control (Biro 2009, p. 32). At this intersection of seeming impassive resignation, physical violence to the body, bourgeois culture and style, and consumer capitalism stands Wieland-­ cum-­ Weimar. Where Weimar had hidden these violent elements that helped to constitute it, Wieland the soccer ball thematizes them, “for being a Dadaist means allowing oneself to be hurled by things” (Huelsenbeck 1918, p. 49), so that, as Ball noted early in Zurich Dada’s spasmodic dances, the “horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible” (FOT, p. 65). That is, the montage cut—on the photographic image that reintroduces the socio-political contexts erased by the presumed objective indexicality and on the human body that is buffeted and hurled by external forces—makes evident and indeed thematizes the previously hidden, background violence, both symbolic and physical, in the formation of ideological subjects during the war and in Weimar Germany. The relationship between the symbolic violence of the montage cut and that of the physical violence to the body, particularly that endured by soldiers during World War I, has been regularly recognized since the early scholarship of Dadaist photomontage. As Benjamin famously noted, from “an alluring visual composition […] the Dadaists turned the artwork into a bullet” that “jolted the viewer” and had a “percussive effect on the spectator” (2008b, p. 39). For Benjamin, this was a taktisch quality (2008b, p. 39; see 1989, p. 379), both tactical and tactile, which is to say a political and bodily experience. This concept of bodily shock would run throughout scholarship of Dadaism and particularly Dadaist photomontage. Brigid Doherty, for example, would continue to use this framework, where the violence of the montage cut both represents and thematically readdresses bodily trauma: “the capacity to induce trauma inheres specifically in the form of photomontage, where […] traumatic shock is made visible in a fragmented body” (1997, p. 84). For Doherty, the Dadaist photomontage “is a vehicle for the monteur’s traumatophilia,” a “bodily identification with the traumatic shock that it stimulates” and forward on to the spectators of the work, shocking and potentially traumatizing them (1997, pp. 129, 132). That is, Dadaist montage-violence is a thematized means of co-­identification, of solidarity between Dadaists, spectators, and veterans; victims all of Weimar’s various forms of violence, the thousandfold problems of the day. Matthew Biro noted the relevance of the cyborg to readings of Dadaist photomontages. Like Wieland’s soccer ball, elements

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of Weimar’s technologically advancing society would invariably be gathered up alongside the artist’s disembodied limbs and subsequently brought into the photomontage representations of reconstituted bodies that “expressed both pleasure and anxiety about human hybridity” (Biro 2009, p. 151). These technological additions, including of course the very technological reproduction of mass-produced photographic images that comprised the photomontages, allowed the newly formed cyborg to potentially “live in environments for which it was not adapted” (Biro 2009, p.  2). Extending Biro’s argument, the technology that exploded last week also holds within it the possibility to augment the bodies of the victims of that explosion, so as to allow them to live in the able-bodied society that had disabled them. Still further, just as the technology of the disruptive explosion has the potential to allow society to continue, so too are the photographic images that compose the continually growing society of the spectacle the later manifestations of a disruptive technological explosion. That is, the physical violence and trauma, the dialectic technology that disrupts and advances that affects the body also affects the body politic.

Dressing Down the Bourgeois Political Subject While Doherty’s ‘neurasthenic’ and Biro’s ‘cyborg’ hint at the subject literally em-bodied within the violently traumatized and potentially augmented figure, Patrizia McBride is explicit in her recognition of the reformation of the subject through the montaged reformation of the body. McBride notes that the montage cut enables “a way of seeing that draws on and literalizes contemporary discourses concerned with refashioning identity” (2011, p. 263). That is, McBride refocuses Dadaist montage onto the bodies and limbs not only excised, but subsequently reassembled, augmented, replaced, agglomerated, or just simply slapped back together to recreate both a body and an identity. Although McBride never uses the specific vocabulary or framework of ideological subject formation through interpellation, her project concerned with refashioning identity runs parallel to it. As if quoting Althusser himself, McBride writes that these identities are (re)fashioned in “this cultural framework [where] subjectivity is formed through individuals’ interaction with their environment and in the reciprocal gaze they exchange with others” (2016a, p. 154; see Lethen 1994). This, in short, is the act of interpellation within an ideological apparatus. By turns, the interaction with the explosions of the environment rips the body apart and puts it back together; the

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reciprocal gaze sees the montage cut and the haphazard reorganization, and the subject is formed and reformed. Already prefigured by the portraits along the hand-fan of Grosz’s Galerie and to a certain extent Heartfield’s bourgeois Wieland as Jedermann, the center of this intersection of physical body, photographic image, and subject-hood is the bourgeois portrait. Indeed, as these first photomontages demonstrate, the “portrait functions as a site for the formation of subjectivity” for those who have been photographed, but also those who view it, who find themselves in a reciprocal gaze (Ginsburg 2015, p. 3). The gaze returned by a photographic portrait is, of course, mechanical, technological, and cold. This disembodied gaze is all the more foreign and uncanny in the case of the mass-­reproduced photographic portrait, with its dead half-tone stippling. With Dadaist photomontage, the cold and dead fragments are brought together like Frankenstein’s monster, traumatic and shocking, even further “problematizing the very act of seeing with its attendant acts of identification, misrecognition, projection, and imitation” (Ginsburg 2015, p. 3). That is, the Dadaist subversion of the bourgeois portrait is a subversion of the bourgeois subject and its formation. One particular example of this photomontage subversion at the intersection of the portrait, cold and dead technology, and the bourgeois subject begins with a poem. In mid-1917, after having been released from a military mental hospital and deemed unfit for service, George Grosz wrote the short poem, “Kaffeehaus” [Café]. Describing the unstable mental state of a returned veteran as he sits in a coffee shop, where elements of his environment change without warning, “circles become eggs,” as does his gaze as if covered by “film / twists around red and yellow” (1918, p. 155). The poem ends: “I am a machine whose pressure gauge has gone to pieces! / And all the cylinders play in a circle— / See: we are all neurasthenics!” (1918, p.  155; see Doherty 1997). The subjectivity of Grosz’s veteran returned from the front is radically destabilized, unable to gauge either environment or gaze, everything able to be overturned as easily as a cylinder. This radically destabilized subjectivity was represented some three years later in photomontage form in Raoul Hausmann’s Selbstporträt des Dadasophen [Self Portrait of the Dadasoph] (1920). The work begins with a large, traditional, seated, bourgeois portrait pasted onto Japanese Washi paper, with visible fibers, that doubles as an internal frame. This portrait functions as something of a framework onto which other photographic fragments are pasted. The chest of the seated bourgeois subject is flayed open, a fragment of an anatomy book representing their exposed lung, the

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neck replaced by various mechanical cylinders and piping which connect the exposed lung to a head now replaced by a large pressure gauge and film projector. This is not only a striking photomontage representation of Grosz’s unstable veteran sitting in a coffee shop, but also now a supposed “self-portrait” of Raoul Hausmann indicated here by his Dada-themed alias, the Dadasoph, as well as a nameless bourgeois subject somewhere under the affixed fragments of anatomy and machinery. This is not merely a destabilized subjectivity for Grosz, his veteran, Hausmann, or the now cyborgian bourgeois subject, but also for the spectator of this work, whose attempt at a reciprocated gaze now returns in the form of the very elements—broken pressure gauge and twisted film strips—that had initial destabilized the veteran’s subjectivity. The photomontage, in other words, weaponizes subjective instability, makes it contagious, and spreads it willingly to its viewers. The instability of the subject is, in fact, fundamental to the technique of Dadaist photomontage itself. As Adorno has argued, the very function of montage is to “disavow[] unity through the emerging disparateness of the parts at the same time that, as a principle of form, it reaffirms unity” (Adorno 2002, p. 154). That is, even though photographic fragments are brought together in order to create a unified form, they incessantly gesture to contexts beyond and outside that unity. Montage then has the potential to reintroduce those elements that the indexicality of the original photographic image has erased, its historical and its political contexts. For Hausmann’s Selbstporträt, the montage unifies as a bourgeois portrait and disintegrates as a cyborgian monstrosity, creates a stable bourgeois subject and simultaneously destabilizes it with those additional fragments. Indeed, the very destabilization that the technique highlights is thematized by the montage’s fragments. Prefiguring elements of Althusser’s interpellation, the bourgeois subject at the center of Hausmann’s self-portrait has been made radically dependent on its interactions with its environment. The lungs exposed and no longer under the control of an internal diaphragm, the subject can neither breathe nor speak for itself, but is rather dependent on external pressures, mirrored by the large pressure gauge that has replaced its head. The mise-en-abyme of this index (photographic image) of an index (pressure gauge),15 however, points not only to the direct 15  Favorite examples of indexical signs for Peirce were barometers, thermometers, weathervanes, etc. to which a pressure gauge could certainly be added, the barometer itself a form of pressure gauge. See CP, §2.286.

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environment surrounding the subject, but also to capitalist and militarist ideological apparatuses. The advertisement from which the pressure gauge was excised notes that it was “tested for military technology and excellently reviewed” (Huttenlocher 1916b, see also 1916a). The film projector, yet another apparatus of (filmic) indexicality, attached to the subject’s pressure-gauge head only repeats what others have filmed, only sees what others have seen. Moreover, these elements are all framed upon not some random or non-descript bourgeois subject, but a portrait of Gustav Noske, the personified intersection of politics and war as Weimar’s Minister of Defense, yet another metonym for Weimar and for Dadaists like Dadasoph Hausmann, for Weimar’s cultural and culture of violence. Technically and thematically, Selbstporträt represents both the ways in which the bourgeois subject is formed in its relationship to ideological apparatuses, as well as the Dadaist praxis itself of being thrown by explosions, the body parts indexical signs that measure and represent a violent environment and society—a self-portrait of Dadaist praxis. The formation of a bourgeois subject is made visible in montage, as is its simultaneous destabilization as its constituent fragments gesture not to the unified subject that it has formed, but the violent ideological apparatuses from which they were excised. While there are a number of Dadaist photomontages that play on this violent formation and subversive destabilization of the subject through the form of the bourgeois portrait,16 Grosz’s Ein Opfer der Gesellschaft [A Victim/Sacrifice of Society] (1919) is particularly explicit in its problematization of the supposed self-constituted subject that press photography had so regularly suggested.17 Although not technically a photomontage, as the underlying bourgeois portrait to which further fragments are attached is in fact an unfinished painting, and elements such as buttons dot the mixed media piece, it is deeply related to other Dadaist photomontages in both subject matter and technique. The instability of Grosz’s Opfer as subject is mirrored in the vagaries of the German title Opfer, both victim and sacrifice, 16  In addition to the portraits by Hausmann detailed above, other examples include Hausmann’s Der Kunstkritiker [The Art Critic] (1919–1920), Elasticum (1920), Tatlin lebt zu Hause [Tatlin Lives at Home] (1920), ABCD (Portrait de l’artiste) [ABCD (Portrait of the Artist)] (1923–1924), and Grosz’s Herr Krause (1919). 17  For example, the day after Grosz’s Galerie was published, the cover of the illustrated newspaper Der Welt Spiegel was covered with photographs of the same Scheidemann cabinet, though each minister given their own respectable distance and individual frames as fully formed gentlemen. See the cover of Der Welt Spiegel, 16 February 1919.

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represented by an oversized looming question mark over his bread and bagel forehead and a threatening straight blade at his dough-like throat, respectively. Opfer is kneaded, formed, and baked by others. Whereas Hausmann literalized the veteran in Grosz’s poem as a mechanized indexical marker of violent society, who was able to register the pressure of the environment, project the films of others, breathe and speak through the diaphragm, here Grosz’s Opfer is both mechanically and biologically othered and destabilized. While the right eye of Opfer is unaffected, his left is covered by the montaged and inverted eye of another.18 Opfer’s left ear is likewise covered by a now third eye (in color, size, and style similar to Opfer’s ersatz left eye), oriented vertically to more fully cover his ear. A series of mechanical couplers and clamps take the place of his nose, leading down to a montaged mouth, shut tightly but with a slight grin, with the same skin tone and style as Opfer’s additional eyes. Except for his remaining right eye, uncovered by montage elements but now gazing out as if awkwardly unfocused, Opfer is incapable of experiencing his environment or his society as anything other than an amalgamation of the input of other montaged senses. He is a victim of the montage process, both in this work and of his society and he is its sacrifice, the figure on which that violence and victimization is made visible. Opfer is the victim and sacrifice of a violent society, both subjected to and subjectivated by that society and its violence. That this formation is a continual process is evidenced in the unfinished portrait painting on which the montaged elements are placed. While Opfer’s face and head appear complete, to the extent visible underneath the additional dough, hardware, and anatomy, his body and more specifically his clothing remain mere sketches as yet uncompleted with paint. This unfinished clothing is all the more evident, with a series of three buttons placed by Grosz where they were to have been painted, further highlighting the bourgeois style of Opfer. Like Hausmann’s Selbstporträt, Opfer is meant to have worn a frock coat, so popular in Weimar Germany as to approach becoming “the emblem of the republic” or indeed “the republic’s uniform” (Doherty 1998, p.  68). Although the frock coat is properly buttoned, the portrait remains emblematically unfinished and left rather in the perpetual process of formative becoming. With this in mind, Opfer is less a fully formed subject behind a mask “made out of the features of mutilated veterans and model 18  In order to avoid confusion, the montaged elements of Opfer are described from the victim’s point of view rather than the spectator of the work, i.e. “his right eye” rather than “the eye on the left hand side of the work.”

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consumers” as was seen in the contemporaneous advertisements for surgical repairs to the disfigured faces of war veterans, but rather a continual formation and re-formation of a subject (Doherty 1998, p. 78).19 Opfer is specifically the forming subject of and as the new Weimar Republic, underpinned by and representative of those very capitalist and militarist ideological apparatuses. Not only is Opfer’s ability to see or hear, to understand the society and culture around him filtered through the sensory apparatuses of others, but he is also unable to speak with his own mouth and therefore own voice. That is, Opfer is a questioned mind only capable of perceiving with the organs of another, or expressing with the mouth of another, atop an unfinished, if properly attired, bourgeois portrait. For observers of the time, however, this unfinished portrait, the matrix upon and into which the fragments of a violent othering are placed, would have been well known. With his distinctive moustache and goatee jutting out from behind the doughy chin, othered mouth, and mechanical nose, the original portrait was of Friedrich Ebert, the first president of Weimar Germany given prominent placement on Grosz’s Galerie, with which Opfer shared space, both works placed atop Otto Dix’s Kriegskrüppel at the Dada-Messe. Where Heartfield’s Jedermann was the object of violence, the soccer ball to be kicked about and a body gathered back together after that violence, both Hausmann’s Selbstporträt and Grosz’s Opfer were literally and figuratively based upon those in the Scheidemann cabinet of the Weimar government, those who did the kicking, who exercised violence and caused the explosions of last week, most notoriously with the aid of the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps. That violence is returned to them, perhaps cathartically, in the form of montage. The violence that plagued the first days of the Weimar Republic applies to everyone, kicker and kicked, metonymically the everyman and metaphorically “The Man,” to the body politic, to society.

From Subject to Society In much the same way as the portrait was particularly important to early photography, so too was the caption for illustrated magazines, both of which served as signposts for the viewer, allowing them to connect to the image and its contexts (Benjamin 2008b, p.  27). Images free of these signposts, of deserted and decontextualized cityscapes and crime scenes, for example, would “unsettle the viewer [who would] feel challenged to  Doherty suggests that Opfer “wear[s] a mask of the present” (1998, p. 78).

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find a particular way to approach them” (Benjamin 2008b, p. 27). Dadaist photomontage similarly destabilizes the viewer in its montage subversions of the now unidentified and often unidentifiable victim or sacrifice of that montage violence. The victim’s lack of identity allows it to stand in for everyone, and ultimately for the scene of the crime to be everywhere, the entirety of the cityscape—the explosions of last week not only violate the body of the metonymic everyman, but also underpin their very socio-­ cultural context. Where some Dadaist photomontages gather up torn apart limbs to represent the subject-body as index of the socio-cultural-­ explosion, still others attempt to gather up the remnants of the explosion itself, to do montage violence not upon and with tattered limbs and subjects, but culture and society. As Huelsenbeck forthrightly put it, “the consequence has been drawn […] this culture is [to be] attacked with all the instruments of satire, bluff, irony, and finally, violence. And in a great common action” (1920f, p.  44). Insofar as montage violence was done upon subject-metonyms of Weimar, so too is it to be done on Weimar itself. While far less numerous than the Dadaist photomontages focused on the subject of the bourgeois portrait, the titles as ersatz captions are just as clear. What had been the subject victim of societal crime, such as Grosz’s Opfer, becomes the specific scene of the crime, Grosz and Heartfield’s work Leben und Treiben in Universal-City um 12 Uhr 5 mittags [Life and Events in Universal-City at 12:05 noon] (1919). What had been Hausmann’s general Selbstporträt was now his 1920 work, Dada im gewöhnlichen Leben; Dada Cino [Dada in Ordinary Life; Dada Cinema]. Where other works had done montage violence to the portrait of the bourgeois subject, the significant increase in text within these works does still further montage violence to the concept of captioned illustrations and their orderly relationship between word and photographic image.20 In both cases, these were direct attacks on those signposts that had provided some semblance of stability in an unstable, fractured and fragmented world. These photomontages, then, not only do violence to representations of stable and orderly society, but in so doing represent society as it is, as explosion, as “the fragmentation of reality” (Bürger 2011, p. 73). 20  Less numerous than Dadaist photomontages focused on the bourgeois portrait, these society spanning photomontages often utilize a significant amount of text within their compositions. See, for example, Johannes Baader’s Ehrenporträt von Charlie Chaplin (Gutenberggedenkblatt) [Honorary Portrait of Charlie Chaplin (Commemorative Sheet for Gutenberg)] (1919) and Grosz’s Germania ohne Hemd [Germania without a Shirt] (1919–1920).

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These society spanning photomontages, however, are not merely the revelatory representations of society as the explosions of last week, the society that is “trying to […] pass off […] all this civilized carnage as a triumph of European intelligence” (FOT, p. 65). They are also interpellations. Not only did these photomontages portray the explosion, but also meant to reproduce and reinforce its effects, the explosion now turned decisively toward the viewer so as to be unavoidable and unavoidably visible. With no ready-made presentation of the entirety of society or its culture on which to place fragments of photographic images, as photomontage portraiture had done with the bourgeois portraits of Friedrich Ebert or Gustav Noske, for example, the societal photomontage would instead regularly arrange photographic fragments on an empty background. This seemingly empty background would therefore be all the more evident between the montaged fragments, the violence of the montage cut and explosive tatters all the more thematized within the work. As Hausmann would explain to Hans Richter, “Photomontage in its earliest form was an explosion of points of view [Blickpunkten] and levels of images churned into each other” (Richter 1964, p. 119; see DAA, p. 116). Hausmann describes a photomontage in which not only the view of society has been exploded for the viewer, but the view point itself, the stability of the viewer’s subject position is undone. The audience is made to view society through an ever-shifting, explosive, kaleidoscopic series of viewpoints and subject positions. Here, the viewer is interpellated as and made into the victim and sacrifice of society as an explosion, that is, made into a Dadaist, having unwittingly perceived society as a Dadaist, thanks to and through a Dadaist work. The interpellation of the Dadaist work, as Wieland Herzfelde explained in the catalogue introduction to the Dada-­ Messe, must be presented as “anti-illusionistic and proceed from the requirement to further the disfiguration of the contemporary world, which already finds itself in a state of disintegration, of metamorphosis” (1920b, p. 102). The work that constitutes the very cover of that Dada-­ Messe catalogue, Grosz and Heartfield’s Leben und Treiben, represents and performs this interpellation of new Dadaists. While other works that had been displayed at the Dada-Messe would go on to be far more well-known and garner far more critical attention, Leben und Treiben’s prominent placement as the background of the catalogue’s cover reflects the degree to which the work exemplified the aesthetic of the exhibition itself (see Fig. 4.2). Serving as something of a background for the work, though relegated and visible only in a section

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Fig. 4.2  The cover of Erste Internationale Dada-Messe [First International Dada-Fair] (July 1920), edited by Wieland Herzfelde

to the lower right of center, is a drawing in the distinctively aggressive style of George Grosz that represents a number of men, most notably capitalists, soldiers, and bourgeois bystanders, complete with Grosz’s regular short-­hand of class-appropriate hats, cigars, and sneers. Grosz’s style overlaps these men, as though they were merged into an indistinguishable mass, no longer a collection of delineated individual subjects. Although the drawing does not cover the tableau, leaving large swaths along the left border and lower right corner a plain white, architectural lines that appear from underneath the added fragments indicate a crowded city scene by Grosz. Atop this, Heartfield inundates Grosz’s drawing with an overabundance of cultural ephemera, most notably from a series of advertisements and films from Universal City, the

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forerunner of Universal Studios.21 Film stock litters the lower right corner and advertisements promote everything from flywheels to bleach to hair products, and of course movies themselves, or “photoplays,” the promotional material of which comprise much of the montaged fragments. This focus, of course, on the promotion of an art form central to the work functions perfectly for its placement on the cover of the DadaMesse’s catalogue that likewise proclaims the event to be an “Exhibition and Sale of Dadaist Products.”22 Indeed, in the upper left corner of the work, where one would begin to “read” as if to read the page of a novel, is a fragment barely recognizable as spelling out “Trade Show” in cursive lettering. As Leben und Treiben indicates, however, the Dada-Messe is not merely a Dada trade show, but rather, again loosely read from left to right, a “DADaING / Trade Show / DADAING,”23 all of which is adjacent to a loudspeaker spreading the word. Dada becomes Dadaing, a noun into a verb, an object into a performance. Just as a movie ticket purchases an experience rather than a movie itself, the primary Dadaist product sold is the experience of exploded points of view—in both cases, radical modes of montage perception as representation and performance of society. Leben und Treiben not only served as the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue, but was of course featured in the exhibition itself. Visible in the promotional photos of Johannes Baader’s large assemblage, Das große Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama [The Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama] (1920),24 Grosz and Heartfield’s work was placed in the second room of the exhibition at Dr. Otto Burchard’s Berlin gallery.25 In a small note attached to the description of the work in the exhibition’s catalogue, Heartfield’s brother Weiland Herzfelde offers a suggestion to the viewer on how to approach, 21  Both Universal City and Universal Studios were founded by Carl Laemmle, a German immigrant to America, to whom the work Leben und Treiben was ultimately given. 22  The catalogue as a whole is reprinted as an unpaginated insert before the bibliography in DT. 23  All lowercase, a third “dadaing” appears in the upper right, just above the advertisement for a hair product. 24  The full name of the piece is Das große Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Deutschlands Größe und Untergang durch Lehrer Hagendorf oder, Die phantastische Lebensgeschichte des Oberdada [The Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Germany’s Greatness and Decline at the Hands of Schoolmaster Hagendorf or, the Fantastic Life of the Superdada]. For a reading of this work, see White (2001). 25  Number 152 in the catalogue, Leben und Treiben was placed in the second room on the wall with the three windows, only 5 meters from the opposite wall.

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so to speak, the work: “To get the correct impression, it is best to take 40 steps back through the wall (Caution, Step!)” (1920a, p. 3; see 1920b, p. 104). This caution is certainly warranted. Given its placement within the exhibition room, any viewer who stood before the work and took 40 paces backward would burst through the wall, fall from the second story, and find themself on Lützowufer just south of the Tiergarten in Berlin. That is, the best view of the work is not of the work at all, but rather of society itself, out on the street. Once this new viewpoint is obtained, Herzfelde continues, the viewer realizes that “it is self-evident that the Dadaist John Heartfield is the enemy of the picture. He has destroyed it himself. One can put this to a very simple and useful test on any random street” (1920a, p. 3; see 1920b, p. 104). That is, Leben und Treiben means to effect in the viewer an experience of society out on the street, the explosions that constitute that society. Heartfield made that experience visible, performed it through its own destruction, both a Dadaist and a Dadaing work that interpellates the viewer to see, in turn, as a Dadaist, a newly minted member of Dada. As Dorothée Brill summarizes, “Dada transposes mimesis from the visual field of depiction onto the more immediate sensorial experience. [… T]he recipient’s experience of being overstrained by the abundance of disjunct impulses here is not an intellectual but a sensorial one” (2010, p.  81). That is, societal photomontages, such as Leben und Treiben, create in the viewer the Dadaist experience of society as explosion, make that viewer sense society in the same way that the bourgeois subjects of Hausmann’s Selbstporträt or Grosz’s Opfer would. All of which is to say, these photomontages interpellate viewers into Dadaists, into critics of photographic interpellation. Few, however, were as adept at this interpellation as the two great Dadaist photomontage works of Hannah Höch.

Höch’s Magnum Opera: Rundschau Playing on the German word Rundschau, Hannah Höch’s photomontage Dada Rundschau (1919) is most often translated as Dada Review, as in a journal or newspaper, but could also be translated, more literally as Dada Look Around or Dada Panorama. This duality alludes simultaneously to the source of many of its montaged fragments as well as to the radical breath of Dada’s critically variegated and panoptic vision of society. This duality is evident in the upper right corner of the work where the word Rundschau, taken from a newspaper masthead, is connected, through the

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second D in the word “DaDA,” to the work’s date, 1919, via a strip of black paper, interrupted by a disembodied and bespectacled pair of eyes, “which thematically and visually summon Dadaist relativizing vision in all directions” (Bergius 1989, p. 106). Insofar as Rundschau functions as a Dadaist newspaper with a revolutionary panoptic vision of society, Höch was able to marshal her personal knowledge of the publishing industry. From 1916 to 1926, Höch worked as a draughtswoman at Ullstein Verlag, the publisher of BIZ and multiple illustrated newspapers and magazines including Die Dame and Uhu. Höch, who thanks to her professional connection to Ullstein and “as an especially avid collector of small ‘wanted’ photographs from magazines,” was able to supply fragments of photographic images not only her own photomontage works, but also to those of many of her fellow Dadaist photomonteurs (Bergius 2000, p. 91). Of course, many of Höch’s photomontages, particularly Rundschau, thematize more than that which is pictorially depicted—they thematize the very concept of the montage cut itself. Höch’s performative framing of her collected and reappropriated image fragments is evidently different from that framing utilized by the traditional mass media from which they were taken. With an array of black and colored strips of paper that crisscross the work, Rundschau performs the clean angles and vertical columns, the properly separated hierarchy of mastheads, sections, and subsections so conspicuously poorly, and therefore productively, that the very concept of traditional framing is questioned. Not only do these strips further enhance the concept of the montage-cut, making it a visible and evident theme of the work itself, but they also complicate how such cuts become frames. Here, Höch makes the frame visible and thereby reframes it as something other than restrictive, other than a border. Rosalind Krauss has suggested that in “dada montage the experience of blanks or spacing is very strong, […] as the medium that both combines and separates them” (1997b, p. 106). Rundschau focuses on these strips of paper almost exclusively as connective tissue, thematically integral to the work itself, occasionally overlapping and giving depth to other textual and iconic elements in the work. A strip lays atop the word Nationalversammlung [National Assembly] in the upper left, for example, just as the strip travels through the opening of the second D in “DaDA” in the middle right. In this way, the concept of the connective cut is as thematically relevant to the work as any of its representational elements. That is, while these strips of paper initially appear similar to the internal frames of traditional print media’s columns and order, if a particularly

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chaotic version, they are something wholly other. Neither an enclosure that is uniquely porous nor merely an “editorial embellishment of the image” (Butler 2009, p. 8), akin to a nonlinguistic caption, these strips of paper function as both the tissue that connects ostensibly disparate elements within the work and a thematization of the montage cut itself. The traditional frame that is “taken for granted in one instance becomes thematized critically or even incredulously” at the edge of Höch’s scissors (Butler 2009, p. 10). Höch’s strips of colored paper make visible both the frame and the utility of the montage cut as a subversive tool to reconnect elements that had been traditionally framed as separate. That is, they simultaneously thematize the forcible frame that separates and the disobedient framework that combines. Thematically highlighted by these strips of paper, the combinatory framework of the montage cut represented by Rundschau almost exclusively involves, which is to say excises, the very elements that constituted the illustrated print media that Rundschau reappropriates and critiques: photographic images of bodies and lines of printed text.26 The thematic connectivity of elements to each other, represented by the addition of tableau-spanning strips of paper, is supplemented by the excised subtraction of potentially dissimulating textual or photographic backgrounds, contexts, and frames. For example, while the traditional print media would have likely separated Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France, from Freikorps snipers atop the Brandenburg Gate, ready to fire on Spartacus League revolutionaries by multiple pages, columns, and sections, wholly dissociated from each other, Höch is able to place the former atop the latter’s back in the lower right of the work. This is, of course, a sly allusion to an anarchist assassin’s attempt on Clemenceau’s life—the photo is of his forced repose after the attempt—as he reclines on the back of right-wing snipers who would soon open fire on Spartacist anarchists and communists. The juxtaposition also serves to represent the cascading effect of Clemenceau’s harsh stance against Germany after the First World War and Weimar’s subsequent violent suppression of dissident thought. It is perhaps most immediately, however, a critique of the media that had kept their stories independently framed, cordoned off from each other, 26  As Rosalind Krauss notes in her discussion of Dadaist photomontage, the fragments excised from the traditional mass media can be viewed “as a separate unit which, like a word is conditioned by its placement within the syntagmatic chain of the sentence, is controlled by the condition of syntax” (1997b, p. 105).

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and that therefore refused to acknowledge their various associations. Excised from the photographic framing of his comfortable Paris reading room, the location of Clemenceau becomes all the more immediate and clear: on the backs of right-wing, paramilitary assassins. This excision, which is to say a reframing, removes any sentimentality toward an elder statesman recovering from an assassination attempt and instead, thanks to the association with ruthless and roving bands of right-wing mercenaries, arouses scorn. This scorn is certainly meant for Clemenceau himself and the assassins on whom he rests, but also the media from which the fragment was taken. The fact that “the montaged fragments […] insistently point outside the artifact to the context from which they were yanked” indicates that the critical potential of Rundschau’s connective cuts, like those of other Dadaist photomontages, functions in two directions (McBride 2016a, p.  18). There is perhaps nowhere in Rundschau that exemplifies this dynamic more than the two bodies at its center: Gustav Noske and Friedrich Ebert. If not of location, the two men are unquestionably Rundschau’s center of focus. Noske and, over his left shoulder, Ebert stand shirtless, hands on hips. In addition to the size of the montage fragments of their bodies, the largest in the work, and their relative bodily autonomy as two of three bodies represented in the work that remain as intact as their initial photographic images allow, Rundschau’s audience would have immediately known not only the men represented but the specific photographic image from which the fragments were excised. Without question, the most well-­ known image in 1919 Germany, the Badebild [Resort Photo] (see Fig. 4.3) infamously ran on the front cover of the 24 August edition of BIZ,27 though distributed on 21 August, the day of Ebert’s swearing in as president of Weimar, with the mocking caption: “Ebert and Noske in the Freshness of Summer.”28 This image of the vacationing Ebert and Noske standing in the Baltic Sea is cropped, reframed and refocused on the two who would come to represent Weimar Germany from a larger image that had run on the cover of the conservative Deutsche Tageszeitung two weeks earlier, which, like BIZ, mocked the subjects of the image in their 27  Höch used this image in her earlier photomontage, Staatshäupter [Heads of State] (1918–1920). George Grosz’s photomontage Germania ohne Hemd [Germania Without a Shirt] (1919–1920) is almost assuredly titled after this image. 28  For a significant study of the political and societal repercussions of the photo, see Albrecht (2002) and Mühlhausen (1999, pp. 310–337).

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Fig. 4.3  Badebild [Resort Photo] as printed on the cover of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (24 August 1919) and a tipped-in postcard, Einst und Jetzt! [Then and Now!], to the Deutsche Tageszeitung

front-­page caption: “The Representation of the ‘New Germany.’” After the furor over the image’s publication on the cover of BIZ, and seeking to politically damage Ebert and Noske as well as reap the rewards of the growing scandal’s publicity, Deutsche Tageszeitung published a once more reframed version of the image as a postcard insert (see Fig. 4.3). Deutsche Tageszeitung gave the cropped image of Ebert and Noske a thick white-and-black frame, that extended to the edges of the postcard. Centered above and below the main image of Ebert and Noske were smaller three-quarter portraits of Kaiser Wilhelm II above and Paul von Hindenburg below. In these official portraits of the final German emperor and king of Prussia, and his field commander throughout the First World War, respectively, the two wear their full military uniforms and regalia, adorned by various medals, epaulets, and ribbons. The difference in presentation between the elder statesmen of the German Empire and the

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representatives of the new Weimar Republic, bare-bellied and smirking, is put into harsh relief with a caption in German Fraktur: Einst und jetzt! [Then and now!]. What had been originally framed with a sneering invocation of “New Germany” was here performatively reframed in contrast with the “Old Germany.” While the original image had proved embarrassing to Ebert, Noske, and the Scheidemann cabinet, its reframing as something of a proto-photomontage itself was an immediate and smashing success for Deutsche Tageszeitung and an utter catastrophe for the governing coalition. Ebert’s first demand for legal action and prosecution as president of the newly formed republic was to prevent the continued publication of the postcard and to destroy any extant copies. The political power of an image, and perhaps more importantly its performative frame, was quickly learned by the politicians, press, and political agitators. The press of the political right framed and reframed this image of the two representatives of Weimar, bathing in their trunks, in order to arouse and subsequently heap scorn upon them. Höch had no intention to negate that scorn, but rather to arouse new scorn, to augment it, to performatively reproduce and reframe it from the political left. As the two focal and central figures of Rundschau, Ebert’s genitals placed at the exact center of the work, the multivalent critique created by Höch’s Dadaist montage framing is most pronounced with the bodies of Ebert and Noske themselves, here fully excised from the idyllic background of the coastal resort. Although excised from their original contexts, the images of these bodies ceaselessly refer back to the scorn aroused by the original image. Indeed, Höch alludes to this scorn, which had often been couched in emasculation, with her only enhancement of their bodily images: a small flower that bursts from the front of each of their swimming trunks. Höch, who out of continual necessity in the heavily masculinized Dada movement was acutely aware of gender and its politics, here sharpens the implicitly emasculative critique of Ebert and Noske in Grosz’s Galerie, a critique she would continue in her photomontage Staatshäupter (1919–1920) of Ebert and Noske now bathing in/on an iron-on embroidery pattern of a woman lounging with a parasol (Makela 1996, pp.  60–61). In Rundschau, Höch performs the postcard’s reframing again, re-reframing Ebert and Noske, surrounding them with the nationalist, military bravado that they had been unable to duplicate, though now as new nationalist, military violence targeting their own citizens. This is perhaps most immediately visible with Ebert’s montaged feet. Beneath the

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surface of the Baltic in the original image,29 Ebert’s feet are now placed in a pair of shiny military boots and surrounded by the tagline for a popular foot powder to ward off sweat and smell: “Gegen feuchte Füße” [Against wet feet]. In Höch’s Dadaist reframing, Ebert’s feet are shown to be clearly meant “Für militärische Stiefel” [For military boots]. The feet of Noske, who is now placed to the right of Ebert rather than as they were originally aligned, their relation to each other fully interchangeable, remain hidden, though now behind an amorphous cloud. Ostensibly labeled “DaDA,” the cloud also immediately implies the recent use of chlorine and mustard gas in the First World War, with the addition to the top of the cloud of a gas-mask bedecked woman, pointing forward directly at the viewer of the work. Beyond the militaristic elements adjoined directly to Ebert and Noske’s bodies, the excisions-as-frame thematized by the strips of colored paper and enacted by the excisions of other bodies and elements from their traditional contexts performatively frame and reframe Ebert, Noske, and the new Weimar Republic for which they stood, with national and military violence, re-viewed. Through the hole in the image of Ebert, between his left arm and body, as his hand jauntily rests on his hip, dives the young swimmer and film star Annette Kellerman directly into the end of a trench periscope, a literal reframing of military perception, that runs down the lower right of the work. At the end of this periscope is not only the hand of the military man holding the periscope from the safety of a trench but also an image of a protesting group and the sniper atop the Brandenburg Gate on whom Clemenceau rests—a member of the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps group that had been deployed by Ebert and Noske in order to quell the Spartacus Uprising after the Freikorps’ arrests and executions of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (see Pelz 2018). By a series of leading lines, the viewer’s gaze is drawn inexorably from Ebert to the Freikorps. That is, the excised photographic images and text function just as the connective strips of paper do. Not merely within the spatial confines of Rundschau itself nor simply upon a matrix of spacing common to Dadaist photomontage, not only thematized by the work’s strips of colored paper nor merely in connection with whichever photographic representation most immediate—each and every element that constitutes the work, as well as the syntax within which those elements are placed, creates a 29  Bergius points out the literal instability of their stance in the shifting silt of the Baltic: “Here is their standpoint also groundless” (1989, p. 104).

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cascading and totalizing series of interconnected internal frames, a totalizing framework. Within the spatial confines of the work itself, there is no conceptual difference between an image, a piece of text, and a frame; each functions as the others. In addition to the original contextual frames from which each fragment was excised and to which each fragment invariably continues to refer, each element within Rundschau contextually reframes and recontextualizes, creates a reevaluation and re-view of every other element within the work, and connects it to previously disparate elements. The reframing, then, is so reciprocative and comprehensive that there is simultaneously no frame and nothing but frame, a non- and hyper-­ framework of nationalist and militarist ideological apparatuses now made visible in and through the new Dadaist framework, Dada’s and Dada Rundschau’s properly critical panoptic vision. At its center stand Ebert and Noske, if not blissfully unaware, then blissfully unperturbed, now seen reframing and being reframed by the political violence that they perpetuated, if not created. While there are various fragments-cum-reframings that reinforce these themes, such as General Erich Ludendorff’s head combined with uniformed bodies or photographs of nationalist mobs holding placards proclaiming “Wir bleiben deutsch!” [We remain German!] and “Einig und deutsch!” [United and German!], one element in particular, a naval cannon at the bottom center of the work, most immediately demonstrates the pervasiveness of this framework hiding in plain sight. Upon seeing the cannon, taken from the 12 February 1915 issue of BIZ, with the original caption “Looking into the tube of a large ship gun,” initial viewers of Rundschau would likely be reminded of the mutiny in Kiel. Ordered into a final and needless battle with England’s Royal Navy during armistice negotiations, German sailors mutinied, effectively ending the German Empire’s ability to continue the war. The mutiny led to a larger revolution in Kiel, which quickly spread throughout Germany, sweeping aside the monarchy and leading to the German Revolution and eventual Spartacist Uprising—all within the span of three months (see Dähnhardt 1978, Wette 2010). A representation of the radical tipping point of the mutiny, the barrel of the cannon functions as something of a portal back in time, receding away from the tumultuous first months of Weimar back to the German Empire. Indeed, this is precisely how it functions in the work. Rundschau invokes yet another disobedient act of seeing—to look literally (around) back, where one finds Höch’s “second” work on the folio verso of Rundschau, a highly variegated portrait of Kaiser

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Wilhelm II, with the title Friedensfürst [Prince of Peace] violently scrawled across the portrait and Wilhelm’s shoulders. The title was a common moniker for Wilhelm II following the 1915 publication of Reinhold Kirchhöfer’s political pamphlet “Wilhelm the Second as Prince of Peace in World Politics.”30 The title, of course, had become darkly tragicomical in the wake of the horrors of the First World War, the violent suppression of the German Revolutions, and the continual difficulties of the new Weimar Republic. Höch here re-performs the framing of Deutsche Tageszeitung’s postcard, Ebert and Noske framed by Wilhelm II, Weimar framed by Wilhelmine. The framing device of the cannon’s barrel, however, is not merely a tipping point’s portal back and forth between then and now (einst und jetzt). Rather, as with an actual cannon, the trajectory of destruction is purposefully and exclusively unidirectional. Given the location of the cannon in relation to the three-quarter portrait of Wilhelm II on the backside of Rundschau, as well as the Dadaist’s often scatological criticisms of the Great War and its aftereffects, the barrel functions as something of a menacing, mechanical, military rectum. Here, Höch implies not only that the nationalistic and militaristic culture of Weimar Germany continues to be supported by Wilhelmine Germany, literally resting upon Wilhelm’s back, nor simply that the two epochs of German history are indeed two sides of the same coin (or tableau), but specifically that Wilhelm and the German Empire was the body politic from which Weimar was noxiously expelled. Indeed, Höch’s work reframes a citation originally meant to frame Ebert and Noske and the culture of Weimar Germany in toto. Beaming from a spotlight perched atop the rectal naval cannon, as something of a textual ray of light, a fragment reads “Schatzkammer des deutschen Gemütes entleert” [Treasury of the German spirit evacuated]. This textual fragment was originally intended, similar to the defeatism of the einst und jetzt postcard, to arouse scorn for those who had so degraded the nobility of a formerly proud empire. Höch’s use of the citation to reframe the militaristic anus of a now disgraced emperor, amidst the chaotic and violent nationalism and militarism portrayed by Rundschau, preemptively answers the Dadaist refrain: “What is German culture? (Answer: Shit!)” (Huelsenbeck 1920f, p.  44). The revolution, the mutiny, and all the war and violence had, in essence, achieved nothing more than a pile of shit. All that had changed was 30  Hausmann, Höch’s partner at the time, used a similar phrase in his manifesto “Alitterel— Delitteral—Sublitteral”: “Wilhelm II was the peace-German incarnate” (1919b, p. 85).

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appearance, military pomp for soggy swimming trunks, a digestive “pseudorevolutionary belly [had] displaced an absolute head of state” (Doherty 1998, p. 66). Weimar was not the phoenix-like new republic that had risen from the ashes of the Great War. Performatively reframed to empower a new dissident perception, Weimar could be viewed for what it was, merely the evacuated excrement passed through a naval cannon anus, little more than the expulsive echo of the decayed empire that had come before. The scorn that the resort image of Ebert and Noske had aroused, whether framed by Deutsche Tageszeitung or BIZ, whether as a cover story with a scathing caption or as a postcard with a biting critique—scorn heaped upon national leaders without grandeur or grace, dignity or distinctions—is likewise performed in Höch’s Rundschau, though reframed. The einst und jetzt that had originally framed Weimar Germany as a precipitous degradation of culture from Wilhelmine Germany, and thereby highlighted a radical difference between what had been then and what is now, has come to represent in Rundschau less of a differentiation between old and new than a radical continuation. Thanks to this reframing, which is to say the addition of this new frame of Kaiser Wilhelm II, himself now scornfully reframed by Höch’s harsh strokes of color and the violent scratch of the darkly ironic title Friedensfürst scratched across his shoulders and Wir [We] across his chest, the scorn aroused for Weimar is also reframed. The anti-Wilhelmine scorn of Friedensfürst reframes the frame of the (already reframed) postcard and reproduces it with a new initial scorn that builds upon itself. Weimar’s Ebert and Noske are again framed as Wilhelm undressed; their soft fat bellies now packed into hard military boots, previously just out of sight, but grounded in militarism and nationalism all the same—einst und jetzt, simultaneously the same as it ever was, and worse. The performance of framing and the reframing allows and even forces the new perception, the re-view. This is the performance of the explosion that subsequently interpellates the viewer as one who sees the ideological apparatuses that traditionally frame society and the Dadaist reframings. That is, it is the interpellation of the viewer as Dadaist. In addition to the exhortation to re-view and review the interpellative frameworks that smooth over society’s explosions, however, is yet another in the form of a textual fragment emanating from the work’s searchlight: “Lesen und an Männer und Frauen weitergeben!” [Read and pass on to men and women!]. The review done, the interpellation of a new critic of interpellation completed, the interpellation itself is then to be passed on to others, now both a reading and a writing of the explosions of society.

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Höch’s Magnum Opera: Schnitt Hanne Bergius suggested that “‘Dada Rundschau’ is to be considered a prelude to the large-scale montage ‘Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands’ (Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany)” (1989, p. 106). Consistently considered her masterpiece, and indeed the center piece of Berlin Dada and Dada as a whole, Höch’s Schnitt is roughly seven times the size of Rundschau and significantly more intricate, with fragments of photographic images that represent over fifty individuals, almost twenty pieces of industrial technology, seven animals, numerous images of architecture and crowds, an array of military imagery, among a host of other ephemera.31 The importance of the work was recognized almost immediately (see, for example, Dech 1981; DT, pp.  142–152; Biro 2009, pp.  65–103; Niebisch 2012, pp.  98–102; Lavin 1993; McBride 2019; McBride 2018). Despite the numerous difficulties that Höch had encountered as she campaigned to have her works included in the Dada-Messe, Hausmann ultimately threatening to pull his works unless Höch’s were included, Schnitt was given prominent placement, placed at eye-level—an important caveat as works covered the walls from ceiling to floor—and in the corner of the first room, directly opposite the room’s entrance, among the first works a visitor would see. Schnitt was praised, of course, not only for its size and scope, but also for the ways in which that size and scope embodied and elucidated Weimar society and Dada’s relationship to it. Schnitt “stands as a visual summa of Berlin Dada’s exuberant condemnation of contemporaneous German society and wholehearted immersion in the revolutionary chaos of post-Wilhelmine Germany” (Boswell 1996, p.  7). As the title would indicate, this condemnation and immersion, of course, is particularly active and violent, not merely a look around at the detritus that would spill out of “Weimar’s pseudorevolutionary beer-belly” (Doherty 1998, p. 74), almost certainly an allusion to Ebert and Noske, but the violent action, the cut, the Schnitt itself. If Rundschau was an interpellation to read, to review both the images and their frames—or as Schwitters may have put it, to recognize the what and the where, the material and the

31  Schnitt measures approximately 114x90 centimeters, while Rundschau is approximately 44x35 centimeters.

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cut—Schnitt is an excursus on the writing, which is to say, on the cutting, on the Schnitt. Höch’s Schnitt is not achieved with the precision of a bourgeois doctor’s scalpel, even if “[s]urgery was another favored Dadaist metaphor, with montage as violent vivisection,” (Doherty 1998, p. 75; see Benjamin 2008b, p.  35), but rather a common, and commonly gendered, household commodity.32 The title, and presumably the theme of the work, therefore is less the explosions of last week that form society, than it is the cut of the Dadaist knife across the belly of the very culture in which the society-as-explosion resides. Rather than the metaphorical and literal explosions of last week, such as the First World War, the German Revolution, and the Spartacist Uprising, the cut here is directed at the flabby flesh that has covered them over and subsumed their revolutionary potential, which has become “a metonym for Weimar’s new political ruling class, and for the Weimar body politic more generally” (Doherty 1996, p. xli). Like Rundschau, Schnitt dwells in a certain grammatical ambiguity. As a noun, Schnitt of course could refer to anything as innocuous as a haircut or, far more likely given the context, an evisceration. Schnitt is also, however, the simple past of the infinitive schneiden, to cut, as in “the surgeon cut the patient.” In Höch’s title, Schnitt is given no grammatical subject beyond the implied Dada itself, as either the name of the kitchen knife or kitchen knife functioning as an adjective of Dada. The former connection, however, has largely dominated scholarship surrounding the work, which has read the work as something of a panoramic photographic image itself, a unique moment that “presents a turbulent image of Germany’s postwar revolutionary moment” and “offers a panoptic view on the Weimar society” or indeed “offers an entire social panorama of the Weimar Republic” (Biro 2009, p. 71; Niebisch 2012, p. 99; Lavin 1993, p. 19). More recently Patrizia McBride’s investigation into Dadaist conceptions of time has connected Höch’s Schnitt with her partner Hausmann’s October 1919 essay “Schnitt durch die Zeit” [Cut Through the Age] and its associations with the Augen-Blick [moment], both the blink of an eye and a moment full of revolutionary potential, as well as the Querschnitt [cross-section], the scientific cross-section that suspends activity in a particular moment for further examination (see 2019, pp.  30–31; 2018, 32  The theme of gender and gender dynamics, both in the work itself and the gendered discrimination that Höch herself endured during her time in Berlin Dada, has been the subject of much criticism. In particular, see Lavin (1993) and McBride (2019).

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pp.  493–494). Schnitt, that is to say, is not merely the remnants of the eviscerating act, as Rundschau could be read, but rather indicative of a process through time, the process of Dada’s critical cutting. While the initial encounter with such a large and intricate work may appear to the modern viewer to be chaotically impenetrable, Bergius notes that “the effect of the montage upon the contemporary viewer is alienating rather than alien. It challenges them because it appeals to what they know” (2000, p. 71; see DT, p. 121). The familiarity would have initially drawn the viewer in, only then to alienate them with the violence of the montage cut. The question, however, quickly becomes how precisely the viewer is meant to proceed, if at all, upon having been drawn in. Two seemingly opposed elements of the work have been regularly highlighted by scholarship. Schnitt includes multiple representations of revolving bodies. These include tires, wheels, ball-bearings, gears and the like, which have served as a theme throughout multiple Dadaist photomontages, but are most pronounced in Schnitt with the conspicuous introduction of the pirouetting dancer Louise “Niddy” Impekoven, holding the disembodied head of Käthe Kollwitz in her hands at the very center of the tableau, around whom the remaining contents of the work would seem to rotate.33 In contradiction, however, scholarship has also often read the work as surprisingly static, with four distinct quadrants. These are then related in a diagonal fashion, usually with the upper left and lower right quadrants held in admiration between the Dadaists and Albert Einstein, the lower left and upper right held in aggression between the assembled masses and Kaiser Wilhelm II (see Biro 2009, pp. 73–75; DT, p. 120). For McBride, this tension between revolutions and static relations belies the confused and ultimately failed revolutionary politics of Berlin Dada, and the Weltrevolution (world revolution) that it meant to incite (2018, p. 494). She notes that even the numerous allusions to revolving and revolution, the tires, wheels, bearings, and cogs all “spin without seemingly going anywhere” (2018, p. 496). These revolving, if un-revolutionary, elements seem to represent more of a Nietzschean eternal recurrence than any attempt at revolutionary change. This, however, is the very einst und jetzt, the same-as-it-ever-was, that Höch had just represented in Rundschau, the prelude to Schnitt according to Bergius. Rather than the forerunner or the 33  The investigations of Dech and Bergius into the sources of the photographic fragments and the elements and humans that the fragments represent have proved invaluable to this reading of Schnitt.

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aftermath, Schnitt is the nomen actionis in that it represents the process of the cut itself, the revolving elements less those of an eternal repetition than of an assembly line that move and facilitate the process of the cut itself. Schnitt is the Dada-ing of Weimar—representing and performing itself and its own tenets. The viewer, then, begins to precede by reading this process. This reading occurs literally. As in many Dadaist photomontages, there are fragments of text that function as “linguistic signals [to] guide the eye through the maze of tiny photo segments and particles because they are clearly offset from the web of photos and […] function as clarifiers and amplifiers of meaning” (DT, p.  121). While previous photomontages, including those by Höch herself, had utilized textual fragments from mass media, those used in Schnitt are almost exclusively from Dadaist manifestos, the word dada itself occurring ten times throughout the work. In this way, Schnitt itself functions as a Dadaist manifesto constituted from Dadaist manifestos.34 As a work that both represents and performs its own process, a manifesto and nomen actionis, the static nature of Schnitt’s diagonals and quadrants can be reformulated, reread as interconnected and dynamic. Perhaps most notable in this reformulation is the concept of revolution. Photographic images of wheels, bearings, and gears almost exclusively align on the borders of these quadrants, most evidently in the three representations of ball bearings, two encased and a third loose, and the Vollgummireife [solid rubber tire], all of which separate the upper from lower left quadrants. Aside from a lone, seemingly decorative tire in the upper right quadrant, all representations of smooth revolution appear along this line, from the middle of the left border out to Impkoven’s rotating body and Kollwitz’s head. This line of bearings breaks the possibility of an eternal recurrence that a tableau spanning revolution might suggest. Insofar as the textual fragments of Dadaist manifestos guide the eye of the viewer as they are read, so too do the bearings themselves, not through them, from lower to upper quadrant, but rather along them, from upper left to upper right. The large cog that may initially appear as a separation between the upper left and upper right quadrants, yet another element 34  “Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife is a remarkably concise and elegant work that functions as a Dadaist manifesto on the politics of Weimar society” (Lavin 1993, p. 19). Puchner also noted the connection: “dada’s two most important forms of expression, manifesto and photomontage, did not stay neatly apart but began to leak into one another, producing dada’s most important form of manifesto art. The best example here is one of the most well-­ known photomontages, Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife” (2006, p. 161).

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that revolves without being revolutionary, in fact transfers those rotations from left to right along the drive shaft that extends from the cog into the upper right quadrant. In this way, Impkoven/Kollwitz functions less as the center around which everything revolves than the overseer of Schnitt, whose own revolutions facilitate a panoptic vision of all aspects, all quadrants, all steps of that process. The viewer drawn in by the familiarity of what the fragments represent is now guided to follow the process represented in and by the work, to read the work as one would any textual manifesto—beginning in the upper left of the tableau. In the upper left quadrant is among the largest contiguous elements of the work, a large portrait of Albert Einstein that had filled the BIZ cover after his revolutionary theory of general relativity was confirmed by the solar eclipse some months earlier (see Elton 1986). This confirmation not only made Einstein among the most popular and recognizable people in the world, but also widely popularized his theories that subverted the very concept of a designated and definitive viewpoint or frame of reference on which Newtonian mechanics had stood. There was no longer a single, stable subject; there was “a negation of absolutes, [… of] stable reference points” (DT, p. 144). Höch represents this relativistic and panoptic vision of Einstein’s not with an ersatz eye of another, but rather a lateral number eight to approximate the mathematical symbol for infinity placed over his right eye. While Dadaists saw this as scientific verification of their subversions of stability, Einstein found in Dadaists a verification of his leftist political leanings.35 The rapprochement between Einstein and Dada is here indicated by a flurry of text from Dadaist manifestos that surround his portrait, such as “Legen Sie Ihr Geld in dada an!” [Put your money in dada!], “dada seigt!” [dada triumphs!], and “He, he, Sie junger Mann / Dada is keine Kunstrichtung” [Hey, hey, you young man / Dada is not an art movement]. Höch’s representation of Einstein and his panoptic Dadaist vision is similarly orbited by multiple elements of dynamic motion such as a hot-air balloon, horses, feet, figure skaters, and a large train running across the top of Einstein’s head, a recurrent element of Einstein’s thought experiments that he would deploy to elucidate his theories of relativity, first collectively published in 1916 (see Einstein 2005). This 35  For example, Einstein wrote to Heartfield and Grosz on the publication of their journal Neue Jugend: “your enterprise is of great interest to me, like any effort that may serve the purpose of international understanding. […] May your work happily overcome the difficulties of birth and take fruitful effect” (qtd. in DT, p. 143).

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dynamic motion is given room to roam by Höch, with large swaths of space visible between fragments of the photographic images. Here, the strips of paper seen in Rundschau are now transformed into a “fluid matrix” on which the fragments are placed, which itself “both combines and separates them” (Krauss 1997b, pp. 107, 106). Resting atop the conveyor belt of tires and ball bearings—even representations of solidity and stability in the girding and elephant are placed directly atop a rotating roller-bearing cassette—the dynamic motion of this quadrant is transferred rightwards to the upper right quadrant though the large cog and drive shaft, into the back of an old foe: Kaiser Wilhelm II. Resembling a large winding key for an automaton or child’s wind-up toy, the cog and drive shaft seem to plug into the Kaiser’s upper back as if animating him and the quadrant that his representative fragment dominates. By far the largest fragment in Schnitt, a half-length portrait again represents Wilhelm II in full military regalia, as he was on the folio verso of Höch’s Rundschau. In this portrait, however, he wears a scepter on his right hip and additional accoutrements atop his more puffed out chest and sideways, self-serious stare. If this was not indicative enough of his importance, a top hat three times too small rests atop his large head. Despite this seeming importance, the fragment of Wilhelm II is almost entirely obscured underneath an avalanche of other fragments of photographic images. What little space there is between fragments, Höch colored black in contradistinction to the open white page and fluid matrix that Einstein and his modes of dynamism enjoy. In this upper right quadrant, rather, the background is Wilhelm. No longer necessary to have a look around, Wilhelm II in all his military garb becomes, to continue Rosalind Krauss’s analogy, “the precondition for meaning as such” (Krauss 1997b, p. 106). Wilhelm himself constitutes “the outsidedness of spacing [that] is revealed as already constituting the condition of the inside” (Krauss 1997b, p. 106). He is the framework within which Weimar 1920 gains meaning, that against which everything in Weimar 1920 is to be measured. As with Rundschau, Wilhelm supports and is surrounded by militarism, nationalism, and suggestions of quickly deteriorating economic prospects. Indeed, this upper right quadrant functions as Höch’s Rundschau, in nuce, with Wilhelm brought out of hiding, if still lurking in the background. The energy of Einstein’s quadrant and its ample space for the dynamic movement represented there, however, have not entirely transferred to Wilhelm II and his. Wilhelm II and his co-inhabitants are pinned to each other, with neither space to move nor representations of movement. Labeled

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jauntily across Wilhelm’s forehead, this quadrant is “Die / anti / dada / istische / Bewegung” [The / anti / Dada / ist / Movement]. Indeed, this quadrant is both anti-Dada and anti-movement. The traditional sign of Dadaist motion, the wheel or tire, is indeed added here to Wilhelm’s quadrant. While such a wheel may have been used to indicate motion and dynamism in other quadrants or photomontages, it is here transformed into a decoration on Wilhelm’s chest, who, having been metaphorically powered by Einstein’s dynamism, only wears it like an unmoving and ostentatious military medal or nipple piercing.36 The only other fragments that suggest motion, two military biplanes, are both pointedly grounded, one with its propellor conspicuously still, the other upside down, resting on its top wing. Other elements that might suggest dynamism or vitality are themselves seemingly frozen in place. Two wrestlers are locked in stalemate, a literal Stillstand [stand still], and inverted so as to function again as decoration, as Wilhelm’s moustache. A dancer similarly appears, though with the head of Paul von Hindenburg, no longer dancing but serenely resting atop Wilhelm’s tire-cum-medal/ nipple piercing, one arm supporting Wilhelm’s chin, the other supporting themself on the shoulder of Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin, the supreme commander of the Austro-Hungarian infantry in Albania. He stands at ease atop the heads of Noske and an unknown German admiral, themselves similarly standing still in discussion. In the upper right stand four older gentlemen, one in military uniform and the other three in long frock coats, steadied and stabilized by their canes as they stand atop a machine gun, itself interwoven with the textual elements that make it further evident that this is indeed “Die anti-dadaistische Bewegung.” Below this and behind Kaiser Wilhelm II’s left shoulder is the second largest fragment of the quadrant, a street scene of a large group of people. While they may initially appear as a riotous street crowd, they are in fact a group of unemployed Berliners, their only dynamism is in their rush to line up and stand patiently still to wait for assistance from the state employment agency. Although the beerbellies of Ebert and Noske are here mercifully absent, the militarist and nationalist accoutrements built upon a Wilhelmine foundation represent the Weimar cultural epoch that the kitchen knife of Dada—or labeled Dada—means to eviscerate. That is, the gastrointestinal 36  This transfer was not only metaphorical. In 1913, Einstein was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Theoretical Physics, now the Max Plank Institute at the Free University in Berlin. See Neffe (2009).

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connection between Wilhelm and Weimar, made visible thanks to Rundschau’s reframing as thematized in the montage cuts as strips of paper, is here not yet cut, not yet reframed. The evacuation yet to be re-­ framed, Schnitt must first eviscerate Wilhelm, and the Weimar to which he grants meaning. The ostensibly static and stable Wilhelm-Weimar composite has no dynamism with which to continue the movement along a series of ball bearings or wheels. Rather, the contents of the quadrant sink down through a makeshift 12-cylinder ship engine, mechanical funnel into the maniacally laughing (or screaming) head of Höch’s partner and coinventor of Dadaist photomontage, Raoul Hausmann. Hausmann’s head is screwed like a lightbulb into the threads on the bottom of the ship engine’s attached oil-pan casing. Hausmann’s boisterous and beaming head is the only part of his body that is not enclosed within a new deep-sea diving “suit that can go to twice the depth of previous suits” (Biro 2009, p. 67).37 As if already crushed slightly by the significant pressure of the deep sea, the suit is twice too small for Hausmann’s head, giving him something of a childish, infantile demeanor. Unlike his own Selbstporträt, where the surrounding pressure would affect both his ability to breathe through his externalized lungs and would register on his pressure-gauge face, Hausmann here can withstand the otherwise overwhelming pressures of the seas, out to which the maritime engine would be able to carry him. Much like the naval cannon in Rundschau that had exposed the connection between Wilhelm and Weimar, here the naval engine and deep sea diving suit is the technology through which Wilhelm’s Weimar is funneled, again recalling the naval mutinies and the revolutions that would come to follow. While that series of revolts had (yet) to prove fruitful— perhaps reason enough for Höch to exchange the quadrant’s original call to Weltrevolution [world revolution] for “Die große / WELT / dada” [The great / WORLD / dada] (see McBride 2019, p.  34)—the naval engine casing into which Hausmann was threaded was adorned with a small photograph of Karl Marx’s head, as if a hood ornament for the engine, and the critical vision that is enacts. That is, this engine as funnel, associated with both the Soviet style mutinies that ended the First World War and the revolutions and uprisings that followed in their footsteps, as well as with the Marxist critique of ideology, is not merely a funnel but a

 This fragment is taken from the 19 January 1920 issue of BIZ.

37

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screen that allows Hausmann to read and write with scissors. It is the mechanical process of the montage cut. In his discussion of the gaze and the role of the picture within it, Lacan notes that the “screen is here the locus of mediation” in that “the screen re-establishes things, in their status as real” (Lacan 1998b, p. 107). That is, the screen “cuts into that which is illuminated without being seen” (Lacan 1998b, p. 108). The screen of the cultural epoch of Weimar has stuffed and squeezed into the beer belly of the upper right quadrant, unified itself as though there were no screen, no cuts or frameworks, into a univocal cultural narrative. As Norman Bryson notes, summarizing Lacan’s concept, this was a cultural and ideological screen. “Between the retina and world is inserted a screen of signs, a screen consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built into the social arena[, …] that is, when I begin to articulate my retinal experience with the codes of recognition that come to me from my social milieu(s), I am inserted into systems of visual discourse” (1988, p. 92). Like the grammar and syntax of language, the visual field is predetermined by a “cultural production of seeing that exists independently of [the viewers] life and outside it” (Bryson 1988, p. 92), a visual discourse that forms ideological subjects in and through their visual perception of images. With this surge of mechanically mass-­ reproduced photoreal images that are perceived as obvious and natural, of the increasingly encompassing “social relation between people that is mediated by images” (Debord 2006, p.  7; §4), the image- and screen-­ based formation of ideological subjects has become all the more pervasive. This is the image-based analogue of Tzara’s language and logic. As this cultural epoch of pre-screened and pre-­digested images are funneled down through maritime mechanical apparatuses, like Rundschau again located where Wilhelm’s digestive tract would end, and into the screaming head of one of the progenitors of Dadaist photomontage, the excrement is critically sifted and screened anew, broken up and cut, the invisible screen of the beer belly made visible. This, then, is where Dada’s critical cut of Schnitt takes place, the Dada-ing of Weimar’s beer belly cultural epoch. The twelve-cylinder ship engine announces itself as screen, Marx positioned as a crest, making visible and allowing for the analysis of other screens and its own. The unity, borderlessness, and oppression of screening-cum-framing that have become all the more influential in its seeming imperceptibility are all undone, rendered ineffectual, and presented for critique as they pass though the cuts of the new Dadaist screen. This naval engine as Marxist-Dadaist screen that cuts the visual field in new and

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critical ways performatively “calls into question the very basis of how it is that the visual media form an everyday reality that appears natural and promises understandability” (Federele 1992, p. 122). This is the alienating view of the non-alien fragments, the new destabilizing Dadaist screen. Whereas Rundschau, given the associations of its title, had critically reviewed and subverted the framing of mass illustrated media, Schnitt critically reframes the screening of the apparatuses of culture itself and therefore the ways in which that cultural screening habituates a certain visual grammar and therefore forms particular and particularly visual ideological subjects. Here the critique of indexicality is combined with the critique of the screen, of visual grammar, and of understandability. Höch’s cut is the application of a “dialectical optics which enables her both to see differently and to present that difference graphically” (Federele 1992, p. 128), which is to say to dehabituate, destabilize, and deform those ideological subjects. Dada’s new alienating screen is then shouted by Hausmann to his fellow “DADA/i/S/t/en” [Dadaists], as the quadrant is appropriately labeled, who populate this lower right quadrant. Grosz and Herzfelde, Heartfield and Huelsenbeck, most all Berlin Dadaists are accounted for, including Höch herself. Johannes Baader appears twice, as does Hausmann, whose head screams the new screen and listens from between the A and i of “Dadaisten.” These doublings, along with Höch as both monteur and montierte, mechanic and mechanism, artist and art, already imply a relativistic vision able to inhabit two points of view at once. Most immediately evident in this quadrant of the great Dada world is the reintroduction of dynamic movement and the space within which it is able to occur. The Dadaist screen of the Marxist naval motor is not merely another screen that forms unity or stability as stasis, but rather one that highlights itself as “something [that] cuts, cuts across” the viewer’s “visual field” (Bryson 1988, p. 92). It shows the cut and its borders, expands the cut in order that it be explicitly shown, be spatially visible, be expanded into the shocking lacuna of Rosalind Krauss’s white page and fluid matrix (1997b, p. 107). From the claustrophobic non-spacing of the beer belly’s unified cultural narrative, the Dadaist quadrant shows this spacing underneath, and thereby the cuts and borders of the new Dadaist screen. Within this far more open space, Dadaists enjoy dynamism and movement that continually shift their points of view. Grosz and Herzfelde twirl atop a pirouetting ballerina, Heartfield is bathed by the dancer Impekoven (who simultaneously oversees the montage rotating around her in the center),

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Baader prepares to jump as a uniformed springboard diver, Höch and Heartfield sit in the Balkan train that journeys from Berlin to then Constantinople and back, implying their connection to both an Einsteinian relativism and a radical internationalism. To the immediate left of the dynamism of the Dadaist quadrant, however, is a trio of, at best, reviled pseudorevolutionaries, if not outright reactionaries. Wilhelm von Mirbach,38 who attempted to bring Russia back into the First World War and displace Russian Bolsheviks from power; Kurt Hiller, the philosopher of logocratic meliorism and prime target of Dadaist vitriol;39 and Adolf Gröber, parliamentarian of the German Center Party and rabid anti-revolutionary. These three, with their vision all radically othered, all face away from the dynamic Dadaists and toward the crowds that create the final quadrant in the lower left. The portraits of these three form something of a blockade or filter of Dadaist praxis, the revolutionary potential of Dadaism again reformulated and deadened by pseudorevolutionaries. Despite the seeming attempt by these three, the masses appear to slip past them, particularly behind Mirbach’s back and under Gröber’s long beard near the very bottom center of the work, able to bypass the barrier. The crowds that comprise the lower left quadrant— from small children to members of the Weimar National Assembly and revolutionary crowds to civilians and soldiers boarding yet another train— are able to recognize and understand Dada’s message from the lower right, to see their expanded series of critical screen cuts. Standing atop an ambulance in the crowd, with both the best vantage to view over the pseudorevolutionary barrier and the benefit of ambulance as soapbox, an agitator with the shoulders and head of Raimund Tost (see Lavin 1993, p. 22), a leader of the mutinous sailors in Kiel, exclaims “Tretet dada bei!” [Join Dada!], rendered here in ornate cursive, shouted back to the center of the work, over Hiller’s head. This second-person imperative is not for some specified you, but rather you all, everyone in all of the crowds in the quadrant, all commanded to join Dada. Rather than Rundschau’s command to read and pass on, the members of the masses are commanded to join Dada, to become a Dadaist. The new Dadaist, as Höch’s Schnitt puts it, recognizes that the visual field of culture functions like a text, with a hidden ideological grammar that forms ideological subjects, a text then that  Dech mistakenly attributes this portrait to Walther Rathenau.  According to Huelsenbeck: “Kurt Hiller, with his intentional or unintentional meliorism, is the theoretician of the expressionist age” (1920f, p. 40). 38 39

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is meant to be read and re-written with critical scissors. Indeed, this is what remains so resonant about Dada, particularly from one of the movement’s greatest works. The perpetual importance of works such as Schnitt is less the material, less whether the observer knows the primary or secondary players in the Kiel mutiny or Weimar politics or war generals (though contemporaneous observers certainly would have), than it is the incisive and trenchant critique of an increasingly ideologically illustrated world that clarifies and subverts the use of such illustrations as interpellations in the processes of ideological reproduction and subject formation. In much the same way that Schwitters had commanded a reader of letters to become the reader of both the material and the non-material materiality of the excision-cut, or that Tzara had undone the dichotomy of membership’s assent or dissent, Höch needed at most suggest a look around, a particular and panoptical recognition of the visual field and of the increasingly illustrated media. The viewers of the time, uniquely familiar with the material fragments of photographic images, need merely recognize what they had long since implicitly known—that images are framed and that those frames are not inviolable. That is, the particular specificities of the processes represented by the naval cannon that connects Wilhelm to Weimar or the maritime engine that funnels Wilhelm-Weimar into Hausmann’s head, the expulsive echoes and Schnitt-screens, are less important than the knowledge that they exist at all. The existence of such hardware belies two interrelated facts. Regardless of where or how or by whom they are formed, both the temporal and spatial frame inherent to photography itself radically decontextualize the objects that are photographically represented. The re-positioning and reframing of these fragments recontextualizes them in ways that allow for new critical modes of vision. In other words, the natural obviousness of the photographic image’s indexicality does not extend to its frame and its contexts. The index as a radical iconicity is not only able to function as a symbol, but indeed always does. As Ball might have summarized Peirce, “the word and image are one” (FOT, p.  66). In an increasingly illustrated world, the visual field and spectacle of modern life are as interpellative as any text, or indeed as interpellative as text itself. Insofar as Dada used language against itself in order to subvert interpellation and the formation of ideological subjects, so too did it with the mass-reproduced photographic image. This is made all the more evident by the montage cut. The visualized and thematized cuts of Dadaist photomontage subvert that interpellation. The ubiquity and unavoidability of those cuts re-interpellate the viewer as

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someone who recognizes them and how they reframe and re-­contextualize that which is represented, indeed that which is visible, all of which is to say, the viewer is visually re-interpellated as a Dadaist in their viewing. For the Dadaist praxis of this radical excision and re-contextualization, as Herzfelde noted in the introduction to the Dada-Messe catalogue, “we need merely take scissors” (1920b, p.  101). Excision, however, extends beyond the montage-cut, for “when something on a smaller scale is involved, we do not need representations at all but take instead the object themselves” (1920b, p.  101). In other words, rather than Picasso and Braque’s piece of newspaper that means to represent a whole newspaper or even, to a certain extent, Dadaist photomontage’s image of ball-bearing to represent a ball-bearing (or by extension rotation, revolution, or simple motion), one could simple utilize the object itself—no longer re-presented but simply presented. “Any product that is manufactured uninfluenced and unencumbered by public authorities and concepts of value is […] Dadaistic, as long as the means of presentation are anti-illusionistic and […] further the disfiguration of the contemporary world” (Herzfelde 1920b, pp. 101–102). While Dadaist photomontages had certainly contributed to this disfiguration in the visual realm of an increasingly illustrated mass media, some years before Herzfelde had written these words and on the other side of the Atlantic, Marcel Duchamp and other New York Dadaists had radicalized this praxis of Berlin Dada within the context of yet another highly visual realm: the continually growing commodity and consumer culture.

CHAPTER 5

“So That Its Useful Significance Disappeared”: Dada and/as Commodity

At the turn of the century, the capitalist mode of production was quickly transforming. Fordism and Taylorism before it revolutionized the productive output of seemingly every system of manufacture. Fordism’s effective deployment of the assembly line and specialized equipment that enabled the employment of fewer, so-called unskilled laborers both radically standardized the commodity that was being manufactured and created a seemingly interminable amount of those commodities. Fordist capitalism’s ability to mass produce an enormous number of standardized commodities transformed the society into which those commodities were unleashed in a multitude of ways. The drastic increase in commodities necessitated a similarly drastic increase in consumers and, therefore, a drastic increase in various modes of commodity aesthetics that would not only market those commodities, but also form those consumer-subjects (see Haug 1986). Commodities and their aesthetics came to inundate society, eventually to ingratiate and intertwine with society to the point that the consumption of aestheticized commodities had become the engine of society itself, a society of commodity consumption and consumers (see Baudrillard 1998). This transformation of society, of course, was not lost on Dadaists. When Tzara states, for example, that “Dada took the offensive and attacked the social system in its entirety” and was therefore to direct their “attacks against the very fundaments of society” (1979, p. 403, 404), it was not simple language and logic against which Dadaists attacked, but consumer © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Pelcher, Dada’s Subject and Structure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26610-2_5

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capitalism—or rather, against the language and logic of consumer capitalism, against commodity aesthetics and their interpellative interactions with (potential) consumer-subjects. In much the same way that Dadaists had deployed subversive attacks by employing “the very elements of the literature and art that [the Dadaists] were attacking” (Tzara 1979, p. 403), so too did they with commodities and commodity aesthetics. Indeed, many Dadaists questioned and transgressed the presupposed border between that world of art and the world of commodity capitalism. Much like the Futurists before them,1 Dadaists often had a deep antipathy toward the world of art, particularly as manifested in the institution of the museum. Such sentiments were perhaps most famously stated in John Heartfield and George Grosz’s article “Der Kunstlump” [The Art Scoundrel] (December 1919) and the debate that surrounded it (see Doherty 2003). For Grosz and Heartfield, works of art “preach the flight of feelings and thoughts, away from the unbearable circumstances of life on earth” (1919, p.  51). Works of art “no longer hold for [Grosz and Heartfield] the slightest value of life,” but rather only “have market interest for the bourgeoisie” (p. 48). That is, commodity capitalism had long since infected the world of art. This line of argument mirrored that of Walter Serner, who two years earlier had begun his infamous “Letzte Lockerung Manifest Dada” by ironically comparing commodities and art, where “ladies’ silk stocking are sold and Gauguins prized. Truly a most deplorable business […] silk stocking can be grasped but not Gauguins,” the latter of which would “unleash rivers of money” from “bourgeois index fingers” (1920b, p.  153). With this view of works of art as little more than the commodity-investments of the bourgeoisie, who wished to escape the difficulties of life, particularly in the tumultuous first decades of the new century, Dadaists employed those same elements of art in their subversive attack on both the world of art and on art as such. That is, “Dadaism is about making and producing art” (Dickerman 2003, p. 8), though specifically and conspicuously art from and as commodities. As Serner summarized, “All in all, my dearest: Art was a teething problem” (1920b, p. 159). Serner’s use of the past tense is telling: “L’art est mort. Vive Dada!” (1920b, p. 160). Art as a bourgeois escape from the horrors of everyday life, and as a secure piggy bank for superfluous bourgeois

1   “We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort” (Marinetti 1909, p. 51).

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money, is dead. Dada has killed it. Long live the Dadaist art that now conspicuously stayed with (rather than avoided) life, with society, with commodity capitalism and its new aesthetic logic.

Advertisement and Commodity Aesthetics From its very inception, indeed even before it, Dada had been deeply enmeshed in the world of commodities and consumer capitalism. Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings’s creation of the Cabaret Voltaire is suffused with the entrepreneurial and commodifying spirit. While the initial evenings of the cabaret’s performances were free and open to all, aside from a 50-cent coat check to offset operational costs, the soon-to-be-labelled Dadaists began to charge admission of two Swiss francs, three for a reserved seat, approximately ten Swiss francs in 2020 (see Bock 2016, pp. 118–119). As the cabaret slowly became an artist’s bar, with makeshift performance and gallery space, various artists would angle to perform or display, ultimately to promote and sell, their works. Of course, these works and performances were not imprisoned in the cabaret, but would make their way out into the world. “[O]ne of Dada’s most important innovations, a media network that served as both conduit of ideas and images and site of practice” (Dickerman 2003, p. 8; see Hage 2021), all of which were ready for purchase. This media network was of course not merely a series of interdepartmental memos, but a network of commodities themselves. Increasingly, this commodification of works of art and their advertisement became the commodification of Dadaism itself, seemingly evident in the first major journal after the single-issue collection Cabaret Voltaire, titled simply Dada. Ball had disliked the word made movement and likely abhorred the movement made product. This was, however, a return for the word—dada likely taken from an advertisement for a hair conditioner named “dada” that ran in Zürich’s daily newspapers (see Meyer 1985, pp.  25–27). The health and beauty company who produced “dada,” Bergmann & Co., also produced a “lily-milk soap” and had a logo of two hobby horses crossed, both of which Ball alluded to in his manifesto.2 After Ball’s departure, and indeed likely having precipitated it, Tzara continued to highlight the complex associations between Dada and capitalism: “Dada—it’s for lying: a successful business. Dada gets into debt and

 “In French it means ‘hobby horse.’” […] Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap” (FDMW, p. 228). 2

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doesn’t live on its well-filled wallet” (1920j, p. 47). Perhaps this is why it was so important that everyone “Legen Sie ihr Geld in dada an!” [Put Your Money in Dada!] (Hausmann 1919c). Dadaists did not merely comment on commodity capitalism, but rather readily and radically ingratiated themselves into all facets of it, commenting from within it. Dada becomes simultaneously producer and consumer, commodity and advertisement. If not necessarily toward the same goal, in a way parallel to Kurt Schwitters’s “Unsittliches i-Gedicht” [Indecent i-Poem] created by merely excising a fragment of an advertisement that listed department store prices, Tzara was among the first to recognize and indeed embrace the fact that Dada and Dadaist works were both advertisement and commodity. Tzara definitively asserted that “advertisement and business are also poetic elements” (1918a, in OC 1, p. 363; see TTDM, p. 8), and more specifically, Dadaist elements (see Beals 2017; Drucker 1994b). Like i, dada does not mean anything outside of itself, but rather functions as a point de capiton stamp, as a kind of commodity aesthetic, a trademark. Dada is a product, sold as and with the help of the word dada. Tzara deployed these intermingled elements in multiple works of his, in everything from office letterhead for the “Mouvement Dada” [Dada Movement] which mirrored those of international corporations with multiple branches and bureaucratic directors, to his hyperactive typographic work of advertisement, Une Nuit d’Échecs Gras [A Night of Crude Failures] (November 1920) with the forthright subtitle “Advertisement for the sale of dada publications” (see Drucker 1994b, p.  214). This conflagration may have reached its apogee in the third issue of Dada, under the direction of Tzara (see Sanouillet and Baudouin 1976). No longer the collection of Dadaist works, as Cabaret Voltaire could be read, Dada 3 was unmistakable as a work in and of itself, which is to say somehow simultaneously a Dadaist product and a Dadaist advertisement for that Dadaist product. The marketing and advertising aesthetics of a myriad of typefaces, sizes, and ligatures, spacings, orientations, and justifications are employed, beginning with the very cover, price prominently displayed and the producers not merely Dadaists, but member-­ employees of the “Administration / Mouvement DADA,” as if an international corporation. The confusion between work as commodity and work as commodity aesthetics continues throughout the issue, with borders and margins between ostensibly separate elements indistinguishable, art and advert inextricably montaged. Tzara’s work Bulletin, for example, is replete with marketing and advertising rhetoric, dedicating the work “to the Destruction of Bygone Beauty & Co.,” and alluding to “the advertisements,” or advertising language that

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promises a “cavalcade of miracles surpassing all language,” and for the reader-cum-investor, “to your profit” (1918d, p. 16). A seemingly genuine advertisement for yet another Dadaist pamphlet of Tzara’s poems accompanied by wood engravings by Hans Arp does not so much intrude on Bulletin than it is integrated into it. The advertisement lays out a price list for the collectable versions of the pamphlet—a numbered edition and a collector’s edition printed on Holland, a type of laid paper—with similar typographic conventions to the Dadaist work with which it is montaged. While Tzara and other Dadaists from Zurich and Paris integrated advertisements and commodity aesthetics into their works, the photomontages of Berlin Dada created works almost exclusively from commodities and advertisements. As the illustrated newspapers and magazines came to dominate Berlin’s media landscape, the large photographic images on their covers functioned as their own marketing, advertisements for themselves, thereby able to sell themselves and the still further advertisements within all the more effectively. The photomontages of Berlin Dada were revolutionary not only for their montage aesthetics, but also for their appropriation and manipulation of commodified images. The flood of images was a flood of commodities. That is, despite their name, photomontages are not montages (or collages) of photos, but rather montages of mass reproduced photographic images that simultaneously function as commodity and commodity aesthetics. Indeed, this began with the first proto-photomontages, whether in the case of Grosz and Heartfield who sent advertising and marketing for commodities, along with small commodities themselves to military actors at the front, or in the case of Höch and Hausmann inspired by the commodified military mementos of the reservist-images as they strolled through northern Germany. This was, of course, not lost on the Dadaists themselves. As Höch mentioned, in addition to the importance of the “high development of photography during the First World War (aerial photographs, x-rays, and close-up images)” (Höch et  al. 1976, pp.  31–32), which had made photography ripe for Dadaist appropriation, the mass reproduced images were likewise seen as products of commodity capitalism, the very “objects from the world of machines and industry[, which we wanted] to integrate into the world of art” (Roditi 1973, pp. 63–64).3 The excised mass reproduced photoreal

3  Patrizia McBride, among others, notes that this desire to reference industry and machinery is precisely the purpose to utilize the German words montieren, Montage, and Monteur (to assemble, assembly, and assembler or mechanic). See McBride (2016b, p. 205).

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images were commodities, elements of mass media newspapers and magazines, but also commodities that were in no small part developed by the military. That the Dada-Messe, among the most commercially focused and commercially unsuccessful Dadaist actions, focused so heavily on photomontages is therefore unsurprising. The commodity capitalism of the Dada-Messe, however, was not focused solely on photomontages.

Fordist Subjectivation Where Dadaist photomontages investigated the role of commercialized and commodified mass media in the formation of the ideological subject, Dadaist assemblages often focused their investigation on the role of the commodity-object itself. In many ways, however, these two forms of Dadaist art functioned parallel to each other, the latter as something of a three-dimensional version of the former. Rather than a montaged series of photographic representations of violence and militarism, for example, Grosz and Heartfield simply juxtaposed a revolver and a medallion from the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle.4 Perhaps less important than the elements juxtaposed, however, is the field on which that juxtaposition occurs. Without that “white page [that] is rather the fluid matrix” on which photographic images can be montaged (Krauss 1997b, p.  107), some form of mannequin would often function as that foundation and framework on which commodities would then be juxtaposed. The most evident examples are indeed the most celebrated Dadaist assemblages: Grosz and Heartfield’s Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield: Elektromecanische Tatlin-Plastik [The Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild. Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture], Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist unserer Zeit) [Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time)], and Johannes Baader’s Das große Plasto-Dio-­ Dada-Drama.5 Whether

4  The Order of the Black Eagle (Schwarzer Adlerorden) was the highest award for chivalry bestowed by the Kingdom of Prussia, which Wilhelm II continued to confer after World War I and from exile. 5  Both Wildgewordene Spießer and Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama were first displayed at the Dada-Messe in July 1920. The creation of Hausmann’s Mechanischer Kopf is often placed as 1919–1920, though it was likely not first shown until its illustration as “Plastique” in I. K. Bonset, ed., Mécano 2 “Blue” (July 1922). I. K. Bonset was a pseudonym of Theo van Doesburg.

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highlighted in isolation, as in the case of Wildgewordene Spießer and Mechanischer Kopf, or within the larger work, as with Plasto-Dio-DadaDrama, the use of the mannequin in Dadaist assemblages parallel that of the bourgeois portrait in Dadaist photomontage—both focused on the formation of the subject. Like a three-dimensional version of Jedermann, of a metonymic bourgeois subject of Weimar, Grosz and Heartfield’s Wildgewordene Spießer is constructed from a mannequin meant for the tailoring of boy’s clothing and various commodities attached to it. In addition to the militarism implied by the gun and martial citation attached to the mannequin’s chest,6 a doorbell attached to Wildgewordene Spießer’s left shoulder “evokes his protective house” (Stavrinaki 2016, p. 27), along with the silverware attached to his chest; not only a good bourgeois homelife, but a good bourgeois because of the accumulations of that homelife. That is, the literally defining aspects of Wildgewordene Spießer, his formation as a bourgeois subject, are exclusive to the commodities that have been added and assembled. Already a structural support on which fashionable commodities are assembled and perfected, the mannequin’s headlessness indicates that Wildgewordene Spießer can neither observe nor think for itself. In place of a head, rather, is a glowing light bulb, a commodity that must literally be plugged into a larger societal system to function or contribute. Hausmann’s Mechanischer Kopf functions as something of Wildgewordene Spießer’s obverse, a wooden hairdresser’s mannequin head unattached to a body. Mirroring Hausmann’s own Selbstporträt and its pressure gauge and film projector, the head of Kopf is similarly adorned with various forms of measurement, such as a ruler, the machinery of a watch, and T-square, as well as a printer’s ink-roller, designed to repeat endlessly the characters put in place by others. The addition of a crocodile skin wallet reminds the viewer of the relations between commodity, consumer capitalism, and subject formation. Hausmann made this clear: “A long time ago I had discovered that people have no character and that their face is only an image made by the barber. […] The quotidian person has no more capabilities than those which chance has glued on the outside of their skull; their brain remains empty” (1967, no pag.). If Wildgewordene Spießer and Mechanischer Kopf function as three-dimensional analogues of portrait photomontages, Plasto-Dio-­Dada-Drama conforms analogously to a larger society spanning photomontages. Nonetheless, this larger societal work

6  Unseen in most photographic representations of the work, Wildgewordene Spießer “bears an Iron Cross of its own on its ass” (Doherty 2003, p. 90).

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similarly has a mannequin, ostensibly meant to represent Baader as Oberdada [Superdada], where “he has literally constructed his subjectivity” from those elements around him (White 2001, p.  592). The mannequin, therefore, represents that Dadaist Jedermann [everyman], the individual made consumer-subject. Some five years earlier, Dadaists within the beating heart of consumer capitalism focused less on the assemblage of multiple commodities held together in a novel syntactic chain than in the individual commodity-­ object itself, excised in a way from the network of commodity aesthetics that the necessities of Fordism would require. The July-August 1915 edition of the proto-Dadaist journal 291, edited by Alfred Stieglitz, printed five full-page works by future Dadaist Francis Picabia on its six possible pages, one page left for short piece by Marius de Zayas that questions the relationship between commercialism and art in America (de Zayas 1915, p. 3). Perhaps the most striking is Picabia’s D’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité [Portrait of an American Girl in a State of Nudity]. With a draftsperson’s precision, Picabia represents the titular Fille américaine as a simple automotive sparkplug, with a small inscription running down the cylinder: “FOR-EVER” (see Homer 1975; Rozaitis 1994). Where Wildgewordene Spießer and Mechanischer Kopf attached commodities to three-dimensional versions of bourgeois portraits, thereby exploring the formation of the bourgeois consumer-subject, Picabia draughts the portrait and represents the bourgeois subject as a simple object of consumption, a commodity. Picabia’s object portrait Fille américaine is where “pure objectivity of form serv[es] as an equivalent for human subjectivity” (Rozaitis 1994, p. 47). There is nothing purely, nakedly human left, nothing of human subjectivity that cannot be represented by consumable objects; no individuals, only nodes within consumer capitalism. For Dadaist investigations parallel to Picabia’s mechanical style and Berlin Dadaist’s three-dimensional assemblages, with deep interest in the commodity form and its aesthetic (re)presentations, and more specifically the ways in which these aspects intersect with and help to form consumer-­ subjects, few were as incisive as Marcel Duchamp.

Commodity Form and High Aesthetics Art historical criticism has almost exclusively viewed the readymades created by Duchamp as radical attacks on artistic production, high aesthetics, and the world of art. This is particularly true of 1917s infamously bathetic,

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scatological, and gendered Fountain, a urinal simply placed on its back, likely a collaboration between Duchamp and the Baroness Elsa von Feytag-­ Loringhoven (see Gammel 2002, pp. 220–228; see also Hopkins 2007). In its defense, Beatrice Wood wrote in the pages of the second issue of The Blind Man (May 1917), with input from Duchamp and Walter Arensburg: “They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit. Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain […]. Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it” (Wood 1917, p. 5). Much of this defense was soon ossified into definition in André Breton’s assertion that readymades were “manufactured objects promoted to the dignity of art objects through the choice of the artist” (Breton 1935, p. 46). Indeed, Duchamp himself would repeat this formulation three years later in Breton and Paul Éluard’s Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme [Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism]. Duchamp writes: “READYMADE—an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist” (1938a, p. 23). Art historians have largely adhered to these definitions by Wood, Breton, Duchamp himself, and others, definitions that focus on the investigation of the “dignity of art objects,” their production through “choice,” and their presumed eventual placement in artistic collections. While more recent criticism has begun to contextualize readymade objects within the world of commodity capitalism in the first decades of the twentieth century, the commodity-objects at the heart of the readymades continue to be framed as critiques of and challenges to art (see Nesbit 1986, Molesworth 2005, de Duve 1984, de Duve 1990b). Consistently underexamined, however, is the critical potential of the ­readymade to expand the high aesthetics of the art world beyond the ­gallery and museum, to introduce art and its strictures into everyday life, in order to critique and subvert the mass-produced commodity, the ­consumer capitalist world from which it was excised, and their aesthetics. Although readymades are rarely subtle in their allusions to the commodity world from which they are purchased, the relationship between readymade and commodity, art and capitalism is significantly more complex. Fountain’s signature, “R. Mutt / 1917,” alludes to J.L. Mott Iron Works, the commodity’s manufacturer and supplier that ran a Manhattan plumbing supply store from which it was chosen, “a fixture you see every day in plumbers’ show windows” (Wood 1917, p. 5). Comb, from 1916, is more explicit; a dog-grooming comb stamped like a business card by the manufacturer: “CHAS F. BINGLER / 166 6TH AVE. N.Y.” Duchamp, however, hinted at the complexities of the readymade’s relationship to the

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commodity with his second addition to Breton and Éluard’s dictionary: “Reciprocal readymade: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board” (1938b, p. 23). Generalized, Duchamp’s definition appears to be a simple reversal: the reciprocal readymade as a work of art demoted to a utilitarian commodity. In actuality, however, complexities abound. In 1919, Duchamp purchased a keepsake postcard of the Mona Lisa, recently popularized by its return to the Louvre after its theft, for a readymade, which he would “rectify” with a mustache, goatee, and the inclusion of its title, L.H.O.O.Q.: art to commodity to readymade to art.7 Francis Picabia’s authorized reproduction for the March 1920 issue of his journal 391, forgetting the goatee, returned L.H.O.O.Q. to the realm of commodities. Duchamp repeated this gesture in 1955 with L’envers de la peinture [The Reverse (or Wrong Side) of Painting], a dishcloth with Duchamp’s original L.H.O.O.Q. reproduced on it. In 1965, Duchamp purchased two packs of playing cards with the Mona Lisa reproduced on the back of each card, pasted them to dinner invitations without alteration and titled them rasée L.H.O.O.Q. [L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved]: a commodified work of art, chosen and rectified as a readymade, therefore promoted in turn to an art object, commodified as the cover of an artistic journal and as an aesthetic washcloth, chosen again as readymade from a deck of playing cards as commodified work of art or artistic commodity. That is, the readymade is neither unidirectional, a transformation from commodity into art, nor uniformly bidirectional, a series of oscillations between the two, but rather a radical complication of them both, to the point of their inseparability. These complexities of the object-commodity as readymade are exacerbated by the eventual entanglement of the utilitarian and aesthetic object, but are cast from the first moment of the readymade’s production: its being chosen, its purchase. Helen Molesworth notes: “it is precisely this quintessentially twentieth-century experience of shopping that Duchamp introduced into the realm of art” (2005, p. 174). New York department stores confronted shoppers with an overabundance of possibilities at the dawn of mass consumption, “largely dependent on the activity of choice” (Molesworth 2005, p.  174). Duchamp, however, viewed the 7  The title L.H.O.O.Q. is a homophone, when spoke in French, of “Elle a chaud au cul,” which translates to “She has a warmth in her ass” or more colloquially, “She’s horny.” Francis Naumann lays out something of a taxonomy of Duchamp’s readymades, including readymades, assisted readymades, rectified readymades, corrected readymades, and reciprocal readymades. L.H.O.O.Q. is considered a “rectified readymade” because the object has been marked by Duchamp. See Naumann (1999, pp. 308–309).

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purchase-as-­choice of readymades very differently than the average shopper: “You have to approach something with an indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste” (Cabanne 1971, p. 48). Just as the average New York shopper must work to determine which commodity they aesthetically prefer and therefore which to acquire, the radical indifference to aesthetic taste plays an outsized role in Duchamp the shopper’s purchase-as-choice of the readymade. The totality of this indifference, the exhaustive aesthetic catalogue that encompasses the entirety of good and bad taste to be avoided, its continual shifts of trends and fashions would of course be impossible, and if it weren’t, no commodities could survive its exclusions. This impossible, theoretical commodity would function as an aesthetic tabula rasa. This aggressive indifference was constitutive of Duchamp’s choice-as-creation: “I am against the word ‘anti’ because […] an anti-artist is just as much of an artist as the other artist. Anartist would have been better. […] Anartist meaning no artist at all” (qtd. in Hopkins 2002, p. 255). Rather than a non- or anti-aesthetic commodity, the readymade is meant, if only theoretically, to be an-aesthetic, an absence of stimulation, of feeling, of sensation, and indeed of sense itself. This attempted an-aesthetic an-sense was meant to extend to the second element of the readymade’s production, its inscription.

Inscription Although less conspicuous than that of choice, inscription likewise complicates the relation between readymade and commodity. If the an-­ aesthetic commodity as readymade is the object as blank canvas, its inscription is “a color that didn’t come from a tube […], a sentence which was to be essentially poetic and often without normal meaning, managing to play with words” (Charbonnier 1994, p. 62).8 Here, the roles appear reversed. This is an aesthetic, described as color and poetry, that has not been prepared, that does not come from a tube, that has been neither commodified nor purchased, that is an an-commodity. The inscription

8  Duchamp regularly conflated painting and the readymade: “Since the tubes of paint used by the artists are manufactured and ready-made products we must conclude that all paintings in the world are ‘readymades aided’ and also assemblages” (Duchamp 1975, p. 142). See de Duve (1996).

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further avoids any potential commodification in its attempt to avoid meaning itself, to be an-hermeneutic and an-sensical. Just as Duchamp supposedly spent weeks with an object to determine whether it was in fact aesthetic (Cabanne 1971, p.  48), he would experiment with texts to remove meaning. Speaking about two of his textual works, The (October 1915) and Rendez-vous du Dimanche 6 Février 1916 [Rendezvous of Sunday, February 6, 1916], Duchamp stated, “The meaning in these sentences was a thing I had to avoid […] the minute I did think of a verb to add to the subject, I would very often see a meaning and immediately […] cross out the verb and change it […] until the text finally read without an echo of the physical world” (CWD, p. 638). These textual works would go on to inform the inscriptions of two of his readymades, In Advance of the Broken Arm (November 1915) and Comb (17 February 1916), respectively. If the inscription is meant to be an-sensical, with no echo of the physical world, there would also, necessarily, be no echo of the consumer capitalism that had begun to dominate it. Duchamp imagines the successful readymade as a separated juxtaposition of an an-aesthetic commodity and an an-­commodity aesthetic, inscribed but not influential. The impossibility of choosing a truly an-aesthetic commodity is mirrored in the impossibility of inscribing an an-commodity aesthetic, the combination of which challenges the possibility of a successful readymade as such. Looking back at the inscription of his first inscribed readymade that doubled as its title, In Advance of the Broken Arm, Duchamp laments, for example, “Obviously I was hoping it was without sense but, deep down, everything ends up having some” (Cabanne 1971, p.  54). The failure is, however, not only linguistic but more specifically locational: “Obviously the association is easy [when you have the object in front of your eyes]: you can break your arm shoveling snow” (Cabanne 1971, p. 54). Although Molly Nesbit notes that “[t]his shovel will never be used, bent, rusted, or fall obsolete,” this has not “effectively silenced” the commodity (1986, p. 62).9 Rather, the shovel has merely been given a new narrative of use, a new sense. This, however, is precisely what Duchamp wished to avoid with the non-intersection of an an-aesthetic object-­ commodity and an-commodity aesthetic-inscription. Failure occurs with the evident association of sense with a commodity, that is, when language 9  In a retrospective of Duchamp’s work in the 1940s in Minnesota, for example, a janitor “mistook it [an authorized replica of Broken Arm] for a shovel, as well he might, and went to work on a snowdrift” (Hamilton 1968, p. 30).

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makes the use of the commodity sensible, when the desired non-­ intersectional juxtaposition becomes amalgamation, when the commodity becomes re-aestheticized. This, of course, is precisely where commodity aesthetics occurs according to Haug: “on the one hand to ‘beauty,’ i.e. an appearance which appeals to the senses; and, on the other hand, to a beauty developed in the service of the realization of exchange value and has been imprinted on the commodity” (2009, p.  23; see 1986, p.  8). Failure in any one of these various moments of the readymade—the an-­ aesthetic commodity, the an-commodity aesthetic, and their non-­ intersectional juxtaposition—constitutes a failed readymade, a seemingly inevitable failure. Duchamp, oddly, appeared to be perfectly at ease with the seemingly inevitable failures of readymades in the face of commodity aesthetics. This ease was not merely evident as a kind of exhausted resignation by the Duchamp of the 1960s, who made profitable replicas of the readymades with Arturo Schwarz and had, therefore, “long since abandoned the problem of the Duchamp of the teens” (Molesworth 2005, p. 173), but was evident already in 1922 as Duchamp took his final pseudonym, created by Robert Desnos: “Marchand du sel,” the merchant of salt (Desnos 1922, p. 15). This loosely phonetic anagram of “Mar-cel Du-champ” associates him with that exceedingly common commodity as white as the blank canvas that the an-aesthetic commodity of the readymade purports to be. As pointed out by Schwarz, this pseudonym also homophonically alludes to Duchamp as a merchant of scel, Old French for signature, stamp, or sigil, not dissimilar to Schwitters’s i-stamp, if decidedly more commercial. Indeed, in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century, scel could just as easily be translated as trademark, the aesthetic slogan or logo of a commodity (see CWD, pp. 216–217).10 Less a merchant of his own auratic signature, however, Duchamp “fray[s] the logic of the trademark [and] render[s] his readymades authentically nonauthentic” (Molesworth 2005, p. 181). A viewer of Duchamp’s Fountain may not notice the stamp of the urinal’s manufacturer, J.L. Mott, but rather Duchamp’s “R. Mutt,” nor would they find the trademarked name of some prestigious shovel maker that actually manufactured the object-commodity of In Advance of the Broken Arm, but rather Duchamp’s inscription-as-title. This scel-­trademark

 As Molesworth notes, the trademark was created in its current form in the United States in 1905, a mere seventeen years before Duchamp began to call himself a merchant. 10

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inscription never deletes the original trademark, nor does Duchamp the merchant appear interested in foregoing the trademark altogether, but rather in “fraying” it, problematizing it, making it conspicuous, and therefore highlighting it. That is, both the trademark merchant and his readymades appear to consistently and willfully fall short of their own descriptions and aspirations: an-artist, an-aesthetic, or an-commodity. The readymade, then, can be seen not merely as a critique of aesthetics or the commodity, but also as a productive failure of the readymade’s own proposed an-­ aesthetic an-commodity, a subversive performance and performative subversion of commodity aesthetics and the mass consumption it induces. Perhaps the most productive failure was in fact an actual failure. In the final collection of Duchamp’s notes published before his death, À l’infinitif [In the Infinitive] more commonly known as The White Box (1966), Duchamp included a small note dated January 1916, between The and Rendez-vous, as he began to experiment with an-sensical inscription: “find inscription for Woolworth Bldg. / as readymade–” (DDS, p. 112). He never did and the Woolworth Building never became a readymade (see Fig. 5.1). It was, however, an exceptional object to choose for fabrication as a readymade—a fifty-seven-floor, 792-foot piece of neo-Gothic architecture, the tallest building in the world at the time. Far from the supposed an-aesthetic commodities chosen for other readymades, the Woolworth Building was commodity aesthetics materialized. Looming over the Manhattan terminus of the Brooklyn Bridge, over which millions of potential consumers from the outer borough would cross, the Woolworth Building functioned as the initial aesthetic presentation of the myriad commodities it housed, architecture as advertisement in itself, “a giant signboard” (Fenske 2008, p. 25). Duchamp chose the very epicenter of modern commodity capitalism, the “Cathedral of Commerce” (see Cadman 1917), the headquarters and crown jewel of the most successful retail corporation in the world, a corporation whose namesake founder and executive recognized and revolutionized the importance of the theatrical commodity aesthetics of shop windows and store fronts now applied to this cathedral. Woolworth “had already earned a reputation for enticing window design,” employing “the latest technologies in plate glass manufacturing, along with mirrors and the new incandescent illumination to heighten the viewers’ experience of the shop windows’ allure” (Fenske 2008, p. 27). Indeed, a majority of the January 1916 Woolworth note in À l’infinitif outlines another unrealized project based on a type of display case: “I.  Show-case with sliding panes. […] II.  With show-case dresser: closed by glass panes sliding panes on ball

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Fig. 5.1  Photograph of the Woolworth Building upon completion (1913)

bearings” (DDS, pp.  111–112). This overlap between the shop-window and the display case mirrored Woolworth’s own thoughts: “Draw them [customers] in with attractive window displays and when you get them in have a plentiful showing of the window goods on the counters. […] Remember our advertisements are in our show windows and on our counters” (qtd. in Fenske 2008, p. 27). The commodities themselves, well positioned, function as their own advertisement. Although Duchamp was unable to find a suitable inscription for the Woolworth Building, its choice not as a commodity itself, but rather as an object that aesthetically displayed

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commodities to potential consumers through the theatrical framework of its shop windows and store fronts extends the concept of the readymade and its interaction with commodity aesthetics beyond the commodity’s material form to include consumer capitalism itself.

Choice at the Shop Window The theatrical presentation of aestheticized commodities within the shop window, the very antithesis or at least the apparent focus of critique for the an-aesthetic an-commodity readymade, was in fact fundamental to the readymade project from the beginning. Over the winter holidays of 1912–13, Duchamp revisited a scene that had long interested him: a chocolate grinder behind the shop window of a Rouen confectionary (Tompkins 2014, pp.  122–124). By March 1913, Duchamp would represent the scene with his Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 1 [Chocolate Grinder, No. 1] in a “utilitarian mode of representation” (Nesbit 1986, p. 60). This proved a watershed moment for Duchamp: “it was there I began to think I could avoid all contact with traditional pictorial painting” (Cabanne 1971, p. 37). That is, this was the first step away from past aesthetics, toward a detached, dry, objective an-aesthetics. To complete the work, however, required a proto-inscription: “commercial formula, trade mark, commercial slogan / inscribed like an advertisement on a bit of glossy and colored paper (have it made by a printer)—this paper glued / to the article: ‘Chocolate Grinder’” (DDS, p. 148). Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 1 functions as a proto-­readymade itself, both in its temporal concurrence with the fellow bachelor-­machine readymade Roue de bicyclette [Bicycle Wheel] and as an intersection of advertisement-like, aesthetic inscription and a chosen commodity represented an-aesthetically. This, therefore, ties the readymade project to the shop window and store front, the theatrical framing and spectacle of commodity capitalism, the “spectacle [that] so fascinated [Duchamp] that [he] took this machine as a point of departure” (DDS, p.  173).11 The shop window, along with the store front in which it is

11  The chocolate grinder and bicycle wheel were considered bachelor machines in that they auto-erotically rotate without going anywhere. For a discussion of the importance of the shop window to Duchamp’s works, particularly La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre) [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)] and the mechanical drawing that connects it to both Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 1 and therefore the readymades, see Trodd (2015, pp. 82–88).

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imbedded, functions as the locus of consumer capitalism; they perform commodity aesthetics for, or rather at, the passerby potential customer. As the readymade productively fails to escape the aesthetics of the commodity form, so too do Duchamp and his readymade project appear concerned with potentially productive failures of the theatrical shop window’s commodity aesthetics. After his spectacular encounter with the chocolate grinder in the shop window, Duchamp jotted a quick and subsequently famous note, which he later juxtaposed with the Woolworth note in À l’infinitif: The question of the shop windows [devanture]:. To undergo the interrogation of shop windows:. The exigency of shop windows: […]. When one undergoes the interrogation of the shop window, one pronounces one’s own Condemnation. In fact, the choice is “round trip.” With the demands of the shop windows, with the inevitable response to shop windows, the cessation of choice concludes. No obstinacy, ad absurdum, of hiding the coition through a glass pane with one or many objects of the shop window. (DDS, p. 111)12

In conjunction with Wood’s capitalized defense, “he CHOSE it,” Molesworth sees in this quote the predicament of the modern shopper who must “choose one thing over another [… but] first must navigate the perilous waters of taste” (2005, p.  174). With recourse to Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, Molesworth continues by asserting that this minefield of choice and taste, the intersection of which dominates the choice of the readymade object, “is in many ways synonymous with the creation and presentation of the self” (2005, p. 175). However, Duchamp’s note appears less interested in the choice and taste of shopping, of commodity acquisition, than in window shopping, that complex of interrogations and responses of and by the window shopper as potential-consumer.13 Such an interaction is neither 12  The note is dated “Neuilly 1913,” the town and year in which Duchamp lived when he visited the confectioner’s shop in Rouen. While devanture could also be translated as store front or the more general frontage, the more common translation of shop window, which is the overwhelmingly dominant feature of store fronts, follows other translations. See translations in Mileaf (2010, p. 44); Duchamp (1975, p. 74). 13  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb to “window shop” and its variations such as “window shopping” and “window shopper” appeared for the first time only twenty odd years earlier in the New York Daily Tribune (1890) and gained wide popularity in the first decade of the twentieth century.

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innocent nor innocuous, the cessation of choice beginning from the moment of the shop window’s demands, a battery of questions, an interrogation to which one must submit, and a condemnation from the start. The interpellation of the passerby into a potential-­consumer, into a subject of consumer capitalism, begins with their turn toward the shop window just as Louis Althusser’s infamous police officer transforms individuals into subjects as they turn toward the officer’s interpellation “Hey, you there!” (ORC, p. 190). That is, subject formation occurs not only in the acquisition of a commodity, but already in the turn toward the shop window that theatrically and aesthetically displays it. If the project of the readymade expands beyond the commodity form to include the shop window, as works such as Woolworth Building and Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 1 indicate, and investigates the role of these commodity aesthetics on subject formation within commodity capitalism, as Molesworth argues and Duchamp implies, Baudrillard’s La société de consommation and Haug’s Kritik der Warenästhetik offer the most pertinent theoretical frameworks. Investigating the formation of the subject in the face of the shop window, Baudrillard complicates Jacques Lacan’s conception of mirror-stage subject formation within consumer capitalism: “There is no longer any mirror or window in the modern order in which the human being would be confronted with their image for better or for worse; there is only the shop window” (1970, p. 309; see 1989, p. 193). There are no innocent mirrors, no unimpeachable reflections that show things as they are “for better or for worse,” only reflections distorted by commodity aesthetics and their spectacular mise-en-scène behind a shop window. While Baudrillard’s project is particularly focused upon a post-­ war consumer society, Janet Ward convincingly argues that Baudrillard’s investigation is applicable not only to late capitalism, but also to the rise in consumer culture and commodity capitalism in the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly as it relates to the shop window (2001, pp.  191–240). Indeed, Haug also utilizes the allegory of reflection and mirrors in his description of subject formation within Fordist commodity aesthetics.14 In these scenarios, the potential consumer, now turned to the 14  Speaking of the flood of images of commodity aesthetics Haug states, for example: “An innumerable series of images are forced upon the individual, like mirrors, seemingly empathetic and totally credible, which bring their secrets to the surface and display them there. In these images, people are continually shown the unfulfilled aspects of their existence” (1986, p. 50).

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shop window, sees their reflection not as the wholly constituted gestalt reflected for Lacan’s infant, but rather only as incomplete in the plate glass so carefully chosen by the department store and its architect, a partial reflection that hovers superimposed and ghostlike amidst the spectacular phantasmagoria of commodities. The fragmented reflection forms a fragmented subject, the dark invisible areas of the potential-consumer’s reflection made whole, fulfilled only by the illuminated commodities behind the shop window. The individual passerby interpellated by the shop window is only able to imagine their subjective fulfillment thanks to the amalgamation of their partial reflection with the aestheticized commodities positioned just so. For the window shopper who has no intention to purchase a commodity at all, such commodities promise utility insofar as they provide and reinforce subjecthood, or a framework of subjecthoods. With the passerby interpellated by, and now turned toward, the shop window, this subject formation is further reinforced and manipulated by the shop window’s exigency, its demands, its interrogations that condemn the individual to subjectivity within consumer capitalism. For Baudrillard, the consumer in front of the shop window “defines themself by their choice within a ‘game’ played between different models or, in other words, by their combinatorial involvement in that game” (1970, p.  310; see 1989, p. 193). The game of window shopping is the purchase of subjective and discursive existence, of a “language to interpret their existence and the world” (Haug 1986, p. 52), the ideological language of the commodity that “speaks a historical language which claims to be universal and transhistorical” (Hamacher 2008, p. 174). The “coition through a glass pane with one or many objects of the shop window,” described by Duchamp, becomes an acculturating educational apparatus where the potential-consumer subject learns the vocabulary of their own subjection to and subjectivity within consumer capitalism. The window shopper plays the game, performs consumer capitalism without purchase, without whole-hearted participation, what Baudrillard called “flirting with the objects” (1989, p. 27). This flirtation is not merely with the commodity-­ objects, however, but what they represent: the promised fulfilment of the potential consumer’s represented lack, a promise of subjecthood. To transform the game of window shopping into the reality of actually shopping, this promise must be put to the test. The promise must always and necessarily be hollow, and therefore continually renewable, a perpetual Althusserian reproduction of capital, the formation of an insatiable consumer. To entice yet another attempt, the promise of purchase and

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possession, the removal of the commodity from the sphere of exchange must invariably disappoint. Duchamp concluded his note on the shop window with precisely this disappointment: “The penalty consists of cutting the pane and in feeling regret as soon as possession is consummated” (DDS, p. 111). The aesthetics of the shop window, its demands and interrogations, become an unwinnable game, the window shopper continually confronted with the unfulfilled aspects of their existence and disappointed in their attempts at fulfillment. If the successful readymade is meant to radically avoid the commodity aesthetics of the object, and therefore the subject formations that the choice of that object entails, the readymade must also mean to avoid the commodity’s aesthetic presentation and must silence the shop window’s demands, exigencies, and interrogations. Nesbit suggests that the readymade has already succeeded: “In the ready-mades, Duchamp seized control of the dialogue dictated by the shop window: the model is taken out of circulation, often given an absurd title, hung in limbo, and effectively silenced” (1986, pp.  61–62). This, however, is less a control of the shop window’s dialogue than of the commodity’s use as a material object. The commodity’s utility to provide and reinforce subjecthood remains, if now shifted from the window shopper to the museum patron. As Molesworth argues, the department store and the museum of the early twentieth century enjoyed an analogous, if somewhat antagonistic, relationship (2005, pp. 176–178). The dialogue of aesthetics, taste, and theatrical presentation, as well as the subjectivities that these dialogues form and reinforce, has merely been translated, repeated, and relocated, from the store front’s window frame to the museum’s pedestal and display case. Duchamp almost seems to allude to this relocation with the subtitle to his work, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (1915–23), a work intimately tied to the project of the readymades. Duchamp wrote: “Type of subtitle / DELAY IN GLASS [RETARD EN VERRE]” (DDS, p. 63). This is not merely the delay of window shopping’s unfulfilled purchase, but also, to use a synonym of the French word retard, an “amusement in glass,” the playful diversion of inconsequential performance, a flirtation with the objects behind the glass. A third potential reading may indicate the work’s deeper affinity to the readymade project, retard as a “step back” or “recoil in glass,” a subversive representation of the radical avoidance of the commodity aesthetics of the object and its presentation.

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Commodity Speech, Commodity Noise À bruit secret [With Hidden Noise] is perhaps the most extreme and successful of the readymades; it recoils or attempts to recoil from all facets of commodity aesthetics. This serves to highlight all the more strongly, however, the elements of those aesthetics that Bruit fails to avoid as well as the unique ways in which it fails to avoid them. Bruit is composed of a hollow spool of twine held in place between two brass plates by four long bolts. Before its final assembly, however, Duchamp’s friend Arensberg placed a small object into the cavity of the spool which, when hit against the inside of the brass plates, creates the titular hidden noise. The readymade object is less Duchamp’s twine, brass plates, and bolts than it is Arensburg’s mysterious object. In this regard, the work is nothing if not a recoil from the commodity aesthetics of object and presentation. The object, hidden behind the radical opacity of brass plates and a ball of twine firmly secured by four bolts, is so removed from the aesthetics of object and presentation, even if the long bolts function as a makeshift pedestal for the hidden object, that the object itself is not visible and is outside the economy of taste. Instead, the object is relegated not to the production of aesthetic sound, but of a hidden noise, the unwanted cacophony filtered from meaningful communication, an-aesthetic, an-sensical, an-hermeneutic. Duchamp was clear in expressing how he thought of this object, even if he was never sure what the object was: “Arensburg put something inside the ball of twine. […] I will never know if it is a diamond or a coin” (Sweeney 1958, p. 95). Indeed, Duchamp referred to the work as a tirelire, a piggy bank (DDS, p. 68). Regardless of what it actually is, Duchamp considered the object a commodity, not only given a presumed potential exchange value, but also to be read as pure exchange value, a universal commodity.15 Although radically denied any “sensual appearance” or any “conception of its use-value […] the promise of use-value” behind two brass plates and a ball of twine (Haug 1986, pp. 16–17), the object-commodity continues to make noise as commodity, to promise an exchange value regardless of

15  For Adam Smith the diamond “has scarcely any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it” (1976, p. 1.45). This is similar to Marx’s view of precious metals, whose “very scarcity makes them more representative of value founded purely upon exchange” (1857, in MECW 28, p.  103). That is, for Marx: “Money [is] the common form into which all commodities transform themselves as exchange values, the general commodity” (1857, in MECW 28, p. 102).

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what the specific value may be. “From the point of view of exchange-­ value, the use-value is only the bait” (Haug 1986, p.  15). The object-­ commodity and its presentation remain a muffled but ultimately unsilenced commodity aesthetics, a hook without bait.16 Bruit’s inscription alludes to this recoil that promises, a promise of useand exchange-value that is unfulfillable. This ultimately results in a productive failure of commodity aesthetics. Duchamp described this inscription as “an exercise in comparative orthography […] French and English are mixed and make no ‘sense’” (CWD, p. 644). Each brass plate is separately inscribed: . IR . CAR . É LONGSEA → F . NE, . HEA ., . O . SQUE → TE . U S . ARP BAR . AIN →

P . G . ECIDES DÉBARRASSE . LE . D . SERT . F . URNIS . ENT AS HOW . V . R COR . ESPONDS

A combination of elements from both The and Rendez-vous, any potential sense of the inscription is shrouded by its multilingualism, typographical elisions, grammar, and syntax. While Duchamp places the word “sense” in scare quotes in his description, the framework within which he viewed the inscription is clear: “letters were occasionally missing like in a neon sign when one letter is not lit and makes the word unintelligible” (qtd. in d’Harnoncourt and McShine ed. 1973, p. 280). Although a simple allusion to commodity signage, broken and illegible, the neon-sign-­inscription is Bruit’s most obvious form of commodity aesthetics. The final two lines of the inscription read: F(I)NE, (C)HEA(P), (L)O(R)SQUE → TE(N)U S(H)ARP BAR(G)AIN →

LE(S) D(E)SERT(S) F(O)URNIS(S)ENT AS HOW(E)V(E)R COR(R)ESPONDS

[FINE, CHEAP, WHILE → [KEPT SHARP BARGAIN →

THE DESERTS PROVIDE] AS HOWEVER CORRESPONDS]17

The restored neon sign narrates commodity exchange: something “fine” hidden within these outwardly “cheap,” desolate, “desert”-like materials which promise to “provide” a “sharp bargain.” Once more, the bait of use

 In many ways, this is a double promise, as only few have ever heard the titular noise, who promise everyone else that it does indeed exist. 17  Also inscribed on the work are the instructions to fix the neon sign: “Replace each period by a letter → / Suitably chosen from the same column.” See CWD, p. 644. 16

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value denied the commodity by Bruit’s recoil from the aesthetics of visual presentation, the inscription turns toward a commodity aesthetics of bargain, of exchange value, a narrative promise from commodity to commodity, commodity speech: “In speaking with one another, commodities promise [versprechen] one another their exchangeability” (Hamacher 2008, pp. 170–171; see Derrida 2006, pp. 250–251). Bruit, likewise, attempts to recoil from this final bastion of commodity aesthetics, commodity speech, in its supposedly indecipherable, multilingual, and an-sensical inscription. Invariably, this inscription fails as well, seemingly purposefully: its reconstruction prescribed, its vocabulary aligned to the aesthetics of exchange and commodity speech. Once again, however, it is a productive failure, a subversive performance of a symbolic order that is ineradicable, of a commodity aesthetics that appears even when the commodity itself does not, and that aesthetic’s perpetual invocation of promise even when divorced from any referent of that promise. The severity, successes, and failures of Bruit help to clarify the readymade project. The Blind Man’s oft-quoted defense of readymades also seems to take on a new significance: the creator of the readymade “took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object” (Wood 1917, p.  5). The useful significance of the object-­ commodity within Bruit disappeared literally within its brass and twine enclosure and figuratively behind the an-sensical inscription comprised of periods and two languages. Commodity aesthetics remain, despite these extreme measures, a radical attempt to muzzle any useful significance, any aesthetics or sense, of the object. As a readymade, however, the commodity’s aesthetics, and their role as interpellation of potential consumers, are displayed for inspection, exhibited in relative isolation from consumer capitalism, its promises muzzled, now more bark than bite—the commodity and its aesthetics to be scrutinized by the so-called high aesthetics of the museum and world of art. With Bruit, the failure of this scrutiny to fully extinguish commodity aesthetics, to truly create a new thought for the object divorced from its commodification, emphasizes that not only is there no hope for commodities (combs, urinals, shovels, postcards, etc.) to abandon their commodity aesthetics, or even be stripped of them, but that there is not even hope of simple noise divorced from these aesthetics. Commodity aesthetics and their use in the formation of consumer-subjects in commodity capitalism, even in the absence of commodities themselves, are ubiquitous. Duchamp, as creator of the readymades in the shadow of Fordist mass production and as commentator on them from the

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epicenter of American Fordism, examined the pervasiveness of commodity aesthetics not merely in commodities or a consumer’s interactions with, and subjectivization by them, but between individuals themselves, without commodities as medium of interaction. Commodity aesthetics have infected every aspect of our lives. As Baudrillard later argued, “the communication which is established at the level of the shop-­window is […] but […] a generalized communication between all individuals […] via the reading and recognition in the same objects of the same system of signs” (Baudrillard 1989, p. 167). Duchamp’s investigations, however, not only prefigured and performed later critiques of commodity aesthetics and their role is subject formation, but they paralleled the ideas of his Dadaist contemporaries. Inscribed on Easter, 24 April 1916, À bruit secret was completed just under a week after a small, unknown group of fellow emigrants who had, similar to Duchamp, fled the war to a neutral land, decided to go by the name dada some six days earlier (18 April 1916; see FOT, p. 63). Less than three months later the de facto leader of this group, Hugo Ball, would perform his infamous manifesto on Bastille Day, 14 July. Disturbed by the capitalist degradation of language, Ball decried this new, “accursed language, to which filth clings as from stockbrokers’ hands that have worn coins down” (1916d, in ZZM, p. 13; see FDMW, p. 229). The curse of the commodification of language and the symbolic order, the radical growth of a new form of interpellative rhetoric, the manic promise of use and exchange, of a stockbroker’s sharp bargains, is the curse of language that has been co-opted by commodity aesthetics in order to form consumer-­ subjects out of us all, a curse against which Duchamp and, unbeknownst to him at the time, his Dadaist contemporaries and future comrades would fight.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Stumbles and Possible Solutions in Dada Scholarship

In comparison to previous scholarship, the format of this investigation into Dadaist praxis has certain benefits. With a focus on Dadaist use and utilization of particular genres, materialities, and media, I have attempted to traverse the traditional framing of Dadaism that has often organized itself according to geographic chapters and chronological histories. This has been indispensable for one of the primary goals of this study. This new framing, I hope, has helped to move beyond a question of what Dada is, often couched in questions of where and when, and to refocus scholarship on what Dada does and its associated questions of with what, to whom, and to what end. While I believe that this study and its novel framework have accomplished many of those goals and lead to incisive ways to think about Dadaism and Dadaist praxis, the simple fact that a framework has been used precludes a certain totality of investigation. The radical variegation of Dadaist works and the Dadaist praxis that they incarnate seems discordant with the totality of the Dadaist attack on cultural fundaments of society. To read Dadaist works closely and across their heterogeneity in order to better understand the totality of Dadaist praxis requires the introduction of such a framework that then separates, partitions, and therefore necessarily undercuts and overlooks that very totality. Not only is “any attempt to place Dada and make sense of it look[] like (and possibly is) a betrayal of its spirit and principles” (Sheppard 2000, p. xi), but the framework it necessitates stands in the way of that attempt’s very goal, the desire to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Pelcher, Dada’s Subject and Structure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26610-2_6

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make sense of something “more macro, […] more overarching about the idea of Dada” (Dickerman 2003, p.  9). Scholarship’s necessary frameworks impede a full understanding of that overarching totality. Insofar as Tzara, and presumably Dada along with him, had destroyed the drawers of the mind and of society, scholarship invariably, indeed necessarily reimposes drawers. While this study has remade and repositioned those drawers in order to view new combinations of Dadaist works and the Dadaist praxis that they embody, they remain drawers nonetheless.

This Is a Sign Is a Manifesto Is a Photo Is a Commodity With individual chapters focused on Dadaist interactions and ultimately subversions of the individual sign, the genre of the manifesto, the photographic image, and the commodity form and its aesthetics, the form of this book reinforces the idea of drawers of Dadaist praxis. In content, however, I have attempted to recognize and highlight both how those drawers are less separate than they may appear and how Dadaist works and praxis see those drawers as already at best unnecessary. Dadaists themselves, of course, not only argued against the detrimental frames and frameworks of society, but also regularly created works that actively transgressed any such frames, even and especially those that my own study reimposes. Hugo Ball was surprisingly lucid in his recognition that “the word and the image are one” (FOT, p.  66) or that words have become infected by commodity aesthetics and consumer capitalism, just as had photographic images. Tristan Tzara further integrated and investigated that association in advertisement-style works or the multiple products of Aa advertised in his manifestos, while Marcel Duchamp showed the impossibility of curing that infection, of separating language and aesthetics from a commodity. Hannah Höch recognized the fragments of photographic images as elements of that same capitalist process, while George Grosz and John Heartfield developed their photomontages from assembled useless commodities sent to the front, only to return to assemblages of commodities. Raoul Hausmann, Grosz, Höch and others similarly capitalized on the unity of word and image expounded by Ball and created image-based manifestos that simultaneously represent and advocate Dada. Written manifestos themselves radically highlight their own written-ness, that they are linguistic creations, regularly focusing on both the word dada itself

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and on the rhetorical tropes of the literary genre of the manifesto. That is, the totality of Dadaist praxis is already evident within the heterogeneity of the Dadaist works themselves, indeed within Dadaist discourse as such. There is, of course, one theoretical vocabulary that is simultaneously broad enough to encompass the totality of the attacks of Dadaist praxis and incisive enough to meaningfully engage with individual Dadaist works: ideology. Here too, Dadaists were surprisingly evident in their use of that conceptual vocabulary. Indeed, Dadaists not only used the conceptual vocabulary, but recognized its utility in the totality of their praxis. Berlin Dadaists, among the more directly political, which is to say openly ideologically engaged Dadaists, would often use the vocabulary of ideology, particularly in their continual opposition to “every kind or method [jede Art] of ideology” (Huelsenbeck 1920c, p. 11). For Tzara, Dadaist works were meant to shake loose the “ideologies, dogmas, systems, created by the intelligence of man” (Tzara 1979, p. 403). In a paratactic chain, Tzara highlights the radical ubiquity of ideological thought in systems and dogmas and principles, as seemingly inescapable as society itself. Tzara manifestos, for all their paradox and irony, were uniquely direct in their distaste for systems, principles, institutions, or academies of thought, which is to say, the foundations on which society and culture are based, material ideological apparatuses. Even Kurt Schwitters, among the least traditionally political Dadaists, stressed the deeply ideological elements of childhood education and the fundaments of linguistic and symbolic expression itself in his i-, which is to say his pointedly Dadaist works. Theoreticians and critics of ideology have occasionally chafed at this conception of ideological ubiquity, indeed inescapability. Terry Eagleton, perhaps the most vociferous critic of this ubiquity, suggests that if all “discourse is aimed at the production of certain effects in its recipients, and is launched from some tendentious ‘subject position’ […] then all language is ‘ideological,’” and ultimately “the category of ideology, expanded to breaking-point, once more collapses” (Eagleton 2007, p. 201). In the study of Dadaist works and Dadaist praxis, the thematic breadth and theoretical incisiveness of this conception of ideology, where discourse in all its variations remains open to ideological analysis, however, is transformed from a conceptual weakness into an overwhelming analytical advantage. The ubiquity of ideology translates well to the totality of Dada’s attack. That is, this conceptualization of ideology is not merely an advantage for scholars, who search for a theoretical framework and vocabulary to analyze Dada without

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constraining it, but was foundational to Dadaist praxis itself—the declarative diagnosis of ideological ubiquity and the performative subversion of its functioning.

This Is Dadaist Praxis That ideology is inescapable, that all discourse is ideological, might suggest that Dadaist works are necessarily ideological—simply in that they are constructed from elements of discourse, they therefore necessarily explore ideology. This is not entirely untrue. However, Dadaist works did not accidentally stumble into such explorations, but actively sought them out. Dadaist works are not merely ideological; they are about ideology, how it functions through and within discourse, and perhaps most importantly, how it endures, how it reproduces itself in and with ideological subject formation. Some fifty years before Althusser theorized that interaction with the material ideological apparatuses that constitute society and form ideological subjects from individuals, Dadaist works were preternaturally interested in that exact interaction and its effects. Whether in the form of a jumbled series of words from a newspaper to an assembled and adorned mannequin or a mechanical drawing of a spark-plug, the Dadaist obsession with portraiture, the “site for the formation of subjectivity” (Ginsburg 2015, p. 3), evinces their unique focus on representing the formation (sometimes literally) of the subject in its interaction with an ideological society. In addition to representation, Dada’s meta-manifestos continually discussed the formation of ideological subjects from within the genre most dedicated to and focused on that formation. Indeed, even those Dadaist works seemingly most divorced from ideological discourse—the simple letter i, the nonsensical proto-word dada itself—are either pointedly revealed as representative of an ideological apparatus that then produces ideological subjects or is made into one. Of course, the ubiquity of ideological discourse, which Dadaist works seemed so astute at highlighting and diagnosing, places those very diagnoses within ideological discourse itself. Dadaists were sure not to waste the opportunity to continue the attack. While the pointed and conspicuous diagnosis of ideology, its ubiquity, and its function is in itself a form of ideology critique, in much the same way as Althusser’s interpellation or Barthes’s mythologies work to uncover the aspects of ideological function that seem to have hidden in plain sight, Dadaist praxis builds upon such diagnoses of structure in order to subversively perform them, to sabotage them in their purposefully poor

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performance. That is, subject formation was not the mere collateral damage of a decentralized, disorderly, and rambunctious Dadaist chaos within ideology, but rather an enunciated target of a theoretically sophisticated and incisive Dadaist praxis. Dadaist photomontages, for example, not only represent the formation of the subject from the amassed collection of mass reproduced photographic images, but also, in their inescapable role as ideological discourse itself, perform that formation in such a way as to be perpetually unsuccessful, or at the very least traditionally unsuccessful. Rather than a singular, stable position from which a subject can and must meaningfully engage with ideological interpellation, Dadaist works offer radically multifarious and unstable positions to its audience, whether through chaotic montage aesthetics or ironic paradox. The interpellation accomplished by Dadaist works is the undoing of the smooth and functional operation of traditional interpellation itself. The formation of the Dadaist subject is one that paradoxically creates a superposition of panoramic viewpoints from which any- and everyone can meaningfully engage with the Dadaist work, but absolutely no one must. Everyone is made Dadaist, but no one needs to be. To whatever extent Dadaist interpellation is successful in forming Dadaist subjects, it remains hollow in its radical and radically purposeful lack of a central ideological framework or apparatus—an empty and self-contradictory dada. That is, there is no stable Other Subject or master signifier “Dada” against which would-be Dadaists can measure themselves. Dada performs interpellations so poorly that it is defanged, separated from any ideological force, and thereby made available to analysis and critique. Focusing on the heterogeneous Dadaist works, indeed necessary for the study of the Dadaist praxis that they embody, has nonetheless tended to shift that study’s focus from the theoretical incisiveness and thematic totality of that very praxis. However, concentration on ideological interpellation as not only a useful theoretical vocabulary for scholarship but also the overarching thematic focus of Dadaist attack undoes that scholarly tension. It gives a vocabulary and framework to those Dadaist elements that had on occasion merely felt like “intellectual positions that are sustained and meaningful: incoherent coherence, meaningful meaninglessness” (Forcer 2015, p. 133). Moreover, it better highlights the resonance that Dadaist works have continued to enjoy over the past century. Rather than resting quietly inert in the past—despite scholarship’s focus on Dada’s deep-seated reactionary antagonism toward a war that has now long-since ended or an economic system that would come to subsume

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Dada itself, along with seemingly everything else, indeed Dada’s antagonism toward any other contemporaneous ideological structures and systems of the early twentieth century—Dadaist praxis’ often comically performative undoing of the processes of all ideology remains forever relevant. A little over a century after Dada, however, the echoes of so many of these same structures and systems have continued to echo; nationalist militarism and the proto- (now post-)fascism that took root in the aftershocks of the First World War, consumer(ist) capitalism and its aesthetics, which have only grown in power and breadth. As leading Althusser scholar Warren Montag notes, “Althusser’s notion that there exist in philosophy and elsewhere relations of force between ideas that have nothing to do with their truth, and that the truth of the true, if I can put it that way, is established and maintained only through struggle, seems terribly relevant today with the growing power of racist and neo-fascist movements globally” (2018, n.pag.). Not only, then, are Althusser’s concepts of ideological reproduction relevant, so too are Dada’s performative subversions, if not more so. From within an ideological totality, a hegemonic power that appears all-­pervasive, heterogeneous Dadaist works both diagnosed that totality’s functional structure and created space within it, in order to performatively subvert and sabotage it. This is the dual movement of Dadaist praxis: prefiguring both structural theoretical diagnoses and poststructural performative subversions of ideological subject formation, relevant again—still.

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Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, and Michael Wutz. 1999. Translator’s Introduction. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, xi–xxxviii. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wood, Beatrice. 1917 [May]. The Richard Mutt Case. The Blind Man 2: 5. Wood, Ellen. 1995. Democracy Against Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wundt, Wilhelm. 1911. Probleme der Völkerpsychologie. Leipzig: Wiegandt. Zervigón, Andrés. 2012. John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. ———. 2001. Enjoy your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge. ———, ed. 2012a. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso. ———. 2012b. Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology. In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, 1–33. London: Verso.

Internet Sources The International On-Line Bibliography of Dada. 2021. International Dada Archive. Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. Accessed June 2021. https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/primo-­explore/search?vid=01IOWADADA. Montag, Warren. 2018. Reassessing the Legacy of Louis Althusser on His 100Year Anniversary: An Interview with Warren Montag. Left Voice. Accessed 1 November 2022. https://www.leftvoice.org/reassessing-­the-­legacy-­of-­louis-­ althusser-­on-­his-­100-­year-­anniversary-­an-­interview-­with-­warren/. Wilson, Woodrow. 1918 [8 January]. Message to Congress. Transcript of speech delivered to United States Congress, Washington, DC. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=62. Window-shop, V. 2019. OED Online. Oxford UP, accessed March 2019, http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/39718618.

Visual Works Referenced Baader, Johannes. (Berlin, 1919). Ehrenporträt von Charlie Chaplin (Gutenberggedenkblatt) [Honorary Portrait of Charlie Chaplin (Commemorative Sheet for Gutenberg)]. Collage with Photomontage (Photograph of Baader) on paper. 35 × 46.5 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p. 136. https://archives-­dada.tumblr.com/post/17259977176/johannes-­baader-­collage-­a-­sous-­titre-­subtitle. ———. (Berlin, 1920). Das große Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Deutschlands Größe und Untergang durch Lehrer Hagendorf oder, Die phantastische Lebensgeschichte des Oberdada [The Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Germany’s Greatness and

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Decline at the Hands of Schoolmaster Hagendorf or, the Fantastic Life of the Superdada]. Original Lost, Dimensions Unknown. See Dickerman 2005, p. 86. https://sammlung-online.berlinischegalerie.de:443/eMP/eMuseumPl us?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=243816&viewTy pe=detailView. Badebild. Cover of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 24 August 1919. Figure 4.3. See Dickerman 2005, p.  105. https://ghdi.ghi-­dc.org/print_document. cfm?document_id=4236. Dix, Otto. (Berlin, 1920). Kriegskrüppel [45% Erwerbsfähig] [War Cripples [45% Fit for Service]]. Figure 4.1. Oil and Montage on Canvas. ca. 150 × 200 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p.  98. https://www.takedadaseriously.com/wp-­ content/uploads/2020/05/dada-­fair-­1280x1051.jpg. Duchamp, Marcel. (Neuilly, March 1913). Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 1 [Chocolate Grinder, No. 1]. Oil on canvas. 61.9 × 64.5 cm. See CWD, p. 578. https:// philamuseum.org/collection/object/51518. ———. (Paris, 1913). Roue de bicyclette [Bicycle Wheel]. Assisted Readymade Bicycle Wheel and Fork Mounted on Painted Wooden Stool; Metal Wheel. 92.7 × 63.5 × 13.9 cm. See CWD, p. 588. https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/59928. ———. (New York, October 1915). The. Manuscript in Ink on Paper. 22.2  ×  14.3  cm. See CWD, p.  638. https://philamuseum.org/collection/ object/51630. ———. (New York, November 1915). In Advance of a Broken Arm. Readymade Wood and Galvanized Iron Snow Shovel. 132  ×  35  cm. See CWD, p.  636. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/105050. ———. (New York, 6 February 1916). Rendez-vous du Dimanche 6 Février 1916 [Rendezvous of Sunday, February 6, 1916]. Typewritten Text on four Postcards, Taped Together. 28.4 × 14.4 cm. See CWD, p. 642. https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/51726. ———. (New York, 17 February 1916). Comb. Readymade Steel Dog Comb. 16.5 × 3.2 × 0.3 cm. See CWD, p. 643. https://philamuseum.org/collection/ object/51552. ———. (New York, 24 April 1916). À bruit secret [With Hidden Noise]. Assisted Readymade Ball of Twine (Containing Unknown Object Chosen by Walter Arensberg) Pressed Between Brass Lates Joined by Screws. 11.4 × 12.9 × 13 cm. See CWD, p.  644. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cML6go. ———. (New York, 1917). Fountain. Assisted Readymade Porcelain Urinal Turned on Its Back. 36 × 48 × 61 cm. See CWD, p. 648. https://dada.lib. uiowa.edu/files/show/108.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

213

———. (Paris, 1919). L.H.O.O.Q. Rectified Readymade Pencil on Reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. 19.7 × 12.4 cm. See CWD, p. 670. https:// www.nortonsimon.org/art/detail/P.1969.094. ———. (New York, 1915–1923). La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre) [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)]. Oil, Varnish, Lead Foil, Lead Wire, and Dust on Two Cracked Glass Panels, Each Mounted between Two Class Panels, with Five Class Strips, Aluminum Foil, and Wood and Steel Frame. 277.5  ×  175.8  cm. See CWD, p. 700. https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/54149. ———. (Paris, 1955). L’envers de la peinture [The Reverse (or Wrong Side) of Painting]. Rectified Readymade: Dish Towel Reproducing Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, with Added Mustache, Goatee, Palette, and Paintbrush. 73 × 43 cm. See CWD, p.  804. https://www.artribune.com/wp-­content/uploads/ 2016/04/Marcel-­Duchamp-­Lenvers-­de-­la-­peinture-­1955-­Collezione-­privata-­ ©-­Succession-­Marcel-­Duchamp-­by-­SIAE-­2015-­per-­Marcel-­Duchamp.jpg ———. (New York, 1965). rasée L.H.O.O.Q. [L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved]. Readymade: Reproduction of the Mona Lisa (Playing Card) 8.8  ×  6.2  cm, Mounted on Dinner Invitation. 20 × 14 cm. See CWD, p. 849. https://philamuseum.org/ collection/object/147708. ———. (New York, 1966). À l’infinitif [In the Infinitive] (The White Box). Box of 79 Facsimile Notes (Dating from 1914–1923) Contained in a Plexiglas Case with a Screenprint Reproduction of the Glider Containing a Water Mill on the Cover. 33.3 × 28.6 × 4.1 cm. See DDS, pp. 110–139. https://philamuseum. org/collection/object/180370. Einst und jetzt! Tipped in Post-card. Deutsche Tageszeitung. Figure 4.3. https:// www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/ITL3M7PCF3C4KGVMV2 UKIHESPIB3IT5D. Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa, and Morton Livingston Schamberg. (New York, 1917). God. Wood Miter Box and Cast Iron Plumbing Trap. 26.7 × 101.6 × 52.4 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p. 344. https://philamuseum. org/collection/object/51106. Grosz, George. (Berlin, 1919). Galerie deutscher Mannesschönheit, Preisfrage “Wer ist der Schönste??” [Gallery of German Manly Beauty, Prize Question “Who is the Most Beautiful??”]. Photomontage. See Dickerman 2005, p. 125. https:// digital.kunsthaus.ch/viewer/image/26075/1/. ———. (Berlin, 1919). Herr Krause. Pen/Ink and Montage, Dadaco Print Sheet. See Bergius 2000, p.  57. Catalogue #45, p.  30: https://www.burg-­halle. de/~bergius/First-­International%20Dada-­1920.pdf. ———. (Berlin, 1919). Ein Opfer der Gesellschaft [A Victim/Sacrifice of Society]. Oil and Graphite on Canvas with Photomontage and Collage of Papers and Buttons. 49  ×  39.5  cm. See Dickerman 2015, p.  118. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/tNdteTj

214 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. (Berlin, 1919–1920). Germania ohne Hemd [Germania without a Shirt]. Montage of Quotes (Photographs and Text) Marked Lower Left: Stamp. See Bergius 2000, p.  94. Catalogue #25, p.  22: https://www.burg-­halle. de/~bergius/First-­International%20Dada-­1920.pdf. Grosz, George, and John Heartfield. (Berlin, 1919). Leben und Treiben in Universal-City um 12 Uhr 5 mittags [Life and Events in Universal-City at 12:05 noon]. Pen-and-ink Drawing by Grosz; Montage of Quotes (Photographs and Text) by Heartfield. Dimensions Unknown. See Brill 2010, p.  82. https:// heartfield.adk.de/node/4726. ———. (Berlin, 1920). Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield: Elektro-mechanische Tatlin-Plastik [The Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild. Electro-­ Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture]. Tailor’s Dummy, Revolver, Doorbell, Knife, Fork, Letter “C” and Number “27” Signs, Plaster Dentures, Embroidered Insignia for the Black Eagle Order on Horse Blanket, Osram Light Bulb, Iron Gross, Stand, and Other Objects. 220  ×  45  ×  45  cm. See Dickerman 2005, p.  123. https://archives-­dada.tumblr.com/post/16176395585/ george-­grosz-­john-­heartfield-­der-­wildgewordene. Hausmann, Raoul. (Berlin, 1919). Dr. Max Ruest. Collage on Silver Japanese Paper. 25.5 × 21.2 cm. See Bergius 2000, p. 39. Artstor.org SSID: 13597015. ———. (Berlin, 1919). Porträt einer alten Frau: Dr. S.  Friedländer-Mynoud [Portrait of an Old Woman: Dr. S.  Friedländer-Mynoud]. Collage on Silver Japanese Paper. 25.5 × 21.2 cm. See Bergius 2000, p. 39. https://www.moma. org/collection/works/217686. ———. (Berlin, 1919). Porträt eines Dichters: Paul Gurk [Portrait of a Poet: Paul Gurk]. Figure  1.1. Collage on Silver Japanese Paper. 25.5  ×  21.2  cm. See Bergius 2000, p. 39. https://dada.lib.uiowa.edu/files/show/1559. ———. (Berlin, 1919). Was ist Dada? [What Is Dada?]. Figure 1.2. Typed ink on Paper, Final Page of Der Dada 2. ca. 8 × 8 cm. See Hausmann 1919f, p. 7. https://dada.lib.uiowa.edu/files/show/1558. ———. (Berlin, 1919–1920). Der Kunstkritiker [The Art Critic]. Photomontage and Collage with Ink Stamp and Crayon on Printed Poster Poem. 31.8 × 25.4 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p. 129. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/ artworks/hausmann-­the-­art-­critic-­t01918. ———. (Berlin, 1920). Dada im gewöhnlichen Leben; Dada Cino [Dada in Ordinary Life; Dada Cinema]. Collage and Photomontage on Paper with Ink Inscription. 31.7 × 22.5 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p. 128. Artstor.org SSID: 13613071 ———. (Berlin, 1920). Elasticum. Photomontage and Collage with Gouache on the Cover of the Exhibition Catalogue Erste Internationale Dada-Messe. 31 × 37 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p. 127. https://archives-­dada.tumblr.com/ post/15894490552/raoul-­hausmann-­elasticum-­1920-­photomontage.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

215

———. (Berlin, 1920). Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist unserer Zeit) [Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time)]. Hairdresser’s Wigmaking Dummy, Crocodile Wallet, Ruler, Pocket, Watch Mechanism and Case, Bronze Segment of Old Camera, Typewriter Cylinder, Segment of Measuring Tape, Collapsible Cup, the Number “22,” Nales, and Bolt. 32.5 × 21 × 20 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p.  130. https://archives-­dada.tumblr.com/post/66361789493/raoul-­ hausmann-­mechanischer-­kopf-­tête-­mécanique. ———. (Berlin, 1920). Selbstporträt des Dadasophen [Self Portrait of the Dadasoph]. Photomontage and Collage on Japanese Paper. 36.2 × 28 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p.  127. https://archives-­dada.tumblr.com/post/ 16466433008/raoul-­hausmann-­selbstbildnis-­als-­dadasoph. ———. (Berlin, 1920e). Tatlin lebt zu Hause [Tatlin Lives at Home]. Photomontage and Aquarelle. 41 × 28 cm. See Biro 2009, p. 138. https://archives-­dada.tumblr.com/post/42100218041/raoul-­hausmann-­tatlin-­lebt-­zu-­hause-­tatlin-­at. ———. (Paris, 1914–1923). ABCD (Portrait de l’artiste) [ABCD (Portrait of the Artist)]. Collage and Photomontage on Paper. 40.4 × 28.2 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p.  132. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/cAneAg6 Heartfield, John. (Berlin, 1919). Jedermann sein eigner Fussball [Everybody Their Own Football]. Cover of Newspaper. 42.7 × 29.2 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p. 125. https://digital.kunsthaus.ch/viewer/image/26075/1/. ———. (Berlin, 1930). Ich bin ein Kohlkopf. Kennt ihr meine Blätter? [I’m a Cabbage Head! Do You Recognize My Leaves?]. Printed Photomontage as Cover of A-I-Z, no. 6. 99.5 × 69 cm. See Zervigón 2012, p. 241. https:// www.bildindex.de/document/obj16304952. Heartfield, John, George Grosz, and Carl Einstein. (Berlin, 1919). Der blütige Ernst: Gegen die Ausbeuter! [The Bloody Seriousness: Against the Exploiters!]. Figure 1.3. Printed Advertisement with Drawing by Grosz. 39.8 × 27.9 cm. https://dada.lib.uiowa.edu/items/show/189. Herzfelde, Wieland. (Berlin, 1920). Erste Internationale Dada-Messe: Katalog. Figure  4.2. Photolithograph. 31  ×  39  cm. See Bergius 2003, n. pag. insert. https://dada.lib.uiowa.edu/files/show/4991. Höch, Hannah. (Berlin, 1919). Dada Rundschau [Dada Review]. Photomontage and Collage with Gouache and Watercolor on Board. 43.7  ×  34.5  cm. See Dickerman 2005, p.  139. https://berlinischegalerie.de/en/collection/ specialised-­fields/prints-­and-­drawings/hannah-­hoech/. ———. (Berlin, 1919). Friedensfürst. Photomontage and Watercolor on Backside of Dada Rundschau. 43.7  ×  34.5  cm. https://sammlung-­online.berlinischegalerie.de/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collectio n&objectId=162060&viewType=detailView.

216 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. (Berlin, 1918–1920). Staatshäupter [Heads of State]. Photomontage on Iron-on Embroidery Pattern. 16.2 × 23.3 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p. 139. Artstor.org SSID: 13908410. ———. (Berlin, 1919–1920). Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada Durch Die Letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands [Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany]. Photomontage and Collage with Watercolor. 114  ×  90  cm. See Dickerman 2005, p. 138. https://id.smb.museum/object/961048. Janco, Marcel. (Zurich, 1916–1919). Masks (series). Painted Papers, Board, Twine Gouache, Pastel, Burlap. ca. 60  ×  30  cm. See Dickerman 2005, pp.  50–51. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cejBaXy, https:// www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cdqne44. Kurrent. Figure 2.2. See Süß 1995, pp. 61–64. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Deutsche_Kurrentschrift#/media/Datei:Deutsche_Kurrentschrift.svg. Picabia, Francis. (New York, 1915). D’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité [Portrait of an American Girl in a State of Nudity]. Reproduction of Ink Drawing on Vellum Paper. 43.9  ×  28.9  cm. See Dickerman 2005, p.  321. https://dada.lib.uiowa.edu/files/show/17. Picabia, Francis after Marcel Duchamp. (Paris, 1920). Tableau Dada par Marcel Duchamp: L.H.O.O.Q. [Dada Picture by Marcel Duchamp: L.H.O.O.Q.]. L.H.O.O.Q. Illustration on the Cover of the Journal 391 no. 12. 55.6 × 38.1 cm. See Dickerman 2005, p.  374. https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/ 254544. Reservistenbild. See Dickerman 2005, pp.  91–92. https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Zur_Erinnerung_an_meine_Dienstzeit.jpg. Schwitters, Kurt. (Hannover, 1919). Anna Blume: Dichtungen. Ink and Watercolor on Paper Mounted on Book Cloth. 22  ×  14.5  cm. See Dickerman 2005, p. 183. https://dada.lib.uiowa.edu/files/show/6690. ———. (Hannover, 1922). Das i-Gedicht [The i-Poem]. Figure 2.1. Mechanically Printed Approximation of Sütterlin i, as emblem. See Schwitters 1922b in DLW 1, p.  206. https://modernismmodernity.org/sites/default/files/media/ fig%202_4.jpg. ———. (Hannover, 1922). Tafelsalz [Table Salt]. Misprinted Paper on Paper. 32.1 × 23.3 cm. See Schwitters 2000, p. 515. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/ artworks/schwitters-­table-­salt-­t12391. ———. (Hannover, 1920–1928). i-Zeichnungen [i-Drawings] (series). See Schwitters 2000, pp. 357–365; 515–516. Sütterlin. Figure 2.2. See Süß 1995, pp. 59–61. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Sütterlinschrift#/media/Datei:Suetterlin_with_block_letters_and_specials.svg. Tzara, Tristan. (Zurich, 1918). Bulletin. Printed Woodcut / Advertisement in Dada, no. 3. ca. 12 × 13 cm. See Drucker 1994b, p. 210. https://dada.lib. uiowa.edu/files/show/1492.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

217

———. (Paris, 1920). Une Nuit d’Échecs Gras [A Night of Crude Failures]. Printed Typography and Images for 391, no. 14. 37  ×  27  cm. See Drucker 1994b, p. 214. https://dada.lib.uiowa.edu/files/show/60. ———. (Paris, 1921). Mouvement Dada [Dada Movement]. Letterpress. 27.3  ×  21  cm. See Hage 2020, p.  5. https://www.moma.org/collection/ works/196997. Woolworth Building. (New York, 1913). Cass Gilbert, Architect. Figure 5.1. 241 Meters Tall. See Fenske 2008. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Category:Woolworth_Building.

Index1

A Adorno, Theodor, 9, 54, 127 Aesthetic Theory, 9, 54, 127 Advertising/marketing, 10, 123, 162, 163 See also Commodity, aesthetics Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), 111 Alphabet, 33, 34, 37, 38, 115 Alphabêtise (Alphabetization), 35, 43, 52, 56, 94 Althusser, Louis, 13–18, 14n7, 14n8, 15n9, 16n11, 17n12, 21, 22, 22n22, 24, 24n23, 29, 31, 35, 37, 43, 45, 46, 52, 54, 55, 58, 68, 71, 94, 99, 102, 109, 125, 127, 176, 186, 188 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes on an Investigation), 13 Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 22n22

Machiavelli and Us, 68 On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 14 Anastrophe, 71n12 An-(prefix) an-aesthetic, 169–172, 174, 179 an-artist, 172 an-sense, 169 Antiqua, 33, 35, 37, 38, 46 Appropriation, 2, 9, 18, 25, 49–51, 53, 163 Aragon, Louis, 117, 120 Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), 2, 116 Arensburg, Walter, 167, 179 Arp, Hans, 48, 49, 70, 163 declaration, 48 Assemblage (sculpture), 6 Austin, J.L., 27, 61, 62, 74, 79n17, 80 How to Do Things with Words, 79n17

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Pelcher, Dada’s Subject and Structure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26610-2

219

220 

INDEX

Austro-Hungarian Empire, 59n1, 65n7, 151 Authority, 24, 26, 27, 60–64, 66–70, 72–75, 77–80, 82, 89, 91, 93, 96, 98, 104, 157 linguistic authority, 52 See also Dictionary; Theatricality B Baader, Johannes, 134, 154, 155, 164, 166 Das große Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Deutschlands Größe und Untergang durch Lehrer Hagendorf oder, Die phantastische Lebensgeschichte des Oberdada (The Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-­Drama: Germany’s Greatness and Decline at the Hands of Schoolmaster Hagendorf or, the Fantastic Life of the Superdada), 134, 134n24, 164 Ehrenporträt von Charlie Chaplin (Gutenberggedenkblatt) (Honorary Portrait of Charlie Chaplin (Commemorative Sheet for Gutenberg)), 131n20 Oberdada, 166 Badebild (resort image), 138–139 Ball, Hugo, 5, 6, 10, 48–54, 55n19, 56, 69–74, 76, 79, 82, 89, 90, 93, 117, 124, 156, 161, 182, 184 “Cabaret Voltaire,” 5, 6, 10, 18, 48, 49, 69, 70, 72, 161 “Eröffnungs– Manifest 1. Dada Abends” (Opening Manifesto of the First Dada Evening), 5, 49, 74 Flight out of Time, 55n19 gadji beri bimba, 6

Baltic Sea, 116, 138 Barrès, Maurice, mock trial of, 5 Barthes, Roland, 38, 119, 186 Mythologies, 38 Base-superstructure, 8 Bastille Day, 182 Baudrillard, Jean, 159, 176, 177, 182 Bavarian revolution, 120 Bazin, André, 109, 119 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 19n19, 27, 32n2, 88, 108, 110, 111, 124, 130, 131, 146 “The Author as Producer,” 108 “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” 88 “Little History of Photography,” 108, 110, 111 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 33n2 The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility, 9, 124, 130–131, 146 Benveniste, Émile, 66, 96 Bergmann & Co., 161 Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ), 113, 113n3, 136, 138, 139, 142, 144, 149 Bible, 34, 38n4, 53 Black Eagle, Prussian Order of (Schwarzer Adlerorden), 164, 164n4 Blickpunkten (viewpoints, points of view), 38, 60, 82, 87, 93, 95, 104, 132, 137, 141n29 Body politic, 125, 130, 143, 146 Bolshevism, 82, 155 Bourdieu, Pierre, 61, 62, 62n3, 64, 175 “Authorized Language,” 61–62, 64 La distinction, 177 Bourgeois(ie), 4, 8, 10, 12, 30, 53, 99, 123, 124, 126–133, 131n20, 135, 146, 160, 165, 166

 INDEX 

Brandenburg Gate, 137, 141 Braque, Georges, 157 Brecht, Bertolt, 111, 114, 115 Die Dreigroschenprozess, 111 “Zum zehnjährigen Bestehen der A-I-Z,” 114, 115 Breton, André, 25, 167, 168 Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (with Paul Éluard), 167 “Phare de la mariée,” 167 Brooklyn Bridge, 172 Buffoonery, 87, 90 Burchard, Otto, 134 Bureaucratic institutions, 84 Butler, Judith, 18n16, 24, 24n23, 31, 81, 137 “Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All,” 24n23 Excitable Speech, 18n16, 31, 81 Frames of War, 137 C Cabaret Voltaire (magazine), 48, 161, 162 Cabaret Voltaire (location), 5, 6, 10, 18, 27, 48–51, 69, 70, 72, 95, 161 Camera, 108–111 lens, 108, 110, 114 Capitalism consumer/commodity, 28, 123, 124, 159–167, 170, 172, 174–177, 181, 184 industrial, 65 “Cathedral of Commerce,” 184 See also Woolworth Building Chance, 2, 165 Choice, 34, 38n4, 65, 167–169, 174–178 See also Purchase Cicero, 86

221

Classroom/school, 35–37, 39–41, 45, 47, 52, 78, 101n27 Clemenceau, Georges, 137, 138, 141 Club Dada, 72, 73 Commodity aesthetics, 25, 27, 159–164, 166, 171, 172, 174–176, 176n14, 178–182, 184 coition, flirtation, 175, 177, 178 form, 166–169, 175, 176, 184 interrogation, 178 purchase, consummation, 177 speech (sprechen), promise (versprechen), 179–182 Communism, 45, 60, 63, 66, 82–84 See also Bolshevism, 84 Contradiction, 56, 85, 87, 90, 90n24, 97, 98, 102, 103, 105, 115, 147 self-contradiction, 57 Cubism, 49, 86, 89, 100 Cyborg, 124, 125 D Dada (hair conditioner), 161 Dada (journal), 93, 98, 100 Dada-Messe, 121, 130, 132, 134, 145, 157, 164, 164n5 Dada (word) discovery/invention of, 116 meanings of, 49 signifies nothing, 47 The Daily Graphic, 112, 112n2 Dance, 6, 70, 89, 100, 101, 124 Debord, Guy, 115, 115n4, 153 Society of the Spectacle, 115, 153 Deixis/deictic, 15, 26, 54, 55, 57, 100 De Man, Paul, 38, 41, 45, 115 Allegories of Reading, 41, 45 The Resistance to Theory, 38, 115 Der Dada, 5, 83n18, 123n14

222 

INDEX

Derrida, Jacques, 41, 44, 45, 52, 52n17, 54, 60–64, 68, 181 “Declarations of Independence,” 61, 64 Of Grammatology, 52n17 “The Law of Genre,” 60 “Signature, Event, Context,” 41, 45, 52, 52n17, 52n18, 54 Spectres of Marx, 63–64, 181 Der Sturm, 30n1 Der Welt Spiegel, 128n17 Desnos, Robert, 171 De Tracy, Antoine Destutt, 7 Deutsche Tageszeitung, 138–140, 143, 144 De Zayas, Mariús, 166 Dictionary, 48–52, 49n12, 168 Die Dame, 136 Die Woche, 113 Discourse, 9, 9n6, 14, 16, 59, 85, 104, 117, 125, 153, 185–187 (Dis)honesty/lying/deception, 77, 88, 161 Dix, Otto, 121, 130 Kriegskrüppel (45% Erwerbsfähig) (War Cripples (45% Fit for Service)), 121 Doesburg, Theo van, 164n5 I.K. Bonset, 164n5 Mécano, 164n5 Dolchstoßlegende, 121 Duchamp, Marcel, 5, 27, 28, 157, 166–182, 168n7, 169n8, 170n9, 171n10, 174n11, 175n12, 184 In Advance of the Broken Arm, 170, 170n9, 171 Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 1 (Chocolate Grinder, No. 1), 174, 174n11, 176 À bruit secret (With Hidden Noise), 179, 182 Comb, 167, 170

Fountain, 167, 171 À l’infinitif (In the Infinitive) (The White Box), 172, 175 La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre) (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)), 174n11, 178 L’envers de la peinture (The Reverse (or Wrong Side) of Painting), 168 L.H.O.O.Q., 168, 168n7 Marchand du sel, 171 rasée L.H.O.O.Q. (L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved), 168 Rendez-vous du Dimanche 6 Février 1916 (Rendezvous of Sunday, February 6, 1916), 170 Richard Mutt, 167 Roue de bicyclette (Bicycle Wheel), 174 E Easter, 182 Ebert, Friedrich, 130, 132, 138–145, 151 Educational ideological apparatus, 26, 35–37, 42, 46, 47, 55, 177 Einstein, Albert, 147, 149–151, 149n35, 151n36 Einstein, Carl, 10 Der blütige Ernst: Gegen die Ausbeuter! (The Bloody Seriousness: Against the Exploiters!), 10 Einst und jetzt! (Then and now!), 140, 143, 144, 147 Éluard, Paul, 167, 168 Emasculation, 140 Emblem, 32, 32n2, 129

 INDEX 

Engels, Friedrich, 8n5, 16, 59, 60, 63–65, 63n5, 88 Engraver, 112 Entrepreneurialism, 161 Ernst, Max, 29 Erste internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair), 28, 121 Erzberger, Matthias, 121 Everyman (metonym), 123, 130, 131, 165, 166 Explosion, 30, 122, 125, 128, 130–132, 135, 144, 146 Expressionism, 81, 82, 86 F (Fabulous) retroactivity, 61, 68, 75 Failure, productive, 172, 175, 180, 181 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 8, 16 The Essence of Christianity, 8 Fibelfrage, 35 (Fictional) Characters, 74–78, 87 Fluid matrix, 150, 154 See also Spacing Folio verso, 142, 150 Forberg, Friedrich Karl, 90n24 Fordism, 25, 27, 65, 159, 164, 166, 176, 181, 182 Foucault, Michel, 35 Archaeology of Knowledge, 9n6, 35 Discipline and Punish, 17n15 Founding, 25, 60, 61, 64–73, 78–81, 85, 87, 89, 95, 96, 100, 101, 117 Fraktur, 33–35, 37–39, 38n4, 46, 140 Frame/framing, 67, 68, 81, 95, 108, 110, 111, 119, 126, 128n17, 136–145, 149, 154, 156, 174, 178, 183, 184 Frankenstein’s monster, 126 Freikorps, 130, 137, 141 French Revolution, 7

223

Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa von, 5, 167 Frock coat, 129, 151 Futurism, 49, 65–67, 86, 89, 95, 100 G Galerie Dada, 6, 93 Galerie Goemens, 117n6 Gauguin, Paul, 160 Gaze, 125–127, 141, 153 Germanness, 35 Glass, plate/pane, 172, 175, 177 Gramsci, Antonio, 8, 14, 14n7, 17n14 Gröber, Adolf, 155 Grosz, George, 10, 27, 116, 120, 121, 126–135, 128n17, 138n27, 140, 149n35, 154, 160, 163–165, 184 Der blütige Ernst: Gegen die Ausbeuter! (The Bloody Seriousness: Against the Exploiters!), 10–11 “Der Kunstlump” (The Art Scoundrel), 160 Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield: Elektro-mecanische Tatlin-­Plastik (The Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild. Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture), 164–166, 164n5 Ein Opfer der Gesellschaft (A Victim/Sacrifice of Society), 128–131, 135 Galerie deutscher Mannesschönheit, Preisfrage “Wer ist der Schönste??” (Gallery of German Manly Beauty, Prize Question “Who is the Most Beautiful??”), 120 Germania ohne Hemd (Germania without a Shirt), 131n20, 138n27 Herr Krause, 128n16

224 

INDEX

Grosz, George (cont.) “Kaffeehaus,” 126 Leben und Treiben in Universal-City um 12 Uhr 5 mittags (Life and Events in Universal-City at 12: 05 noon), 131, 132, 134–135 Neue Jugend, 149n35 Guillemets, 42, 42n7, 43, 46, 54, 55 H Hail/hailing, see Interpellation (Handwritten) script, 33, 34, 36 Haug, Wolfgang, 159, 171, 176, 176n14, 177, 179, 180 Hausmann, Raoul, 2, 4–6, 13, 27, 47, 53, 55, 72, 73, 79, 82–91, 83n18, 116–120, 126–132, 128n16, 135, 145, 146, 152–154, 156, 162–165, 164n5, 184 ABCD (Portrait de l'artiste) (ABCD (Portrait of the Artist)), 128n16 “Alitteral–Delitteral– Sublitteral,” 143n30 Am Anfang war Dada (At the Beginning was Dada), 6n4 Courrier Dada, 116–118 Dada im gewöhnlichen Leben; Dada Cino (Dada in Ordinary Life; Dada Cinema), 131 “DADA in Europa” (DADA in Europe), 85, 89 “Dada ist mehr als dada” (Dada is More than Dada), 35, 55 “Der deutsche Spiesser ärgert sich” (The German Petit Bourgeois is Cross), 90–91 Der Kunstkritiker (The Art Critic), 128n16 Dr. Max Ruest, 2

Elasticum, 128 “Legen Sie ihr Geld in dada an!” (Put Your Money in Dada!), 73, 85, 149, 162 “L’ésprit de notre temps” (The Spirit of Our Times), 165 Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist unserer Zeit) (Mechanical Head, The Spirit of our Time), 164–166, 164n5 Porträt einer alten Frau: Dr. S. Friedländer-Mynoud (Portrait of an Old Woman: Dr. S. Friedländer-Mynoud), 2 Porträt eines Dichters: Paul Gurk (Portrait of a Poet: Paul Gurk), 2, 3 Selbstporträt des Dadasophen (Self Portrait of the Dadasoph), 126–131, 135, 152, 165 Sieg Triumph Tabak mit Bohnen (Victory, Triumph, Tobacco, with Beans), 88 Tatlin lebt zu Hause (Tatlin Lives at Home), 128n16 “Tretet dada bei” (Join Dada), 72, 85, 155 “Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?” (What is Dadaism and What Does it Want in Germany?), 83–85 “Was will der Dadaismus in Europa?” (What Does Dada Want in Europe?), 4, 83 Havelock, Eric, 37, 115 Heartfield, John (Helmut Herzfelde), 2, 10, 27, 116, 120, 123, 126, 130–135, 149n35, 154, 155, 160, 163–165, 184 Der blütige Ernst: Gegen die Ausbeuter! (The Bloody Seriousness: Against the Exploiters!), 10–11

 INDEX 

“Der Kunstlump” (The Art Rogue), 160 Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield: Elektro-mecanische Tatlin-­Plastik (The Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild. Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture), 164–166, 164n5 Ich bin ein Kohlkopf. Kennt ihr meine Blätter? (I’m a Cabbage Head! Do You Recognize My Leaves?), 2 Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (Everybody Their Own Football), 120, 123, 126, 130, 165 Leben und Treiben in Universal-City um 12 Uhr 5 mittags (Life and Events in Universal-City at 12: 05 noon), 131, 132, 134–135 Neue Jugend, 149n35 Hennings, Emmy, 69, 70, 72, 161 Herzfelde, Wieland, 116, 120, 123, 132, 134, 135, 154, 157 Erste Internationale Dada-Messe: Katalog (First International Dada Fair, catalogue), 28, 121, 132–135, 157 Jedermann sein eigener Fußball (magazine), 120, 121n12, 123 “Hey, you there!,” 15, 176 Hiller, Kurt, 155, 155n39 See also Meliorism Hindenburg, Paul von, 121, 139, 151 Höch, Hannah, 27, 116, 135–145, 163, 184 Dada Rundschau (Dada Review), 27, 135–145 Friedensfürst, 143, 144 Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada Durch Die Letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche

225

Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany), 27, 145–157 Staatshäupter (Heads of State), 138n27, 140 Holophrasis, 51, 51n15 Homosocial(ity), 24 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 6, 7, 9, 12, 19, 20, 27, 30, 30n1, 48, 49n13, 51, 57n20, 69, 70, 81–86, 83n18, 89, 90, 93, 99n26, 101n27, 122–124, 131, 143, 154, 155n39, 185 Dada Almanach (Dada Almanac), 12, 81–83, 99n26, 101n27 “Dadaistishes Manifest” (Dada Manifesto), 57n20, 81, 82, 89, 90, 122–124 “Dada lebt” (Dada Lives), 48, 49n13, 51 En Avant Dada, 82, 83 “Legen Sie Ihr Geld in dada an!” (Put Your Money in Dada), 73, 85, 149, 162 “Tretet dada bei” (Join Dada), 72, 85, 155 “Was ist dada?” (What is dada?), 6, 7, 19, 47, 55 “Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?” (What is Dadaism and What Does it Want for Germany?), 83 “Was wollte der Expressionismus?” (What did Expressionism Want?), 81–83 Hugnet, Georges, 48 “L’ésprit dada dans la peinture” (The Dada Spirit in Painting), 48 Husserl, Edmund, 54

226 

INDEX

Hyperbole, 84, 85, 89, 104 See also Ostentation Hypertheatricality, 80, 88, 91, 104, 105 I Ideological State Apparatus, 13 Ideological subject formation, 16, 20–22, 24, 25, 35, 58, 97, 101, 125, 186, 188 Ideology denegation, 21, 43, 109 false consciousness, 8, 12, 13, 16 Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), 113 Imaginary, 16, 85 Impassivity, 30–32 Impekoven, Louise “Niddy,” 147, 154 Index/indexicality, 108–120, 119n8, 119n9, 119n10, 123, 124, 127, 128, 131, 154, 156, 160 Infantile/infantilism, 51, 152 Insult, 81, 86, 87, 89 Interpellation, 9, 14–16, 14n8, 18n16, 20–26, 28–34, 39, 43–48, 55, 57, 58, 68, 69, 73, 76, 79, 80, 82, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94, 99–105, 125, 127, 132, 135, 144, 145, 156, 176, 181, 186, 187 See also Ideology; Ideological subject formation Irigaray, Luce, 18n17 This Sex Which is Not One, 18 Irony poetic, 87 (see also Schlegel, Friedrich) Socratic, 87 stable, 86, 87 (see also Quintilian) Ives Process, 112, 112n2 J J. L. Mott Iron Works, 167 Johnson, Barbara, 15

Josef, Franz (Emperor) “An meine Völker” (To My People), 59n1 Journalism, 14, 31, 56, 113, 114 K Kellerman, Annette, 141 Kiel mutiny, 121, 156 Kirchhofer, Reinhold, 143 Kittler, Friedrich, 36, 38, 42, 94n25 Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter), 34–36, 38, 42, 94n24 Kollwitz, Käthe, 147–149 Kracauer, Siegfried, 27, 111, 114, 115, 115n4 The Mass Ornament, 115, 115n4 memory-image, 114 “photography,” 27, 111, 114, 115, 115n4 Krupp, 111 Kurrent, 33–39 L Laban school, 70 Lacan, Jacques, 16, 22n21, 45, 46, 58, 94n25, 153, 176, 177 “Of the Gaze as Objet petit a,”, 153 “The Master and the Hysteric,” 45 “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” 16 point de capiton, 45, 46, 58 “the quilting point,” 45n11 “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” 58 “the symbolic universe,” 17n13 Lanham, Richard, 37, 39, 115

 INDEX 

League of Nations, 84 Le Figaro, 64, 65, 88n23 Leggotype, 112n2 Lenin, Vladimir, 83 Liebknecht, Karl, 121n12, 141 Lithograph, 116 Littérature, 1, 89 Louvre, 168 Ludendorff, Erich, 121, 142 Ludendorff Offensive, 122 Luther, Martin, 34, 38n4 Luxembourg, Rosa, 121n12 M (Made) visible/visibility, 41, 42, 44–46, 70, 124, 126, 128, 129, 132, 134–137, 140, 142, 150, 152–154, 157, 179 Malik-Verlag, 123n14 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 34 Manhattan, 167, 172 Manicule, 6n4, 54, 95, 121 Manifesting, 60–68, 72, 80, 81, 85, 87, 89, 100 Manifestoism, 69, 73, 105 Manifesto/Manifest/Manifeste, 2, 39, 59–105, 122, 161, 184–186 Mannequin, 164–166, 186 Marinetti, Filippo, 25, 60, 64–68, 70, 81, 85, 86, 88, 89, 93, 96 “The Futurist Synthetic Theater,” 70 “La foundation du Futurisme et son manifeste” (The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism), 60, 65 Marx, Karl, 8, 16, 17, 59, 59n2, 60, 63–65, 63n5, 85, 88, 89, 152, 153, 179n15 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 8 Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58, 179n15

227

The Great Men of the Exile, 59, 60 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 59 Mark (Derrida), 44 Mask, 70, 79, 129, 141 Mass media, 2, 4, 6, 23, 25, 26, 112, 114, 136, 148, 157, 164 Master signifier, 45, 46, 57, 69, 187 See also Other Subject Masthead, 135, 136 Material, 12, 14, 15, 17, 21, 23, 24, 26, 32–35, 37, 39–43, 45–48, 52, 55, 56, 64, 94, 98, 101, 108, 117, 134, 145, 156, 174, 178, 180, 185, 186 Materiality of communication/discourse/ language, 14, 24, 26, 32–35, 37, 41, 45–46, 56 of ideology, 14, 17, 23 Meliorism, 82, 90, 155, 155n39 Memory-image, see Kracauer, Sigfried Merz (journal), 33 Merz, see Schwitters, Kurt Militarism, 10, 143, 144, 150, 164, 165, 188 Mirbach, Wilhelm von, 155 Mirror, 16, 17n14, 20, 52, 53, 123, 172, 176, 176n14 Mirror stage, 16, 176 Mis(re)cognition, 15, 15n10, 16, 22, 80, 103, 126 Moholy-Nagy, László, 109, 110 The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, 110 Painting Photography Film, 109 Mona Lisa, 168 Montage/collage, 163 Montage, montieren, monteur, montierte, 154, 163n3 Motion, dynamic, 149, 150 Movement, art, 5, 60, 65, 71, 149

228 

INDEX

Müntzer, Thomas, 59n1 Praguer Manifest (Prague Manifesto), 59n1 N Naming, 53, 65, 69, 71, 72, 93, 96 Napoleon, 8 Narren (fools), 89, 90n24 Nature/natural, 8, 19, 26, 31, 32n2, 33, 38, 41, 43, 56, 57, 68, 82, 107–110, 118, 120, 148 Navy/naval, 142–144, 152–154, 156 Neuilly, 175n12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22n21 Nihilism, 18, 19n19, 23, 50, 80, 102 Nomen actionis, 148 Noske, Gustav, 121, 121n12, 128, 132, 138–145, 151 O Objectivity, 108–114, 166 See also Index/indexicality Obviousness, 26, 29, 37, 55, 57, 94, 95, 102, 103, 156 Ostentation, 25, 37, 43, 151 See also Hyperbole Other Subject, 16, 23, 45, 46, 57, 187 See also Master signifier P Panoptic vision, 135, 136, 142, 149 Papier collé, 118 Paradox, 22, 57, 83, 85, 87, 90, 91, 97, 98, 102, 103, 105, 185, 187 Paratext, 42, 45, 55 Parody, 88, 103 Pascal, Blaise, 17, 22 Peirce, Charles, 107–110, 119, 120, 123, 127n15, 156 trifurcation of signs, 108

(Performative) speech act (In)felicity, 78, 80 relation to theatricality, 62 Performativity, 21, 26, 64, 68, 70, 78–85, 93, 98 (Personal) pronouns (We/I/Us/You/ etc.), 15, 40, 63, 66, 67, 72, 75, 76 Pflanzer-Baltin, Karl von, 151 Photography mass-reproducibility, 25, 26, 111–116, 118, 119, 125, 126, 153, 156, 163–164, 187 photochemical/photomechanical processes, 108, 110, 112 photo-real, 114, 153, 164 Photojournalism, 113, 115 Photomontage, 2, 27, 108, 116–120, 116n5, 122–128, 131, 131n20, 132, 135, 136, 137n26, 138, 138n27, 140, 141, 147, 148, 148n34, 151–153, 156, 157, 163–165, 184, 187 Picabia, Francis, 18, 28, 86, 91, 166, 168 D’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of an American Girl in a State of Nudity), 166 “Manifeste cannibale dada” (Cannibal Dada Manifesto), 86 Tableau Dada par Marcel Duchamp: LHOOQ (Dada Picture by Marcel Duchamp: LHOOQ), 168 Picasso, Pablo, 157 Piggy bank, 160, 179 Plato, 87 Police officer, 8, 14–17, 31–32, 57, 94, 176 Portraiture bourgeois portrait, 126–128, 130–132, 131n20, 165, 166 self portrait, 127, 128

 INDEX 

(Post)modernism, 21 (Post)structuralism, 21, 188 Prefigure, 21, 47, 94n25 Pre- & proto-linguistic, 51, 53, 55 Primitivism, 2, 25, 51 Promise, 28, 71, 78–80, 79n17, 93, 154, 163, 177, 179–182, 180n16 Prussia, 36, 139, 164n4 Purchase, 14, 134, 161, 168, 177, 178 Q Quintilian, 86 Quotation (Marks), 42, 42n7, 43, 46, 54, 55, 180 R Ray, Man, 5 Reading, 17n12, 26–28, 33–35, 37–39, 41, 43, 44, 54, 56, 64, 77, 109, 110, 117, 124, 134n24, 138, 144, 147n33, 148, 178, 182 Lesen, lies (to read, read), 33 Readymade, 6, 27, 28, 166–172, 168n7, 169n8, 174–176, 174n11, 178, 179, 181 Reciprocal readymade, 168, 168n7 (Re)citation, 27, 33, 43–46, 52, 54–56, 143, 165 Recognition, 15, 15n10, 16, 21, 22, 24, 25, 41, 43, 44, 47, 58, 80, 103, 125, 153, 156, 182, 184 Reduplication, 53, 54 Regalia, 121, 139, 150 Reichstag, 39 Religion, 6, 19, 55 Repressive state apparatus, 14, 17 Reservistenbilder (reservist images), 116, 118, 118n7 Retard (Delay, Amusement, Recoil), 178

229

Reverdy, Pierre, 41, 44n8 “Regard” (Look), 41 Revolution/revolving, 6, 7, 27, 30, 31, 50, 65, 121, 142, 143, 146–149, 152, 157 Richter, Hans, 132 Dada Kunst und Antikunst (Dada Art and Anti-Art), 5, 116, 132 Rosenstock, Samuel, 73–78, 96 See also Tzara, Tristan Rouen, 174, 175n12 S Scheidemann cabinet, 120, 121, 128n17, 130, 140 Schlegel, Friedrich, 87, 88, 90 Schwarz, Arturo, 171 Schwitters, Kurt, 26, 30–35, 30n1, 37–47, 40n6, 44n8, 45n10, 51, 55, 56, 58, 78, 89, 118, 145, 156, 162, 171, 185 Anna Blume: Dichtungen (Eve Blossom Poems) (collection), 30n1 “An Anna Blume” (To Eve Blossom), 30, 30n1 “Banalitäten (3)” (Banalities (3)), 43 “Banalitäten (4)” (Banalities (4)), 43 “Das i-Gedicht” (The i-Poem), 26, 32, 34, 35, 37–44, 40n6, 42n7, 46, 47, 55 Die Blume Anne, Die neue Anna Blume (The Blossom Eve, The New Eve Blossom), 32 Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling (Franz Müller’s Wire Springtime), 30, 32 i, 26, 32–35, 39–47, 162 /i/, 32–34, 33n3, 39–46, 52, 54, 55 “i-Architektur” (i-Architecture), 33n3 “i (Ein Manifest)” (i (A Manifesto)), 39

230 

INDEX

Schwitters, Kurt (cont.) i-Zeichnungen (i-Drawings) (series), 44, 44n9 “Konsequente Dichtung,” 32 Merz, 26, 33, 39–41, 40n6, 47 “Pornographisches i-Gedicht” (Pornographic i-Poem), 44 Tafelsalz (Table Salt), 45n10 “Unsittliches i- Gedicht” (Indecent i-Poem), 44, 162 “Ursachen und Beginn der großen glorreichen Revolution in Revon” (Causes and Beginnings of the Great, Glorious Revolution in Revon), 30 “What art is, you know…,” 41 Scissors, 1, 22, 39, 40, 44, 46, 107–139 Self-evidence, 57 Serate, 64, 65n7, 70 Serner, Walter, 4, 8n5, 13, 86, 86n21, 160 “Der Schluch um die Achse” (The Swig about the Axis), 8n5 “Letzte Lockerung Manifest Dada” (Last Loosening Dada Manifesto), 4, 86, 86n20, 160 Severini, Gino, 88, 89 Shakespeare, William, 62, 63 Hamlet, 63 Romeo and Juliet, 62 As You Like It, 88 Shop window, 172–178, 182 See also Store front Sign Peirce’s Tripartite; icon, 32 (see also Index/indexicality); symbol, 119, 120, 123 signifier/signified, 5n3, 23, 42, 45, 47, 49, 54, 69, 79, 99–101, 187 Signature/valediction, 9, 61, 62, 77, 78, 167, 171

Simon, Carly, 15 “You’re So Vain,” 15 Smith, Adam, 179n15 Soapbox, 62 See also Stage Spacing, 41, 45, 136, 141, 150, 154, 162 See also Fluid matrix Spartacist Uprising, 120n11, 121, 141, 142, 146 Spartacus League, 137 Spectacle, 115, 118, 125, 156, 174 See also Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle Spectre, 60, 62–63, 66 Specular image, 16 Spokespersonship, 78, 80 authorization, 80 Stage, 16, 43, 62–64, 69, 70, 72, 74, 80, 87–90, 99, 100, 110 Stamp, 44–47, 78, 116, 162, 171 Stance(s), see Blickpunkten (viewpoints, points of view) State, 6, 8, 14, 20, 31, 32, 55, 59, 85, 101n27, 115, 126, 132, 144, 151 Stieglitz, Alfred, 166 Stillstand (stand still), 151 Store front, 172, 174, 175n12, 178 Subject, formation of, see Ideology; Ideological subject formation; Interpellation Surgery, 40, 130 Surrealism, 25, 117, 167 Sütterlin, 33, 35, 42 Sütterlin, Ludwig, 36–38 Systematicity, 77, 94, 100–101 T Taktisch (tactical, tactile), 9, 124 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 107, 108, 112 The Pencil of Nature, 107, 112

 INDEX 

Taste, 169, 175, 178, 179 Tatlin, Vladimir, 128, 164 Tauber-Arp, Sophie, 70 Taylorism, 159 Terror, The, 7 Theater, 62, 64, 69, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 90 Theatricality, 26, 27, 62–64, 66–70, 72–75, 77–85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 95, 96, 98 hypertheatricality, 90, 104, 105 See also Authority Tost, Raimund, 155 Trademark, 162, 171, 171n10, 172 Transparency ideological, 37, 39 linguistic, 37–39 Trauma, 2, 40, 124, 125 Typography, 6, 38 Tzara, Tristan, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 48–51, 53, 55, 70, 73–79, 89–103, 94n25, 99n26, 105, 115, 153, 156, 159–163, 184, 185 Aa/Aaism, 73–79, 96, 184 Bulletin, 162, 163 Chronique Zurichoise (Zurich Chronicle), 70 “Dada est un microbe vierge” (Dada is a virgin germ), 55 “Dada manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer” (Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love), 1, 25, 77, 91 “An Introduction to Dada,” 9, 12, 20, 50, 105, 115–116, 159, 160, 185 “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer” (The Admiral Searches for a House to Rent), 29 “La première aventure céléste de Mr. Antipyrine” (The First

231

Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, Fire Extinguisher), 74 “Lecture on Dada,” 55 “Manifeste Dada 1918” (Dada Manifesto 1918), 27, 49, 50, 53, 91–105 “Manifeste de Monsieur Aa l’antiphilosophe” (Manifesto of Aa the Antiphilosopher), 74 “Manifeste de monsieur Antipyrine” (Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto), 74 “Monsieur Aa l’antiphilosophe nous envoie ce manifeste” (Monsieur Aa the Antiphilosopher Sends Us This Manifesto), 74 Mouvement Dada (Dada Movement), 162 “Pour faire un poème dadaïste” (To Make a Dadaist Poem), 1, 4, 10, 12, 22, 25 Samuel Rosenstock, 73–78, 96 Sept Manifestes Dada et lampisteries (Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries), 75n14, 89, 101–102 “Tristan Tzara,” 74, 76–78 trist în t ̦ară, 74 Une Nuit d’Échecs Gras (A Night of Crude Failures), 162 U Uhu, 136 Ullstein Verlag, 136 See also Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ); Die Dame; Uhu Universal City/Studios, 133, 134, 134n21 Utopia, 84

232 

INDEX

V Value exchange, 171, 179–181, 179n15 use, 28, 179–181 Verdun, Battle of, 50 Vision, 109, 110, 135, 136, 142, 149, 152–156 panoptic/panoramic, 135, 136, 142, 146, 149, 187 W Waag Hall, 74 Want(s), 81–84, 86, 95, 97–98 See also Expressionism, Meliorism Weaponry, 9, 18 cannon, 10, 142–144, 152, 156 Weber, Max, 14 Wedekind, Frank, 55n19 O-Aha!, 55n19 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 73n13, 116, 139, 143, 143n30, 144, 147, 150, 151, 164n4

Wilson, Woodrow, 84 Wood, Beatrice, 167, 175, 181 Woolworth Building, 172, 173, 176 World War I, 2, 6, 19, 34, 37, 59n1, 65, 84, 121, 124, 137, 139, 141, 143, 146, 152, 155, 163, 164n4, 188 Writing, 17, 24n23, 35, 37, 38, 43, 44, 48, 59n2, 61, 71, 72, 95, 97, 98, 102, 144, 146 See also Scissors Z Žižek, Slavoj, 15, 16, 17n12, 38, 45, 46, 109 Enjoy Your Symptom!, 15 Mapping Ideology, 38, 109 Sublime Object of Ideology, 16, 45